icke - frank ankersmit's narrative substance a legacy to historians (rethinking history)

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Frank Ankersmit's narrativesubstance: A legacy to historiansPeter P. Icke aa History Department , University of Chichester , UKPublished online: 27 Oct 2010.

To cite this article: Peter P. Icke (2010) Frank Ankersmit's narrative substance: A legacyto historians, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, 14:4, 551-567,DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2010.515809

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Frank Ankersmits narrative substance: A legacy to historians

Peter P. Icke*

History Department, University of Chichester, UK

This essay is not intended as a critique of Ankersmits theorisations,neither in the general nor in the particular. Rather, it will focus onAnkersmits concept of the narrative substance at an explanatory levelonly, expressly in order to advance the arguments herein. To be moreprecise, I will explore two very signicant points which, it appears to me,unquestionably arise out of this specic element of Ankersmits widerthesis. In doing so I hope to illustrate the inescapable centrality oflanguage in historical theory a matter which has been pushed to oneside, or wholly excluded, following the recent fashionable growth ofinterest in memory and experience studies.

Keywords: Ankersmit; narrative; colligation; metaphor; symbolism;language

Frank Ankersmit is currently Professor of Intellectual History andHistorical Theory at the University of Groningen in Holland. Over thelast 27 years he has published a substantial body of literature relating to, andexploring the consequences of, recent developments in historical theory.That is to say, to be more precise, the development of historical theory fromits radical re-assessment occasioned by the so-called linguistic turn of the1970s/early 1980s up to its present day (2010) interest in memory andexperience studies. However, for the purposes of this paper my particularinterest is in Ankersmits very rst book Narrative logic (Ankersmit 1983)and, to be even more specic, I am focusing here on its central and deningelement, the narrative substance.

First, however, some brief prefacing remarks in relation to the work ofHayden White, with whom Ankersmit is so often linked, and then a coupleof more general negative comments. With regard to White, it seemsobvious that one cannot and Ankersmit certainly does not ignoreWhites huge contribution to the eld of historical theory and indeedAnkersmits work could in some ways be seen as a development of it.

*Email: [email protected]

Rethinking HistoryVol. 14, No. 4, December 2010, 551567

ISSN 1364-2529 print/ISSN 1470-1154 online

2010 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/13642529.2010.515809

http://www.informaworld.com

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Nevertheless, I think it would be a mistake to imagine that Ankersmit mighthave found in White a model for his own work, for whilst he presents adistinctively personal philosophical style of argument which, broadlyspeaking, carries him towards the same conclusions as those expressed in,for instance, Whites Metahistory (1973), he has always been (and indeed is)original and complex in his own right.

Furthermore, I should point out that before the publication of these twobooks (Metahistory and Narrative logic) historical theory concerned itselfalmost exclusively with the philosophical problems associated with historicalresearch and thus (despite White) there was arguably no comprehensivephilosophical analysis of the narrative writing of history per se. Ankersmitspurpose in writing Narrative logic was, as he insisted, to put this matter rightand in so doing he demonstrated that contemporary historical theory wasinadequate to its undertaking; that it failed to satisfactorily account for thenature of the narrative form which was generally taken to ariseunproblematically out of the product the facts and singular statements of historical research. Ankersmits intervention in historical theoryaccordingly corrected that established position by proposing that thehitherto presumed transparent process of historical writing was nothing lessthan opaque and, furthermore, that almost everything that really matteredin historical theory took place between the completion of historical researchand its writing up into narrative form a process which Ankersmit referredto as the trajectory from evidence to text. It was the express purpose ofNarrative logic to scrutinise these matters through philosophical enquiry essentially an enquiry into the nature of the narrative form, the nature ofnarrative knowledge that emerged from it and the role of linguisticinstruments in the structure of that knowledge. Thus the possibility, orotherwise, of correspondence between the past and its narrative representa-tion might be determined.

But now to my negative comments. This paper is, as I have alreadyindicated, about the originality and permanency of Ankersmits thesis vis-a`-vis narrative substances with some contextualising comments about thecontinuing signicance of its linguistic/textual expression in the currentpost-textual/post-linguistic days in which we are alleged to be living, aidednot least by Ankersmits own progression beyond such linguistic and textualconcerns (in Ankersmits case of the sublime kind). This paper is nottherefore, and should not be read as, a defence of Ankersmits theorisations.Rather, I am using Ankersmits narrative substance or, to be more precise,two very signicant points which arise from it in order to illustrate theinescapable centrality of language in historical theory; a matter which seemsto have been overlooked or pushed aside with the recent substantial growthof interest in memory/experience studies. In short, there is no intendedcritique of Ankersmit in this essay there is simply an explanation ofAnkersmits narrative substance which serves as a vehicle for my argument.

