Theme Issue 58
History of Knowledge
Edited by Helge Jordheim and David Gary Shaw
Cover image: Odeon of Herodes Atticus, Athens, Greece, by João Marcelo Martins (9 January 2019)
+ HELGE JORDHEIM AND DAVID GARY SHAW, Opening Doors: A Turn to Knowledge, History and Theory, Theme Issue 58 (December 2020), 3-18.
Lively debates have taken place about what the history of knowledge can offer that other approaches cannot. In this article we argue that the advantage of the history of knowledge is its capacity to open up new possibilities for historical work and reflection that are deeply infused with interdisciplinary perspectives and tools. This is important because, within both the academy and in society and politics more widely, we are actually within a knowledge turn or moment in which the stakes of delivering and challenging knowledge are unusually high. At the level of events, experiences, and concepts, the knowledge turn needs examination. The articles in this theme issue also show how issues within the theory of history and the theory of knowledge are ripe for deeper understanding, as both explore deeply issues and doubts about such things as historical development and progress and the existence and importance of knowledge itself, its relation to science and humanistic endeavors, as well as its European, Western, and global historical contexts. These articles also advance a knowledge toolkit of great attraction for historians of all subfields: notions like disknowledge, delay, conceptual and logical comparison, media, materiality, information, and networks are dynamic and productive. In the end, we argue that historical knowledge is itself a key concept that is open to present and past, necessarily constructive in orientation, and skeptical in approach without denying that some types of knowing are more powerful than others and that knowledge as a concept and topic strengthens our interdisciplinary historical and cultural work.
+ FEDERICO MARCON, The Critical Promises of the History of Knowledge: Perspectives from East Asian Studies, History and Theory, Theme Issue 58 (December 2020), 19-47.
This essay, written from the vantage point of a historian specialized in early modern Japan, asks if and in what capacity the history of knowledge offers an advantage for our understanding of the past compared to established historiographical forms. It accounts for the intellectual relevance of this genre of history and concludes with a strong endorsement of its self‐reflexive methodology. It also contends that historical research on East Asia is of inestimable value for this historiographical approach because of its resistance to uncritically universalizing Eurocentric terminology and because of its direct engagement with transcultural translation of both archival sources and heuristic apparatus. Historians working on knowledge production in East Asia or in other parts of the “non‐Western” world must constantly question the effects of their interpretive categories on the topics and archives they study; they are thus accustomed to the epistemological self‐reflection that this new approach seems to require. The essay concludes by advocating metaphorical comparison as a formal model that best expresses historians’ heuristic practices.
+ JEREMY A. GREENE, Knowledge in Medias Res: Toward a Media History of Science, History and Theory, Theme Issue 58 (December 2020), 48-66.
Media history offers an essential but easily overlooked set of tools for understanding scientific facts as historical processes. This essay argues that the “when” of the specific media through which scientific knowledge is created, disseminated, and taken up as authoritative has played a central part in the “how,” “what,” and “why” of scientific fact‐making as well as our iterative attempts to historicize science, medicine, and technology. Attending explicitly to how new (and old) media engage in the production, circulation, and consumption of knowledge can further help the historian understand dilations and contractions in the threshold of participation in scientific fact‐making itself. Manuscripts, printing presses, cheap newsprint, and open‐source digital publications open up and shut down possibilities of who gets to learn about science as news, who gets to act as a nodal point in the circulation of scientific knowledge, and who is able to make and share an observation about the natural world in the first place. Centering the media of scientific knowledge‐in‐the‐making offers a means of relating the history of science to the broader history of knowledge not in terms of absolute difference but in terms of the specificity of mediation.
+ LISA GITELMAN, Popular Kinematics: Technical Knowing in the Age of Machines, History and Theory, Theme Issue 58 (December 2020), 67-85.
The history of knowledge easily includes the history of science but has a harder time including the history of technology. Although the historical profession has productively explored how technology is knowledge, the framing of this equivalence can itself be historicized, and nineteenth‐century analyses of machines offer one opportunity to do so. Taking popular illustrated representations of machine components—mechanisms—as its examples, this essay pursues a mechanic's answer to the question of how technology is knowledge. Henry T. Brown's immensely popular Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements (1868) draws on a long publication tradition to present mechanical motion as the key to understanding machines, a notion that would be revised by practitioners of the emergent science of kinematics and profession of mechanical engineering. Brown's book takes up but does not solve the problem of representing mechanical movement on the page, and it exhibits contradictory commitments to technology as ideational—invented by individuals—and technology as the cumulative expressions of human culture. Itself the product of the latest industrial printing techniques, Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements represents technical knowing as a species of intuitive visualization stimulated by text‐image correlation as well as by experiencing machines themselves.
+ VERA KELLER, Into the Unknown: Clues, Hints, and Projects in the History of Knowledge, History and Theory, Theme Issue 58 (December 2020), 86-110.
