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History and Schizophrenia
*Michael Mirabile *
/ Reed College/
mirabilm@reed.edu
(c) 2006 Michael Mirabile.
All rights reserved.
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Review of:
Sande Cohen, History Out of Joint: Essays on the Use and Abuse of
History. Johns Hopkins UP, 2006.
1. History Out of Joint: Essays on the Use and Abuse of History
begins by expressing surprise at the various claims that fall
under the rubric of history today. Cohen asks why contemporary
culture values historicism so highly and allows it to acquire the
force of necessity.
2. "Always historicize!" is Fredric Jameson's famous command in the
opening of The Political Unconscious (1981). He humorously adds
that it is almost possible to consider this a transcendental or
"transhistorical" imperative (9). Of course the concept of history
must only be almost transcendental, must always stop short of
being a noncontingent evaluative principle, which Jameson
acknowledges. Absent that delimitation it would not, according to
habitual and circular thinking, be judged rigorously "historical."
Cohen sees this general historicizing tendency as culturally
symptomatic, hardly restricted to Jameson or to Marxist criticism.
Covering a variety of topics, from Deleuze's theory of repetition
and Derrida's reading of Marx to the politics of the Los Angeles
art world and Taiwanese resistance to the "one China," History Out
of Joint is above all distinctive for its sustained effort to
bring something like the full weight of the postmodern
condition--including media saturation, the cultural effects of
globalization, skepticism about linguistic referentiality--to bear
on historiography. Just as the "critiques of metanarratives" have
"unsettled historical synthesis," historians writing in the age of
hypertext may no longer "trust in the sense of continuity of plot
if their readers are increasingly pre- and postliterary" (History
106, 104). At times the territory appears too vast to map or, at
the very least, resistant to the micro-examination Cohen evidently
prefers. Put still another way: his approach raises the question
whether a subject as large as history, or as the end of history's
descriptive efficacy, may be addressed comprehensively through
selective readings of uses of history. However, even the book's
most contestable critical interventions produce valuable insights
that might have been missed in a less ambitious book.
3. Cohen's thesis, stated most concisely, is that "/we are
overhistoricized and undercritical/" (History 125). He opposes the
reductionism of what he variously labels "normative criticism,"
"university-based legitimations of criticism," and "the
explanatory models of modern thought." He nevertheless upholds a
firm notion of critique throughout History Out of Joint. In one
intervention that I examine at length because it exemplifies the
book's analytical labor, Cohen associates Derrida's Specters of
Marx (1998) with a trend toward "anticriticism" (155). Cohen
continues to pursue the concern with academic criticism of his
earlier Academia and the Luster of Capital and Passive Nihilism,
but expands his focus beyond that of a single institutional
formation and discursive practice to include the contemporary
cultural field in general. In History Out of Joint he also
considers popular representations of history and the historian,
such as those advanced in Los Angeles Times editorials. The
interest of the book consequently far exceeds the specific
disciplinary frame professional historians would likely bring to it.
4. Despite many apparent and some actual similarities between Cohen's
work and Hayden White's, Cohen distinguishes his critical
revaluation from White's metahistorical and tropological analysis.
Having denied the possibility of applying critical insight from
historiography to the real, Cohen moves from forms of order and
patterning to those of contingency and alterity--from, as he
announces, narrative to event. White, accounting in Metahistory
(1973) for the deep structure of the nineteenth-century European
historical imagination, and in Tropics of Discourse (1978) for
recurrent figurations traced back as far as Vico that offer "the
key to an understanding of the Western discourse about
consciousness" (12), examines the importance of narrative and
rhetorical conventions in historical writing. "Metahistory," as
its project is summarized in History Out of Joint, examines "the
conditions of possibility in the writing of a narrative (the use
of criteria to select things to narrate)" (168), whereas Cohen,
confining himself to the present or to the recent past of
modernity, engages ongoing cultural debates in the absence of a
shared, pre-constituted language. In a thoroughly "out of joint"
present, historians and cultural analysts can no longer have
recourse to homology, to recurrent paradigms that hold across
discourses, disciplines, and geographies.
5. "/To historicize/ goes schizo," according to one particularly
suggestive formulation, when historians incorporate into the
writing of history a consciousness of the reductionism of history
as a concept and category (History 124). With this momentous shift
they register a crisis in the use-value of historicity:
"schizophrenia comes into historiography when one actively notices
the restrictions placed on what can count as a narrative subject"
(106). In Academia and the Luster of Capital Cohen also sees
history not in epistemological terms, as process and procedure,
but as mediation: "As a concept concerning reality, 'history' . .
