Feminists versus Gallants: Manners and Morals in Enlightenment Britain.
Barbara Taylor.
Representations 87, 2004 (123-148)
Starts from Wollstonecrafts critique of the Enlightenment and its tendency toward gallantry and makes an argument that this gallantry was not a remnant or relic, but a newly constructed attempt at oppression. The problem it intended to solve was, if I understand it, demands for a new civilized man for modernity, "most of whose key attributes ... belonged on the feminine side of the gender axis." (135) Women set the standard ... but "if men were to emulate women, what became of virility and its associated prerogatives?" (ibid) or as Adam Smith put the risk "The delicate sensibility required in civilized nations sometimes destroys the masculine firmness of the character" (footnote 64 page 135)
Taylor argues that, not only are Vickery and Colley right in arguing that the spheres weren't exactly separate but "by the mid-eigtheenth century, men and women of the British middle ranks were becoming more like each other" (136) and the "amazons of the pen" (Sam Johnson's expression - footnote 72) "were everywhere contest[ing] the usurpations of virility."
And now we get to it - the patronizing gallantry is a "rearguard effort to stave off the equalizing pressures of commercial society, to shore up a 'sexual distinction' " (137), as opposed to the effeminate French bastards who clearly could not be trusted to do it right.
Showing posts with label precis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label precis. Show all posts
Monday, July 28, 2008
Monday, January 07, 2008
ASECS 2008 paper notes
Richardson, R. C., "LITERATURE AND HISTORY": THE IDENTITY AND PURPOSE OF THE JOURNAL, Literature and History, 11:1 (1985), 1-?.
Literature and History - started 1975 - is interdisciplinary but mostly (70 %) literary. "too many historians are evidently not deeply interested either in literature as the special and unique kind of source material which it is or in the methods and theories which literary critics have devised for studying it." (6)
Also a discussion of how historians deal with the icky material - as straightforward evidence or illustration ...
Allen, James Smith. "History and the Novel: Mentalité in Modern Popular Fiction"
History and Theory, 22, 3 (1983), 233-252.
"Unfortunately, social historians have expended more effort extracting and verifying information from novels than they have spent considering how this should be done. Compared with quantitative history, the level of theoretical and technical sophistication in the historian's use of literature has been remarkably low.5 Unself-conscious, eclectic, traditional historians tend to shy
away from this kind of theorizing, thus compounding the numerous problems of using a source as unreliable as fiction." (234-5)
Quentin Skinner "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas." History and Theory, 8 (1969), 3-53.
Talks about why neither the ONLY THE TEXT nor the USE THE CONTEXT to explain the text works. We must understand the text - what it says, the material and intellectual conditions and circumstances that produce the text, AND we must understand the intended force of the text. Was it intended to reinforce an accepted position, or to be subversive and controversial? Was it intended to be challenging and thoughtprovoking or simply to clarify what everyone was thinking anyway?
Anyway, the point of it is that knowing the context is helpful, but the context does not necessarily explain the meaning of the text. "The 'context' mistakenly gets treated as ateh determinant of what is said. It needs rather to be treated as an ultimate framework for helping to decide what conventionally recognizable meanings, in a society of that kind, it might in principle have been possible for someone to have intended to communicate." (49)
We can't say that history is important because it helps us study timeless ideas; there IS no perennial wisdom. There may be perennial questions but, .... "whenever it is claimed that the point of historical study of such questions is that we may learn directly from the answers, it will be found that what counts as an answer will usually look, in a different culture or period, so different in itself that it can hardly be in the least useful even to go on thinking of the relevant question as being 'the same' in the required sense after all." (52)
"The key to the indispensable value of of studying the history of ideas" is instead that the classic texts "help to reveal, if we let them, not the essential sameness, but rather the essential variety of viable moral assumptions and political commitments." (52)
Linda Colley in
Going Native, Telling Tales: Captivity, Collaborations and Empire, by Linda Colley. Past and Present, 2000, 170-193.
says "Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers - and readers - rarely accepted a rigid division between empirical reportage and fiction, and this militates against understanding in several ways" (173)
Defoe's Life ... of the Famous Captain Singleton, published in 1720, was not advertised or necessarily read as fiction - but when an ostensibly factual account by Robert Drury of his captivity was published in 1729, it was described as "such another romance as Robinson Crusoe"
BIBLIOGRAPHY FROM ALLEN:
5. In fact, despite a widespread practice, very few historians have considered their use of
literature; most "discussions" are either asides or afterthoughts, for example, Perrot, Les Ouvriers
en greve, 11545. Major exceptions to this general rule, however, are the widely ranging Peter
Laslett, "The Wrong Way through the Telescope: A Note on Literary Evidence in Sociology and in
Historical Sociology," British Journal of Sociology 27 (1976), 319-342, which touches on nearly
every issue of the source's unreliability; the more narrowly focused William 0. Aydelotte, "The
England of Marx and Mill as Reflected in Fiction," Journal of Economic History 8 (1948), Supplement,
42-58; Alexander Gerschenkron, "A Neglected Source of Economic Information on Soviet
Russia," Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 296-317;
George L. Mosse, "Literature and Society in Germany" in Literature and Western Civilization,
Vol. 5: The Modern World, 11, Realities, ed. David Daiches and Anthony Thorlby (London,
1972), 267-299; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, L'Argent, I'amour et la mort en pays d'oc: PrPcPdPdu roman de I'abbe Fabre "Jean-I'ont-pris" (1756) (Paris, 1980); Bonnie G. Smith, "The Domestic Myth," Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1981), 187-213; Jerome Blum, "Fiction and the European Peasantry: The Realist Novel as a Historical Source," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 126 (1982), 2: 122-139; and the more personal Herbert Butterfield, The Historical Novel (Cambridge, 1924), and Richard Cobb, Promenades: A Historian's Appreciation of Modern French Literature (Oxford, 1980).
Literature and History - started 1975 - is interdisciplinary but mostly (70 %) literary. "too many historians are evidently not deeply interested either in literature as the special and unique kind of source material which it is or in the methods and theories which literary critics have devised for studying it." (6)
Also a discussion of how historians deal with the icky material - as straightforward evidence or illustration ...
Allen, James Smith. "History and the Novel: Mentalité in Modern Popular Fiction"
History and Theory, 22, 3 (1983), 233-252.
"Unfortunately, social historians have expended more effort extracting and verifying information from novels than they have spent considering how this should be done. Compared with quantitative history, the level of theoretical and technical sophistication in the historian's use of literature has been remarkably low.5 Unself-conscious, eclectic, traditional historians tend to shy
away from this kind of theorizing, thus compounding the numerous problems of using a source as unreliable as fiction." (234-5)
Quentin Skinner "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas." History and Theory, 8 (1969), 3-53.
Talks about why neither the ONLY THE TEXT nor the USE THE CONTEXT to explain the text works. We must understand the text - what it says, the material and intellectual conditions and circumstances that produce the text, AND we must understand the intended force of the text. Was it intended to reinforce an accepted position, or to be subversive and controversial? Was it intended to be challenging and thoughtprovoking or simply to clarify what everyone was thinking anyway?
Anyway, the point of it is that knowing the context is helpful, but the context does not necessarily explain the meaning of the text. "The 'context' mistakenly gets treated as ateh determinant of what is said. It needs rather to be treated as an ultimate framework for helping to decide what conventionally recognizable meanings, in a society of that kind, it might in principle have been possible for someone to have intended to communicate." (49)
We can't say that history is important because it helps us study timeless ideas; there IS no perennial wisdom. There may be perennial questions but, .... "whenever it is claimed that the point of historical study of such questions is that we may learn directly from the answers, it will be found that what counts as an answer will usually look, in a different culture or period, so different in itself that it can hardly be in the least useful even to go on thinking of the relevant question as being 'the same' in the required sense after all." (52)
"The key to the indispensable value of of studying the history of ideas" is instead that the classic texts "help to reveal, if we let them, not the essential sameness, but rather the essential variety of viable moral assumptions and political commitments." (52)
Linda Colley in
Going Native, Telling Tales: Captivity, Collaborations and Empire, by Linda Colley. Past and Present, 2000, 170-193.
says "Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers - and readers - rarely accepted a rigid division between empirical reportage and fiction, and this militates against understanding in several ways" (173)
Defoe's Life ... of the Famous Captain Singleton, published in 1720, was not advertised or necessarily read as fiction - but when an ostensibly factual account by Robert Drury of his captivity was published in 1729, it was described as "such another romance as Robinson Crusoe"
BIBLIOGRAPHY FROM ALLEN:
5. In fact, despite a widespread practice, very few historians have considered their use of
literature; most "discussions" are either asides or afterthoughts, for example, Perrot, Les Ouvriers
en greve, 11545. Major exceptions to this general rule, however, are the widely ranging Peter
Laslett, "The Wrong Way through the Telescope: A Note on Literary Evidence in Sociology and in
Historical Sociology," British Journal of Sociology 27 (1976), 319-342, which touches on nearly
every issue of the source's unreliability; the more narrowly focused William 0. Aydelotte, "The
England of Marx and Mill as Reflected in Fiction," Journal of Economic History 8 (1948), Supplement,
42-58; Alexander Gerschenkron, "A Neglected Source of Economic Information on Soviet
Russia," Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 296-317;
George L. Mosse, "Literature and Society in Germany" in Literature and Western Civilization,
Vol. 5: The Modern World, 11, Realities, ed. David Daiches and Anthony Thorlby (London,
1972), 267-299; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, L'Argent, I'amour et la mort en pays d'oc: PrPcPdPdu roman de I'abbe Fabre "Jean-I'ont-pris" (1756) (Paris, 1980); Bonnie G. Smith, "The Domestic Myth," Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1981), 187-213; Jerome Blum, "Fiction and the European Peasantry: The Realist Novel as a Historical Source," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 126 (1982), 2: 122-139; and the more personal Herbert Butterfield, The Historical Novel (Cambridge, 1924), and Richard Cobb, Promenades: A Historian's Appreciation of Modern French Literature (Oxford, 1980).
