History and Theory, Theme Issue 50 (December 2011), 11-23 Wesleyan University 2011 ISSN: 0018-2656

RethINkINg hIStoRIcal DIStaNce:

FRom DoctRINe to heURIStIc
maRk SalbeR PhIllIPS
abStRact
In common usage, historical distance refers to a position of detached observation made
possible by the passage of time. Understood in these terms, distance has long been re-
garded as essential to modern historical practice, but this conception narrows the idea of
distance and burdens it with a regulatory purpose. I argue that distance needs to be re-
conceived in terms of the wider set of engagements that mediate our relations to the past,
as well as the full spectrum of distance-positions from near to far. Re-imagined in these
terms, distance sheds its prescriptiveness and becomes a valuable heuristic for examining
the history of historical representation. When distance is studied in relation to the range
of mediations entailed in historical representation, it becomes evident that the plasticities
of distance/proximity are by no means limited to gradients of time; rather, temporality is
bound up with other distances that come from our need to engage with the historical past
as (simultaneously) a realm of making, of feeling, of doing, and of understanding. thus for
every historical work, we need to consider at least four basic dimensions of representation
as they relate to the problem of mediating distance: 1. the genres, media, and vocabularies
that shape the historys formal structures of representation; 2. the affective claims made
by the historical account, including the emotional experiences it promises or withholds; 3.
the works implications for action, whether of a political or moral nature; and 4. the modes
of understanding on which the historys intelligibility depends. these overlapping, but
distinctive, distancesformal, affective, ideological, and conceptualprovide an analytic
framework for examining changing modes of historical representation.

Keywords: historiography, historical distance, representation, mediation, David hume
I. INtRoDUctIoN
It would be hard to name an idea that historians have more often invoked or more
persistently taken for granted than the one that this essay explores.
1
as commonly
understood, historical distance refers to the growing clarity that comes with the
passage of time. conceived in this sense, the idea of distance has exercised an im-
portant infuence on how we think about historical understanding, elevating dis-
tancing and detachment to a privileged position with respect to knowledge of the
1. this essay is a version of the introduction to a book-length study of historical distance, entitled
Bringing the Distant Near: Distance and Historical Representation. It appears here with the permis-
sion of Yale University Press. I am grateful to the organizers of the groningen conference for their
invitation to participate, and to Robert goheen, Stephen Rifkin, and edward hundert for careful
readings of the text.
Mark Salber PhilliPS
12
past. a useful suppleness can be gained, however, when distance is reconceived
in relation to a wider range of mediatory purposes that shape historical represen-
tation. In this context, calendrical time and objective knowledge have to be put
in context with other forms of engagement that mediate the now/then of history.
Formal structures and rhetorics, affective coloring and ideological commitments,
the quest for intelligibility and understandingthe push and pull of these funda-
mental investments give historical time a complex plasticity around which a more
capacious view of historical distance can be articulated.
historians are not alone in believing that truth is the daughter of time, but
the idea holds a special place in the historical disciplineindeed, it has come to
defne history as a discipline. Retrospectiveness, as eric hobsbawm once put it,
is the secret weapon of the historian.
2
as the years pass, so we believe, we come
to see events more accurately, reduce them to their proper proportion, and observe
their consequences with greater detachment. In personal life, this process is iden-
tifed with adulthood: we grow up and learn to see things in perspective, albeit
with some nostalgia for the lost vividness of childhood. by analogy, awareness
of historical distance is fgured as the maturity of nations: a stage of conscious-
ness far removed from the simplicity of earlier ages, which expressed their view
of history in the bright colors of chronicles and romantic legends. In modernity,
however, we have become so attuned to discriminations of historical time that it
becomes possible to be playful about time-consciousness in ways that would have
been unthinkable earlier. as moderns, we note Shakespeares anachronisms with
indulgence, never worrying that an inventive staging of Julius caesar set in gang-
land Chicago might look like a slip. Equally, we fnd pleasure in scenes of ancient
saints walking the streets of medieval bruges or Siena, attracted by a display of
faith that seems all the more sincere for being innocent of times passing.
For historians, it is evident, mastery of distance carries strong positive connota-
tions, but the association of distancing with intellectual clarity needs to be put in
context with an accompanying desire for other kinds of relation to the past. Since
the late eighteenth century at least, europeans have seen some form of distancing
as bound up with historical knowledge. Yet the same condition of estrangement
also produces a strong counter-current, encouraging a widespread desire to re-
capture a feeling of historical intimacy and connected tradition. historians and
philosophers have conceived this challenge in a wide variety of ways, calling it
resurrection (michelet), Verstehen (Dilthey), re-enactment (collingwood),
or tradition (gadamer). behind each of these terms, however, stand some simi-
lar assumptions about the conditions of historical understanding: namely, that a
genuine encounter with the past must trace a path from initial recognition of al-
terity to some form of insight and comprehension. Far from putting an end to the
desire for engagement, modernitys preoccupation with its rupture from the past
has often made the desire to abbreviate distance all the more compelling.
conventionally, narratives that make presence their central concern are associ-
ated with epochs of romantic emotionalism, but macaulays ambition to make the
2. eric hobsbawm, Un historien et son temps present, in Actes de la journe dtudes de
lInstitut dHistoire du Temps Present (Paris: cNRS, 1992), 98.
