[by Michel Messu[1]]
For some time now, the social sciences have been agitated by a current of opinion that proposes to rethink the history of our contemporary societies based on a renewed reading of what the colonization carried out by Western countries would have been like since what is sometimes called the times of Modernity (the times of the "great discoveries" and the formation of the Iberian colonial empires, the commercial, military and political conquests of the other European maritime powers up to the colonial deployment of several of them during the 19th century).e and XXe centuries before the so-called "decolonization" period). This rereading calls into question and undermines not only the history that had been made of this period but also the understanding of its effects in our current societies. As a result, it reactivates in a caricatured way an epistemological issue that is nevertheless central on the part of historians and all those who rely on their analyses in their own work.
However, it is not as an academic historian, practicing the aforementioned historical discipline, that I position myself to lead this reflection on what this "decolonial" reading represents for the social sciences, to preserve the proposed vocabulary. This would be entering the domain of epistemology specific to historical science. But it is as a supporter of the incorporation of the historical dimension in the understanding and explanation of social phenomena that the discipline that I seek to practice proposes to provide: what has sometimes been called "socio-history". Which seeks to establish the possible, or plausible, explanatory or comprehensive relationships between social phenomena observed today and the historical past to which they follow. This gives this type of sociological analysis the dynamic dimension that other approaches lack and redoubles the aforementioned epistemological challenge.
Of course, history, when we understand it so generically, is first a problem before being an answer. History, as a social science and like any social science, is problematic, in both senses of the term. It poses a problem as to its object: the history of what? of whom? from what point of view? on what scale? etc. It must also be problematized in order to be the history of something – which is precisely what historians are trying to do – and to free itself from the legendary stories that the same historical facts are occasionally given, not to mention the imaginary stories that sometimes replace them. This is what leads the sociologist to seek information from the historian in order to both ensure the truthfulness of the historical story that he will retain and to give form to the observations that he will have made under the auspices of this historical story. We will compare this conception of sociology to that professed by Norbert Elias and his desire to include the individual in the chain of generations, as he himself declares, and, in doing so, to attempt to grasp the processes (prozess) and the unique organization of these long-term processes (Configuration) which thus become the object of sociology and lead to producing what Elias calls a "structured history of sociologists"[2].
What must of course be kept in mind here is that the notion of history is fundamentally polysemic. In addition to the fact that it refers, as Paul Ricœur notes, to the writing that is done of it and to its formatting as a historiographical narrative, under penalty of falling into legend, tale, the fabrication of the story reported by word of mouth (which contemporary Anglo-Americans distinguish with the words history et story yet of the same origin), history, from Herodotus and, perhaps especially, Thucydides, is the product of an investigation into facts, past events, forever unreproducible in their singularity and to which the account that will be made of them will nevertheless give a new topicality – no longer factual, of course, but ideal. History, from then on, is a mode of knowledge of the past, a specified mode of knowledge. History has the appearance of a “historical knowledge”, subject therefore to the conditions of possibility of knowledge in general, of scientific knowledge – when history wants to be a science of the past – in particular.
This is why the history of historians, says P. Ricœur, "is writing from start to finish"[3], both in its documentary or archival phase of collective memory (with a view to constituting documentary evidence validating the later phases of writing), as in its explanatory/comprehensive phase (the one that answers the question "why?" using the connector "because") and in its "representative" phase, that of the scriptural elaboration of the present truthfulness of a vanished past. These epistemological foundations of scholarly history identified by P. Ricœur, hailed moreover by the recognized historians of the time[4], were far, in the latter's mind, from exhausting the question of the social, political and philosophical uses of history. Hence the triangulation of his reflection on the epistemology of history with the notions of "memory" and, singularly, of "forgetting".
It is the whole of Ricœur's reflection on history, narrative, memory and forgetting, which is shaken up and discredited by what is called here "decolonial thought" and which presents itself as an alternative narrative of colonialism and its socio-political consequences in our societies, Western societies at the very least.
