WHOSE AUTOPOIESIS?

DIE LINEATUR DER GESCHICHTE. By Kurt Röttgers. Amsterdam and Atlanta:Rodopi, 1998. Pp. 370. (Philosophie und Repräsentation, Volume 6).

The purpose of this book is to identify and delineate the formal structures(Lineaturen) by which history establishes and sustains itself as an autopoieticsystem—a concept borrowed from systems theorist Niklas Luhmann to refer tothe self-reproduction of all living systems (about which more further on). Chiefamong the structures that enable history to reproduce itself in the form of whatRöttgers calls “communicative texts” are the characteristic discursive practicesof history and its figuration of time and society. He develops his model of the“communicative text” in the course of investigating such matters as the role ofsilence in historical narration, the rhythm of history, narrating lived experience,history as a mode of power, historical identity, the end of history, and, finally, themorality of history. Röttgers’s purview is wide, ranging from analytic philoso-phy to the phenomenology of Husserl and Ricoeur, Althusserian Marxism,Lacanian psychoanalysis, and narrative theory.

Röttgers bases his investigation of historical time largely on the work of PaulRicoeur, principally his view that time is constituted by consciousness and thatnarrative is “the language structure that has temporality as its ultimate referent.”1

In this respect, historical narrative is no different from other narrative forms,such as myth and fiction. The difference is that only history can claim a referentinscribed in empirical reality, in that historical intentionality aims at events thathave actually occurred.

Even if the past no longer exists and if, in Augustine’s expression, it can be reached onlyin the present of the past, that is, through the traces of the past that have become docu-ments for the historian, still it did happen. The past event, however absent it may be frompresent perception, nonetheless governs the historical intentionality, conferring upon it arealistic note that literature will never equal, even if it makes a claim to be “realistic.”2

Thus, while history alone of the narrative forms can claim to represent the pastas real, it is at the same time, like all other narrative forms, “constructivist.” Evenat the level of dating events and periodizing time, Röttgers states, historians areworking with a “particular fiction (objective time), which they themselves can-not and do not seek to justify” (28). That is, historians do not simply record butengage in an activity (a Tun) of “refiguring” time, for which Ricoeur provides thetheory (or poetics).

1. Paul Ricoeur, “Narrative Time,” Critical Inquiry 7 (1980), 169.2. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, transl. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer (Chicago, 1984), I, 82.

History initially reveals its creative capacity to refigure time through its invention and useof certain reflective instruments such as the calendar, which entails the idea of the succes-sion of generations—and, connected to this, the idea of the threefold realm of contempo-raries, predecessors, and successors; finally, and above all, in its recourse to archives, doc-uments, and traces. These reflective instruments are noteworthy in that they play the roleof connectors between lived time and universal time. In this respect, they bear witness tothe poetic function of history insofar as it contributes to solving the aporias of time.3

Connecting the dimensions of language and time produces the concept of thetext; connecting language with the social dimension produces the concept ofcommunication. But what, besides these two linkages, makes for a communica-tive text in the full sense, for Röttgers, and why he thinks that historical narra-tives exemplify this category, is a third relation, namely that between the socialdimension and time. And this for three reasons: (1) narrating histories is itself atemporal process that involves distancing and the construction of continuities;(2) right from the outset historical narration is a unity of reception and produc-tion; and (3) history is narrated within a particular language, an idiom, evenwithin particular conventional stabilized discursive practices (150).