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Seeing the Past
Review by Roy Porter in Past and Present, 118, 1988, pp 186-205.
In this review Porter asks how we can read visual evidence such as prints. He points to problems with using prints as saying something real about what they portray - at least as regards the topic of a particular print (the madman acting out stage madness 202). Possibly we can use the wallpaper or peripheral figures more easily since they were intended specifically AS background (204). I think he is on to something here - but I also believe it is important and useful to understand what the "stock images" were.
He argues that prints were for the same audience as verbal texts - and that that audience was a literate elite. Political prints were, he says, "aimed at a particular elite of the reading public" (90). As evidence he uses the small print runs and the coded nature of the prints (changing over time) - something which in turn he blames on a desire to avoid censorship (all on page 191). I disagree. Prints may have been intended for that elite audience, but what was intended as political was clearly used by others for different reasons - and if the messages were coded it becomes even easier to reinterpret (see Donald and McCreary).
Finally, Porter challenges scholars to explore "what the ... prints tell us about women in Georgian society?" (204) He says that what we DO know is "how utterly 'sexualized' is the woman of the prints" (205) and suggests that this should be read as saying that "because of their sexual nature, women can be fit only for private life; the public business of politics must be left to men only" (205). This I violently disagree with. First of all I am not sure that all women are sexualized. Second, I believe we must keep in mind the common parallell between the family and the state (the concentration narratives, etc) and perhaps read it the other way around - women, sexuality, courtship, etc are so commonly portrayed in political prints as to suggest a very porous relationship between private and public and a much less regimented separation between male and female spheres.
So there.
In this review Porter asks how we can read visual evidence such as prints. He points to problems with using prints as saying something real about what they portray - at least as regards the topic of a particular print (the madman acting out stage madness 202). Possibly we can use the wallpaper or peripheral figures more easily since they were intended specifically AS background (204). I think he is on to something here - but I also believe it is important and useful to understand what the "stock images" were.
He argues that prints were for the same audience as verbal texts - and that that audience was a literate elite. Political prints were, he says, "aimed at a particular elite of the reading public" (90). As evidence he uses the small print runs and the coded nature of the prints (changing over time) - something which in turn he blames on a desire to avoid censorship (all on page 191). I disagree. Prints may have been intended for that elite audience, but what was intended as political was clearly used by others for different reasons - and if the messages were coded it becomes even easier to reinterpret (see Donald and McCreary).
Finally, Porter challenges scholars to explore "what the ... prints tell us about women in Georgian society?" (204) He says that what we DO know is "how utterly 'sexualized' is the woman of the prints" (205) and suggests that this should be read as saying that "because of their sexual nature, women can be fit only for private life; the public business of politics must be left to men only" (205). This I violently disagree with. First of all I am not sure that all women are sexualized. Second, I believe we must keep in mind the common parallell between the family and the state (the concentration narratives, etc) and perhaps read it the other way around - women, sexuality, courtship, etc are so commonly portrayed in political prints as to suggest a very porous relationship between private and public and a much less regimented separation between male and female spheres.
So there.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
McKeon's comments at the Long Eighteenth Blog
From the blog "The Long Eighteenth"
http://long18th.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_archive.html
I agree entirely that "interpretation" and "explanation" form a dialectical doublet, in their interrelation defining what historical method should aim to achieve. I emphasize the former only because I feel as though "our" attentiveness to the self-conceptions of the past in recent years has been overbalanced by methods and perspectives that derive from modern experience. By this I meant something very imprecise, and the term "presentist" is probably misleading except in so far as it, too, means simply "what postdates the portion of the past that's under study." I think "explanation" is crucial to historical study, but perhaps only once (a schematic temporalization) "interpretation" has defined a sense of the past's self-understanding on the basis of which the claim to "explain" by *other* means can become intelligible.So in these terms, the presentism I sought to rebalance in Secret History is the tendency to read the period in which modernity first seems to emerge (which I take at least to include the 18th century) from the viewpoint of the failures of modernity, paradigmatically, capitalism, the bourgeoisie, class conflict, liberalism, the public sphere, separate spheres, "The Enlightenment." To study these things from the viewpoint of "the past" is, as I've already quoted, "to view the past not only as the prelude to our present but also as a response to its own past" (xxvii), a formulation that suggests that the distinction between interp. and explan. can also name the difference between attending to the intentional *motives* with which past activities, etc. were undertaken and elaborating a theoretical or *causal* understanding whose possibility depends on taking a certain distance from the aims of the past culture in question. In 1690 capitalism meant not commodity fetishism, alienated labor, and the extraction of surplus labor but freedom from hierarchical political and economic control. The bourgeoisie was not a self-conscious class whose ideology sought to universalize its own interests. Indeed, whether it even existed is a definitional rather than an empirical question--hence my objection (74) to the translation of Habermas's burgerlich as bourgeois rather than civil. What people *experienced* in 1690 was not class conflict but a conflict between status-based assumptions about the coextension of birth and worth and emergent class-based assumptions that worth was a function of labor discipline within one's calling, or simply one's industrious accomplishments and the upward mobility that attended them.Except for a few thoughtful "Tory feminists," "liberalism" wasn't an ideology of human rights and negative freedom that nonetheless silently drew the line at women and indigent men but a revolutionary alternative to the tacit belief in monarchal legitimacy. Similarly, the public sphere wasn't a hypocritical claim to inclusiveness and equality but a revolutionary intuition that the determination of public affairs should be the work of others besides the king and his ministers. Separate spheres was not simply the modern, more ruthlessly efficient instantiation of patriarchal inequality but one result of reconceiving gender relations no longer as a matter of better vs. worse but instead as a matter of equality in difference. And the Enlightenment was not the dogmatic adherence to rational and instrumental "objectivity" but a dialectical effort to make sense of the difference between the object and the subject, science and the humanities that had been bequeathed by the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns. This is not to fashion an apology for modernity but to fill in its other side (as it seems these days necessary to do) so as to come closer to an understanding of the past as, like the present, historical process.This sort of presentism can't be laid at the door of any single recent critical movement: the post-structuralist demystification of "history," utopian Marxist contempt for the achievements of modernization, new historicist efforts to "do" history outside the protocols of empiricism--i.e., without abandoning the poststructuralist belief that "history" is epistemologically inaccessible--all these have contributed to the haze of "negative hermeneutics" (Ricoeur) of our times. To recur to one of your points, Dave, although I see what you mean about the comparable vulnerability of "presentism" and "historicism" to partiality, I'd rather reorient these terms, partly on the precedent of previous usage. I take presentism itself to be a mode of "historicism" in the now very general sense of historicism as entailing any commitment to historical understanding. But as I see it, "historicism" came into usage to name what I've been calling "interpretation," the aim to study the past in its own terms, as opposed to the aim to elaborate general laws of historical formation and development that can "explain" history in a more trans-historical fashion, i.e., the attempt to apply the model of scientific "natural laws" to sociohistorical experience.(I associate this meaning of historicism with, e.g., Troeltsch and Dilthey; but ironically Popper and others later adopted the term to describe and discredit what I'm calling "explanation".)And I agree that to conceive interpretation as the study of the past in its own terms begs the question of what, or even more *whose*, past we're talking about. Thinking of inter./explan. as methodologically a dialectical doublet, however, suggests that this is the necessary next step in interpretation: dividing interpretation--a whole vis a vis its opposition to explanation--into its own parts once that preceding division has been accomplished. This can be both diachronic and synchronic: the former in so far as "the past" we seek to understand is a chronology that needs diachronic subdivision if we're to sort out different viewpoints and perspectives; certainly the latter once we recognize that any diachronic period is defined apart from others according to a synchronic perception of what makes it, as a unit, different from surrounding periods. I.e., synchronic study isn't the opposite of diachronic study, it presupposes it as the means by which any slice of diachrony becomes susceptible, by bracketing adjacent chronologies, to synchronic understanding. In this respect I don't think cultural studies devotes itself to synchronic rather than diachronic study; it brackets the problem of diachrony--and thereby takes a position on diachrony--by conceiving a period (or a decade or a day) as susceptible to its "own" analysis. And I think we owe synchronic study not to any recent thinking but to the Scottish Enlightenment historians and then, soon after, to the full elaboration of Marx, for whom the synchronic relationship between infrastructure and superstructure became as indispensable to "historical" study as is the relationship between one event or period and others. (The attribution of the discovery of synchrony to cultural studies might even be seen as an example of "presentism," like the case of looking to Said [as Dave points out]for the origins of what Selden already practiced.) And I think that when people castigate "master narratives" they're not thinking of diachronic totalizations alone. The strong meaning of "teleology" as positing "at the outset a result purported to emerge only as the result of inquiry" (xxv) doesn't require a linear narrative in which to operate. After all, Marx's synchronic relation of ideology/material base has been accused (although I think wrongly)of teleology, as well as of "abstraction" and "reduction." On the other hand, the ambition to hunt out teleology has led some to conflate teleology with linear succession or temporality, which seems to me a mistake. (If this were true, then chronological readings would be ipso facto "evolutionary" readings, whereas in fact they also can be, and can be criticized as, "devolutionary.")For a discussion of interp./explan. that very interestingly argues the subtlety with which that distinction can be made when applied to micro-questions of whether individual actions are the result of "internal" motive or "external" cause see Alasdair MacIntyre, "The Idea of a Social Science," in Against the Self-Images of the Age (Notre Dame, 1984), 211-29.
