A Concept paper presented on 21st Jan 2012 at Seminar on “New History”, IUCSSRE, Mahatma Gandhi

University, Kottayam, Kerala, India- 19-21, January 2012.

On History, Historiography and Minor History

P.Madhu

History is increasingly understood as an art, like painting, sculpting, or drawing

(Preston, 1969; Bagge, 1989; Mortimer, 2010,). It is an art of inventing the past. Like
a sculptor brings forth statues historians sculpture history, absorbed within the
contemporary discourse of history making (Eric, 2001). The raw materials historians
use are complex and hence the craft of history making too becomes more intriguing
than sculpting.

The raw materials historians use - documents, monument and other residues1 of the
past -are not artefacts of any single line of history that was in the making, rather they
are the residual sum of all histories, visible and invisible. In the residues a historian
may have no clues of the myriad of histories cancelled each other or co-opted into
one another2. They are also actively silent on certain aspects. Complexity of history
writing gets further accelerated by the historians’ genre, contemporary discourses of
historiography, political pressures on interpreting history and reader’s disposition are
added up as ingredients craft f history.

Historians connect the points of the remains into lines and lines into drawing.
The drawing is completed only with its viewer filling in the gaps suggested by the
artist. A keen historian when looks for further dots she finds more to make her
drawing further a different art. A look for more may reveal that each dots of
residues are universe in themselves with incomprehendable diversity. Further,
history continues to make new residual-dots. Once drawn it hides, silences and de-
potentializes the countervailing powers of counter narratives, at least temporarily.

1
The remainder of history in the forms of documents, monuments, artefacts etc.
2
The idea of ‘sum over all possibilities’ is first expressed by Richard Feynman. While explaining history of
electronic particles Feynman observed that every residue of electronic particle does not just have one history
but every possible history. Further, he challenged the received notion of classical physics that further
trajectory of the particle depend upon particle's initial velocity and the forces acting on it. Such certainties of
grand theories of classical physics, for him, indicate merely one of many probabilities. If this is the case with
the physical objects, I presume, more so would be the trajectory of human action.

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As a whole, crafting history is a never ending creative endeavour serving
interests of containment and liberation. To grasp the complexity, I would like to
attempt a brief commentary of historiography from three theoretical perspectives:
ethnomethodology, actor -network theory and subtractive ontology.

Hidden social processes underlying the residue are overlooked because without
overlooking them history writing as it is mostly practiced would not be possible. The
social circumstances, inter-subjective understandings, taken for granted normalities,
patchworks of ‘recipe knowledge’3, multiplicity of tacit methods of reasoning of the
actants4 that achieved the residues could hardly be captured in the art of history.
History presupposes continuity so much as the conventional sociology presupposed
the society. Ethnomethodologists helped sociologists to recognize the overarching
continuous thing ‘society’ is a myth. Shared understanding of ad-hoc practices and
their taken for granted contextual understandings hardly be engendered as ‘common
culture’ (Garfinkel, 1967:1). Similarly, it can be argued that tracing social continuity in
the form of history can only be a convenient story telling. Ethnomethodological
perspective challenges the very project of historiography that presents a continuing
unity of the social extracted from the sequence of events represented by residues of
historical artefacts.

Conventionally, history is taken to be purely human history. Bruno Latour in his

writings challenges the reduction of history as the exclusive human trajectory. For
him, this is an obsession and not a scientific pursuit of analysing the semantic and
material network of the human world that is intriguingly twined with trajectories of
other beings categorized as living or non-living. For Latour, the world is a series of
negotiations between a motley armada of forces with humans among them. Such
world, he holds, cannot be divided between two pre-existing poles called ‘nature’ and
‘society’. (Graham, 2009:13). The world of actants comprise all entities atoms and
molecules as much it contains children, bullet trains, raindrops, climate, Tsunamis,
earthquakes, fire, politicians and numerals. Every actant is simply what it is. No
actant, Latour holds, is just fodder for others; each enhances and resists the others
in highly specific ways (p.16). In the network of actants the non-human actants resist
and even determine human fabrications just as human fabrications resist polio-

3
Intersubjective understanding within the taken-for granted stock of knowledge of the interacting individuals.
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human and non-human actors, with in a network of relations.

