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Representations 26 (Spring 1989)
Probably no one
doubts that ethical and political dispositions depend on narratives. Having a
sense of what ought to be done is inseparable, if it is even distinguishable,
from being committed to certain patterns of action—that is to say, to certain
repeatable narratives forms. Whether being committed to a pattern of action
necessarily involves a commitment to some specific narrative—for
instance, to the narrated acts of a particular hero and not just to a general
style of heroic action—is an interesting question but not one I will pursue. It
seems clear that specific narratives at least sometimes play a role in shaping
people’s dispositions, whether they do so directly (if it happens, for
instance, that a Christian is disposed to imitate some particular act and not
just a type of action imputed to Jesus) or by giving rise to vague stereotypes
of right action. And if dispositions are at least sometimes connected with
specific narratives, then socially shared dispositions are likely to be
connected with narratives preserved by collective memory, for example by oral
tradition or a canonical literature. Beyond the causal role they play in
influencing people’s dispositions, the narratives preserved by collective
memory sometimes play a normative role—that is, they may in various ways
provide criteria, implicit or explicit, by which contemporary models of action
can be shaped or corrected, or even by which particular ethical or political
proposals can be authorized or criticized. For convenience, I will speak of a
narrative that possesses such normative status as bearing collective authority.
The question that
concerns me, then, is this: why should it ever matter, if it does, that an authoritative
narrative correspond to historical actuality? What is the relation between a
narrated act’s paradigmatic authority and that act’s actually having taken
place at some specifiable moment, or any moment, in the past? The
question sounds abstract, but in fact numerous concrete projects in various
interpretive disciplines seem to involve the claim that historical actuality
matters; that, for instance, the political role played in the present by
canonical texts ought to be connected in some way to an unmasked or demystified
account of the actual historical conditions under which those texts were
produced. Sometimes this claim finds expression in an attempt to use the
exposure of social origins as a means of emptying a canonical text of its
traditional prestige; in other cases, the point is not simply to reject the
canonical narrative but to transfer its authority, once its historical falsity
has been exposed, to politically desirable features of the actual past that the
text has either distorted or suppressed. Either way, an assumption implicit in
a number of current critical tendencies, visible in a range of feminist,
Marxist, and what have come to be called “New Historicist” treatments of
canonical texts, is that the truth about the actual collective past has a
necessary or intrinsic relevance to ethical and political action in the
present. My aim in what follows will be to explore the grounds and implications
of this assumption, first by examining the role it plays in three recent
proposals, two from the field of biblical criticism and one from the criticism
of secular canonical literature. While my treatment of these proposals will be
critical, my purpose in considering them is not primarily polemical; I will be
using these examples mainly to suggest the difficulty of accounting, in any
very simple or straightforward way, for an investment in the actually
collective past as such. After that I will consider one possible way of
understanding this investment, namely via an analogy between personal and collective
relations to the actual past; the brief concluding section will then turn from
these somewhat skeptical explorations to a series of modest but more positive
suggestions about the ethical and political relevance of historical
revisionism.
. . .
Where then, if not
in their status as signs of (unaltered) divine intentions, does materialist
criticism locate the scriptural authority of ancient events? The answer seems
to lie in a peculiar combination of two kinds of relation between the present
and the past: a combination of, on one hand, the relation of analogy
and, on the other hand, sheer historical continuity. Specifically, the present
authority of Israel’s or of the Church’s actual social origins is presumes to
derive from the intersection of two relations: first, the perceived analogy
between ancient and modern social struggles; second, the influence, however
remote, that the ancient struggles have exerted on the struggles in which
participants in the tradition are, or should be, presently engaged.
The principles of
analogy and continuity, while not explicitly named by Schüssler Fiorenza, are
implicitly combined in her insistence on the essential role of feminist memory.
Biblical contexts are relevant to present feminist struggles because they provide
the “roots and beginnings” of the “continuous history” of what Schüssler
Fiorenza calls “women as the ekklesia of God” (MH, 350). But
ancient struggles are not merely early steps in a historical sequence that
eventuates in modern feminism. Those struggles are also similar to present
ones, so that remembering them “not only keeps alive the suffering and hopes of
Christian women in the past but also allows for a universal solidarity of
sisterhood with all women of the past, present, and future who follow the same
vision” (MH, 31). The crucial point, once again, is the coincidence of
continuity, which connects past and present via historical sequence, and
analogy, which connects past and present via a common property to both—namely,
the “vision” shared by ancient and modern feminists.
