RICERCA ITALIANA     

Political communication and history

Università degli Studi di Teramo

Abstract

History, understood as that discursive field which uses the past for social conservation and/or redesign of the constituent order, is an essential characteristic of European and western society. This, to use Claude Lévi Strauss' expression, is precisely what makes it a "hot" society. In the last twenty years a series of changes in the conception of history and historiographic practice have made it possible to tackle this connection between a discourse on the past and its political use in a different way, often far from the traditional doxa. Thanks to these developments it is now possible to dwell on the theme of the uses of history in political communication, in a notably different way from the one traditionally understood. Not only the historiographic tradition in the proper sense, not only the wider occasional literature but also the images and the forms of ceremony, and above all the symbols re-enter this view. If, for contemporary history, an important dimension in which the new approach has been concretised is that of the "sites of memory" (P. Nora), the history of the modern era constitutes an extremely fertile terrain on which to apply the theme. It is precisely in the investigation of the ancien régime that one can see, earlier and more consistently than anywhere else, the beginning of that intolerance of modernising anachronisms which then made up the dominant methodology mark of new political history.
The project intends to focus some aspects of the political communication in the history, particular attention is given to the language, to the simbolism and to the signs that allow that ways of communication, to the authors and to the addressee of those medium, and to the more or less hidden ideological valence in the message, was it written or "represented".
The research will try to enlarge themes that are being discussed at an international level to the Italian historiography, thanks also to the good integration of the different competences at a different local unit level, and the research aims to make a program in which to converge different interpretative and critic-methodologic paths, facing in particular, delimited chosen aspects on their capability of crossing different "knowledges" and in allowing fertile interconnections;
a) the use of the past, the public use of history, the construction of social and political identities, also by the invention of tradition. In particular, the Medicean gran duchy reality and other Tuscany ones (16th-18th centuries), the Papal Rome (between 16th and 17th centuries), the sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century France, the New World after the second half of 17th century will be examined.
b) The culture and the political practice of government, the associative nets between the end of 18th century and the first decades of 19th century, in Lombard-Venetian area, in the Reign of Naples, in France, with particular reference to the French revolutionary proposition, as well as to the Counterrevolutionary, reactionary and royalist sides. Especially, the way of communication of the political thought (Revolutionary and not) with the treatystics, publicistics, the newspapers, the official publication containing details of new laws, and also with the instruments and the most suitable language to the diffusion of the new political ideas among the popular stratus, as, i.e., the use of "Revolutionary catechism".
c) The simbolic language and the way of iconographic communication carried out with the help of municipalistic literature, of nobility treaties, ceremonialities, holidays, illustrious men collections, etc., while particular attention will be put to Tuscany reality of 16th-17th centuries, to the Rome of the Renaissance and baroque, to the Sicily of 18th century, and to the figure of Alessandro Farnese. <<<

Principal Investigator

Francesco BENIGNO Università degli Studi di TERAMO

Research Objectives

The research program aims to reach related objectives.
a) historiographically speaking, the researchs will bring original contributions (monographs, collective volumes and essays), in order to communicate and let the works be usable as well as they have the aim to affect in a significant way on the actual international discussions, giving contribution to the redefinition and to the innovation of the historiographic orientation on the subjects.
b) Under a methodological asset, the will to study and analyze interdisciplinary questions and problems needs a cute consideration on the best and more innovative paths for the traitment (both at theoretical and technical levels) of the different and imprescindible sources, written and iconographics ones. Infact, it is intended to proceed to the inventory, digitalization and publishing of documentary sources, iconograph materials and texts, printed and handwritten, of particular relevance.
c) As far as the scientific comparison and divulgation of results are concerned, thematic seminars and international conferences will be organized from each single Unit side. In particular, at the end of each research program, the central Unit will provide an international conference in order to introduce and to discuss the work made and the reached objectives both from the critical-methodological point of view, and from the knowledge progress, so that to put them under the international and national scientific community sifting. All the Units of the program, infact, have different kinds of relationships with scholars of international universitary research centers (Paris, Cambridge, Marseille, Madrid, Barcelona, Cohimbra) and the provided seminars and conferences - especially the conclusive one – will have involved all of them. <<<

