The continuous discontinuity of history’s agent-strands

History is made up of microhistories. If you stand a distance from the tapestry, it might appear that the individual threads make up sweeping stripes –grand movements; irresistible forces— but upon closer inspection, it is apparent that each ‘thread’ has a story tangled with the stories of others. ‘Grand narrative’ is ultimately composed of a vast number of ‘small narratives’: history comprises the lives of individuals, their choices, their desires, their influences, their backgrounds, and nothing can remove that fact. To weave those threads together in such a way that the work produced by the historian matches the tapestry –of infinite complexity— of the past as it actually happened is the job of they who set out to historicise; it is an impossible task, but one whose original intent must not be forgotten. To lose sight of the micro is to ultimately find that one has a macro that is not history, but fantasy: it will inevitably be inaccurate.

Andrade, in his brief and very enjoyable microhistory of Dutch-Taiwanese espionage, concludes with the exhortation to his peers to ‘be mediums, to bring alive, just for a few pages, some of the people who inhabited [the past’s] structures and lived through those [historicised] processes’: ‘let’s bring the history of our interconnected world to life, one story at a time.’[1] Such an approach brings the past to life, but also to truth. The imagination that he acclaims and evinces in his work certainly injects into such a history a very winsome emotion, bringing it to life in the mind of the reader; the focus on the individual, and the attempt to reconstruct their pressures, responses, doubts and convictions, places back at the heart of history that of which it is ultimately comprised: actors. History historicises humanity; we must not forget that humanity is, after all, made up of humans. ‘A week is a long time in politics’, as the saying goes: equally, though, it can be ‘a long time’ for anybody, anywhere. The historian must recognise this— that actors are not ciphers.

Equally, however, its actors are not –are never— set apart from history. They are not subject to determinism— but they also make choices that are contingent: we must recognise that each actor has their reasons for choosing whatever it is that they do choose in any given instance. Walter Benjamin, Matti Peltonen comments, argued that a monad –that which, following Leibniz’s 1714 work, is a ‘living mirror of the universe’— can visibly fulfil such a function only when they have been ‘blasted out of the continuity of history’, at which point ‘their structure becomes obvious’.[2] I have to admit that I am not quite certain what Peltonen means by this. Leibniz, firstly, argued that a monad was the uniquely self-composed element of existence, such that its structure could never ‘become obvious’ due to the fact that it had no structure. Benjamin, meanwhile, would surely have been wrong to argue for something having been ‘blasted out of the continuity of history’; as outlined above, history is simultaneously a) composed of the ‘discontinuity’ consequent to multiple agencies (acting, I would however argue, according to the Hobbesian axiom of convenience), and b) the result of choices always contingent upon other occurrences: to look for elements discontinuous to a holistic historiography will result in either futile search or ahistorical fiction. This continuity/discontinuity tension is, so far as I understand it, the ‘double bind’ observed by Peltonen in his conclusion.

Whither, and indeed wherefore, microhistory, in that case? Peltonen, briefly surveying numerous practitioners of microhistory, comes to suggest that ‘the new microhistory’ could be ‘described as the study of the typical exception.’[3] If one is finding ‘typical exceptions’, I would suggest, one’s theory leaves something to be desired: it is either excessively specific and in its specificity inaccurate, or it does not pay sufficiently close attention to detail and thus leaves room for anomaly. There is, in other words, no such thing as a ‘typical exception’; or alternatively, everything is typically exceptional, recognising that there is also no such thing as either an ‘average individual’ from whom a microhistory can extrapolate grand conclusions on the macro level, or an ‘extraordinary individual’ ‘blasted’ from the contingencies of historical location. As a result, the sole ‘monad’ is, as Leibniz originally intended it, the individual actor.[4] Societies, and the other conceptual macro-constructs to which it is argued that microhistory ought (and is perhaps unable) to extrapolate, are made up of actors: actors are the strands of which the historical tapestry is comprised, and the anthropological flow of ideas, goods and all else would not exist without actors. Economists, Matti Peltonen notes, have the concept of the ‘microfoundations of macrotheory’.[5] So too must be the case for history. It is not easy –it may even be impossible— to weave together the necessary multiplicity of individual lives and choices to yield a full understanding of the near-infinite global flows omnipresent across humanity. Conceptually, however, it can be recognised to be at the very least highly advisable.

[1] Tonio Andrade, “A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys, and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory”, Journal of World History, Vol. 21, No. 4 (December 2010), pp. 573-591, p. 591

[2] Matti Peltonen, “Clues, Margins, and Monads: the Micro-Macro Link in Historical Research”, History and Theory, No. 40, October 2001, pp. 347-359, p. 356

[3] Ibid.

[4] Gottfried Leibniz, Monadology, § 63

[5] Peltonen, p. 357