Is the alternative history of “decolonialism” still history?
The epistemological bases of the history of historians are willingly maligned by the proponents of this alternative narrative, their credo is based on an inversion of the colonizer's narrative in favor of what they present as the colonized's narrative. Which, incidentally, presupposes that a (unique?) colonizer's narrative already exists, postulates the antithesis of the values granted to the facts of colonialism (positive/negative) and claims that true history must, and can, be rewritten from the point of view of the colonized. Clearly, this involves sweeping aside the previous work of historians and rewriting history on a blank sheet of paper, which is quite rare when it comes to a science of society. One imagines that such a narrative will not hesitate to take more than liberties with the epistemology of history, Ricœurian or not, to which professional historians subject themselves.
What then matters is the conditions of the development of the documentary evidence, we extrapolate a "salient fact" supposed to attest to the process at work and we think we have established the validity of the alternative "historical" story, this in the "general public" version of the story. In its "social science" version, we will reverse the regime of proof and heuristic discovery, the archival document is only worth as an illustration of the thesis to be defended and the thesis is to reveal the malignant perversion of the "system". Because, such is the object of the alternative story, to establish that a "system", Western-centric what is more, of socio-political perversion was established, was historically felt by those who suffered from it and is still felt within current Western societies in the ways of maintaining social relations with the descendants of enslaved peoples. But this story is quite simply a fantasized story, a legend served to accredit the idea that there is a "systemic racism" at work in our societies, sometimes called "state racism", and which should be met by a great repentance of the white man, collective and individual, whose avowed objective is diluted in a fog of "good reasons" that can range from the idea of justice to be re-established to that of revenge to be facilitated, via a somewhat dystopian project of a society of reinforced communities (based on declared identities called gender, sexuality or race and their possible combinations).
I will leave, as I said, to professional historians the task of carrying out the internal critique of the archival moment and the explanatory moment of the historical approach to which the alternative "decolonial" narrative is supposed to conform, in order to subject to a principled epistemological critique the alternative narrative produced and, as P. Ricœur would have said, its capacity to provide a "representation".[5] of the colonial fact and its contemporary effects. In common terms: does the alternative “decolonial” narrative have the capacity to provide us with a meaningful representation that is relevant to understanding the world in which we live?
If, in fact, the intentionality of the historical narrative is that of the truthfulness of the facts of the past – to be distinguished therefore from a revelation of a hidden, concealed or obscured truth of said past –, this can only emanate from traces, testimonies, archives, in short from documents thus taking on a historiographical value and (re)constructed from them. What subjects them to the critical examination of their collection, their origin and other selection operations aimed at promoting them as historiographical documents and, of course, since their historiographical meaning is not exhausted in what they “say”, “show” or “present” – their readability is also said –, demands their attestative subsumption under the analytical thesis that they authorize and which will confer on them a historical “meaning” and a value of truthfulness. This is P. Ricœur’s explanatory-comprehensive moment.
The additional meaning that the latter attributes to the historiographical approach will come from the fact that the historical narrative is a current discourse on facts that no longer exist but to which meaning is conferred for us, in this case a meaning that we aspire to be the one that presided over what took place, without ever being able to totally coincide with it (hence the contextualizing hypotheses that support the interpretations), a meaning that is also more or less perverted by the current universe of meaning in which it will take place. "Excess meaning" that makes history, like all the human and social sciences, indebted to a marginal epistemology differentiated from that of the natural sciences, as we also say, a fortiori formal languages. "Excess of meaning", however, which constantly risks overflowing the intentionality of history, at least that which is placed behind proven historical facts. This additional meaning is therefore fraught with interpretative and comprehension difficulties, amphibologies and ambiguities of all kinds. Also, it can constitute a trap for the historian. That, in particular, of overinterpretation when he states more than it was possible to do from the evidence gathered, when he projects onto the past the concerns, the visions of the moment which were foreign to this past, when he reduces historical temporalities to the flow of a uniform time creating concatenated causalities and responsibilities.