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

History, understood as that discursive field which uses the past for social conservation and/or redesign of the constituent order, is an essential characteristic of European and western society. This, to use Claude Lévi Strauss' expression, is precisely what makes it a "hot" society. In the last twenty years a series of changes in the conception of history and historiographic practice have made it possible to tackle this connection between a discourse on the past and its political use in a different way, often far from the traditional doxa.
The first great transformation arises from a growing awareness of the discipline of history's specific way of being a science. After a long period of attraction to the so-called "exact" sciences, and to the possibility of finding basic coherences (which can in some ways be assimilated to natural laws) in the social universe, a different attitude has appeared and become increasingly influential. This attitude takes the contingent character of social reality as a reference point – even saving the scientific dimension of history on the methodological and, it goes without saying, deontological levels. In other words, this is the same way out of scientific paradigms (be they positivist or functionalist or structuralist) which have run through other "humanistic" scientific disciplines such as sociology or anthropology since the 1980s. A growing awareness of the essentially interpretative nature of historical discourse, thanks to the influence of the so-called critical re-orientation of anthropology (A. Gouldner) and of methodological individualism, has been seen after the disappearance of the objectivist "noble dream" of Peter Novick, nourished by the Durkheimian suggestion that social facts are nothing other than "things". Moreover, it has been taken as evidence of this interpretative-creative, and not merely reconstructive trend, the use of rhetoric and specific styles which have been classified as "meta-historical" (Hayden White). This has not only been a "return to narrative" (Lawrence Stone) but a deeper shift which has been called hermeneutic or also the linguistic turn.
This transformation is parallel to a second methodological shift of enormous significance. This could be defined as the irruption of the dimension of identity into the historico-social analysis. Once the idea of a social universe ordered by predefined macro-categories inspired by a rigid attribution of political identity to the underlying socio-economic reality has been abandoned, the tendency to reconstruct the disposition of the historical players in their political contexts as being determinable only a posteriori has appeared. This substantially frees them from any deterministic anchoring to their position with respect to the means and methods of production. The enormous success of the identity dimension is not only explained by the fact that it makes it possible to take into account the process of the construction of social groups (of class through the class struggle, to use E.P Thompson's idea) but also by the fact that with this it has become possible to clear the role of the present-past nexus in the reinvention of tradition which accompanies the processes of legitimation and re-legitimation of social change.
These fundamental transformations in historiographic practice have been translated into some cultural reorientations of notable importance. The first of these is precisely the affirmation of new attention being given to the processes of invention and reinvention of tradition (E.J.Hobsbawm). If a heuristic aspiration lies at the heart of the epistemological growth of the historical discipline since its beginnings, recognisable at least starting from the texts of Bollandist Jesuits and Maurine Benedictines right through to the theorisations of Ranke and the Prussian school, the epistemological maturity that the discipline earned during the 20th century and the awareness of the existence in the historical operation of a double hermenuetic register, has produced a growing attraction for the political use of a past continually invented and reused for the aims of the present. Attention thus moves from the true/false binary opposition to the use made of historical sources and/or texts. "Incredible" genealogies and invented prosopographies now are sources as useful as the demographic data patiently collected using Henry and Fleury's methods of reconstructing the family. While social groups considered as solid realities, such as the English working class, have thus been investigated as a "forming" reality, complex and layered, the process of nation building has been re-read starting from the presuppositions of cultural integration (L.Colley) forged by "immaginary communities" (R.Benedict), often piloted by constructions of topoi and stereotypes (E.Said).
The second reorientation has come about in the area of that which was once called the history of political thought. If the history of political ideas was traditionally essentially investigated in search of theoretical innovation, with a privileging of the authorial "great tradition", it has now passed to looking much more carefully at current circulation. This evolution has been seen above all in work in pre-Revolutionary France considered rightly or wrongly (following the seminal works of J.Habermas and R.Koselleck) the cradle of modern public opinion. A tradition which essentially saw the ideal hunting ground for charting the waves of cultural change and even the intellectual roots of the Revolution in the transformations of the late 18th century public sphere (D. Mornet) has largely fallen into disuse, while the works of D. Roche, R. Darnton and R. Chartier have gradually enlarged views of the Enlightenment tradition to include a more complex universe of texts, made up of pamphlets, newspapers, serialised novels, occasional writings, libels, transcriptions of sentences, satirical invectives in prose and verse. This is a tendency in some ways parallel to that seen in England, where Quentin Skinner and J.A.G. Pocock have modified the traditional vision of a history of ideas limited to great thinkers to enlarge it to include the enormous mass of texts produced in the period of the "British civil wars", already given much attention in its time by Christopher Hill.
A third reorientation lies in the affirmation, again beginning in the 1980s and thanks to the rediscovery of the seminal work of Ernst Kantorowicz, of a wider conception of political communication. New attention given to prints, to the circulation of satirical images, to emblems and devices, influenced by the parallel transformations which have run through art criticism (A.Warburg), has been accompanied by a great attention to the modality of the rhetoric of gestuality, of public rituals, and, above all through the rediscovery of Norbert Elias, of the etiquette and ceremonies of court. The study of political communications has therefore gone over and above not only the study of tracts, but the written word itself, extending to the analysis of the kind of "illustrated politics" made up of all the representations organised by the social body, from public ceremonies to auto da fé, from collective rites to "good manners", from celebrational "triumphs" to the ritualised manifestations of dissent, protest and opposition. Above all, characterisation on the basis of identity, evidently in progress, conferred on social groups has obliged new political history to dedicate more attention to the symbolic dimension, to those signs of recognition around which collective identities concentrate and coagulate.
Thanks to these developments it is now possible to dwell on the theme of the uses of history in political communication, in a notably different way from the one traditionally understood. Not only the historiographic tradition in the proper sense, not only the wider occasional literature but also the images and the forms of ceremony, and above all the symbols re-enter this view. If, for contemporary history, an important dimension in which the new approach has been concretised is that of the "sites of memory" (P. Nora), the history of the modern era constitutes an extremely fertile terrain on which to apply the theme. It is precisely in the investigation of the ancien régime that one can see, earlier and more consistently than anywhere else, the beginning of that intolerance of modernising anachronisms which then made up the dominant methodology mark of new political history. <<<