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The redundancy of history in a

historicized world
a
Martin L. Davies
a
School of Historical Studies at the University of
Leicester, UK
Published online: 15 Aug 2011.

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world, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, 15:3, 335-353, DOI:
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 Rethinking History
Vol. 15, No. 3, September 2011, 335–353

The redundancy of history in a historicized world

Martin L. Davies*

School of Historical Studies at the University of Leicester, UK

In this essay I argue that in a world by now thoroughly historicized,

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‘historical knowledge’ claims to authority and legitimacy are predicated,

ironically, on the notion of redundancy. By redundancy, I mean here that
the whole semantic field of history (of history culture) now comprises
superfluous production leading to irrelevance (the amplification,
atomization, ephemeralization of knowledge generating tautologies,
solipsisms, obsolescence, and uselessness); the essay concludes that
history thus projects the aura of a finished world.
Keywords: historicized world; redundancy; cognition; Bateson; Valéry;
Wells

History offers itself as a dominant cognitive norm. Its natural, all-too-

natural order projects the world as the outcome of rational necessity. It
blocks any attempt to abrogate its procedures, to expose its existential
irrelevance. Therefore, even to mention the redundancy of history,
particularly now, in this already historicized world, goes against the way
things are going, against the grain of things, but to do so, converges –
ironically – with historical materialism. That disclosed the past as it was for
itself, even as it was being instrumentalized by dominant political interests,
to redeem it fleetingly from the cognitive conformity about to drown it
(Benjamin 1977, 253–4). Benjamin’s distanciated view now reveals history as
a reality structure falling in on itself, confronting in its redundancy the final
consequence of its historicizing impetus.
The historicized world comes into existence once historical knowledge
produces its dominant ideas, the ideas of the dominant political and
economic interests – with history-focused behaviour enforcing its reality
principle, with ‘doing history’ or thinking historically constituting history-
making endeavours in a world already comprehensively grasped by historical
knowledge. Defined by historicized consciousness, by a historical hyper-
consciousness, this is a world where history historicizes itself, makes itself a
thing of the past – as in the proliferation of sites of memory, the promotion of

*Email: mld@leicester.ac.uk

ISSN 1364-2529 print/ISSN 1470-1154 online

Ó 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2011.588520
http://www.informaworld.com
 336 M.L. Davies
national heritage, the public’s submission to the tutelage of museums, the
production and marketing of ever-latest things. However, for all its
comprehensive self-knowledge and despite the sedative effects of history-
focused behaviour (or probably through addiction to them), the historicized
world is actually never fully realized: it constantly generates apprehension.
Its potential produces the misgiving (if not the hope) that more could be
possible than is actually real. Hence, at any level of society, but particularly
within its political or technocratic elite, history-focused behaviour never
grasps its historicized circumstances. Consequently, the historicized world,
comprehensively managed by technical expertise, by ‘humanist bureaucrats’,
produces world-blindness, misrecognition: its unconscious implications
generating radical malfunctions in the global economic and political systems
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(Semprun 1993, 50; 2009, 26). From (e.g.) the Titanic (1912) up to Seveso
(1976), Bhopal (1984), Chernobyl (1986), the BSE epidemic (1990–2003) and
beyond, the historicized world, though replete with sufficient reasons, has de
facto excelled itself in the ‘serialized reproduction of catastrophes’ that
shadows the industrial progress that drives it (cf. Virilio 2005, 19).
The historicized world thus presents itself as a psychopathological
formation. It induces cognitive and behavioural ambivalence, a paralysing
oscillation between comprehension and apprehension, between aspiration
and misgiving (cf. Laplanche and Pontalis 1990, 19–21). The history-focused
behaviour it fosters, the historicized reality-principle it establishes, work
through precedence, deferral, and pre-emption. Already historicized, reality
exists only in these temporal perspectives. Only thus can it pacify the
apprehension it engenders. Naturally, history-focused behaviour concedes
precedence to the past. In historical production the past always comes first:
the undisputed priority of its numinous presence offers, supposedly,
metaphysical reassurance, sufficient reasons – explanations. This precedent
presence of the past then produces the other characteristics of historicized
behaviour. The historian function (the social role the historian plays)
inevitably defers to what used to exist, this deference producing the
indispensable ‘lessons of history’ underpinning the bureaucratic management
of social identities, guaranteeing the stabilizing continuities, traditions and
processes that make historical knowledge possible, that make humanity’s
existence make sense. Additionally, as a form of managerial regulation,
deferring involves deferral. History-focused behaviour resists any strategy
that threatens the way things are (e.g. the principle of hope). Morality may
well be ‘instantaneous’ (as Bachelard remarked); but any old historicizing
scheme will produce an excusing pretext – as, while visiting China and when
questioned about restricted internet access there, US President Obama
observed that ‘different countries have different traditions’ (Bachelard 1994,
110; Macleod 2009). Deference to the past also triggers the occlusive,
historical pre-emption of reality (cf. Davies 2010, 189ff.). This takes various
forms – as when an event is said to ‘change the course of history’ or a person
 Rethinking History 337
is assessed as being ‘ahead of their times’ or when, as in corporate commercial
or technological environments, future forecasting redirects current beha-
viour. Occlusive pre-emption invests history (i.e. the actualities of existence,
res gestae) with an a-priori course or an identifiable, providential trajectory:
it offers prophecy.
Informing these fundamental, historicizing perspectives is a culture of
authoritarianism. Proclaiming itself as the ‘best qualified’ or as the ‘best
placed’, the historian function presupposes an authoritative structure that
permits it not just to manage historicized reality, but also to monitor the
history-focused behaviour historicized reality enforces (Tosh 2008, 110,
131). Nothing eludes historicization. Comprehensive in scope, its reach is
totalitarian: ‘from a historian’s point of view, much of what is studied under
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the rubric of (for example) Anthropology or Politics or Sociology or Law