This is the trap that decolonial discourse falls into without any caution, which, on the basis of an alternative historical narrative of colonialism – centered essentially on documentary evidence attesting to the suffering of colonized peoples – promotes an excess of meaning that goes beyond what colonial historiography has been able to establish and which proposes an abusive interpretation of both colonial intent and its persistence in the former colonizing nations. To do this, it is necessary to abandon the terrain of the scientific mode of knowledge of history, the one that is restrictively framed by the practice of the professional historian, and to devote oneself to the development of a discourse that has everything to do with a “fantasized history.”
The fantasy story, or the story we would have liked to see but which did not happen
The question "what history to write?" or "what history to remember?" remains a central question for both the historian and his audience, and a fortiori for all those who use history for scientific purposes (socio-history, anthropo-history, etc.) or for social and political purposes (essayists, political leaders, etc.) The obvious answer, "the history of historians", multiplies if we are attentive to the fact that history, as has been said, tends to give an increase in meaning to historical facts and that among historians themselves - but this is true of all social sciences - there is also a propensity to treat these historical facts from the point of view of the history that we would have liked to see come true, even if this is not what happened, even if factual historiography provides completely different elements. In debates between historians, we readily speak in this regard of "hypothetical history", or even of "retrospective history". But the question is not simple, as the interpretative approach of the facts for the historian requires an effort of abstraction from the result known today to try to find the reasons or the causes, or even, in the perspective of P. Ricœur, the specific intentionality of the historical fact. To make the history of the observed historical moment is to seek to identify the "good causal reasons" which presided over it since an observation bias linked to the knowledge of what happened after what one seeks to understand and explain took place. This is the challenge assumed by the professional historian, at least since Lucien Febvre who emphasized how much the history made by the historian is the daughter of the time in which the latter is immersed.
Wanting to submit the historical fact studied to what is consequential to it in terms of realized and possibly known history, presupposes that a logical link of causality, and not a simple link of temporality, makes the known consequential derive from the antecedent studied. To economize on this "proof" is to expose oneself to imputing to the fact studied a causality and an intentionality that it perhaps does not have. It is to proceed to a retrospective projection by erasing short causalities, so to speak, in favor of long causalities, always so to speak, or, more precisely, in favor of correspondences over the long term. Which can be stimulating, sometimes heuristic, for the spirit of research, but fragile on the demonstrative level.
Also, the central question of historical scientific research and more broadly of social science remains that of its capacity to causally explain documented facts, for the historian, constructed or problematized facts, for the sociologist, the anthropologist and others. In other words, for the historian, to make history only on the archival basis at his disposal. A form of challenge when we think of history as that which underlies the present and illuminates the future while the historical past is no more and its traces are very often erased. A probable risk of locking history into a technical archival science not very conducive to giving "meaning" to history itself. And yet, the historian cannot give in to the retrospective illusion of the history that he would have liked to see come true instead of the history that he is able to formulate in a concern for truthfulness, just as the sociologist cannot give in to the projective illusion by resorting to the adoption of conflicting values in society – Weber's war of the gods. The "addition of meaning" brought by history and highlighted by P. Ricœur, is probably located in this tension between a history that does not give in to the retrospective illusion by being respectful of the historiographical facts and a history that would be only an archival collation without significant power, if not that which is attributed to it in a discretionary manner. This is why the historian is so often confronted with the objection of the facts at his disposal, an objection which demands above all, on his part, to be interpreted, since it can vary from the cancellation to the confirmation of the validity of the evidence hitherto retained.
