and use of. history or rather of the dialectic of duration exhibited in the
profession
and s
ustain
ed
observationof historians.'19
Profession, observation, works, servant, sales-girl . , . These words must
have displeased our theorist. I note also the words which must have per·
suaded him to range Braude! -among the unemancipated slaves of linear
time: the addition of days, his
recitatifof conjunctures, the rotation of the
28 PIERRE VILAR
earth, time as a measure, time identical with itself and, in the plural, times which lock into one another without difficulty ·and are .measured by the same standard. All this is quite opposed to Bachelard's sociological time.. Yet is it so difficult to perceive the beginnings of a critique, the gleams of irony behind Braudel's insistence? Althusser has not 'situated' the essay. For him, the knowledge of history is no more historical than the knowl edge of sugar is sweet. Nonsense! The knowledge of this knowlfdge is always itself
historically
constituted, whether in Braude!, in Althusser, or in Marx (who knew this well).In 1958 Braude! wonders about the destiny of his persbna\ contribution to such knowledge: the 'long tempo', 'geo-history' conceived as something imposed by space upon time. This is a weighty question, to which he turns twelve years after writing his Mediterranee, in response to
other orientations,
some a matter of 'historical practice', others no:t. Implicitly ironizing at the expense of the 'recitatif' of conjunctures, Braude! expresses the fear that the latter may lead to a kind of return to 'events'. Labrousse had passed from his own 'long eighteenth century' of 1933 to a subsequent emphasis in 1943 on a prNevolutionary 'intercycle' of less than fifteen years, and then - in 1948 -to a brilliant summary of revolutions taken in the shortterm: 1789, 1830 and 1848.20 This earns him some friendly teasing on the 'tricks of the trade' or the historian as 'film director'. For Braude\ the historian should take up a stance above the level of 'dramatic news'. If it is objected ·chat the_ trade of the historian consists, precisely, in situating events within the d)'namic of structures, then (he insinuates) by trying to do this the historian wil! always end by sacrificing structure to events.
When he wrote his essay, he could afford to be less anxious in the· other sense, concerning the 'long term'. Bur here he has since been outflanked._ Today, there is an 'anthropology' which seeks its permanent factors in the log1cal structure of sociological 'atoms', and an economics which has dis� covered virtues in the qualitative mathematics of 'communication'. Always responsive to the 'latest thing', Braude! is much· drawn by such seductions. These novelties go broadly in his direction - chat of resistance to ,hanges. Yet he loves his own trade. The historian welcomes 'long tempos'. But if time disappears altogether, then so must he. He therefore proposes the term structure for 'an assemblage, doubtless an architecture, but more importantly for a reality which time wears away only with difficulty, and carries forward only very slowly'. The theorist may still look down his nose at this. 'Doubtless', 'more important', that is not very 'rigorous'. And whatever the reality may be, it is not 'time' which erodes it, but 'some thing' which wears it away unevenly according to the realities in question. It is this 'something' which is the problem.
If one reality lasts longer than another, however. it will envelop the latter, and it is this term 'envelop' which Braude! selects, stressing its math ematical meaning. For him it designates the geographical and biological
MARXIST HISTORY, A HISTORY IN THE MAKING "
constraints, the technical impotences out of which he built up his 'long
tempos', and which include (anticipating Foucault) the 'persistent prisons' of 'intellectual constraints' or 'mental frameworks'. Can one fail to situate these statements in .relation to Mar�. when Braude! refers to him explicitly as the. first creator of 'historical models' and indicates in which sectors he has tried to follow his example, if not his method? If the reference is not too persuasive, however, I think this may be because Marx never thought with partial models: thus the concept of 'model' as applied to monetary
circulation is not Marxist, while concepts such as 'crisis' or 'mental equip ment' are much more so, even if they do not claim to be 'models',
But this does not mean that Marxist theory will be able to ignore the problems posed by Fernand Braude! both in this essay and in his work as a whole. Nature, geographical space, resistant structures, a-historical structures (if there are any su�;h): what will the historian make of these? (i) First nature. In the only text of his which can be considered as the sketch of a possible historical treatise, Marx recalls finally that 'the point of departure' is 'obviously the natural characteristics, subjectively and objec
tively';21 his fundamental definition of productivity also mentions 'natural conditions' at the end, Last but not least. For a dialectic between man and nature can scarcely underestimate the importance of 'natural condi� tions', Only, one must set over against these conditions techniques (and then science). Between any two victories of the latter the mode of production is framed within the
limits
thus marked out. The fifth of the 'points not to be forgotten' in the 1857 Introduction -'dialectic of the concepts productive force (means of prqduction) and relation of production, a dialectic whose boundaries are to be determined, and which does not suspend the
real differencem - shows, for example, how one should treat the persist�
ence of 'crises of the old sort' in several modes of production in twentieth� century Europe.