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The paper is divided into three sections. In Section 1 I explain whatAnkersmit meant by the term narrative substance and describe its mode ofoperation. In Section 2, following a selective expansion of the argumentspresented in Section 1, I consider what I take to be the central and lastingimportance of the narrative substance for historians. And nally in Section 3I relate the notion of the narrative substance to a wider (and current)philosophical perspective.

These prefacing remarks now made, let me outline what I take to beAnkersmits proposal for narrative substances.

1. The narrative substance

Ankersmits argument (as laid out in Narrative logic) is articulated aroundthree propositions or theses, which he himself called his three essentialpillars which, briey put, go as follows:

(1) The past has no narrative structure within it; any such apparentstructures can only occur in the forms of the narratives themselves.

(2) Narrative substances are the primary narrative entities in narrativeaccounts of the past.

(3) There exists a relationship between the narrative substance andmetaphor and, moreover, the narrative use of language is fundamen-tally metaphorical.

Now, point (1) and the second aspect of point (3) are not my immediateconcern in this paper and it will suce to make just the following brief com-ments about them in order to justify my marginalisation of them at this point.

Referring then to point (1), Luis O. Mink long ago (and famously)pointed out the obvious and clear distinction between life and action on theone hand and its narrativisation on the other. That is to say that ourthoughts and actions may well be the subject of narratives that we tellourselves, but the thoughts and actions themselves are not narratives. Or, toput it another way, we may well be the historians of ourselves but not at themoment we act. In short, as Mink puts it, Stories are not lived but told(1987, 60).

Referring now to the second part of point (3), the fundamentallymetaphorical nature of language is for me a given. The point here is that newor strange phenomena are always put under description in terms offamiliar or presumed to be understood previously described phenomenawhich, in their turn, have been subject to the same familiarisation process,and so on in an apparently endless regression. Hence, it would appear thatthe language with which we choose to put our human version of the worldunder description, and thereby deduce our so-called knowledge of it,comprises a complex of receding metaphors all the way down.

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Having made these points I may now proceed with my explanation ofAnkersmits concept of narrative substances and I do so by rst answeringthe question what precisely does Ankersmit mean by narrative substancesand where does this idea come from? Well, I think that the best way to getinto Ankersmits essential position is to understand how the concept of thenarrative substance emerged out of an old idea which Ankersmit hadappropriated and then ingeniously reshaped for his own purposes. By whichI mean that what Ankersmit so successfully did was to appropriate W.H.Walshs exhausted notion of the colligatory concept, sever it from all itsobjective referential entanglements, re-describe it as a linguistic instrumentand then relocate it in language where it had really always belonged.

Colligation, as construed by Walsh, was essentially a form ofcontextualisation; that is to say that past events are placed in a contextthrough the establishment of a web of interconnections with other events in amanner that reveals the larger historical wholes within which the individualevents, as its constituent parts might be thought to have been explained.Walsh expected that colligation would oer the historian a tool of commonusage in the sense that it might operate in its own right and independentlywith regard to the existing positivist and idealist theories of historicalunderstanding which had been essentially articulated through C.G. HempelsCovering Law Model and R.G. Collingwoods Re-enactment Theory.1

Now, a number of historical theorists had, over several years, buriedthemselves in the nuts and bolts of Walshs theory in what turned out to bean endless and unproductive search for some kind of workable under-standing of it. Ankersmit then stepped into the frame with a brilliant ideawhich nally closed down the debate, for he appropriated Walshscolligatory concept, cut it loose from its problematic direct referentiallinkage with the past and re-described it under a new name, the narrativesubstance, as a linguistic device; a device which was, and is, fundamental tothe logical structure of narrative accounts of the past.

In essence Ankersmits postulation of the narrative substance rests on theobservation that, taken in isolation, a constituent statement of a narrativeaccount of the past has a double and not a single function. As a statement itrefers directly to some aspect of the past or thing in the past, however, as acomponent of the narrative viewed as a whole, it serves as a property of apicture of the past. Thus Ankersmit draws attention to the clear distinctionbetween the narrative statements referring to as opposed to its beingabout some aspect of the past. Where a statement, or indeed a single word,performs this double function within the narrative it might not be clearwhich of these two functions is operative at any one time. Take, for example,the narrative use of the word Napoleon, which could refer directly to theman himself empirically acquired biographical details perhaps or theword could be embedded in a component of a coherently individuatedpicture of Napoleon from the unique viewpoint of the narratives author

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who favours a particular interpretation of Napoleon as this or that type ofman the authors Napoleon. One could say, then, that there are twosubjects intrinsic to the word Napoleon. First there is the narrativesubject the actual man about whom veriable statements can be madewhich refer directly to the past and in the second place the narrativesubstance or the narrative picture of a man generated within the logic of thetext which cannot be subject to truth claims precisely because this picture isgured by the historian within the substance of the narrative itself and doesnot refer to anything outside it to which correspondence criteria might beapplied; it is just an opinion governed by a point-of-view which is notinformed by the past itself. Ankersmits subject/substance distinction is ofimportance because the conation of these two functions can lead toconfusion and unjustied claims with regard to the status of the narrativeviewed as a whole; claims such as, for instance, the facts are right so thestory must be right. Such claims disregard the ontological distinctionbetween the content and the form of narrative accounts of the past.

