All Roads Lead to Methodology

My last post for the term: Have you all noticed how Foucault manages to bring all discussions back to his methodologies in the essays we've read this term? He has a wonderful, nuanced discussion of Kant (I particularly enjoyed the idea that modernity is an ethos, not a time-period), but then he appropriates the question of what enlightenment is and answers it with something like "(the search for) enlightenment is the pursuit of situated connections and small-t truths using a genealogical/archeological method." In a sense, he places his project(s) within what he calls the modern ethos, within the critical reflection on self and context.

-Chris

Someone missed out on their morning coffee

Maybe I'm reading my 6:30am wake up time into this, but did Foucault seem a tad cranky in this week's interview? The interviewer raised two questions that Foucault never fully answered. I'll start with the first:

Do relations of power always include relations of domination, or can they be separable, as suggested by Arendt? (378)

The basic question really seems to be, is power always bad, and is domination always exploitative? Foucault answers that Arendt is wrong, that you can't separate the two. But he seems to pick and choose how he considers this relationship. Go back a few pages the second question asked that Foucault does not, in my mind, adequately address:

How to deal with Heidegger and the Nazis? (374)

Although Heidegger is a shining example, the question really asks: if domination is bad for your general health, how do we deal with the works of people who willingly (and sometimes happily) ascribed to and support those systems of domination that Foucault is so bothered (and fascinated) by? Or, in Tweekese: How to deal with TJ and the slaves?

Foucault answer, to me, is a cop out: "The key to the personal poetic attitude of a philosopher is not to be sought in his ideas, as if it could be deduced from them, but rather in his philosophy-as-life, in his philosophical life, his ethos." (274) But isn't that the problem with Heidegger? How, and where, do we separate the author from the academic text? How do we deal with text we don't want the author to have written? We can separate the two? Really? His "philosophical life, his ethos" doesn't resonate in his work? They are in some ways separable? Power and domination are inseparable, but those who use power, or ascribe to a system that uses power to really violently dominate people, are separable from their participation that system?

At the same time, including "but, but, he was a Nazi" prior, or post, whenever you deal with Heidegger seems to be an odd solution too.

I've lost coherency by this point, but this is an issue I intend to raise later on this morning. In some ways it's a questions of how to deal with the sources produced within relationships of power, and then how to deal with the authors and their relationship to the power system.

This is actually my response to last week's reading that I never got around to posting...

Genealogy of Ethics:

I found this week’s reading particularly interesting in the context of my own current project, an analysis of 18thc European and American constructions of virtue. This week I’ve been exploring (and trying to create some sense of) the works of Locke and Rousseau, specifically. Foucault’s discussion about the origins of ethics, especially as it pertains to sex and morality, sheds some light on a few of the more confusing concepts I encountered in the writings of these Enlightenment intellectuals.

Locke’s “Principle of Virtue” states that virtue is self-denial, the ability to quell or ignore your passions. Similarly, Rousseau argues, in his First Discourse on the arts and sciences, that “luxury is diametrically opposed to virtue,” and that those who cannot resist the desire for luxury are immoral. He also argues that the new interest in the arts and sciences will lead to vice – vanity, further desire for luxuries and wealth instead of simplicity, and other “effeminate” behaviors are the result of the renewed interest in the arts and sciences.

What does this have to do with Foucault? I don’t know. It made sense when I was reading it. But I can try to forge some connection anyway –

Foucault says that in antiquity, sex was considered “activity,” whereas, for the Christians, it was considered “passivity,” and he cites this as one of the reasons why Christianity sees sex as sinful. Both Locke and Rousseau characterize passivity as feminine – women are not strong enough to silence their passions, and are therefore less virtuous than men. Men, on the other hand, are active, and those that are passive and unable to engage in Locke’s “self-denial” are considered effeminate. Similarly, Rousseau uses feminine epithets to rail against the desire for wealth and luxury. Either way, it seems that an appetite or desire satisfied means femininity triumphs over masculinity and vice triumphs over virtue.

I also found Foucault’s discussion about desire and pleasure useful, and I would like to discuss it further tomorrow morning (which was last week...ohhhhwell).