This is where, obviously, the critical debate internal to the historical discipline takes on its full meaning. Not that of stopping once and for all the history to be retained, as a crystallized base forever present for the future of societies, but that of maintaining the historical discipline in its framework of epistemological elaboration, that of the tension that we have just underlined. The critical debate, when it is part of a scientific activity, is first methodical before focusing on the propositions to be retained or rejected. Are we still in this framework where history is developed in tension between the duly gathered historiographical facts and the additional meaning that they can receive, or are we already outside this framework, in a fantasized history that we would have liked to see come true?
The "decolonial" rhetoric, for its part, avoids this tension, it is part of those fantasized stories that we would have liked to see happen in order to support the argument it pursues and which would have it that, because of this fantasized story, our society would contain a deep ferment of racism - systemic racism, it is said - promoting a privileged, dominating and exterminating "white man", using the universalism of rights and values only to better dominate those he abuses. To believe it, we must reduce the forms of Western colonialism that spread over several centuries to a single and schematic model of systematic pillage - a modern form of vandalism - for the sole purpose of establishing Western supremacy and enslaving, or even eradicating, the colonized peoples. All other effects, both on the colonizer and the colonized, are considered negligible, at best as derivative means to achieve the intended ends. It is still necessary to carry out a drastic crushing of the facts of colonization, which nevertheless occurred over nearly five centuries, to the sole embarkation of Black slaves from the island of Gorée – a mythical place celebrated by the UN – or any other symbol of slavery. Above all, it is necessary to lend to a general abstract concept, colonialism, the strategic capacity to pursue an end sui generis which would only be accomplished through millions of human brains obediently at its service[6]. A well-planned story trick of sorts.
Suffice to say that the "decolonial" thought that is offered to us behind the rhetoric of the "racialization" of our societies is a double-edged fantasy story. A fantasy story of real colonialism reduced to the stereotypical schema of what we would have liked it to be: a simple enterprise of enslaving peoples to bring about and reinforce white supremacy. A fantasy story of history that would only accomplish on the scale of a long time - taken, however, from an even longer time - the design that it would have given itself, as if history were its own actor. It will have been understood that this story disregards the complexity of the factors that make up history. It is to the difficult history of the meaning to be given to duly documented historical facts that the scientific historian tackles, it is from this that the "decolonial" activist turns away, convinced that his cause is worth some denial of historical truth.
A renunciation of history in the service of ideological objectives
Denial, as is often the case, is less about the object in question than about the probable consequences of recognizing it. This reinforcement of the negation shifts its scope and signals the strategic intention of the denier. It is about escaping the consequences of recognizing the fact and continuing in its alternative version. Here, to profess a pseudo-colonial history that proceeds to the telescoping of a fantasized colonial history with political and social issues more or less clearly identified within our societies. Hence the strictly ideological form that this fantasized history of colonialism takes.
Let us try to clarify this, because behind all this is at stake a recurring question concerning history, that of knowing whether history, including in its intention of scientific knowledge, would not obey, in one way or another, motives which would be external to it, particularly those which agitate the air of the present time.
What we can call the "decolonial" surplus of meaning is most often the work of representatives of the nebula of those who claim to be from history - and more broadly from the social sciences incorporating a historical dimension - and who, by "critical" or "alternative" vocation, make a point of revealing an ignored, hidden or knowingly concealed truth. All this could only give rise to a lively polemic between historians anxious to satisfy their disciplinary epistemology and those who free themselves from it, if the latter did not receive a favorable echo within society itself. Generally speaking, the "surplus of meaning" deemed here historical, elsewhere sociological, political or other, only receives its full significant dimension when seized by social forces that will make it their ideological credo.
Regarding the alternative decolonial narrative, these social forces are recruited today in universities as well as in the spheres of the media, the political world and in the educated and cultured social classes of our society. Especially since, nowadays, every ideology integrates in one way or another a real or supposed "scientific" basis. The alternative narrative of colonization plays this role for the decolonial ideology that is trying to impose itself Urbi et orbi by spreading both in university and secondary school courses and in cultural productions (literary, cinematographic, etc.), but also beyond these spheres since it leads to the adoption of political and legislative provisions which more or less take up its subject.
