4.4 AT TATE BRITAIN

‘After method', in this chapter, has had two different meanings. In developing the first meaning, I have described an encounter between the historical disciplines and international law that seems full of promise.

I will finish this chapter by offering a brief epilogue (perhaps more of a prolegomenon) on what I want to call literary virtue after method. And the reason we might want to think of this as literary is because it resembles the best fiction. What is it to be Shostakovich in the 1930s? One answer is found in Julian Barnes's novel, The Noise of Time, which I happened to be reading as I wrote this. The quality that emerges from the exchange between writer (Barnes) and writee (Shostakovich) is sympathetic engagement with predica- ment.^[220] Similarly, and this hews close to some familiar and proximate meth­odological credos, a tonally convincing history might at least start with the predicament of a treatise writer in 1884 or a publicist in 1589 or an institution­builder in 1919 or, indeed, the predicament of those who had been in the habit of receiving international law rather than making it. When we feel the predicament of writer and subject as we do in literature, this history produced seems both indirect and more plausible.

An associated literary virtue requires a sensitivity to the present and future as well. A lot of conventional history in these fields holds the present in a certain position as it moves into the past. So, the present is understood to be, say, self- evidently, the era of globalisation or technique or market or, to go back to earlier ‘presents', the clash of universalist ideologies or the culmination of this or that progress or anti-progress narrative. This is not quite a methodology - though certain methodologies will enact it - but more of predisposition or what Hartog calls, ‘a regime'.^[223] In Hartog's case it is not so much that only the present exists but that the present exists only as a present.^[224] Thus we have the idea of ‘a history of the present' - one that unnerves and reveals the conditions of possibility that define the present is familiar enough now from work on genealogy.^[225] Or, to put it less abstractly, historians are enjoined to vigilantly watch over the present (Charles Peguy).^[226]

The question that might dog us (or inspire us) here is the question of what we want from history or what history demands from us. What conceptions of the present force us into a certain way of thinking about the past?^[227] What attitude to the present or demand made by an imagined present threatens to obliterate those strange or alien aspects of the past histories and past thinkers that might be suggestive of a different politics? If every political arrangement is understood as ‘sovereignty' or even anti-sovereignty then we might deny ourselves the resources to think about alternative political futures.

The Tate Britain recently curated an exhibition called Artist and Empire. Apart from giving the impression that Empire had been a series of glorious defeats or, at least, ‘Last Stands' (Gordon, Wolfe), there was a surprisingly large number of paintings depicting treaty-making and negotiation. So, one story offered (though I am mutilating the exhibition here) as one moved from Room 2 to Room 3 of the Gallery was of imperial expansion as a period of treaty-formation followed by a catalogue of British military disasters: as if the British had somehow been hoodwinked by international law into a bunch of unequal treaties. Of course, things tended to work the other way. But the paintings themselves are actually quite ambiguous. This was not really just international law being brought to some extra-European world. There was a degree of mutuality (though one wouldn't want to overstate this). The most striking thing about one of the paintings (dating from 1773), Agostino Brunias's Sir William Young Conducting a Treaty with the Black Caribs on the Island of St Vincent, is the representation of the Black Carib chief, Chatoyer, who assesses his interlocutors with a look of wry appraisal: as if the historical context of empire had stepped out of the painting to comment directly upon it. Suddenly, this subaltern gaze at the treaty-makers suggests treaties as instru­ments of anachronism: not quite fit for purpose or out of step with the times, or fictions to be treated with amusement or disdain.

‘After method', then, we might look at history anew. Yes, with sympathy for the choices and milieux of our protagonists and a greater sensitivity to the detail of their social, cultural, and political lives and their worlds of struggle (Scott), yes, with a refusal of the easy traditions of linearity and expansion and unity (history as a history of ‘dead effects' (Benjamin)) in favour of a setting down of complexity in its fullness. But most of all with the intuition that after method, we might be able to see history in all its strangeness.

For us, as lawyers, history, for sure, is an itinerary (and generator) of norms or precedents - sometimes wrenched from their context - but it is also a place where we might go to feel estranged from the current world so that we revisit it as strangers and habituees, and experience both its abject familiarity and closedness as well as, and at the same time, its sheer unlikeliness and mutability.