Stanciu-Narrativity, Experience and Meaning

History and Theory 0, no. 0 (May 2024), 1–9 © 2024 The Author(s).
History and Theory published by Wiley

Periodicals LLC on behalf of Wesleyan University. ISSN: 0018-2656
DOI: 10.1111/hith.12355
REVIEW ESSAY
NARRATIVITY, EXPERIENCE, AND MEANING1
HISTORIA FALLIDA. By Kalle Pihlainen. Translated by Rodrigo Zamorano.

Buenos Aires: Palinodia, 2023. Pp. 96.
ABSTRACT
This review essay aims to reconstruct the main tenets of the “narrative constructivist”
position defended by Kalle Pihlainen in his book titled Historia fallida and to lay out
some of the ambiguities this position generates. I begin by exposing the core commitments
underwriting this theoretical project and insist upon the centrality of the distinction be-
tween constructivism and constructionism and upon the arguments he advances against the
contemporary approaches in the theory of history that advocate the idea of an experience
or a presence of the past. Then, I outline the criticism he levels against the understanding
of historians’ work as a “conversation with the past” and highlight that, on Pihlainen’s
account, a responsible historical enterprise must necessarily assume the unavailability
of the past and, hence, the ontological distinction between the present and the past. In
the final part of the essay, I formulate three interrogations with regard to the overall
orientation of this project. First, drawing on Reinhart Koselleck’s concept of a “historical
nonsynchronicity,” I question the possibility of establishing a clear-cut separation between
the past and the present and show that the present is never a homogenous field, for it entails
different levels of temporality and a plurality of conflicting registers of meaning. Then, I
challenge the description of the past as “a closed domain with no room for interaction.”
Finally, I point out that the gap Pihlainen introduces between historical narratives and
existential narratives cannot be maintained insofar as the historian’s practice must be
anthropologically grounded—that is, it must be understood as drawing on a narrative
capacity (narrativeness) that belongs to the human life-form.
Keywords: narrativity, constructivism, presence, experience of the past, narrativism, histor-