As regards the first, there is no evidence that we are born with a sense of tem-poral awareness; and when we acquire it, our intuitive feeling is that time issomething universal and absolute.4 We experience a feeling of duration when werelate our present situation either to our past experiences or to our future expec-tations and desires. Our awareness of duration thus involves some sense of thedifferences between past, present, and future, and therefore a sense of temporaldistance and continuity as well. In differentiating past from present and describ-ing events as past, in their past-ness, historians necessarily distance them fromthe present and produce a tension (Spannung) between past and present. That iswhy Röttgers says that only those who are no longer completely enclosed in thesphere of their subject matter can narrate its history (153). Distancing can alsohave the therapeutic value of freeing us from an all too oppressive present, orfrom an oppressive past still experienced as present.5

If distancing represents the past as Other, the construction of continuitiesserves to stabilize our identity in the present and to orient us towards the futurewithin an unstable and unpredictable temporal flux. These ways of “refiguring”time, because they can produce such effects, are ways of empowering the narra-tive. As Röttgers puts it:

Every act of distancing is at the same time a power relation; the historian takes possessionof history by rooting out an event and opposing it to the continuum of events, especially

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3. Ibid., III, 104.4. For the historical development of the concept of time, see G. J. Whitrow, Time in History: Views

of Time from Prehistory to the Present Day (Oxford and New York, 1988); and John G. Gunnell,Political Philosophy and Time (Middletown, Conn., 1968).

5. On some of the psychological aspects of historical practice, see Joachim and Orlinde Radkau,Praxis der Geschichtswissenschaft: Die Desorientiertheit des historischen Interesses (Düsseldorf,1972); and Alice Kohli-Kunz, Erinnern und Vergessen: Das Gegenwärtigsein des Vergangenen alsGrundproblem historischer Wissenschaft (Berlin, 1973). See also my review of these books in Historyand Theory 14 (1975), 326-335.

where the acting subjects of the past event become not only objects of representation butcontinue to exist as subjects capable of acting, e.g. histories of monarchies or nationswhich reconstruct them as continuous. (153)

The same empowerment holds also for continuity:

Every construction of continuity excludes; every narration conceals or passes over; everynarrative situation excludes possible narrators from narrating; every identity defines itselfagainst the non-identical; every self is a self vis-à-vis the Other. For continuity is not pro-vided by the narrated object. Every construction of continuity at the same time producesthe Other as the excluded, and, barred from the narrative content and the narrative situa-tion, is simply posited by the construction of continuity as the discontinuous. (196)

From this perspective, one might say of the current catastrophe in Kosovo thatSerb historical consciousness is short on the distancing capacity and long on thecapacity to invest a battle lost in the fourteenth century with a contemporaneityfew non-Serbs find credible or even comprehensible. Or, to take a more complexexample, China historian W. J. F. Jenner observes that the Chinese language,especially in its classical written version, “disguises time.”

It is not that distinctions cannot be made between what is and what was but that—by con-trast with Indo-European languages—the distinction does not have to be made. . . . We[English-speakers] cannot talk about the past without underlining its distance and differencefrom us with every verb. But this does not apply to Chinese, which can describe the situa-tion of today, last year and two thousand years ago in the same linguistic forms. And becausethe Chinese writing code is not essentially phonetic, and the style of writing history changedlittle over two millennia, the records of the remote and recent past look much the same.6

This situation only reinforced the longstanding attitude in China that “oldergenerally meant better.”7 At the other extreme are Americans with a strong capac-ity to distance (parodied by Henry Ford’s famous dictum: “History is bunk!”)and, in contrast to the Chinese, a strong inclination to “Make It New.”8 The pointis that these operations of distancing events and constructing continuities can anddo have far-reaching political and practical consequences. Understanding timeand human life as experienced in time, and disseminated in society, is an impor-tant part of society’s understanding of itself, of its structure and what legitimizesit, and of the modes of action that are possible to it and in it.

The second characteristic of historical narration as a communicative text, itsunity of reception and production, follows from the first. We can have no histo-ry in private, but only in relation to others. The historian is one self among otherselves, and both belong to the same temporal and social structure. Historiansconstitute themselves in the process of constituting others, and in this way pro-duce and stabilize a collective identity. To perform this operation properly,according to Röttgers, the historian must view the other as a partner, not as a dis-crete object of study—an operation that runs counter to the conditions and pro-tocols of the production of historical texts in a competitive, atomizing market

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6. W. J. F. Jenner, The Tyranny of History: The Roots of China’s Crisis (London, 1992), 7.7. Ibid., 9.8. Ibid.

economy. To establish this relationship in a market economy means that histori-cal texts cannot just be products, passively reflecting and validating the values ofthe market economy, but they must be productive forces in their own right,exposing and challenging the conditions of their production.

