The Ends of History: Response from Justine Murison

Monday, February 20, 2012

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Federal troops occupying line of breastworks on the north bank of the North Anna River in Virgina (1864)
[This post from Justine Murison (English) is the last in our series of comments from the closing roundtable at the Unit's February 10 Ends of History symposium.]

Written by Justine Murison (English)

The title of this conference offers the chance for linguistic play around the word "ends": is this the ending of history and/or historicism? Or are we discussing the aims of historicism? In other words, are we marking a periodization in which literary scholars "end" being "historicists"? Or are we declaring a proliferation of the methodological goals of historicist literary scholarship? As is often the case, all of the above, if not more. But let me consider this question more narrowly by qualifying what we mean by "historicism" since it seems to me that we are here, in part, to mourn the passing of the "New Historicism," a name given to the method somewhat haphazardly and that nobody seemed to like.

On the one hand, we live in the post-New Historicist era, in which the traditional methods of the New Historicism (that is, anecdote, juxtaposition, and a constrained synchronic archive) can no longer respond adequately to the weight of evidence produced by the proliferation and accessibility of digital archives. Nor have these critical maneuvers survived the other major shift, arguably born out of the historical turn and digitization, toward book history, print culture, and bibliography. The new capacities for searching and analyzing data provided by the work of digital humanities has put increased pressure on how we assemble an archive and what we do with it. On the other hand, the recent turn to such modes of analysis like Heather Love’s revival of description and observation, Best and Marcus’s invitation to "surface reading," or Rita Felski’s calls for new formalist strategies all seem to follow from the deconstructive logic of New Historicism, in which historicist research is inevitably incapable of a complete and totalizing summary of the text and thus the world. The "ends" of history seem therefore also to express the limitations of ideological critique and utopian aspirations in criticism. While the scale of the archive seems to stretch ever wider, the scale of the claims about that archive modestly shrinks.

We face a twinned question about the scale of evidence and the purpose of accruing that evidence, and I would submit then that our question is as much existential as it is methodological. What is the purpose of literary study itself at this moment in time, post-9/11 and Iraq, in an era of global warming skepticism and economic collapse? In other words, we are talking about a historical shift in the history of literary criticism. As Eve Sedgwick and Bruno Latour suggest in distinct but complementary ways, we came to the past decade armed with subtle critiques of the invisible machinations of power in liberalism only to be surprised by the very overt, visible, and spectacular methods of power in the War on Terror or, conversely, how the Arab Spring united traditional protest (that is, bodies on the line) with the networking capabilities of new technologies.

If what we are marking in this conference is the end of an era of literary method, I would like to briefly sketch the other "ends" that our renewed interests make visible and also possible, fully cognizant that in doing so I seek to proliferate historical narratives rather than to set them aside. Curiously, these lines of inquiry seem, at first blush, to be paradoxical. They are roughly in affect and phenomenology, on the one hand, and the vast scale of quantification, on the other hand. To be sure, what connects these methods is a renewed sense of what we mean by "materialism." The first method recognizes that our responses, reactions, emotions, and very bodies have a material life inextricable from the texts we assign and interpret, responses that may not be "deep" in the psychoanalytic sense but are nonetheless material and meaningful. In turn, new methods of quantification expressly respond to a scale of evidence that risks becoming so wide that it demands a seemingly opposite perspective: that is, counting, graphing, mapping, and other presentations of data advocated by Franco Moretti. We might thus consider these methods as reflecting (and, arguably, in contention with) not a smoothly functioning liberalism but its inversion in modern warfare in which the fragility of the body’s and brain’s surface and integrity have become as intensely scrutinized as the "distance" of drone attacks.

