Hayden White

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Hayden V. White (born July 12, 1928 in Martin (Tennessee) , † March 5, 2018 in Santa Cruz (California) ) was an American historian and literary scholar . He became known for his approach of analyzing historiography in terms of literary theory.

Life

Hayden White studied at Wayne State University and the University of Michigan , where he graduated with a doctorate in 1956. White was Professor of "History of Consciousness" at the University of California, Santa Cruz . He later taught comparative literature at Stanford University . In Germany, White became known with the book Metahistory (1973), which made waves in history. In addition, he cooperated with the German historian Reinhart Koselleck . In 1991, White was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Since 2000 he was an elected member of the American Philosophical Society .

theory

By analyzing historiography for the first time with categories of literary theory, White deserves the credit of having initiated the debate about postmodern and poststructuralist approaches in historical studies . Critics accused him of being “the most damaging undertaking ever performed by a historian of his profession”.

His theory of the poetics of history , which he developed in Metahistory , states that any representation of historical contexts is subject to poetological categories. Historiography , says White, is necessarily narrative, even where it pretends not to be. This knowledge is condensed in the phrase “ Klio also poems” in the title of the German translation of Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism.

In order to create “the semblance of explanation” (White) in his presentation, the historian can use three different strategies, each of which has four forms:

Narrative modeling (emplotment)

With the help of narrative modeling, the historian provides the story with an explanation. Following Northrop Frye , Hayden White distinguishes four narrative styles: romance, tragedy, comedy and satire .

  1. The romance emphasizes the constant advancement of society for the better and the "eternal victory of good over evil".
  2. The tragedy describes the failure of mankind to develop society further and the eventual surrender to the immutability of things.
  3. The comedy describes a partial failure of humanity, at the end of which there is a reconciliation with society, from which it emerges better.
  4. The satire is the absolute opposite of the romantic redemption drama. It also begins with an attempt to develop further and ends in failure, which shows people their inability to interpret the laws of history.

Formal conclusions

Formatism

The formist theory of truth aims to identify the unique properties of objects in a historical field and thus explains the historical field as such. The focus of the investigation is therefore on the uniqueness of the actors, the action and the work that make up the events and not the background against which they arise. The explanation of a historical field is complete when the objects present have been fully identified (with regard to their class, genus, the special characteristics ascribed to them and the labels attached to them).

According to White, objects include individuals as well as collectives, the individual as well as the universal, concrete things as well as abstractions. Examples of the formativistic nature of the explanation can be found in Herder , Carlyle , Michelet , the romantic historians as well as the great historical storytellers such as Niebuhr , Mommsen and Trevelyan .

The format tivi tables declaration form is, according to White more of a "scattering" (dispersive) as an integrating. They tend to be imprecise in their concepts and tend to make generalizations about the entire historical field that are so broad that they can hardly be confirmed or refuted by empirical data.

Organism

According to White, organicistic world hypotheses are integrative, meaning that their procedures aim to simplify facts. The organicist sees individual past events as moments of a synthetic occurrence. He understands individual phenomena as components of larger processes, which in turn are broken down into units. According to White, these units are each different from the sum of their parts. Historians who use an organic narrative structure condense a number of scattered elements into one large structure, the significance of which exceeds the individual facts described. White assumes the organicist presentation of history primarily to the historians of the 19th century and recognizes this narrative structure in particular in Leopold von Ranke , Theodor Mommsen, Heinrich von Treitschke , Heinrich von Sybel , Frederic William Maitland and William Stubbs . According to White, organicistic historians are not so interested in describing individual elements as they are in characterizing the integration process as a whole. This historicist historiography tends towards a teleology of history as a whole. It ascribes a goal to the course of history to which all movements in the historical field point. At the same time, White identifies the tendency among organicistic historians to avoid looking for historical regularities. The organizer prefers to speak of “principles” and “ideas” that shape the individual historical case on the one hand and the development as a whole on the other. In these principles and ideas, according to White, the goal of the organicists, towards which they believe the whole historical process is moving, is mapped out.

mechanism

Mechanistic assumptions about the world are integrative. They are more in favor of a reductive than a synthetic outlook. White mentions Kenneth Burke's extra-historical driving forces . This speaks of "actors" and "actions" in the historical field. The origin for this lies in the "scenery" where the action mentioned takes place.

