Volume 57
Written By Elizabeth Boyle
ARTICLES
FORUM: THE SEVENTH HISTORY AND THEORY LECTURE
Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Anthropocene Time," History and Theory 57, no. 1 (2018), 5-32.Beginning with the question of how a sense of geological time remains strangely withdrawn in contemporary discussions of the Anthropocene in the human sciences and yields place to the more human‐centered time of world history, this article proceeds to discuss the differences between human‐historical time and the time of geology as they relate to the concept of the Anthropocene. The article discusses the difficulty of developing a mode of thinking about the present that would attempt to hold together these two rather different senses of time and ends with a ground‐clearing exercise that might enable the development of such thought.
Herman Paul and Adriaaan van Veldhuizen, “A Retrieval of Historicism: Frank Ankersmit’s Philosophy of HIstory and Politics," History and Theory 57, no. 1 (2018), 33-55.
Frank Ankersmit is often perceived as a postmodern thinker, as a European Hayden White, or as an author whose work in political philosophy can safely be ignored by those interested only in his philosophy of history. Although none of these perceptions is entirely wrong, they are of little help in understanding the nature of Ankersmit's work and the sources on which it draws. Specifically, they do not elucidate the extent to which Ankersmit raises questions different from White's, finds himself inspired by continental European traditions, responds to specifically Dutch concerns, and is as active as a public intellectual as he has been prolific in philosophy of history. In order to propose a more comprehensive and balanced interpretation of Ankersmit's work, this article offers a contextual reading based largely on Dutch‐language sources, some of which are unknown even in the Netherlands. The thesis advanced is that Ankersmit draws consistently on nineteenth‐century German historicism as interpreted by Friedrich Meinecke and advocated by his Groningen teacher, Ernst Kossmann. Without forcing each and every element of Ankersmit's oeuvre into a historicist mold, the article demonstrates that some of its most salient aspects can profitably be read as attempts at translating and modifying historicist key notions into late twentieth‐century categories. Also, without creating a father myth of the sort that White helped create around his teacher William Bossenbrook, the article argues that Ankersmit at crucial moments in his intellectual trajectory draws on texts and authors central to Kossmann's research interests.
Kristin Asdal and Helge Jordheim, “Texts on the Move: Textuality and Historicity Revisited," History and Theory 57, no. 1 (2018), 56-75.
The last time texts were brought onto the general theoretical and methodological agenda of the human and social sciences, they were reintroduced into history in terms of an indefinite set of indefinitely complex contexts, which gave every text a specific date and location in a network of other texts and events. A couple of decades later, however, a more prominent feature of texts seems to be that they are permanently on the move: they circulate, have effects on other things, change and transform realities, and are at the same time themselves translated and modified. In the literature exploring the textuality of history, these dimensions have been under‐theorized and often ignored. To meet this challenge, we need to develop concepts and approaches that enable us to place the mobility of texts as well as their mobilizing force at the center of our current historical concerns. In this article we will explore what the consequences of this move could be, and what resources are already at hand in different scholarly traditions. Exploring the entanglements between actor‐network theory (ANT in the version of Bruno Latour), on the one hand, and literary criticism, linguistics, and book history, on the other, enables us to focus on how texts move and how they move others. We will proceed in this essay by identifying three decisive moments in twentieth‐ and twenty‐first‐century textual scholarship, often conceptualized as “turns,” which are linked to the works of three path‐breaking authors and which at the same time represent three different stages or forms of textuality: the linguistic turn (Saussure), the turn to writing (Derrida), and the turn to print (Eisenstein). Our discussions of these three moments and forms of textuality aim at uncovering how they also represent seminal moments in Bruno Latour's development of the theoretical and methodological complex now referred to as ANT.
Juan L. Fernandez, “Story Makes History, Theory Makes Story: Developing Rüsen’s Historik in Logical and Semiotic Directions," History and Theory 57, no. 1 (2018), 75-103.
