HISTORICAL FACTUALITY AND REPRESENTATION

Abstract

Historical facts are not objects; rather, they are representational processes within other processes that also produced objects and left traces. These latter ones are themselves not historical facts either but are the same as historical facts in a given time and acquire meaning and significance with respect to that particular time. Therefore, the ‘historical-real’ is constitutively representational and constitutively temporal because it is a process. The question of what is a given truth in history then becomes the dilemma of creating a representative reconstruction of the process of (past) events that is close to the ‘real’ events as they are given in that specific time. Those ‘real’ events have been conceived, represented, lived, created, and narrated. The interweaving of the theory of history and the [cognitive] theory of representation is revealed as a central interlacing that could be proposed between the theory of history and the theory of narrative on the one hand and the theory of history and the theory of action on the other. From one perspective, history is about other people, other institutions, other representations and other visions of the world. It is about people who lived in different eras, who have created and inhabited different institutions, who spoke other languages, who embraced other conceptions and beliefs and so on. From another perspective, however, historians are not faced with a radical otherness. History describes people like us, but it is we who are the heirs of those cultures, those institutions, that wealth of knowledge, those skills, those beliefs and so on, and we are not without tools to recover, reproduce or re-present them.