http://long18th.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_archive.html
I agree entirely that "interpretation" and "explanation" form a dialectical doublet, in their interrelation defining what historical method should aim to achieve. I emphasize the former only because I feel as though "our" attentiveness to the self-conceptions of the past in recent years has been overbalanced by methods and perspectives that derive from modern experience. By this I meant something very imprecise, and the term "presentist" is probably misleading except in so far as it, too, means simply "what postdates the portion of the past that's under study." I think "explanation" is crucial to historical study, but perhaps only once (a schematic temporalization) "interpretation" has defined a sense of the past's self-understanding on the basis of which the claim to "explain" by *other* means can become intelligible.So in these terms, the presentism I sought to rebalance in Secret History is the tendency to read the period in which modernity first seems to emerge (which I take at least to include the 18th century) from the viewpoint of the failures of modernity, paradigmatically, capitalism, the bourgeoisie, class conflict, liberalism, the public sphere, separate spheres, "The Enlightenment." To study these things from the viewpoint of "the past" is, as I've already quoted, "to view the past not only as the prelude to our present but also as a response to its own past" (xxvii), a formulation that suggests that the distinction between interp. and explan. can also name the difference between attending to the intentional *motives* with which past activities, etc. were undertaken and elaborating a theoretical or *causal* understanding whose possibility depends on taking a certain distance from the aims of the past culture in question. In 1690 capitalism meant not commodity fetishism, alienated labor, and the extraction of surplus labor but freedom from hierarchical political and economic control. The bourgeoisie was not a self-conscious class whose ideology sought to universalize its own interests. Indeed, whether it even existed is a definitional rather than an empirical question--hence my objection (74) to the translation of Habermas's burgerlich as bourgeois rather than civil. What people *experienced* in 1690 was not class conflict but a conflict between status-based assumptions about the coextension of birth and worth and emergent class-based assumptions that worth was a function of labor discipline within one's calling, or simply one's industrious accomplishments and the upward mobility that attended them.Except for a few thoughtful "Tory feminists," "liberalism" wasn't an ideology of human rights and negative freedom that nonetheless silently drew the line at women and indigent men but a revolutionary alternative to the tacit belief in monarchal legitimacy. Similarly, the public sphere wasn't a hypocritical claim to inclusiveness and equality but a revolutionary intuition that the determination of public affairs should be the work of others besides the king and his ministers. Separate spheres was not simply the modern, more ruthlessly efficient instantiation of patriarchal inequality but one result of reconceiving gender relations no longer as a matter of better vs. worse but instead as a matter of equality in difference. And the Enlightenment was not the dogmatic adherence to rational and instrumental "objectivity" but a dialectical effort to make sense of the difference between the object and the subject, science and the humanities that had been bequeathed by the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns. This is not to fashion an apology for modernity but to fill in its other side (as it seems these days necessary to do) so as to come closer to an understanding of the past as, like the present, historical process.This sort of presentism can't be laid at the door of any single recent critical movement: the post-structuralist demystification of "history," utopian Marxist contempt for the achievements of modernization, new historicist efforts to "do" history outside the protocols of empiricism--i.e., without abandoning the poststructuralist belief that "history" is epistemologically inaccessible--all these have contributed to the haze of "negative hermeneutics" (Ricoeur) of our times. To recur to one of your points, Dave, although I see what you mean about the comparable vulnerability of "presentism" and "historicism" to partiality, I'd rather reorient these terms, partly on the precedent of previous usage. I take presentism itself to be a mode of "historicism" in the now very general sense of historicism as entailing any commitment to historical understanding. But as I see it, "historicism" came into usage to name what I've been calling "interpretation," the aim to study the past in its own terms, as opposed to the aim to elaborate general laws of historical formation and development that can "explain" history in a more trans-historical fashion, i.e., the attempt to apply the model of scientific "natural laws" to sociohistorical experience.(I associate this meaning of historicism with, e.g., Troeltsch and Dilthey; but ironically Popper and others later adopted the term to describe and discredit what I'm calling "explanation".)And I agree that to conceive interpretation as the study of the past in its own terms begs the question of what, or even more *whose*, past we're talking about. Thinking of inter./explan. as methodologically a dialectical doublet, however, suggests that this is the necessary next step in interpretation: dividing interpretation--a whole vis a vis its opposition to explanation--into its own parts once that preceding division has been accomplished. This can be both diachronic and synchronic: the former in so far as "the past" we seek to understand is a chronology that needs diachronic subdivision if we're to sort out different viewpoints and perspectives; certainly the latter once we recognize that any diachronic period is defined apart from others according to a synchronic perception of what makes it, as a unit, different from surrounding periods. I.e., synchronic study isn't the opposite of diachronic study, it presupposes it as the means by which any slice of diachrony becomes susceptible, by bracketing adjacent chronologies, to synchronic understanding. In this respect I don't think cultural studies devotes itself to synchronic rather than diachronic study; it brackets the problem of diachrony--and thereby takes a position on diachrony--by conceiving a period (or a decade or a day) as susceptible to its "own" analysis. And I think we owe synchronic study not to any recent thinking but to the Scottish Enlightenment historians and then, soon after, to the full elaboration of Marx, for whom the synchronic relationship between infrastructure and superstructure became as indispensable to "historical" study as is the relationship between one event or period and others. (The attribution of the discovery of synchrony to cultural studies might even be seen as an example of "presentism," like the case of looking to Said [as Dave points out]for the origins of what Selden already practiced.) And I think that when people castigate "master narratives" they're not thinking of diachronic totalizations alone. The strong meaning of "teleology" as positing "at the outset a result purported to emerge only as the result of inquiry" (xxv) doesn't require a linear narrative in which to operate. After all, Marx's synchronic relation of ideology/material base has been accused (although I think wrongly)of teleology, as well as of "abstraction" and "reduction." On the other hand, the ambition to hunt out teleology has led some to conflate teleology with linear succession or temporality, which seems to me a mistake. (If this were true, then chronological readings would be ipso facto "evolutionary" readings, whereas in fact they also can be, and can be criticized as, "devolutionary.")For a discussion of interp./explan. that very interestingly argues the subtlety with which that distinction can be made when applied to micro-questions of whether individual actions are the result of "internal" motive or "external" cause see Alasdair MacIntyre, "The Idea of a Social Science," in Against the Self-Images of the Age (Notre Dame, 1984), 211-29.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
The Ordering of the World in the Eighteenth Century
Donald, Diana and Frank O'Gorman. The Ordering of the World in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
INTRO:
Arts exuded order - static order. Order was also in the universe, divinely structured not for man, but only man, purportedly, could fully appreciate it. Ideas of order flowed back and forth between religion, humanities, science.
Joshua Reynold's Discourses describe artistic order and hierarchy, ranking the styles and subjects of art. At the summit was art modelled on the renaissance. Its epick style roused the nobler passions, based on severity - sober tones or bold, simple contrasts. From there we move down along the Great Chain of Being. Threats to this beauty came from Venice with nuances and light flickering that seduced the painter (these works were fickle, superficial, vain, etc - in language borrowed from Pope these paintings were all the bad of feminine).
More on the Chain - there is hierarchy of course, and balance (from top to bottom, from man being both spiritual and physical). The things below were - subjected - to those higher up. Many assumed this to be true, and that the drudges needed to be kept in ignorance to not be too miserable. People like Johnson, in Rasselas, questioned the resulting social stagnation - "the maxims of a commercial nations .... promote a rotation of property" (Johnson The Works)
Some - noting eg the importance of earth worms - saw rather the mutlifarious lateral relations of interdependence.
Foucault says this is when belief in the mysterious affinities linking all the objects in the world gives way to rational systemisation as per Linneaus (although some critics thought it was silly to base system on a few external criteria when clearly the truth is on the inside). People DID, though, look closely at the world to set up their systems - and some said it was an unsustainable theological fantasy to make unbroken linear continuity a part of the plan of the Creation (Blumenbach quoted on page 10)
What many hoped to find was that nature reflected a benevolent and perfect Creator - like Newton perhaps - but increasingly what they found was disorder and constant flux. Donald says this "was as closely related to concepts of the political order and of human destiny as the hierarchical 'Great Chain' had been" (11)
Buffon regarding nature and Smith regarding the economy are said to have had parallell systems of irresistible, opposite but self-correcting forces. More critical voices included Hume, who did not see an invisible hand keeping order and indeed thought that man created trouble for himself - "man is the greatest enemy of man", and Malthus, who presented nature not as abundant and ever-nurturing but as an "indigent parent who could not provide for all her fecklessly produced off-spring" (13). Then Darwin taking inspiration from Malthus, in a cross-pollination that as we have seen is the norm rather than an exception.
