keith thomas takes note of taking notes.
It never helps historians to say too much about their working methods. For just as the conjuror’s magic disappears if the audience knows how the trick is done, so the credibility of scholars can be sharply diminished if readers learn everything about how exactly their books came to be written.
Surely history is one of the most important things for us to imagine and to realize that we are imagining.
— Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (quoted in David Shulman, “A Passion for Hindu Myths,” New York Review of Books, 19 November 2009)
the historian of customs and ideas vs. the historian of events.
The historian of customs and ideas has no less austere a mission than the historian of events. The latter has the surface of civilization, the struggles for crowns, the births of princes, the marriages of kings, the battles, the assemblies, the great public men, the revolutions in broad daylight, all the externals; the other historian has the internals, the background, the common people who work, suffer, and wait, the downtrodden woman, the child in its death throes, the muted one-on-one wars, obscure ferocities, the prejudices, the accepted iniquities, the hidden repercussions of the law, the secret revolutions of souls, the indistinct quiverings of the multitudes, those ding of hunger, the barefoot, the barearmed, the disinherited, the orphans, the wretched, and the vile, all the spineless worms that wander in the dark. He has to descend, his heart full of charity and severity at the same time, like a brother and like a judge, right down to those impenetrable blockhouses where those who are bleeding and those who strike, those who are crying and those who curse, those who go without food and those who devour, those who endure wrong and those who do it, crawl and slither willy-nilly. Are the duties of these historians of hearts and souls lesser than those of the historians of external events? Do you think Dante has less to say than Machiavelli? Is the bottom of civilization, being deeper and darker, any less important than the top? Can you really know the mountain well if you don’t know anything about the cave?
We must say, however, in passing that from some of the above you might infer that there is a clear-cut division between the two classes of historian that does not, to our mind, exist. Nobody can be a good historian of the patent, visible, dazzling, and public life of peoples if he is not at the same time, to a certain extent, a historian of their deep and hidden life; and nobody can be a good historian of the inner life if he can’t manage to be, whenever necessary, a historian of events, and the other way round. They are two different orders of fact that match each other, that always follow on from one another and often generate each other. All the lines of Providence draws on a nation’s surface have their somber but distinct parallels down below, and all the convulsions down below produce upheavals on the surface. True history involving everything, the true historian gets involved with everything.
Man is not a circle with a single center; he is an ellipse with two focal points. Deeds are one, ideas the other.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, trans. Julie Rose
history’s shadowy past.
In spite of worthy, and indeed indispensable, attempts to become different, history, as its clearsighted practitioners are obliged to admit, can never completely divest itself of myth.
- Claude Levi-Strauss
caroline walker bynum proposes a work slowdown of historic proportions.
Caroline Walker Bynum has an intriguing essay in the Winter 2009 edition of Daedalus in which she asks historians to slow down. I imagine this applies to most fields in the academic humanities and perhaps beyond to intellectual life in general. Bynum argues that for young historians, value has been placed increasingly on research productivity rather than quality.
To combat this, Bynum argues for a postmodern notion of what historical knowledge is. She wants us to recognize that our own interpretations and arguments are but partial parts of the whole cloth of historical narrative. This ideological position, she contends, could serve as a framework for stopping the knowledge production speed-up that has been afflicting the humanities, and history in particular. Here’s how she puts it:
I propose that we adopt toward professional practices the same postmodern stance that has facilitated creative new work in the substance of our scholarship. For if we could really understand what we undertake as historians to be by definition partial and discontinuous, forever redone and in need of redoing because of our own cultural situated-ness, we—all of us, young scholars and old—would be able to slow down. If there is no goal at the end of the race—that is, if the point is the running not the goal—why sprint instead of stroll (especially if sprinting damages our knees forever)?
Bynum makes an important addition to this argument. For she is no relativist:
Awareness that we all write from a particular perspective and with the aid of specific methods and interpretations does not mean that there is no difference between good and bad arguments; opposing the transparency of evidence—whether objects or texts—does not mean opposing evidence. Indeed, exactly the opposite is true. More attention to the complex and indirect ways in which evidence renders up the past leads to more attention to the cogency and accuracy of argument.
For Bynum, the key notion is that we adopt a postmodern methodology—a kind of empathetic skepticism—that might undergird a new economy of thinking and writing history.
But paying more attention means taking more time. What I suggest is that an enthusiastic acceptance (instead of a grim fear) that each of us writes from a partial perspective might free us from the pressures of speed-up and over-production.
