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

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