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deaths and annual flooding of rivers. Most of the material available as history, from
this perspective, is an endeavour that essentializes the contingent transience of
networked existence into an exclusive affair of human trajectory narrated from a
privileged theoretical position or from the gaze of the dominant gender, class or
caste.

Local, national and global histories written usually totalize. Can there be a practice of
history sans totalization? This is a crucial question from the perspective of
subtractive ontology (Derrida, 2005:161). History tends to be additive. Within the
additive schema some historians make a difference by arguing for non-linear
additions to the trajectory of history. It tends to indulge in projects of convergence
rather than focusing the rupture, event or break-away. It takes for granted the
residues of historical artefacts as marks of continuity neglecting overlaps between
the multiplicity of temporal scales. Without silencing multiplicities and ruptures
historians cannot draw smooth lines and curves, linear or otherwise, connecting the
residues to produce their art of history (Badiou, 2006:98). To make history neat and
possible inconsistent-multiplicities are reduced to unities and ruptures are silenced
into continuity. The mobility witnessed by history, seen from the perspective of
subtractive ontology, is fundamentally because of differentiations, transients, bursts,
ruptures and events occur within the pure and inconsistent multiplicities and not
merely simple nesting of cycles. In other words, the pluri-temporal progressions,
hetero-temporal junctions, transcendence through ruptures and symmetry-breaking
events converging or diverging into multiple directions of temporal assemblages5 are
mistaken to constitute a neat additive of historical trajectory, linear or non-linear.
Silencing the pure-multiplicity into ‘One’ and drawing lines connecting the ones is a
precondition for writing history though indeed the One is an ontological impossibility,
imagined at conveniences, compulsions or out of discursive habituations. The
‘counting’ of multiplicity as ‘one’ is explained by Badiou in terms of the null set axiom.
The axiom postulates inevitable existence of a set that has no elements within all
sets of objects, beings, junctures or activities. The null-set is an exception within the
set; while all other multiples are multiples of multiples, this one is ‘multiple of

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Assemblages are heterogeneous open-ended systems as they are continually individuated
(DeLanda,2004:66). Political, social, cultural, financial and other systems as they exist are assemblages
individuated through presidencies of weak or strong singularities/ counter singularities. Even climatological,
geological, organic, or scientific systems are assemblages thus derived.

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nothing’. In other words, the null set axiom states the set is more than what it
appears because the set has elements which is unknown, uncounted, unpresented,
yet to emerge and hence a burst of the set is in the offing. Put it differently, every set
is ready for events. Accordingly, every residue, artefact, document or a juncture in
history counted as one, could be understood as a set of inconsistent- pure-multiple
assemblages ontologically set towards bursts. Conventionally, historiography tended
to present convergence into some unity as history, neglecting the burst or event.
Unity of history is the derivative result of a unifying or identifying operation performed
upon sets of historical junctures that are themselves without unity or identity. This
understanding along with the perspective of ethnomethodology and actor-network
approach radicalizes history to new vistas. Here, I may have to distinguish new-new
from the old-new. ‘New’ in the conventional sense meant ordering as it is used in the
expressions like ‘brave new world’ or ‘new world order’. Foucault was tracing the
‘historical ontology’ of ‘truth games’ that constituted the orders of governmentality.
The new of new physics or new mathematics is of a different kind. Here we witness
the historical ontology invented by ordering sciences were punctured unexpectedly
by the new spurts of understandings. The ruptures are not merely ‘paradigm shifts’
rather they burst paradigms beyond the will and intension of the involved. ‘New
history’ in the old sense is ‘ordering’ for a new world as preferred by some. In other
words, the new-new is a challenge to the historical ontologies, trajectories, facticities
and truth games by merit of the ontological inevitability of plurality, rupture, and
heterotemporality. Orders, if maintained, it is only through habituated obsession for
order. Minor history exposes the instability, discontinuity, disorder and multi-
temporality de-privileging the order by problematizing contingencies while histories in
the making.

