Metahistory

In the poetic act which precedes the formal analysis of the field, the historian both creates his object of analysis and predetermines the modality of the conceptual strategies he will use to explain it. Hayden White, Metahistory.

We live our lives and constantly invent ourselves. We experience events and arrange them in a way that corresponds to how we’ve fashioned ourselves. We read the news, and even if we for a moment assume that these are transparent, objective, and true representations of events, the manner in which we assimilate these news contributes to the image of the world that we have constructed. In each present, the world is built anew.

So is history continually reinvented to suit our present needs. But if Hayden White, in Metahistory, sees this construction as essentially poetic, then it seems that poetry would be at the heart of our relationship to the world. Etymologically, poeisis: making. World-making.

White’s aim is to study the diffrent models for writing history that existed during the nineteenth century (and still form the basis for history-writing). He organises them around their major tropes, modes of emplotment, and political implications. Perhaps most importantly he makes clear how intimate the connection between one’s given conception of history and one’s political position: be it a conservatism based on the idea that we have already arrived at the best political state into which the chaotic matter of humanity can be fashioned or a revolutionism seeking to erase the flawed paths of history to make room for utopia.’There does,’ he writes, ‘appear to be an irreducible ideological component in every historical account of reality.’ This ideological component is related to the poetic one: ideology informs how the historian represents the historical object of analysis, an act of representation that is poetic because it creates the historical object of study. Where a Hegelian constructs the coming-to-self-knowledge of Spirit as the noblest subject of historical investigation, a Marxist sees the forces of production as the elementary materials of history. In either case, the ideological position is inseparable from the poetic act in which the subject of history is constructed and then presented as a subject of historical study.

But if all of historiography boils down to ideological mythopoeia, where does it leave poetry? Does something irreducibly poetic remain, or is all poetry merely the implicit or explicit representation of ethical, political, or ideological standpoints? And could not the irrelevance of poetry proper, as a genre, in our own historical moment be found prefigured within White’s analysis of the poetic nature of historiography? An argument that would suggest that the creative potential of poetry has left the crafting or words and entered other fields: historiography in White’s example, or our perpetial self-fashioning in everyday life. No longer a matter of words, poeisis has become history, and from there on, life itself.