Such interchanges were common among the many conflicting ideas of order, and each structure was internally incoherent - we are looking then, at several, flawed, attempts at ordering the world. This is organised as follows (list of chapters and content).
CHAPTER ONE - J.D. Clark:
"Providence, Predestination, and Progress: Or, Did the Enlightenment Fail?"
Chapter two - Frank O'Gorman
"Ordering the Political World"
Looking for an overarching model of the political order in 18th c Britain - the old idea that there is a stable and solid political order is misleading. The Whig interpretation has held though, and it "emphasized both the constitutional legitimacy and historical continuity of the political system." (p 84)
Standard interpretations have been:
1) J Clark saying Britain in the eighteenth century was dominated by the forces of monarchy, Anglicanism and aristocracy - an ancien régime - a confessional state.
2) John Brewer said England was a Fiscal-Military State - acknowledging that Britain depended on parliamentary supply and presenting Britain as essentially secular.
3) A social interpretation by eg Borsay, Corfield and Paul Langford that emphasizes the growth and importance of the middling classes. Complements Brewer rather than Clark.
4) Linda Colley has described how a Protestant-based patriotism emerged to protect the nation against its other - France.
All of them seem to assume the order was stable - working from Jack Plumb's lectures in the 60's where he claimed that in the 1720's England achieved political stability after decades of strife. Whigs had won over Tories, court over country, executive over the legislature and electoral franchises had been narrowed. Finally, the independence of London had been curtailed and Scotland and Ireland been pacified. (p 87)
there are problems with the stability thesis:
1) growth of oligarchy and expansion in the executive is said to have created INstability under William and Anne but stability under George I and II?
2) Plumb claims electoral patron subdued their constituencies - but this is not the case, as many seats were contested later and the size of the electorate increased
3) Walpole believed there were threats everywhere -Whigs, Jacobites, France
4) Plumb leaned on Habbakuk's theory of the growth of large estates - didn't happen. The GENTRY prospered, not the aristocracy.
5) Plumb said Whigs were in control - but the Tories were a constant, serious threat - and many Tories were also Jacobites and ready to renounce the Hanoverians.
6) and Church-state relations in Scotland and Ireland made for instability
7) and Plumb did not look at local issues - local gov't had worked through the instabilites of the 17th C and just kept on going, not noticing much difference in the 18th
8) Plumb doesn't say how long it is supposed to have lasted [maybe until the colonies were lost?]
What really IS there is rebellion - dynastic, imperial, and religious (p 89) - additionally there are a number of plots and crises (p 90). Also, no other country has this kind of constant crises or rebellion going on, OTHER countries are much more stable. In France, things are quiet before the revolution - except the riots, but riots in Britain are much bigger. Only in Poland can we see a country whose history "manifestly exceeds that of Britain in the vulnerability and persistent instability" (91).
Chapter four - Rosemary Sweet
"The Ordering of Family and Gender in the Age of Enlightenment"
Although patriarchy was questioned - the family was still an organising factor. "The institution of the family and the distinction between man and woman were seen to be God-given and 'natural'; they were the basic determinants of order in eighteenth-century society and, as such,not open to question" (112). Lawrence Stone's classical discussion of the separation of spheres and other key features of 'modern family life' should be given up in favor of a "plurality of overlapping models of family life" (113)
Nuclear family? some maybe, but experiences are widely divergent. They existed before and kinship models kept existing. Publications of antiquarian family history, establishing family kinships, persisted (117) THey may have been 'cultural residue' (Raymond Williams) but still important (118).
The family and polical culture (check out Lewis Namier ...) Recent research has found:
a) neat theoretical distinction between public and private spheres breaks down when tested against the lived experience
b) the importance of the family - particularly in informal politics, which was a lot of it. (120)Campaigners would target women as well as men and women were expected to help out and were vital conduits of information
Women worked for the family, not themselves, but then I guess so did men ...
Family interest and Corruption - familial interest and involvement was questioned as symptom of corruption - please note this was at least in part a class issue. Pigott and others used gender to point out the immoral mores of the aristocracy and to question aristocratic privilege. Family influence continued unabated - but it was being transformed into a different kind of political force, "one of the points where the unreformed system was most vulnerable to attack" (122)
Urbanization: a challenge to the family? Conservative moralists such as Byng feared the loss of distinction and privileges due to birth and breeding, and looked upon the growth of urban society with horror" (123) ... "but the concept of the family amongst the middling sort should not automatically equate with a simple model of individual autonomy and private domesticity, or the rejection of the obligations due to wider kin" (123) - RICHARD GRASSBY has shown that "half of business partners came from immediate family or kinsfolk, with no decline towards the latter end of the period" (124) There are though, some studies that show a shift toward friends and neighbours instead of kin ... Kin and networks based on occupation, politics, religion and neighbourhood coexisted!
Separate Spheres, gender roles and the nuclear family - aristocratic connections of kinship did come under attack but some of the other claims are weak. Judith Lewis has argued (in line with Stone) that aristocratic women were forced to withdraw, Thomas Laqueur has claimed that we went from one sex to a two sex model of gender and women were defined in terms of childbearing (127). "This mode of thought, it has been argued, produced a discourse which was able to 'stabilize and maintain a social order of gender inequality', even as the traditional foundations of patriarchal theory were being undermined" (127).
It IS true that women found themselves excluded from some professions, but in many ways "the tidy transition that is supposed to have taken place in early eighteenth-centuryy thought is considerably less clear-cut than some interpretations have suggested" (128)
KAREN HARVEY has shown that two-sex and one-sex models exist parallell to each-other in both seventeenth and nineteenth-century literature. Numerous historians have shown that affectionate love existed long before the 18th century (129) [Keith Wrightson I believe is one].
Marriage: Romantic Ideals and Pragmatic Reality ... upper class folks seem to have some element of romance, but much more of parental suitability, middling sort folk seemed to often consider the partnership, co-dependency ... (see eg Hunt) - hard to find any direct changes in emotional register depicted in sources ... clear that although there was general agreement that adultery was wrong, positions were changing and thetre were increasing numbers of divorce, esp. after 1770 (130) = also "adultery was becoming a social problem rather than a religious offence" (130).
It is difficult to know what to make of print culture evidence - what exactly does it mean? And that sort of reasoning also sidesteps the issue of "whether gender weighed more heavily than social status or class in determining an individual's identity and experience" (130)
there is also the yawning chasm between prescription and practice - "recent research has cumulatively built up a picture of the widespread participation of women in the urban economy that blurs the clarity of the distinctions that historians have traditionally tried to draw" (131)
!!!!! COMMENT!!!!
The deal is that women were always also all these other things - and depending on what they were doing they would use whatever was their strongest suit - "I qualify for this position/authority/whatever because of X" ... X is never their gender, being a woman was almost never the basis for authority - and it was often a the basis for devaluation and humiliation. When you wanted to question someone you would use their weakest suit - and that was often gender ... but in between those two situations there were many when gender did not come up, where other criteria already had decided. Those who had a number of strong suits did not have to discuss their gender as often - they had other capital. The question then becomes if gender is always seen as the weakest suit to take someone down with?
"fluctuating and contested nature of masculinity" (131) - one change "that can be attributed to the code of politeness was a diminished tolerance for violence". the values of politeness were often those associated with women so there was a fine line to balance on
and btw, the importance of family was relevant to men too - "private, domestic virtues of a man began to have an increased bearing upon his public persona, whether he was a statesman or a military hero" (132)
Finally - as you have seen things were complex - the model of big change and separate spheres is too simple, older patterns were still viable and the terrain contested - note that the model is not the reality - the ideal type shows the pattern, not any individual truth. (133)
INTRO:
Arts exuded order - static order. Order was also in the universe, divinely structured not for man, but only man, purportedly, could fully appreciate it. Ideas of order flowed back and forth between religion, humanities, science.
Joshua Reynold's Discourses describe artistic order and hierarchy, ranking the styles and subjects of art. At the summit was art modelled on the renaissance. Its epick style roused the nobler passions, based on severity - sober tones or bold, simple contrasts. From there we move down along the Great Chain of Being. Threats to this beauty came from Venice with nuances and light flickering that seduced the painter (these works were fickle, superficial, vain, etc - in language borrowed from Pope these paintings were all the bad of feminine).
More on the Chain - there is hierarchy of course, and balance (from top to bottom, from man being both spiritual and physical). The things below were - subjected - to those higher up. Many assumed this to be true, and that the drudges needed to be kept in ignorance to not be too miserable. People like Johnson, in Rasselas, questioned the resulting social stagnation - "the maxims of a commercial nations .... promote a rotation of property" (Johnson The Works)
Some - noting eg the importance of earth worms - saw rather the mutlifarious lateral relations of interdependence.
