This essay focuses on three topics that arose at the Photography and Historical Interpretation conference: photography’s incapacity to conceive duration; photography and the “rim of ontological uncertainty;” photography’s “anthropological revolution.” In the late nineteenth century, blindness to duration was conceptualized as the cost of photographic precision. Since the late twentieth century, blindness to our own desires, or inauthenticity, has been underlined as the price of photographic ubiquity. These forms of blindness, however, are not so much disabilities to be overcome as (...) they are aspects of modern consciousness to be acknowledged. The engagement with photography’s impact on historical consciousness gives rise to reconsiderations of temporal extension and to the difficulties of acknowledging one’s desires in an increasingly open and fractured social field. Photography’s indexicality combined with its reproducibility gives rise to photographic ambivalence. As with other forms of ambivalence, we should be less concerned with diluting its constitutive tensions than with learning to live with its conflicted possibilities. (shrink)

This thesis situates recent tensions in debates about history over epistemology within their historical and social contexts. It explores the possibilities for developing historical understanding across epistemologies by considering the role ideas of justice can play in contemporary historical praxis. By considering historical praxis in relation to ideas of justice I have identified a nexus in which to explore different ways of knowing the past that is at once responsive to difference whilst also situating the ethical as an essential regulator (...) in determining meaningful, responsible and valid representations of the past. (shrink)

Philosophers' reflections on history have been dominated for decades by two themes: representation and memory. On both of these accounts, historical inquiry is divided by a certain gap from what it seeks to find or wants to know, and its activity is seen by philosophers as that of bridging this gap. Against this background, the concept of experience, in spite of its apparent rootedness in the present, can be revived as a means of thinking about our connection to the past. (...) After examining variants on the concept of experience, with special attention to its temporality, I argue in this essay that experience can be said to furnish a connection to the past that underlies both memory and representation. (shrink)

A mediados de los 70 ́s irrumpe con Hayden White el narrativismo en la escena de la filosofía de la historia contemporánea. Hoy, cuarenta años después de la publicación de Metahistoria, se hace necesario reflexionar acerca de la continuidad de la influencia whiteana. Caracterizando el gesto filosófico fundacional del narrativismo como una aceptación irónica del uso del lenguaje en la historiografía y las últimas reflexiones de White y Frank Ankersmit como un aparente rechazo romántico de sus posiciones anteriores, el presente (...) trabajo propone una narración del narrativismo para evaluar su actualidad para el futuro de la filosofía de la historia. (shrink)

How can the subliminal, mysterious, but uncommonly powerful living-on, the presence, of the past be envisaged? In this essay I argue that presence is not brought about by stories — by, that is, the "storiness" of stories. Presence rather shows itself in how the past can force us—and enable us—to rewrite our stories about ourselves. The question then is how we acquire the experiences that can eventually force us to do so. How, and with what kind of things, does the (...) mémoire involontaire—from which presence wells up—get filled? In order to answer this question one might turn it around to the question how we can fill the mémoire involontaire of others. A consideration of the "art of slandering" shows that the mémoire involontaire tends to get filled with things that we believe are "common knowledge," that are "obliquely" communicated, and that are cast in metonymies. Metonymy offers a much better road to the mémoire involontaire than metaphor because metonymy is better at suggesting that what it conveys is "common knowledge." Therefore, I propose that presence resides in the metonymical region of language. Instead of being contained in the meaningful content of stories, presence resides in what a story inadvertently has to be—in, that is, the things a story has to present in order to present a story. My conclusion is that as presence the past is the exact opposite of what historians think it is. It is indestructible, uncannily close, and—despite its closeness and its durability—utterly impossible to conserve in "representations" that can be taken along in the hand luggage with which we traverse time. (shrink)

Preliminary remark:The following conversation began as a series of written email exchanges. Due to technical reasons, this exchange had to be interrupted at some point. Rather than rewriting the text that had obtained from scratch, I continued the conversation, turning the real “other” of the dialogue into an imagined one. Heartfelt thanks to Oren Harman, the guest editor of this topical issue, for continuing support and for having taken the risk of designing this unusual topical issue ofScience in Contextwith me. (...) AM. (shrink)