Now, as Ankersmit points out, narrative substances might be associatedwith specic names (for instance The Renaissance, The Cold War, TheEnlightenment and so on), but often this will not be the case. Nevertheless,this does not mean that pictures of the past are not in use when suchgenerally accepted terms fail to appear. Rather, the essential point here is thatit is the narrative substance (governed by the historians uniquely individuatedpoint-of-view) which gives rise to and embodies narrative meaning, and thatthis function should not be confused with, conated with, or reduced to, thecapacity of the narratives individual statements to describe and, therefore,refer to the past. On this basis Ankersmit stakes claim to a third logical entityin addition to the subject and predicate of propositional logic and it is hiscontention that this new entity, the narrative substance, carries the narrativemeaning of historical accounts of the past and, as such, constitutes theprimary logical entity within those narrative accounts.

When a narrative substance acquires a name (for example TheRenaissance) and this name subsequently enters into common usage, anerroneous presumption becomes attached to it. That is, it acquires theputative status of a known and denable entity which is assumed to inhabitthe past itself; it is taken (as Ankersmit would say) as part of the inventory ofthe past such that, as a consequence, the clearly demonstrable case that thereare as many dierent Renaissances as there are historians who write on thesubject is lost from view. Of course in practice the narrative substance(regardless of any discursive familiarity leading to its presumed ontic status)will lack any clear consensual identity because there will always be somemeasure of disagreement over the appropriate make up of its individuatingstatements. Furthermore, Ankersmit submits, narrative substances or points-of-view, in order to possess identity at all, will require the presence of othercompeting points-of-view. That is to say that identity itself is a relational and


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thus relative matter which arises out of dierences; the notion of theexistence of just one single point-of-view is arguably oxymoronic becausesuch singularity would constitute a postulated truth and not signify aproposal about it. Consequently, because any particular historians point-of-view will strive to exclude competing points-of-view, it follows that thenarrative substance gains its identity negatively by virtue of what it rejects by what it is not. And, crucially important here, it should be noted thatcompeting collections of narrative representations of past events depend fortheir existence on the various narrative substances within them. Moreover,there could be no historical debate without them for such debate would thenbe restricted to the empirical level of reference which, on its own, could notconstitute a history at all: no narrative substance, no history.

Turning now to the rst part of the third pillar of Narrative logic (torecall his argument here that there is a relationship between narrativesubstances and metaphor) Ankersmit argues that one cannot overlook theconspicuous similarity that exists between the modes of operation of boththe narrative substance and metaphor such that the narrative substance canbe seen to be of a fundamentally metaphorical kind. He builds his argumentto that eect in the following way.

Narrative statements (as previously established) have a double function they describe the past (such description being subject to empiricalfalsication) and they collectively constitute an image of the past (animage, seen from a particular point-of-view which logically cannot submit toany form of falsication). There is therefore a clear analytical distinctionbetween these two quite dierent uses of language, the empirical referentiallanguage of description and the aesthetic language of individuation and yet,Ankersmit argues, these two language functions will always be conatedwithin the narrative itself. And, Ankersmit points out, this double function,which typies narrative statements is also typical of metaphoricalstatements. Take, for an example Shakespeares metaphor All the worldsa stage from As You Like It. The meanings of the words world and stage inisolation (their signication) would, in Ankersmits argument, comprise theliteral content of the phrase. However, taken in the whole, the phrase alsoconstitutes an invitation to the reader or audience to visualise the world froma particular point-of-view which, in this case, eects the transfer of theattributes of the (theatrical) stage onto the world. This metaphorical use oflanguage which is crucial for all meaning making thus endowsShakespeares phrase with a surplus of meaning which accordingly exceeds(is in excess of) its literal meanings. Ankersmit refers to this excess as thescope of the metaphor (more of this in a moment), which allows him to makethe signicant observation that the metaphor is not part of reality itself butshould rather be seen as a linguistic gure which, in common with thenarrative form, proposes a particular view about reality. This, then, is thebasis of Ankersmits central argument which ties the gure of metaphor to

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that of narrative substances and thence to the narrative form. In so doing hedraws attention to the most conspicuous logical property shared by themetaphor and the narrative seen as a whole; namely, that their meanings canbe said to be carried by their propositional and not by their descriptivemodes of articulation.