The question, then, might ultimately be ethical, as Stephen Best suggested in his talk this morning: how to maintain a sense of the urgencies, sensitivities, and, above all, limitations at both ends of these scales. This is the quandary expressed, for instance, in Herman Melville’s and Walt Whitman’s reactions to the Civil War. Rather than running from quantification and trying to embrace the "depth" of meaning of the dead, both instead try to account for the different scales of modern warfare through lyric, lists, and numbers. Melville’s Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War marries the material bodies of soldiers and the physical destruction of the war to quantifications of both by annotating his poems with statistical and factual information. Shifting from lyrical to numerical, from poem to endnote, Melville attaches the two inextricably together but recognizes that they are not synonymous, just as Whitman would in enumerating the war dead through statistics that end with lyrical prose like "the dead, the dead, the dead—our dead— [. . .] ours all, (all, all, all, finally dear to me)." Whitman certainly evokes the "melancholic subject" of history; Melville, however, does not. In his poem, "Shiloh," Melville instead finds a way to express within the poem itself the cumulative effect of moving from lyric to quantification, elsewhere separated in the book. He does so in his remarkable parenthetical aside that distinguishes the temporal break before and after battle: "(What like a bullet can undeceive!)" This line suggests not simply the loss of ideological innocence, or the unveiling of the materiality of that ideology. Instead, it evokes both simultaneously. In fact, it is both a shout and a secret: it appears in parentheses but ends with an exclamation point. It announces and hides, unveils and recovers.

A shout and a secret: in the materialisms we turn to now we contend with what seems overwhelmingly manifest and obvious in the weight of evidentiary expectations, but we are also grappling with the obscured ethical responsibility that evidence entails. This may well be the connecting thread in this reconsideration of history and method across the literary disciplines – that it is a response, ultimately, to the ethical constraints of our scholarly relation to the material world. Read more

The Ends of History, "History Without Ends"
Guest Writer: Ezra Claverie

Friday, February 17, 2012

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[On February 10, 2012, the Unit for Criticism partnered with the Trowbridge Office on American Literature, Culture, & Society for a symposium, The Ends of History. The below contribution is from Ezra Claverie. It is the second of two in a series of grad student posts published on the event.]

“History Without Ends”

Written by Ezra Claverie (English)

I have forgiven myself for assuming that the 10 February symposium, The Ends of History, would deal with what Giorgio Agamben calls “the Hegelo-Kojèvian idea of an end of history.” A look at some of the Unit’s suggested background readings showed me my error, though it might be fairer to say that it made me realize that the wordplay of the symposium’s title had offered me two readings of the noun end, and I had taken the wrong one. These are not “ends” in the sense of completion, where a process ceases (in, say, a utopia or, perhaps, a sustainable liberal commonwealth); these are “ends” as opposed to means, the ends of “doing” history—as in methodological historicism. If historicism is the use of history as “theory” in Jonathan Culler’s sense—that is, the techniques and assumptions of one discipline brought usefully to bear in another—then the question that the participants in this symposium all seemed to ask was, what kind of historicism should literary scholars do, and why?

One answer is that they should do “surface reading” which could be conceived as a shallower kind of historicism. In articles available on the Unit for Criticism’s webpage, two speakers at the symposium, Stephen Best and Heather Love (along with Best's co-author Sharon Marcus) argue from comparable perspectives that the dominance of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” has inflated critics’ self-importance leading scholars to fancy themselves as prophets who reveal the meanings encrypted in texts, while simultaneously blinding these very same scholars to meanings hiding in plain sight on the text’s surface. A more polemical variation on this argument is found in Rita Felski’s essay. But, as Rachel Buurma noted in her lecture, the only speaker to advocate against historicism explicitly is Walter Benn Michaels.

Unsurprisingly, then, a recurring topic at the symposium concerned the distinction between a detached and “antiquarian” historicism (to use the adjective Michaels introduced into the discussion of Best’s paper on Toni Morrison’s A Mercy), and an ethically and politically committed brand of historicism—which might possibly but not necessarily take its cue from an identitarian politics such as the aim to recover the stories of marginalized or silenced populations. For Americanists this might center on the lost or diminished voices of slaves in the Americas though, from a different point of view, historian Andrew Sartori (whose paper was read at the conference by Zack Sell in History) pointed to African responses to the imposition of capitalist structures in the imperial era. In discussion and in his paper, Michaels argued that understanding the past is neither sufficient for nor even necessary to changing the present. In particular, understanding the historical origins of the high levels of economic inequality in the United States is well and good, he argued; but it does not tell us what to do next, and it does not do that work for us. Most of all, Michaels argued, identitarian focus on race and the history of slavery loses sight of the fact that inequality is increasingly a question of class rather than race. Neither the presenters nor the audience seemed satisfied with Michaels’s more polemical claims—including Best, whose published arguments in favor of “surface reading” did not appear to tally with Michaels’s position against the history of race in particular and the use of historicism more generally. Nonetheless, those claims did lead to the most energetic discussions of the day.