RETHINKING HISTORICAL DISTANCE
13
past present, to bring the distant near
3
remains a goal for historians whose style
and ideology are far removed from the spirit of the age of carlyle and michelet.
Some of the best historical writing of the past generation, in fact, has cultivated a
more immediate connection to the ordinary worlds of men and women in the past,
and though the result has been to foreground affective experience, it would be hard
to call the motives romantic. Rather, strong ideological commitments fueled this
democratized interest in questions of gender, memory, or trauma, much as they in-
spired a whole generation of left-leaning historians to rally to edward thompsons
call to rescue forgotten lives from the enormous condescension of posterity.
4
In historical representation, as in daily life, assuming a position of proximity is
often connected to sympathetic understanding, as it is in thompsons champion-
ing of the casualties of history. Quite the opposite effect, however, is intended by
the opening of Foucaults Discipline and Punish, where a close-up description
of the tortures inficted on Damiens, the regicide, is not designed to enlist the
readers pity. the hideous violence works in the contrary direction, functioning
as a kind of alienation effect that estranges all regimes of punishment alike, the
modern penitentiary system as much as the premodern tearing of the fesh.
Foucaults coldly aggressive close-up, no less than the warm persuasions of
thompsons style, draw attention to the plasticity of distance, in which the same
formal relationclose descriptioncan result in such contrary affective and ide-
ological results. by extension, comparisons of this sort point to the importance
of distance in discriminating among various modes of historical writing, distin-
guishing the political bite of journalism from the measured judgment of academic
scholarship, or the often intimate tone of memoir from the wider compass of his-
tory proper. though these assumptions are seldom fully explicit, they are so
embedded in our understanding of the rhetoric of historical representation that
it seems impossible to defne the competing claims of different historical genres
without implicit reference to associations of this kind.
Form, affect, and ideology shape much of our engagement with the past, but
still more far-reaching are the implications of distance for conceptions of his-
torical understanding. For the past two centuries especially, doctrines related to
distance have exercised a powerful role in setting the terms for both practice and
speculation. much like the discipline of art history, historiography has made the
mastery of perspective into an index of the progress and sophistication of Western
traditions of historical thought. medieval and early modern societies, it is widely
agreed, lacked a proper sense of anachronism, and even the enlightenment, if we
credit Dilthey or collingwood, fell short of a full historical consciousness. It was
only with Vico, herder, and their successors (so the story goes) that historians
and philosophers turned away from the generalizing ambitions of the eighteenth
century to grasp the essential particularity of historical process. the dialectics of
3. thomas babington macaulay, hallams constitutional history, in Critical, Historical, and
Miscellaneous Essays and Poems (New York: albert cogswell, 1880), I, 310. First published in the
Edinburgh Review, September, 1828.
4. edward thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (harmondsworth, Uk: Penguin,
1963), 12.
Mark Salber PhilliPS
14
distanceof alterity and insightacquired a new authority as the indispensable
structure of historical understanding.
5

these views, carried forward as a legacy of nineteenth-century historicism,
have exercised a deep infuence on historians at large, legitimating certain forms
of historical thought while relegating others to an inferior station. (What is the
phrase history and memory if not a shorthand for two modes of historical dis-
tance?) the consequence is that certain prescriptive views of distance have be-
come so incorporated into historical doctrine that the idea of historical distance
now seems barely distinguishable from the idea of history itself.
II. DIStaNce aND meDIatIoN
to the degree that it has built its disciplinary claims as well as its literary hier-
archies on commitments to particular forms of distance, modern historiography
makes it diffcult to recognize ideas of historical perspective as doctrines that
serve particular values or ideas. In its simplest conception, historical distance is
regarded as a natural accompaniment to times passing, as though the progress
of years were suffcient to explain changes in historical understanding. But this
is to accept the powerful effects that accompany linear temporality without ac-
knowledging the full range of engagements that mediate our relations with the
past. more fully conceived, distance is a dimension of history that is both variable
and multi-faceted: not just the bequest of time, it is the work of hands, hearts, and
minds (sometimes tugging in different directions), and it is in this much more
comprehensive meaning that distance takes us close to the central functions of
historical representation.