can be regarded as specialist subsets of History, which takes as its remit the
whole of the human experience’ (Corfield 2008). In practice, in the
production of historical discourse, it imposes its ‘regime of truth’ through
‘words of command’ that impose total comprehension in terms of
categorical coordinators such as origins, precedents, contexts, trajectories,
traditions, heritages, legacies, identities, catalysts, causes, processes, and
products (Rancière 1992, 180; Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 95ff.; Davies
2010, 2, 105). In a historicized world, it makes historical scholarship
essentially and fundamentally affirmative: the academically accredited
identity of whatever was, of whatever is; the academically vindicated
necessity connecting whatever was with whatever is. Inevitably, it insists,
how things are now is how they have got to be, so that things now are how
they have got to be – how they necessarily must be.
To propose that, in a historicized world, history (the technology for
producing historical knowledge) would become redundant seems absurd.
Surely the sheer volume-production of historical works in all media, its mass
consumption in a phantasmagoria of commodified forms proves the
opposite: that historical culture meets a social ‘need’, that it is not
superfluous. Nevertheless, if ‘all people’ really ‘are living histories’, if (as
Droysen remarked) ‘everyone is to a certain extent a historian’, if (as neo-
liberal cultural policy insists) ‘the past is all around us’ and ‘the historic
environment [. . .] is central [. . .] to our identity as individuals,
communities and as a nation’, if ‘every aspect of human experience now
has its historians’ – if human reality is, therefore, already comprehensively
defined by a historicizing identity principle, what ‘more’ ever more historical
knowledge could add is not obvious (Corfield 2008; Droysen 1977, 28;
DCMS 2001, 7; Thomas 2006, 4). Already, there are misgivings: that, ‘in an
unprecedentedly productive community of [. . .] scholars’, ‘the amount of
output [. . .] is now frankly unmanageable’, so that the ‘growth of output
means the growth of rubbish’; that ‘much of this vast published output is read
by so small an audience that it is tempting to wonder what is the point in
 338 M.L. Davies
writing or publishing it in the first place’; that the ‘overwhelming’ ‘torrent of
publication’ from research-driven universities is producing an ‘accumulation
of specialized knowledge’ that is ‘crippling’ (Fernández-Armesto 2002, 150;
Cannadine 1999, 10; Thomas 2006, 4). Academic specialization itself, the
professional discipline, evidently creates redundancy. With history having
become ‘a crowded and heterogeneous field’, the historian can hardly keep up
with developments in his or her specialist area, let alone in others’ (Thomas
2006, 4). Its proliferating sub- and sub-subdisciplines may have little
relevance anyway for each other: ‘what,’ after all (asks Sande Cohen) ‘do
the archaeologists of Armegeddon have to do with the contemporary writing
of, say, the history of rock and roll?’ (Cohen 2006, 108). Further, maintaining
that the ‘growth of rubbish [. . .] means the increased availability of good
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work, too’ is sophistry (Fernández-Armesto 2002, 150). Who, precisely, has

the comprehensive overview of this overproduction, the evaluating
authority – unless it be historians themselves, in their social-managerial
role as ‘humanist bureaucrats’, officially prosecuting peer-review adjudica-
tions at the behest of so-called Research Assessment Exercises (cf. Davies
2006, 159; 2010, 29–30)? If history matters (as historians continually
contend), does it not also matter that an unquantifiable amount of historical
expertise of undefined quality keeps being wasted? Ironically, historians, so
adept at identifying other people’s historical dilemmas, discount their own. A
world already comprehensively historicized displays nothing but what they
deplore: historical knowledge amplified, atomized, ephemeralized.
This line of enquiry, however, only leads so far. What the redundancy of
history means, can be pursued much further. For a start, it needs
reconceiving. The volume-production and mass-consumption of history
prompt different questions: why does an already historicized world need to
generate superfluous, ephemeral quantities of historical knowledge, why does
it need to create redundant history, and with what results? Be it as producing
superfluity, as indulging in wasteful expenditure, as abandoning what is
obsolete, or as generating uselessness or non-significance, redundancy is itself
significant – not just socially (in terms of economics) or cognitively, but also
in historicist terms. It is significant, since being in a position to produce
superfluity, wastefulness, obsolescence, or uselessness signifies economic
power and so identifies cultural and political authority. In an already
historicized world, the production of the redundancy of historical knowl-
edge, therefore, reinforces the social and cognitive authority of historical
comprehension, its sustaining metaphysical (or rather meta-historical)
principle.
The way in which a society growing demographically and economically
uses the superfluity it produces decides that society’s character, permits it to
choose to be military, religious, industrial, or sumptuary. Bataille gained
this insight from the particular case of Tibet: because of its isolated
geopolitical situation that made a standing army or commercial institutions
 Rethinking History 339
redundant, it could maintain an unproductive priesthood (a caste of pure
consumers) to absorb its surplus resources (cf. Caillois 1964, 150). In the
historicized world, industrial and technological society has already made
itself totalitarian and capitalist: production has become totally socialized
through ‘economic-technical coordination’; nothing exists that has no
economic value (Marcuse 2001, 50). Capitalism is society’s historicizing
principle, constantly revolutionizing itself and its environment. The agency
of its total, social and technical coordination, the conformist social practice
of contemporary homo oeconomicus, history-focused behaviour generates
public economic value, be it as intellectual or manual work, be it as cultural
or leisure activity (cf. Davies 2010, 25, 121ff). Capitalism aims to produce
surpluses and redundancies as indices of its historical development,
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surpluses it reinvests in its industrial-technical production process, in the