Gottwald seems
somewhat less confident than Schüssler Fiorenza that ancient and modern
participants in the biblical tradition share “the same vision.” The version of
sociology that Gottwald favors assumes that ideological products like “visions”
are closely bound to the contexts from which they emerge. Hence, according to
Gottwald, “To purport to believe the same things in different social and
intellectual conditions is in fact not to believe the same things at all” (TY,
704). In general Gottwald seems less ready than Schüssler Fiorenza to suppose
that we really can “continue to derive symbolic resources from the biblical
traditions” (TY, 705). But if this is possible, then the basis of
the possibility turns out once again to be a coincidence of analogy and
continuity. Thus Israel’s “powerful, evocative symbolism” helped it, Gottwald
writes, to strive “for liberated life of a sort realizable under the
socioeconomic and intellectual-cultural conditions peculiar to its time and
place.” Nevertheless, “similar struggles in great variety have
punctuated the long history that connects us with early Israel” (TY,
705; emphasis added).
Similarity and
connection or, again in my terms, analogy and continuity. Everything seems to
hinge on the possibility of making these two relations coincide. Neither one by
itself seems sufficient to justify a sense that the truth about ancient
struggles is intrinsically relevant to present ones. If an event in the past
merely resembles one in the present, it may indeed provide us with
“symbolic resources”—ways of representing our present values and intentions so
as to shape and motivate our present actions. But in that case our sense of
what is symbolically useful in the past will depend on our present sense of
what matters, and the values represented by what we borrow from the past will
only be the ones we already have. Aspects of the past that fail to match up
with our present dispositions will necessarily seem irrelevant. When it comes
to analogy, in other words, the lines of authority run from present to past and
not the other way around.
Another way to get
at this point is to ask whether it matters, except for convenience, that the
narrated events providing the symbolic resources should actually have occurred
in our own collective past—or, indeed, that they should actually have occurred
at all. If the value of the analogy lies in the fact that some other situation
provides opportunities for representing our own judgments and desires, why not
turn to other people’s histories—or to fiction—for symbolic narratives as good
as or better than the ones our own tradition happens to provide? Why aren’t
narratives of events in our actual past simply replaceable by other narratives
that meet our criteria of symbolic relevance?
There is one
obvious reason, however, why other people’s pasts—and fictional narratives—may
strike us as less useful than our own histories: they are incapable of
satisfying our curiosity about our own origins; they fail to provide explanations
of how we got where we are. When it comes to explanation, in contrast to
analogy, the lines of force that matter are indeed those that run from past to
present, and that do so following a particular and irreplaceable causal chain.
But why should the fact that a past event has explanatory relevance to
the present endow it with ethical or political authority over present
agents—unless, once again, it happens to correspond to the values those agents
already have? The historian Edmund S. Morgan argues convincingly, for instance,
that American ideals of freedom and equality can be traced in part to an
ideology that arose in colonial Virginia, where the possession of even a few
slaves gave a modicum of independence and social prestige to small landowners;
“equality” thus meant solidarity among slaveholders. If Morgan’s explanation is
correct, it is hard to see how such causal “roots and beginnings” of
egalitarian values collectively affirmed in the present can function usefully
as a means of symbolically promoting or reinforcing those values. Certainly the
explanatory significance of the social reality Morgan reconstructs does not
confer any present authority on that past reality; it’s not as if one
feels inclined, after reading Morgan’s account, to advocate slaveholding as a
way of living up to one’s egalitarian commitments. (I will return to Morgan—and
to the question of what kinds of relevance the actual past may have even if it
lacks intrinsic authority—in the last two sections.)
As this example
suggests, the locus of authority is always in the present; we use, for
promoting and reinforcing ethical and political dispositions, only those
elements of the past that correspond to our sense of what presently compels us.
In fact, not even a belief in the divine manipulation of history or the
inspired inerrancy of scripture would really shift the locus of authority from
the present to the past. Conservative believers simply assume that the power
that expressed itself in divinely inspired texts or events is the same power that
presently reigns over them—and that this power has not, in the meantime,
changed its mind. Even for conservative believers, it is the supposed
permanence of God’s intentions—not a source of authority located in the actual
past as such—that keeps the past alive and gives it a derived authority over
the present.
If these points by
now seem obvious, it is crucial to recognize how persistently they are obscured
in current attempts to give revisionist interpretations an intrinsic ethical
and political significance. The programmatic remarks I have excerpted from the
writings of Gottwald and Schüssler Fiorenza exemplify what I take to be a
primary logical mechanism by which a wide range of such attempts are sustained.