Röttgers, following Althusser and Lacan, uses the metaphor of the mirrorimage to represent this partnership between the historian and the Other: “That weare mirrors for one another . . . means: the Other allows us to see ourselves aswe never could without it. It makes us unfamiliar to ourselves and thereby under-standable. But it is not the ‘true’ self we recognize through the Other but only areflected self” (85). The “true” self, our subjectivity, is not an essence but a setof relationships established in and through language. This view was theorized bythe French linguist Émile Benveniste in an important essay entitled “Subjectivityin Language” (1958),9 where he shows that the pronoun “I” always implies aspeaker to whom it refers, and “you” always implies a listener addressed by thespeaker. These roles are endlessly reversible, as are the signifiers that dependupon them; the person who functions as a speaker one moment functions as a lis-tener the next. These pronouns are only intermittently activated, and thus haveonly a periodic meaning. In ordinary conversational situations, the speaking sub-ject automatically links the pronouns “I” and “you” to the mental images bymeans of which it recognizes both itself and the person it addresses, identifyingwith the former of these. Subjectivity, then, can only be induced by discourse, bythe activation of a signifying system that precedes and determines our culturalidentity. What happens in ordinary conversational situations is even more evi-dent and pronounced in Benveniste’s description of Freudian analysis, whichexpresses almost exactly Röttgers’s notion of the pathology of the production ofhistorical texts in the market economy:

All through Freudian analysis it can be seen that the subject makes use of the act of speechand discourse in order to “represent himself” to himself as he wishes to see himself andas he calls upon the “other” to see him. His discourse is appeal and recourse: a sometimesvehement solicitation of the other through the discourse in which he figures himself des-perately, and an often mendacious recourse to the other in order to individualize himselfin his own eyes. Through the sole fact of addressing another, the one who is speaking ofhimself installs the other in himself and thereby apprehends himself, confronts himself,and establishes himself as he aspires to be, and finally historicizes himself in this incom-plete or falsified history. . . . The subject’s language (langue) provides the instrument of adiscourse in which his personality is released and creates itself, reaches out to the otherand makes itself be recognized by him.10

Röttgers uses this model to investigate not only what goes on in a particularlinguistic [sprachlicher] text, or among different linguistic texts, but also—andmore importantly with regard to historical texts—to investigate the relationship

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9. Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, transl. M. E. Meek (Coral Gables, Fla.,1971), 226.

10. Ibid., 67. Röttgers doesn’t mention Benveniste, whose views intersect with Lacan’s at manypoints, but whose linguistic approach is (to my mind) more useful for analyzing historical discoursethan Lacan’s brand of psychoanalysis. See my “Bakhtin’s Truths of Laughter,” Clio 14 (1985), 235-257, esp. 245ff.

of linguistic texts to their non-linguistic context: that is, to events and actions,which, because they go unrecorded, usually fall outside the limits of historicalinquiry. For what Röttgers wants are histories, which, in their reflexiveness,enable us to see “between the lines” how historians constitute themselves in rela-tion to the Other, how both are constituted as belonging to the same temporal andsocial structure, and what that structure includes and excludes.

This brings us to the third characteristic of history as an autopoietic system: itsnormalizing discursive practices. Histories are written to be repeated and furtherdeveloped [wieder- und weitererzählt], for only in this way are they able to createa collective sense of belonging to a common world with a common past, present,and future, and to differentiate this world from the world of the Other. The peri-odization of Western history into ancient, medieval, and modern—as well as theuse of such terms as Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment—reinforcethis sense of belonging to a common world, and serve to conceal or smooth overgaps and lapses in the historical record and breaks and ruptures in the sociotem-poral dimension. The fact that a story is presented as consistent with other storiesand verifiable in relation to them is, after all, what certifies it as history and dis-tinguishes it from myth and fiction. Unlike “great” works of fiction, there is noth-ing in historical literature that is incommensurable; nor could there be.