Scientifc time may be measured by abstractions, but historys movements are
neither neutral nor uniform. though time is often compared to a river (a more apt
metaphor if we think of it as a current of fsh as well as of water), it might equally
be imagined as a city street, where the traffc changes its rhythms at different times
of the day, and where the fow of present purposes rubs up against structures built
by earlier generations. In narrative, as in a streetscape, heterogeneity produces a
variety not reducible to a single optimum viewpointwhat some have wanted to
call a truly historical perspective.
6
Rather, historical distance emerges as a com-
plex balance that has as much to do with the emotional or political uses of the past
as with its explanatory functions or its formal design. to eighteenth-century brit-
ons, ancient Rome was more immediate and compelling than classical athens, but
for their nineteenth-century descendants the reverse was generally true. (Witness
5. the classic statement of this historicist view is Friedrich meinecke, Historism, transl. J. e.
anderson (london: Routledge, 1972). the widely discussed emergence of a sensitivity to anachro-
nism in the Renaissance is well summarized in Peter burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (lon-
don: edward arnold, 1969). For collingwoods criticism of the limitations of historical consciousness
in the enlightenment, see note 6 below.
6. See, for example, collingwoods condemnation of the historical outlook of the enlightenment:
a truly historical view of history sees everything in that history as having its own raison detre . . .
thus the historical outlook of the enlightenment was not genuinely historical. The Idea of History,
ed. J. van der Dussen (oxford: oxford University Press, 1994), 77. meinecke, similarly, though
elevating Rousseau above hume, speaks of the latters failure to achieve a fully historical attitude.
Historism, 300.
RETHINKING HISTORICAL DISTANCE
15
mills remark that the battle of marathon, even as an event in english history, is
more important than the battle of hastings.
7
) Similarly, americans today feel the
Founding Fathers as a presence in their history and continue an engagement with
the eighteenth century that has little resonance for their anglo-canadian neigh-
borsthough Francophone and aboriginal canadians come to the same period
with other, less happy concerns.
an old-fashioned, but still usefully compact formulation of historys media-
tional character is burckhardts dictum that history is on all occasions the record
of that which one age fnds worthy of note in another.
8
this unapologetic recog-
nition that history is and ought to be the product of present interests as much as
past realities endows historical understanding with a binocular depth absent from
the positivist conceptions burckhardt opposed. Rather than detracting from its
truthfulness, historys dialogical character supplies the questions that carry the
narrative forward in an effort to establish meaningful relations between past and
present. For this reason, history is best seen as a mediatory practice, requiring
what gadamer, writing a century later (and with different mediations in mind),
would call a fusion of horizons.
9
This redefnition, it should be added, does
not require historians to neglect their traditional concern for questions of evi-
dence and explanation, nor to abandon their more recent interest in narratology
and rhetoric. Rather, the mediatory focus suggests ways to bring all of these issues
together under a set of common concerns.
as conventionally understood, distance carries a heavy weight of prescription.
Historians generally invoke principles of distance in order to defne the optimum
position from which to observe historical events, or (what amounts to much the
same thing) to trace a genealogy of modern practice. how often, for example, have
students of the Renaissance cited a growing sensitivity to anachronism as evidence
of the prescient modernity of that age?
10
the same features that seem to invite
prescriptiveness, however, make questions of distance a guide to more open-ended
approaches to historical practice. In this spirit, I want to propose a liberal heuristic
that encompasses a wider range of positions, none of which is privileged except
in relation to the specifc purposes pursued by historical authors and readers. Ev-
ery representation of history, whatever its genre, incorporates elements of making,
feeling, doing, and understandingor (to alter the terms somewhat) questions of
formal structure and vocabulary, affective impact, moral or ideological interpel-
lation, and underlying intelligibility. Consequently, a more ramifed analysis of
historical representation needs to consider the problem of mediation as it relates
to four fundamental dimensions of distance that shape our experience of histori-
7. J. S. mill, grotes history of greece, in Collected Works, ed. J. m. Robson (toronto:
University of toronto Press, 1978), XI, 273.
8. Jacob burckhardt, Judgements on History and Historians, transl. h. Zohn (Indianapolis, IN:
liberty Press, 1999), 168. For a present-day articulation of this tension, see andreas huyssen: given
a selective and permanently shifting dialogue between the present and the past, we have come to rec-
ognize that our present will inevitably have an impact on what and how we remember. It is important
to understand that process, not to regret it in the mistaken belief that some ultimately pure, complete,
and transcendent memory is possible. Twilight Memories (New York: Routledge, 1999), 250.
9. hans-georg gadamer, Truth and Method, transl. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald g. marshall,
2nd ed. (New York: continuum, 1995), 306.
10. the best summary remains burkes Renaissance Sense of the Past.