It can be seen from the foregoing that Ankersmit takes the view that (touse his own words) descriptive statements have no narrative compass oftheir own. It is only the historians unique point-of-view that endowspurposefully selected narrative statements with their collective capacity toillustrate that very same governing point-of-view from which thosestatements were selected. Seen this way, there is an internal circularitywhich characterises the make-up of all historical narratives and which,accordingly, arms the autonomous nature of the narrative meaning carriedby the whole historical text. This is how Ankersmit puts the circularityargument in Narrative logic:

The dependence of separate descriptive statements upon the points of viewindividuated by them when taken together, their compasslessness when takenin isolation, underlines . . . the circularity so characteristic of historicalknowledge. Isolated individual [narrative] statements . . . may indicate allconceivable directions only a narrative point-of-view can give themnarrative direction, yet this point-of-view only comes into being thanks tothose helpless descriptive statements. (Ankersmit 1983, 218)

Furthermore, with regard to facts and narrative meanings he continues that

. . . the variety of narrative meanings one and the same statement may have indierent narratives suggests that what the historical facts are (i.e. what isexpressed by narrative statements) always depends on what narrative use ismade of the narrative statements in question. Thus there are no facts devoid ofnarrative interpretation in narratives. (Ankersmit 1983, 2189)

Now, the foregoing relativism would appear to permanently preclude thepossibility of any denitive selection criteria that might be put to use inorder to identify the best of any collection of variously construed historicalnarratives each purporting to properly (truly) represent the same past event.However, skirting this relativistic conclusion, Ankersmit himself proposed aselection strategy that rested on his notion of scope which, accordingly, heextended beyond the metaphor to encompass the narrative form as a whole(and which somewhat deected attention away from this relativisticdiculty).

The scope of a metaphorical statement then is, as already explained,wider than its literal descriptive content because its descriptive content, inisolation and lacking a point-of-view, fails to project any familiarisingstructure of comprehension onto that part of reality in question. HenceAnkersmit concludes that


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. . . it seems only reasonable to say that the most successful metaphoricalstatements are those in which the dissimilarity between scope and descriptivecontent has been maximalized. Scope-maximalization is the goal of themetaphorical dimension in language. (Ankersmit 1983, 221)

Following this line of argument, but now applying it to the narrative as awhole (which, as already shown, possesses meaning in excess of the sum ofits constituent descriptive parts), Ankersmit concludes that a narrativesmerit must, as was the case with the metaphor, turn on the degree to whichits scope has been maximalised. Indeed, whenever historical narratives arecompared it is precisely their scopes and not their points-of-view that formthe basis of that comparison because there is no common ground againstwhich the comparisons of intangible points-of-view could take place.Consequently, Ankersmit contends that the best narrative among competingnarratives must be the one that has most eectively and courageouslymaximalised its scope. To quote Ankersmit directly; Fertility and not truthis our criterion for deciding upon the relative merits of narratives(Ankersmit 1983, 223). Ankersmit is therefore making his preferred selectionfrom competing narrative accounts of past events on the basis of aestheticconsiderations alone his preference does not, by any measure whatsoever,turn on considerations relating to empirical truth claims.

This, then, is Ankersmits essential thesis with regard to narrativesubstances and I now want to consider its signicance and consequences forhistorians.

2. The unavoidable consequences of the narrative substance for thediscourse of history

Ankersmits central thesis, then, focuses clearly on the sometimes observedyet scarcely worked distinction between historical research and historicalwriting. The product of historical research is typically expressed in the formof veriable facts and singular statements that refer directly to the past,while the product of historical writing is expressed in the form of narrativeproposals about the past that necessarily refer internally to their ownnarrative substances and not to the past itself. Historical writing, seen as acoherent whole, is therefore an internally referenced imaginative product ofan aesthetic kind and as such cannot possibly be subject to validation on thebasis of truth claims at the level of the singular statement. So clear does thispoint appear to be that it is interesting, curious even, to note here bearingin mind that (a) histories are necessarily constituted, and thus carry theirmeanings, in culturally dependant story forms and (b) that it is undeniablythe case that such story forms cannot be found in the past itself thatAnkersmits helpful proposition, which identied the narrative substance asthe referent of its own manifest story form, received the negative reaction

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that it did. After all his proposition presented immediate solutions to anumber of problems within historical theory; not least it oered a veryplausible explanation for the apparently inexhaustible growth in theproduction of dierent, sometimes radically dierent but always dierent,historical accounts of a single vanished past a past evidenced only througha nite common base of traces remaining from that single past.

The narrative substance thus functions as a kind of lter whichprocesses available facts and narrative statements according to theirusefulness with respect to the particular narrative meaning intrinsic to thenarrative substance in question. Or, to rephrase, it is from the point-of-viewwhich governs the historians chosen narrative substance that a preference fora particular fact or statement is expressed. This preference will be for factsand statements which contribute to the individuation of that very samenarrative substance or point-of-view which, in turn, is itself an expression ofthe historians predisposition to a story form of a particular kind. Hence inthis circular fashion Ankersmit shows that the writing of history is anautonomous activity in the extent to which narrative meaning (meaningcarried by the narrative viewed as a whole) is referenced internally to its ownpoint-of-view rather than to the past itself. On this understanding it followsthat the facts and singular statements arising out of historical research donot, and cannot, somehow gure forth the truth about the past. Rather,they constitute the reservoir of raw unprocessed (and therefore historicallymeaningless) materials from which the historian makes a preferred selectionin order to individuate a pregured notion about the causality/direction/meaning and so on, of the past. Having imagined and individuated a history,coherently articulated about its own governing but arbitrary narrativesubstance, some might see t to defend that meaning as if it were part of thepast itself and not a projection onto it of an imaginary narrative proposalabout an ultimately unfathomable past which, of course, never possessed anarrative form in the rst place.

