The Past in Rethinking What is History by Jenkins

Jenkins Rethinking History is a fascinating, albeit slightly long-winded read. While reading, idea after idea profoundly struck me until about midway through the text when I realized that in a large way, Jenkins is showing us how the concept of perspectivism-particularly in the ways that Nietzsche speaks of it. Which is to say that Jenkins asks us to examine the ways that our perspectives influence our readings of any text including the past because after all, we have no direct access to the past; it’s not as if we can just head out and investigate the past directly. Rather, we’re always in a discourse wherein people discuss, theorize, recall, and reinvent “the past” because the past itself is unattainable.

Jenkins develops this idea in an interesting (albeit Heideggerian way) by arguing that the question “what is history?” is the wrong question. Rather, we should ask, “who is history for?” because history is perspectival and very often has served someone’s agenda (Jenkins 22). But it’s also problematic because biases, empathy, separation, etc. lead to one’s perspective and are very often subconscious and therefore invisible to the reader.

Jenkins digs into the meat of this idea on pages 40 through 44. He argues that no method establishes “incorrigible meanings; all facts … (are) … embedded in interpretive readings that … contain them but which do not … arise from them… If history is interpretation, if history is historians’ work(s), the historiography is what the ‘proper’ study of history is actually about…. everything is a discursive construct…” (Jenkins 41-42).

And this leads to the most intriguing issue in the text (at least in my perspective): the idea of “the centre” (Jenkins 43). Traditionally, people involved in “objective” pursuits have been focused on the idea that they were able to find a perfect balance in their pursuits. But this is to ignore the looming question: the centre of what? And for Jenkins, the centre is an ideological standpoint somewhere along the ideological spectrum. And so at any given time, when someone gives a balanced, centered argument for something, it’s really only balanced and centered in relation to some discourse that already exist in and itself is an already established value matrix.

Jenkins’ reading of discourse allows us not only to rethink history: it allows us to rethink a lot of our discourses. For instance, the idea of balance of centre just described could help the epistemology of any postmodern discourse that runs into the problem of relativity because it argues that all opinions are relative to a centre, and from that centre we can argue for a specified set of shared values. So even though the spectrum of an issue can be infinitely varied, the structure of centre, right, left, and balance will simply shift.

And though the structure will change semantic values, it’ll still operate in the same way (allowing us to interpret things within a specific standpoint). So, we can then see objective readings as problematic insofar as they ignore the fact that their objectivity owes an epistemic debt to the standpoint from which they argue. And if that’s the case, then objectivity is just bad scholarly work, which greatly validates the postmodern project of arguing for overlapping values.