Foucault says this is when belief in the mysterious affinities linking all the objects in the world gives way to rational systemisation as per Linneaus (although some critics thought it was silly to base system on a few external criteria when clearly the truth is on the inside). People DID, though, look closely at the world to set up their systems - and some said it was an unsustainable theological fantasy to make unbroken linear continuity a part of the plan of the Creation (Blumenbach quoted on page 10)
What many hoped to find was that nature reflected a benevolent and perfect Creator - like Newton perhaps - but increasingly what they found was disorder and constant flux. Donald says this "was as closely related to concepts of the political order and of human destiny as the hierarchical 'Great Chain' had been" (11)
Buffon regarding nature and Smith regarding the economy are said to have had parallell systems of irresistible, opposite but self-correcting forces. More critical voices included Hume, who did not see an invisible hand keeping order and indeed thought that man created trouble for himself - "man is the greatest enemy of man", and Malthus, who presented nature not as abundant and ever-nurturing but as an "indigent parent who could not provide for all her fecklessly produced off-spring" (13). Then Darwin taking inspiration from Malthus, in a cross-pollination that as we have seen is the norm rather than an exception.
Such interchanges were common among the many conflicting ideas of order, and each structure was internally incoherent - we are looking then, at several, flawed, attempts at ordering the world. This is organised as follows (list of chapters and content).
CHAPTER ONE - J.D. Clark:
"Providence, Predestination, and Progress: Or, Did the Enlightenment Fail?"
Basically Jonathan Clark says that divine providence as an explanation of the course of human affairs (private lives and politics alike) remained a vital and mainstream explanatory model. I think he also says that when people moved away from providence is was as often as not toward chaos, not scientific rationality ... Finally, scientific rationality and providence were not, initially, at odds with eachother - they were often seen as the same (e.g. Newtion's view that we see God's hand in the laws of nature).
There is a discussion of how miracles are less seen as events where God overules the laws of nature than as a fortuitous confluence of individually natural events = providence. I think the underlying debate is as to the nature of God - if all-powerful he need not tinker constantly with his creation, but then if people have free will God needs to clean up after their bad decisions. On the other hand if people do have free will - is God still omnipotent?
At times he seems to go off his topic and just generally discuss the kinds of debates on order taking place in the eighteenth century - his long term goal seems to be to argue that the Enlightenment wasn't secular, not modern, and that the focus on order and structure was invented as a straw man in the nineteenth century by people who were questioning everything sacred. And the only thing they managed was to question themselves.
Chapter two - Frank O'Gorman
"Ordering the Political World"
Looking for an overarching model of the political order in 18th c Britain - the old idea that there is a stable and solid political order is misleading. The Whig interpretation has held though, and it "emphasized both the constitutional legitimacy and historical continuity of the political system." (p 84)
Standard interpretations have been:
1) J Clark saying Britain in the eighteenth century was dominated by the forces of monarchy, Anglicanism and aristocracy - an ancien régime - a confessional state.
2) John Brewer said England was a Fiscal-Military State - acknowledging that Britain depended on parliamentary supply and presenting Britain as essentially secular.
3) A social interpretation by eg Borsay, Corfield and Paul Langford that emphasizes the growth and importance of the middling classes. Complements Brewer rather than Clark.
4) Linda Colley has described how a Protestant-based patriotism emerged to protect the nation against its other - France.
All of them seem to assume the order was stable - working from Jack Plumb's lectures in the 60's where he claimed that in the 1720's England achieved political stability after decades of strife. Whigs had won over Tories, court over country, executive over the legislature and electoral franchises had been narrowed. Finally, the independence of London had been curtailed and Scotland and Ireland been pacified. (p 87)
there are problems with the stability thesis:
1) growth of oligarchy and expansion in the executive is said to have created INstability under William and Anne but stability under George I and II?
2) Plumb claims electoral patron subdued their constituencies - but this is not the case, as many seats were contested later and the size of the electorate increased
3) Walpole believed there were threats everywhere -Whigs, Jacobites, France
4) Plumb leaned on Habbakuk's theory of the growth of large estates - didn't happen. The GENTRY prospered, not the aristocracy.
5) Plumb said Whigs were in control - but the Tories were a constant, serious threat - and many Tories were also Jacobites and ready to renounce the Hanoverians.
6) and Church-state relations in Scotland and Ireland made for instability
7) and Plumb did not look at local issues - local gov't had worked through the instabilites of the 17th C and just kept on going, not noticing much difference in the 18th
8) Plumb doesn't say how long it is supposed to have lasted [maybe until the colonies were lost?]
What really IS there is rebellion - dynastic, imperial, and religious (p 89) - additionally there are a number of plots and crises (p 90). Also, no other country has this kind of constant crises or rebellion going on, OTHER countries are much more stable. In France, things are quiet before the revolution - except the riots, but riots in Britain are much bigger. Only in Poland can we see a country whose history "manifestly exceeds that of Britain in the vulnerability and persistent instability" (91).
One of the general problems is of course terminology - what do we mean by stability and crisis? Plumb's definition is too wide and there is no other agreed upon. Stability is when people believe gov't is legitimate and this belief is consistent with general beliefs so people continue to assent to gov'ts authority. The opposite happens when people feel alienated from the political order - a "crisis of legitimation". O'Gorman says this happened on a number of occasions in 18th c Britain.
The first time was w the Glorious Revolution, then w the installation of George I, then the Jacobite uprising in 1715, then end of peace w France 1741) at the time of the War of Austrian Succession and the fall of Walpole (1742), and then the Jacobite uprising of 1745-6. After that the Jacobites were done for but stability was not to be had ... things just got worse with the rebellion of the colonies and the American war of independence (1776-1783). The conflict raised serious issues about legitimacy and loyalty and subjection. Add to this the county associations under Christopher Wyhill and the Gordon Riots in 1780 and it is clear the whole country was mad the whole time.
Then we get ten pages of the different crises and how they were handled - in the end O'Gorman says that the crises did not break the country apart but rather served to strengthen the cohesion of the country (104). The issues that caused instabiliy were solved and stability grew - the problem of distance, of dynastic inheritance, of loyal opposition. Darly on people were frightfully disloyal -
MY NOTE HERE - this says they were perhaps doing something else? that they were not being disloyal to England but loyal to their religion, that they were not disloyal to the king but loyal to the idea of monarchy ... I think that is a really interesting question - what US did people feel like they belonged to, and what did that belonging entail. I do NOT think that O'Gorman shows instability - I think he shows exactly what others have been talking about - a nation that was stable enough to deal with so many crises without falling apart.
Chapter four - Rosemary Sweet
"The Ordering of Family and Gender in the Age of Enlightenment"
Although patriarchy was questioned - the family was still an organising factor. "The institution of the family and the distinction between man and woman were seen to be God-given and 'natural'; they were the basic determinants of order in eighteenth-century society and, as such,not open to question" (112). Lawrence Stone's classical discussion of the separation of spheres and other key features of 'modern family life' should be given up in favor of a "plurality of overlapping models of family life" (113)
Nuclear family? some maybe, but experiences are widely divergent. They existed before and kinship models kept existing. Publications of antiquarian family history, establishing family kinships, persisted (117) THey may have been 'cultural residue' (Raymond Williams) but still important (118).
The family and polical culture (check out Lewis Namier ...) Recent research has found:
a) neat theoretical distinction between public and private spheres breaks down when tested against the lived experience
b) the importance of the family - particularly in informal politics, which was a lot of it. (120)Campaigners would target women as well as men and women were expected to help out and were vital conduits of information
Women worked for the family, not themselves, but then I guess so did men ...
Family interest and Corruption - familial interest and involvement was questioned as symptom of corruption - please note this was at least in part a class issue. Pigott and others used gender to point out the immoral mores of the aristocracy and to question aristocratic privilege. Family influence continued unabated - but it was being transformed into a different kind of political force, "one of the points where the unreformed system was most vulnerable to attack" (122)
Urbanization: a challenge to the family? Conservative moralists such as Byng feared the loss of distinction and privileges due to birth and breeding, and looked upon the growth of urban society with horror" (123) ... "but the concept of the family amongst the middling sort should not automatically equate with a simple model of individual autonomy and private domesticity, or the rejection of the obligations due to wider kin" (123) - RICHARD GRASSBY has shown that "half of business partners came from immediate family or kinsfolk, with no decline towards the latter end of the period" (124) There are though, some studies that show a shift toward friends and neighbours instead of kin ... Kin and networks based on occupation, politics, religion and neighbourhood coexisted!
Separate Spheres, gender roles and the nuclear family - aristocratic connections of kinship did come under attack but some of the other claims are weak. Judith Lewis has argued (in line with Stone) that aristocratic women were forced to withdraw, Thomas Laqueur has claimed that we went from one sex to a two sex model of gender and women were defined in terms of childbearing (127). "This mode of thought, it has been argued, produced a discourse which was able to 'stabilize and maintain a social order of gender inequality', even as the traditional foundations of patriarchal theory were being undermined" (127).
It IS true that women found themselves excluded from some professions, but in many ways "the tidy transition that is supposed to have taken place in early eighteenth-centuryy thought is considerably less clear-cut than some interpretations have suggested" (128)
KAREN HARVEY has shown that two-sex and one-sex models exist parallell to each-other in both seventeenth and nineteenth-century literature. Numerous historians have shown that affectionate love existed long before the 18th century (129) [Keith Wrightson I believe is one].
Marriage: Romantic Ideals and Pragmatic Reality ... upper class folks seem to have some element of romance, but much more of parental suitability, middling sort folk seemed to often consider the partnership, co-dependency ... (see eg Hunt) - hard to find any direct changes in emotional register depicted in sources ... clear that although there was general agreement that adultery was wrong, positions were changing and thetre were increasing numbers of divorce, esp. after 1770 (130) = also "adultery was becoming a social problem rather than a religious offence" (130).