To complete this section of the paper, I now want to highlight the twomost signicant points2 which, in my view, logically follow fromAnkersmits position in relation to narrative substances.

My rst point is that (on Ankersmits view and mine) the autonomouslinguistic construct that we call history cannot provide access to anymeaning, direction or purpose located in the past itself; indeed, the discourseof history has little at all to do with the past in that sense. What emergesfrom Ankersmits argument is therefore the defensible proposition thathistorians, for purposes of their own, linguistically generate and then projectimagined meanings onto a past that neither notices nor cares about them.History is one way trac nothing ows back from the past but the echoof the imaginative gure of history itself. There is, in short, an immutabledisconnect (a dissonance) between history and the past which historypurports to adequately represent. It therefore follows that the notion that


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history could constitute some sort of bridge to the actuality of the past isfundamentally awed and cannot be sustained.

And my second point, concerning narrative meanings and values, is that itshould be understood that the facts and statements which comprise anarrative proposal about the past, taken in isolation, are in a manner ofspeaking vacant; that is to say that as empty signiers they are devoid ofnarrative meaning and direction, or compassless (to quote Ankersmit). Itfollows that it is only relative to their appropriation and organisation intonarrative form under the governing rationale of a narrative substance thatfacts and statements have their narrative dependant (and hence relative)meanings and values impressed onto them in accordance with the syntheticnarrative point-of-view which they have been purposefully selected toindividuate. Or, in short, the meanings and therefore the values attached tohistorical facts/statements are to be found only in relation to their uses whenorganised into narrative form. Furthermore, even if it were possible (and it isnot) to nd the denitive history of some past event a kind of transcendentalhistory which would embody the capacity to reject all competing accounts ofthat same event and place the undisputed intrinsic meaning of that past eventbefore us all there yet remains an insurmountable problem. That is (as canbe deduced from Ankersmits argument) that any happening or fact, eitherpast or present, does not entail, intrinsically within itself, a xed value whichmight lead to a xed ethical imperative or response to that happening or fact.Values/meanings are not in happenings/facts; they are always projected ontothem in relation to enculturation, ideology, context (and so on) which, takentogether, constitute a point-of-view: value and meanings are indisputably arelative matter. It follows therefore, that since values are neither in norentailed from facts, that any perceived imperative or actual response to thefacts of a situation or happening can be seen to be resting on a whollyarbitrary rhetorical position. Thus, in any particular instance, one might askwhose values are they that are in play, how and why are such particularvalues privileged above all others and in whose interests do they operate?

Understood in relation to the above two points, the writing of historyand the shape or structure of the meaning that it carries can be seen to ariseout of an arbitrary unsanctioned organisation of the past an internallyfunctioning organisation which draws both on its own narrative sub-stance(s) and on language and linguistic devices in order to generate itsmanifest (and meaningful) story form. Accordingly, Ankersmit sees suchorganisation of the past as a violation of the past . . .

. . . the [t]elling of the past . . . is unavoidably a violation of that past in orderto eect such a narrative organisation of the past an organisation that is notintrinsic to the past itself. . . . (Domanska 1998, 78).

Summing up, one could conclude that the evidential traces of the contingentactions and situations which once constituted the actuality of some past event

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are drawn/gured together into some or other historical order by the histo-rian through the imposition of some or other story form upon them. Thisstory form is a linguistic construct informed solely by its own narrativesubstance. It is a product of the enculturation of its own time and it cannot befound in the past itself. The past is thus violated by the very act of histo-ricisation; that is to say that the past is pushed around, beaten into shape andsuitably appropriated in order to t an arbitrary story form which isretrospectively imposed on it whence to serve some human purpose to whichthe past itself is indierent. Moreover, this process of constituting the histo-rical past backwards, which Hayden White sees as a process of retrospectiveancestral constitution, is (as he puts it) what historical consciousness is allabout. Eliminate it and historical systems would not exist at all.3

For the nal section of the paper I am now going to relate these mattersback to a more general philosophical position with regard to thehistoricisation of the past. A position which eectively precludes thepossibility that these matters might be put aside or discounted (not least byAnkersmit himself) through arguments which seek to dismiss the linguisticturn and hence the narrative substance in historical theory as passe andirrelevant. And, moreover, that in its wake we should now embrace forms ofreal presence and real experience which are seen in some quarters to lifthistory out of the realms of both the empirical/epistemological and thelinguistic/textual into the new light of direct historical experience(s).4 Myargument is that Ankersmits own position in relation to narrativesubstances, as I have outlined it here, is so strong that such a negation ofit (that is through bypassing/superseding the linguistic/textual or, indeed,ignoring it altogether) is a massive mistake. These considerations of courseopen up an extensive discursive eld which is beyond the scope of this essayand it is for this reason that, on this occasion and in order to best illustratemy point, I intend to narrow that eld by invoking some pertinentarguments which I have extracted from Martin Daviess recent publicationHistorics (2005). It should again be understood that it is not my purposehere to comment on or critique Daviess overall thesis; I am simplyappropriating, or stripping from it (in a Rortian sense), whatever is of use inthe furtherance of my own argument.