. will be treated here as an essentially politicizing construct"
(81). More generally the crisis concerns changes in our collective
experience of time. "Nonsynchronous movements and actions" follow,
for instance, from "a 'vampiric' or zombie-like time (shopping)"
(Academia 83). The contemporary scene is characterized, in Cohen's
view, by such distinct, site-specific temporalities for which the
framework of history provides only inapt analogies and metaphors.
6. Still, Cohen observes, occasional recognition of the crisis
coexists with a renewed commitment to historicism. One hears calls
for returns to history and promises of history's return--as in the
inevitable return of the repressed. In the countervailing and
culturally dominant refusal to "schizophrenize" history, Cohen
discerns a reaction-formation against an ever more politically and
socially elusive moment. Thus precisely now, when "the pressure to
historicize is so great," Cohen insists on the need for a
questioning, a genealogical rethinking, of historical
representation itself (History 105). As a self-declared
"ex-historian" working amidst the paradoxical conditions of
"posthistory," Cohen pushes back against the archivilist trend in
scholarship toward increasing contextual specificity. "Historical
context," as the indispensable category and mantra for "verbal
aggressions in support" of history's return among groups as
dissimilar as new historicists and revisionists, "promises an
iconic and indexical satisfaction" (Academia xii) yet merely
results in "historicization by restriction" of meaning (History
111). "Historical criticism" amounts, for Cohen, to a
contradiction.[1 <#foot1>] In sum, he reorders the terms of the
discussion. On the side of history and its methodological
extensions (historiography, historicism) he ranges narrative,
repression, institutionalization, selection, and telos, which
signal interpretive and referential closure. In contrast, he
associates what I have been cautiously calling the real with
plenitude, the continual production of meaning. Finally, history
is "out of joint" for Cohen because, as a prime instance of
territorialization, it is out of step with the massive
deterritorializing machines of capital and modernity. (At the
opposite end of this spectrum stands Jameson's equation of the
Lacanian Real with a capitalized "History" in his "Imaginary and
Symbolic in Lacan" [1977].) Cohen concludes that history can no
longer "speak" to the conditions of the present.
7. I expected the chapter on Derrida's reading of Marx to disavow
academic enthusiasm for deconstruction. Cohen's sensitivity to the
perils of critical reductionism, on the other hand, made
counterclaims on behalf of dialectical or materialist categories,
in particular Marxian historiography, appear unlikely. I prepared
myself to encounter, in short, an interpretation resembling the
more anti-Derridean contributions to the valuable collection
Ghostly Demarcations (1999; edited by Michael Sprinker) without
the corresponding New Left ideological investments.
8. In the opening pages, aspects of the chapter's discussion seemed
to fulfill my expectations: if not in Cohen's forthright
declaration that his "reading is at odds with Derrida's project,"
then in the willingness to revisit apolitical characterizations of
deconstruction common in Derrida's Anglo-American reception
history (History 155). Cohen trespasses what would appear
unassailable territory for deconstructionists: the exposure of
binary thinking. Undaunted by the task, he questions
deconstruction's global relevance "in the face of nearly universal
extreme concentrations of wealth, authority, and value" (166).
Wouldn't a criticism that begins by specifying instead of
undermining distinctions prove more politically useful? Of course
this assumes, against the use of deconstruction to begin, in
Drucilla Cornell's words, an inquiry into "the current conditions
of society and the possibilities of social change" (69), that
Derrida advances a value-neutral language or form of linguistic
reflexivity.[2 <#foot2>] The neglect of this prominent, by now
long-standing practice of reading Derrida politically in Cohen's
own presumed politicization of deconstruction is a major
shortcoming of the chapter.
9. At, if not beyond, the limits of Cohen's politicizing gesture,
just as he considers that it might be "unfair" to mention "that
one-third of the world's actual population has no daily, reliable
source of potable water," he transfers his critical energies to a
more foundational inquiry into the precepts of Derrida's
deconstruction (History 166). Cohen's reading transitions, in
other words, from a mere charge of hermeticism to a meditation on
the fate of differential critique. He eventually attempts to turn
Derrida's attack on metaphysics against his own critical
procedure. The challenge that Cohen advances from this point of
the chapter on is a serious one. Nevertheless it will likely
elicit the charge that Cohen is simplifying Derrida's engagement
with Marxism. In light of the pressing question, raised in the
later chapter on Deleuze, whether forms of critique "give the
concept of difference its difference," Cohen finds Specters of
Marx lacking (229). While Deleuze "wants to make difference a
catastrophe," Derrida restages, according to Cohen, the promised
return of history not as the irrecuperable singularity of the
event but as repetition of the same (235). More specifically,
"true repetition"--likewise following a Deleuzian
formulation--repeats without identity, perhaps even paradoxically
"repeats something unrepeatable" (232). Cohen alludes to Derrida's
"meta-metahistory" not as the condition of possibility for
narrativization--as in White--but as "the condition of conditions"
that guarantees an unchanging structural disparity of privilege
and supplement as well as the past's latent visitation upon the
present in spectral form (168). In a conclusion to which many
readers of Derrida will object, Cohen accuses Derrida of
indifference to discursive and temporal difference.