- Heather

What is Foucault's definition of the modern self?

While I found Foucault's analysis of the Greek, Christian, and Renaissance 'self' intriguing, I kept wondering throughout--what would Foucault define as the modern self? What are modern ethics? Perhaps I missed something here... but I seem to recall the interviewer at one point asking him to define the modern self and instead of answering the question Foucault lapses into discussing Greek/Christian notions of 'self' again. Here, I think the answer may reside somewhere in the discussion at the end about Descartes' notion of self (oneself as a subject capable of thinking for oneself) but I wonder how this idea of 'self' changes with the proliferation of institutions in the 19th century which seek to control self as individual. For instance, there seems to have been a rise in the anxiety surrounding notions of free will--people recognize themselves as individuals with a free will and therefore must be controlled. (Foucault elaborates on the relationship between individuals and the state in another essay I read, claiming that the state only uses individuals insofar as it strengthens the state.) So, there seems to be a presumption that the modern self must somehow recognize itself as an individual -- and I think this is also what Foucault is getting at when he discusses how the Greeks only recognized self by the eye of others.

The most compelling and fascinating portion of the interview--and for which I wish he had provided a specific example--was his discussion of the anxiety people wrote about in diaries when they discovered this modern 'self' as individual and how it may not have been easy to write about. I take it for granted today that I can say or compose something that describes how I feel or experience something in some sort of supposedly unique way--something that is interior to myself and not dependent on another's eye or on God. And yet, at the same time, in my daily life I feel I am controlled or molded by certain ideals of 'normalcy' based on certain morals and ethics of our society. Should this disturb/alert me or does the fact that I have recognized this simply confirm me as a 'normal' modern self, if I even know what that is?

Finally, to avoid thoroughly confusing myself and everyone else, I'll end with questions. What is the relationship of ethics to desire/pleasure? What is the relationship of sex to desire/pleasure? How does this change over time and what is the relationship today? I'm not as clear on the differences here, so maybe we can map those out more explicitly.


~Amanda

Society - Ethics

There's a lot to chew on in these interviews. I want to point out just one element that I found particularly interesting. Foucault makes a direct causal link between the form of Greek society (hierarchical, patriarchal, slave-owning) and its ethics (techniques of the self based on aesthetics and/or on being worthy of citizenship.) Since the first few interviews here often jump to the present and allude to the liberation movements of the 70s (as well as "Californianism" [!]), it's intriguing to me to consider "our" ethics in terms of the political and social composition of the US. By this, I mean our shared belief in democracy: we may think that there are serious problems with America and the world, but our implicit assumptions informing our sense of injustice is that things are insufficiently democratic. It would be really interesting to speculate about American ethics (plural) in these terms: do we believe in pluralism because of our democratic convictions, or did universalisms about human rights and so on "logically" lead to pluralism? And, since Foucault's discussions here were about sex, do present notions of mutually-pleasurable sexual indulgence arise out of pluralism, too?

-Chris

Foucault's Genealogy of History

I found this week's reading to be particularly enlightening in directly telling us the theory behind the genealogies of history he has constructed. His discussion of "effective" history versus "traditional" history gives us numerous ideas for constructing a non-linear historical narrative or, rather, how one would break out of that mold. I actually don't think most people have methodologically applied Foucault very well. For instance, how many historians acknowledge that there are absolutely no constants in history--including the body itself (87)? I'm not saying there haven't been attempts to look at how the body is an unstable site, but I can't think of a historian who actually applies this method to his or her work besides Foucault... maybe somebody else can enlighten the rest of us.

The German words are a bit confusing and I also am having difficult with the idea of descent (Herkunft). If I had to guess as to what he's getting at, I would say that he finds descent ultimately rooted in and a major part of varying articulations of the body (at different times and places)--articulations that can somehow be identified at different points when they change. Those changes are related to various emergences (Entstehung). We should discuss what he means by the descent as being part of the "dissociation of identity" (94) and recognizing "all of those discontinuities that cross us" (95). I'm not quite sure I understand what he means by this.

