Practical Past and Rewriting of History. Or What is art for?

NATALIA TACCETTA

Ouro Preto

Conferencia; 2nd Conference of the International Network for Theory of History, ?The Practical Past: on the advantages and disadvantages of history for life?; 2016

International Network for Theory of History

In his latest book, Hayden White develops the notion of "practical past" by questioning the elements of literature that relocates "factual facts" in a plot that can hardly be considered simply as fictional. Assertive and poetic components are combined in these devices allowing some access to the historical reference. White works on devices like WG Sebald?s Austerlitz that reconfigure the relationship between history and literature, between factual and fictional writing, between the realistic and the imaginative, and even between the mythical and the rational. These pairs suggest a critique of historicism of twentieth century also made by Walter Benjamin.White introduces his analysis of what might be called the novel (neo) historical. For some, an unfortunate mix of the distinction between fact and fiction, or between reality and fantasy. White sees it as a mechanism or means to put into center scene the relationship between past and present. Choosing the historical novel, the artist / historian challenges the dogma that determines what a "historical event" is; that can no longer be seen as something opposite to the "fiction". White's work on these literary artworks constitutes a postmodernist approach to the practical past pointing a tough critique of historicism that connects evidently with the late Benjamin?s production explicitly referred by White.It is well known that thesis of On the Concept of History (1940) can be read as a manifesto on history understood as a permanent catastrophe; with a core that homologates culture and barbarism. Benjamin assumes that the task of philosophy and art is rethinking and rewriting history, reorganizing thinking of time and experience, and repositioning events of the past in a plot with the present avoiding progressive and teleological stories. These ideas can be linked with the whitean treatment of the practical past starting from the postmodernist novel, where the rewriting of history is not linked -or not only linked- to complaints made from the past, but to show its productivity in the present. Somehow, Benjamin conceived rewriting history as a new selection of past events in a new narrative that does justice to the victims of domination.In addition to this, it is possible to link White reflections with some other aspects of Benjamin's thinking, especially, his explorations on art and storytelling. His inquiries about the literature and mass culture have the task of translating the aesthetic experience to the historical one. They have the function of thinking the conditions of possibility of any historical experience. Therefore, the notion of "now" in Benjamin?s thought is combined with a dialectical dimension that allows him to imagine historical meanings politically responsible with the past. From the double requirement of an interruption of the continuum of history and artistic horizons inappropriable by fascism, Benjamin deposited in the artwork a sort of "trust" to develop alternatives that challenge progress chrono-normativity and oppression. Thinking the whitean operation, arguably Benjamin also relies on the emancipatory power of art (at least some forms of art) in the sense that it allows to reconfigure the link with the past and create conditions for the empowerment in the present. In both authors, it is possible to think about a "profanation" -in the sense of returning available- of knowledge provided by the discourse of history.