10. No less contestable is Cohen's portrayal of Taiwanese resistance
to Chinese hegemony as nothing short of "resistance to
history--something more affirmative than opposition" (History 49).
Taiwan's unique geopolitical situation subjects it to the distinct
but often combined economic forces of China and the United States.
It provides Cohen with an opportunity to scrutinize an example of
simultaneous self-enclosure and event-like semiotic openness.
Based partly, as Cohen notes, on his personal experience of living
in Taiwan, this chapter demonstrates how meticulous his analysis
can be. At the same time Taiwan's situation functions as a kind of
parable of the limits and potential dangers of historicizing.
Indeed, media coverage of Taiwan, symptomatic for Cohen of the
"abuse" of history, reveals the territorializing force of
historical narration. Here it is employed to secure proleptically
an uninterrupted flow of capital. "To historicize," Cohen reminds
us, "is as much now a tactic placed in the service of making a
future as it is a recuperation of any lost and forgotten past"
(124). By contrast, Taiwan embodies for some (including Cohen)
local political struggle against globalization and the imposed
narrative of progressive economic expansion. The repeated
neo-liberal exhortations in the Los Angeles Times and the New York
Times in the name of the marketplace, as "a paramount instance of
misfiguration" involving among other things the repression of
Taiwan's colonial past, prompt Cohen to conduct an analysis of the
politics of representation in the American media (61, 49). To be
sure, the predispositions and socio-political horizons of
individual readers will to a large extent dictate how viable the
analysis appears. Its final turn is, again, not to recommend a
more proper use--against the abuses--of history. Instead Cohen's
strategy is to embrace the "ahistorical" in its full
anti-foundationalist implications.
11. Does political resistance receive fresh impetus from the
revelation of history as mediation and fetish? Or does the
revelation bring us one step closer to nihilism? The option of an
"ahistorical" collective identity, which History Out of Joint
ascribes to Taiwan, may not at first glance seem particularly
empowering, though Cohen's redefinition of "ahistorical" as that
which designates "those times when a people or group cannot be
assimilated to Western narratives" should compel readers to
question the value habitually attached to historical consciousness
(History 48). I am convinced that the non-metaphysical
end-of-history gesture offered here is more than a clever
reordering of terms and associations--with interpretive and
referential plenitude, typically assigned to the historically
contextualized event, being replaced by impoverishment. More
immediately, however, will Cohen's proclamation of an irreducible,
posthistorical present correspond to actual reductions in the use
of historicism? Will injunctions such as Jameson's that we always
historicize lose their authority? On these latter questions I am
left to conclude, no doubt reductively and conventionally, that
only time will tell. In any case, Cohen has helped start a
difficult and long overdue conversation.
/ English and Humanities
Reed College
mirabilm@reed.edu /
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Notes
1 <#ref1>. Expanding upon and clarifying this point, Cohen notes
that "'historical criticism' or criticism 'founded' upon 'history'
is an unnecessary recoding of one or more versions of the endemic
myth that criticism equals enlightenment." "Criticism," he
concludes, "would be better off if it were groundless /and/
elicited meanings that tried to reach the limits of language
rather than constantly producing the effect of
/oversignification/" (Academia 28).
2 <#ref2>. I take the citation above from Cornell's contribution
to the collection Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice.
The attitude expressed strikes me as representative of that
informing the overall project of the juridical extension of
deconstructive critique. Other collections, such as Consequences
of Theory, eds. Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson, and Critical
Encounters, eds. Cathy Caruth and Deborah Esch, focus less on law
and more on the general political field, but join Deconstruction
and the Possibility of Justice in rejecting the apolitical reading
of deconstruction.
Works Cited
Arac, Jonathan, and Barbara Johnson, eds. Consequences of Theory:
Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1987-88. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP, 1991.
Caruth, Cathy, and Deborah Esch, eds. Critical Encounters:
Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing. New
Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1995.
Cohen, Sande. Academia and the Luster of Capital. Minneapolis:
Minnesota UP, 1993.
Cornell, Drucilla. "The Philosophy of the Limit: Systems Theory
and Feminist Legal Reform." Deconstruction and the Possibility of
Justice. London: Routledge, 1992. 68-91.
Jameson, Fredric. "Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan." The
Ideologies of Theory. Vol. I: Situations of Theory. Minneapolis: U
of Minnesota P, 1988. 75-115.
---. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic
Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.
White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.