Questions of History

What are the decisions made when a historical moment is selected, con- textualised within particular frameworks and used to narrate the past? What exactly is the evidence determining the ‘facts’ of history? Should history, as cultural historian Marius Kwint suggests, ‘fully admit to its illusory and constructed nature, and stop pretending that it refers to a real process which is amenable to systematic analysis and even prediction’?1 Should it admit to the sometimes arbitrary choices made by the historian who follows a hunch or a path with a head already full of ideas, but who through necessity gets momentarily side-tracked as new discoveries make themselves visible? What are the positioned approaches taken by historians, bringing their world-views to shadow the table where chosen sources are spread out for examination? How are these sources revealed in the light of the future moment of the new history’s arrival? These questions raise possibilities which the practice of history brings to the fore, and to my mind these positioned approaches cannot pretend to exist within the certainties of a definitive methodology. Instead, I believe they should embrace an openness required for a methodology of discovery more akin to Paul Feyerabend’s ‘conviction that anarchism, while perhaps not the most attractive political philosophy, is certainly excellent medicine for epistemolog/ (Feyerabend’s italics).2