Words in Time

A Plea for Historical Re-thinking

Francesco Benigno

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351804776
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Through questions such as 'What is power?', 'How are revolutions generated?', 'Does public opinion really exist?', 'What does terrorism mean?' and 'When are generations created?', Words in Time scrutinizes the fundamental concepts by which we confer meaning to the historical and social world and what they actually signify, analysing their formation and use in modern thought within both history and the social sciences.

In this volume, Francesco Benigno examines the origins and development of the words we use, critiquing the ways in which they have traditionally been employed in historical thinking and examining their potential usefulness today. Rather than being a general inventory or a specialized dictionary, this book analyses a selection of words particularly relevant not only in the idiom and jargon of the social sciences and history, but also in the discourse of ordinary people.

Exploring new trends in the historical field of reflection and representing a call for a new, more conscious, historical approach to the social world, this is valuable reading for all students of historical theory and method.

PART I

Rethinking Early Modern Europe

1

Violence

For some time now the subject of violence has exerted over historians, and social scientists in general, a power of attraction comparable to the power once exerted by the subject of revolution. In fact, it is in the field of revolutionary studies that such a change may most clearly be seen. The cultural climate preceding, accompanying and succeeding the bicentenary of the French Revolution already seemed to indicate a change in emphasis, particularly in the writings of English-speaking historians such as William Doyle and Simon Schama: attention could be seen as shifting from the analysis of the immediate or distant causes of the revolutionary rupture to its tragic dimension, and to its traumatic repercussions on people’s lives. This change of focus became even more apparent after 9/11. If violence had long been considered an unfortunate but unavoidable effect of political and social change, as a brute fact inherent in change and hence seen as somehow natural (just as labour pains accompany birth, in Marx’s famous words), so violence, freeing itself of its ancillary role to politics,¹ became a subject of study in its own right, as was shown by the appearance of general studies of violence,² of readers³ and even of manuals on the subject.⁴

It would be a mistake to see this new orientation as merely the effect of a change in the political and cultural climate, that is, as the result of the rise of a revisionist (and politically conservative) reading of history which saw, in negative rather than positive terms, the generally accepted judgement on revolutions, which were no longer considered stages of Western civilization’s glorious march of progress but as senseless tragedies, or at least as tragic errors resulting from misapprehensions, ideological fanaticism and factional struggle.⁵ The new orientation signalled something more, and something different, which resulted from an intellectual transformation that had occurred in the intervening period. This included the questioning of progressive views of history and of grand progressive narratives; new attention to the cultural and symbolic dimension rather than to economic and social factors; the prevalence of interest in the processes of communication involved in creating identity which went hand in hand with the deconstruction of the great ascriptive macro-categories (nation, class, religious belief ). All this led to a profound rethinking of historical judgement on the twentieth century, the culminating point of Western civilization but at the same time the apogee of mass state violence.⁶ More importantly, violence has taken on a central and constituent role in the new hegemonic scheme of historical memory, aptly named liturgical memory,⁷ that is, as a necessary element of the sacral dimension which accompanies the symbolic and the mystical, identity-based appropriation of the past as embodied in the figure of martyred victims and their executioners.⁸

Using the astrological language congenial to historical players of the early modern period, one might say that violence emerged from the marginal or ancillary role which it had filled in the rationalist-historical constellation of Hegelian inspiration (revolution-progress-social change) with its narrative matrix of the Grande Révolution, and entered, now in the role of protagonist, a different emotional and memorial constellation of Nietzschean inspiration (executioner-witness-victim), the script for which is the Holocaust.⁹

Given the recent centrality of violence in historiographical discourse, it may be useful to reconsider some of the ways in which historiography, especially that of the early modern period, has dealt with the theme of popular violence over the last three decades. One of the most obvious limitations to be found in numerous historiographical approaches is the projection of violence on to a rather ambiguous entity, the armed crowd:¹⁰ an opaque figure on which were foisted ideological concerns generally in quest of the authentic ‘spirit’ of popular actions in crowd behaviour. This raised the old question of the extent to which popular action was manipulated or hetero-directed, and the resultant anxious attempt to decipher autonomous codes which were genuinely ‘popular’ and were in some way distinct from codes of a broader culture. There was a consequent overvaluation of all elements conducive to delineating a ‘popular’ entity which was the vector of traditional and, at times, ancestral values which were supposedly ‘revealed’ by so-called rites of violence. There was a corresponding undervaluation of the interpenetration between the politics of élites and the politics of subordinate players. Violence was thus incorporated into a process of normalization/repression: popular violence, described as rooted in a ‘natural’ and insubordinate tradition, was set against state violence, imagined as innovative, rationalizing and orderly in a process which saw the triumph of Lent over Carnival, of the civilization of good manners over sauvagerie, and of disciplined control over festival/revolt.¹¹

This tendency to ascribe violence to a predetermined, insubordinate entity highlights the other tendency to concentrate violence in someone other than us, in an entity carrying out dark and dirty work ‘on our behalf’, that is, publicly and literally, enacting humanity’s disgusting, repugnant and terrifying aspect, which was thought of as primitive animality capable of barbarous deeds: ritual mutilations, physical and symbolic violations, the shedding of blood and guts, and even beheading and cannibalism. This is to forget that the starting point of any discussion of violence should, in fact, be institutional and conventional practices, and the normal business of the violent imposition of social norms.