There are wonderfully radical implications in Bynum’s call for a postmodern turn in historical method, particularly in mapping out a philosophy that pushes toward deeper, more fully-realized scholarship that speaks to the meandering and often difficult pursuit of new truths, even partial truths (or better said, of evidence-based interpretations that join the rich fabric of meanings that make up the past).
The only problem is that Bynum really does sidestep the economic and institutional dimensions of the speed-up she identifies in scholarly production. She does so in a manner, I must add, that only an institutionally and economically well-established scholar is capable of doing (I want to make clear here that Bynum is, in my opinion, absolutely and deservedly well-established—her work is magnificent and this essay is important in its argument—but that doesn’t dismiss the condescending undertone that keeps creeping in to this otherwise insightful article).
The problem is twofold. The first is that the essay lacks of a deeper explanation of the speed-up’s causes, particularly as they relate to economic and institutional factors. “I am attempting to counter (at least for the United States) that current professional anxieties are owing primarily to economic or institutional forces,” she writes.
Bynum does not link the academic culture of the speed-up to any material basis. I’m not asking for a crass Marxist base-superstructure argument here. I’m a culture rover after all. But the problem is that Bynum only kind of “ahems” about the experience of the crisis for many aspiring scholars in the humanities. She writes, “Despite a disturbing increase in the number of people in adjunct or part-time positions who would prefer full-time employment, and an alarming tendency for women to suffer salary discrimination at later points in their careers and at elite institutions…” and then goes on to cite statistics to argue that the job market is not that bad and that assistant professors are still getting tenure (wait, what about all those adjunct and part-time people she just mentioned?). That’s it.
But, what are the causes of this speed-up? All we get is “as publishers are increasingly willing to review and publish manuscripts in only those areas they think will sell, and department chairpersons and senior professors put greater and greater pressure on young scholars to produce what Jonathan Beck has cynically called work that counts, is countable, and is counted, it will require courage (as indeed it has always done) to tackle genuinely new topics.” Nowhere in this essay do I grasp the reasons behind the increasing focus is on limiting economic and marketing factors (Beck’s idea of “work that counts, is countable, and is counted”). Why is this speed-up happening? What is it about, exactly?
We are just told to have “courage” and enjoy the feeling of our voices swept up in the partial, contingent making of history. Fine. I’m all for exchange and wondering and the mystery of it all. Go team! But are the tenure lines going to be “forever redone and in need of undoing,” as Bynum wants the postmodern knowledge-making to be? Are the endowed chairs going to be “partial,” “fragmentary,” and “truly collaborative”? If you do not alter those institutional and economic factors alongside the call for a postmodern methodology, you seem to be selling younger scholars a bill of goods (for which they will accrue much student debt).
This leads to a second problem—more a blind spot I think—in the essay. Nowhere does Bynum address the ways in which capitalism itself has adjusted so well to the postmodernism sense of “professional practices” she calls for us to adopt. If anyone has made the most of the postmodern acceptance of radical pluralism and its destabilizing, egalitarian implications, it is capitalism in its recent “conquest of cool” guise. I want to be on Bynum’s team, but will most of us wind up as “team members” in the Whole Foods history department? “Associates” instead of associate professors?
Unless structural changes in economics and institutions accompany Bynum’s call for new cultural and intellectual attitudes, this all sounds more like a descent into doublespeak than dissent of the courageous sort she asks young scholars to embark upon. It sounds like superficial changes rather than deeper liberations, or, worse yet, it opens the door for university managers to undo the economic and institutional basis in which postmodern pursuits of historical knowledge might flourish. The puzzle is how to let history become the brave unknown it should be while securing the means for more people to pursue its endless depths of mysterious wonder with dignity.
Despite all that, I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with Bynum’s vision for historical scholarship: first, that there is, indeed, a speed-up; and, second, that she is absolutely right about the real story of history: that it is much more productive to think of it in a postmodern framework, as something contingent, partial, without a larger meta-narrative, and that we might approach our own work as part of a larger canvas, researching and writing “in the comic mode.”
There is a lot of fun and joy to be had in these hard labors of the mind, and there is a need for much more time to be spent on the stitching, on the discovery of new threads, on the fashioning and re-fashioning of the seams, and on the interdisciplinary exchange of tips and the creation of collective patchwork. But the work Bynum envisions will only work if the postmodern knowledge factory itself is reimagined alongside her call for a new postmodern mentalité.
of digital public intellectuals, civic engagers, and policy wonks.