Mark Salber PhilliPS
16
cal time. First, we need to consider the genres, media, and conventions that give
the history its formal structures of representation, including its aesthetic qualities
and rhetorical address. Second, we should take notice of the affective force of the
narrative, including the emotional experiences it promises or withholds. third, we
must take account of the works implications for action, whether what it calls for
is political, religious, or ethical in nature. Fourth, we must consider the conceptual
assumptions about explanation and understanding on which the historys intelligi-
bility depends. combining in various ways to shape our experience of time, these
four overlapping but distinguishable distancesform, affect, ideology, and under-
standingconstitute the axes of a study of historical representation.
11
In this more complex meaning, distance enters into all the ways a narrative
works to bridge the then-and-now of history, including its formal structures, its
affective and ideological demands, and its claims to truth or understanding. but a
further expansion is still required to make the best use of a conception that has
been hobbled by a combination of prescriptive and polarized usage. In ordinary
speech, distance refers to a position of detachment or separation: chronologi-
cally a then that is remote from now. In relational terms, however, this bina-
rism dissolves into a continuous gradation made up of all positions from near to
far. affect, to make an obvious point, can take many forms: sometimes the warmth
of intimacy, other times cool detachment or even an ironic smile. Similarly, under-
standing, so often identifed with objectivity and abstraction, also operates through
insights won at close range and absorbed in the fnest detail. Redefned in this
way, distance becomes the entire dimension of representation rather than one ex-
tremity or limit. this leaves distancing or distanciation to designate move-
ments toward positions that are comparatively remote or detached. What matters
is to recognize that all historical representations mediate our engagement with the
past, though their distances vary both in type and degree.
III. Some comPleXItIeS oF DIStaNce aND RePReSeNtatIoN
In exploring problems of mediation and distance we can draw upon those phi-
losophers who have taught us to see history as a communicative process built on
the model of dialogue.
12
In this context, gadamers emphasis on the situatedness
of understanding seems an essential starting point for thinking about the nature
11. In earlier work I referred to the fourth category of distance under the rubric of cognition. I had
in mind louis minks narrative form as cognitive instrument, where narrative becomes a mode of
comprehension, or michael baxandalls idea of a cognitive style that contributes to what he calls
the period eye. this usage now seems likely to invite misunderstanding. It seems more appropriate
to my purpose to speak about these issues (as here) in terms of modes of understanding or concep-
tualization. I am aware, of course, that the idea of conceptual schemes has also generated a great
deal of discussion.
12. hans-georg gadamer, the Problem of historical consciousness, in Interpretive Social
Science: A Second Look, ed. Paul Rabinow and William m Sullivan (berkeley: University of
california Press, 1987), 87. charles taylor has often acted as an interpreter of gadamer. See, for
instance, taylor, Understanding the other: a gadamerian View on conceptual Schemes, in
Gadamers Century: Essays In Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Jeff malpas, Ulrich arnswand,
and Jens kertscher (cambridge, ma: mIt Press, 2002), 270-297. taylors most comprehensive
critique of positivist positions is Interpretation and the Sciences of man, in his Philosophy and the
Human Sciences (cambridge, Uk: cambridge University Press, 1985), 15-57.
RETHINKING HISTORICAL DISTANCE
17
of the dialogue with the past made possible by language and tradition, just as his
positive reformulation of the idea of prejudice transforms what we can say about
ideological dimensions of distance.
13
and (staying with gadamer a little longer)
his discussion of the regulative features of play brings unexpected illumination to
issues of form.
14

as Ricoeur observes of gadamers hermeneutics, the mediatory framework I
am adopting obeys a desire to escape from the alternative between alienating
distanciation and participatory belonging.
15
that said, this heuristic has a distinct
purpose that sets it apart from the philosophical discussions from which it takes
a part of its inspiration. most obviously, the historical and critical focus of this
analytic requires a strenuous inclusiveness with respect to the myriad forms and
practices that have served the purposes of historical representation over the centu-
ries. this is not to suggest that historians of historiography should renounce critical
judgment in their readings of particular texts or schools. Nonetheless, there is a
strong sense in which the heuristic needs to be as ecumenical as possible if it is to
avoid re-inscribing received ideas of distance. Philosophers like collingwood or
Gadamer have a larger story to tell that justifes speaking of truly historical con-
sciousness, but this prescriptiveness seems the wrong language for the student of
historical thought to adopt.
16

the heuristic is open to a range of critical insights, including some that in their
original context were motivated by quite different goals. Questions of formal dis-
tance, for example, have drawn a great deal of attention in literary scholarship,
much of it formalist or structuralist rather than hermeneutic in inspiration.
17
on a
grander scale, there is no more forceful classifcation of distances than Nietzsches
On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life: the monumental with its
desire for emulation; the antiquarian, with its posture of reverence; and the criti-
cal, with its aspiration to produce a past from which one would be proud to de-
scend. this brilliant attack on the smugness of german historicism has a place in
13. these issues run through gadamers work, but the most relevant sections are to be found in
Truth and Method, part II, section II.