The claim that racial history is antiquarian may seem simply false to some, but Lauren Goodlad offered a useful way of getting past the debate when she suggested that even an antiquarian historicism could be pedagogically important. Our undergraduates, she pointed out, do not necessarily understand that the world in which they live is significantly different from the world of thirty years ago (or 130 years ago): that is, they often don’t understand that the common sense of any given period has, historically, changed over time, with so-called conventional wisdom often (as it is now) in contest. “Mere” antiquarian history, which strives to reconstruct past events and structures of feeling, enables students to formulate their own political opinions—once they are able to realize that the status quo is not (and has never been) either natural or eternal.

My own experience as a teacher of film bears out the significance of these questions. Many times I have interrupted students whose urge to analyze “deep” phenomena blinds them to the obvious:

CINEMA TEACHER: So what do these [camera] framings of the gunfighters do here?

 STUDENT: Well, the outlaw is like, a wanderer between the city and the wilderness, which is why he’s wearing a hat—hats are a product of civilization—even though we can still see the mountains behind him. And he’s from Red River, which is probably something about communism and the Russians—

 CINEMA TEACHER: Yeah, but in the reverse shot, you can see the mountains behind the sheriff, too, and the mountains are out of focus in both shots. And the sheriff is also wearing a hat. But over the sheriff’s shoulder you can see the stagecoach waiting, and it’s in focus. Let’s just talk about what we see and hear during these two shots—then let’s talk function, then let’s talk motivation.

So, yes, “surface reading” makes sense: for students as well as teachers in the humanities.

Yet, I would add that arguments about motivation, why a certain technique appears in an artwork, can and should use historicist methods, especially in the classroom. In the above story, is the camera technique salient without knowing that two years earlier, the same production company made a successful (but now largely forgotten) spy film using the same personnel and equipment? Does the western’s supposedly distinctive mountain landscape enter plain sight because the producers shot the film in a location where the costs of labor were low (say, the right-to-work state of North Carolina), or in a country without any movie industry (say, the Canary Islands)—far from the usual locations where Hollywood and Cinecittà shoot their horse operas?

Thus, even non-suspicious research into the histories of production and reception can give our students wider bases on which to interpret texts, whether those interpretations lean toward formalism, “symptomatic” reading, or some blend of the two. Love’s call for “descriptive reading” that is close but not deep may require the descriptive inputs of “antiquarian” history–even as students are enabled to understand (pace Goodlad’s point) that the conditions of textual production and reception are not and have never been eternal.

My hypothetical student’s impulse to find latent or hidden political meanings is not blameworthy, but students imitate their teachers whether or not they have mastered the hermeneutic techniques that their teachers use with such apparent ease. We might do well to rein in our desire to map the submerged part of the iceberg for our undergraduates, until we have carefully mapped the part that anyone can see, and maybe we should convince them that our surface mappings are thorough and accurate before we send them into the depths. Read more

The Ends of History, "Pleasure Without Depth"
Guest Writer: Ben Bascom

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Henry Adams, 1875
[On February 10, 2012, the Unit for Criticism partnered with the Trowbridge Office on American Literature, Culture, & Society for a symposium, The Ends of History. The below contribution is from Ben Bascom. It is one in a series and the first of two grad student posts we will publish on the event.]

"Pleasure Without Depth"

Written by Ben Bascom (English)

Let’s imagine for a moment that historicism has ended, that the past is considered incommunicable and/or unnecessary for what we do as cultural critics and that no phantom limb affirms the past’s absent presence—nagging our consciousness, as it were, while we do our work, whatever that work might be. History, of course, continues to be made—or done, rather, as time won’t stop intervening into human awareness—but our work as cultural critics ceases to use constructions of the past as a frame for the forms and ideologies that hold in place our objects of study. There is only the ever-present now. Envision the immediate possibilities of a scholarly world without historicism (if not quite a world without history).

Stephen Best, in his talk "On Failing to Make the Past Present" at the Unit for Criticism’s The Ends of History conference, provided a salient reason to think outside the presumed benefits of historicism. Instead of arguing that the past is a sort of red herring for real political problems in the present—as Walter Benn Michaels did—Best pointed out the past’s limitations as a model for understanding and changing the present. Where Michaels asserted that the past sends critical inquiry in the wrong direction, Best finds that the political expediency in the directional movement to the past is insufficient to address present inequalities and oppressions. Taking Morrison’s Beloved and A Mercy as two texts that highlight what he calls a movement away from the "melancholic turn"—or the conceptualization that the irretrievable slave past functions as a way to understand present African-American experience—he stated: "the logic of racial slavery does not fully describe or capture injustice in the present." Historicism isn’t the problem, for Best, as it is for Michaels, but rather it is a weak solution. Something more is needed.

