Theses on Bentley's Theory of History

Author's Note: I've decided to fashion my response to Bentley's recent work in the time-honored and celebrated form of aphorisms. The reasons are manifold. For one thing, as Bentley is decidedly more proactive than I am, he has written the thesis on which I can only, in a sense, comment. For another, Bentley is a historical figure whose ideas have had a marked and lasting influence at The Enfranchised and should be come-to-grips-with before any meaningful departure from them can take place.

1. Signifiers as memorials are aimed at evoking a sympathy which can not, by the loose and overlapping 'laws' which govern the human mind, be produced ex nihilo in an unaffected subject. One way of putting this is to say that memorials are signifiers which reinforce the primacy of the (insert unit of political aggregation here), or sustain and reproduce various "imagined communities", whose decay or absence would undermine the prevailing discourses of power. A more sympathetic and slightly less...Continental way of thinking about this, is to say that memorials as signifiers give an otherwise disparate and indifferent set of individuals a common frame of reference from which to motivate certain moral judgments and beliefs which they would otherwise be unmoved to issue. I give you the Le Monde on September 12, 2001: "Today, we are all Americans."

2. We will allow, and indeed assert, the kind of point that Bentley makes about the all-too transient nature of historical remembrances. The Alamo, the Maine, Pearl Harbor, all fade with time and are replaced by the likes of Mai Lei, Tianamen and September 11 (notice the degree of ex poste facto reflexivity and cosmopolitanism associated with the first five that the last, as of yet, lacks). The sheer biological fact of man is that his sympathies fade with spacial and temporal distance. Hume conjectured this in 1740 and it has been confirmed by 150 years of anthropology and social psychology. But this doesn't seem to be all we can say about the matter.

3. Material and institutional remembrances are of two discrete kinds: Those which aim to commemorate and reinforce a particular act, belief, or mode of behavior deemed to be useful and/or important to a given society; and those which aim to emphasize a particularly disuseful or distasteful act, belief or mode of behavior so as discourage its repetion in the future. To acknowledge this distinction is to acknowledge that to say "Support our troops" is something quite different--not just in context but in kind--than to say "Never forget the Holocaust." This, of course, in no way precludes the possibility of a remembrance appealing to both the reinforcement of a positive and the admonition of a negative--as say, the Gettysburg Memorial is both a testament to the bravery of American soldiers and a warning about consequences of deep civil divisions; or Martin Luther King Day is both a celebration of the life of a great American and a warning against the kind of ideological pathos that led to his assassination.

4. Bentley calls on us to "stop deceiving widows and orphans: your loss will be remembered for as long as it can be, as long as it is still useful to remember, as long as it doesn't cause more loss as baggage than it reminds of joy. We are sorry if this compounds your loss, but it has only been by telling this to the generations before you that you even now can walk through streets without weeping at the undiminished loss of those who came before." This is an accurate and thoroughly unattractive conception of the facts. It nevertheless gives the lie to Bentley's broader skepticism. For Bentley, this call to action stems from the moral repugrance of a political end. And while we will not assert that that which is morally impermissible is in someway politically permissible, we will reluctantly but forcefully assert the political efficacy of something that is not impermissible but morally counter-intuitive. By this I mean that the broader social grief and remembrance outlined in #1 is and ought be distinct from the rather more personal and permanent grief and remembrance we can attribute to those "widows and orphans". Whereas the latter are all-too-human reactions to the loss of loved-ones, the former are at least in part practical social tools. I say "in part" because some of the public reaction to 9/11 was no doubt rooted in a universal human sympathy (the existence of which is beyond our present scope). I say this sympathy is in part a "social tool" because it and its material manifestations (memorials etc.) are of one of the two types mentioned in #3. As signifiers subject to distribution via the global media, they remind peoples around the world of acts, beliefs and behaviors to be approbated or admonished. (Notice too that the very same material signifier can and does signify different things to different cultures, e.g. coverage of 9/11 on CNN vs. coverage on Al-Jazeera).

5. Hegel saw history as the acts of a metaphysical agent he called the World Spirit, or, in facile German, the Weltgeist, whose teleological Idea was the substantiation of human freedom through the dialectics of historical change. In Hegel and many of the thinkers of the late Englightenment, there is a kind of almost absurd belief that the history of the world tends toward the better, the greater, the more just. This is what seems so alien to us in the 21st century (and to Bentley and his sympathizers), both about the thinkers themselves and the prevailing social structure to which their ideas gave form. Of course, now we know that it is not inevitable that things get better. In the very least it is contingent. At worst, if one believes in a sort of social entropy, it is inevitable for things to get worse.

6. This knowledge sheds light on a salient and complex feature of history as we have come to understand it: namely, that while things can get better and worse (and while the prevailing discourses of power can be both progressive and reactionary) history itself cannot, in a very important sense, move backwards. It can't, that is, only so long as we remember. It doesn't necessarily matter which particulars we remember, or which images and persons we choose to immortalize, it only matters that there survives a recorded overlapping consensus (with all its inevitable contradictions and subjective interpretations) of what HAS BEEN and WHAT IS. It is of chief importance to remember, even transiently, because remembering is the stuff civilization is built on. Its artificiality need not inspire cynicism in us; its artificiality is essential to its purpose. Society, ideology, material culture, all of it IS artifice. It is the scaffolding to which we cling to keep our collective noses just inches above the raging sea of fundamentalism (and I use that term in its absolutely broadest sense) that threatens to drown us in the pre-historic anarchy, in a life which Hobbes aptly describes as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

7. The human capacity for language, its opposable thumbs and precision grip, as well as a handful of other evolutionary upshots, have given us rational and material capacities sufficiently rich that we can Represent. And if we can Represent we can Remember, and if we can Remember we can Learn, and if we Learn we can Change. It is my hope that it won't be viewed as ugly humanism (and if it is, so be it) to say that man can lay claim to at least some part of the stake in his own teleological end which, until Ozymandias (for all his arrogance and irony), was solely the province of Mother Nature.

D.R. Foster
Pembroke College
Oxford

Erratum

i. Homo Erectus was by definition a hominid, not an australopithicoid.
ii. Signifiers and signifieds? Derrida is dead, may he rest in peace.