This essay will argue that the traditional opposition between narrative and theory in historical sciences is dissolved if we conceive of narratives as theoretical devices for understanding events in time through special concepts that abridge typical sequences of events. I shall stress, in the context of the Historical Knowledge Epistemological Square (HKES) that emerged with the scientization of history, that history is always narrative, story has a theoretical ground of itself, and scientific histories address the need for a conceptual progression in ever‐improved narratives. This will lead to identification of three major theoretical levels in historical stories: naming, plotting (or emplotment), and formalizing. We revisit Jörn Rüsen's theory of history as the best starting point, and explore to what extent it could be developed by (i) taking a deeper look into narratological knowledge, and (ii) reanalyzing logically the conceptual strata in order to bridge the overrated Forschung/Darstellung (research/exposition) divide. The corollary: we should consider (scientific) historical writing as the last step of historical research, not as the next step after research is over. This thesis will drive us to a reconsideration of the German Historikregarding the problem of interpretation and exposition. Far from alienating history from science, narrative links history positively to anthropology and biology. The crossing of our triad name‐plot‐model with Rüsen's four theoretical levels (categories‐types‐concepts‐names) points to the feasibility of expanding Rüsen's Historik in logical and semiotic directions. Story makes history, theory makes story, and historical reason may proceed.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Johannes Lang on The History of Emotions: An Introduction by Jan Plamper and Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700–2000 by Ute Frevert et al., History and Theory 57, no. 1 (2018), 104-120.
Paul A. Roth on Philosophy of History after Hayden White, edited by Robert Doran, History and Theory 57, no. 1 (2018), 121-136.
David P. Jordan on SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard, History and Theory 57, no. 1 (2018), 137-148.
Daniel Gordon on The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Lévy and Jews and Words by Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger, History and Theory 57, no. 1 (2018), 149-165.
ARTICLES
Baris Mücen, "The Ontology of Capital: On the Shared Methodological Limits of Modernization Theory and its Critics," History and Theory 57, no. 2 (2018), 173-194.
This article argues that critical scholarship in historical studies has not overcome the methodological limits of modernization theory for failing to question the ontological principles that construct its object of analysis. I call these principles the “ontology of capital” and explicate them through Bourdieu’s conceptualization of the field and capital. I argue that this ontology is established according to a distribution model in which social entities come into the analysis with the amount and value of the capital they hold. This model grasps all social relations in the form of competition, and actors and actions enter into the analysis only when they are involved in such relations. I then analyze Bernard Lewis’s The Emergence of Modern Turkey, which is written explicitly from a modernization perspective, to show how the principles of the “ontology of capital” operate in this text. The analysis focuses on how sociohistorical facts are constructed through selection and articulation of empirical evidence that become meaningful only on the basis of this ontology. The aim of this analysis is to show the ontology of capital that constructs the object of analysis in Lewis’s text rather than the Eurocentric, teleological, and elitist character of his analysis of history that critics in recent decades have addressed as problems of the modernization paradigm. Based on this, I argue that for a productive critical approach, relational analysis, which characterizes critical scholarship in contrast to essentialism, also has to consider the ontological principles in a historical work to overcome methodological limits. The failure to interrogate this ontology leads to an analytical separation in critical scholarship between the analysis of historical reality and of alternatives to this reality. This separation not only produces a dehistoricized analysis of the present from a critical perspective, but also turns the alternatives into utopian models.
Rajbir Singh Judge, "There Is No Colonial Relationship: Antagonism, Sikhism, and South Asian Studies," History and Theory 57, no. 2 (2018), 195-217.
This article identifies how scholars have displaced antagonism within histories of Sikhism and South Asian Studies more broadly. In contrast to this displacement, this article foregrounds antagonism by taking into account a third element within the presumed colonizer and colonized relationship: a curved space of nonrelation that signals there can be no colonial relationship. By considering the constitutive nature of antagonism within social reality that remains unable to be demarcated, this article examines the generative principles of Sikh practices and concepts that both structure Sikhism’s institutions and productively conceptualize this antagonism. Examining these concepts and practices, I consider the possibility of different modes of both historical being and becoming not bound within our current conceptual rubrics. These different possibilities culled through Sikh concepts and theories demand we reflect upon the rabble: those unable to be contained within colonial civil society or within attempts by the colonized for self-determination in political societies. This void then fractured Sikh reform organizations historically, providing multiple avenues for politics unaccountable within our bifurcated and asymmetrical understandings of civil society and political societies and colonizer and colonized.
Goran Gaber, "What Was Critical History? A Reading of Richard Simon’s Histoire critique du Vieux Testament," History and Theory 57, no. 2 (2018), 218-233.
