1.

The Discourse of History

1.1. Intro 1.1.1. First level of linguistics: discourse. Linguistics must study this 1.1.2. Second level of linguistics: universals in discourse. Units and general rules of combination. 1.1.2.1. Asks: are the normal grouping and oppositions of discourses (novels, poetry, history) sufficient? 1.1.2.2. Question of essay: Does history, which has usually followed rules and been bound to the real really differ from fiction? 1.2. The Act of Uttering 1.2.1. What authorizes historian to go from uttering to utterance? 1.2.2. Two types of shifters (terms that can change meaning) for utterance 1.2.2.1. Shifter type 1: listening testimonial with event reported, act of informer, and speech of the utterer. Designates historian listening and gathering data from elsewhere. Makes historian like anthropologist as they give source of info. To my knowledge, as I have heard, etc. Herodotus. 1.2.2.2. Shifter Type 2: organizational - all explicit signs whereby the utterer organizes his own discourse, providing explicit points of reference. Shows a movement through time. Here is, there is. (immobility, returning to an earlier state, coming back again, stopping dead, announcing.) 1.2.2.2.1. Problem: friction between two times time of uttering and time of utterance. 1.2.2.2.2. Problem brings three factors to history 1.2.2.2.2.1. Factor 1: production of acceleration in historical account. Same number of pages can have different tempos. Does it progress slow or quickly? The closer to contemporary time, the slower. 1.2.2.2.2.2. Factor 2: Zig-zag or sawtooth history (again amplifies depth of time). Example of Herodotus giving us the history of the ancestors to a newcomer on the scene, and then progresses a bit, and then does it again. 1.2.2.2.2.3. Factor 3: how is historical discourse inaugurated? (shows destructive force of organizing shifter to historical chronology). 1.2.2.2.2.3.1. Inauguration 1: performative opening, where the words perform a solemn ace of foundation. I sing of poets. 1.2.2.2.2.3.2. Inauguration 2: the Preface. Either announces what is to come of retrospectively gives judgment on it. 1.2.2.3. These shifters show the predictive function of the historian. They attempt to dechronologize the thread of history. Make it complex. He needs to double up the chronological unwinding with references to the time of his own speech. 1.2.3. Shifters that deal with receiver and sender 1.2.3.1. Shifter of reader: Teach lessons: Bossuet stands in the place of God, speaking his words, as History teaches us lessons and he is showing them. 1.2.3.2. Shifter of sender: his absence is a shifter. Purposefully remove self.

1.2.3.2.1.1. Actually in this case, the utterer nullifies his emotional persona, but substitutes for it another persona, the objective persona. The subject persists in its plenitude, but as an objective subject. 11 1.2.3.2.1.2. He calls this the referential illusion and says it claims to allow the referent to speak all on its own. 11 1.2.3.2.1.3. He again repeats that the absence of signs is significant. 1.2.3.3. What of when same person is actor and utterer? Think of Grants writings on the Civil War. Only a certain type of action is preselected that the use for themselves 1.2.3.3.1. They show the choice of an apersonal pronoun is no more than a rhetorical alibi, and that the true situation of the utterer is clear from the choice of syntagmas with which he surrounds his past actions. 12 1.3. The Utterance 1.3.1. Historical utterance can be broken down into units of content and classified. They are signifieds as neither pure referents or the discourse as a whole. Seth: I think this is that middle category of names, etc, that stand between the discourse as a whole and the actual referents. Some sort of middle term. 1.3.1.1. Existents: beings or entities. Ex: dynasties, princes, soldiers in Herodotus. 1.3.1.2. Occurrents: predicates of beings or entities. Ex: laying waste, making slaves, making alliances in Herodotus. 1.3.1.3. SO: these two types form collections or a grammar that cover all of the discourse. It is set up beforehand really. 1.3.1.4. AND: the personal thematic of the author can function similarly, structuring the discourse. 1.3.2. Problem of naming historical objects 1.3.2.1. Names can function to structure texts. Like conspiracy in Machiavelli. The very act of naming, which enables the discourse to be spoken clearly, reinforces its structure. 1.3.3. Same problem for Occurrents: 1.3.3.1. Three statuses of processes: affirmative, negative, or interrogative. 1.3.3.2. BUT: status of historical discourse is only assertive and affirmative. The historical discourse doesnt do much negation, we only pay attention to what actually happened. 1.3.3.3. Objective discourse as schizophrenic 1.3.3.3.1. The psychotic person speaks only of things that dont exist. In the same way, the objective historian only speaks of things that do. In both cases, there is a radical censorship of the act of uttering. 14 1.3.4. Classifying unites of content and their progression seem to match fiction 1.3.4.1. First Class: comprises all the segments of discourse which lead back to an implicit signified through metaphor. Describe motley clothing, bad arms, etc all to show the moral disintegration of 15th century. Class of indices or signs. 1.3.4.2. Second Class: fragments of discourse which are rational by nature. Incomplete syllogisms. Enthymemes (syllogism with a hidden premise).