A good example of all this was provided by the way in which politicians, in this case the parliamentarians of the time, seized upon alternative accounts of the slave trade carried out by the Western powers for several centuries – the famous triangular trade – to orient the “sense of history” towards an understanding tending to assimilate this trade to the genocide perpetrated against the Jews during the Nazi “final solution” during the Second World War. If “historical criticism” was already widely used among historians specializing in this “historical fact” – for example regarding the number of these transatlantic slaves, the means implemented concerning their capture, their trade or their legal status, the demographic and social effects in Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas, etc. – it will be extinguished by the vote of the Taubira law of May 21, 2001 qualifying as a "crime against humanity" the practices of slavery and the slave trade carried out by Europeans, and by them alone, since the XNUMXth centurye century in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Therefore, their discussion academicism became a form of denial punishable by law. De facto, political and ideological censorship thus fell on the normal exercise of historical science. Confirmation will be given when the one who had been the rapporteur of the said law, promoted to Minister of Justice, will not hesitate to publicly slander the historian Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau after a group of associations – the Collectif-DOM – files a complaint against him for “apology for crimes against humanity” on the grounds that he refused to equate the slave trade and the Holocaust. It will take an Appeal launched by the most recognized academic historians[7] is alarmed by the tendency of so-called memorial parliamentary provisions to limit their freedom of analysis and that a President of the Republic, Jacques Chirac, declares that "in the Republic, there is no official history", so that the so-called memorial laws of the time appear for what they were, namely ideological orientations attempting to impose a "historical truth" totally escaping the history of historians or, to put it lapidarily, an official history with a totalitarian appearance.
On the socio-political level this time, we will have seen how the iron law of oligarchy described by Robert Michels, a disciple of Max Weber, and which wants that in a democratic regime governments tend to follow influence groups rather than public opinion – because the latter are better organized Mancur Olson would say –, this iron law therefore, or Olson effect according to Raymond Boudon, had acted in depth to shift on the ideological and political level the nature of the scientific issues of professional historians and to make them social and legal problems deriving from the presence in number of those who will declare themselves “descendants of slaves”[8]. In other words, by confusing, if not confiscating, the practice of history carried out by professional historians, constrained by the methods and procedures that their epistemology demands of them, in favor of an officialized history or ideologized pseudo-history – even if it is reinforced by the support of certain professional historians, since there are always professional historians who lend themselves, voluntarily or not, to this ideological slippage –, we are witnessing a coup de force against historical social science to subject it to ideological-political imperatives that are external to it and tend to erase it as a discipline of knowledge always to be developed. A denial of science in a way.
The "decolonial" narrative that we are being served today is an extension of this coup de force from the beginning of the century. If, today, Parliament lends itself less to the exercise of writing an official history, it is now towards an "ethical" history to be spread throughout society through the appropriate channels of dissemination that the proponents of the "decolonial" narrative are working. This time, they are recruited less from politicians, parliamentarians or government officials - although, if we look at certain ministries, they cannot be far away - than from what we agree to call civil society, in fact militant ideological currents, fascinated by the way in which social conflicts unfold in the United States and who would like to draw inspiration from it to go beyond a class struggle model that has become obsolete in their eyes. It is therefore a current of thought that tends in various places in the socio-political space to take an explicitly claimed activist form. Its field of action will be that of ideology. Postgraduate Course , ideas to triumph, understandings to impose, sensitivities to give birth to, etc. Hence the dissemination in the media of a rhetoric full of neologisms that smell of science in action ("systemic racism", "racialization", "whiteness", etc.). Hence, also, the procedural investment in the courts, the media pressure campaigns on economic, political and social actors, the impact on school programs, etc., in short the updated weapons of Gramscian hegemonic thought.