The roots of the modern critical historical attitude are usually set in one of the following phenomena: (1) the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns; (2) the establishment of historiography as a scientific discipline; and (3) the newly gained awareness of anachronism. However, these accounts either neglect the normative character of the above-mentioned phenomena or operate with an a priori definition of “critical history,” which leads them to retrospectively attribute the concept of “critique” to historical realities that have not used the term to denote their attitude toward or their treatment of the past. Rather than starting from an a priori definition of what “critical history” is, I propose to inquire into what “critical history” was at the moment when it was first conceived as such—namely in Richard Simon’s Histoire critique du Vieux Testament. I will begin by presenting Simon’s conception of critique, which entailed: (a) a grammatical and philological treatment of the text in question; (b) a historical and cultural contextualization of this text; and (c) a specific type of judgment to be applied to what is written therein. Since this last aspect constitutes the key to understanding critique’s attitude toward the past, I will, in the second part, focus my attention on the notion that plays a pivotal role in the exercise of “critical judgment,” that is, on the concept of tradition. Last, I will propose that since Simon’s critical history does not seem to be completely autonomous in relation to its object, the roots of our modern call for normative autonomy vis-à-vis the past should be sought with the authors whom Simon opposed in his work, but from whom nonetheless he inherited the term critique: Protestant authors such as Scaliger, Casaubon, and Cappel.
FORUM: HISTORICIZING NOSTALGIA
Tobias Becker, "The Meanings of Nostalgia: Genealogy and Critique," History and Theory 57, no. 2 (2018), 234-250.Nostalgia has become a new master narrative both in public discourse and academic research, serving as an explanation for trends in fields as different as popular culture, fashion, technology, and politics. This essay criticizes the wide-ranging use of the term. It argues that nostalgia often does not adequately describe the diverse uses of the past to which it is applied. It does this by historicizing the nostalgia discourse with particular emphasis on the 1970s, when dictionaries first noted a semantic shift from homesickness to a sentimental yearning for the past, and intellectuals discussed a widespread, pathological “nostalgia wave.” After the introduction, the second section looks at the changing meanings of nostalgia, the third examines how the “nostalgia wave” was seen to manifest itself and who was thought to be afflicted by it, and the fourth discusses contemporary explanations. Building on this, the final section critically examines the nostalgia discourse before evaluating its continuing influence.
Achim Landwehr, "Nostalgia and the Turbulence of Times," History and Theory 57, no. 2 (2018), 251-268.The concept of nostalgia has an invaluable advantage: In contrast to other cultural concepts, it has an exact date of birth. It was in 1688 when the medic Johannes Hofer published a thesis in which he described an illness he termed with the neologism “nostalgia.” But instead of following the academic and larger cultural discourses that evolved from this starting point until the present, the question that deserves some attention is which temporal setting goes along with the concept of nostalgia. Most of the experts on nostalgia as a sickness during the last three and a half centuries did not diagnose themselves but others, quite often patients from rural areas who had to leave home to work abroad, where they became nostalgic. With this diagnosis these experts also established a certain time-model, because they separated a “modern” time-model of irreversibility from a “nostalgic” time-model of reversibility. If we take a closer look at the nostalgia diagnosis and its consequences, we might also gain some ideas for our thinking about the theory of history.
Patricia M. E. Lorcin, "The Nostalgias for Empire," History and Theory 57, no. 2 (2018), 269-285.The aim of this article is to explore the theoretical and practical differences between colonial and imperial nostalgia. It opens with a substantial theoretical discussion of the relevant scholarship followed by an analysis of the nostalgias of empire. Nostalgia, in relation to empire, is usually analyzed as a longing for a period of former imperial and colonial glory, thus blurring the various hegemonic practices associated with empire. This elision arises out of the fact colonialism was integral to European imperialism. Yet there is a significant distinction between imperial and colonial nostalgia. With its main focus on postcolonial society in France and Britain, the article will theorize the differences between them, arguing that one is connected to the loss of global power and the other to the loss of a socioeconomic lifestyle. It will explore the way in which these two types of nostalgia are constructed and historicized, examining their differences from historical memory through the responses of both former colonizing and colonized individuals or groups. It will demonstrate that collective nostalgia is not merely a “feel-good” sentiment about an idealized political or socioeconomic past, but can be readily connected to coming to terms with past trauma(s) thus being a mechanism to elide violence experienced and violence perpetrated by highlighting one to the detriment of the other.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Haun Saussy on Seven Days of Nectar: Contemporary Oral Performance of the Bhagavatapurana by McComas Taylor, History and Theory 57, no. 2 (2018), 286-291.
Patrick H. Hutton on Collective Memory and the Historical Past by Jeffrey Andrew Barash, History and Theory 57, no. 2 (2018), 292-305.