3. A broader philosophy

In his book Historics, Davies (2005) articulates an uncompromising critiqueof the historicised culture in which we humans live (the already historicisedworld) and he censures the generally accepted condence in historicalknowledge as a foundational discipline in the humanities. He does notcomment much on the fundamentally illusory nature of the historicaldiscourse; this is for him a given a starting point or presupposition forwhich there already exists a vast body of supportive and persuasive


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literature (White 1973, 1978; Ricoeur 1984, especially 91174; Ankersmit1983; Cohen 1986; and many others). Rather, taking all this as given, Daviesexamines the consequences of living in a world which is obsessed with thenotion of historical knowledge to the extent that this notion in itself comesto underpin both our individual and collective understandings of identityand our understanding of society.

For the purpose of this argument I turn to the last section of VariationFour of Historics, entitled History as symbolic re-enactment whereinDavies focuses on the central function of tradition and legacy (embodiedin our already historicised world) in the legitimisation of current practice or,in short, the function of history and its symbolism as an armative ideology.

Within our (human) historicised world, Davies argues, there is nothingwhich cannot become or has not already become a historical symbol thepast is all around us in our historic environment which is a collectivememory containing stories written in stone, brick, wood, glass, steel; storiesinscribed in eld patterns, hedgerows, designed landscapes and so on . . .(Davies 2005, 233). Accordingly, the past which no longer exists can only(putatively) make itself known through some kind of existing historical textwithin the historicised semiotic system. There is, therefore, no extra-textualreferent for the historical text, no knowable objective reality, nothingbeyond the semiotic-system which describes it. Davies, quoting MichaelOakeshott, is in agreement with Oakeshotts notion that . . . the illusion ofan extra-textual referent boils down to a purely self-referential textualcoherence (Davies 2005, 234).

Thus humans, as symbol using language animals, consciously operatereexively through systems of representations sign-systems (notations) ofhuman making without which human objective reality would beunthinkable and thus unknowable. This world of words creates the worldof things or, as Hayden White expressed it in his Introduction to Tropics ofDiscourse, . . . tropics [meaning tropological language use] is the process bywhich all discourse constitutes the objects which it pretends only to describerealistically and analyse objectively (White 1985, 2).

Returning again to Historics, Davies, drawing on George Steiner,continues

. . . the past is thinkable and knowable only through the current semiotic orsymbolic system. Our sense of the past, not as immediately, innately acquiredreexes, but as a shaped selection of remembrance, is radically linguistic.History, in the human sense, is a language-net cast backwards. . . . whichreinforces the illusion of an objective past as a substantive extra-textualreferent. (Davies 2005, 235)

The past (to paraphrase Davies again) takes extra-textual priority becausethe historicising reex is already intended in the texture of signs andsymbols that is, in the grammatical structures that make up the

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language-system. Whatever the historical reex produces is, in some form oranother, already known already there which is why history has nothingnew to teach us. Consequently, what history authorises Davies characterises as

. . . the constant reproduction of the already existing, morbid culture oftraumatic experience, phantom memories and petried objects. It sanctions amentality that defers automatically to a traditional value-system that puts aselection of dead saints, cardinals, archbishops, and earls before thegenerations of the living. It thereby sustains a pessimistic, misanthropicideology that always has seen prelates and nobles as the repositories andguardians of conservative truths. (Davies 2005, 235)

One day (Davies concludes) historys fatal arrogance might provoke oppo-sition: the dissociation of humanity from history, the institution of a newlanguage and a new thought-style for the humanities (Davies 2005, 235).