1.3.4.3. Third Class: functions of the narrative, or cardinal points where anecdote may go a different course. Like an oracle where three different courses of actions are given. 1.3.5. Two poles of historical discourse: whether indices or functions predominate. 1.3.5.1. Indexical units predominate: history is drawn toward metaphorical form and borders upon the lyrical and symbolic. Michelet 1.3.5.2. Functional unites predominate: history is metonymic (something is called by another name (Hollywood for film industry) in close relation to the epic. 1.3.5.3. Reasoning is dominant: tries to reproduce in the structure of the discourse the structure of the choices lived by the protagonist. Reflexive history, strategic history. Machiavelli. 1.4. Signification 1.4.1. Chronicles and annals are confined to unstructured series of notations and thus dont signify. 1.4.2. Fully formed historical discourse: the facts related function as indices, or core elements function as indices. 1.4.3. Two levels of signifieds in historical discourse. 1.4.3.1. Level One: the importance the historian gives to facts. Moral and political lessons. 1.4.3.2. Level Two: themes of the discourse. Herodotus uses all his stories to give a certain philosophy of history, that submission of the world of men to the workings of the divine law. 1.4.4. Historians have to give meaning to a meaningless series. Have to move from annals to histories. 1.4.4.1. The historian is not so much a collector of facts as a collector and relator of signifiers; that is to say, he organizes them with the purpose of establishing positive meaning and filling the vacuum of pure, meaningless series. 16 1.4.4.2. As we can see, simply from looking at its structure and without having to invoke the substance of its content, historical discourse is in its essence a form of ideological elaboration, or to put it more precisely, an imaginary elaboration, if we can take the imagery to be the language through which the utterer of a discourse (a purely linguistics entity) fills out the place of subject of the utterance (a psychological or ideological entity). 16 1.4.4.3. THUS: there are no facts. From the moment that language is involved (and when is it not involved?), the fact can only be defined in a tautological fashion: what is noted derives from the notable, but the notable is only from Herodotus onwards, when the word lost its accepted mythic meaning what is worthy of recollection, that is to say, worth of being noted. 1617 1.4.4.4. Paradox of historical discourse: The fact can only have a linguistic existence, as a term in a discourse, and yet it is exactly as if this existence were merely the copy, purely and simply, of another existence situated in the extra-structural domain of the real. This type of discourse is doubtless the only type in which the referent is aimed for as something external to the

discourse, without it ever being possible to attain it outside this discourse. 17 1.4.5. Crafty double operation of historical discourse 1.4.5.1. Operation 1: referent is detached from the discourse and becomes external to it and serves as its founding principle. History is just the history of the things happening. 1.4.5.2. Operation 2: the signified itself is forced out and becomes confused with the referent. Referent enters into a direct relation with the signifier, and the discourse, trying to express the real, believes itself authorized to dispense with the signified. 1.4.5.3. THUS: history claims to only know two terms, the referent and the signifier. Thus there is (illusory) confusion of referent and signified (like in performative discourse). 1.4.6. Conclusion 1.4.6.1. In objective history, the real is never more than an unformulated signified, sheltering behind the apparently all-powerful referent. This situation characterizes what we might call the realistic effect. The signified is eliminated from the objective discourse, and ostensibly allows the real and its expression to come together, and this succeeds in establishing a new meaning, on the infallible principle already stated that any deficiency of elements in a system is in itself significant. This new meaning which extends to the whole of historical discourse and is its ultimately distinctive property is the real in itself, surreptitiously transformed into a sheepish signified. Historical discourse does not follow the real, it can do no more than signify the real, constantly repeating that it happened, without this assertion amounting to anything but the signified other side of the whole process of historical narration. 17-18 1.4.6.2. Our society has a taste for the real and the reality effect. 1.4.6.3. Seth: he is saying that by combining, pressing together, the referent and signifier, history is just repeating the meaningless phrase it happened without actually saying anything. They are trying to say the impossible and thus for political and ideological reasons saying there is no difference. 2.

The Reality Effect