This essay explores the ways that the specter of deconstruction has been haunting history over the past thirty years, in particular this specter's effects on the revision of intellectual and cultural history. The essay uses the terms "specter" and "haunting" to express the fact that while deconstruction is repeatedly targeted in attacks against the dangers of postmodernism, poststructuralism, or the linguistic turn, very few historians actively use deconstruction as a historical methodology; in this regard the target has always been a (...) phantom. However, some historians have employed the methods of deconstruction, and by examining their work as well as the attacks on it the essay attempts to explain the historiographical reasons behind these attacks. The goal of the essay is ultimately to indicate some of the ways that deconstruction is useful for the historian, as evidenced in the project of historical revision. (shrink)

My purpose in the researching and the writing of this thesis has been to investigate, and to try to explain, Frank Ankersmit's curious shift from his well expressed and firmly held narrativist position of "Narrative Logic", to an arguably contradictory, yet passionately held counter belief in the plausibility of a form of direct historical experience - an authentic unmediated relationship with the past. I am, accordingly, presenting here what I believe to be the most adequate explanatory account of/for Ankersmit's intellectual (...) journey. A journey which, in essence, constituted a substitution of his earlier representational, language centred philosophy of history for what might be taken as a new and mystical non-representational theory. This alternative theory of Ankersmit' s, lacking cognitive foundations, works on the basis of sensations, moods, feelings and therefore a consciousness deemed to be received directly from the past itself, and therein - for this thesis - lies its fatal weakness as a historical theory. Belief in the mystical may be all right at some level, if this is what is wanted, but a mystical experience itself cannot produce a historical re-presentation which is the only way that the past can be presented historically. Thus, I argue that Ankersmit's journey from language to experience - the latter phenomenon being more appropriately situated within the field of sociology/social theory and memory studies - is, in the end, a lost historical cause. (shrink)

London-based company ScanLab Projects is a multi-disciplinary commercial collaboration between architect, artist, coders and designers who utilize technologies surrounding 3D laser scanning in their practice. Inherent in the manner their projects are pitched is through reference to the photographic as technological process. Central to their engagement with the light detection and ranging (LiDAR) scanning apparatus is a consideration of the relationality between virtual or digital object and what could be determined as extrinsic or ‘real’ terrain. In Post-lenticular Landscapes, 2017, ScanLab (...) created a series of LiDAR scans of Yosemite National Park. The landscape, presented as a stereoscopic film work where the spectator flies through an ephemeral black and white point cloud, is contextualized relationally to a certain photo-historical context and lineage: As Yosemite is synonymous with the advent of photographic process through the work of Muybridge, Watkins, Woods and Adams, the work revisits an archetypal image of the American sublime. In this text, I unpack ScanLab’s usage and conceptualization of LiDAR scans referentially to an understanding of the photographic. By considering how ScanLab frames our understanding of the project through the technological apparatus, the text attempts to problematize the scans by reading them through a particular art historic heritage. In this context, I posit alternate ways of reading the work, specifically through reference to the image of Yosemite that has proliferated across the desktops of Apple computers since 2014. Furthermore, through a reading of metonymy in the writing of Eelco Runia, the eerie as understood by Mark Fisher and in relation to Lev Manovich’s description of photorealism, I propose that the future of the mediation and understandings of machinic vision are to be thought with a reconsidered notion of the photographic. (shrink)

In order to discuss the notion of presence, I explore Fascist Italy as an example of a presence-based culture. In the first part of this paper, I focus on the doctrines of "the philosopher of fascism," Giovanni Gentile , in order to show that his programme of cultural awakening revolves around the notion of the "presentification of the past." This notion formed the basis of Gentile's dialectic of the act of thought, which is the kernel of his actual idealism, or (...) actualism. I argue that actualism should primarily be interpreted as an ontology of a historical reality; it expresses the view that reality is history. In his 1914 inaugural "L'esperienza pura e la realtà storica" , Gentile drew this view to its ultimate consequence by developing a view of experience that has some striking parallels with the contemporary views of presence as expounded by Gumbrecht, Runia, and Ankermit. In the second part of my paper, I discuss how Gentile and his collaborators put presence into practice in school reforms, the Enciclopedia Italiana, and in hundreds of monuments, memorials, and exhibitions. Finally, I discuss the 1932 Mostra della rivoluzione fascista, which was not only the apex of Fascist culture politics, but also of the practice of presence. In this context, I argue that this practice should not be seen as a politics of historical interpretation, as Hayden White once held, but as a politics of sublime historical experience, or presence. The presence of presence in Fascist political culture raises some difficult questions for all who embrace the new paradigm, questions that can only be answered if the notion of presence is somehow balanced by the critical historical method, which is the basis for a true dialogue with the past. (shrink)