Iterability is best served by mimesis and the discourse of realism, becauserealism creates the impression that it is continuous with life itself. It proceeds asthough it were so immersed in life that the differences between representationand experience, between text and context, and between signifier and signifiedseem to evaporate. Realism holds that the “truth” about the human world (histo-ry) can be known by the same or similar means by which we know the naturalworld: common sense, observation, and analysis. Thus, what it has to say abouthuman life gives the impression that it carries the force and authority of a law ofnature. Realism thus sustains our sense of living in a world that can be verified,provided only that all the pertinent data are made available. And the data realismdeems pertinent turn out to be precisely those which lend themselves to this,reassuringly empirical and democratic, method of verification: social class,wealth, law, social conventions, institutions, family, politics, morals, and theways these forces influence human behavior and individual destinies. The powerof realism to foster a sense of living in a common world and the iterability of his-torical narratives lies in the illusion it produces that life is as we expect it to be,that what we know is really the case, and that what we don’t know is continuouswith what we think we do know. Realism conceals its fictionality under the guiseof factuality, and, in fetishizing fact, excludes possibility. Realism, therefore, canprovide no surprises; it is a discourse of reconciliation.11

This is a brief description of Röttgers’s model of a communicative text, whichhe uses to show how history establishes, sustains, and empowers itself as an

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11. For a discussion and defense of realism in historical writing, see my “Realism and Ideology:The Question of Order,” History and Theory 22 (1983), 107-119. See also Hilary Putnam, Reason,Truth and History (Cambridge, Mass., 1981); The Many Faces of Realism (LaSalle, Ill., 1987); andRepresentation and Reality (Cambridge, Mass., 1988). Two other important works are by Chris

autopoietic system. To write history is a way of making history, and the historieswe make teach us that, whether we like it or not, we are subject to a will greaterthan our own, the will of History (246ff). History empowers itself by producing asense of historical time as a seamless web—not because it really is, but becausehistory requires this notion of time to stabilize and normalize identities and as asine qua non for the iterability of its narratives. History empowers itself throughits techniques of inclusion and exclusion, its elimination of contingency, its con-struction of hierarchies, and its narrative control over the rhythms of historicaltime. History empowers itself by its logocentrism and its inattention to the role ofsilence—the ultimate other—in its representations of the past. In sum, history thusconceived ensures that history will always favor the winners, never the losers.

Here, some words about Luhmann are in order since he provides Röttgers withhis basic interpretive paradigm of history as a self-reproductive system. ForLuhmann, modern society, in contrast to the hierarchical premodern society, ismade up of a congeries of semi-autonomous systems—politics, law, the econo-my, the natural sciences, religion, and so on—each of which operates accordingto its own internal codes for maintaining and perpetuating itself. Systems aresensitive to stimuli from the environment, but their capacity to respond to themis restricted by their system-specific codes. Social systems (in contrast, say, tobiological systems) use communication as their particular mode of autopoiesis.Social systems don’t produce information, but they process it, and process it dif-ferently according to their different codes. Thus, as Luhmann says, a system is“within the world,” while at the same time “operating within a ‘world’ of itsown.”12 The inability of a system to operate beyond its boundaries is what he isreferring to when he says, echoing Wittgenstein, that “a system can see onlywhat it can see. It cannot see what it cannot.”13 When crude oil surfaced inPennsylvania and elsewhere in the last century, Native Americans viewed it as agooey nuisance, not as the mother’s milk of industrial society it would becomeonly a few decades later. And what was, for philosopher Kant, “old, half-effacedinformation from archives” he did not wish to scribble on his brain,14 became inthe next century, for historian Ranke, the mother’s milk of historical research—a notion that still sustains the historical profession today.

