On History and Comprehension: The Discourses and Approaches of the Intellectual, Institutional and Public By Georgia Smith History is perhaps the most communicative of discourses. A diverse collection of popular and intellectual mediations, stories, myths and images produced as collective and individual bodies moving towards social comprehension. As such, these disparate social, political and cultural bodies communicate conflicting yet interrelated conceptions of history and reality, formulated in narratives perpetually vying for ascendency and resulting primarily in a striking cocktail of reality, fantasy and fiction. Discussions of the philosophy and theory of history allow for the exploration of the character of various discourses advanced by intellectual theories, institutional narratives, and myths, as well as their consumption and reconfiguration by the public. Such an analysis is reliant on a narrative theory of history, one which, rooted in the debate over history’s fundamental character as a science or an art, emphasises the fundamental subjectivity and literary nature of history not as the seat of rationality but a mutable discourse reliant on complex human subjects. This being a mode of thought inherently divorced from original nineteenth-century philosophies of history as immutable, objective.
arises. In ensuring the viability of communication, theories must mutate. Questioning the significance of academic histories may be a clichéd practice; however, such suspicions are perhaps better reformulated into questions of the immediate practicality of intellectual practice. The perception of a fundamental separation between the spheres of the intellectual, institutional and public is a fiction. Intellectual modes of thought seep into and become suffused with both the public and the institutional, forming the inherited language and conceptual framework in which we conduct ourselves, albeit on the scale of the informal and intimate and conveyed most often viva voce. Drawing on the intellectual, institutional histories
History as an academic discipline represents only one mode of historical thought. While dependent on strict, yet diverse, rational source-based methodologies, theories of history such as historical materialism, to name one of the most obvious, may also be read as symbolic of a deterministic or teleological approach, hence prone to a fundamental essentialism. The danger inherent within much post-modern historiography is this continued susceptibility of essentialism – it remains that the intellectual is a human actor, a mediator bestowed with the powers of framing, who perhaps unconsciously desires comprehensibility. As Hayden White suggests, there is an “irreducible and inexpungable element of interpretation” within historiography. The overuse of structuralism as a method of historical causality is further evidence of this, a factor which becomes particularly seductive in relation to the analysis of the function of institutions, especially within a political climate which prioritises blame. The tendency for the complex within intellectual theories, both on the level of micro and macro history, highlights the necessity of distillation which serves as the basis of the relation between intellectual, institutional and public theories and is consequently where conflict
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Illustration by Emily Geeson
