Against Declarativity

Abstract

Historical discourse is a period phenomenon shaped by the rhetorical and genre understanding of the moment in which it became formalized and professionalized - that is, the second half of the nineteenth century. In the figurative arts, realist painting and its rival, photography, was dominant, and the literary form this notion of consciousness took was the realist novel. Literary realism devices replaced romantic literature devices, just as those latter devices had succeeded, but never replaced the eighteenth-century devices. Historical discourse and the very notion of proper history followed realism devices, mostly the single-lens photographic perspective, one viewer’s viewpoint. From a discourse perspective, this approach took the form of declarative, statement-making. Also, it is not to say that the declarative sentence which gives this term its name was rejected as the preferred way of making assertions about the world - far from it. Although a few self-conscious stylists (Derrida, for instance) work hard to avoid it, the declarative sentence is almost inevitable. Their readers work even harder. But just as narrativity encompasses a realm that extends far beyond narratives, so that narratives can proliferate in an environment that has, in a crucial sense, rejected grand narratives, so declarative statements will exist without entailing statement-making. The declarative act became the defining mark of professional history and remained its principal mode, just as it remains the predominant mode of literature and any number of other discourses. Indeed, this essay is written in the declarative rhetorical mode. However, literary modernism, philosophy, and a host of scientific developments have left this way of representing the world behind. Moreover, the same technological and intellectual changes that caused the modernist vision have, at the same time, created a different world to be depicted, a different sort of event to be represented historically. Not only the form but also the content have changed. The ethical and practical frustrations of representing such events have led to a theoretical challenge to the declarative form of knowing and to a challenge for the genre distinctions that constitute guild history: the idea of the past produced by academically professionalized individuals. For example, the difference between history and fiction - or rather, their respective relationship to truth and reality - has blurred. In contrast, history has adopted some of the modernist literature devices and the present’s practical demands.