One of my
favourite genres of thread on History Twitter is the one where someone, usually
a historian, helpfully unpacks why the issue du jour isn’t like
something that already happened. It starts something like
Trump’s administration isn’t like Germany in the
1930s, and
here’s a thread why (1/39)
here’s a thread why (1/39)
If you
make it to the end, and few of us do, you’ll see comments starting ‘Yeah, but…’
or ‘Yes, and…’ , and the darkly muttered, ‘I think you’ve overlooked the
significance of….’
In recent
weeks Trump and the Nazis have thankfully been replaced by another, more
pressing problem:
COVID-19 isn’t like the Spanish flu, and here’s a
thread why
(1/78)
(1/78)
This one
comes with a variant:
COVID-19 isn’t like HIV-AIDS, etc
Whatever
the subject, people seem to get really shitty that historians do this—just read
the comments. But guys: the historians are right. On the surface there are lots
of similarities, lots of points of coincidence. But just because the trends are
similar, the situations aren’t the same. That’s the nature of historical
events.
One way
of understanding it is to look at how Michel Foucault understood the nature of
historical inquiry.
Foucault
thought of himself as a practising historian (yeah, I know),[1]
and he developed what he called the archaeology of history, in order to
investigate historical discourses without resort to metanarrative.
Backing
up a bit. Most basic intros to Foucault read something like ‘Foucault blah blah
discourse.’ The discourse is central to Foucault’s approach to just
about everything. Basically, the discourse is a model of how patterns of
relations of power and knowledge form people’s behaviour. Technically, the
discourse is a collection of statements that have the effect of actions,
resulting in the ordering of objects.[2]
In practical terms, a discourse is a system by where knowledge is used to
maintain power— where techniques and practices are used to control and dominate
people within local contexts.[3]
Each
discourse is a unique object, having its own meaning in its own time and place.
The historian can’t track a linear progression of meanings assigned to a
discourse, because there is no progression beyond the local context.[4]
The discourse can’t be used as a key to all of history, like a metanarrative
can; it emerges from the local context, so it has no meaning outside that
context.
See where
we’re heading?
The
purpose of archaeology (the historian’s job) is to identify and describe
the discourses. In order to establish the parameters of a discourse the
historian must establish where there are breaks between discourses: the
interruptions, displacements and transformations—the discontinuities.
These help the historian establish periodisation, possible levels of analysis,
and the appropriate methods for their examination.[5]
Finding
and exposing the discontinuities is a fundamental element of historical
analysis.[6]
So these party-poopers telling us that Trump is not Hitler and that COVID-19
isn’t HIV aren’t being trolls. They’re just doing their job.
Pace
Santayana, we’re not condemned to repeat the past, we’re condemned to do it
again but a bit differently.
[1] Michel Foucault, “On the Ways of
Writing History”, Aesthetics, method and epistemology: essential works of
Foucault 1954-1984, (New York: New Press, 1998), Vol 2, pp. 279-80.