Finally, if we have time, I'd like to discuss the importance of knowledge in "effective" history; both as power/domination, as the basis for creating a meaningful world, and in relation to the line I'm most unclear about: "the critique of the injustices of the past by a truth held by men in the present becomes the destruction of the man who maintains knowledge by the injustice proper to the will to knowledge" (97). What does he mean by "the injustice proper to the will to knowledge"?

~Amanda

Attempted Definitions

Obviously, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History is the most difficult reading we've done so far. Here are a few attempted definitions:

Herkunft: a kind of broken family tree of an idea and its “inscription on the body.” (84) This is a difficult concept to grasp; perhaps the moment at which an identifiable religious or cultural tradition coalesces would be an example?

Entstehung: when an idea crystallized in the midst of struggle (“Emergence is thus the entry of forces; it is the eruption, the leap from the wings to center stage…” [84]) Much easier to grasp - Foucault's whole idea of the disciplinary society coming together around the time of the French Revolution is an example.

Also, a nicely concise summary of his idea of the function of law: “humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination.” (85)

Obviously, the most fruitful discussion for us is going to be his idea of the proper (or, at least, useful) role of the historian. What strikes me re-reading that part is that what he describes, the restless historian eschewing metanarratives and being suspicious of lofty concepts, is precisely what we see in a lot of contemporary history. These kind of ideas have taken root among practicing historians. Given when Foucault died, I doubt he really got to see that come to fruition; I wonder what he would have to say at this point.

-Chris

Spatial vs. Temporal Metaphors

The most intriguing part of this discussion (Foucault vs. the geographers) for me was the geograpers' point that Foucault is very precise about temporal shifts and very murky about spatial shifts. I think that's accurate, especially in Discipline and Punish. What Foucault goes on to suggest is that spatial metaphors are very useful, if not in fact necessary, in describing power relations. Thinking of power in terms of space (i.e. power radiating out from points, coalescing at other points, being dispersed over fields, etc.) is precisely how Foucault describes it. I'd like to discuss what we think about the issue.

Another intriguing point: Foucault ends up thanking the geographers for pointing out that it was geography that mapped, literally and figuratively, everything he describes in terms of the growth of panoptism in the 19th century. This reminds me of an article I read recently about colonialism, that the appropriate set of metaphors for discussing the colonial project surround cartography, because cartography is the inscribing of spaces, types, and differences.

-Chris

Foucault's Politics

Chapter 7 is the most explicitly political chapter we've read yet this term. In it, Foucault speaks more closely about his own politics than he has in the earlier interviews we read, albeit implicitly. There are two major themes I want to mention:

1. The fact that when the interview was arranged, in 1977, he was still forced to speak in an intellectual environment dominated by Marxist discourse. The 70s in France were the decade in which Marxism finally lost its grip on the academy and during which Marxists struggled with the legacy of the Gulag system in the USSR (hence all the space given over to that issue in the interview) and, often, abandoned Marxism (sometimes becoming irritatingly strident neo-liberals, alla Bernard-Henri Levy.) But what strikes me about this interview is that Foucault is forced to repeatedly point out the manifest absurdity of accusing people of "reformism," which on the left was like saying someone was a child molester. I think the best, and most accurate, quote of his regarding that is "the great States of the nineteenth century adopted a strategic mode of thought, while the revolutionary struggles conceived their strategy only in a very conjunctural manner, endeavouring at the same time always to inscribe it within the horizon of contradiction." (p. 144). In other words, the supposedly-"bourgeois" states worked with and through practical policies and were ideologically flexible, while the entire socialist movement seized on the revolutionary trope despite its increasingly dated character.

2. That said, it is clear throughout that Foucault considered himself "a leftist" of some kind; someone who was concerned about diagnosing power dyanmics and frameworks for the sake of (besides just accuracy) the potential of providing better tactics to "the left." I'd like to talk about this; I feel like he gets as close as he ever does to talking about his own politics in this piece.