Of course, Luhmann didn’t mean that we can’t observe the world and othersystems; if we couldn’t, we’d be like fish in the sea. Being “within the world”enables a system “to distinguish and observe and control itself.”15 Moreover, the

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Lorenz, “Historical Knowledge and Historical Reality: A Plea for ‘Internal Realism’,” History andTheory 33 (1994), 297-327; and Konstruktion der Vergangenheit: Eine Einführung in dieGeschichtstheorie (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 1997). See also my review of Lorenz’s book inHistory and Theory 38 (1999), 111-121.

12. Niklas Luhmann, Essays on Self-Reference (New York, 1990), chapter 1: “The Autopoiesis ofSocial Systems,” 7.

13. Niklas Luhmann, Ecological Communication, transl. J. Bednarz (Chicago, 1989), 23.14. Cited in Kant, On History, ed. Lewis W. Beck, transl. L.W. Beck, R. Anchor, E. Fackenheim

(Indianapolis, 1963), vii.15. Luhmann, “The Autopoiesis of Social Systems,” 7.

observation of one system by another enables the observing system to “observethe restrictions forced on the observed system by its own mode of operation. . . .It can observe the horizons of the observed system so that what they excludebecomes evident.”16 And this provides the observing system with new possibili-ties. But what Luhmann did mean is that observation and autopoiesis are twovery different operations, and that a system cannot transcend its self-reproduc-tive codes. It isn’t the world that guarantees the unity of the system, but the sys-tem that guarantees the unity of the world. No system has a God’s-eye view ofthe world. Far from being a disadvantage, however, a system’s inability to tran-scend its particular mode of autopoiesis is a necessary condition for its self-reproduction and ability to relate to and shape the world—a condition reminis-cent of Kant’s claim that Reason’s recognition of its own possibilities and limi-tations is a necessary condition for it to know what it can and cannot know, andnot to strive to know what it cannot know (as Goethe’s Faust did, to his regret).Röttgers sees history as a system of this kind.

In his essay “Speaking and Silence” (1989),17 Luhmann makes the point thatsilence itself is an act of communication: “Every instance of speech reactualizessilence . . . for ‘silence’ is not an operation outside of society, but only a counter-image which society projects into its environment, or it is the mirror in whichsociety comes to see that what is not said is not said.”18 As the Other, the“counter-image” of speech, silence marks the limits of a system’s autopoieticauthority. In the case of history, Röttgers shows, silence reveals the fictionalityof its concept of objective time. Silence exposes (communicates) the discontinu-ities within the continuity that narrative projects by concealing or smoothingover gaps in time, in action, and in documentation.19 “Nesting” in the momen-tary pauses, breaks, and shifts of the narrative, silence harbors secrets of its own:new or alternative versions of the story being told, or new possibilities for newnarratives (136ff). In psychological terms, silence is speech’s alter ego. Röttgersillustrates this point by citing John Cage’s amusing response to a question askedof him after a lecture he gave entitled “Lecture on Nothing” (1947): “That is avery good question. I should not want to spoil it with an answer” (138). Lessamusing is George Steiner’s reference to Hölderlin’s and Rimbaud’s “suicidalrhetoric of silence.”20

Though philosophers and artists have given serious thought to silence as amode of communication, few historians have, mainly, Röttgers would argue,because of their inveterate logocentrism. One fortunate exception is Peter Burke,whose “Notes for a Social History of Silence,”21 is a mine of information about

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16. Luhmann, Ecological Communication, 23.17. Luhmann, “Speaking and Silence,” transl. K. Behnke, New German Critique 61 (1994), 25-37.

This whole issue of NGC is devoted to Luhmann.18. Ibid., 32-33.19. See Hans Kellner, Language and Historical Representation: Getting the Story Crooked

(Madison, Wisc., 1989), especially chapters 2 and 3; and Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A CuriousHistory (Cambridge, Mass., 1997).