The mechanistic theory of explanation pays attention to the "laws of causality" which determine the results of the events discovered in the historical field. Historical objects are considered items. The historical objects have a part-part relationship with each other and their specific configurations are governed by laws that regulate their exchange. Supporters of the mechanistic conceptions are Buckle , Taine or Marx , even Tocqueville is one of them. To get on the track of the movement of history, they write in narrative form to explain its effect.

In the search for laws, the mechanistic tendency is threatened by abstraction: Individual structures are less important to him than classes of phenomena. And phenomena classes, in turn, are less meaningful than laws. In the mechanistic conception of history, laws are only considered important if they resemble the laws of physics about nature. These historical laws are then applied to data so that the configuration of the laws can be understood as a function. Typifications, which are used by Tocqueville, are also less important than historically powerful laws. The advantage of the mechanistic conceptions is the conceptual precision. The bigger disadvantage, however, is the narrow perspective and the tendency towards abstraction.

Contextualism

The premise of the contextualist form of explanation is that events can be explained by placing them in their context. Why they happened this way and not otherwise is explained by uncovering the specific relationships to other events in their historical context at a given time within the historical field studied. Modern philosophers such as Walsh and Berlin have called the process that is used "colligation". In doing so, the “threads” are identified “that connect the examined individual or institution with the external sociocultural 'present'.” The phenomena recognized in the historical field are integrated into sub-areas (“relative integration”). The historical field is divided into districts of important events. They serve as a basis for differentiating between periods and epochs. Examples of this can be found with most historians, but especially in the 19th century with Burckhardt .

Ideological implications

Hayden White distinguishes four ideological terms that influence the interpretation of the story. These are:

  1. anarchism
  2. conservatism
  3. radicalism
  4. liberalism

What these basic ideological positions have in common is that they refer to “reason, science and realism”, which oblige them to engage in critical discourse with the other basic positions. All agree on the inevitability of social change, but differ on the desirability and the pace of it.

To work out the differences between ideologies and their influence on historiography, Hayden White uses five different categories:

  1. Attitude to change in society
  2. Ideal of change
  3. Pace of change
  4. Time orientation (temporal distance to utopia)
  5. social congruence and transcendence (compatibility with the current social situation)

Even more fundamental than these modes of explanation are the rhetorical figures ( tropics ), which always form the basis of a history representation (like any text in general):

metaphor

The metaphor (literally: transference) is used in historiography to represent objects. Phenomena are characterized by making an analogy or a comparison. As an example, White cites the expression "my love, a rose". The expression "love" stands for the individual whose characteristics such as beauty, preciousness, tenderness are represented by the image or symbol of the rose. It is a comparison of similar properties, and not a complete equation of two phenomena or a reduction of one to the other. The beloved is not identified with the rose, nor is it reduced to her.

metonymy

The metonymy literally means name change. In metonymy, a part stands for the whole. An example of this would be the expression "fifty sails" which means "fifty ships". This makes it clear that metonymy is reductionist. The whole is reduced to its parts. The part-to-part relationships are perceived in metonymy. This makes it possible to transfer the status of one aspect or function to another. A distinction is made in metonymy between 1. those parts that are representative of the whole and 2. those that merely represent aspects. Another example would be "the rumble of thunder". Here it is divided into two phenomena: firstly into the cause “thunder” and secondly into the effect “rumble”. This is a separation that puts the “thunder” to the “rumble” in a cause-effect-reduction relationship. In metonymy one can also make a distinction between actor-action-relationship B. the "thunder" rumbles. Thus, in the metonymy there is a division into actors and driving forces. This means that two orders are possible: agent and cause on the one hand and actions and effect on the other. It is characteristic of the metonymy that the reduction between two orders is extrinsic .