This essay argues for integrating the history of ignorance into the history of knowledge. Through a case study of the (failed) project of colonial Virginian sericulture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it explores the entanglement of various forms of knowledge and ignorance. These comprise forms of knowledge that have been presented as certain, such as clues and rules, and empirical, such as observations and questionnaires. They also include forms highlighting probabilism and risk‐benefit analyses, such as projects, and forms that made a virtue of uncertainty, such as hints. By exploring the cultural meanings and social functions of these forms of knowledge, this essay illustrates their coproduction with sociopolitical ideals, norms, and biases. The history of unspecified ignorance—including knowledge suppressed due to racism, misogyny, and other social biases—intersects with the history of these agnotological and epistemological tools. Such intersections collectively make up the history of knowledge.
+ JOHAN ÖSTLING, Circulation, Arenas, and the Quest for Public Knowledge: Historiographical Currents and Analytical Frameworks, History and Theory, Theme Issue 58 (December 2020), 111-126.
The recent surge in publications on the history of knowledge may obscure the fact that there are several parallel understandings of what the field is. In this article, I discern five major historiographical directions in contemporary scholarship regarding the history of knowledge. The analytical framework that has so far attracted the most attention is the circulation of knowledge. As productive as it is, the very concept of circulation is in need of both elaboration and theorization. In order to achieve this, I focus on the public circulation of knowledge. This kind of circulation implies that knowledge should be studied as a broad, societal phenomenon. There are a number of possible methodological approaches to study the processes, situations, or contexts where knowledge has or gains public significance. Here I focus on and develop the concept of public arenas of knowledge, which might be virtual, physical, or hybrid spaces. Drawing on several new studies, I demonstrate how different public arenas of knowledge functioned during the postwar period and how they were part of a larger infrastructure of knowledge.
+ SHADI BARTSCH, The Rationality Wars: The Ancient Greeks and the Counter-Enlightenment in Contemporary China, History and Theory, Theme Issue 58 (December 2020), 127-143.
Amid contemporary discussions about the relationship of logic to knowing, an entirely different conversation about the moral status of rationality is taking place between Chinese and Western thinkers. Although most would agree that deductive thought has been a highly privileged feature of the Western philosophical tradition since Plato (for good or bad), the question of its role in Confucian thought is less clear—and considerations of this topic tend to be highly charged. In turn, the question of whether the West has been tarred by a Weberian descent into a merely instrumental form of rationality has emerged as a hot topic in Chinese scholarship. However, the question merely supplies a way of engaging in cross‐cultural comparisons that are political rather than genuinely philosophical in nature. This article explores the sparring over terminology and concepts that characterizes this recent trend in scholarship. Ultimately, it suggests that instead of Chinese scholars appropriating the ideas of Western authors in order to raise anti‐Western specters of spiritual derangement, both traditions would be better off discarding this outdated and essentializing terminology in the first place.
+ SUZANNE MARCHAND, Weighing Context and Practices: Theodor Mommsen and the Many Dimensions of Nineteenth-Century Humanistic Knowledge, History and Theory, Theme Issue 58 (December 2020), 144-167.
This essay argues that the history of knowledge, especially when applied to humanistic knowledge making, ought not to study practices of knowing to the exclusion of the peculiarities of individuals and the specifics of the wider contexts in which they operate. It uses the life and work of the Roman historian Theodor Mommsen as a case study, sketching first his qualities as a writer and political actor formed by the particularities of the post‐Romantic era. Showing that Mommsen belongs to the world of realist writers and liberal nationalist reformers, this essay then demonstrates how much these aspects of his thought‐world resonated with and informed the ways in which he practiced as a scholar. This essay aims to remind historians of the humanities that a focus on practices of knowing might bring us into exciting conversations with historians of science, but we ought not to lose touch with our colleagues in general and intellectual history.
+ CLIFFORD SISKIN, Enlightenment, Information, and the Copernican Delay: A Venture into the History of Knowledge, History and Theory, Theme Issue 58 (December 2020), 168-183.
This essay pursues the history of knowledge in the form of what Francis Bacon called a “literary history”—a “story of learning” that tracks “the antiquities and originals of knowledges.” It focuses on the changing interrelations of information and knowledge from the seventeenth century to the present day in order to identify a fundamental continuity in a knowledge project that links the Enlightenment to our own era of quantum computation. At the core of that project has been Bacon's and Robert Boyle's dreams of re‐making the world through a “handshake” between the intellectual and physical worlds. Quantum theory tells us that the lingua franca that realizes that handshake is information. I track that realization from the simultaneous emergence of newspapers and modern science 350 years ago to today's moment of fake news and quantum computation. In doing so, I identify a feature of the history of knowledge that is applicable to other ventures into that history: a taxonomy of “delays” in explanatory knowledge caused by mismatches between concepts and technologies.