History in the Discursive Condition

The talk discusses the challenges and the new options the ‘Discursive Condition’ presents to historians.  History as conventionally understood and practised belongs to modernity; it involves relatively little attention to the question of what, exactly, is its function in our cultural life.  Take, for example, the key instruments of conventional history–facts, individuals, and emergent causalities.  Unreflective use of such instruments implies that they are the harmless means of producing an accurate picture or representation of ‘reality’, the more neutral the better: as accurate a picture as possible of civil war in Bosnia, Michaelangelo’s personal life, or the year 1776. The implication is that history, in providing a picture of ‘reality,’ performs a culturally neutral task in producing such resemblances.   Because of tectonic changes across the range of practice, especially at the turn of the twentieth century, we now find ourselves on the far side of a sea change away from the objectifications of modernity and into what I call the ‘Discursive Condition’, where the focus has shifted to systemic values and away from the neutrality and objectifications of modernity.  Historians have largely ignored or resisted this shift in attention but denial is no longer an option when the shift in question has appeared across the range of practice, disciplinary and otherwise, and in sciences as well as humanities.  The focus of attention has shifted from the secondary picture or resemblance to the primary arena of enunciation and practice, and to the recognition of differences within and between codes; this shift requires a new kind of historical writing and new tools of thought.