14. on play, see gadamer, Truth and Method, 101-120.
15. Paul Ricoeur, the hermeneutical Function of Distanciation, in From Text to Action: Essays
in Hermeneutics II, transl. kathleen blamey and John b. thompson (evanston, Il: Northwestern
University Press, 1991), 75-76. Ricoeurs observation occurs in a discussion of gadamer and is in
part leveled as criticism of what he sees as an antinomy expressed in the title of gadamers Truth and
Method. Ricoeur rejects this choice and seeks to overcome it through an analysis of the text, which
he claims reintroduces a positive and . . . productive notion of distanciation. In my view, this gives
too narrow a reading of gadamers work. georgia Warnke puts the issue more fairly in saying that for
gadamer hermeneutics is not as much a counterforce to methodical science as, instead, a reflection
on the scope and meaning of its results. See georgia Warnke, Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition,
and Reason (Palo alto, ca: Stanford University Press, 1987), 137.
16. See gadamer, Truth and Method, 305.
17. Questions of estrangement, focalization, and authorial distance, for example, have an evident
relevance to matters of formal distance. on estrangement, the classic reference is Victor Shklovsky,
art as Device, in Theory of Form, transl. benjamin Sher (Normal, Il: Dalkey archive Press,
1990), 1-14. For focalizing, see gerard genette, Narrative Discourse, transl. Jane lewin (Ithaca, NY:
cornell University Press, 1980), and mieke ball, Narratology, 2nd ed. (toronto: toronto University
Press, 1985). on fiction and narrative inwardness, see especially Dorit cohn, Transparent Minds
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). For an illuminating but much less technical discussion,
see James Wood, How Fiction Works (New York: Farrar, Straus, and giroux, 2008).
Mark Salber PhilliPS
18
any consideration of ideological distance, but its polemical spirit is remote from
the combination of comprehensiveness and non-prescriptiveness we need.
18

Reconceived in these terms, the idea of distance acquires a layered complexity
that resists rigid and artifcial distinctions. In practice, historians call upon all the
resources that our modes of representation allow, and the combinations that result
are rarely a matter of self-conscious strategy or theoretical principle. affect and
ideology, for example, are often closely entwined, whether what is at stake is the
kind of persuasion that takes the form of warm encouragement or deliberate es-
trangement. Nor can we doubt the extent to which the best reasoned descriptions
are conditioned by affective states or ideological commitments. Form, for its part,
holds the whole business of representation in its hands, while understanding has a
stake in everything belonging to historical thought and imagination.
other problems need further discussion. one has to do with the manner in
which these mediations orient themselves in time. the formal, being the realm of
making, is the dimension of mediation most fully rooted in present time, and it
carries that knowledge to the reader. In modern circumstances, when aesthetic
form is often chosen for historical effectthe antiquated typefaces of nineteenth-
century gothic, the anglo-Saxon meters of hopkins or Pound, the revival of fres-
co painting by the Nazareneswe understand the meaning of such formal ges-
tures precisely because we accept that the act of representation itself lies fully in
its own present. affect, by contrast, seems the realm in which representation most
clearly solicits a willing suspension of disbelief. as readers, we participate in a
special class of historical emotions, whether founded in fctions of unmediated
access, or (to the contrary) the opacity of a past thatby resisting every attempt
at familiarizationcan never be our own.
If the formal is most fully entrenched in the present, and affect most evident
in negotiating the presence of the past, ideology is the dimension of representa-
tion that most explicitly signals an orientation to the future. only there, where
history has not yet happened, can practical action still be contemplated. Stated
more broadly, it is in the ideological dimension that we are most aware that all
historical representation incorporates a then of futurity as well as praeterity. by
the same token, of all the engagements involved in historical representation, the
conceptual realm is the one that most clearly traces the circle through present,
past, and future as well as from question to answer. Unsurprisingly, this journey
toward understanding has often monopolized the attention of philosophers and
historians, while other dimensions of mediation are sublimated or ignored as less
respectable modes of encounter with the past.
18. much the same can be said of Johannes Fabians powerful critique of anthropology, Time
and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: columbia University Press, 2002),
a book that has done so much to expose the oppressive force of distance assumptions surrounding
primitivism. though often sharply critical, the writings of carlo ginzburg are less polemical in their
tone, but no contemporary historian has done more to illuminate issues of proximity and distance.
among a long series of remarkable histories, see especially his Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on
Distance, transl. martin Ryle and kate Soper (New York: columbia University Press, 2001), and his
earlier Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, transl. John and anne c. tedeschi (baltimore and
london: Johns hopkins University Press, 1989).