David Carr on Full History: On the Meaningfulness of Shared Action by Steven G. Smith, History and Theory 57, no. 2 (2018), 306-312.
Alison Bashford on Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, History and Theory 57, no. 2 (2018), 313-322.
ARTICLES
Alexandra Lianeri, "Historia Magistra Vitae, Interrupting: Thucydides and the Agonistic Temporality of Antiquity and Mode,” History and Theory 57, no. 3 (2018), 327-348.
In this essay I discuss Koselleck's thesis on the dissolution of historia magistra vitae in modernity with a view to exploring how the modern historiographical engagement with Thucydides entails qualifications of this argument. Focusing on Barthold Georg Niebuhr's contextualization of Thucydides in a new temporality of “ancient and modern history,” I examine how modernity is caught between conflicting notions of its own prehistory, and that this conflict suggests that the forward‐leaping qualities of Neuzeit were co‐articulated with other temporal notions, and particularly an idea of historical exemplarity associated with historia magistra vitae. This plurality of times highlights an agonistic temporality linking antiquity and modernity: a model of conflicting times inscribed in a dialogue through which modern historiography interrupted the “useful” history of antiquity, while simultaneously being itself interrupted by it. By following this dialogue, I seek to test two interrelated hypotheses: a) that modernity produced a multitemporal scheme in which the ideas of differential time and the future were intertwined with a notion of historia magistra vitae as meaningful and sense‐bearing time; and b) that contradictions in this scheme arising from the modern confrontation with Thucydides's poetics challenges the opposition between historia magistra vitaeand modern historical sense and configures a temporality that is self‐agonistic in the sense that it confronts historical actors before and beyond the terms through which they may be able to give it meaning. Formulated as a poetics of the possible, this notion is approached as a corrective alternative to the modern consideration of the future as distanced from the space of experience, but nonetheless as grounded in actuality and therefore largely mastered by human knowledge and action.
Anthony K. Jensen, "Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of History,” History and Theory 57, no. 3 (2018), 349-370.
Contained mostly within one brief chapter of his The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer's philosophy of history has long been considered either hostile or irrelevant to nineteenth‐century philosophy of history. This article argues that, on the contrary, Schopenhauer maintained what would become a widely accepted criticism of the methodological identity of historiography and the natural sciences. His criticism of Hegel's teleological historiography was more philosophically rigorous than is commonly acknowledged. And his proposal of a “genuine” historiography along the model of art became a major influence on the historiography of Burckhardt, Emerson, and Nietzsche. This article accordingly aims to restore Schopenhauer to the conversation of nineteenth‐century philosophy of history.
Simon Lumsden, "Hegel and Pathologized Modernity or the End of Spirit in the Anthropocene,” History and Theory 57, no. 3 (2018), 271-389.
This article has two broad concerns, both of which are pursued primarily with reference to Hegel's philosophy of history. First, it examines whether Hegel can help explain the difficulty we have in modernity in responding to climate change and ecological crisis. It argues that Hegel provides a useful analysis of this problem, since the model of self‐determination that he appeals to is comprehensively embedded in embodied forms of culture. This helps explain why even a self‐correcting worldview like modernity is obdurate in the face of this crisis. Second, Hegel claims that the defining attribute of spirit is its capacity for self‐production. Modernity is characterized by the emerging and widespread knowledge that spirit is self‐producing. Modernity develops institutions that facilitate and provide an objective reality for spirit's self‐production and its freedom. This aspect of the article examines whether the distinctive capacity of spirit for self‐determination, which is realized in modernity, is subject to the same atrophying conditions by which Hegel says all other historical shapes of spirit are characterized. It asks if the present ecological crisis, something that is directly attributable to spirit itself, represents the limits of self‐producing spirit. The article concludes by examining the difficult position of those countries that cannot be considered to be responsible for the emergence of the Anthropocene but whose actions in the present will amplify its impact.
Angelika Epple, "Calling for a Practice Turn in Global History: Practices as Drivers of Globalization/s,” History and Theory 57, no. 3 (2018), 390-407.
