The past is less than objective

In recent years it has become imperative to question the external nature of objectivity, realism and truth which traditional historians take as their essentials. Emphasis on discourse and the construction of meaning is arguably the best way that history ought to proceed if it is to be modernised. It would be preferable to replace history with quot;historiesquot; owing to its nature of multiplicity. The world has to be read as a text and these readings are infinite. It is obvious that the world/past comes to us as various stories which we interpret and out of which we can never break out. These narratives quot;always alreadyquot; constitute reality and never permit us to have a wholly different or original view. It could, therefore, be argued that history is nothing but historiography, an array of reading practices that engage dialectically with existing texts that represent an assortment of culturally constructed forms of knowledge, beliefs, codes, and customs.

There are no histories that are not aimed at someone. The ideological nature of all positions fixes the historical account without one having to pay excessive attention to centres because clearly there are no centres. Keith Jenkins, a contemporary historian, rightly argues that quot;there are only local patterns of marginality and dominance, which are all historiographically constructed and which must be historiographically read.quot; The old centres do not hold in the post-liberal, post-western, post-Marxist world. As George Steiner has argued, quot;it is this collapse, more or less complete, more or less conscious, of those hierarchical, definitional value gradients and can there be value without hierarchy? which is now the major fact of our intellectual and social circumstances.quot; The past can be quot;infinitely re-describedquot; and from any perspective that suits the particular ideological group, may it be Tory, Whig, or Marxist. These accounts would legitimate any explanation useful for them quot;as they try to be in control, so that they can make the past their past, and so say, along with Neitzsche, So I willed itquot;.

The philosophical foundations of history go to reformulate the link between reality and theory, but there is an inherent constraint in this relationship. For the sake of historical objectivity, the historian tries to reconstruct and reinterpret the past out of the evidence available to him but quot;evidence imposes definite limits to the factual assertions that can be madequot; and this limits the range of interpretations. Thus the question that can be posed is: To what degree are historical studies objective? Often interpretation takes hold over the thinking process which cannot transcend its own discursive practices to get to the truth. As is postulated by postmodernism, there is no autonomous procedure of bringing reality to bear on interpretation since all judgments are based on interpretation that cannot be infallible. It can, therefore, be concluded that there cannot be rigid foundations for knowledge. Though it is a difficult task to satisfy the sceptic, and this is what many writers also feel, they finally do succumb to Foucault8217;s claim that though all that he produces is fiction, he does not quot;go so far as to say that fictions are beyond truth.quot; He is of the view that it is possible to make fiction work inside of truth.

The intrusion of politics and theory into the discipline, has led to the historian becoming more and more defensive. His approach to language and to the narrative conventions that he has always followed has a vividly untheorised position which has turned the post-modern critic into an antagonist who strongly disagrees with the empirical bases of historical inquiry.

The writer is a reader in English at Panjab University, Chandigarh