RETHINKING HISTORICAL DISTANCE
19
complexities of another sort arise from the paradoxes of representation itself.
By defnition, representation gives access to something not presentin portraiture
an individual human life, in politics a constituency. In the striking phrase of a late
sixteenth-century churchman and theorist of images, we make representations in
order to overcome the obstacle of distanceil difetto della lontananza.
19
In the
present age, however, this optimistic belief in the abbreviation of distance often
gives way to an appreciation of the instabilities of representation, since the same
formal devices that give presence to what is absent may also serve to emphasize
absence itself. an old photograph, for example, may bring back a lively sense of
loved parents or a childhood home, but whether the fnal effect is one of pleasure
or loss is hard to control. When the process of substitution becomes a matter for
self-conscious refection, however, the weight of representation is likely to shift
toward absence.
take macaulays evocation of the tasks of representation: to call up our ances-
tors before us with all their peculiarities of language, manners, and garb, to show
us over their houses, to seat us at their tables, to rummage their old-fashioned
wardrobes, to explain the uses of their ponderous furniture.
20
the solid domestic-
ity of ancestral england seems well calculated to evoke the sense of connection
macaulay has in mind. In their plainness and materiality, these ponderous ob-
jects signal the continuities of living tradition. however, it would not take a great
deal of manipulation to re-distance the image toward nostalgia and loss. a letter
held in the hand may convey a warm sense of presence, but Vermeers Woman
Reading a Letter is clearly a painting about absence.
It remains to say something about the work these observations on mediation
and distance are meant to perform. as a theoretical structure, the framework pro-
posed has a relatively modest ambition. crucially, its purpose is heuristic rather
than predictive. It does not assume, for example, that particular explanatory struc-
tures come attached to particular ideologies. on the contrary, although it is clear
that the various forms of historical engagement overlap, making it possible to
speak of the overall balance of distances in a given work, I am not suggesting
a fxed combinatory logic. Rather, the plasticity of historical distance produces
richly variable designs, and it is only on the level of specifc schools or genres
that we should expect to fnd recurrent patterns deriving from historically specifc
ways of engaging the past.
the heuristic lends itself to two kinds of historiographical inquiry, one focus-
ing on analysis of historical change, the other on comparisons of form and genre.
Since norms of distance underpin aspects of historical practice, periodic revisions
of these norms play a role in the emergence of new schools or approaches. (For
historians who came of age in the 1960s, the displacement of the braudelian his-
toire globale by microstoria provides a ready example.) In parallel fashion, the
various genres of historical representation are associated with distance patterns
19. gabriele Paleotti, Discorso intorno alle imagine sacre e profane (1582) in Trattati dArte del
Cinquecento, ed. Paola barocchi (bari: laterza, 1961), II, 142. Paleotti was a counter-Reformation
churchman engaged in turning back the tide of the Reformation and spreading the Word to the corners
of the earth.
20. macaulay, hallam, in Miscellaneous Essays, 310.
Mark Salber PhilliPS
20
of their own. biographies, for example, are not just abbreviated general histories.
Rather, the writer of lives is expected to offer a more intimate view and a closer
insight into character and motive. In practice, changes in forms and approaches
often fow together, so that the clearest signal of new historical interests may be
the emergence of new genres. The fowering of microhistory, for example, pro-
duced a hybrid form that married the affective attractions of biography to a wider
historical outlook. at the same time, as giovanni levi and carlo ginzburg in-
sisted, a mere reduction of scale was not enough; their choice of close focus made
it possible to illuminate lives and experiences previously excluded by adverse
standards of evidence.
21

IV. meDIatIoN aND metaPhoR
Distance, it is sometimes objected, is really about spaceimplying that all other
distances are merely derivative. this view not only goes against much thoughtful
commentary,
22
but also fnds no confrmation in English etymology. The Oxford
English Dictionary cites the earliest meaning of distance as discord or quar-
rel, and it follows this with a wide variety of usages, including not only intervals
of space and time, but also closeness and separation as factors of social hierarchy,
temperament, or personal and familial relations. In any event, no stigma attaches
to the fact that this one word covers such a wide variety of meanings. Words re-
quiring multiple defnitions are those that we rely upon to express the most basic
and widely useful ideas. Surely this broad usage stands as a warning about how
much we impoverish the concept if we focus too narrowly on empty time with-
out taking into account other dimensions of experience.
Distance is often invoked to defne disciplinary ideals and methods, but even
within a scholarly framework there is room for considerable variation in the way
it is defned and asserted. Witness Claude Lvi-Strausss image of the mental and
physical withdrawal that conditions the anthropologists mission. the ethnogra-
pher, Lvi-Strauss writes,
while in no wise abdicating his own humanity, strives to know and estimate his fellow man
from a lofty and distant point of vantage: only thus can he abstract them from the contin-
gencies particular to this or that civilization. the conditions of his life and work cut him
off from his own group for long periods together; and he himself acquires a kind of chronic
uprootedness from the sheer brutality of the environmental changes to which he is exposed.
