What is History?

That was the question that Paul posed yesterday evening in the 'methodology' module session. Clearly one of the challenges for a humanities course which aims to make connections between disciplines is that we all have different areas of subject knowledge and expertise, consequently the lecturers have to try to fill knowledge gaps as best as possible by providing a cross between a route-map and a whistle-stop tour o their subject discipline.

I enjoy these big picture, big idea sessions. They get you thinking and trying to fit your previous knowledge into a different frame. Paul was good, ushering us through the development of History as a discipline from the Nineteenth Century through to post -modern challenges to history's claims to an objective, evidence based analysis of the past. On the way we touched on political history, economic history, social and local history, cultural history and urban history...phew!

And I did learn some new stuff, certainly relating to Whig History and more practically, some of the approaches developed by scholars involved with urban history who have used the fabric of the city itself to analyse, explain and elaborate historical developments. These could well have applications to the heritage theme I am considering as an aspect of a 'creative project'. What I need to track down is an equivalent to Mumford's The City in History' relating to the development of roads. Mumford's book itself might be a useful read too, just to get some creative juices flowing so far as the historical studies is concerned.

The latter part of the session was given over to considering the impact of post-modernism on history and its assertions concerning the pre-eminence of narrative and how rationalist tools such as categorisation and evaluative hierarchies could be challenged as being reflections of cultural, social; and political constructs. I do find many of these ideas fascinating and see how they guard against  overly simplistic notions about objective truth. I also find myself frustrated and slightly annoyed by the effects of some ideas - Braudilliard's Precession of Simulacra for example. OK, lets for a moment agree that any notion of external truth has been replaced by simulations and that any attempt to change things just ends up with an adapted simulation. I can see how that is an insightful and powerful approach might help us to understand the operation of virtual realities within culture enabled by social networking. But now what?

I am left with no resonable argument to explain my frustration, instead a flurry of analogies which occur to me all prefaced by the phrase...the trouble with post modernism is:

• it's like a health service that only doles out diagnoses, but refuses to discuss treatments because we're all going to die anyway.
• it can only explore a concept such as 'dancing for joy' by considering the instances of joy dancing in differing cultures aiming to 'de-construct' the notion of joy and understand how it is culturally constructed and may reveal hitherto hidden gender based power games within outbursts of joy. A joyless way of thinking!
• it tends towards being self-referencing and hermetic - poetry becomes 'language poetry' interested in the structures and nature of language itself rather than engaging with situations
• it's associated in my head with a manufactured language of faux scholarly debate: I know, its my WASPish prejudice, but when faced with a book entitled 'Post-colonial, Queer Theory - Theoretical Intersections - I just know is going to be brimming with earnest essays jam-packed with gobbledygook - like 'heteronormativity', 'gendered', 'stituatedness', 'historical positioning' and 'homoerotic codings'.

So, a  feral reaction - I'm going to have to understand this before I can think more clearly about the issues. Somewhere along the line I know my discomfort has to do with the relationship between knowledge and belief. I accept that the work of structuralists and post structuralists have given us tools to better understand how human belief is largely culturally conditioned and linguistically constructed. OK, but now what? Where does that place our need to believe in order to take action, otherwise we are cast in the position of being eternal commentators. It seems to me to be a condition of super-scepticism, some kind of counsel of despair.

I got back home just in time to watch Brian Cox's programme Science Britannica. No post-modern anguise here! With an enthusiasm bordering on the naive, Professor Cox asserted the pre-eminence of Britain right now and in the past in both the fields of  applied and 'blue sky' science. Having just learned about Whiggish history, then here we have its scientific counterpart, Professor Cox seems almost gleeful in his pursuit of ethnocentrism. I realise the programme sets out to argue a political point, it is polemical, but it does assert a view that it is possible to change things for the better.

In the end, I suspect the odd amalgam of the utilitarian and libertarian, the bureaucrat and the poet which pervades my way of thinking, are, no doubt culturally conditioned by a non-conformist, working class background which valued hard work and self improvement, yet engendered equally a burning sense of social injustice and inner rebellion.  So, there is one post modernist that I would quote because his approach appears to be a call to arms, a rallying cry:

I would like my books to be a kind of tool-box which others can rummage through to find a tool which they can use however they wish in their own area... I would like the little volume that I want to write on disciplinary systems to be useful to an educator, a warden, a magistrate, a conscientious objector. I don't write for an audience, I write for users, not readers.'

Michel Foucault. (1994) [1974]. 'Prisons et asiles dans le mécanisme du pouvoir'. In Dits et Ecrits vol. 11. Paris: Gallimard, pp. 523-4. (This passage trans. Clare O'Farrell).

'I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means for it; the desire is there; the things to be known are infinite; the people who can employ themselves at this task exist. What are we suffering from? From too little: from channels that are too narrow, skimpy, quasi-monopolistic, insufficient. There is no point in adopting a protectionist attitude, to prevent "bad" information from invading and suffocating the "good". Rather we must multiply the paths and the possibility of comings and goings... Which doesn't mean, as is often feared, the homogenization and leveling from below. But on the contrary, the differentiation and simultaneity of different networks.'

Michel Foucault. (1996) [1980]. 'The Masked Philosopher'. In Sylvère Lotringer (ed.) Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961-1984). Tr. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston. 2nd edition. New York: Semiotext(e), p.305