Abstract This paper is a classic critique of speculative philosophies of history based on Maurice Mandelbaum's work. Unlike the more famous invective by Karl Popper, I argue that Mandelbaum's is a richer and more interesting approach, which reveals through exposition a deeper unity to Mandelbaum's work than is normally evident. Because Popper's nominalism is suspicious of all metaphysics, it loses credibility whereas Mandelbaum placed reflection on the nature of society and causality at the center of his interests. Mandelbaum's critique then (...) is an invitation to investigate metaphysics on realist principles and he requires that we have a robust theory of historical ontology and truth with which to judge what goes beyond the proper representation of history and becomes speculative. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to ask whether what it calls the "presence" of things, including things of the past, can be rendered in language, including the language of historians. In Part I the essay adumbrates what it means by presence . It also proposes two ideal types: meaning-cultures , and presence-cultures . In the modern period, linguistic utterance has typically come to be used for, and to be interpreted as, the way by which meaning rather than presence is (...) expressed, thereby creating a gap between language and presence. Thus, in Part II the essay explores ways that this gap might be bridged, examining seven instances in which presence can be "amalgamated" with language. These range from instances in which the physical dimensions of language itself are made manifest, to those through which the physicality of the things to which language refers is supposed to be made evident. Of particular note for theorists of history are those instances in which things can be made present by employing the deictic, poetic, and incantatory potential of linguistic expression. The essay concludes in Part III with a reflection on Heidegger's idea that language is the "house of being," now interpreted as the idea that language can be the medium through which the separation of humans and the things of their environment may be overcome. The hope of achieving presence in language is no less than a reconciliation of humans with their world, including—and of most interest to historians—the things and events of their past. (shrink)

How can the subliminal, mysterious, but uncommonly powerful living-on, the presence, of the past be envisaged? In this essay I argue that presence is not brought about by stories — by, that is, the "storiness" of stories. Presence rather shows itself in how the past can force us—and enable us—to rewrite our stories about ourselves. The question then is how we acquire the experiences that can eventually force us to do so. How, and with what kind of things, does the (...) mémoire involontaire—from which presence wells up—get filled? In order to answer this question one might turn it around to the question how we can fill the mémoire involontaire of others. A consideration of the "art of slandering" shows that the mémoire involontaire tends to get filled with things that we believe are "common knowledge," that are "obliquely" communicated, and that are cast in metonymies. Metonymy offers a much better road to the mémoire involontaire than metaphor because metonymy is better at suggesting that what it conveys is "common knowledge." Therefore, I propose that presence resides in the metonymical region of language. Instead of being contained in the meaningful content of stories, presence resides in what a story inadvertently has to be—in, that is, the things a story has to present in order to present a story. My conclusion is that as presence the past is the exact opposite of what historians think it is. It is indestructible, uncannily close, and—despite its closeness and its durability—utterly impossible to conserve in "representations" that can be taken along in the hand luggage with which we traverse time. (shrink)