Never can he feel himself at home anywhere.
23

21. ginzburg writes: to select as a cognitive object only what is repetitive, and therefore capable
of being serialized, signifies paying a very high price in cognitive terms. he goes on to make the
point in more directly ideological terms, pointing out that in any society the conditions of access to
the production of documentation are tied to a situation of power. See carlo ginzburg, microhistory:
two or three things that I know about It, Critical Inquiry 20 (1993), 23. Similarly, giovanni levi
observes in relation to complex negotiations of power: the unifying principle of all microhistorical
research is the belief that microscopic observation will reveal factors previously unobserved. on
microhistory, in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter burke (University Park, Pa:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 97.
22. See henri bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness,
transl. F. l. Pogson (New York: macmillan, 1912).
23. Claude Lvi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, quoted in clifford geertz, Works and Lives: The
Anthropologist as Author (Palo alto, ca: Stanford University Press, 1988), 36.
RETHINKING HISTORICAL DISTANCE
21
In comparison, georg Simmels classic essay on the Stranger offers an idea
of distancing that is considerably less lofty. Not only does Simmels view entail
a more complex balance between engagement and detachment, but also his iden-
tifcation of distance with the fgure of the stranger (a decidedly less heroic
fgure than Lvi-Strausss self-isolating ethnographer) suggests wider and more
ambiguous social meanings. another expression of this constellation lies in the
objectivity of the stranger, Simmel writes. he is not radically committed to the
unique ingredients and peculiar tendencies of the group, and therefore approaches
them with the specifc attitude of objectivity. But objectivity does not simply
involve passivity and detachment; it is a particular structure composed of distance
and nearness, indifference and involvement.
24
For Simmel, the stranger brings
into sharp relief the complex balance of alterity and acceptance found in every hu-
man relation. In consequence, the phenomenon of the stranger represents both
an empirical category of social relations and an analytic device for measuring
distance-relations across a broad social spectrum. thus, though Simmels essay
lacks Lvi-Strausss explicit self-reference, it is natural to read it as a refection on
his own condition, both as a social analyst and a european Jew.
Distance lends itself to the economy of metaphor. life, says charles chaplin,
is a tragedy when seen close up, but a comedy in long shot. macaulay is almost
as succinct in his summary of the evolution of historical writing from the color-
ful narratives of herodotus or Joinville to the dry analytical writings of his own
day: It may be laid down as a general rule, though subject to considerable quali-
fcations and exceptions, that history begins in novel and ends in essay.
25
oscar
Wilde and lord acton make an odd pairing, but their thoughts on truthful testi-
mony have something in common. man is least himself when he talks in his own
person, writes Wilde, but [g]ive him a mask, and he will tell you the truth. For
acton, the context is certainly different, but his observations on the deceptions of
self-censorship are much the same: the living do not give up their secrets with
the candour of the dead . . . one key is always excepted.
26
Simmel, as already noted, speaks of the objectivity of the stranger as condi-
tioned by combination of distance and nearness, indifference and involvement.
acton (quoting Seeley) invokes similar terms to speak about historys relationship
to the practicalities of political life: Politics are vulgar when they are not liberal-
ized by history, and history fades into mere literature when it loses sight of its rela-
tions to politics. and where Simmel says nothing about his own circumstances,
the never-reticent michelet is brimming with energetic self-disclosure: I speak
because no one would speak in my place. . . . as for me, I have always loved. Per-
haps I also knew better the antecedents of France; I lived in her grand eternal life
and not in her present condition. I was more alive in sympathies and more dead in
interests; I came to the questions of the day with the disinterest of the dead.
27
24. georg Simmel, the Stranger, in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, transl. and ed. kurt Wolff
(New York: Free Press, 1950), 402-404.
25. macaulay, history, in Miscellaneous Writings, I, 270 (originally published in the Edinburgh
Review, may 1828).
26. lord acton, Essays on Freedom and Power, ed. gertrude himmelfarb (New York: meridian
books, 1962), 26.
27. Jules michelet, The People, transl. John P. mckay (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973),
20.
Mark Salber PhilliPS
22
the eighteenth century made distance central to aesthetic commentary, both as
a matter of idealized images and disinterested viewing. In Shaftesbury (and later
kant) disinterestedness plays a crucial role in forming the emerging category
of the aesthetic. the mere face painter indeed has little in common with the
poet, writes Shaftesbury; but, like the mere historian, copies what he sees and
minutely traces every feature and odd mark. It is otherwise with men of invention
and design.