It is difficult to know what to make of print culture evidence - what exactly does it mean? And that sort of reasoning also sidesteps the issue of "whether gender weighed more heavily than social status or class in determining an individual's identity and experience" (130)
there is also the yawning chasm between prescription and practice - "recent research has cumulatively built up a picture of the widespread participation of women in the urban economy that blurs the clarity of the distinctions that historians have traditionally tried to draw" (131)
!!!!! COMMENT!!!!
The deal is that women were always also all these other things - and depending on what they were doing they would use whatever was their strongest suit - "I qualify for this position/authority/whatever because of X" ... X is never their gender, being a woman was almost never the basis for authority - and it was often a the basis for devaluation and humiliation. When you wanted to question someone you would use their weakest suit - and that was often gender ... but in between those two situations there were many when gender did not come up, where other criteria already had decided. Those who had a number of strong suits did not have to discuss their gender as often - they had other capital. The question then becomes if gender is always seen as the weakest suit to take someone down with?
"fluctuating and contested nature of masculinity" (131) - one change "that can be attributed to the code of politeness was a diminished tolerance for violence". the values of politeness were often those associated with women so there was a fine line to balance on
and btw, the importance of family was relevant to men too - "private, domestic virtues of a man began to have an increased bearing upon his public persona, whether he was a statesman or a military hero" (132)
Finally - as you have seen things were complex - the model of big change and separate spheres is too simple, older patterns were still viable and the terrain contested - note that the model is not the reality - the ideal type shows the pattern, not any individual truth. (133)
Sunday, September 09, 2007
"History of Ideas at 80"
By Richard Macksey in MLN 117.5 (2002) 1083-1097
Modern American History of Ideas born at lunch w Arthur Lovejoy, George Boas, and Gilbert Chinard when a club was proposed. It was formed on January 24, 1923.
Pre-history w Aristotle, "universal histories" by Polybius, Vico, Kant and Schelling, discussions of Zeitgeist, Denkstil, and world-view, as well as e.g. cassirer and begriffsgeschichte.
Lovejovian history of ideas "involves an interdisciplinary approach to the indetification and tracing of certain "unit-ideas" as they find expression in a wide range of cultural fields from philosophic systems to literature, the other arts, the sciences, and social thought." (1084)
In 1940 they founded the Journal of the History of Ideas. Isaiah Berlin, Rene Wellek and others have been on the board, a number of academic programs have been founded as history of ideas programs, and the Dictionary of the History of Ideas was published to spread the ideas.
The paradigm work is of course "The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of Ideas" (1933). The unit ideas of plenitude, continuity, and gradation were followed from Plato to the early nineteenth century on the trail of the "single pervasive complex of ideas" embodied in the title. I guess here the idea of the great chain is that it encompasses everything, that it gives continuity over time and that it provides a hierarchy for the world? - at least this is the idea until the enlightenment and romanticism kills the unity of the universe.
Lovejoy says HOI is more specific and less restricted than history of philosophy, coz the units studied are different. He wants to study unit-ideas, the constitutive element of all the larger systems, creeds, and -isms. Macksey says Lovejoy believes the unit-ideas are finite in number and persistent through time - which makes it questionable whether an actual unit-idea has any history at all?
According to Macksey - Lovejoy's emphasis on this anatomizing process tends to foreground continuity over discontinuity, since "the seeming novelty of many a system is due solely to the novelty of application or arrangement of the old elements which enter into it" (4). (Macksey page 1089)
According to Macksey - Lovejoy then describes some unit-ideas - most are of the following types: implicit or incompletely explicit assumptions, or "more or less unconscious mental habits" , "dialectical motives", "types of metaphysical pathos", "sacred words or phrases of a period or movement" and, more explicitly, specific propositions or principles (eg the Great Chain)
TWO OF THESE TYPES DESCRIBED BY LOVEJOY ARE ESPECIALLY USEFUL TO ANYONE ATTEMPTING TO ACCOUNT FOR THE NON-RATIONAL SUBSTRATE IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY; the "dialectical motives", which are the mental tics that form the characteristic turns of reasoning or assumptions of an individual, school, or even generation; and "metaphysical pathos" which is Lovejoy's term for the emotional 'charge' of certain words or phrases (Macksey page 1089)
Then three important aspects of the recurrent phenomena -
1) same presuppositions or operative ideas in diverse provinces of thought and different periods
2) the role of the semantic transitions and confusions
3) the internal tensions or waverings of the mind of almost every individual writer
Innovation is to Lovejoy a matter of recombination of the basic elements of thought
Development in France - histoire des idees much like academic source study but also the Geneva School. Georges Poulet - is more concerned with the concepts we think with than the things we think about.
Development in Germany - "several rival versions of conceptional history in the generation after Dilthey, notably Friedrich Mienecke's Ideengeschichte" and eg Gadamer. Also , the exploration of commonplaces, "sacred words and phrases" in Ernst Robert Curtius' European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1953)
Development in Britain - Isaiah Berlin. Where Lovejoy stresses continuity of unit-ideas, Berlin "is characteristically drawn to new or emergent ideas" (1092)
Next generation in Britain were Quentin Skinner and John Dunn. Skinner says neither context nor the total insistence on the autonomy of the text is enough. And compare this to the scholars (old-school history of literature folks) v critics (new school new criticism folks) debate.
Then we get to practical applications which have been various. Lit scholars have learned to be cautious about periods, many confusions have been cleared up and disambiguations taken place.
Many second generation studies have wandered beyond particular eras looking at such things as progess, primitivism, biblical covenant, etc
Then we get to fruitful objections such as are described in eg Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being after Fifty Years by Daniel Wilson (1987).
Spitzer who wanted a synthetic method that allows the historian to comprehend the 'totality of features of a given period or movement' " (1094)
Mandelbaum who wanted to distinguish between continuing ideas and recurrent ideas.
Mink who ?
Foucault who was tireless in his attacks (no, it is not that I don't describe what they are, it is that Macksey doesn't - silly man), but had certain similarities:
a) committed to a vigorously cross-disciplinary approach
b) identified and studied the profound break in thought separating the E from Romanticism
c) more interested in the CONSTRAINTS on thought at any given period than in its flow
d) anti-formalists
General problems:
what is an idea?
define causality and influence?
discontinuities or paradigm shifts?
meaning and value?
This really is not a very good article - there are many claims and very few examples to support them. There is no way to figure out from this how different scholars see the history of ideas as a discipline and what it is supposed to be doing. For instance, at the end Macksey says that the linguistic turn has significantly altered the way in which readers how approach the conceptual formulations in Lovejoy's narrative - no shit, Sherlock - but he says not a word about HOW the approaches have been altered. GRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.
Modern American History of Ideas born at lunch w Arthur Lovejoy, George Boas, and Gilbert Chinard when a club was proposed. It was formed on January 24, 1923.
Pre-history w Aristotle, "universal histories" by Polybius, Vico, Kant and Schelling, discussions of Zeitgeist, Denkstil, and world-view, as well as e.g. cassirer and begriffsgeschichte.
Lovejovian history of ideas "involves an interdisciplinary approach to the indetification and tracing of certain "unit-ideas" as they find expression in a wide range of cultural fields from philosophic systems to literature, the other arts, the sciences, and social thought." (1084)
In 1940 they founded the Journal of the History of Ideas. Isaiah Berlin, Rene Wellek and others have been on the board, a number of academic programs have been founded as history of ideas programs, and the Dictionary of the History of Ideas was published to spread the ideas.
The paradigm work is of course "The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of Ideas" (1933). The unit ideas of plenitude, continuity, and gradation were followed from Plato to the early nineteenth century on the trail of the "single pervasive complex of ideas" embodied in the title. I guess here the idea of the great chain is that it encompasses everything, that it gives continuity over time and that it provides a hierarchy for the world? - at least this is the idea until the enlightenment and romanticism kills the unity of the universe.
Lovejoy says HOI is more specific and less restricted than history of philosophy, coz the units studied are different. He wants to study unit-ideas, the constitutive element of all the larger systems, creeds, and -isms. Macksey says Lovejoy believes the unit-ideas are finite in number and persistent through time - which makes it questionable whether an actual unit-idea has any history at all?
According to Macksey - Lovejoy's emphasis on this anatomizing process tends to foreground continuity over discontinuity, since "the seeming novelty of many a system is due solely to the novelty of application or arrangement of the old elements which enter into it" (4). (Macksey page 1089)
According to Macksey - Lovejoy then describes some unit-ideas - most are of the following types: implicit or incompletely explicit assumptions, or "more or less unconscious mental habits" , "dialectical motives", "types of metaphysical pathos", "sacred words or phrases of a period or movement" and, more explicitly, specific propositions or principles (eg the Great Chain)
TWO OF THESE TYPES DESCRIBED BY LOVEJOY ARE ESPECIALLY USEFUL TO ANYONE ATTEMPTING TO ACCOUNT FOR THE NON-RATIONAL SUBSTRATE IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY; the "dialectical motives", which are the mental tics that form the characteristic turns of reasoning or assumptions of an individual, school, or even generation; and "metaphysical pathos" which is Lovejoy's term for the emotional 'charge' of certain words or phrases (Macksey page 1089)
Then three important aspects of the recurrent phenomena -
1) same presuppositions or operative ideas in diverse provinces of thought and different periods
2) the role of the semantic transitions and confusions
3) the internal tensions or waverings of the mind of almost every individual writer
Innovation is to Lovejoy a matter of recombination of the basic elements of thought
Development in France - histoire des idees much like academic source study but also the Geneva School. Georges Poulet - is more concerned with the concepts we think with than the things we think about.