(1) Michael Bérubé visited our Engaged Humanities Scholar as Public Intellectual research workshop at Northwestern U in mid-October. He was smart and funny, offering a model of the public intellectual as witty and welcoming to others.
(2) He talked about his new project, The Left at War, which examines intra-progressive intellectual debates about the military responses to 9/11. Michael argues that cultural studies–particularly the legacy of Stuart Hall’s more explicit political examinations of the ideological background in which Thatcherism emerged in 1980s Britain–can help us gain a better sense of how to build a progressive multilateralism in the US and the world (imitating Hall’s famous phrase “Marxism without guarantees,” I’d call Michael’s vision “multilateralism without guarantees”). Michael’s point was to use Stuart Hall’s more political analysis rather than his more famous subcultural studies work in order to critique both the liberal hawk pro-war position, which was easily coopted by the right, and to criticize what Michael calls the “Manichean left,” which assumes that the enemy of my enemy is my friend (even in this case fundamentalist terrorists). Though I want to learn more from the book about how, exactly, cultural studies fits into this new model of progressive internationalism (Ellen Willis figures in the part of the book Michael did not discuss as much during his visit, which can’t be a bad thing!), Michael’s careful effort to think through how ideas and culture relate to the world of politics was captivating.
(3) Michael’s visit, which took place the same weekend as the wonderful conference at U of Iowa called Platforms for Public Scholars, made me think more consciously about the whole concept of the “public intellectual” in our time. I was left thinking about three different models of public intellectual that both overlap and diverge:
(4) So, how might these three kinds of public intellectualism intersect and overlap and diverge? Where does the digital fit? Are there other kinds of public intellectual activity and what should be their relationships to the models above. I think there are great and perhaps even insurmountable differences between the three models above, and I am left thinking about the role of the digital in exacerbating these differences and, also, the potential of the digital to offer tools for reorganizing public intellectual life in new ways. I want to get away from the “digital is democratic, may a 1000 blogs bloom” euphoria. At the same time, I think the digital does offer enormous potential for a sense of quality intellectual engagement and civic belonging beyond both what the book, magazine, newspaper, and cafe could do in days of yore as well as what the campus could do with chalk and chalkboard.
(5) I’m starting to think about how the abstractions above can be applied to particular projects of scholarly inquiry. So as I begin to organize my next research projects, I am pondering how I might move among the three models above while developing a history of folk music festivals, a biography of Paul Goodman, or a history of the 1976 US bicentennial. And I am thinking about how the digital might be applied in this research, and I’m particularly contemplating how one might represent these different sorts of projects in U.S. intellectual and cultural history through digital means.
For instance, how might the participatory and multicultural dimensions of folk music festivals appear digitally? How might not only the analog music of banjos and clogs and slide guitars and accordions, but also the feeling of community and exchange at these festivals, be investigated through digital means? How might Goodman’s multi-genre approaches to public life appear online? How might the reader/viewer/interactor with this material contribute to making meaning out of it? How might I represent the knowledge gleaned from my research so that it can “go viral,” mutate, be used and re-used in new ways?
(7) Thanks again to Michael Bérubé for his enormous energy and generosity of time and spirit during his visit.
X-posted (and revised somewhat) from HASTAC blog.
sarah best maps her memories of dancing at links hall, chicago.
Shouldn’t all architectural drawings include the memories of what happened within their walls?
a reaction against reactionary history.
David Kaiser’s recent, woe-is-me interview on the History News Network puts traditional history in the role of victim. He places practitioners of “new history” (now almost forty years old, but never mind) in the role of usurping pirates and mutinying crew.
Kaiser’s interview is striking for the ways in which he seems utterly tone deaf to the insights of the multiple approaches he lumps together willy-nilly as “new history.” Worse yet, his objections barely conceal what I can only call a muted racism and misogyny: blacks, browns, yellows, gays, and worst of all (gasp!) women, are suddenly in charge, demanding that their stories be told, too, and that they might too have a hand on the historical steering wheel; oh no, the ship of state might be steered in new directions, and the older modes of political history tossed overboard in favor of silly concerns about gender, language, and the role of those who have not successfully (or tragically, as Kaiser’s own work makes known) concentrated governmental or economic power in their hands!