Undoubtedly, this ideology has a hegemonic way of thinking.[9] both intellectual, artistic, cultural and also scientifically stamped production refers to it as the best established foundation of historical science while it only operates in the form of a dogma to be admitted. The dogma according to which the colonial past of our countries would resurface, by a postulated virtue of history but not yet demonstrated, in the form of an ambient racism towards those who, objectively or subjectively, would bear the stigmata of this past. Postulated virtue of history, because only suggested by rapprochements of concomitance between specified traits and situations objectified according to a patent confirmation bias, between, if you will, "identities" and social positions distributed on the plane that we preferred to retain. "Systemic racism" at school or university should make us smile when we think that those who would be the operators of its effectuation, the teachers and their (to sacrifice to the ambient gibberish), are often the most convinced propagandists of the "decolonial" narrative (hence their success in influencing school programs and the content to be taught). What is missing from this affair is a real historical sociology of the modalities by which this new spirit of colonialism entirely haunted by race would have triumphed. A sociology that is not just the umpteenth rehash of the conceptual harmonic of the infra and the supra. But not everyone can be Weber.
From this point of view, the theoretical failure is obvious. We always come back to the same incantatory formulas that are so popular on the media, ideological and political scene. The scientific scene is abandoned, even rejected, sometimes subservient to the militant objective. Even what had structured itself as a theoretical influence group – following the Cultural studies at Stuart Hall and Postcolonial studies which have emerged in the Anglo-American world – only leads to caricature, so gaping do the analytical flaws appear, but above all so much does the rejection of disciplinary epistemological bases, of historical science and of the social sciences Postgraduate Course , is pushed to its limit. History and social sciences in general are reduced to being nothing more than militant acts. And who says militant act, says prefixed utility, the complete opposite of the aim of truthfulness of the scientific approach.
A recent example was provided by the broadcast on the Arte television channel of a documentary presented as "a powerful meditation in images" entitled Exterminate all these brutes and directed by Raoul Peck. It is a selection of images and commentaries cinematically very well edited, presenting itself as a set of attested historical facts, but which amounts to being nothing more than a lively protest aimed at associating, in the words of its creator, Civilization-colonization-extermination. A "decolonial" profession of faith, nothing more, nothing less. Although the documentary does not claim to be a certified historical document, it gives itself the appearance of one and distils over long time slots the idea that "from the genocide of the American Indians to the Holocaust, imperialism, colonialism and white supremacy constitute an unthought that is still active in the history of the West." The plea is devastating, bordering on defining a new, unknown "axis of evil" whose misdeeds continue in the form of our current "racialized" victims. It was therefore a question for the author, as Arte admits, of "thus deconstructing the fabrication and silences of a history written by the victors in order to confront each of us with the unthoughts of our own vision of the past."[10]
As with the memorial law on the slave trade, the Arte documentary is based on a reasoned selection of historical facts, a scale of observation, an explanatory causality, etc., all governed by the political and ideological "cause" to be defended, falsely proposed as conclusive when it comes first in the historiographical approach and treatment. An operation , in short, subordinate to the militant advocacy that motivates it. A way of doing history that is purely and simply freed from the concern for truthfulness of the scientific historian who goes through the confrontation of sources, the critical justification of their selection, the explanation of interpretative hypotheses and the respect of a causal logic that always needs to be specified, even if it is that of the "good reasons" to act as the actors of the moment did.
The moral, political, philosophical or ideological qualification of reconstructed historical facts and their consequences form the limit, albeit shifting, of the scientific approach to history, especially when it uses notions, conceptions, visions of the world that were not those of contemporaries. Most often, here, we leave the domain of history for that of moral and political philosophy, when it is a question of a debate of ideas. We enter into partisan and ideological conflict, which we know involves a cascade of multiple interests, when we call upon history – or, more precisely, extrapolated history, freed from the historical science of professional historians and their disciplinary epistemology – to establish a value judgment dictated by the vision of history that we would have liked to see realized. Judging history rather than explaining it, such is the epistemological pitfall.
