Michael Mirabile

English and Humanities
Reed College
michael.mirabile@reed.edu

 

Review of: Sande Cohen, History Out of Joint: Essays on the Use and Abuse of History.Johns Hopkins UP, 2006.

 

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.

 

“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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

“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.

 

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 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.

 

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.

 

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 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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Notes

 

1. 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. 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.