Development in Germany - "several rival versions of conceptional history in the generation after Dilthey, notably Friedrich Mienecke's Ideengeschichte" and eg Gadamer. Also , the exploration of commonplaces, "sacred words and phrases" in Ernst Robert Curtius' European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1953)
Development in Britain - Isaiah Berlin. Where Lovejoy stresses continuity of unit-ideas, Berlin "is characteristically drawn to new or emergent ideas" (1092)
Next generation in Britain were Quentin Skinner and John Dunn. Skinner says neither context nor the total insistence on the autonomy of the text is enough. And compare this to the scholars (old-school history of literature folks) v critics (new school new criticism folks) debate.
Then we get to practical applications which have been various. Lit scholars have learned to be cautious about periods, many confusions have been cleared up and disambiguations taken place.
Many second generation studies have wandered beyond particular eras looking at such things as progess, primitivism, biblical covenant, etc
Then we get to fruitful objections such as are described in eg Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being after Fifty Years by Daniel Wilson (1987).
Spitzer who wanted a synthetic method that allows the historian to comprehend the 'totality of features of a given period or movement' " (1094)
Mandelbaum who wanted to distinguish between continuing ideas and recurrent ideas.
Mink who ?
Foucault who was tireless in his attacks (no, it is not that I don't describe what they are, it is that Macksey doesn't - silly man), but had certain similarities:
a) committed to a vigorously cross-disciplinary approach
b) identified and studied the profound break in thought separating the E from Romanticism
c) more interested in the CONSTRAINTS on thought at any given period than in its flow
d) anti-formalists
General problems:
what is an idea?
define causality and influence?
discontinuities or paradigm shifts?
meaning and value?
This really is not a very good article - there are many claims and very few examples to support them. There is no way to figure out from this how different scholars see the history of ideas as a discipline and what it is supposed to be doing. For instance, at the end Macksey says that the linguistic turn has significantly altered the way in which readers how approach the conceptual formulations in Lovejoy's narrative - no shit, Sherlock - but he says not a word about HOW the approaches have been altered. GRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
History of Sensibilities
Article in AHR by Dan Wickberg.
two interpretive directions of new cultural history
A) cultural history of representation
B) history of sensibilities
I think these two relate to the discussion of intellectual history v the social (material) history of intellectuals but I am not sure how? Maybe what the first article says is that Wickberg, rather than study what people have thought about (which would put IH very close to history of philosophy or perhaps in history tend toward a cultural history of representation) or study what made people think about certain things (which would be a social history of intellectuals), believes we should study HOW people think and feel about things - and how, historically, we have perceived the things we think and feel about ... which would be a history of sensibilities.
The first case looks at how eg whiteness is represented and think that says something about race - the second case "foregrounds the sensibility" (662)
He quotes Huizinga and says that "what separates the people in the past from our contemporaries in the present is not so much the things they were concerned with, but the alien ways in which they sensed and felt those things" (664).
Then we get a short history of the term sensibilities - founded in the idea of sense experience as described eg by John Locke and defining sensibility as the general capacity for sense experience and the faculty of mind responsible for sensation.
A second lineage developed though, emphasizing the moral, emotional, and literary elements of character, associating sensibility with refined feeling, taste, and sensitivity to suffering. This is embodied in "the Man of Feeling".
Along these two paths sensibility was unitary - you had it, to a larger or lesser degree, but it was one thing. In the twentieth century art movements took aesthetic sensibility and turned it into sensibilities (666).
When Trilling and Sontag used the term they "emphasized its collective nature and tied its moral to its aestethic content" (667). Sontag equated sensibility with collectively held forms of taste (667)
When Clifford Geertz used the term, he linked culture and sensibility - "what marked people as different from one another was precisely the difference in the structure of perception, feeling, and value that could be designated as 'sensibility'; the task of cultural anthropology was to translate one sensibility into another without collapsing the differences between them" (668)
IN a different direction TS Eliot talked about the dissociation of sensibility - sensation and perception are separated and thought and feeling divided - not good. His discussion shows that sensibility is not just a structure of feeling but a pattern in which idea and emotion are bound up with one another" (669)
Why is sensibilities better? Because it is broader and combines things in a better way:
Episteme (Foucault) and paradigm (Kuhn) are focused on thought and knowledge - not emotion.
Mentalité (Annales school) distinguishes between elites - who have rational ideas - and the people - who have "popular attitudes" or .. mentalités.
Structures of feeling (Raymond Williams) is good because it considers emotion, but limited because it seems to imply formal systems of thought do not contain particular structures of feeling .. it is also Marxist
Habitus - Bourdieu - focus on embodiment makes it problematic for groups? Also, "the notion of habitus is lacking that sense of the interior mental and emotional life that the concept of sensibility captures so well; its problem in some sense is that it is too rigid in its focus on system and structure to capture the looseness and fluidity of sensibilities" (672)
Finally - all the other concepts have a lot of theoretical baggage that sensibilities does not have.
Why not sensibilities? (673)
1) It avoids discussions of POWER
- "posits deep structure of mind" where "meaning is not negotiated, but is already given"
- concerned more with description than with explanation
this can of course be seen as an advantage too - coz it lets us talk about culture that is not implicated in power - "culture is not power, nor is power the most important element of culture" (674)
2) focuses more on what than why - bad for folks who want causality
3) propensity for use in a sweeping and over-generalizing fashion
- tends toward "consensus" history since it easily portrays a uniform culture
but it doesn't HAVE to be like that - you can change elements that are outdated - [so I wonder why this is not theoretical baggage and the outdated elements of other concepts are not - maybe it is easier to broaden a concept and add complexity than to narrow a concept and take out complexity?]
two interpretive directions of new cultural history
A) cultural history of representation
B) history of sensibilities
I think these two relate to the discussion of intellectual history v the social (material) history of intellectuals but I am not sure how? Maybe what the first article says is that Wickberg, rather than study what people have thought about (which would put IH very close to history of philosophy or perhaps in history tend toward a cultural history of representation) or study what made people think about certain things (which would be a social history of intellectuals), believes we should study HOW people think and feel about things - and how, historically, we have perceived the things we think and feel about ... which would be a history of sensibilities.
The first case looks at how eg whiteness is represented and think that says something about race - the second case "foregrounds the sensibility" (662)
He quotes Huizinga and says that "what separates the people in the past from our contemporaries in the present is not so much the things they were concerned with, but the alien ways in which they sensed and felt those things" (664).
Then we get a short history of the term sensibilities - founded in the idea of sense experience as described eg by John Locke and defining sensibility as the general capacity for sense experience and the faculty of mind responsible for sensation.
A second lineage developed though, emphasizing the moral, emotional, and literary elements of character, associating sensibility with refined feeling, taste, and sensitivity to suffering. This is embodied in "the Man of Feeling".
Along these two paths sensibility was unitary - you had it, to a larger or lesser degree, but it was one thing. In the twentieth century art movements took aesthetic sensibility and turned it into sensibilities (666).
When Trilling and Sontag used the term they "emphasized its collective nature and tied its moral to its aestethic content" (667). Sontag equated sensibility with collectively held forms of taste (667)
When Clifford Geertz used the term, he linked culture and sensibility - "what marked people as different from one another was precisely the difference in the structure of perception, feeling, and value that could be designated as 'sensibility'; the task of cultural anthropology was to translate one sensibility into another without collapsing the differences between them" (668)
IN a different direction TS Eliot talked about the dissociation of sensibility - sensation and perception are separated and thought and feeling divided - not good. His discussion shows that sensibility is not just a structure of feeling but a pattern in which idea and emotion are bound up with one another" (669)
Why is sensibilities better? Because it is broader and combines things in a better way:
Episteme (Foucault) and paradigm (Kuhn) are focused on thought and knowledge - not emotion.
Mentalité (Annales school) distinguishes between elites - who have rational ideas - and the people - who have "popular attitudes" or .. mentalités.
Structures of feeling (Raymond Williams) is good because it considers emotion, but limited because it seems to imply formal systems of thought do not contain particular structures of feeling .. it is also Marxist
Habitus - Bourdieu - focus on embodiment makes it problematic for groups? Also, "the notion of habitus is lacking that sense of the interior mental and emotional life that the concept of sensibility captures so well; its problem in some sense is that it is too rigid in its focus on system and structure to capture the looseness and fluidity of sensibilities" (672)
Finally - all the other concepts have a lot of theoretical baggage that sensibilities does not have.
Why not sensibilities? (673)
1) It avoids discussions of POWER
- "posits deep structure of mind" where "meaning is not negotiated, but is already given"
- concerned more with description than with explanation
this can of course be seen as an advantage too - coz it lets us talk about culture that is not implicated in power - "culture is not power, nor is power the most important element of culture" (674)
2) focuses more on what than why - bad for folks who want causality
3) propensity for use in a sweeping and over-generalizing fashion
- tends toward "consensus" history since it easily portrays a uniform culture
but it doesn't HAVE to be like that - you can change elements that are outdated - [so I wonder why this is not theoretical baggage and the outdated elements of other concepts are not - maybe it is easier to broaden a concept and add complexity than to narrow a concept and take out complexity?]
