SPIEGEL, Gabrielle.

The future of the past: history, memory and the ethical

imperatives of writing history. Journal of philosophy of history, v.8, p.149-179,
2014.

Logo no abstract, alo que merece pesquisa: “Memorial literature, as Berber

Bevernage has so compellingly demonstrated, relies on a certain haunting of the
present by the past” (p.149).

O texto começa relembrando os impactos que o “desafio semiótico” colocou

para a historiografia – isto é, a crença no caráter fundamentalmente linguístico do
mundo e nosso conhecimento sobre o mundo. As diversas “escolas” como o
estruturalismo (na linguística e antropologia), os “pós-estruturalistas”, o narrativismo,
entre, outros, repercutiram esse desafio e muitas vezes são agrupados (erroneamente
na visão da autora) com o rótulo geral de “giro linguístico”.
“The embedded confusions notwithstanding, it seemed to me that at stake in
the debate occasioned by what I earlier called the “semiotic challenge” were a
number of concepts traditionally deployed by historians in their attempts to
understand the past: “causality, change, authorial intent, stability of meaning, human
agency and social determination.”” (p.152).
Passados quarenta anos após a emergência do “desafio semiótico” na
historiografia, a autora afirma que tem crescido a insatisfação com “its overly
systematic account of the operation of language in the domain of human endeavors of
all kinds” (p.152). Segundo a autora, assiste-se na historiografia uma alteração muito
profunda nas bases desse desafio semiótico: a negação de do construtivismo radical
(que vê a cultura como um sistema de símbolos fechados e impessoais, onde o sujeito
não teria nenhuma agência ou instância de autonomia), de modo a conceber a cultura
como uma esfera da atividade prática onde atuam a ação deliberada, as relações de
poder, as lutas e contradições, e as mudanças históricas.
Nesse sentido, a própria concepção de linguagem e discurso passou por uma
alteração: “Among historians who have angaged in these debates, one response to the
success of the semiotic/linguistic view of culture and society has taken place via a
refocusing on precisely the categories of causality, change, human agency and
subjectivity, experience, and a revised understanding of the master category of
discourse that stresses less the structural aspects of its linguistic constructs than the
pragmatics of their use. Thus practice and meaning have been at least partially
uncoupled from the impersonal workings of discursive regimes and rejoined to the
active intentions of human agents embedded in social worlds” (p.153).
Spiegel identifica essa passagem como a transição de uma “semiótica”
(estrutural) para uma semântica (pragmática) do discurso, e ela implica uma
“recuperação” da noção de agência individual como ator histórico (ainda que não
mais totalmente auto-consciente). “From a historiographical point of view, what
results is the restoration, albeit in a now de-essentialized form, of a version of
phenomenology akin, although not identical, to that phenomenology against which
the generation of French theorists who articulated the basic premises of
poststructuralism struggled” (p.153).
A autora faz então um logo de palavras: não se pode dizer que a história está
buscando “salvar o fenômeno” (“save the phenomena”), isto é, retornar à noção de
história como ciência objetiva nos moldes do “wie es eigentlich gewesen”; trata-se
antes de a história “salvar o fenomenológico” (“save the phenomenological”), ou seja,
recuperar para o centro do interesse historiográfico o ator histórico e sua “consciência
do mundo”, ainda que esta esteja mediada por discursos.
Para Spiegel, esse deslocamento é comprovado pelo “retorno” da história
social, em contraste com os anos 1960 e 1970, onde predominava a questão da
textualidade e por isso a centralidade dos aspectos literários da escrita da história
(como foi a primeira fase do “giro linguístico” com White e LaCapra, por exemplo).
“In my understanding of the current situation in history and theory, a large
part of the revisionist critique of “linguistic turn” historiography and cultural history
and the attempt to move “beyond the cultural turn” is taking its stance on a neo-
phenomenological approach that seeks, as Bourdieu explains (although dissenting
from its analytic utility) “to make explicit the primary experience of the social world”
(p.155).
Essa “neo-fenomenologia” que tem dominado a cena do debate teórico atual
busca focar no primado da experiência do mundo social. A autora cita até alguns
“sócio-fenomenólogos” que tem se preocupado em definir os contornos dessa noção
de experiência do mundo social em termos fenomenológicos. A agência histórica
passa a ser entendida como a relação do indivíduo com a ordem cultural,
problematizando a noção de “estrutura” do (pós-)estruturalismo. Aqui, as “estruturas”
de significação da linguagem são entendidas a partir do “prática” dos atores históricos
que as mobilizam, sendo que essas práticas são sempre contingentes e historicamente
mediadas. “In this view, culture emerges less as a systematic structure than a
repertoire of competencies, a ‘tool kit’, a regime of practical rationality or a set of
strategies guiding action” (p.156). A cultura, assim, passaria por um “giro
performativo”.
Assim, a noção de experiência ganha cada vez mais destaque no debate
historiológico, uma chave com a qual a estrutura se transforma em processo e que
permita ao sujeito “reentrar na história”. “Hence neo-phenomenology gives rise to a
theory of “practice,” which emphasizes both the mental and bodily acts undertaken
by historical actors, in which, as Richard Biernacki argues, ‘agents call on bodily
competencies that have their own structure and coordinating influence, incorporating
corporeal principles of practical knowledge’.” (p.156).
Essa abordagem neo-fenomenológica tem apontado para novas possibilidades
de pesquisa: “Historical investigation, from this perspective, would take practices
(not structure) as the starting point of social analysis and practice itself assumes the
form of a sociology of meaning, or ‘sémantique des situations’ as Bernard Lepetit
calls it” (p.157).
E um pouco mais à frente: “From this perspective, it seems clear that any
“return to reality” will include a consideration of the ways in which individual and
collective social actors operate, based upon their perceptions and understandings of
both the social and symbolic systems that govern behaviors and endow them with
socially significant meanings” (p.158).
Com essa centralidade da dimensão da prática, não apenas busca-se recuperar
a noção de agência histórica, como também afirmar que a “subjetividade” é algo mais
do que uma simples questão de “posição de sujeito” demarcada pelo discurso, como
afirmara Foucault (o que não implica num retorno a uma compreensão essencializada
do sujeito). Uma nova dialética da subjetividade aparece entre “sistema” e “prática”
na vida social, resultando numa ideia de subjetividade que não se esgota numa mera
construção arbitrária de estruturas de significação, mas que se efetiva no mundo social
por meio da deliberação e das relações de poder.
 Spiegel acrescenta outro ponto que deve ser destacado para o entendimento
dessa questão: “Critical to this process is the notion that inherited languages (or
discourses) can never fully encompass or adequately describe the vast variety of
empirical realities or experiences presented to the social actor for categorization and
interpretation and that, in that sense, life outruns the capacity of culture to account
for it” (p.160).