In attending the conference, I was excited to hear either about alternatives to historicism, or ways that historicism might be refurbished for new purposes. Being a sort of begrudging cultural materialist myself, I anticipated learning about new reading methodologies that could recognize the political limitations of historicism while simultaneously making possible new theories of cultural reception (say, through affect studies). Yet if historicism were to end, as Michaels’s talk "If We Can’t End History, Could We At Least End Historicism? (An Apology)" proposed, how would that come to be and what might be the stakes for its departure? Michaels believes that historicism’s relationship to identity politics naturalizes the actual facts of inequality more than it remediates this problem. Yet, considering identity politics’ call for the recognition and ethical treatment of difference, does the work of historicism necessarily lead to perpetual atavism and inevitable conservatism? Or might there be a more nuanced way of understanding experience, even the ofttimes visceral and embodied connections forged through the study of history?

Throughout the conference, many in the audience questioned the efficacy and possibility of ceasing to historicize. Some wondered if the desire to stop historicizing is merely one more thing that needs to be historicized—an initiative that should be contextualized to understand it in its appropriate light. Indeed, my opening sentence obfuscates the actor(s) that would bring about this end to historicism (if not history). Will historicists cease to historicize? And, if they did, what would be lost ?

Henry Adams’s interesting if self-indulgent The Education of Henry Adams (1918) might, I think, provide a useful example to think about the relationship between history and experience. This curious text offers a model of experiencing the past that I find guardedly visceral, with Adams talking about himself in the third person--objectifying his experience--yet often using emotion and bodily affect as a way to represent his memories. Bodily responses to feelings, then, are used in order to conjure his own (and the reader’s) sense of historicity, but they simultaneously make the remembering subject--the individual nursing emotional and visceral connections to the past--as a sort of historical-materialist version of Emerson's transparent eyeball, no longer transparent and no longer transcendental but rather embedded in a particular space and experiencing that space in an explicitly material manner. For Adams, emotion theorizes his relationship to the past--it is the suture that enables him to represent the 10-year-old Adams's life. Speaking of his experience viewing "The Dynamo and the Virgin," he finds "his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new." Studying history can often provide this sort of psychological whiplash. (Was it really less than 100 years ago that a federal amendment in the US allowed women to vote? Was it really only 50 years ago that the remaining Jim Crow laws could be legally recognized as unconstitutional? And, indeed, was it really just a year ago that openly gay and lesbian citizens couldn’t serve in the US military?) I would venture to say that the affects one experiences in responding to such historical information could and should be described and brought into conversation with whatever cultural object we have on the table.

But perhaps the metaphor of the examining table relies too much on a medico-analytical model that the "descriptive turn" tries to question. This turn to description animated Heather Love’s talk—"What Is Going on Here? Observational Method and Literary History." She began by pointing out how issues of concretion and scale inform how she perceives individuals building frameworks around the cultural objects they study. These words "concretion" and "scale" bring to mind a spatial imaginary, as opposed to historicism’s emphasis on temporality. In hearing the paper, I got the sense that she was theorizing a mode of suspending judgment on cultural objects—offering a practice in critical humility that doesn’t jump too quickly to presumed ideological implications. Using a sociological text by Erving Goffman as a model through which to theorize alternatives to the hermeneutics of suspicion (e.g., the "paranoid reading" that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick contrasted to "reparative reading"), she also built on Christopher Nealon’s notion of reading as a historical friend. No one likes the friend (or acquaintance, rather) who constantly points out shortcomings and failings. (Indeed, the needlessly repetitive Debbie Downer from SNL seems vaguely familiar to how easy it is to read cultural objects as being always [already?] ideologically suspect.) In thinking of reading under a model of friendship, Love asks, pointedly, how far can we push a false-consciousness model of reading? Instead, Love wants to consider how the line between description and interpretation—identification and disidentification—is never quite as demarcated as we’d like; relying on a model of reading that presumes a false consciousness (one that hides latent issues) can quickly paint us into a corner, as it were, where there is symbolically nothing left to do but verbalize the colors, shades, and brushstrokes of the world before us.