1 Rites of violence?

One of the most characteristic features of the way in which historiography of the early modern period has treated violence is its frequent recourse to the category of the rite of violence. The time is ripe for a careful assessment of this concept which, seen from a present-day perspective, seems questionable but, remaining untested, continues to be used as if out of inertia. The concept emerged and developed in the intellectually stimulating period of the discovery of history from the bottom up: at the time the possibility seemed within grasp of giving a voice to the popular classes who generally had never had one, and of making sense of actions which had previously been considered simply as the unthinking expression of primordial needs, as the rumblings of ‘empty stomachs’, or as merely irrational instincts. From the second half of the 1960s, and particularly after E. P. Thompson’s enunciation of his concept of moral economy, there took place a process which radically broadened the range of meanings for the action of popular crowds. The then-fashionable structuralist and quantitative economic and social models, some of which were crude and mechanistic, were progressively questioned and critically discussed. At stake was the view of popular participants as passive subjects, virtually under the sway of impersonal and systemic forces and thus seen, so to speak, as mere chemical reagents in explanatory models dominated by the working of economic and social laws, such as the dictatorship of the economic cycle, regulated by the alternation of phases A and B, the Hausse and the Baisse, as theorized by François Simiand. In opposition to such economic and social determinism, which turned historical players into puppets performing a prepared script, the 1960s and 1970s witnessed the emergence of an interpretation which was more reflective and more attentive to autonomous forms of expression, in a word, fascinated with the so-called popular culture.

To put it as succinctly as possible, it may be said that the view of popular violence seen in ritual terms arose from the confluence of three concepts which, despite the considerable contribution they made to historical studies, nowadays all appear, each in its way, problematic. The first concept, needless to say, is ‘popular culture’ itself, that is to say, the belief in a coherent cultural universe, the origin of which is unclear, that interacts dialectically with another and equally moot concept, ‘élite culture’; both are imagined as being so internally coherent as to make it possible both to trace, at least at a European level, general features immune from local differentiation, and to ground ‘popular culture’ in a Eurasian substrate which, as a concept, is even more complex and vague.¹²

The second concept is the armed crowd as an autonomous player, vector of what might be called a general subjectivity and hence an entity which by its actions supposedly expresses the desires, interests and aspirations of the popular world as a whole:¹³ such a world is made up of acts and symbols which need to be deciphered, and underlying this is what Edward Muir referred to as ‘the mysterious alchemy of crowd behaviour’.¹⁴ As a result of the so-called hermeneutic turning point in the last two decades of the twentieth century, the idea gained ground of interpreting crowd actions as a récit, a performance, and more or less metaphorically as a text.

The third element contributing to the formation of the idea of the rite of violence is naturally the actual concept of rite which entered historiography through the anthropological work of Max Gluckman among the Zulus in the middle of the twentieth century,¹⁵ and particularly through the theoretical extensions of his pupil, Victor Turner, whose starting point was his close observation of the rituals of the Ndembu people in Zambia from which he developed the concept of social drama.¹⁶ However, there was a significant shift of emphasis in the way that historians actually read the anthropology of ritual, and in their approach to the subject: the focus was no longer on the crucial problem of resolving conflict and restoring order (which is how Gluckman and Turner saw the problem), but on the possibility, mediated especially by historians’ reading of Mikhail Bakhtin, of using conflict as a means of gaining access to an otherwise closed and impenetrable universe of signs and ideas.

In her celebrated essay on the rites of violence, the American historian Natalie Zemon Davis drew attention to the line of scholars (Georges Rudé, Eric J. Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Charles Tilly) who made it possible to interpret the people outside the classic stereotypes of sixteenth-century literature (the Hydra, la beste à plusieurs testes and the like), and to grasp instead the political and moral traditions which legitimized or permitted the expression of violence.¹⁷ These historians, Zemon Davis wrote, taught us to see the ancien régime crowds not as aggregations of rootless and precarious beings but, even if poor and marginalized, as belonging to communities with their own traditions and values. Above all ‘we may see their violence, however cruel, not as random and limitless, but as aimed at defined targets and selected from a repertory of traditional punishments and forms of destruction’.¹⁸ The people possess an array of punitive and purificatory measures which together create a fundamental reserve of sense: even in the most extreme cases of religious violence, crowds know what they are doing and sense that they are carrying out a legitimate act.

In the same period Yves-Marie Bercé, in a series of studies, above all that on the fête-révolte, put forward a possible way of studying violence as an expression of a universe of customs and feelings particular to the subordinate classes.¹⁹ In Bercé’s view, reasons for malcontent and protest found an outlet in the early modern period in ritual festive celebrations, such as Carnival, and did so by using a traditional array of playful jibes, role reversals and inversion of the norms of obedience and legitimacy which typified such festivities as a means of expressing a desire to restore an order which had been violated. The nexus between Carnival and revolt subsequently became a much-favoured subject among historians: one thinks of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s work on the Carnival of Romans,²⁰ or Edward Muir’s study of the ‘cruel zobia grassa’ in Udine in 1511.²¹

Seen from a present-day perspective, this insistence on the link between Carnival and revolt with its stress on primordial, bestial and materialistic elements, in keeping with a Bachtinian interpretation of Carnival as a typical expression of a quite different and distinct culture which was resistant to state modernization, raises substantial doubts. When Muir’s and Le Roy Ladurie’s books are now re-read some years after they appeared, they seem only in part to conform to the fête-révolte model, which posited the liberating and joyous eruption of popular rage; what these ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Writing history at a time of memory
• PART I: Rethinking Early Modern Europe
• PART II: Rethinking Modernity
• Index