HISTÓRIA, MEMÓRIA E ÉTICA

“One extremely powerful movement, not centrally in play in these discussions

of cultural and social history but significant nonetheless for the in which it is
changing the conceptual, methodological and ethical imperatives that guide the
writing of history, is the growing, indeed now massive, attempt to incorporate
memory into the field of history” (p.162-163).
Andreas Huyssen: o problema da memória se tornou uma obsessão de
proporções monumentais; Jay Winter: esta é a assinatura histórica da nossa geração.
Chalres Maier: a “sobrecarga de memória” se tornou o vício de nosso tempo. E a
própria Spiegel: “Today, one hears more about the dangers of excessive memory than
the limits of representation” (p.164).
Na França, a memória se tornou um “foco de investimento historiográfico”
(nas palavras de J. Revel) desde a publicação de Les lieux de mémoire, de Pierre Nora.
Temos também a emergência dos memory studies, em que se destacam autores como
Aleida e Jan Assmann. O estudo histórico dos testemunhos (e principalmente a
questão dos eventos traumáticos) tem ocupado o centro do debate contemporâneo.
“Thus, as in the case of the rehabilitation of agency, individual, personal
experience provides the ground for the valorization of memory, a point already made
in the philosopher Maurice Mandelbaum’s “doctrine of immediacy,” which argued
that ‘related to the assumption that our experience has authenticity is the further
assumption that our memory does also, and that memory’s authenticity amounts to a
species of validity, overriding any problems of accuracy arising from an original
misperception or from distortions introduced in the lapse of time”” (p.163-164)1.

De acordo com Spiegel, muitos historiadores tem insistido em entender a

memória como um fenômeno socialmente mediado (e por isso historicamente
condicionado). Cita os trabalhos de Lawrence Kirmeyer (artigo Landscapes of
Memory, Trauma, Narrative and Dissociation) e Berber Bevernage (History, Memory
and State-Sponsored Violence Time and Justice), entre outros.
“If transitional justice offers one example of the way in which memory and
history are intermingled in contemporary discourse, the social and political
dimensions of the “memory work” it performs clearly indicates, as does the so-called
“culture of victims” noted above, that memory is no longer seen as an exclusively
individual phenomenon but has a collective dimension that, in its emphasis on social
groups, and varied forms of intentionality and political strategies within the
competitive arena of memory politics, makes the study of collective memory one of the
avenues by which history returns to the center of historians’ attempts to deal, both
substantively and methodologically, with unmastered pasts. To be sure, collective
memory is not history, as Wulf Kansteiner insists in his important article on collective
1
Nota da autora: For a fuller discussion of Mandelbaum’s “doctrine of immediacy” see Allan Megill,
“History, Memory, Identity,” History of the Human Sciences, 11 (1998), 37–62
memory studies, but it necessarily draws upon historical material and takes a
fundamentally historical approach in its focus on the sociological base of
representations of the past.” (p.169).