I’m still riveted by Love’s sense of reading—its possibilities and the ironic depth its focus on "surface" opens for nonjudgmental observation. As one who enjoys being lost in the forests and mazes and oceans of texts that surround me—whether in the library’s archives or on the Internet—there’s a sort of pleasure without depth in a model of reading more attuned to attend to the project of description rather than analytical implication. Poignantly, Love asserted at the end of her paper that cultural critics should "get rid of the assumption that [they] know what’s going on. In the meantime," she concluded, "describe." Read more

The Ends of History: Response from Mark Steinberg

Monday, February 13, 2012

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A covered arcade in 19th-century Paris.
[On February 10, 2012, the Unit for Criticism partnered with the Trowbridge Office on American Literature, Culture, & Society for a symposium, The Ends of History. Below are remarks from Mark Steinberg, professor of History and Slavic Languages & Literatures at the University of Illinois, delivered as part of the symposium's closing roundtable. Prof. Steinberg's is the first of several responses we hope to publish.]

Written by Mark Steinberg (History/Slavic Languages & Literatures)

I want to pick up on a couple of large themes provoked by the background readings for this conference as well as today’s papers and discussions—especially a few in the work of literary scholars that spoke to my own work as a historian (most recently of city stories, especially in newspapers, as an account of what "modernity" might mean in early 20th-century Russia as well as, more recently, the meanings and uses of violence and freedom in the Russian revolution) and as a history teacher where questions of method are constantly at issue.

Above all, I was struck by appeals—often gathered around talk of a descriptive turn in literary studies—to allow ourselves to become intimate with the past, to engage in a sustained, susceptible, and generous attentiveness, enabled by a willful uncertainty about meanings (most of these terms are taken from the essay by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus). Or as Rita Felski suggests, in her recent critique of the fetishization of historical context in literary studies, that scholars need to "slow down at each step, forgo theoretical shortcuts, and attend to the words of our fellow actors rather than overriding—and overwriting—them with without own." In other words—to invoke the often-quoted Bruno Latour—the problem is "stopping description when you are too tired or lazy to go on," and failing to recognize that we need "more not less, multiplication not subtraction." Most historians would find all of this rather encouraging, even feel ourselves to be rather superior in doing this already so well: we love more, we love attending to the words of others; we love description. Like Walter Benjamin's flâneur, we sometimes feel a certain "intoxication" in endlessly wandering in the past, taking in everything, looking for every connection.

Too much so, in fact.

The problem in a great deal of history work is often going beyond attentiveness, susceptibility, and multiplication. I see this often in dissertations, but also in submitted scholarly articles (as editor of a journal), and not only in the discipline of history. Of course, it used to be worse: especially when historical work was dominated by the old-historicist faith that "all information is within reach and every problem has become capable of solution" (the infamous declaration of the editor of the first Cambridge Modern History, Lord Acton, in the 1890s). Most historians now consider it a commonplace that we cannot "reach" every fact (and, as E. P. Thompson famously put it, that facts often "lie"). Still less can we see and understand all of the connections, and it is the connections that are most important—what Felski calls the "sociability" of texts.

In some ways, these doubts have pushed historians more in the direction of description. In the fact of inevitable interpretive uncertainty, the impossibility of closure, we might as well revel in the fragmentary and incoherent traces of the past, in the Romantic ruins of evidence, in the pleasures of intimacy with echoes and ghosts. It is indeed, as Baudelaire famously said, an "immense joy" to be the "the passionate spectator"—the "perfect flâneur" who "set[s] up house...amidst the ebb and flow...the fugitive and the infinite." Working on Russian city texts, I found just this sort of pleasure in reading the daily papers of a century ago—agreeing with Walter Benjamin, in his essay trying to explain his "Arcades Project," that "to seize the essence of history, it suffices to compare Herodotus and the morning newspaper"—which, for me, meant favoring the unboxed temporality of the newspaper.

Latour is right, but in the opposite way he seems to mean: we cannot stop here, we have to work our way through and beyond description. And this means not being too deferential to the texts of the past. It is not enough to "talk with the dead" because we cannot, however much we dream of this. For the dead tend speak only in response to our questions—which shape the answers we get. And they sometimes lie. So we need to interrogate them—though short of "torture" (say with the splinters-under-the-fingernails of grand theory), which can produce, as torture tends to, new lies and substitute the interrogators strong voice for the fainter voices of the past.