20. George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman(New York, 1970), 50.

21. Peter Burke, The Art of Conversation (Ithaca, 1993), chapter 5.

the social meanings of silence in, but not confined to, early modern Europe.Burke finds two important principles underlying the system of silence in earlymodern Europe: (1) “the principle of respect or deference, one of the many signsof a fundamentally hierarchical society. Women were supposed to be silent in thepresence of men, children in the presence of adults, courtiers in the presence ofthe prince.” Silence in church and the silence of servants in the presence of theirmasters had a similar meaning. (2) The silence of prudence, which included the“silence of fear,” but also “the dissimulation of princes and the discretion of thewise.”22 Silence, like speech, can mean different things in different times andplaces; by the nineteenth century, Burke suggests with Foucault in mind, the“bridling of the tongue” (as expressed in the famous proverb: Silence is Golden)had become a generally accepted form of physical self-control, though more soin Protestant than in Catholic regions, “thus widening the gap between the moresilent, self-controlled, individualistic, democratic, capitalist, cold north, and themore talkative, spontaneous, disorderly, familistic, feudal, warm south.”23 ForRöttgers, as for Burke, once silence is recognized as a mode of communication,historians may then understand it as “a form of practice,” as a transition from textto deed [Text zur Tat], though, silence being what it is, one can never be certain(144). Still, it should not and need not be ignored, if only to call attention to thediscontinuities in the narrative that the narrative tries to conceal.

The chapter entitled “The End of History” raises the question of whether itmakes sense in our postmodern age to speak of an end to history, and, if so, inwhat sense. If all history is narrated history, and if there is no one “true” history,no “master narrative,” no teleological principle inherent in the empirical recordof the past, and no objective time, as Röttgers claims, then on what basis can athesis of the end of history be sustained? Röttgers raises this question notbecause he thinks that a definitive prognostication of the end of history is possi-ble (the world goes on indefinitely) or even desirable, but because it is useful asa “regulative idea” in the Kantian sense in that it enables us to orient ourselvestoward the future. Röttgers believes that a thesis of the end of history in thissense can be sustained, but only on condition that the narrative dimension of his-tory be decoupled [entkoppelt] from the assumption of history as the totality ofhuman events. The problem with all past historical prognostications of the endof history is that they were bound to a linear concept of time on the one hand,and on the other, to monist philosophies, which adapted history to their self-ver-ifying practices (317ff). The decoupling Röttgers proposes would have the desir-able effect of allowing for a multitude of narratives to flourish and to compete inthe marketplace of ideas for the moral imagination of the audiences for whomthey are written.

Ethics and history is the topic of the last chapter, where Röttgers once againasserts the need for history to be inclusive. Writing with reference to theHistorikerstreit in Germany in the 1980s, he takes the position that historians

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22. Ibid., 135-136.23. Ibid., 140-141.

ought to keep their own ethics out of their narratives and stick to giving everypoint of view a fair hearing, no matter how unpopular a particular point of viewmight be at the moment. Narration is essentially descriptive; ethics essentially aphilosophical matter. Thus, historians qua historians should stick to describing;they can express their moral and ethical views in other forums. As historians theycan and should describe past actions with reference to the ethical norms preva-lent at the time the actions took place. They can also use the techniques of dis-tancing and establishing continuities to put past actions into ethical perspective.But, in the end, the ethics of historians qua historians must be to be open-mind-ed and understanding of the actions they describe. Röttgers concludes this chap-ter and his book by saying: “there can be no narrativistic ethics, i.e. a foundingof ethical norms through historical narration—although one can very well nar-rate histories of ethical problems” (342).