The residue in the form of artefact, document or monument is a pure multiple that
has aspects yet to be accounted. It is not merely a dot waiting to be connected with
other dots. A genuine exploration of the residues would expose the inconsistency,
pure multiplicity, contingency in relation with the network of actants, all within taken
for granted mentalities within the time of its production. On the other hand,
producing history as a teleologically over arching unity is history produced in ‘bad
faith’. ‘Bad faith’ as Sartre coined the phrase is being in complete affirmation with
facticity (Sartre, 1993:79).

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Historiography is often accumulative account of drawing history upon the already
drawn. Alternatively, History can be conceived as ‘minor art’ that trigger events
through unsettling the settled accounts of history. Minor arts break with habitual
formations and dominant signifying regimes (Deleuze &Guattari, 1999:59-68). On the
contrary, ‘major history’ makes claims of is-ness and was-ness within a single
trajectory. What sustains the claims of isness is conformity to facticities and
‘reduction’. When the historical object/ substance liberated from the reductions or
taken beyond the facticity, there should be cracks in the idols of the major history.

Now the challenge is how to conceptualize a ‘minor history’. Historiography seen

from Deleuzian understanding is tracing the pure-multiplicities folding towards or
rupturing against a few attractors asymptotically. The history figurating towards a few
attractors guided by the situational contingencies of the history in the making is
explained in terms of ‘individuation’ by Deleuze. Individuation unlike essentialization
is not governed by any pre-given laws of history (Parr, 2005:73). The genesis of
Individuation within the vector field of the histories in the making is presided by the
tussle between singularities and counter singularities. Strong singularities in the
schema of Alain Badiou are events (Badiou 2003, 132). Events puncture situations
and turn the vector of history abruptly into other directions taking its course away
from its ‘normal’ trajectory. Or, the mobility of history could merely be stereotypical
modifications. If the singularity is weak, the flow of history may yield to forces of
maintenance that work counter to singularity and place history in its ‘normal’
trajectory. History while in the making individuate either within the fold of trajectory or
its ‘normal’ trajectory would be torpedoed giving history new directions. Social time is
hardly mono-temporal linearity waiting to be discovered by historians. Rather, it is
inherently pluri-temporal moving contingently towards diverse vectorial dimensions
that crisscross other phases of temporalities (hetero-temporal) individuated into
multiple sequences of varying singularities from strong to weak. Trajectories are
concocted through misrecognizing the ruptured plurality of heterotemporal
conjectures as if they constituted linear or non-linier march of history. All possible
histories are made at once and the residues bear sum of all histories. Contingently
social temporalities individuate into multiple singularities. Conditioned by the
symbolic, social and cultural capitals of field of history production, historians see
some and neglect some other temporal sequences while making sense of the

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residue, all within the contemporary discourse of history writing. Historians interpret
history from the current assemblage of individuations, while ontologically history is a
plurality of assemblages moving in all directions. The task of the minor historian is to
interpret the history of the contingent assemblages not merely in affirmation with
facticities but to recreate the tension between singularities and counter singularities
and give voice to the strong singularity, even if the voices are silenced in the current
assemblage of individuations.

Strong Weak Modification Weak Strong

Singularity Singularity Counter Counter
(Event) singularity Singularity
● ● ● ● ●
Events/ counter events

History Residues
●●●●● ●●●●● ●●●●● ●●●●● ●●●●●

Historiography
Assemblages
● ● ● ● ●

Strong Weak Modification Weak Strong

Singularity Singularity Counter Counter
(Event) singularity Singularity

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DeLanda, Manuel, (2004). Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. London: Continuum.

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Derrida, Jacques. (2005). Writing and Difference. New Delhi: Continuum.

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Dr.P.Madhu, Associate Fellow, Inter University Centre for Social Science Research and Extension,
School of Social Sciences, Mahatma Gandhi University, Pullarikunnu, Mallossery, Kottayam- 686 560.
Email: madhu.iuc@gmail.com