reproduction of new technologies of production and consumption, in the
concomitant reproduction of obsolescent commodities and patterns of social
behaviour. It produces commodities, series of ever-latest things, recurrent
signs of the conspicuous consumption that surplus production sustains.
Ultimately, such socialized production endorses the interests of national
security. Military conflicts (history-making events inherent in the ‘unsocial
sociability’ of human coexistence) vindicate the extravagant expenditure of
society’s accumulated financial, social, intellectual, and technological
resources: like extravagant festivals, wars require wasteful sacrifice; armies
too are dedicated to pure consumption (cf. Kant 1982, 37–8, 42; Caillois
1994, 191, 205).
Cognitively speaking, the creation of patterns of meaning, as in the
communication of information, also requires redundancy. This can be
further defined as the ‘patterning or predictability of particular events within
a larger aggregate’; patterning and predictability being ‘the very essence and
raison d’eˆtre of communication’, the basis of meaning, of what it is ‘about’.
Communication is not just in the world; it also implies ‘a larger universe of
relevance consisting of message-plus-referent’ with ‘redundancy or pattern or
predictability [. . .] introduced into this universe by the message’. Predicated
on a correspondence between the message and its referent, redundancy as
pattern, as predictability, ‘informs’ this universe (Bateson 2000, 412–14).
Redundancy is clearest, meaning is most explicit, when it manifests tautology
and sanctions solipsism – as with the concept of identity (A ¼ A) (e.g. a
passport is both crucial and superfluous: it says only that you are who you
are). Generally, redundancy is evinced within a communication when certain
signifiers are discounted because, as background relief, they offset the central
message or when the larger subject that makes it make sense goes
unmentioned. All communication, therefore, appears to be figurative,
predicated on synecdoche, the substitution of part for whole (e.g. ‘the pen
is mightier than the sword’). Redundancy thus requires the observer to focus
on the internal structure of the message material and on the rules that
 340 M.L. Davies
organize it. From the patterning that it evinces (i.e. its grammar, spelling,
referents) s/he infers what it means; from the sense it displays s/he predicts
what more sense it implies (Bateson 2000, 415–16, 419–21). Therefore, in any
explanatory system free from external interference, redundancy ensures that
‘each step in a communicational sequence’ appears ‘along the pathway as a
‘transform of the previous step’ (Bateson 2000, 416). Predictably enough, the
identical pattern extends itself with consistent regularity. Lastly, redundancy
patterns ecological systems and cultural morphology. The system ‘organism-
plus-environment’ enables the observer to infer from the organism’s
morphology and behaviour the nature of its environment. In adapting to
this system, ‘the organism may learn to use the information contained in
patterned sequences of events’. Conversely, redundancy will ensure that in
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this same system ‘events will occur to complete patterns or configurations of

learned adaptation between organism and environment’ (Bateson 2000, 421–
2). It will offer the organism the capacity for ensuring that its response to
ongoing events derives from or extends adaptive behaviour patterns
established hitherto.
‘New redundancies of the obvious, new concentrations of language shore
up existing powers’ (Cohen 1999, 53). In the historicized world, history
makes sense by producing redundancy both socio-economically (as
extravagant expenditure or as expired relevance) and cognitively (through
discursive rules informing historical communication or through reinforcing
behaviour patterns adapted to the historicized world).
Socio-economically, the surplus production of historical information is a
form of pre-emptive occlusion of personal experience. As Nietzsche
recognized, ‘history as the precious superabundance of knowledge and
luxury’ offers ‘instruction without stimulation’, instruction that is, therefore,
existentially irrelevant (Nietzsche 1988, 245). It demonstrates, incontrovert-
ibly, that whatever one thinks – and thinking by definition ‘will not passively
accept what has always been the case [das je Gegebene]’ – the world has
always been already organized and bureaucratized, historically organized
and bureaucratized (Adorno 2003, 765). The sheer quantity of historically
mediated facts drowns the primacy of one’s own subjectivity in ‘hetero-
nomous objectivity’ (Adorno 1982, 172). The production of superfluity
affirms a world so comprehensively historicized that it cannot help reiterating
its historical self-comprehension. This mass production of historical knowl-
edge is driven by the professionally recognized methods of academic
scholarship. These validate the socialization of the historian function. They
also legitimate the social diffusion (i.e. the heteronomous force) of history-
focused behaviour and the forms it can take: a disciplinary corrective to
received opinion; the stimulant of collective memory, the indulgence of
popular nostalgia; the prosthetic compensation for past, but still painful,
national traumas; the vindication of atavistic social attitudes and multi-
farious forms of fundamentalism; an incentive for producing a financially
 Rethinking History 341
quantifiable public value in (e.g.) the tourist and heritage industries; a
referential simulation of commercial interest and capital accumulation; a
resource in social and cultural policy for fabricating community identities
and commonplaces as means of promoting social cohesion. Historical
knowledge and historical values prove highly adaptable: their professional,
academic validation vindicates their constitutive promiscuity. In the
historicized world the professional academic becomes totally assimilated to
the generally socialized historian function, to the technocrat cadres and to
cliques of ‘humanist bureaucrats’ that organize, maintain, and service social
technologies, particularly such an adaptable managerial technology as
history, truly a technology of technologies. History-focused behaviour,
implicit in both the professional academic and the wider social historian
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function, becomes the indispensable, commonplace social practice of the