It is against this broad backdrop that I can now more readily positionAnkersmits narrative substance. For, seen as a self referencing creativelinguistic instrument an enabling device which both constitutes andexplains its object of historical enquiry internally in relation to itself it tsinto the general framework of thought exemplied by Davies in his bookHistorics. This framework is articulated about the understanding that wehumans live in a rhetorical world of human making which is constituted inthe language we use to describe it. Any thing that lies outside our capacityfor its linguistic description could not be linguistically related to other thingsand thus could not (as Richard Rorty argues) be talked of or thought of. Or,as Rortys Nietzsche points out,

. . . that things posses a constitution in themselves quite apart frominterpretation and subjectivity, is a quite hopeless hypothesis; it presupposesthat interpretation and subjectivity are not essential, that a thing freed from allrelationships would still be a thing. (Rorty 2007, 111)

Thus, to step outside a language of description is to step into an ineablevoid. A void which, in a converse sense, nds itself in serious want of alanguage of description (and any familiarising language would do, providingthat it has sucient utility value to allow us humans to get around in it).There is, then, no escape from language and I therefore cannot agree withMichael Roth who, in his recent indexical review entitled Ebb tide (2007),maintained that following the demise of the linguistic turn

. . . the massive tide of language. . . . has receded . . . [and] we are now able tolook across the sand to see what might be worth salvaging before the nextwave of theory. . . . begins to pound the shore. As language recedes. . . . etc/etc. (Roth 2007, 66)

For here the point is that arguably the medium of language does not (norcannot) itself recede it is not (in Roths sense) tidal: language cannot


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succumb (to use his metaphor) to the moons gravity and thereby leave usbeached outside its reach in an ineable void. As symbol using languageanimals we are always continuously and totally submerged in language like it or not, that is how it is.

Ankersmits narrative substance, then, understood as a linguisticinstrument, both uses and inescapably resides inside Steiners languagenet. And when that net is guratively speaking cast backwards the natureof the historical discourse which emerges from it can, in essence, beexplained in relation to the matrix of the narrative substance which, in therst place, draws attention to and arms the fundamental and categoricalstructural divide between the past and its narrative representation and,second, suggests an autonomy of narrative function which can be shown tobe primarily governed by a narrative logic informed by linguistic rules anddevices rather than the actuality of the past itself.

The historical narrative cannot therefore be taken as some sort ofwindow through which the actual past might be viewed exactly as it was.Rather, the historicisation of the past has to be seen as a proposal (as arepresentation of an aesthetic kind), cut adrift from the past itself because itis unavoidably mediated through a complex of self-governing narrativestructures which, stricto-sensu, lack any points of reference located in thepast. Moreover, it should also be noted that, as a proposition, the historicalnarrative rests on an argument (as all propositions do) and an argument canneither be true nor false arguments can only be valid or invalid. Thusthe notion of truth, in this sense, has no bearing on or relevance to thedebate on the function and nature of the narrative form in historiography.

In conclusion I oer two brief endnotes, the rst relating to thesubstance of my central argument and the second constituting a reexivecomment on the nature of all arguments my own included.

Point One: Although hinted at in this essay rather than being argued forat length, I think that Ankersmits own recent move beyond the linguisticand the textual is prohibited by his own theory of narrative substances. Thatis to say that if his theory/argument is valid, and I have argued here that it is,then this best Ankersmit (as dened by his own notion of the narrativesubstance) is so good that various eorts (including his own) to go beyond itcannot succeed and hence his own recent moves towards experience andaway from language are destined to be still-born. This matter, which has abearing on the many contemporary moves towards experience and presenceis not, of course, the subject of this paper. For, as I have explained, it is notmy primary intention here to critique Ankersmit, but rather to use theAnkersmit of Narrative logic (with particular reference to his narrativesubstances) to rearm the centrality of language in historical theory. If Ihave made my point, then the upshot here is that this best Ankersmit is notonly good enough for us all but that he is also (in relation to his excursionsinto historical experience) too good for his own good.

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Point Two: This is an elementary one in that it might be assumed of anyacademic paper. Namely, that of its relative positioning which, given all thatAnkersmit has to say about the relativistic nature of any point-of-view,needs some comment here. With regard to my own point-of-view, then, allthe foregoing represents my current position on the matters that I haveraised and this position, in a Rortian sense (once again), is constitutedwithin the structure of my own end language. Now, some have misunder-stood Rortys end language concept and, accordingly, they nd in it acontradictory foundationalist (or xed) position resting uneasily within abroader relativist philosophy. But this argument is awed, for an endlanguage is not xed. Rather, it continuously reshapes in relation to newrhetorical proposals (new metaphors) and thus any end language can onlyaord a temporary or quasi-foundation for argument pending bettermetaphors to come. In this sense no argument can ever reach closure andthis consideration also applies to, and hence governs, the status of thearguments (albeit arguments which are to me the best that are available rightnow) which I have put forward within this paper. For, as I have alreadypointed out, even the very best arguments can only be expressed in relationto the always temporary rhetorical positions adopted by their authors. Seenthus, no argument can possibly transcend its permanent and inescapablestatus as work in progress. The historical world is a world without closure.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Keith Jenkins for his critical evaluation of my argument and hisinvaluable support and enthusiasm for it. I also want to mention Jonathan Coope,whose constructive comments following his reading of an early draft of this paperhave helped to shape its nal form.

Notes on contributor

Following his 31-year career in the world of Civil Aviation as an Airline Pilot, PeterIcke returned to the far more hazardous world of academia; he is currentlycompleting a PhD thesis on Frank Ankersmit under the supervision of ProfessorKeith Jenkins at the University of Chichester.