“The “historical evidence” generated by collective and cultural memory,

along with the individual memorial testimony to genocide, atrocities and traumatic
events of all kinds, has long been banished by the protocols of historical epistemology
and evidence by reason of its obvious fallibility and unreliability, something not
contested even by the most strenuous advocates for the place of memory in historical
studies” (p.172).

A autora discorda de certas tendências em fazer borrar as fronteiras entre

história e memória2. Em sua perspectiva é fundamental manter o compromisso
histórico com o passado que seja diferente da memória.
“As Michael Roth has commented, “acknowledgment of the past in the present
is a necessary ingredient of modern historical consciousness and hence of modern
freedom”, a position that would seem to entail the integration or melding of history
and memory. But even Roth retreats when he stipulates that “there is no recuperation
of the immediate, and trauma is not a foundation for historical theory.” The historian
is not the guardian of memory, but a critic of the past, whether recent or distant, and
to abandon historiography as a critical enterprise would be to give away the game in
its entirety” (p.174).

MEMÓRIA, HISTÓRIA E TEMPO: “The most obvious challenge posed to

“positivist” (and, indeed, poststructural) notions of historiography posed by the
“memory paradigm” and the differential temporality that it embraces resides in the
belief in the persistence of the past or, more generally, the ongoing “presence of the
past.” For in seeking to keep alive a sense of the experiential, affective dimensions of
past traumatic events and catastrophes, historians of these subjects defy the very
logic of history, which depends on the death of the past and its necessarily mediated
re-presentation in the present, the one place where historicism and poststructuralism
meet, at least from an epistemological perspective” (p.174).

HISTÓRIA, MEMÓRIA E TESTEMUNHO: “To incorporate “memory” and

trauma into historical representation will mean acknowledging and accepting as
historiographically legitimate the differing status of analytically recuperated “facts”
and victim testimony. As Roth argues, “appeals to memory are not subject to the same
criteria of adjudication as appeals to historical evidence. They claim an unmediated
authenticity not subject to academic critique’” (p.174-175).
E prossegue: “Yet for many historians “history’s obligation [is] to offer a
critical perspective on memory.”92 Historians’ openness to memorial testimony, Roth
believes, should be seen rather as an “ethical response to the fragility of
representation” and he questions whether attempts to find a place for traumatic
events within historical consciousness “can ever be more than an aspiration.”93
From this point of view, to equate memory and history as equally valid and
cognitively comparable would completely revise the evidentiary standards operative
in the profession. This in turn, would require that we find a way to theorize, as has yet
to be done, the materiality and reality of “voices” from the past, without assuming the

2
Verónia Tozzi, “The Epistemic and Moral Role of Testimony,” History and Theory, 51 (Feb. 2012), 3.
necessary “truth” of what they convey, at least in terms of the factuality of its
content” (p.175).

DOIS ÚLTIMOS PARÁGRAFOS (FUNDAMENTAIS):

“It does appear that, at the moment anyway, ethical claims for “justice”
embedded in testimony and traumatic memory are sufficiently powerful to justify their
admission into normal historiographical discourse, despite the notorious vagaries of
memory, not to mention its culturally and socially mediated character. Yet to the
extent that the “linguistic turn” has already modified our understanding of the truth
claims embedded in historical work and more or less laid to rest the notion of
“objectivity” as an illusion, epistemological revisions to traditional historiographical
pursuits have long been in place. If we can agree that history is the product of
contemporary mental representations of the absent past that bear within them strong
ideological and/or political imprints – and it seems unlikely that any historian would
today disagree with this, whether framed in terms of discourse, social location, or
some other form of the historian’s fashioning – then it seems logical to include within
the determinants of historical practice the impress of individual psychological forces
in the coding and decoding of those socially generated norms and discourses. And
thus the historian is as imbricated in the cultural and psychological forces at play in
the construction of the past as the victim” (p.177).
“In the end, what is at stake in these discussion is not an epistemological
question of “truth” but an ethical response to the catastrophes of the last century and,
in a more general sense, a turn from epistemological to ethical commitments in the
study of the past, creating a place (and a plea) for a new historical ethics that need
not – and probably cannot and should not – mean the abandonment of the search for
evidence, the responsibility to seek to “get it right” in our investigations of the past,
or the insistence on a critical approach to knowledge in all its manifest forms as the
fundamental practice of the historian” (p.177).

No final, um post-scriptum que trata do tema das histórias digitais, e a

influência dos meios digitais na construção social da memória, bem como os seus
impactos para a consciência histórica.