Ever since the spatial turn, historians have faced major challenges regarding how to write and research global history in general and the history of globalization in particular. The four major challenges analyzed in this article are (1) the challenge of polyphony, (2) how to determine the subject of global history beyond geographical definitions, (3) the dynamic of homo‐ and heterogenization accompanying the term “globalization/s,” and (4) how to grasp the relation between the micro level of individual actions and the macro level of global structures. The challenge of polyphony stems from the growing awareness of how Eurocentric perspectives have far too long obscured academic history‐writing with inappropriate presuppositions. The same goes for other (unreflected) area‐centrisms. A biased narrative for only one voice has to make way for a polyphonic narrative that meets the requirements of an up‐to‐date global history. Accordingly, this article suggests that neither geographically defined units nor the relation between given entities should be at the center of global history. Indeed, global history should deal with the “relationing” and the “making of” entities—one of which turns out to be “the global.” This article then proposes using the term “globalization” in the plural, but also reflects on its dependence on the singular. Closely connected to the pluralization of globalizing processes is the challenge of bridging convincingly between the micro level of individual actions and the macro level of global structures without disavowing the contingency and the heterogeneity of the individual. Several theories, such as practice theory and actor–network theory, can be used and modified to address these challenges, especially in determining the relation between macro‐ and microdynamics. I argue that practice theory offers one possible solution to these four challenges by combining both the heterogeneity of the micro level and the comprehensive narrative of global changes.
FORUM: ON RICHARD ELDRIDGE, IMAGES OF HISTORY
Richard Eldridge, "Précis: Images of History: Kant, Benjamin, Freedom, and the Human Subject,” History and Theory 57, no. 3 (2018), 408-412.
My fundamental motivation in writing Images of History was to avoid some forms of hubris and despair that trouble contemporary philosophy and to develop instead a picture of human life in historical time. According to this picture, we live amid institutional and practical inheritances we can address but can never fully stabilize and perfect. In different ways, Kant and Benjamin each accept this thought, and they each develop a picture of philosophy as historically situated, open criticism of existing practices and institutions. Each emphasizes the priority of the practical over any fixed metaphysical‐theoretical stance. I survey each of their general theories of critical historical understanding, and I pay special attention to the texts in which they each provide detailed, specific accounts of Western social‐historical development or circumstances: Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Benjamin's One‐Way Street. Where Kant's philosophical criticism is reformist, liberal, and casually dismissive of non‐Christian religion, Benjamin's is modernist, erotic, and improvisatory. Their respective images of history according to which we achieve orientation are both complementary and fundamentally opposed—not readily combinable into a consistent whole. Drawing on the work of Jonathan Lear, I end with a picture of maturity and practical self‐unity as centrally a matter of developing the skill of modulated alternation between these two orientation‐affording images.
Warren Breckman, "Bootstrapping, Self-Binding, and Other Metaphors of Antifoundationalism,” History and Theory 57, no. 3 (2018), 413-418.
In Images of History, Richard Eldridge deploys the metaphor of “bootstrapping” to describe the possibility of a mutually constitutive interaction of historical understanding and reflection on political ideals outside of and beyond the notion of a completed theory or teleological development. Although “bootstrapping” does considerable work in the book, it remains relatively unthematized in itself. This article explores the concept of bootstrapping in both Eldridge's book and in a number of disciplines. In doing so, it aims to make three critical observations. First, while Eldridge rightly seeks to energize our sense of historical openness, the argument is usefully enriched by the adjacent field of political theory, where “boot‐strapping” is often paired with “self‐binding” to describe how self‐creating processes might be arrested and stabilized. Second, Eldridge's use focuses on individual dispositions, but the concept of “bootstrapping” points to the need to pursue understanding of collective processes of self‐institution. Third, when extended to the natural world, “bootstrapping” calls for scrutiny of the relationship between human self‐creation and nature as a site of emergence and self‐organizing phenomena.
Robert R. Clewis, "Nature, Religion, and Imagination: Comments on Images of History,” History and Theory 57, no. 3 (2018), 419-425.
After sharing some reflections, I raise three questions. The first asks about the role of nature and reason according to Kant's teleological history, and the extent to which Kant's essays written before the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) are “dogmatic,” as his phrase “aim of nature” might suggest. The second asks about Kant's “impure” ethics and the role of religion. What would Kantian religion look like today? The last question concerns the relation between images and ideas—a thornier issue than Kant's initial definitions of imagination and reason would seem to suggest.
Espen Hammer, "Reason, Agency, and History: Remarks on Kant and Benjamin,” History and Theory 57, no. 3 (2018), 426-430.