historicized world. Through it, in terms of psychology and behaviour, the
individual adapts him-or herself to the rhythm of history, to the dominant
interpretations of the dominant events, to acquiescence in things being how
they have got to be. This intellectual and behavioural adaptation requires
‘zealous conformity to what has always been validated’ (beflissene Anpassung
ans je Geltende), ‘the uncompromising belief in things that have got to be the
way they are’ (Glaube an Bestehendes um jeden Preis) (Adorno 2003, 484). It is
reinforced by the superfluity of historical knowledge production in itself as a
form of production in its own right. In thinking and producing historically in
accordance with recognized disciplinary methods, you proclaim your
allegiance not just to the dominant norms of academic production, but
also to the equivalent, dominant norms of economic production: you are not
doing anything else, anything radically different.
Communication is also predicated on redundancy because the discursive
order (grammar, syntax, spelling) is nothing primary: it derives from the pre-
existing social order. A communication (l’e´nonce´) carries only the bare
minimum of information necessary for making it transmit what it orders, for
identifying the order it affirms (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 95–6). This
message-structure applies particularly to ‘history’: the term connotes both
‘the past’ and ‘knowledge about the past’. The discursive order of historical
knowledge makes itself redundant. Presenting itself as the truth of the past,
as being the way it really was, it affirms the existing world order, it becomes
indistinguishable from its referent. This redundancy is evinced in the
structural ambivalence of historical knowledge: its perpetual oscillation
between ‘change’ and ‘continuity’. Certainly, it encodes temporal develop-
ments by recourse to arbitrary patterns of meaning traced by factors such as
origins, precedents, periods, contexts, trajectories, traditions, heritages,
legacies, identities, analogies, equivalences, catalysts, causes, processes, and
products which ensure the fundamental, historicist legitimation of the
historical account. However, the identitary thinking sustaining them, their
function as categorical coordinators, ensure that, however much anything
 342 M.L. Davies
changes, they preclude any ‘change in the conditions of change’, that ‘in the
whole everything moves on, except the whole itself’ (cf. Popper 1974, 130;
Adorno 2003, 623). The redundancy produced by the stabilized dynamics of
the history system further vindicates the ‘piecemeal tinkering’ or ‘problem
solving’ that constitutes academic history (Popper 1974, 58ff.; Fulbrook
2002, 53ff., 66ff.). By definition they encourage and reinforce the perpetual
reproduction of transforms of knowledge already known – of the same old
thing. Further, the superfluous production driven by these academic
strategies also enforces mental and behavioural conformity: history’s
comprehensive scope is diffused into a mass of behaviouristic reflexes. As
an information technician, the historian function communicates historical
sense through patterns of precedence, deferral, and pre-emptive occlusion
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involving signifiers that it excludes and significances that it implies.

Predicated on the principles of identity and sufficient reason, the categorical
coordinators that structure this information, that make it make historical
sense, have a priori erased (i.e. made redundant) anything different. Hence,
‘historical discourse presupposes as its material context the academic
legitimation of narrative culture as such: life is a story and non-life equals
non-narratability’ (Cohen 1988, 18). The edicts of history are thus
totalitarian and final: what cannot be historicized should not exist; but
also what the historian function refuses to historicize does not exist. At the
same time, these edicts are totally arbitrary. After all, ‘given that phenomena
as such are of no intrinsic type, then it is not obvious how you determine
which phenomena go where’: ‘What exactly ‘belongs to’ the concepts of, say,
class, gender, progress, regress, decline and fall? What ‘falls into’ the
organising categories of the economic, the social, the political, cultural,
ideological?’ (Jenkins 2009, 8). Apart from purely disciplinary convention or
tradition, what makes an historical topic intelligible, capable of being
narrated, is not at all self-evident – unless it derives from the predictable
patterning inherent in the redundancy of historicizing discourse.
Predicated on the production of redundancy, already conducive to
psychopathological ambivalence, the historicized world incites apprehen-
sion. ‘Being sick with history, with the eclipse of history’, we hurtle towards
‘the golden age of terror’ (vers l’âge d’or de l’effroi) (Cioran 2008, 64).
However, the historian function denies the apprehension its conventions
create. Instead, it exerts its socially legitimated, correctional authority to pre-
empt the implications of its investigations (cf. Davies 2010, 194ff.). It thus
exudes the intellectual complacency afforded by cognitive prejudice, by the
refusal even to consider that the basis of historical representation could be
epistemologically problematic. After all, ‘If you are already in possession of a
‘given’ world, with isolable, identifiable objects such as people, physical
environment, and actions, then quite clearly you have already solved, or
prejudged any issue in the theory of knowledge’. On this basis, to claim that
‘you already know the world, [that] you possess a world-home and an
 Rethinking History 343
identity’ has in epistemological terms ‘altogether missed the point’ (Gellner
1979, 41), for this claim discounts the cognitive principle implicit in
historicization as a modernizing agency fixated on the latest things: the
‘ideological shift’ that, with (e.g.) Descartes and Kant, makes ‘the foundation
stone of [. . .] our world and identity [. . .] not some [. . .] reverence-inspiring
object or being out there’ in the world, but, instead, ‘our cognitive equipment
[. . .] our criteria of sound knowledge’. It fails to grasp that knowledge of the
world is established ‘no longer by an appeal to the nature of things, but [. . .]
by an appeal to the inner necessities of our cognitive apparatus’; that,
therefore, since the world can be seen only ‘within knowledge’, knowledge is
no longer just ‘one thing or process amongst others within a wider world’
(Gellner 1979, 28–9). This ‘ideological shift’ invests ‘the norms of cognition’
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with ‘real intellectual sovereignty’ (Gellner 1979, 28). Certainly, it refutes the
idea of the past as a natural object and historical science as a natural
cognitive practice in the world. Conversely and ironically, it makes historical
norms of cognition absolutely, naturally sovereign, based as they are on
tautology (i.e. on redundancy), on the self-evident principles of identity and
sufficient reason. Their fundamental rationale is defined by Vico’s observa-
tion that ‘this world of nations has certainly been made by men and its guise
must be found in the modifications of our own human mind. History cannot
be more certain than when he who creates the things also narrates them’
(Vico 1984, 104).
This apology for historical reason is solipsistic: ‘solipsism is neither an
aberration, nor a sophism: it is the very structure of reason’ (Levinas 2001,
48). In a comprehensively historicized world, therefore, history is concerned
not with the world, but with the patterns in the world that historical
discourse necessarily constructs, with the larger, transcendent world-plus-
history, the world history constitutes and necessarily informs. Being
engrossed with itself in this larger world occurs only through redundancy,
by discounting the world in and for itself, the world that, created inter-
subjectively, is the sole environment available for human species-existence.
Based on a temporal scheme of precedence, deferral, and pre-emption,
articulated through an infinitely variable set of categorical coordinators, the
norms of historical cognition structure both history-making action in the
historicized world and the history-making comprehension of the self-same
historicizing action. To history-focused behaviour and the historian
function based on it, they reflect nothing but their own self-image. There
is a priori nothing ‘out there’ in the world that is not a historical object: the
norms of historical cognition, prompting the ‘modifications of our own
human mind’, identify them a priori as historical. In the comprehensively
historicized world, objective historical knowledge can never, therefore, elude
the suspicion of illusoriness: it cannot avoid its fundamental tautology, its
sustaining redundancy. Hence, to make it objective, indispensable, and
compelling, ‘the historian’s prose narrative is not materially linked to a
 344 M.L. Davies
commitment to represent or tell the truth at all, but rather, to a refusal of
allowing disengagement from its own narrative form’. Instead – and as
evinced (e.g.) by historians’ own mistrust of superfluous, cognitively
‘crippling’ historical production – ‘it is culturally first about its own
competency and legitimacy as a form’ (Cohen 1988, 104). This observation
may, however, be refined. The historian function mistakes history-focused
behaviour (such as locating sources, gathering evidence, testing inferences,
reviewing the historiography) for a natural activity in the world when it is
actually an a priori, mental predisposition towards the world predicated on
the principle of identity, on the solipsism of historicizing rationalization.
This misapprehension just demonstrates, both in historical scholarship and
in the humanities that history scholarship supports, that ‘epistemological
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error is often reinforced and therefore self-validating’, that ‘you can