Notes

1. For Hempels Covering Law Model see Hempel (1965) and for CollingwoodsRe-enactment Theory see Collingwood (1994, 282302). Also see Walsh (1942,1967) for a more detailed description of colligation.

2. While Ankersmit would (I think) be in agreement with my rst point, as outlinedhere, it is unlikely that he would be in agreement with my second point because,in contradiction to his earlier theorisations, it is his current belief that there existswithin the historical narrative a continuity between fact and value. Ankersmitaccordingly nds that . . . historical representation truly presents us with themuch sought-after trait dunion between the is and the ought. We begin withmerely a set of true statements and move then, automatically and naturally,toward an answer to the question of how to act in the future. The transition is


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completely natural, and at no stage can we identify a point where pureknowledge becomes pure action . . . fact and value, the is and theought, are merely the extremes on a continuous scale . . . (Ankersmit 2001,94). Now this position of Ankersmits, briey suggested in Narrative logic andexpanded in subsequent publications (most recently during an interview withRanjan Ghosh, see Ghosh 2007) appears to me to embody the rm assumptionthat there is a denite link (an entailment), of a xed and permanent kind,between fact and value. For, in order that true statements might moveautomatically and naturally toward an answer to the question of how to act inthe future those true statements must have xed values embedded within them a multiplicity of possible values could only suggest a multiplicity of possibleactions and thus fail to answer the question of how to act in the future. But, theidea that facts have values xed within them is at variance with Ankersmits owncentral concept concerning narrative substances which relies on the particularunderstanding that facts and individual statements are, as he puts it in Narrativelogic . . .compassless when taken in isolation . . . only a narrative point ofview can give them a narrative direction . . . the variety of narrative meaningsone and the same statement may have in dierent narratios suggests that whatthe historical facts are . . . always depends on what narrative use is made of thenarrative statements in question. Thus there are no facts devoid of narrativeinterpretation in Narratios (Ankersmit 1983, 21819). It seems, therefore, thatfor the purpose of his seminal narrative substance argument, Ankersmit took therelativistic view that the meanings, and therefore the values, attached tohistorical facts are to be found only in relation to their uses when organised intonarrative form. However, he contradicted and undermined this earlier positionwhen he proposed his more recent continuous scale fact/value argument whichcan only operate on the basis of a single xed relationship between any particularfact and value. Such a foundationalist position would not rest easily with myown position as expressed here.

3. This view is expressed by both Hayden White and Hans Kellner. See theIntroduction in Re-guring Hayden White (Kellner 2009).

4. For example the works of the Groningen School (that is, works mostlyemanating from or inspired by the Centre for Metaphysics, Groningen, whichwas set up by Frank Ankersmit and Eelco Runia to study historical experienceand related phenomena). For general coverage of the subject see essays by Runia(2006), Ankersmit (2006), Bentley (2006) and others (History and Theory 45,no. 3).

References

Ankersmit, F.R. 1983. Narrative logic: A semantic analysis of the historians language.The Hague: Martinus Nijho.

Ankersmit, F.R. 2001. Historical representation. Stanford, CA: Stanford UniversityPress.

Ankersmit, F.R. 2006. Presence and myth. History and Theory 45, no. 3: 32836.Bentley, M. 2006. Past and presence: Revisiting historical ontology. History and

Theory 45, no. 3: 34961.Cohen, S. 1986. Historical culture. Stanford, CA: University of California Press.Collingwood, R.G. 1994 [1936]. The idea of history. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Davies, M.L. 2005. Historics: Why history dominates contemporary Society. London:

Routledge.Domanska, E. 1998. Encounters: Philosophy of history after postmodernism.

Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

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Ghosh, R. 2007. Interdisciplinarity and the doing of history: A dialogue betweenF.R. Ankersmit and Ranjan Ghosh. Rethinking History 11, no. 2: 22549.

Hempel, C.G. 1965. Aspects of scientic explanation and other essays in the philosophyof science. New York: Free Press.

Kellner, H. 2009. Introduction. In Re-guring Hayden White, ed. F.R. Ankersmit, E.Domanska and H. Kellner, 18. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Mink, L.O. 1987. Historical understanding. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Ricoeur, P. 1984. Time and narrative, Vol. 1. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago

Press.Rorty, R. 2007. Philosophy as cultural politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.Roth, M.S. 2007. Ebb tide. History and Theory 46, no. 1: 6673.Runia, E. 2006. Spots of time. History and Theory 45, no. 3: 30516.Walsh, W.H. 1942. The intelligibility of history. Philosophy 17, no. 66: 12843.Walsh, W.H. 1967. An introduction to philosophy of history. London: Hutchison.White, H. 1973.Metahistory: The historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe.

Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.White, H. 1978. Tropics of discourse. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University

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icke - frank ankersmit's narrative substance a legacy to historians (rethinking history)

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