Postmodern historiography

After reviewing some of the more radical proposals for a postmodern historiography, Christopher Butler, no friend to postmodernism, makes the sensible suggestion that “Postmodern relativism needn’t mean that anything goes, or that faction and fiction are the same as history. What it does mean is that we should be more skeptically aware, more relativist abut, more attentive to, the theoretical assumptions which support the narratives produced by all historians, whether they see themselves as empiricists or deconstructors or as postmodern ‘new historicists.’” Sensible, except that it is not at all clear how this qualifies as “relativism.”

Butler admits that “an exact correspondence between narrative and ‘the past’ is not possible.” (Note the very pomo quotes around “the past.”) This is because the “‘same’ event” (whoa! quotes again) can be described in all sorts of ways, and besides “our access to the evidence is always mediated, nothing is simply transparent, and there are always absences and gaps and biases to deal with.” Despite these difficulties, “narratives can still be more or less adequate to the (interpreted) evidence, and new evidence can still overturn narratives.” As good old-style liberal, Butler wants to ensure that all accounts of the past remain open to scrutiny and debate, lest “some ‘official version’ may come to represent for us a true and final account of the past” and (heaven forbid) become a “dominant ideology.” The possibility that liberalism might be a dominant and even oppressive ideology does not occur to him.

He ends with this sensible comment: When it comes down to it, “the deconstructionist historian differs from the others only in a tendency to worry aloud, as he or she writes, about the difficulties of the job.”

Here is a thesis worth pursuing: Postmodernism is theoretical whining.