get along all right in spite of the fact that you entertain at rather deep levels
of the mind premises which are simply false’ (Bateson 2000, 488).
The term ‘historicized world’, it should be stressed, has no meaning
within a world comprehensively historicized. It hypothesizes a distanciated
perspective on a comprehensively historicized world and its underlying
solipsism of historicizing cognition. With historians, it would not resonate.
Deplore it though they might, the amplification of historical knowledge, the
sovereignty of the discipline it affirms, affords them narcissistic pleasure,
even though, in blocking self-reflection, it conceals its fatality. The term
‘historicized world’ identifies a situation which makes the self-centred
historian function both indispensable and redundant, compelling it to affirm
its necessity in order to deny its redundancy; which, through self-
amplification, atomization, and ephemeralization, ‘bulks it up’ to project
substantive relevance. It defines an unprecedented predicament: historical
comprehension culminating in a delusional cognitive norm both absolute
and pointless and in the concomitant collapse of the metaphysical principles
and discursive practices that a priori promote the solipsistic illusion,
historicized cognition.
By contrast, within historicism the term ‘historicization’ is affirmative. As
a dynamic agenda (as, e.g., Hegelianism or dialectical materialism),
historicism in its strong, meta-narrative form has surely lost credibility,
except, possibly, for anyone endorsing Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis. As
in patterns proposing a transcendent, comprehensive sense for history,
sustained by temporal continuities and perspectives, organized on the basis
of categorical coordinators, it still implicitly structures historicized thinking.
It supplies the principle of sufficient reason that motivates professional,
academic history, let alone the coercive narratives that predict individual,
community, or national identity. To its ‘core principles’ – analysis in the
identitary terms of historical process and analogical reasoning – the historian
function still defers. They legitimate its exercise of social tutelage; they
sanction its correctional authority (Tosh 2008, 116). In other words, they
 Rethinking History 345
promote ‘care about the past’ as ‘an essential element in public conscious-
ness, cultural enrichment and civilised living’; they justify the conviction ‘that
a knowledge of the past helps people to behave as intelligent citizens’
(Cannadine 1999, 21; Marwick 2001, 37). They thus encode contemporary
circumstances (that are the way they have got to be) as already civilized and
intelligent, as already predisposed towards academic, historicizing explana-
tion. The rationale for this ‘weaker’ historicism, its epistemological basis,
finds its classic expression in Droysen’s Historik (1977 [1857–82]). Deferring
not just to Kant and Schleiermacher, but particularly to Wilhelm von
Humboldt, Droysen identifies the epistemological anchor, the metaphysical
justification, for both history-making action and history-making compre-
hension of this self-same action. He defines them as both a metaphysical
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obligation and a cosmological vocation for the human species: their aim
(telos) is to provide an ethical, civilizing ‘finish’ to the creation of the world
(Droysen 1977, 15ff.). For Droysen it is axiomatic that the planet, already
composed of geological, botanical, and biological strata (established by
natural history, the history of nature), requires a final, ethical veneer to
complete its creation (to be established by human history, the history of
humanity).
This scheme is also pure sophistry, its premise unverifiable. It relies on
the self-serving identity principle (A ¼ A), on the identitary – classical,
metaphysical – proposition that thought and the object of thought, the
knowing mind and the object to be known are equivalent (cf. Davies 2010,
60ff., 139). It testifies to anthropic bias. It presumes that human beings have
a unique, self-reflective moral intelligence traceable not just in history-
making action and in its history-making comprehension, but also, and most
importantly, in the crucial, self-affirming principle of historicization:
history-making comprehension as the motivation for ever more history-
making action and its concomitant, ever more history-making comprehen-
sion. When would this world be finished? How would anyone know?
Everyone now lives in a globalized world; no one is a ‘world-citizen’, the
culmination of humanity’s historicizing effort envisaged by Kant or Jaspers.
It is all a sophistical deception, a beguiling fallacy that a brief recourse to
zoology exposes. Experiments with higher mammals (e.g. monkeys) evince
behaviour involving conflict resolution, empathy, reciprocity, and a sense of
justice. This suggests that ethics originated in group survival strategies that
emerged long before Homo sapiens evolved; this implies in turn that Homo
sapiens’s self-reflective, moral intelligence denies the historicist claim for its
exceptional status (Atlan and de Waal 2007: 62ff., 103; Schaeffer 2007: 255).
Historicization thus proves to be both deceptive and deceitful.
Indomitable it may look; structurally it is vulnerable. It appears
indispensable; but, describing merely its own identity, it is actually
redundant. Suppose that the self-reflective moral intelligence central to
historicism and to historicization were one day to discover that the world
 346 M.L. Davies
had been totally parcelled up by national interests; suppose it realized too
that no part of it eluded legal regulation, that there would be no tribe, so
remote, that ‘through the malificence of writing’ (les male´fices de l’e´criture)
would not find its affairs administered ‘by a bureaucracy of distant, diverse
humanists’ (de divers humanistes lointains dans leurs bureaux) (synonymous
with the ‘humanist bureaucrats’ evoked earlier): would not that suggest the
‘beginning of the era of the finished world’ (Le temps du monde fini
commence)? This is precisely what the Avant-propos (1931) to Paul Valéry’s
essay collection Regards sur le monde actuel (Observations on the
Contemporary World) (1931, 1938, 1945) concludes (Valéry 1960, 923).
Regards sur le monde actuel already confronts history as a fatally self-
reinforcing ‘horrible mish-mash’ (un horrible me´lange); as an imprecise form
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of knowledge, oriented towards a heterogeneous subject matter, dealing