ical nonsynchronicity, narrative identity, affectivity
In his recent book titled Historia fallida (History undone), Kalle Pihlainen
pursues the theoretical project that he outlined in his 2017 book, The Work of
History: Constructivism and a Politics of the Past, by further elaborating the car-
dinal insights sustaining his approach and by putting his framework to use in new
contexts. His previous work was centered around three main intellectual tasks.
First, Pihlainen attempted to offer a restatement of a “narrative constructivist”
1. The work was funded by the EU’s NextGenerationEU instrument through the National Recovery
and Resilience Plan of Romania Pilar III-C9-I-8, managed by the Ministery of Research, Innovation
and Digitalization, within the project entitled “The Life of the Heart: Phenomenology of Body and
Emotions,” contract no. 760052/23.05.2023, code CF 21/14.11.2022.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommer-
cial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work
is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
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2 NARRATIVITY, EXPERIENCE, AND MEANING
position in the theory of history in a way that would be both consistent with the
broad spirit of Hayden White’s approach and capable of overcoming the common
misconceptions associated with it, the chief of which being the reduction of
constructivism to constructionism—that is, to a relativist and antirealist position.
In this regard, he insisted that adopting a constructivist view does not imply the
dismissal of the protocols that enable us to establish past facts—to formulate
individual descriptive statements about past realities—but rather amounts to
acknowledging the constructed character of meaning and the ideological nature
of the various practices of history-writing. The emphasis placed on “narrativity”
and “construction” is meant to dispel the naive notion that the activity of the
historian consists in registering, recollecting, and reporting “brute” or “naked”
facts and retracing the connections between them. On the contrary, associating
history-writing with narrativity and fiction amounts to recognizing that historians
are active and creative in relation to the past; that is, they are constantly encoding
events into a structure and framing the past to fit into a narrative. However,
the meaningful units and the narrative patterns fashioned by historians are not
arbitrary: the profusion of sociocultural codes and commitments, determining
both scholarly pursuits and everyday practices, places heavy restrictions on the
way narrative truth can be articulated and enables us to distinguish between rival
renderings of a particular portion of the past. However, these constraints are con-
textual, social, and pragmatic and do not stem from the positive reality of the past.
Second, he purported to offer a defense of this theoretical program and to ward
off the objections leveled against it by a powerful contemporary trend in the the-
ory of history that advocates the necessity of “mov[ing] away from an ‘excessive’
focus on narrative, representation and language”2 in order to retrieve a presence,
an experience, or a “direct access” to the past (a position that can be found most
notably in the works of Frank Ankersmit, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, and Eelco
Runia). The crucial insight motivating such approaches is the unsurpassable rift
between past reality and its narrative fashioning or processing—that is, the rift
between the past and the stories we tell about it. However, on Pihlainen’s reading,
the appeals to “presence” or “experience” and, moreover, the project of grasping
the past “on its own terms” are fueled by a desire for immediacy that obliterates
the necessary mediated character of our relation to the past and runs the risk of
falling back into a variant of positivism. If we attend to the epistemological pre-
scriptions and the methodological strictures that are inherent in the discipline of
history, we must admit that the historical past remains experientially inaccessible
or unattainable—that is, we can never get “in touch” with it. The only way of
grappling with the past is through complex meaning-formation processes that, by
their very nature, keep us at distance from it: history is an object of knowledge,
not a field of experience.
Third, he sought to outline the practical implications of his position and
to emphasize the ethical and political commitments that are embedded in the
constructivist framework. Insofar as historical narratives can serve as carriers
2. Kalle Pihlainen, The Work of History: Constructivism and a Politics of the Past (New York:
Routledge, 2017), xv.
OVIDIU STANCIU 3
of established or hegemonic ideologies, narrative constructivism is inextrica-
bly bound to a politics of the past: endorsing such a theoretical stance may
have important repercussions within the present by enabling interventions in
contemporary societal debates.
These theoretical motives are taken up and worked out in further detail in His-
toria fallida. In the first chapter, Pihlainen offers a vehement critique of the un-