There are two intertwined strands to Kaiser’s complaint that deserve untangling:
The first is a methodological knot he seeks to unkink. Kaiser wishes to place language and ideology back in the hands of masterful historical actors and he wants to insist that history is about reconstructing the past as those powerful figures understood themselves. “There is an intrinsic interest to studying decisions that affect the lives of millions,” he argues. “Personalities of people like Wilson, Roosevelt, LBJ, Nixon, Westmoreland, etc., are also inherently interesting.”
In contrast to these “inherently interesting” men, Kaiser seems to reject histories that seek to understand the (maybe also inherently interesting?) contexts in which they lived. He points to Frank Costigliola’s explorations of George F. Kennan’s gendered language in shaping understandings of the early Cold War among American diplomats. “That’s a problem,” Kaiser argues, “with post-modernist history, looking for ‘gendered’ language and such in the past.” To Kaiser, “they are not studying the past as such, not asking what words meant to those who used them.”
But the whole point of the new history (social history, cultural history, women’s history, labor history, whatever subfields are not traditional diplomatic and political history) was to explore more carefully “the past as such.” These historians sought to ask whether historical actors themselves were products of history, shaped by the frameworks of larger linguistic, cultural, and ideological forces. They noticed that you couldn’t just ignore the kink in the methodological rope.
Kaiser will have none of this. Without providing much evidence, he asserts that, “What you have to understand is that the new history has given up the idea that the past can be recreated as it really was.” But this has always been the point of “new history”: to investigate carefully the “real” in “really was.”
This first complaint is an age-old one: as Kaiser himself admits, powerful men such as George F. Kennan “don’t make them with complete freedom of action”; and he grants that “sophisticated historians have always understood that.” But for Kaiser, the methodological strand of his complaint is tied up with another problem, one that makes his commentary far more troubling.
His second, and related, complaint is that new historians are relativists. Kaiser simply refuses to engage with the vexing questions of historical objectivity that new history raises. Instead, he dismisses all new history for its “postmodernist” subjectivity and insists that it is dominated by the “assumption that history is simply a matter of valorizing certain people over others.”
I can only describe this second gripe as close-minded, even reactionary; it seeks to close down debate in the name of Kaiser’s asserted version of the truth. And that, upon reflection, seems far more relativistic than anything new history has ever come up with.
I would argue that almost no “new” historians are the relativists Kaiser fears. They have only asked new questions of existing archival materials, sought out untapped sources that raise new perspectives, and explored new categories of analysis. They have not rejected objectivity in doing so, but rather have sought to more carefully expand its scope and, simultaneously, to probe its complexities. Kaiser refuses to see this. And his response to the new history tilts toward a Horowitzian (as in David of the “101 most dangerous academics”) anxiety about new voices and perspectives shaping how we understand the past.
There is a nostalgia in Kaiser’s words for an older kind of worldview, one in which powerful men make history through limited channels of state power or economic might while everyone else has history made for them. This nostalgia barely hides a reactionary backlash against new ways of viewing the world–and maybe also the new people doing that viewing.
Kaiser wants his history to only be about those men “who, by virtue of the positions they occupy, make decisions upon which the lives, property and happiness of thousands, and sometimes millions of people depend.” And he patronizingly dismisses the study of other historical actors as not “the past…as it really was.” His seething resentment against broadening the historical terrain is most striking (and revealing) when he says the following:
I was in grad school when social history was having an impact. It—like women’s history, the history of sexuality, etc., later—was sold as a way to broaden out history by adding previously understudied topics.
Um, it’s not that women or sexuality (or race, or class, or culture, or add to the list) were legitimate and innovative new ways of exploring the past objectively. No, in Kaiser’s form of infantile historical objectivity, they were merely “sold” to unsuspecting and naïve (and feminized?) consumers who were bamboozled into thinking they were true.
“There’s only so much room in the garden,” Kaiser insists of ye old Edenic traditional history, when Adam was in charge until Eve ate the apple, “and the new species are crowding out the old, and replicating themselves much faster.”
Watch out! Those “replicating” weeds of nature have overrun paradise for Kaiser. But maybe it’s more accurate to say that the messy past of historical time as it “really was” has arrived. Better board your ship of state, Noah, and batten down the hatches to survive the flood.
A few related articles:
the past before the past, and after.
Once a self-replicating system develops from chemicals, this is the beginning of genetic history, since each molecule carries the imprint of its ancestor. Dr. Crick, who was interested in the chemistry that preceded replication, once observed, “After this point, the rest is just history.”
— From Nicholas Wade, “New Glimpses of Life’s Puzzling Origins,” New York Times.
Approach politics from behind and cut across societies on the diagonal. – Michel Foucault