Touching the void: Affective history and the impossible

Explorations in feminist historiography: Rhetoric, affect, and ‘what really happened’ in feminism’s recent past

“…In other words, there is more to history than language, or as Reinhardt Koselleck puts it: 'language and history depend on each other but never coincide' (Koselleck, 2004, p. 22). A past event will always exceed any specific interpretation or conceptualization, and this is what guides the historical intentionality and the affective 'pull' toward the archive, infusing and driving our pursuit of a past that we nevertheless know is irrevocably absent and unknowable (Robinson, 2010). Affect is thus not only at work within the textual fabric of historical narratives; it is also a powerful component of archival research that seeks to somehow get at 'what really happened'.…”

Condemned to repeat ourselves? Historians and the perils of deflection

“…This journal's readers know well that I am not the first person to make this call. I might even venture to say that there has been some very good work done on it -from Emily Robinson and Vanessa Agnew's recent considerations of the assumptions underlying 'affective' history, which appeared in these pages, as far back as Wilhelm Dilthey's focus on 'understanding' (verstehen) as 'that process by which we recognize, behind signs given to our senses, that psychic reality of which they are the expression' (Agnew 2007;Bakker 1999, 52-57;Dilthey 1996, 236;Robinson 2010). Dilthey arrived at his formulation in response to the self-posed question of how 'one individually structured consciousness [can] bring an alien individuality of a completely different type to objective knowledge' -essentially, the dilemma of all social knowledge made more acute by the historian's conundrum of retrieving lives no longer immediately knowable to his senses.…”

“…The connection that I learned to make in my own education as a historian -and that I tried to promote when I finally began working with students of my own -was rarely to the 'psychic reality' of those who lived before us, far more commonly to the discipline and literature of history that have represented and, in the process, displaced it. Following on Dilthey's and others' strict interpretation of the written word as the source of revelation, I directed my own efforts as a student toward learning the proper way to order and interpret texts -and, like my students today, I came to invest those processes with the status of ends in themselves, rather than seeing them as means toward a goal as uncomfortably mystical-sounding as 'reconstructing inner life' (see Robinson [2010] for an account of the affective power even of the scholar's encounter with documents in the archive) More recently, as a new teacher, I resumed my place on that path, peppering my syllabi and teaching portfolios with phrases like 'learn to make a reasoned historical argument' and 'assess competing historical claims based on evidence. '…”

Historians and the yearning for historical justice

“…They have tried to elicit affective responses from their readers by conveying their own empathetic engagement with historical actors (see Phillips 2008). They have reflected on the affective appeal of their practice (Robinson 2010). The questions of how particular affective dispositions are aroused by particular subject matters and how historians could harness such dispositions have received less attention.…”