with accidental, contingent issues; as the treacherous basis of action since, as
in a political crisis, it compels parliaments to digress into ‘imaginary
memories’ (souvenirs imaginaires) rather than address it as something
unprecedented, but particularly since, containing examples of all kinds of
behaviour (and so offering no lessons to teach) it serves any and every cause
(Valéry 1960, 917, 935). Valéry already questions the validity of historical
evaluations which, in following disciplinary conventions on the nature and
scope of ‘historical processes’ (e.g. Bismarck’s policy towards Africa),
disregard momentous but slow-moving events these conventions fail to
comprehend (e.g. the discovery of electricity). But le monde fini implies
something more, something more fatal. It suggests that, even if historicizing
action and its historicizing comprehension, however heterogeneous,
arbitrary or conventional, might just have worked in a world still to be
discovered, in a globalized world administered by comprehensive histor-
icization they not only lose their purpose (perdent leur sens) but are also
misleading, engendering ‘fruitless initiatives and mistakes’ (deviennent causes
d’efforts infructueux et d’erreurs) (Valéry 1960, 924).
Signifying a radical critique of historicization, the phrase monde fini is
highly suggestive. Fini does not preclude ‘finish’, the superior, cosmological
stratum of historicized, inevitably bourgeois civilization (even though Valéry
does not pursue this association), but it does imply ‘finished’, not just ‘finite’
and ‘closed’ (the converse of ‘undiscovered’ or ‘unexplored’) but ‘over and
done with’, ‘purposeless’: in other words, redundant. It also anticipates
something more: ‘finished’ as synonymous with ‘used up’ or ‘worn out’,
another kind of redundancy. It has yet to reveal why a finite world, with its
historicized finish, is finished: why historicization has finished with itself. In
the end, it comes down to the self-reflective intelligence that, with its
temporal perspectives, its principles of identity and sufficient reason, its
categorical coordinators, was always behind it. In the end, the finite world,
with its historicized finish, is finished because this self-reflective intelligence
henceforth confronts in it nothing other than itself, its own redundancy.
 Rethinking History 347
In the end, historicization has produced in the comprehensively historicized
world a lethal situation. Created by intelligence, it enables this intelligence to
‘get its own back’ by confronting it ‘with entirely new problems and
numerous enigmas’ (Valéry 1960, 1058). The outcome of comprehensive
historicization, the historicized world proves to be existentially disorientat-
ing. The historicizing intelligence that created it cannot comprehend it or
itself, not least because ‘no society can predict, scientifically, its own future
states of knowledge’ (Popper 1974, vii). It turns out that ‘if we imprint on
the world the pace of our intelligence [l’allure de notre esprit], it becomes just
as unpredictable; it adopts its disorderliness’ (Valéry 1960, 1068).
In the historicized world, therefore, the mind finds itself ‘at the end of its
tether’, a situation described by H.G. Wells whose novels and essays
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advocate nothing if not the need for self-reflective, moral intelligence totally
to determine the course of human history. But Wells’s last, late book, The
mind at the end of its tether (1946), recognizes the redundancy notice served
on this historicist vision by the actually historicized world. The identitary
coordination of humanity and history, existential meaning and historical
process, has gone: henceforth ‘the cosmic movement of events is increasingly
adverse to the mental make-up of our daily life’ (Wells 2006, 44, 45). Now
‘that congruence with mind, which man has attributed to the secular
process, is not really there at all’: history, the story of humanity, was a mere
blip in the history of nature, the ‘three thousand million years of Organic
Evolution’, this ‘secular process’ indistinguishable from ‘such non-mental
rhythms as the accumulation of crystalline matter in a mineral vein or with
the flight of a shower of meteors’ (Wells 2006, 44, 48). Disorientation results.
Historical structures, predicated on identitary coordination, are in melt-
down: ‘Events now follow one another in an entirely untrustworthy
sequence’; ‘A harsh queerness is coming over things and rushes past what
we have hitherto been wont to consider the definite limits of hard fact. Hard
fact runs away from analysis and does not return’ (Wells 2006, 46–7).
Exposing the redundancy of historicizing comprehension, the historicized
world induces apprehension: ‘We pass into the harsh glare of hitherto
incredible novelty. It beats the searching imagination. The more it strives the
less it grasps. The more strenuous the analysis, the more inescapable the
sense of mental defeat’ (Wells 2006, 45, 47).
The historicized world thus induces a typical history phobia. The
apprehensiveness implicit in Regards sur le monde actuel and The mind at the
end of its tether is confirmed in an entire corpus of twentieth-century texts
defining historicization as an existential liability – such as Walther
Rathenau’s Zur Kritik der Zeit (A critique of the age) (1912), Theodor
Lessing’s, Geschichte als Sinngebung des Sinnlosen (History: the attribution of
meaning to meaninglessness) (1919), Gaston Bachelard, Intuition de l’instant
(The intuition of the instant) (1932), Ernst Bloch’s Erbschaft dieser Zeit (The
heritage of this age) (1935), Stefan Zweig’s Die Welt von Gestern (The world
 348 M.L. Davies
of yesterday) (1944), Heinrich Mann’s Ein Zeitalter wird besichtigt (An age
reviewed) (1946), Max Horkheimer’s Notizen (Notes and jottings) (1974).
They are offset by a pervasive sense of the decline of a specifically European
civilization, exemplified less by the tendentious pessimism of Spengler’s
Untergang des Abendlandes (Decline of the West) (1918), than by the self-
disclosure of a fatal fault in the human cognitive capacity, in self-reflective,
moral intelligence itself: what Valéry called ‘the crisis of the mind’ (La crise
de l’esprit). European civilization (it proposes) has proved to be mortal, has
turned to ash and cinders because its cognitive capacity, its consciousness
(connaissance) has been ‘incapable of saving anything at all’ and its science,
‘dishonoured by the cruelty of its applications’, has received ‘a mortal blow
to its moral ambitions’ (Valéry 1957, 988, 990). This desolate situation, ‘the
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modern epoch’, is the legacy of historicization: moral intelligence boils down