Does this mean, as Felski’s critique suggests, that the we know more than the texts that precede us? I think it does, but this is nothing to be arrogant or complacent about (or tired and lazy, as Latour says). It requires hard critical work: not only in a more intense and immersive encounter with the residues of the past, but also more "suspicion" not less: and not only past texts and voices (what is said and is not said), our own vision and voice, (especially how we question the past) but also what we cannot read because it is absent, or we are not intellectually ready to hear.

Which brings me to my last theme: the much contested concept of "historical context." Felski and others are right to warn against a notion of context that forces everything we find into a "box" of teleological or structural argument. Or, as the historian Martin Jay recently wrote in characterizing this crude approach to contextualization, we cannot situate every event in terms of "deep, abiding structures," every text into a "single, homogeneous discursive whole," every story into a coherent and totalizing teleological narrative, including not only reified historical "periods" but also sometimes over-determining boxes like class, gender, and race—which should be questions not answers.

But context can be (and is, in much good history) a landscape rather than a box, a way of exploring and questioning, not answering. Something never closed. Something that is both singular and rich in its particularity (like a literary text, as Heather Love commented) and linked to other times, and places, and questions. Context is where we wander and work (slowly, attentively, susceptibly...but also full of questions and doubts), not where we end our walk because we have become tired.
Also, we cannot (and should not) be too sure of what we may find. It has been said (by Susan Buck-Morss, echoing Benjamin) that it is the work of the historian to "surprise" the present with the evidence of the past…. It is no less our work to surprise the past from the perspective of the present. And, hopefully, surprise ourselves. Read more

The Ends of History: Lauren M. E. Goodlad's Opening Remarks

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[On February 10, 2012, the Unit for Criticism partnered with the Trowbridge Office on American Literature, Culture, & Society for a symposium, The Ends of History. Published below are the symposium's opening remarks from Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Director of the Unit for Criticism.]

Welcome everyone to this February 2011 Winter symposium, a product of the Unit for Criticism’s ongoing partnership with Gordon Hutner, American Literary History, and the Trowbridge Office on American Literature, Culture, & Society. For their invaluable support, I also want to thank the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, the Department of English, and the School of Literatures, Cultures, & Linguistics; I want to thank J. B. Capino, the Unit’s Nicholson Associate Director, for all of his support and the Unit’s Research Assistants, Mike Black and mc Anderson for their indispensable contribution to the organizing and publicizing of this event. I also thank the distinguished scholars who have gathered here today from campuses as far as UC Berkeley and as near as University of Illinois, Chicago; and the Illinois moderators and closing roundtablers who will be participating today. Not least of all I thank this wonderful audience for joining us this morning.

The last time I had the pleasure of convening a co-organized winter symposium with Gordon it was two years ago and the topic was serial television: in particular AMC’s Mad Men. Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s, the collection of essays that grew out of that event is now in production with Duke University Press. It may seem to be a very different kind of topic, except of course that Mad Men is a show about history: American history, the history of the 60s, global history, feminist history, civil rights, and above all—as my co-editors Lilya Kaganovksy, Rob Rushing, and I argue in the introduction to the volume—the history of the present-day neoliberalism which we continue to inhabit today. Mad Men is also a formally interesting television text: highly aestheticist, and demonstrably—indeed, for some, addictively—serial. Whatever their particular engagements with past and present, when audiences engage serial forms, following storylines that develop slowly over time, part of what they experience is a kind of formal allegory of the actuality of living in history.

This is to say that forms and formalism are not, as has sometimes been postulated, antithetical to history and historicism. Rather, since form and history stand in relation to one another, formalist and historicist standpoints should occasion dialogue. In the months leading up to the organizing of this conference Gordon and I observed a number of critical questions pressing us to consider the relation of form and history: for example, Franco Moretti’s work on digital archives; Bruno Latour’s question of why critique has run out of steam; mounting interest in formal structures such as the web, matrix, network, or tree; Rita Felski’s ongoing critiques of the hermeneutics of suspicion, and Sharon Marcus’s and Stephen Best’s wonderfully stimulating special issue of Representations, "The Way We Read Now." The result was this symposium and the occasion to invite this veritable dream team of speakers all of whom are working at the cutting edge of this topic. I am really excited about this event.
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