derstanding of historians’ work as a “conversation with the past” (13) by showing
that this metaphor is based on an essentialization of the past that misapprehends
its ontological status. He advocates for replacing the metaphor of conversation
with that of reading in our dealing with the past: conceiving the historian’s en-
gagement with the past as an act of reading can preserve both the alterity of the
past and the difficulty of grasping it adequately while at the same time emphasiz-
ing the necessity of devising intellectual strategies for approaching it and making
sense of it. In the second chapter, he discusses the arguments that can be adduced
to support the historical practice in the context of the breakdown of the belief
in history as an “objective science” endowed with a didactic function and in the
context of the commodification of historical artifacts. Admitting that tropes such
as “historia magistra vitae” or “those who do not know the past are doomed to
repeat it” are not only misguided but also irremediably worn-out may open the
space for a “critical history” that is attentive both to the receiving subject and its
interests and to the exclusionary power structures that are at play in traditional
history-writing. On his account, such a critical history would be capable of per-
forming a “therapeutic function” (47) with regard to individuals and communi-
ties. In the third chapter, Pihlainen tackles the question of the status of historical
writing and maintains that the criticism leveled against White’s association of the
historical enterprise with literature is ill-founded. He shows that the project of
returning to a “historical real” or to an “experience of the past,” a project that
has been championed by several contemporary theorists of history, is based on
a misinterpretation of the difference between fiction as an imaginary or illusion-
ary production and fiction as a construction of meaning, as an organization of
the traces of the past according to certain patterns that are not intrinsic to those
documents: meaning is constructed and not received; it is projected onto past
materials and not autochthonous to them. Thus, underlining history’s “fictioned-
ness” is not tantamount to blurring the line between res factae and res fictae but
rather aims to pinpoint the common patterns and conventions of building narra-
tives that are at play in both fictional and historical writing and, furthermore, to
heighten our awareness of the representational strategies that are embedded in
any rendering of the past. However, in this discussion, a new sense of experi-
ence emerges, for, as Pihlainen puts it, “historians can and probably should strive
for experientiality” (63). According to this new understanding, experience should
be seen as something historians must strive toward and not something they start
off from, as the result of history-writing and not as its presupposition. In the fi-
nal chapter of the book, Pihlainen discusses one of the challenges history-writing
has had to face in recent decades—namely, that of representing identities and
claims that identities are not the presupposition of history-writing but rather its
effects.
Several cross-cutting themes run throughout the chapters and sustain the over-
arching argument Pihlainen puts forth in this book. A pivotal theme, one of the
guiding threads of the inquiry, is the assumption that the past is “ontologically
distinct from the present” (14) or that there is an “ontological break between the
past and representations of it” (16). Acknowledging the “ontological distance, the
unavailability, the radical alterity” (16) of the past enables Pihlainen not only to
distinguish the historical enterprise from any form of engagement with our per-
sonal or cultural memory; indeed, in one case, we are dealing with sources, doc-
uments, traces, and echoes of a bygone reality, while, in the other, we can draw
on experiential motives and embodied structures. It also enables him to challenge
the metaphor of a “conversation with the past,” which is employed by some con-
temporary theorists of history. On his view, such a “communicative metaphor” is
ill-constructed: for a conversation to take place, we need at least two participants,
both endowed with a form of agency, both able to address each other. However,
one must admit that the past is bereft of any form of initiative and that it cannot
speak back. Thus, in works where such a “dialogue” with the past is staged, the
conversation is one-directional: one of the partners is not capable of actual par-
ticipation, as the historian formulates both the questions and the answers. This is
not because of some provisional lack in the historian’s practice that could be cor-
rected by further methodological refinements but rather occurs for structural rea-
sons: the remnants of the past, the handed-down documents and sources, traces,
and inscriptions, are themselves mute and become meaningful—that is, they start
to have a voice—only insofar as the historian lends them his own voice by crafting
narratives out of them. Thus, unless we subscribe to a view whereby the historian
becomes a mystical medium capable of overcoming the ontological distance sepa-