This essay begins by determining the nature of Richard Eldridge's project. Referring mainly to writings by Immanuel Kant and Walter Benjamin, I view his attempt as considering what it involves to be an agent in a historical setting. According to Eldridge, the correct answer will have to involve the right combination of Kant's emphasis on rational self‐determination and Benjamin's account of spontaneous (yet nonrational) self‐transformation. In response to this answer, I suggest that Benjamin's view may not easily lend itself to being made compatible with Kantian thinking. In particular, Benjamin's effort to think experience in terms that do not make any reference to rational self‐determination must be viewed as deeply foreign to Kant's project. I also argue that Kant's third Critique, in particular its conception of reflective judgment, could have provided Eldridge with a view of agency and experience that does not deviate substantially from Kant's project elsewhere. At the end of the essay, I argue that the duality we find in Eldridge's exposition should be viewed as not only related to individuals but to society in general. An attempt to resolve it must involve reflection on how historically constituted social forms create such stark oppositions between reason and its other.
Richard Eldridge, "Replies to Comments on Images of History by Warren Breckman, Robert R. Clewis, and Espen Hammer,” History and Theory 57, no. 3 (2018), 431-437.
In my replies to the perceptive and cogent observations and questions about my book offered by Warren Breckman, Robert Clewis, and Espen Hammer, I emphasize the thought that we must learn to live with standing tensions between settled institutions and improvisatory courses of action. In reply to Breckman, I suggest that Münchhausen's Trilemma is best regarded as a practical problem that should be addressed in different ways in different contexts rather than as an epistemological puzzle to be solved, and I embrace his rejection of methodological individualism. Although our evolved biology sets some limits and some possibilities, our practical lives are also relatively autonomous from biological determination. In reply to Robert Clewis, I emphasize that Kant has a picture of divine noumenal causation, dimly discernible in history and operating principally through human beings as agents, and I suggest, with Kant, that we may well be unable to explain in any satisfactory way the nature of this noumenal causation. In reply to Espen Hammer's worries about whether a dialogue between Kant and Benjamin is really possible without doing violence to one side or the other, I stress that I am not myself trying to develop a single consistent theory of the meaning of history. Instead, I am “working through” my own perplexity at the constitutive tensions that shape human life, including my own, and trying to see those tensions more clearly.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Geoff Eley on The Past as History: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Modern Europe by Stefan Berger with Christian Conrad, History and Theory 57, no. 3 (2018), 438-449.
Geoff Eley on The Afterlife of Idealism: The Impact of New Idealism on British Historical and Political Thought, 1945–1980 by Admir Skodo, History and Theory 57, no. 3 (2018), 450-463.
Erik Grimmer-Solem on India, Modernity and theGreat Divergence: Mysore and Gujarat (17TH to 19TH C.) by Kaveh Yazdani, History and Theory 57, no. 3 (2018), 464-481.
Writing as Action, Situation, and Trace
Laura Stark, “Making a Mark," History and Theory, Theme Issue 56 (2018), 3-7.
Walter Benjamin believed it was possible “to read what was never written.” His own writing and practices sought both to explain and model how a person might undertake this historical project. Benjamin's essay “On the Mimetic Faculty” provides a through line for the papers collected in this theme issue, which is designed to prompt further work and inquiry into how words—and historical materials broadly construed—might be read not only for their content but for insights about the past that may be evident in their arrangement, appearance, texture, or location. Scholars from history, philosophy, literature, anthropology, and beyond look at cases ranging from premodern Japan to present‐day South Africa to consider how and suggest why scholars might want to “read what was never written.” Together, the articles and commentaries are offered as a record of what has been done, in the eager anticipation of reading what has yet to be written.
John Tresch, “The Compositor’s Reversal: Typography, Science, and Creation in Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym," History and Theory, Theme Issue 56 (2018), 8-31.
Known for his tales of mystery and horror, Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) was a meticulous, self‐conscious literary craftsman. He was also skilled in the methods of science, engineering, and typesetting. Poe's writing reflected on printed letters’ aesthetic effects, their ability to direct and divert meaning, and their power to build and alter worlds. In the printer's office, a limited set of material elements was manipulated to assemble infinite combinations; lining up letters in the composing stick in reverse, compositors had to arrange and read type backwards. The mirrors, doubles, and “weird symmetry” that structure Poe's plots and his theory of the universe can be traced back to these central facts of nineteenth‐century typography. In his only completed novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket—a broad canvas on which he worked out strategies later deployed in more concentrated works—typography was a crucial site for the conversions and exchanges between spirit and matter. Forging connections between the material and imaginative practice of “composition” and the cosmological uncertainties of the antebellum US, Poe's meditations on the transmutations effected by type linked literary invention, technical construction, and divine creation.
