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Tunnel Vision David Levine

History cannot be compared to a tunnel through which an express races until it brings its freight o f passengers out into sunlit plains. Or, i f it can be, then generations o f passengers are born, live in the dark, and die while the train is still within the tunnel. An historian must surely be more interested than the teleologists allow him to be in the quality o f life, the sufferings and satisfactions, o f those who live and die in unredeemed time.

It is not altogether clear that Tony Judt would welcome such an approach to history. He clearly asserts that the "proper pursuit of history" has to do with power and politics. "The centrality of politics, properly understood, will bring in its train a recognition of the full identity of people in the past," so we are told. 2 This position I recognize as a return to the kind of teleological special pleading against which Edward Thompson inveighed in the extract quoted above. Judt expresses contempt for studying "unredeemed time". The thrust of his argument is an important challenge to those of us who believe that we must attempt to illuminate the dark regions of "the tunnel". While power and politics are important aspects of the subject, they are not the beginning and end of the study of social change in the past. An exclusive and intense spotlight on those periods and groups involved in frenetic upheavals only relegates other times and other peoples to the wasteland of historical study. This is an unfortunate pass, not least because such a position denies the contradictions, the back currents and swirling eddies, of historical time. By spotlighting periods of change and people in conflict we willfully ignore the long caesuras in the historical process. The teleologist is more arbitrary about proclaiming the "proper" modes of comprehending such experiences. The contradictions of the process escape his view and we are treated to a homoge- nization of response and a compression of experience.

The study of history requires us to create chronologies and structures out of a myriad of events. Clearly, we bring our concerns and questions with us and so we find coherent patterns that make the social process intelligible to us. But these chronologies and structures are of our making, so they are bound to dif- fer in important ways from the chronologies and structures understood by men and women in past times. This contradiction creates the problematic of social history. That is, how can we acknowledge the process of social change while, at one and the same time, comprehending the structures and chronologies that were experienced by men and women in past times. In essence, then, the problematic becomes similar to that propounded by Max Planck and Wer- ner yon Heisenberg when they tried tocome to terms with their newly acquired understanding of the physical world, in which general theories were inadequate guides to explaining sub-atomic behavior. Two kinds of explanation are required - each is dependent upon the kind of question being posed. Each mode of questioning is very much a part of the "proper pursuit of history". Neither, by itself, makes very much sense if we seek to recognize "the full identity of people in the past."

Far too much of the chronology of the "proper pursuit" leaves historical experience unexplained and unattended. Because it does not fit into a neat

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package does no t mean it did no t occur nor does it mean it was not impor tan t ; it may no t be impor tan t to us but that is a different matter . Morever, the variety itself demands that history be read against the grain, as Walter Benja- min suggested. 3 In doing so we quickly find that average experience is the exper ience of no one. Means and medians tell us something, but all too of ten, in historical demography for example, studies are bedevilled by an implici t assumption that the po ta toes in the sack all resemble each other . And so they do when we compare them with bananas. If, however , we compare them with each other , then the differences become more impor tan t and more real. Those differences were precisely the ones people in the past unders tood and exper ienced. In direct ing a t tent ion to the differences which distinguished men and women and rendered their exper ience unique, one must avoid the

pitfall of phenomenologica l anarchy. Social relat ions are worked out within structures that create regularities and patterns. The discovery of those averages heightens our awareness o f the congruence be tween the social norms and social behavior o f earlier social formations. It does nothing, by itself, to tell us about how these norms were in terpre ted by individuals who are al l - too-often studied

in the sack. Only by looking beyond averages at the variety of ways in which social rules have been incorpora ted into daily life can we unders tand the expe- rience of people in the past. The key to unders tanding is suggested in Bourdieu 's discussion of "s t ra tegies" which frankly acknowledge the diversity of interests that were compet ing within the apparent hegemony of normat ive rules. 4 In this way it becomes possible to recuperate the silences and spaces left out of teleological history. In so doing it may be possible for us to i l luminate those lives that were passed in the tunnel ' s darkness, during unredeemed time.

Ontario Inst i tute for Studies in Educat ion

NOTES

1. E.P. Thompson, "The Peculiarities of the English," in The Poverty of Theory (Merlin Press, 1978), 86.

2. Tony Judt, "A Clown in Regal Purple: Social History and the Historians," History Workshop (Spring 1979), 88. Judt's view is extraordinarily restrictive and strikes me as being conservative in that he would relegate non-struggle to the historical junkpile. He confuses his attack on "bad" social history with a larger assertion that any attempt to study the sociology of the past must necessarily be suspect. "Bad" social history, then, is dangerously close to being nothing more than retrospective social science.

3. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History - Thesis 7," in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah and Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (Jonathan Cape, 1970), 258-259. I understand Benjamin's injunction to mean that we must resist the usage of conventional categories to pigeon-hole historical studies. I further understand Judt's imploration that the centrality of politics will serve to enlighten us is an invi- tation to pigeon-hole "this entirely cerebral activity" (88).

4. See, for example, "Marriage Strategies as Strategies of Social Reproduction," in Family and Society, ed. Robert Forster and Orest Ranum, trans. Elborg Forster and Patricia M. Ranum (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 117-144. The original was published in Annales, E.S.C. (July-October, 1972), 1105-1125.