To think history geographically is not therefore contrary to Marxism. It would, however, be more Marxist ro think geography historically. Among the 'permanences' how may we distinguish the poles where man's grip is most effective? The Mediterranean is full of them. But they are 'enveloped'
by deserts and mountains. This i.s surely a fine object to be 'identified' and 'constructed' by a (dialectical) history; but Althusser is not sufficiently
aware of this even to discuss it.
{ii) Then, space. This is equally an object to be constructed. Theories of it have been suggested, and then worked out,. but while Braude\ has paid attention ro them, Althusser has not. They refine (and occasionally carica� ture) the old temptations of geographers, economists and. logicians in this respect. Men, villages, towns, fields, factories, were not implanted 'any old
how', and we ought to be able to discover a logic to their locatiOn. This
can give rise to many exercises in mathematics, graphics and cartography, none of which should be disdained. But if the historian can take. some
30 PIERRE VJLAR
lessons from them, he also has his own to give. The organization of space in the service of man, a 'geography of the will', is quite thinkable; this is one of the tasks of the day after tomorrow. One can also imagine a new capitalism upon a new space, instal!ing itself with no overall plan, accord ing to its own internal logic. The United States was almost like this
(as Marx often indicated). The impetus of development in this case was very powerful. It is now coming to be perceived as monstrous, so that the mystique of 'ecology' has arisen around it.
In old countries, however, the problem is more complex than this. There history is not only an interlacing of times but of spaces as well. The logic of a Breton village is not that of Nuremberg, which in turn is not that of Manhattan. The nineteenth ce.ntury evi.!icerated medieval Paris and ruined the Marais. The twentieth century is saving the Marais, and demolishing Les Hailes in Paris. Barcelona took five centuries to move outside its wal!s, invented the Cerda Plan, then disfigured it almost at once. The Latin American city bears with it the cancer of the
favela.s
and the barriadas. The periphery of the Mediterranean has become a play-ground, torn between the skyscraper and the tent. The current Vedel Plan offers the vocation of pleasure�park to two�thirds of arable France. In this world there is nomore 'long duration'.
But historians of rural landscape or urbanization usually lose their way in prehistory or in collective psychology. While space itself, if it escapes the speculator, falls into the clutches of the empirical sociologist or the technocrat. If divorced from the concept of time, the concept of space is ill-suited to old countries in which every stage of production, every social system, has had its towns and fields, its palaces and cottages, each histor· ical totality nesting down as best1t can in the heritage of another. A 'real history' would draw up balance-sheets and display mechanisms and thus help to construct -this time in a concrete sense - a properly thought-out
combination of past and future. Socialism can count some successes In this domain. It would be interesting to know what (if anything). they owe to the Marxist conception of this combination.