For if the past is merely a source of analogies, particular past events may
provide models for present action but are in principle expendable; they can all
be replaced by analogies borrowed from other traditions or from fiction. If the
past is merely a source of explanations, it may well be irreplaceable (there is
no other way to explain how we got where we are), but ancestral ractions of the
greatest explanatory interest may express values remote from any we can now
embrace. Hence the pressure to focus on historical phenomena whose combination
of symbolic resonance and explanatory uniqueness will make these two benefits
seem mutually dependent. But the fact that some events can function both as
sources of authoritative images and as explanations of a present situation does
not mean that seeking explanations and seeking authoritative images amount to
the same operation; it does not mean, in other words, that a special ethical
importance attaches to the actual as distinct from the remembered or the
imagined past.
. . .
The trouble with
punishing someone for an act committed by an ancestor cannot be that she stands
in a different metaphysical relation to the acts of her ancestors than
she does to her own past acts. In both cases the act—as well as the state of
the organism as it existed in the moment of action—is no longer present; in
both cases, in other words, the justification of punishment cannot be
metaphysical but can only be normative. But remember the main point of using
punishment to make people identify with their own actual past actions: we do so
because we want people to anticipate, as they consider performing certain acts,
that the disapproval merited by those acts will become a permanent part of
their own attitudes toward the selves with which they will later have to
identify. The aim of punishment, on this account, is to enforce a sense of
identity that can become (if not in the agent herself then in other who witness
her punishment) the basis of what might be called proleptic guilt. But this
requires that the act for which an agent is punished be an act that she might
have avoided performing had she taken seriously enough its consequences for her
later relation to herself. Yet no amount of proleptic guilt could have caused
her to avoid performing an act that was never hers to perform.
Punishing someone
for the acts of her ancestors does not seem promising, then, as a means of
giving someone a disposition to feel proleptic guilt in relation to an act she
contemplates performing; on the contrary, the very notion of collective
punishment involves a separation of accountability and action, since at
least some of those held accountable are by definition not the agents who
performed the reprehensible act. If anything, collective punishment seems
calculated to weaken an agent’s disposition to connect her present
actions with the self she expects to become.
Suppose, however,
that what matters in the case of collective punishment is not first of all the
agent’s relation to her own future self but to the future of her collectivity.
In that case a practice of collective punishment might make sense if
raltionalized along the following lines: we punish someone today for an act
previously performed by other members of a group to which she belongs. The
punishment forces her (or others who witness it) to anticipate, not that each
individual will be held accountable for acts she herself performs, but that, in
general, members of the group will be treated—more important, will treat
themselves—as if they were still performing the acts once performed by other
members of the same group. Prospective wrongdoers are thus encouraged to expect
that their actions will make a permanent difference not on their own
self-identification but to the self-identification of others who belong to the
same collectivity.
Such a practice of
punishment, in other words, is intended to cause an agent to anticipate, as she
considers performing certain acts, that the disapproval merited by those acts
will become a permanent part of the way other members of her group evaluate the
selves with which they will have to identify. The point is to make her
anticipate not her own guilt but the guilt that others will inherit if she acts
badly. Presumably this expectation will serve as a deterrent only to the extent
that the agent is inclined to feel guilty about imposing guilt on other members
of her group. The logical structure of collective punishment thus turns out to
be more complex than the structure of individual punishment, since it involves
two distinct forms of guilt: the guilt that an agent’s act will impose on
others and the guilt it will impose on her by virtue of what it does to them.
For that reason, the likelihood of success in the case of collective punishment
may well seem more remote (one might say, even more remote) than in the
case of individual punishment. Apart from such practical difficulties, there no
doubt remains serious grounds for skepticism regarding the justice of
collective punishment; above all, perhaps, it is hard to see how one might go
about justifying the criteria (genetic? geographical? ideological?) by which a
punishable collectivity could be defined. I will return to these difficulties
later; my aim in this section has only been to determine whether the logic of
punishment bears out the intuited analogy between individual and collective
relations to the actual past. The foregoing analysis suggests that the answer
is yes, and that the ethical relevance of the actual past in both the
individual and the collective cases derives, paradoxically, from an agent’s
imaginative relation to the future consequences of some contemplated action. It
is what we want her to imagine about the future, and not a debt owed to the
past as such, that justifies, if anything does, our sense that an agent’s
present ethical status may properly be affected by discoveries about the actual
content of her own or a collective past.
Indeed, the
discovery that what matters is the agent’s relation to an imagined future shows
that punishment, collective or otherwise, is finally beside the point.
Collective punishment, on the foregoing account, is an attempt to cause people
to identify with a collective future by forcing them to identify with a
collective past. What matters, for my purposes here, is not the feasibility or
justice of forcing people to identify with a collective past but the
logic of the identification as such. The central point that has emerged from
this section is that the ethical relevance of the actual collective past
depends on an agent’s disposition to identify with an imagined collective future.
. . .