Synecdoche

In contrast to metonymy, the synecdoche is intrinsic, where relationships between common qualities are interpreted. In the trope of the Synekdoche the two parts are interpreted as a whole through integration. The quality is distinguished from the sum "which are merely microcosmic reproduction of it". To explain the Synekdoche, Hayden White uses the example "He is all of the heart". The term "heart" must be read figuratively (figuratively). A part of the body is not referred to here, but a character trait is symbolized. It is a symbol of a quality that stands for the whole individual. This is a "microcosm-macrocosm relationship". Here, a name change is not indicated as in the metonymy, but certain characteristics such as generosity, compassion and more.

irony

Irony is described by White as a form of metaphor and, in his opinion, is an essentially negatorial element. White calls metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche “naive tropes”, while the trope of irony represents the “sentimental counterpart”. The basic mode of irony is catachresis (literally "misuse"), an obviously nonsensical metaphor. This stylistic device is used to stimulate thought about the metaphorically described object and to expose the inadequacy of the description itself. With the rhetorical figure of doubt, the author of a (historical) text signals distrust of the truth of his own statements, according to White. In his opinion, the aim of the ironic statement lies in the negation of what was actually communicated verbatim.

Authors of historical texts who work with irony, according to White, are critical of “naive” formulations of formativistic, mechanistic and organicistic explanatory strategies. Their textual form, satire, also stands in opposition to the other types (romance, comedy, tragedy).

Irony as a world view tends to weaken belief in the chance of positive political action.

These stylistic devices have different effects on the content of the representations. “Irony, metonymy and synecdoche are forms of metaphor, but they differ from one another in the type of reduction or integration they produce on the level of literal meaning and in what they want to emphasize on the visual level. The metaphor is essentially representative, the metonymy reductionist, the synecdoche integrative, the irony negatorial. "

Although White has worked out these categories on the basis of the authoritative historians and philosophers of history of the 19th century, he emphasizes their timeless importance. The subspecies of these categories can be linked differently (even if some are mutually exclusive); "Natural allies" are grouped as follows (with the respective historians and philosophers of history who have presented history in this way):

rhetorical
figure (trope)		 narrative
structure		 formal
conclusion		 ideological
implication		 historian philosopher
metaphor romance formativistic anarchist Michelet Nietzsche
metonymy tragedy mechanistic radical Tocqueville Karl Marx
Synecdoche comedy organicistic conservative Tendril Hegel
irony satire contextualistic liberal Burckhardt Croce

White refined this rigid scheme in later work. "As White recognizes in his later works, the most interesting - the most classic - texts are those that are characterized by an exciting interplay between different tropes ." (Irmgard Wagner)

Fonts

  • The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957–2007 , ed. by Robert Doran, Baltimore, Md. [ua]: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2010
  • Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect , Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1999
  • The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation , Baltimore [et al.]: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987
    • German translation: The meaning of form , Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1990
  • Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism , Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978.
    • German translation: Klio also writes or the fiction of the factual. Studies on the tropology of historical discourse. Einf. V. Reinhart Koselleck, from d. American. by Brigitte Brinkmann-Siepmann and Thomas Siepmann, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1986
  • Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe , Baltimore [including]: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973
    • German translation: Metahistory. The historical imagination in 19th century Europe. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer 1991, ISBN 3-10-091202-0
  • The Greco-Roman Tradition, London: Harper & Row 1973
  • The Emergence of Liberal Humanism, Vol. 1 of An Intellectual History of Europe (with Willson H. Coates), New York: McGrew-Hill, 1966
  • The Ordeal of Liberal Humanism, Vol. 2 of An Intellectual History of Europe (with Willson H. Coates), New York: McGrew-Hill, 1970