David Lurie, “Parables of Inscription: Some Notes on Narratives of the Origin of Writing," History and Theory, Theme Issue 56 (2018), 32-49.
The story of the god Thoth and King Ammon in Plato's Phaedrus is perhaps the most familiar example of a script‐origin narrative, but such accounts also exist from ancient China (such as Xu Shen's postface to the Shuowen jiezi) and Mesopotamia (the poem “Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta”). There are also rich and provocative ancient discussions of what it means to “borrow” or “adapt” writing from an adjacent (often more powerful) civilization, including a set of related narratives in eighth‐century Japanese chronicles about Korean scribes importing Sinitic writing. Such premodern sources can be profitably juxtaposed with modern discussions of colonial and ethnological encounters with literacy, such as frequently quoted and requoted stories of “natives” taken aback at the power of writing, or Claude Lévi‐Strauss's famous “Writing Lesson” (from his 1955 book Tristes Tropiques). This article considers the persistent anachronism that marks such accounts. Whether premodern or modern, it seems they inevitably become parables or allegories of the powers of writing at the time of their composition, rather than plausible reconstructions of its earliest stages. What lies behind this difficulty in writing the history of writing?
Jaume Aurell, “Writing Beyond Time: The Durability of Historical Texts," History and Theory, Theme Issue 56 (2018), 50-70.
When we think in terms of the durability of historical texts, some works instantly come to mind: Herodotus's, Thucydides's, and Polybius's war narratives, Plutarch's comparative biographies, Eusebius's ecclesiastical history, Augustine's City of God, Jean Froissart's chronicles, Francesco Guicciardini's history of Florence, Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Jules Michelet's History of France, Leopold von Ranke's History of the Reformation, Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Johan Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages, Fernand Braudel's Mediterranean, and Edward Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, among others. Historians instantly perceive them as durable texts, part of a canon of history and historiography. Surrounded as we are by the exaltation of innovation over tradition, and assuming the challenging concept of “writing as historical practice” proposed by the editor of this issue, In this article I examine the conditions that might be considered necessary for historical writing to achieve durability, propose what conditions of creation and reception enabled this longevity, justify why these and other historical texts have the potential for durability, and discuss what practical lessons we might obtain from this inquiry. I begin by making some distinctions among the three related concepts of durability, the classic, and the canon, and try to establish the specific conditions of the durability of historical texts, focusing on the effect of contemporaneity and the connections between the concepts of durability and the practical past.
David Carr, “Reflections on Temporal Perspective: The Use and Abuse of Hindsight," History and Theory, Theme Issue 56 (2018), 71-80.
In this article I focus on the temporal aspects of the historian's situation: being in the present and representing the past. Writing is a time‐bound process. It is in this context that the notion of temporal perspective arises. What follows is a series of reflections, variations on the theme, perhaps, of temporal perspective as it figures in historical writing. The concept of hindsight figures prominently in these reflections. I also deal with examples of superimposed chronology that sometimes result from temporal perspective. My reflections avoid grand conclusions about time and history. I hope they may instead cast some modest light on the issues.
Tyler Williams, “’If the Whole World Were Paper . . . ‘: A History of Writing in the North Indian Vernacular," History and Theory, Theme Issue 56 (2018), 71-80.
The poetic and hagiographical works of early modern north Indian saints constitute a rich case study for understanding the relationship among changes in language, material practices of writing, and ideologies of writing. Beginning in the fourteenth century, the commitment of the vernacular language of bhāṣā to writing had the effect of reconfiguring practices and ideologies of writing, posing a serious challenge to the epistemic and cultural privilege formerly accorded to writing in the literary, intellectual, and religious traditions contained in Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic. Although unable to completely escape the conceptual structures of a postliterate society, these supposedly illiterate, subaltern poet‐saints were able to undermine systems of religious and intellectual authority by questioning the ontological status and epistemic utility of written language and by divesting writing of its aura. They did so by emphasizing the materiality and banality of writing and by characterizing inscription as just another form of worldly labor. Such readings of the saints’ poetic works are made possible precisely by their authorial personas as subaltern, illiterate figures, and these personas are in turn established not in the poetry itself but in the hagiographical works that narrativize these saints’ lives. Importantly, these hagiographies reflect a concern with historicizing both the saints’ utterances and the material processes through which those utterances came to be written down. Perhaps paradoxically, it is this concern with historicity that enables the tradition to establish the transcendent nature of the saints’ speech and thought, and to enable those in the present to recreate the transformative speech acts that the hagiographies describe.