Conscientious historians don’t need narrativists to tell them they shouldn’tinject their own ethical or political values into their narratives. When they do,other historians are quick to criticize them. But the problem goes deeper thaninjecting explicit ethical or political preferences into the narrative. As ChrisLorenz points out, the language of historians, all language for that matter, per-forms both descriptive and normative functions simultaneously.24 Words like“dictator,” “genocide,” “racism,” and “death camp,” which would be difficult toavoid using in writing a narrative of National Socialism or some aspect of it, arenot merely descriptive but also normative. For example, to say “Hitler commit-ted genocide” and to say “Hitler is accused of having committed genocide” arestatements that are compatible at the level of description; but they also imply eth-ical meanings, and very different ethical meanings at that. The first statementdescribes Hitler unequivocally as a mass murderer; and whatever one thinks ofmass murder, the term is not ethically neutral. (Even cannibals in Borneo thoughtthat eating their enemies was not only nutritious but also the right thing to do.)The second statement leaves open the possibility that Hitler may not have beena mass murderer; and readers of this statement (unless they’ve been living incaves the last sixty years) can be pretty sure that what follows will be some sortof “revisionist” history, with all that that implies ethically. Hitler himself, afterall, never killed a Jew, never signed a document ordering genocide, never visit-ed a death camp, and was not present at the Wannsee Conference where the FinalSolution was finalized. Moreover, he was a vegetarian, liked dogs and kids andHollywood movies, and is said to have been a charming host.

Why, then, does Röttgers insist that “good” history restricts itself to descrip-tion (representation)? Not because it really does, but because thinking it doeslends itself to the autopoietic practices of the narrativism he champions. No his-torian writes simply to describe or represent; all historians, from the theoretical-ly most naive to the most sophisticated, write to explain, as far as the evidenceallows, what really happened and what it means. And most historians realizethat, even if it were desirable, they could not write completely value-free narra-

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24. Lorenz, “Historical Knowledge and Historical Reality,” 115.

tives, if only because language itself is never completely value-free. If “there canbe no narrativistic ethics,” there can be an ethics for historians. As Lorenz says:“Historians who wish to know nothing about value judgments within their disci-pline must also as historians remain silent about Auschwitz and the Gulag.”25

But the real sticking point between narrativists and historians is history’s truthclaims. Röttgers is right to insist that history “constructs” the past, and that iter-ability is a sign of its “truth.” What he makes less clear is whether a communityaccepts a particular narrative because it is true, or whether it is true because acommunity accepts it as true. In either case, what is important for Röttgers is notthe cognitive status of the narrative’s truth claims but their persuasiveness, howthey function as instruments of power. “Because a common temporal and socialorientation in the world and in action can only be constructed on the basis of truehistories,26 truth . . . presents itself as a function of power” (133). Maybe so, butif truth is a function of power, then history’s truth claims needn’t be proved; theyneed only be persuasive. But would this view apply also to Röttgers’s own “truthclaims”? Or, say, to Foucault, one of Röttgers’s intellectual heroes and thestaunchest advocate of the knowledge-as-power-thesis since Nietzsche? ThoughFoucault disliked conventional history and preferred to call his studies genealo-gies, he constantly worked on the assumption that he was being faithful to eachage’s outlook on whatever he happened to be writing about (insanity, knowledge,punishment, sex), and that his documents (medical and administrative records,old treatises on many disciplines, prison files, literature on sexual morality, andso on) could prove him right. For all his Nietzchean contempt for objective truth,he liked to have it speak for him as much as any conventional historian. Andwhatever kind of historiography he was up to—whether the historian’s or thegenealogist’s—Foucault was the first to claim that the evidence was on his side.Evidence (not a popular word in the narrativist vocabulary) may not tell us whatreally happened in the past and what it means, but it can tell us what we are enti-tled to believe happened in the past and what it means. And that is historicalknowledge, not autopoiesis. For Röttgers—as for Luhmann, Foucault, andNietzsche—history is a blindly operating self-regulating system whose truthclaims seem little more than a functionally necessary deception. On this view,history could thrive even in a society that does not distinguish between fact andfiction—as one-eyed king in a land of the blind.

Die Lineatur der Geschichte is a very good book about the autopoiesis of his-tory. I know of none better, though reading it is a bit like taking a cold shower:uncomfortable, but bracing. What’s needed now is an equally good book aboutthe autopoiesis of narrativism. But until one comes along, and probably evenafterwards, history and narrativism are likely to continue to face each other asmirror images.

ROBERT ANCHOR

Phoenix, Arizona

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25. Lorenz, Konstruktion der Vergangenheit, 422.26. By “true histories” Röttgers doesn’t mean true histories, but only histories that make truth

claims.