to nothing more than the mental chaos, the endlessly conflictual,
heterogeneous motives of thought and behaviour that come with a
comprehensively historicized world (Valéry 1957, 992). In the last analysis
historicization makes moral intelligence, its self-immanent motivation,
redundant.
As the outcome of its comprehensive historicization, the historicized
world compels a fatal reorientation of human species’ interests: it presents
an unprecedented anthropic predicament. To claim that it is just a historical
phase, to locate it in ‘temporal perspective’, to ‘contextualize’ it, evinces
merely the same old cognitive reflex, perpetuates a vicious mental habit, and
reinforces the constitutive bias in historicized thought – despite this reflex,
habit, and bias being now redundant. The comprehensively historicized
world also undermines the metaphysical principles that made historicization
make sense, that motivated its cosmological vocation. Historicization was
ultimately guaranteed by the thought of God as its ultimate self-sufficient
cause. Hence, historical science was ‘a constant process of discovery from
the standpoint of God’ (die Historie [. . .] ist ein stetes Finden aus Gott)
(Droysen 1977, 236, 254–5). Within the context of a theologically oriented
‘historiosophy’ (i.e. the historicist science of organizing the ‘higher moments
of the mind into the real and important elements of history’) history could
even be projected as ‘the Sensorium commune of the universe’, as its
cosmological nerve centre (Cieszkowski 1981, 68–9). Further, the cosmo-
logical vocation of history was endorsed by its eschatological dynamic as it
unfolded from the moment of Creation to the apocalyptic Last Judgement,
the ultimate historical verdict. In a historicized world, these absolute
parameters of action and comprehension themselves become historicized.
Now redundant they collapse into history: Creation and Apocalypse are
redeployed as further instruments of comprehensive historicization, so, in
genetic research and biotechnology Homo sapiens plays God, creating
biological mutants, tampering with its own species-matter, envisaging a
eugenically improved, chemically fuelled ‘post-human’ future and, with it,
 Rethinking History 349
its own biological obsolescence (Fukuyama 2002, 52–3, 69; Anders 1986,
22–5; cf. Davies 2006, 201; 2010, 119). So too, with the proliferation of
nuclear weapons: the historicized world produces an apprehensive ‘counter-
theology’, ‘the theology of the atomic situation’ in which the historical
production of nuclear technology enables historicized humanity to assume
the hitherto divine task of discharging final judgements. As its self-
proclaimed avatar, the paradigmatic historicizing agent backed up by its
humanist bureaucrats, the state visits with death and destruction (e.g.) on
Baghdad (2003) or Gaza (2009) retribution from on high while the media
conveniently repackage it as a global TV spectacle (cf. Anders 1986, 404,
407–8; Deleuze 2006, 61; Davies 2010, 214–15).
Thus, left to its own historical devices, the historicized world refunctions
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the logic of historicization, redirecting it towards catastrophic self-defeat, to