literature

  • Frank Ankersmit, Ewa Domanska, Hans Kellner (Eds.): Re-Figuring Hayden White . Stanford University Press, Stanford 2009, ISBN 978-0-8047-6275-5 .
  • Alessandro Barberi : Clio wounded: Hayden White, Carlo Ginzburg and the language problem of history . Turia and Kant, Vienna 2000, ISBN 3-85132-220-7 .
  • Patrick Bahners : Klio also writes, as Hayden White never said. But he meant it that way, in the sense of freedom: To the death of the historian who threw his subject off the shelf. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , March 7, 2018, No. 56, p. 11.
  • Robert Doran (Ed.): Philosophy of History After Hayden White . Bloomsbury, London 2013, ISBN 978-1-4411-0821-0 .
  • Daniel Fulda: Science as Art. The emergence of modern German historiography 1760–1860 . De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1996, ISBN 3-11-015014-X .
  • Hans-Jürgen Goertz : An uncertain story. On the theory of historical referentiality . Reclam, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-15-017035-4 .
  • Jörn Stückrath, Jürg Zbinden: Metagistory, Hayden White and Paul Ricoeur. Reality represented in European culture in the context of Husserl, Weber, Auerbach and Gombrich . Nomos, Baden-Baden 1997, ISBN 3-7890-4984-0 .
  • Irmgard Wagner: history as text. On the tropology of Hayden White . In: Wolfgang Küttler , Jörn Rüsen , Ernst Schulin (Hrsg.): Geschichtsdiskurs. Basics and methods of the history of historiography . Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-596-11475-6 .

Web links

Remarks

  1. ^ Neil Genzlinger: Hayden White, Who Explored How History Is Made, Dies at 89. In: New York Times . March 9, 2018, accessed November 19, 2019 .
  2. ^ White, Hayden V. 1928- | Encyclopedia.com. Retrieved October 19, 2018 .
  3. ^ Scott Rappaport: Influential historian Hayden White dies at 89 . In: UC Santa Cruz News . ( ucsc.edu [accessed October 19, 2018]).
  4. ↑ Hayden White (1928-2018) | DIVISION OF LITERATURES, CULTURES, AND LANGUAGES. Retrieved October 19, 2018 .
  5. ^ Academy of Arts & Sciences Website Search. Retrieved October 19, 2018 .
  6. ^ Member History: Hayden White. American Philosophical Society, accessed January 1, 2019 (with biographical notes).
  7. ↑ Geoffrey Elton , quoted from Hans-Jürgen Goertz: Unsafe history. On the theory of historical referentiality. Stuttgart 2001, p. 11.
  8. ↑ Patrick Bahners: On the Death of Hayden White: There's Muse Inside . In: FAZ.NET . ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed October 19, 2018]).
  9. ^ Hayden White: Metahistory. The historical imagination in 19th century Europe. Frankfurt am Main 1991, pp. 21-25.
  10. ^ Hayden White: Metahistory. The historical imagination in 19th century Europe. Frankfurt am Main 1991, pp. 29-30.
  11. ^ Hayden White: Metahistory. The historical imagination in 19th century Europe. Frankfurt am Main 1991, pp. 30f.
  12. ^ Hayden White: Metahistory. The historical imagination in 19th century Europe. Frankfurt am Main 1991, p. 31.
  13. ^ Hayden White: Metahistory. The historical imagination in 19th century Europe. Frankfurt am Main 1991, p. 32.
  14. ^ Hayden White: Metahistory. The historical imagination in 19th century Europe. Frankfurt am Main 1991, pp. 33-35.
  15. ^ Hayden White: Metahistory. The historical imagination in 19th century Europe. Frankfurt am Main 1991, pp. 51-52.
  16. ^ Hayden White: Metahistory. The historical imagination in 19th century Europe. Frankfurt am Main 1991, p. 51.
  17. ^ Hayden White: Metahistory. The historical imagination in 19th century Europe. Frankfurt am Main 1991, p. 52.
  18. ^ Hayden White: Metahistory. The historical imagination in 19th century Europe. Frankfurt am Main 1991, p. 53.
  19. ^ Hayden White: Metahistory. The historical imagination in 19th century Europe. Frankfurt am Main 1991, p. 54.
  20. ^ Hayden White: Metahistory. The historical imagination in 19th century Europe. Frankfurt am Main 1991, p. 55.
  21. ^ Hayden White: Metahistory. The historical imagination in 19th century Europe. Frankfurt am Main 1991.
personal data
SURNAME White, Hayden
ALTERNATIVE NAMES White, Hayden V.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American literary and history theorist
DATE OF BIRTH July 12, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Martin (Tennessee)
DATE OF DEATH 5th March 2018
Place of death Santa Cruz (California)