rating us from the past, we have to acknowledge that we are simply removed from
the past, that we do not have any direct grasp of it, and that, hence, the only way
to engage with it is through the production of meaningful matrixes of meaning, by
means of critical constructions, that remain necessarily problematic and incom-
plete. Any form of mutual involvement is thereby excluded, and the possibility of
a dialogue is foreclosed.
Another theme that features prominently throughout the book is the difference
between “past” and “history.” While “past” designates the entirety of human re-
ality that existed before us, “history” is that part of the past that has already been
mapped out by historians or that could be mapped out by them. There are impor-
tant slices of the past that do not lend themselves to a historical elucidation un-
dertaken according to the protocols of the profession and that are treated by other
disciplines, such as archeology, anthropology, ethnology, psychoanalysis, and ge-
netics. Therefore, history should not be thought of as the only way of engaging
with the past or as the best approach for coming to grips with the past. It can even
be argued that, with regard to stretches of the past that do lend themselves to his-
torical study, history does not have any particular privilege in dealing with them.
Indeed, we might get a firmer grasp of the social world of the Second Bourbon
Restoration and of the July Monarchy by reading Honoré de Balzac’s The Hu-
man Comedy than we could get from examining the political, social, or cultural
OVIDIU STANCIU 5
histories of the period. However, questioning the privilege that is traditionally
granted to history—that is, the privilege of being considered the most appropriate
means of dealing with the past—does not lead to its dismissal as a legitimate intel-
lectual enterprise. On the contrary, such a gesture may instead enable us to make
transparent the specific operations historians perform and to expose the narrative
strategies and the theoretical commitments that undergird history’s peculiar way
of relating to the past.
A critical point determining much of the discussion in the book has to do with
what Pihlainen calls “the historian’s phenomenological yearning—a yearning for
the ‘reality’ of the past when dealing with it” (22). This irrepressible urge can
overtake historians only insofar as they admit that the past is capable of forcing
its way into the present, of intruding into the field of experience to which each
historian belongs. Thus, the thirst for historical reality has as its counterpart the
past’s ability to reach out to us and to disturb the narratives we fashion about it.
Pihlainen takes aim at such accounts insofar as, on his view, they embody implau-
sible assumptions concerning the possibilities that are inherent in the exercise of
history and appeal to ideas of empathy or transposition in another worldview that
are not only impossible to fulfill but, moreover, incompatible with the critical dis-
tance historians must assume. While the propensity to restore a direct connection
with the past might be a legitimate motive driving someone to engage in the study
of history, acknowledging the specific norms, procedures, and limitations govern-
ing the discipline of history should prevent us from adopting it as the fundamental
objective of history-writing.
The wealth of topics discussed in the book testifies to how much of the
theoretical landscape narrative constructivism can encompass. Moreover, the
sharpness and the clarity with which the main theses are formulated can con-
tribute to bringing the discussion a step further. In this spirit, we can formulate
a certain number of interrogations with regard to the overall orientation of
this project. While the book warns us against any “unwarranted conflations of
personal memory and historical knowledge” (17) and insists that the past should
be conceived as that which exists “beyond our domain of experience” (20), we
may wonder whether such an account involves a one-sided account of the present.
The clear-cut distinction between our domain of experience and the past domain
of experience relies on the assumption that we live in one domain of experience,
that the present constitutes a unified field possessing a definite shape. However,
it may be argued that what characterizes the present is precisely its processuality
and incompleteness, which prohibit its crystallization into a rigid configuration of
meaning. Insofar as it is an ongoing process, the present is never a homogenous
field, for it entails different, or even discordant, levels of temporality, a plurality of
conflicting registers of meaning that cannot be unified or brought to a standstill.
Drawing on a theme already worked out by Ernst Bloch and Reinhart Koselleck,
Rebecca Comay evokes, in her book on the reception of the French Revolution in
German philosophy, the idea of a “historical nonsynchronicity” and argues that
this moment in German history can be seen as entailing “a dissonant counterpoint
of divergent rhythms running along separate tracks, each set to a different tempo
and a different beat.”3 She goes on to transfer the characteristics elaborated in

