History and Interpretation

“All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation. (…) Such disagreements are the stuff out of which historical writing is made and from which historical knowledge derives. For interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is in interpreting, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place. In this sense, all interpretations are what might be called situational: they always occur in a situation whose bearing on the interpretation is affiliative. It is related to what other interpreters have said, either by confirming them, or by disputing them, or by continuing them. No interpretation is without precedents or without some connection to other interpretations.” Edward Said, Covering Islam, (154-5)

The study of history, as a methodology and not as a discipline, is a constant effort of representation. What Said describes as the inevitable interpretation, is this act of representing facts or data. To avoid any misunderstanding of this provoking sentence, it might be of use to articulate it differently.

The inevitable act of interpretation, as the only possible knowledge about human society, does not refute the existence of facts or data. On the contrary, one should assume that as long as there is interpretation there must be facts and data to interpret – these are the objects of interpretation. However, it is also deducible that these facts cannot be articulated as facts; they cannot be assimilated into our system of knowledge as mere facts. These facts take place outside the realm of language, and the act of interpretation is, precisely, their translation (with the obvious loss and gain) into a symbolic structure which can be either written language, images, sounds or any other system. In the lacanian structure, these facts are the unattainable object of desire whose specter is overwhelming but impossible to take form within the symbolic structure of our consciousness. In order to “see” this specter, we try the best we can to give it a form by using the symbolic structure of our language – this is the act of interpretation – but we are never able to “see” it. The best we can achieve is a poor compensation that nourishes the unending strive to fulfill the desire to attain this lost specter of the real.

In his book, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx writes about the small-holding peasants, a mass of people who live in similar conditions without, however, entering into manifold relations with each other. This group of people whose very mode of production – their raison d’être, without which they would not form the group in the first place – isolates them from one another. Therefore, Marx writes, “they are incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name. (…) They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above.” (Emphasis added)

If we look at this relation of power and representation as a metaphor that can apply to the relations of power in the context of knowledge and interpretation, the small-holding peasants, by definition unable to represent themselves, are the facts which by definition are unable to appear to us as facts, and thus unable to represent themselves. The representative, the one who must represent them, is the interpreter, the authority that can provide a meaning, an articulation, and visibility to these interpreted facts. In this case it is not the facts that are presented to us; rather, it is the interpretation which is the only accessible knowledge we have of the unattainable facts, an interpretation which is in a constant movement: a mobile structure that pertains to the dynamics of translation as described by Derrida in his concept of Différance (See Jacque Derrida, Difference in Translation, and, What is a relevant translation), where the meaning is constantly differed and multiple without at any moment being a copy of the original which itself does not have a meaning in itself, but a series of meanings that appear by a similar act of interpretation which makes historical knowledge as described by Said both necessary and impossible.

(to be continued)