The past is never entirely past. It is always present, sometimes in latent form, sometimes manifest. This claim, which sounds paradoxical, ought to be a truism. It would be in most of the societies that preceded ours, where life was structured by the past in the form of rituals and stories, customs and skills. But contemporary capitalist societies accord the past no more relevance than a rotary-dial telephone—a grave mistake which, unless dispelled by the exercise of reason, will result in countless disasters.
Observation. Barely five years have passed since the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter hurricane, and it is as if this had been no more than a dream. It is staggering to realize that nearly a thousand black Americans have been killed by the police since 2020, among them a 52-year-old in Canton, Ohio, Frank Tyson, who died under a policeman’s knee repeating, ‘I can’t breathe’, just as Floyd did. It seems that our regime of historicity is that of the ‘sequence’, to borrow a term dear to communications consultants.footnote1 The Black Lives Matter sequence has been closed. Everything can now carry on as before.
All human societies produce a particular discourse about their past, and hence a particular ‘history’, in both senses of the French histoire: as story and as knowledge.
Corollary 1. The story that we call history is therefore never simply ‘the past’, since it is a discourse that is always produced by a particular present.
Corollary 2. A historian—that is, a researcher who investigates the past in a scholarly way—must therefore have a good grasp of the present, since they have to be able to distinguish its imprint within any discourse about the past.footnote2
Observation. This holds even for societies like ours, which treat the past as irrelevant. What is really deemed irrelevant, however, is the past as a historical and human reality. Once it has been run through the machinery of event-driven pr, our elites are only too happy to give the past pride of place. In the French case, think of François Hollande’s tribute to Jaurès on the centenary of his assassination, Anne Hidalgo’s celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune or Emmanuel Macron’s homage to Missak Manouchian, the Armenian communist exile executed by the Nazis in 1944. In every case a particular discourse is being produced. No living connection is forged between our experience and that of our forebears. We are left, as Benjamin wrote in one of his most clear-sighted texts, ‘poorer in experience’.footnote3
Through this discourse about the past, societies do not seek the most accurate knowledge of their history. They instead seek to cast a favourable light on their origins, their way of life and the values they claim to uphold—rightly or wrongly, legitimately or otherwise; in short, on the social order and the imaginary identity that is indispensable to sustaining it.