relation to this historical moment to the historical experience as such. On her
account, “a structural anachronism afflicts all historical experience. The clocks
are never synchronized, the schedules never coordinated, every epoch is a discor-
dant mix of divergent rhythms, unequal durations, and variable speeds.”4 We are
constantly “burdened with a legacy that is not ours to inherit, mourning the loss of
what was never ours to relinquish, driven by the pressure of secondhand desires,
handed-down fantasies, and borrowed hopes.”5 Thus, every historical present is
characterized not only by its mobility and incompleteness but also by its inner
discordance, by its capacity to envelop different temporal layers: unfulfilled or
protracted projections and residues of an undischarged past mingle continuously
and are woven together within the present to give it its unmanageable form.
However, if the present can appear as intrinsically plural, as nonhomogeneous, as
possessing a depth, we may wonder whether the past can adequately be thought
of as irremediably gone and as stretched out behind the present. Should it not
instead be thought of as inhabiting the present, as when archaisms, words that are
no longer in use, can still be understood by the speaker of a language, or when
social institutions, having lost their force, are still at work in the present, but
only as vestiges we don’t want to get rid of? Rather than being contiguous with
the present, the past is interwoven with it so that it belongs to the fabric of our
experience. This theoretical situation may not only cast doubt on the clear-cut
distinction between the present and the past that organizes much of Pihlainen’s
analyses; it may also rehabilitate the idea of a presence of the past within the
present. Paying heed to the sloppiness of the present—that is, its deep-seated
heterogeneity and the relentless misalignment between the divergent temporal
strands that determine its makeup—may thus enable us to redeem a sense of the
past’s presence without resorting to a naive realism and while remaining far away
from any form of immediacy and positivity. What is thus uncovered is not a way
of getting in touch or reestablishing contact with the past but rather the way in
which the past is implicated in the unruly configuration of the present.
Furthermore, there seems to be an important gap between the two theses
that determine the book’s broader argument. Pihlainen maintains, on one hand,
that “the past existed beyond our domain of experience” (22) and, on the other,
that “the past is a closed domain with no room for interaction” (41). Although the
author might have intended these claims to be equivalent, there is an important
conceptual leap between these two formulations. Understanding the past as a
“closed domain” implies that it remains forever unattainable, that the only way we
can deal with it is through fiction or construction, while claiming that it is distant,
or that it exists “beyond our domain of experience,” rules out only the possibility
of an immediate relation to it and leaves open the possibility of a “communication
at distance,” which, although not modeled on the paradigm of conversation, might
3. Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2011), 2.
4. Ibid., 4.
5. Ibid.
OVIDIU STANCIU 7
enable us to get access to it—as we can get access to other remote domains of
experience. (We can consider, in this regard, the work of anthropologists.)
To make sense of the claim that the past is a “closed domain,” we must
examine the counter-concept that it necessarily calls forth—namely, the idea of
an “open” or “transparent” domain. Such a domain cannot be simply equated
with the present, for, as we have seen, the present is itself plural and, within the
present, we are confronted with an array of matrixes of meaning that remain
opaque to us: contemporaneity is not synonymous with accessibility or openness.
What, then, could legitimately count as an “open domain”? Presumably, it
refers to the societal and cultural field into which one is embedded, the familiar
background of our lives, whose symbolic codes and structures are transparent
to us; this is the field where our expectations of meaning are more often than
not fulfilled. Insisting that a historian is always situated in an “open domain”
and that the historian is articulating historical narratives and working out ex-
plicative frameworks from this unique vantage point amounts to calling into
question the pretensions of an objectivist history and avoiding the delusions
of a view-from-nowhere. However, highlighting the historian’s situatedness
should not lead us to conclude that the historian is encapsulated in a rigorously
delineated domain, one that possesses rigid confines. A powerful direction in
contemporary phenomenology, one that has been developed by authors such as
Bernhard Waldenfels and Anthony Steinbock,6 has shown that a coefficient of
alienness always affects our way of inhabiting the world so that the sphere of our
belonging is never entirely closed off or completely severed from the outside.
Rather, that which does not fit into our conceptual schemes or that which cannot
be assimilated into the hegemonic framework of meaning—the “alien” or the
“other”—always permeates and contaminates our sphere of ownness. A form of
“alienness,” “otherness,” or “absence” belongs to the makeup of our experience:
“the alien begins in ourselves and not outside ourselves.”7 However, insofar as
we are open not only to that which is familiar to us but also to that which is alien
to us, we may conclude that the past, while remaining at a distance, should not
be conceived as a closed, inaccessible, or unreachable domain.
Finally, it is worthwhile to inquire whether the procedures of meaning-
formation that enable us to find our way in the world and to get along in our
daily lives and the meaning-formation strategies forged by historians are formally
equivalent or genealogically related to one another. In this regard, Pihlainen points
out in The Work of History that “meaning is imposed on facts in their employment
and figuration, whether in history writing or in more everyday practices of under-
standing,”8 and he consequently stresses “the ubiquitousness of narrative as a
6. See, among others, Bernhard Waldenfels, Phenomenology of the Alien: Basic Concepts, transl.
Alexander Kozin and Tanja Stähler (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011); Bernhard
Waldenfels, The Question of the Other (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2007); and Anthony
J. Steinbock, Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1995).
7. Waldenfels, Phenomenology of the Alien, 76.
8. Pihlainen, The Work of History, xxi.
sense-making strategy.”9 However, these declarations seem to be at odds with his

