Why bother with the past? Engaging with some issues raised by the possible 'end of history as we have known it'

Abstract

It seems rather obvious to say that perhaps the main reason why historians study the past is because they consider that what this work may produce - a historical consciousness - is a good thing. But today, beyond this minimalist intention, common endeavour and agreement collapse. For given that it is the idea of the good which defines the desired type of consciousness; that is, if a good historical consciousness is anything the definer so stipulates (which it is) then because 'we' live amongst so many competing (democratic) notions of the good with no neutral (foundational) criteria for adjudication between them, so not only does the ultimate closure of the good become endlessly deferred, but the very idea of a good historical consciousness is similarly affected: we now have no clear sense of what a good history/historical consciousness looks like. There are various reactions to this 'relativist' conclusion, but perhaps the most popular is not to try (and keep on trying) to find a 'real history/historical consciousness' beyond constitutive interests, but to admit one's position (one's interests) so to be as reflexive, ironic (apres Rorty) and as 'open about one's closures' as one can be. But perhaps this 'postist' explicitness is still 'too historical'. Maybe we are at a moment (a postmodern moment) when we can forget history altogether and live our lives without reference to a past tense articulated in ways which are 'historically familiar'. Maybe we can forget the past and - because we do still have to live together - just talk about how to do that: ethics talk. And yet, this alternative may also be, in turn, 'too ethical'. Perhaps ethical systems also have to go, to be replaced by, at best, the 'morality (madness) of the decision' (Derrida, Levinas, Lyotard, Laclau, et al.) or, at worst (or best - how do we decide?) something like a Baudrillardian nihilism. In The Perfect Crime, Baudrillard argues that whereas the great philosophical question used to be 'why is there something rather than nothing?' today the 'real' question is, 'why is there nothing rather than something?' To constitute performatively our lives on the basis of nothing (what's new?), to embrace the ineffable and the abysmal, may be energizing both morally (Lyotard, Rorty, et al.) and - if we still want creative temporalities - historically (White's sublime). Such imaginaries won't give us definitive answers to what the good or the historical are, but they may help us relax if and when we still bother to run them contingently and pragmatically together in ways which will always, to put it in the future-anterior tense, 'not have been good enough'. As to the question, 'good enough for what?', doubtless our answers to that will also 'not have been good enough'. Postmodernism thus arguably suggests, at most, a radically othering, relativist 'historiography' without guarantees or, at least (at most?) a productive silence. © Routledge 1997.