The relationship between history and justice traditionally has been dominated by the idea of the past as distant or absent . This ambiguous ontological status makes it very difficult to situate the often-felt “duty to remember” or obligation to “do justice to the past” in that past itself, and this has led philosophers from Friedrich Nietzsche to Keith Jenkins to plead against an “obsession” with history in favor of an ethics aimed at the present. History’s ability to contribute to the (...) quest for justice, as a result, often seems very restricted or even nonexistent. The introduction of the “presence”-paradigm in historiography can potentially alter this relation between history and justice. However, to do so it should be conceived in such a way that it offers a fundamental critique of the metaphysical dichotomy between the present and the absent and the underlying concept of time that supports this dichotomy. The “presence”-paradigm can be emancipatory and productive only if presence and absence are not perceived as absolute dichotomies. In the first part of this article I elaborate on the influence that the present/absent dichotomy has on the notion of justice by introducing a conceptual contrast between what I will call the “time of jurisdiction” and the “time of history.” The second part of the article focuses on the way certain aspects of the dominant Western chronosophy reinforce the present/absent dichotomy and thereby prevent us from thoroughly exploring the ambiguous but often very problematic presence of the past. Throughout the article I refer to the relatively recent phenomenon of truth commissions and the context of transitional justice to discuss some challenges for the “presence”-paradigm. (shrink)

There are no dictionary meanings or authoritative discussions of "presence" that fix the significance of this word in a way that ought to be accepted by anybody using it. So we are in the welcome possession of great freedom to maneuver when using the term. In fact, the only feasible requirement for its use is that it should maximally contribute to our understanding of the humanities. When trying to satisfy this requirement I shall relate "presence" to representation. Then I focus (...) on a variant of representation in which the past is allowed to travel to the present as a kind of "stowaway", so that the past is literally "present" in historical representation. I appeal to Runia's notion of so-called "parallel processes" for an analysis of this variant of historical representation. (shrink)

El renovado interés que ha adquirido el pensamiento político desde la segunda mitad del siglo veinte ha dado lugar a nuevas perspectivas para su estudio. Sin embargo, el desarrollo teórico de las ciencias sociales no ha tenido una interacción fluida entre las disciplinas que la componen. En este trabajo argumentaré que los desarrollos metodológicos sobre la posibilidad histórica de la teoría política deberían estar interconectados con los desarrollos en el campo de la historiografía. Para sostener mi posición me propongo realizar (...) una aproximación problemática en torno a la posibilidad de construir un conocimiento histórico-científico de la teoría política, a partir de los siguientes tópicos: la temporalidad histórica; el vínculo entre temporalidad y pensamiento, y la politización del pensamiento. (shrink)

This article addresses Barthes’s development from a structuralist semiotician towards an affectively responding reader in terms of ‘postrational’ subjectivity. In light of his whole oeuvre, Barthes anticipates the understanding of emotion as an integral part of cognition presented in contemporary social neuroscience. To illustrate Barthes’s growing awareness of the importance of this epistemological move, the article starts from his textual ‘reality effect’ as a critical vehicle of realist representation. It then shifts to his attempt at conceptualising an affective reading which (...) resists the universalising idea of one ideologically determined signified. Barthes’s progress towards embracing the actual reader’s embodied self-feeling is prompted by two conceptual milestones: the obtuse meaning found incinematic stills, and the experience of punctum felt in photos. In light of his lectures in the Collège de France, Barthes substitutes the Husserlian disembodied method of introspection with the Chinese wu-wei as a reading practice. As a result, his Zen-Buddhist concentration on bodily feelings elicited by visual/verbal images becomes a method capable of creating a fruitful link between language and wordless cognition. Finally, the article proposes an idea of the ‘embodied reality effect’ by reading affectively two similar scenes interpreted by the early and late Barthes himself. (shrink)

There are no dictionary meanings or authoritative discussions of "presence" that fix the significance of this word in a way that ought to be accepted by anybody using it. So we are in the welcome possession of great freedom to maneuver when using the term. In fact, the only feasible requirement for its use is that it should maximally contribute to our understanding of the humanities. When trying to satisfy this requirement I shall relate "presence" to representation. Then I focus (...) on a variant of representation in which the past is allowed to travel to the present as a kind of "stowaway" , so that the past is literally "present" in historical representation. I appeal to Runia's notion of so-called "parallel processes" for an analysis of this variant of historical representation. (shrink)

The approach that philosophers have taken to history has too often been one-dimensional. It is my aim in this paper to map out a future multi-dimensional philosophy of history, by invoking the notion of a relation with the past, and by arguing for the philosophical relevance of multiple such relations.