Para-history

 

 

In the Wolfgang Promies edition of Lichtenberg’s Sudelbücher, the beginning note in notebook A, which could be the beginning of this “book”, such as it is, reads: “The great art of making small deviations from the truth in order to get to the truth, on which the whole differential calculus is built, is at the same time the foundation of our most brilliant [witzigen] thoughts, where often the whole thing would collapse if we took the point of view of philosophical strictness in relation to the deviations.”

This is a great way to begin a “waste book” that is no book – neither a book of maxims on the order of the French moralists nor a diary nor an essay, but a mix of all three - and it is also a motto for a certain genre that I would call the “para-historical”.

Writers of all types – bloggers, Sunday researchers, journalists, memoirists – “do” history, but do it outside the strict methodologies and judgments of real historians – academic historians. The latter are absolutely necessary, of course, but the para-historian can provide a “brilliant” thought here and there which casts a light on the past. Especially in as much as history is necessarily burdened with factoids – the cops lies that get into a folder in the archive, a politician’s misquote, a partisan’s distortions, etc. Para-historians are, of course, also prone to factoids – often they pass them on as part of a whole agenda. And para-historians have other problems, too: the emphasis on the anecdotal and the downplaying of context, for instance. The attraction to “mysteries” rather than problems. And the parallel attraction to “solutions”.

I’ve spent a good few years writing a series of factoidal stories, parahistories of a sort. Mine cover the Cold war era. Even that term is an unreliable designator – what kind of war is it? If a war exists where none is declared, but rather polities are hostile to each other, than all eras are eras of Cold War. Hostility is the total story. I think, however, that the Cold War, from whatever beginning date you argue for to whatever ending date you argue for, is distinguished by the way in which the hostility of nations is routinized in ideologies that motivate populations to sponsor them: pay for them, fight for them, make others fight for them, etc. From this point of view, the Cold War as a form started in 1789, with the French revolution, and found its perfect counterrevolutionary expression in Burke’s Letters on a Regicide Peace. Burke’s pamphlet is at the head of a tradition in Anglophony that one can follow even up to now – the premise that no peace, no coexistence is possible with the ideological enemy. This realigns the nation’s interests in an interesting way – for if the ideology of the Other is the enemy, than those within the nation who adhere or lean towards that ideology are also the enemy.

And so I have concentrated on various crimes that have to do with that simple formula, as it complexified and fortified itself over the time, relatively, that I have been alive.