28
In a different context, collingwood too argues against undigested
particularity. Since the historians knowledge of the past is mediate or inferen-
tial or indirect, never empirical, collingwood asserts, if we could build some
Wellesian machine for looking backwards through time, the resulting informa-
tion would not count as historical knowledge.
29
Like Simmels stranger, all of these images are fgures of distance. Chaplins
long shot, macaulays novel versus essay, Wildes masks, actons mere
literature, Shaftesburys mere face painter, michelets love of country, and
collingwoods time machine: these and any number of similar expressions en-
rich the language of distance relations in order to give shape to what Simmel calls
the unity of nearness and remoteness involved in every human relation.
30
even
Lvi-Strausss heroic self-description as lonely ethnographer becomes a symbolic
fgure when seen in long shot.
V. DIStaNce aND Re-DIStaNcINg
let me conclude by pursuing Simmels idea of the unity of nearness and remote-
ness a little further, taking David humes observations on distance as my text. If
the goal is to revive the capaciousness of a concept that has been reduced to nar-
rower and more prescriptive purposes, it is worth asking why we need concepts
of distance at all.
historical distance encompasses the variety of ways in which we are placed in
relation to the past (orto put the case more fullyto the futures that the past
makes possible). In broader terms, this means that historical distance belongs to
a family of feelings, judgments, and actions that are bound up with our need to
navigate the world around uswhether in relation to gradations of time, space,
affect, or the rewards and pressures of community. thus, though historical dis-
tance is usually discussed in more restricted contexts, it is clear that the need for
conceptions of distance begins in something broader and more elementary.
In essence, distances are relational concepts, and much of the work they do
addresses the continual need we have to reconcile the claims of something close
bythe here and now, the family, the home, or communitywith the larger struc-
tures that surround us. as hume put it, there is an easy reason, why everything
contiguous to us, either in space or time, shoud be conceivd with a peculiar force
and vivacity, and excel every other object, in its infuence on the imagination.
ourself is intimately present to us, and whatever is related to self must partake of
28. anthony ashley cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times, ed. lawrence e. klein (cambridge, Uk: cambridge University Press, 2000), 66-67.
29. collingwood, Idea of History, 252, 282.
30. Simmel, Stranger, 402.
RETHINKING HISTORICAL DISTANCE
23
that quality.
31
as a result, hume goes on to say, men are principally concernd
about those objects, which are not much removd either in space or time . . . talk
to a man of his condition thirty years hence, and he will not regard you. Speak
of what is to happen to-morrow and he will lend you attention. the breaking of a
mirror gives us more concern when at home, than the burning of a house, when
abroad, and some hundred leagues distant.
32
hume puts a great deal of weight upon this elementary recognition that hu-
man life is deeply conditioned by the force and vivacity that objects acquire by
virtue of being intimate to the self. but if the starting point is easy, tracing the
consequences certainly is not, since it becomes his task to understand how the
powerful preference given to whatever is related to the self succeeds in produc-
ing life-worlds that are socially responsive and cognitively stable. thus the raw
data of sight would grossly distort the size of physical objects depending upon
their distance from the eye, leaving us with a very uncertain understanding of the
relative size of a far-off mountain or a nearby chair. So too the proper functioning
of human affairs depends upon an analogous capacity to resize social objects to
bring them closer to their real proportions
33
in other words, to the way others
would perceive them. and tho the heart does not always take part with those
general notions, hume concedes, or regulate its love and hatred by them, yet are
they suffcient for discourse, and serve all our purposes in company, in the pulpit,
on the theatre, and in the schools.
34
this is not the place for an extended discussion of humes historical thought.
It is enough to note his conviction that attention to distance is key to understand-
ing the dynamics of social relations and the role of the passions. Depending on
situation, of course, different distances will be salient. thus, though space and
time are broadly similar in their effects, hume speculates on the dissimilarities
between them, whether these be in the realm of aesthetics, affect, or authority.
In general terms, however, what matters is the invitation he offers to view the
play of distances as motivating some of the most fundamental features of social
life, coupled with his clearly stated belief that were it not for the human capacity
for re-distancing, proper social communication would be all but impossible. No
wonder, then, that distance is so frequently a focus in his writing, whether the im-
mediate subject is as trivial as the breaking of a mirror or as grandly pathetic as
the execution of a king.
Carleton University
31. David hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and mary J. Norton (oxford:
oxford University Press, 2000), 274.
32. Ibid.
33. adam Smith provides a particularly clear statement of this idea: as to the eye of the body,
objects appear great or small, not so much according to their real dimension, as according to the
nearness or distance of their situation; so do they likewise to what may be called the natural eye of
the mind: and we remedy the defects of both these organs pretty much in the same manner. Theory
of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and a. l. macfie (Indianapolis, IN: liberty classics, 1982),
134-135.
34. hume, Treatise, 385.