Rosalind C. Morris, “Shadow and Impress: Ethnography, Film, and the Task of Writing History in the Space of South Africa’s Deindustrialization," History and Theory, Theme Issue 56 (2018), 102-125.
The historiography of natural‐resource extraction, especially in colonial contexts, is often torn between two temptations: to represent these histories in narratives commencing with discovery, and thus rupture; or to render them in tales of continuity and thus an identity that transcends history. In the increasingly common scenarios of deindustrialization, these twin temptations are sutured together via the figure of return. Thus, accounts of postindustrial life often construe it as a return to forms of life that preceded capital‐intensive industrial practice, and are written in the idiom of the “artisanal.” In doing so, they mistake a mere form of appearance, which is to say an image of the past, for its repetition, effacing the degree to which the materialities of industrialization shape, as both shadow and impress, the corporeal gestures and unconscious habits of those who inhabit its ruins. At the same time, and in an era of memory studies, truth commissions, and heritage projects, people who inhabit the spaces of deindustrialization often believe that they can survive the destruction of their life‐worlds only by giving themselves to be seen in the form of an image that resembles the past, and in a museological register. In this essay, based on two decades of field research in the areas of deep‐level mining in South Africa, and an ongoing documentary film project with informal migrant miners called zama‐zamas, I attempt to find another form and method for producing a historical and dialectical anthropological understanding of postindustrial life. The essay is an experiment in narrative that attempts to redeem a photographic and cinematographic tradition that is often culpable of reproducing the above‐named temptations. The essay thus weaves together forms of the close‐up—a gesture that seeks to get hold of history by means of an image—with contemplative reflections based in the temporally extended accounts of those who inhabit the ruins of deep‐level gold mines. In so doing, I propose a means of rethinking historiographical practice in the context of an always already vanishing present.
Nancy Rose Hunt, “History as Form, with Simmel in Tow," History and Theory, Theme Issue 56 (2018), 102-125.
This essay is an engagement with forms, objects, and the nature of sly poetics in historical practice. It wonders about how historians have been practicing and theorizing craft at a time when postcolonial politics are urging for stronger attention to the vernacular, the archival, the affective, and the aesthetic. Offering a generous detour through a little‐known version of Georg Simmel, then driving idealist ideas about history and creativity, this essay draws attention to some parallel practices emerging in Global South terrains. It uses three late and refractory Simmel essays on history and form as a prism through which to consider generative concepts, fragmentary and aesthetic methods, and historical sensibilities. While history as form is an enduring, vital theme, aesthetic theorizing is inciting new experiments with archival surfaces, memory work, aesthetic learning, and historical assemblages. Formal attentiveness sharpens critique in addressing historical, contemporary, and archival problems. Simmel may expand our sensory range, our openness to subjectivity and égo‐histoire, tonality and mood, unknotting the interpretive impasse of much fashionable work in today's humanities: with its too tight pairing of the affective and the material.
Joshua Kates, “Talk! As Historical Practice," History and Theory, Theme Issue 56 (2018), 145-167.
“Talk! as Historical Practice” proposes a conception of our insertion into history, and thus the practice of historiography, by way of denying the existence of language as commonly understood: as a pregiven repository of words, signifieds, signifiers, and/or grammars regulative of communication and understanding. (To distinguish this more radical, discourse‐based conception, in part drawn from Donald Davidson's writings, from those of French discourse theory, it employs the neologism “talk!.”) In addition to sketching a version of talk!, this paper argues for its centrality for those writing history. Talk!, for one, gives a vantage point on the past and its relation to the rest of temporality, alternative to that held in common by two leading contemporary theorists, otherwise deeply opposed: Frank Ankersmit and Ethan Kleinberg. Second, it makes available new possibilities for historical practice, as here illustrated by a persusal of Henry Adams's The Education of Henry Adams, and some of his other late works. Adams's autobiography enshrines an externalist, talk!‐based view of his own past utterances and experiences; hence, he writes of himself only in the third person, as what he calls “the manikin.” In this instance and others, this approach lets Adams craft a unique kind of hyperbole, through which he presents a version of history as the medium of everything that happens and all who exist, within a modernity broken into ever more rapidly occurring epochs. Talk!, as here construed, ultimately questions modernity and all other periods and epochs, descending from “big picture” history. Adams's template, I thus argue in conclusion, may serve as a limit case for many more recent viewpoints.
Cover image: Reggio Emilia Railway Station, Reggio Emilia, Italy, by Luca Bravo (20 January 2018)