total redundancy. With theodicy reprogrammed for the contingencies of
state policy and with natural history adapted to an inherently accidental
human reality, it induces apprehension. Disorientated, historicization
culminates in the inversion of its original motivation, the betrayal of its
(alleged) cosmological vocation. Far from imparting a polished, civilizing
‘finish’ to a world already composed of geological, botanical, and biological
substrata, it wastes them, exhausts them. According to the ecological think-
tank, Global Footprint Network (2009), globalized humanity is already (at
this point in its history it should be said) in ecological ‘overshoot’, living
beyond its ecological means, ‘depleting the very resources on which human
life and biodiversity depend’. It calculates that contemporary life styles (the
product of human history, it should be stressed) require 1.4 planets to
support them: in other words, ‘in less than 10 months, humanity will have
used ecological services it takes 12 months for the Earth to regenerate’. It
estimates that ‘if current population and consumption trends continue, by
the mid 2030s we will need the equivalent of two Earths to support us’. With
its self-amplification, atomization, and ephemeralization, history too
intensifies the ever-accelerating, dromospheric conditions of life driven by
global communications and a global economy that in themselves exceed the
natural limits of the planet (cf. Virilio 2007, 44, 90, 114, 131). Symptomatic of
the ecological apprehension that comes with being held hostage by a planet
which its historicizing delusions have exploited and trashed is a metaphysical
irony: a totally historicized species reduced to seeking ontological self-
reassurance through persistently searching in remote galaxies for inhabitable
planets, for the least, let alone the lowest, forms of life.
Why then, finally, is history redundant in a world that the historian
function has constructed, a comprehensively historicized world, testimony
to ‘an epoch in which since 1945 the succession of epochs is over’ (Die
Epoche der Epochenwechsel ist seit 1945 vorüber), in which ‘the sense of
history does not begin to change, but rather what happens is no longer
history’ (Nicht die Geschichte beginnt den Sinn zu ändern, sondern das
 350 M.L. Davies
Geschehen ist nicht Geschichte mehr) (Anders 1986, 20; Jünger 1983, 16)? To
begin with, the historian function operates in a self-constructed void.
Because it imparts to the past the inertial momentum that drives what
happens now, history still looks persuasive, even if its relevance is finished.
With the dominant political and economic interests endorsing the ‘expanded
reproduction of the past’ so that the future involves nothing more than ‘the
administration of the refuse from the present’, it has no relation to what
happens (Semprun 2009, 23). Consequently, by default, history-focused
behaviour promotes the ideology of the status quo. Via the identity principle
it aligns individual consciousness with the prevailing neo-liberal agenda of
totalitarian capitalism. With its ‘humanist bureaucrats’ and their carceral
mentality consigning people collectively to a ‘secure location within time-
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space’, ‘locking [them] [. . .] into a temporal frame’, helping to ‘strengthen the

ties that can bind people to place and past’, fabricating the ‘shared values
that bind us together and give us common purpose’, it confiscates the
subjective value of personal existence, the only value it has (Corfield 2007, 25;
Hunt 2006, 27; Brown 2006). Simultaneously, it manifests itself as a
totalitarian means of social control, given that ‘people who seek to control
the behaviour of large numbers of other people work on the experiences of
those other people’: so that ‘once people can be induced to experience a
situation in a similar way, they can be expected to behave in similar ways’
(Laing 1968, 80). In promoting through history-focused behaviour as a mass
activity common forms of experience, the socialized historian function
operates as a management-technology defining and controlling this social
mass: it erodes personal autonomy.
Conversely, the very term ‘historicized world’ suggests a distanciated
attitude. The historian function may well affirm a historicizing socio-
economic system mesmerized with the ever latest things, pushing its
pacifying narcotics. Confronting it is an indispensable critique that would
‘prevent anyone losing themselves in the ideas and modes of behaviour that
society as it is currently organized suggests to them’ (Horkheimer 1976,
282). In confirming how things have got to be the way they are, history-
focused behaviour may well be reassuring, but no one can risk falling for it,
for that would paralyse the dynamics of his or her existence, anaesthetize his
or her capacity for vigilance essential to the dissident instinct of thought.
Automatic deference to the past would thus, in defeating the interest of
knowledge itself, pre-empt existential self-orientation. That human beings
create themselves, that they can not only refuse any given reality but also
imagine realities to which they aspire, is a basic premise of philosophical
anthropology. Both this self-creation and this refusal derive from the
experience of reality (Realitätserlebnis) preceding rather than being preceded
by its conception (Vorstellung), particularly by its pre-conception, its
historicized pre-emption (Kant 1982, 57–8; Scheler 1978, 54–6). This is the
only possible response to the remarkable predicament historicization has
 Rethinking History 351
produced: an inheritance of historical erudition, as redundant as it is
comprehensive, leaving everyone in their immediate, existential situation
more vulnerable and apprehensive than in any conjectured primordial (i.e.
pre-historical) ‘state of nature’. Consequently, given that the world one lives
in depends on how it is described, the critique of historicization comes down
to a politics of knowledge. This, as suggested here in this essay, would
address the fundamental delusion of the comprehensively historicized world:
its presumption that its historicizing description of the world one lives in has
a privileged meaning in that world for the life one lives there. In stressing the
ideological complicity of the historian or the academic-function (essentially
identical), it could explain why some descriptions (e.g. historicizing
descriptions) can impose themselves more than others, why they assert a
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prerogative automatically to disqualify others. This politics of knowledge

would be indispensable, not least because the technical-academic elite, ‘the
dominated faction amongst those who dominate’ (ensconced not least in
universities ‘inescapably central’ to the regime of totalitarian capitalism) has
already compromised itself, has already taken sides (Bourdieu 1984, 70;
Mandelson 2009, 3).

Acknowledgements
This article is a revised and expanded version of a paper read at the Research
Seminar in the Philosophy of History at the Institute of Historical Research,
London, on 8 October 2009 and at the Modern Literature Research Seminar in the
Department of English at the University of Leicester on 4 November 2009. For the
first occasion I would like to thank Robert Burns and Keith Jenkins for their
invitation; and for the second Phil Shaw and Emma Parker. I would also like to
thank the reviewers of this article for their very helpful advice with further revisions.

Notes on contributor
Martin L. Davies is a Reader in the School of Historical Studies at the University of
Leicester, UK. Besides edited books and numerous articles, he has published Identity
or history? Marcus Herz and the end of the Enlightenment (1995), and Historics. Why
history dominates contemporary society (2006), and Imprisoned by history. Aspects of
historicized life (2010).

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