The burden of this
essay has been skeptical. My reflections have tended, on the whole, to raise
doubts about the intrinsic ethical or political importance of new discoveries
about what actually took place in the collective past. Indeed, my arguments so
far might plausibly be taken to imply that I consider revisionist historical
research ethically and politically irrelevant—mere antiquarianism, in Jameson’s
sense. The purpose of this section is consequently to point to several ways in
which revisionist research might indeed prove relevant to present values, even
if not quite for the reasons imagined by the critics treated in the opening
sections.
My argument to
this point has assumed that people’s ethical and political values take the form
of commitments to doctrines or images that are in turn dependent on imagined or
remembered patterns of action. Suppose it turns out, however, that at least
some ethical values held by some people involve commitments not to a pattern of
action but to whatever actually occurred in some designated segment of
the past or whatever was actually done by some designated ancestor.
Suppose, in other words, the logic of ethical values is at least sometimes indexical,
so that a disposition to act in an ethically appropriate way is a disposition
to act in the way some designated person or group acted, whatever that may have
been. Thus (to return to an example from the opening paragraph) a Christian
believer of a certain kind might be disposed to act in the way Jesus acted,
whatever Jesus’ actions turned out to have been and whether or not they matched
the received accounts. In that case, a historical discovery that revised the
traditional record of Jesus’ actions would necessarily change the
content of the believer’s values, and nothing else could change it in the same
way. Presumably there would be a limit to how far revision could go before the
believer repudiated the value of acting in whatever way Jesus acted—for
instance, if the historical reconstruction showed that he was a murderer or a
Roman spy. The limit in this case would be set by the other values, perhaps
nonindexical ones, to which the believer was also committed. Nevertheless,
whether or not she remained committed to the value of imitating Jesus, the
content of that value would have changed, necessarily, along with historical
information.
The question is
whether anyone’s values really take this “indexical” form—that is, the form of
a commitment to act in whatever way it turns out some designated person acted,
or perhaps of an intention to mean by some ethical term whatever some
designated ancestors meant by it. Might there really be, for instance, an
American whose commitment to equality was in fact a commitment to
whatever the Founders meant when they affirmed it? Possibly there is no one
whose ethical dispositions could be understood primarily in these terms, though
some degree of indexical commitment may play a role in the normative
life of any agent or collectivity.
The second kind of
relevance I have in mind is less interesting theoretically (since it stops
short of giving discoveries about the past a necessary relevance to the
present) but perhaps more plausible psychologically as an account of how
someone might be affected by revisionist inquiry. Suppose one discovers that a
value one presently holds has been linked in the past to motives or
consequences that now seem repulsive; suppose this discovery creates a
suspicion that the value in question is still linked to something one would
like to repudiate. (Conversely, research might show that a value one no longer
holds has been linked to benefits one still finds attractive, and this might
lead one to ask whether the neglected value deserves a revival.) Perhaps, once
again, I am convinced by Morgan’s claim that the notion of equality was
connected in colonial Virginia to a slaveholding ideology. As has been
suggested, this is unlikely to persuade me to revise my concept of
egalitarianism along colonial Virginian lines. But I might begin to wonder
whether egalitarian advocacy in certain contexts in the present might not end
up serving similar ends, for instance by reinforcing the solidarity of one
group at the expense of another.
The fact that
someone might be led to question her present commitments in this way would not
show that historical research was necessary to the correction or more careful
application of present values, since the potential use of egalitarian
principles by oppressive interests could in principle have been demonstrated by
fictional examples or logical analysis. Still, it was useful, and in practice
may have been invaluable, to have the historical precedent to work with;
novelists and political theorists might never have invented an equally
revealing example. In this sense, historical investigation of the origins of
present values may serve as a means of gathering examples that provoke
reflection on the possible social consequences of certain ideological
commitments, though, once again, there would be no necessary connection between
the historical actuality of the example and its utility. In fact, the
historicity of the example might be positively misleading, if for instance the
alleged status of the Virginian ideology as the true historical origin of
American egalitarianism were interpreted (via genetic fallacy) to mean that the
connection between egalitarianism and oppression was a necessary one.
The last kind of
relevance I wish to mention has less to do with information than with
motivation. In the previous section, I imagined a reader of Morgan’s history
who began to wonder whether an American identity really existed in quite the
way she previously thought. To say, however, that such a discovery might raise
questions about the precise character of an American identity is not to say
that the reader’s commitment to what she perceived as American values would
therefore be weakened. On the contrary, recognizing the fragility and
contingency of American egalitarianism in its earliest moments might intensify
her sense of an obligation to preserve and foster this inherited value, despite
or even because of its ambiguous lineage.
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