Good examples of sensibilities:
William James who distinguished between tender minded (rationalistic - going by principles - intellectualistic, idealistic, optimistic, religious etc) and tough-minded (empiricist - going by facts - sensationalistict, materialistic, pessimistic, sceptical, irreligous). James believed though, that these were psychological habits of persons , rather than cultural habits of collectives so he is not a historian. (677)
Richard Hofstadter who is one of the primary architects of consensus history, described what he called the paranoid style in American history (one particular kind of conservativish conspiracy theorist)
Jackson Lears whose history of advertizing became an entre into changing sensibilities. Like Huizinga he describes a paradise lost where people felt differently, but the important thing is that he asked readers to "look beyond the 'what' of consumer culture ... to see the 'how' - the separation of desire from the embodied world.
David Brion Davis who wrote about the humanitarian spirit that developed in the 19th century and challenged slavery among other things. Haskell criticized Davis writing but never quite dealt with the sensibility issue - "In order to emphasize the supposed new ways of imagining causal sequence provoked by the market, Haskell had to downplay the moral ideas and feelings of the new sensibility (680).
Thomas Laqueur demonstrated that realistic representation of concrete details .. drew a moral connection between concreteness, immediate sensation, and ameliorative action. Realism fosters moral impulse to intervene (hmm - - - is that really what happens? Is that why we have all the reality shows?)
In these footsteps follow Karen Halttunen who works on horror and the 'pornography of pain' and Elizabeth Clark who works on humanitarianism.
Also there is the history of emotions as researched by Stearns, and a history of the senses themselves (visual sense has been privileged so we need to consider other senses and how "the significance of various forms of sensory experience is culturally variable")
Sceptics will say that sensibilites will be found only in representations - that it is only in discourse or texts of some sort that we can see these sensibilities - and they are right. But instead of collecting texts about slavery and insist that they are saying things about slavery we should see that they say something about HOW those people said things in general. The humanitarian sensibility is not a response to slavery - rather slavery came to be represented as a moral evil in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at least in part because of the development of a humanitarian sensibility. [I don't know that I buy that causality - I DO think that the humanitarian sensibility deter .... THis is where my computer did not save stuff ... rewrite
footnote 29 is a whole universe by itself: nomothetic or ideographic discipline - social science or humanistic discpline? Sounds a little bit like the distinction between lumpers and splitters (and Isaiah Berlin's categorizing thinkers as 'Hedgehogs' (lumpers) and 'Foxes' (splitters) in his essay on Leo Tolstoy, 'The Hedgehox and the Fox'.)
from Britannica:
"question of whether it is better to study groups of individuals and attempt to draw general conclusions (termed the nomothetic approach) or to study the behaviours that make individuals unique (termed the idiographic approach)…"
from Wikipedia:
Nomothetic and idiographic are terms coined by Kantian philosopher Wilhelm Windelband to describe two distinct approaches to knowledge, each one corresponding to a different intellectual tendency, and each one corresponding to a different branch of academe.
Nomothetic is based on what Kant described as a tendency to generalize, and is expressed in the natural sciences. It describes the effort to derive laws that explain objective phenomena.
Idiographic is based on what Kant described as a tendency to specify, and is expressed in the humanities. It describes the effort to understand the meaning of contingent, accidental, and often subjective phenomena.
Usually, nomothetic approaches are quantitative, and idiographic approaches are qualitative.
Monday, October 02, 2006
"The invidious censures which may ensue from striking into a path of literature rarely trodden by my sex, will not permit a selfish consideration to keep me mute in the cause of liberty and virtue, whilst the doctrine of slavery finds so many interested writers to defend it by fraud and sophistry, in opposition to the common reason of mankind and the experience of every age."
Macaulay, Catharine. History of England. x, 1763.
Macaulay, Catharine. History of England. x, 1763.
Thursday, February 16, 2006
What Greenblatt said
With the notion of representation Greenblatt connects to literature - because the representation of a character and a person is the same, there is always a narrative, a text, that carries a presentation of self, and there is no real distinction between literature and social life. Greenblatt wants to read people, and characters, as cultural artifacts, something put together that represents and is representative of its culture. Quoting Clifford Geertz, Greenblatt says that “there is no such thing as a human nature independent of culture”, which not only means that people are constructions represented as characters, but that the process of construction is marked by the environment in which it was constructed. (3). Greenblatt argues that the construction of self is restrained by the concepts, values and structures available in a particular culture. The individual is never free to create a self out of whole cloth, but has to use existing cultural codes, things that already have some meaning.
Literature functions in this system in three ways: as manifestation of the author, as expression of the code, and as a reflection upon those codes. I take this to mean that art/literature gives us information about the author and about the code (the particular cultural structure it was written in), but literature/art is not only a passive observer, not a neutral filter - it is also a participant in the culture.
Greenblatt argues that there are similarities in the way people in a given culture fashion themselves and lists what he calls the “governing conditions”. On the one hand there is submission to some absolute authority that is at least in part external, this may be for instance God, the church, science, on the sovereign. On the other hand there is an antiauthority, a demonic Other that is also external and that is either chaotic or false. Between these two poles, a person defines herself to be like her chosen authority and unlike the Other.
Greenblatt ues six writers to exemplify his theory; More, Tyndale, Wyatt, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare. They all submit to different authorities - e.g. More to the Church, Tyndale to the Bible and Wyatt to the absolutist state. They also balance differently between authority and rejection, i.e. some define themselves more by describing Us against the Other and others by describing The Other in Us. So Spenser is said to celebrate his chosen authority - the Fairie Queen, Marlowe to “embrace the alien” and Shakespeare is said to demonstrate a more ambiguous stance, a sort of subversive submission.
I want to look for similar patterns in the writings of my women, to see how they fashion public selves in general and how they render these selves legitimate public speakers in relation to a gender that would seem to exclude that role. Put in marketing terms the questions are
a) what kind of spin do they use to legitimize voice?
b) is it possible to discern a set of available tropes that these women leaned on?
c) how do these tropes relate to gender - do they ignore gender or use it?
d) how to other people respond to the spin and to what extend do their responses relate to gender as a relevant issue (do they use gender as they women have or is gender used to undercut the women's spin)?
e) does it seem like they are constructing whole selves or bitd and pieces for different audiences (something more like Todd's signs hung out to invite a certain kind of audience).
My work is different from Greenblatt in that I am looking for how they dealt with a particular aspect of their - public - selves, that I use only non fiction texts and letters ( how different is that?), that I want to leave the door open for a fragmented self AND a fragmented, continual process of self fashioning that is affected by the responses and that may be different from the private individual self (maybe the letters give a hint to a disconnect - maybe they will show women believing their own hype).
and
ADDED a year later - this piece I will only know about AFTER I have done more research - if there are patterns, tropes, and if they look similar across the chronology ... ah ... if they are different, that might say something, if they are not, that might say something else.
Literature functions in this system in three ways: as manifestation of the author, as expression of the code, and as a reflection upon those codes. I take this to mean that art/literature gives us information about the author and about the code (the particular cultural structure it was written in), but literature/art is not only a passive observer, not a neutral filter - it is also a participant in the culture.
Greenblatt argues that there are similarities in the way people in a given culture fashion themselves and lists what he calls the “governing conditions”. On the one hand there is submission to some absolute authority that is at least in part external, this may be for instance God, the church, science, on the sovereign. On the other hand there is an antiauthority, a demonic Other that is also external and that is either chaotic or false. Between these two poles, a person defines herself to be like her chosen authority and unlike the Other.
Greenblatt ues six writers to exemplify his theory; More, Tyndale, Wyatt, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare. They all submit to different authorities - e.g. More to the Church, Tyndale to the Bible and Wyatt to the absolutist state. They also balance differently between authority and rejection, i.e. some define themselves more by describing Us against the Other and others by describing The Other in Us. So Spenser is said to celebrate his chosen authority - the Fairie Queen, Marlowe to “embrace the alien” and Shakespeare is said to demonstrate a more ambiguous stance, a sort of subversive submission.
I want to look for similar patterns in the writings of my women, to see how they fashion public selves in general and how they render these selves legitimate public speakers in relation to a gender that would seem to exclude that role. Put in marketing terms the questions are
a) what kind of spin do they use to legitimize voice?
b) is it possible to discern a set of available tropes that these women leaned on?
c) how do these tropes relate to gender - do they ignore gender or use it?
d) how to other people respond to the spin and to what extend do their responses relate to gender as a relevant issue (do they use gender as they women have or is gender used to undercut the women's spin)?
e) does it seem like they are constructing whole selves or bitd and pieces for different audiences (something more like Todd's signs hung out to invite a certain kind of audience).
My work is different from Greenblatt in that I am looking for how they dealt with a particular aspect of their - public - selves, that I use only non fiction texts and letters ( how different is that?), that I want to leave the door open for a fragmented self AND a fragmented, continual process of self fashioning that is affected by the responses and that may be different from the private individual self (maybe the letters give a hint to a disconnect - maybe they will show women believing their own hype).
and
ADDED a year later - this piece I will only know about AFTER I have done more research - if there are patterns, tropes, and if they look similar across the chronology ... ah ... if they are different, that might say something, if they are not, that might say something else.
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