resolute rejection of the perspective articulated by certain theorists of narrative
identity (such as David Carr10 ) who seek to inscribe the narrative practice of the
historian into a broader picture and to underscore its necessary links to—or, even
stronger, its dependence on—an understanding of the self as a narrative identity.
The view advanced by the narrative-identity theorists affirms, on the one hand,
that our personal identity—our selfhood—consists in the unity of the history of
our life and, on the other, that the unity of the history of our life is structured as
the unity of a narrated story.11 Thus, on this account, an individual’s identity is
not objectively given in that individual’s life and then simply reflected in a story;
rather, it is constructed by the narrative that organizes the occurred events into a
meaningful sequence. We constitute ourselves by constantly recounting our lives.
Relying on the alleged isomorphism between the way individuals unify their lives
in a coherent story and the way historians organize the past to fit into a compelling
narrative, the proponents of the narrative-identity theory attempt to construct a
bridge between the stories individuals tell about themselves and the narratives
historians fashion about the past.
Against what he deems to be the reduction of historical processes to the actor’s
perspective, Pihlainen strongly asserts that admitting structural parallels between
these two levels does not amount to acknowledging a relation of derivation be-
tween the two. While it is true that, in both cases, the unity is crafted and is not
simply the mirroring of a preexistent reality, this does not imply that the accounts
forged by historians can be extracted from the self-understandings of the actors in-
volved in the processes that are under scrutiny. To offer a rendering of a particular
historical epoch does not amount to reproducing or synthesizing the accounts of
the participants, for such an undertaking entails formulating statements that could
not have been proffered in that period. For instance, to carve out concepts that
are meant to capture determinate economic conditions or social transformations
is tantamount to advancing a series of statements that cannot be drawn directly
from individual sources. Furthermore, it is obvious that, when historians attempt
to delineate long-term processes that span various generations, envelop a range
of experiences, and entail structural changes within a determinate society, they
construct narratives that are not contained in any singular source; nor are they
obtained through the summation of individual sources. The dynamics that are re-
constructed cannot be ascribed to any singular agent or to the sum of the agents
involved.
However, although the arguments Pihlainen levels against any straightforward
or linear derivation of historical narratives from individual narratives are convinc-
ing, his position seems less compelling when he discards any form of relations
or articulation between individual and historical narratives. His main critical
concern is that of rejecting what might be called a “narratological realism,” the
9. Ibid., 6.
10. See David Carr, Experience and History: Phenomenological Perspectives on the Historical
World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
11. In this regard, see, among others, László Tengelyi, The Wild Region in Life-History, transl.
Géza Kállay (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2004), xv.
OVIDIU STANCIU 9
thesis according to which stories we tell are “real.” But even if we accept his
reservations with regard to attributing reality to narratives, we might still wonder
whether the consequences he extracts from this are excessive. Indeed, assuming
that individual and historical narratives can be articulated does not amount to
leveling down or dissolving the differences between the two; nor does it amount
to establishing a unilinear relation of dependence. Rather, it entails acknowl-
edging that the practice of history-writing is not deprived of any mooring that is
anthropologically grounded. The narratives historians construct make sense to us
precisely because they draw on a narrative capacity that belongs to the human
life-form. Thus, we can rescue Pihlainen’s claim concerning “the ubiquitousness
of narrative as a sense-making strategy” by giving it a different twist: historical
practices are rooted in an existential “narrativeness” that is proper to the human
life-form; they draw on an all-pervading meaning-making strategy.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Open access publishing facilitated by Anelis Plus (the official name of Asociatia
Universitatilor, a Institutelor de Cercetare “Dezvoltare si a Bibliotecilor Centrale
Universitare din Romania”), as part of the Wiley - Anelis Plus agreement.
OVIDIU STANCIU
University of Bucharest

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History and Theory 0, no. 0 (May 2024), 1–9 © 2024 The Author(s).

History and Theory published by Wiley

NARRATIVITY, EXPERIENCE, AND MEANING1

HISTORIA FALLIDA. By Kalle Pihlainen. Translated by Rodrigo Zamorano.

Keywords: narrativity, constructivism, presence, experience of the past, narrativism, histor-

and a different beat.”3 She goes on to transfer the characteristics elaborated in

sense-making strategy.”9 However, these declarations seem to be at odds with his

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