(iii)
Historical times
andstruggles between
groups
are combined in still another fash1on. With their terse assimilation of history to class struggle, Marx and Engels gave rise to a long equ'ivocation over thei.r thought. It came to be believed that they despised the ethnic bases of political group· ings. And at first· this equivocation was a useful weapon in the fight against a conception of history founded ideologically upon the, might of monarchs and national wars. But in their correspondence and their journalistic· article� Marx and Engels employ the terms German, French, English, Turk and Russian as often as they do 'proletarian' and 'bourgeois'. Class con tradictions are the motor of history, as technique and economy arethe
origin of these contradictions. However, this 'last instance' exerts irs power through many other realities, Again, among the 'points not to be forgotten' of theMARXIST HISTORY, A HISTORY IN THE MAKING ,
1857 Introduction, the very first place goes to war, and the last to peoples, races, etcP We are certainly compelled to remember them, Nationalities and supranationalities, fascist nationalisms and revolutionary nationalisms, centralized states against ethnic minorities, the resistance of monetary autonomies to multinational economic bonds - a !I go to show a second half of the twentieth .. century at least as sensitive as the first (and possibly more so) to the existettce or the demands of political formations expressing the consciousness of groups. Here too Marxism has a theory to propose, decisively formulated by Stalin in 1913, and based upon 'differential tern· pos' explained in terms of the central concept of mode of production
(let· me add; also of the concept of class).
The political type-formation corresponding to competitive capitalism is the Nation-State-Market with a bourgeois ruling dass, which either devel· ops out of an over-narrow fe:uda! framework (Germany, Italy) or else at the expelise of vast and heterogeneous empires (Austria, Russia, Turkey). But the condition o f such formations is the pre-existence of 'stable com munities', not eternal in character but historically constituted by a number of ve·ry different factors over very long periods of time. In no sense does Marxism accept these communities as absolute ends-in·themselves, or determining factors. They are the pre-posed framework, the instruments offered to otte dass with which to forge its state. In irs own fashion the feudal world had already given examples of thi"s. The mercantilist phase of the bourgeoiSie directly prepGted the national state in France and England.
Now this projection backward suggests another one forward in time. Other classes can in their turn take such 'stable communities' as the basis for their action. Their success depends upon their ability to create a n�w mode of production. On the other hand, the role of capitalism as a national instrument has meanwhile been eroded. Rosa Luxemburg unduly anticipated the lcmg-term tendency of capital to weave multinational ties and forge super-states (as Lenin's critique of her pointed out). But today this tendency is manifestly asserting itself, and the national bourgeoisies are only feebly resisting it. It is peoples which resist, to the degree to which the class struggle has created revolutionary situations amongst them. Soc ialism, finally, faces the task of constru,ting the past-future combination in the organization of multirta.tional spaces, as in the organization of eco• nomic spaces (sc:ienrifically if possible and - of course - on the basis of a concept of history). Everything here depends upon its analytical fidelity to theory.
This three-fold dialectic between (a) 'long times' and specific times of the mode of production, (b) the small spaces' of ethnic groups and the large zones demanded by modern activity, and (c) between class struggles and the consciousness of groups, has served my own historical researches very well 11.nd thrown much light on the presen� fot me. Hence I can only regret that it was Invoked neither by Fernand Braude\ in relation to his 'long
" PIERRE VllAR
tempos' nor by Louis Althusser with regard to his 'interlacing' of specific tempos. Doubtless Marxist theory becomes more opaque, as it penetrates deeper into a history still under constructi
o
n.(iv) Some words
on a-historical structures.
The historian (the MarXist.historian above all) will distrust this concept. For him,
everything changes.
And nothing is totally independent of a global structure itself in course of modification. Yet if he admits the notions- of 'long times' and 'stable com munities', why should the resistant networks of the most ancient structures - like the family. or myth - not· be integrated in the- same categories? Naturally the historian must be grateful to the ethnologist who has recon structed the logic of these structures when they have observed them in near to their pure state. But what will be of more concern to him are the gradations, modes -and functions of such resistant networks inside societies under transformation. Again, the 'interlacing of tempos�.
Two other claims of structuralism (or structuralisms)l perhaps inevitable at an early stage and now anyway moderated, demand a different sort of discussion;
Firstly, the autonomy of fields of research. Anxious above all for a self sufficient explanation in terms of its own internal structures, each field proclaimed any attempt at h'istorical integration· of irs case-studies to be useless, even scandalous. Quite possibly this impulse. represented - in lit erature, for example - a healthy reaction agaln:st
superficial
historicaltreatment. of examples; yet to carry it too far means leaving any concrete case incompletely understood. I have tried to show this myself in the
case of Cervantes/4 but I believe that essays of this kind s'hould ideally
come as the conclusion of global historical resetrch in depth, rather than as objects studied ln their own tight and vaguely related to an approximate hi�>tory. Structurale-Marxist essays generally Sl)ffer from lack of sufficient historical information; and Althusser has given us 'few particulars concern ing his combination of autonomous-dependtmt 'levels'.
Secondly, there is another and global 'gttucturalist' pretension: .all the human sciences (history and the quantitative 'social sciences' excluded)
must be seen. as constituting an 'anthropology' based upon their formalizab!e structures, and in particular upon those of communication, such str1,1ctures
being taken as the revelation of underlying psychologkal and inte!!ectual. mechanisms. Curiously, this 'anthropology' with man as its 'Object' declares itself also anti¥, or at least a¥humanist. Yet to the extent to which it wants
to be, or thinks it is, an
exact science,
it would surely be v�ry odd if it did not rapidly becomean applied science
and - consequently - tied to the interests of human beings and their social classes. The project itself rejoins the old metaphysics of 'human nature' and isideological
in chatacter: itsets out to study societies on the basis of their 'atoms', before observing them on the macro-economic and macro-social levels.
MA.ffXJS'T HISTORY, A HISTORY IN THE MAKING 33
The assimilation of social relationships to-a 'language', and of economics ro a 'communication of goods' (neglecting production, and the relationship with nature) refurbishes the 'naive anthropology' of exchange equilibrium.
A theory of games in which all the players ·rake rational decisions always makes it difficult to explain the existence of losers. All this arises from a generaHzed confusion with the science of li11guistics, as renovated by struc� turalist discoveries after a long period of false historicization. But it is -already becoming dear that the autonomy of linguistics ls not integraL Above all, while the historian (as in the analogous cases of literature and art) must assimilate enough of the structuralist lesson to avoid conferring a historical meaning on what may only be a common inheritance, he knows that differentiations are still his domain. If historical semantics remains an unploughed field, it is because changes in signs, words, here represent changes in things; if 1stable communities' are separated by lin guistic birriers, why do some resist the passage of time and events so much better than others? The questions which interest the historian are those to whic.h structuralism has no answer.
It is curious that Marx thought an analogy with language useful, in h1s discussion of production: 'however, even though the most developed ian� guages have laws and chara,teristics in common with the least developed, nevertheless just those things which determine their development, i.e., the elements which are not general and common, must be separated out from the determinations valid for production as such, so that in their unity - which arises already from the identitY of the subject, humanity, and of the object, nature - their essential difference is not forgotten.'l.l Bali bar is quite tight to point out that this text does not seek to distinguish between the generality of concepts and the particularity of the real, but rather be tween two sorts of abstraction, ·two sorts of liaison between cortcepts in the theory of history, neither of which is privileged when it comes to constitutirtg the theory of knowledge. This remark is crucial for the debate between history and structuralism. It should be added, though, that Marx warns the reader against any appeal to 'generalities' about man or nature in economics, which rely upon 'commonplaces gone mad', The common� place and the tautology are often rediscovered (not always uselessly) in an examination of the logic of things. One must merely make sure rhat, beneath scholarly guise or vulgar mask, the commonplace is not delirious. I have deliberately chosen to be optimistic in a time of gloom. I have tried to show that_ history is better equipped than is imagined by many theoretical Marxists in pursuit of the (quite un-Marxist) goal of absolute knowledge. I have attempted to indicate the possible utilization by Marxist historians of everything in contemporary historical research which seeks for a global