-Chris

A response to a response - Amanda

Sorry I didn't read or post to the blog before today's meeting. I could have perhaps formulated a more articulate response to Kelly's question about gender constructs and sex in the case of Chinese history. However, after thinking a little bit more about this tonight, it occurred to me that there are definitely two large, looming aspects of the so-called "pre-modern" Chinese sexuality that I didn't discuss: same-sex relations and concubinage. Men and women (particular men) were not shunned for pre-martial same-sex relations for most of Chinese history. After marriage, they were dissuaded from this practice not for what we would call "moral" reasons, but because it was widely held that men should be more concerned with procreation in order to uphold their family line. This was the same reason for concubines, of course. For similar reasons, women were not necessarily discouraged from lesbianism except when it interfered with marriage and procreation. The medicalization of sex and sexuality and what it meant to have a "modern" marriage and family, obviously imported from Western models of modernity (which May 4th intellectuals fully embraced in the 1910s and 1920s, wishing to completely dispel any and all Confucian ideals of the family and marriage), fundamentally shifted the focus from family, status, and patriarchy to modern concepts of gender, the nuclear family, and biological sex differentiations but equality between sexes. So I guess what I'm trying to say here is that in the Chinese case, the regulation of sex was initially caught up not so much with morality as with pro-creation and carrying on the family line. And yet: for widowed women, it was deemed inappropriate (according to traditional Confucian practices) to re-marry or have sexual relations with a man. Many women, for financial reasons (such as taking care of the farm and household) didn't follow this proscription. Actually, this does seem to be a gender issue here. That's not to say men could do whatever they wanted to do: pro-creation and filial piety were still of utmost importance.

In terms of relating this to Foucault's discussion of sex and sexuality--I find this particularly difficult because I don't think he's allowing for much wiggle room between a sexualized/de-sexualized environment. In fact, I think he is caught up in modern binary concepts and power relations behind sex and sexuality and needs to step back and look at how pre-modern conceptions of sexuality, particularly in the case of China, did not necessarily revolve around pleasure (though that's not to say it wasn't pleasurable in some cases)--isn't "free love" a modern concept anyways?

~Amanda

Oh, I have another question I am not prepared to try and answer: were would eunuchs fit into the picture for Foucault?

History of Sexuality

"There is something in surveillance, or more accurately in the gaze of those involved in the act of surveillance, which is no stranger to the pleasure of surveillance, the pleasure of the surveillance of pleasure, and so on."
-Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 186.

In other words, there is a voyeuristic impulse involved in the panoptical view. We ought to talk about that tomorrow; even though it was an unrehearsed comment, it seems pretty problematic to me.

What I'm really interested in this week's reading is the fact that I now think Foucault overcompensated in his attempt to get away from traditional history and into geneaology. What I mean specifically is that world-historical processes, everything bound up with "modernity," were at the heart of his analyses of power-structures (what he calls in this chapter "politics.") The very-short version of my comment here is that much of his writing would be less obscure if he would just talk about the state once in a while, and not only that, but specific states.

That said, he indicates in a few places that he regards all of his investigations as inchoate, and the suggestive quality of obscure prose has led a lot of gender and colonial historians to write on the specifics of state-sponsored regulations of sexuality, so maybe he was just trying to be provocative.

Finally, I will note that I really need to read History of Sexuality. I'm intrigued by Foucault's conclusion here that we would all be better served by "desexualizing" our understanding of pleasure, that sex should not be linked to every connotation of pleasure or enjoyment.

-Chris

Some musings, flashbacks to Gender, and hope for the future - Kelly

This will be a romp through some of what I found to be the more intriguing quotes from this week's readings:

"For the State to function in the way that it does, there must be, between male and female or adult and child, quite specific relations of domination which have their own configuration and relative autonomy."

Undoubtedly, we here in the US are watching the re-working of these relations of power as manifest in this century's "culture wars." The anxiety regarding gay marriage, divorce rates, and single parenthood stems directly from the fear of the dissolution of male-female-two-parent household and the implications that has for other "entrenched" structures of power. If Dad isn't in control, who is? The mere idea that there are "specific relations of domination which have their own configuration and relative autonomy," speaks to the convincing power of a discourse of "naturalized" power relations. Naturalized, of course, because they are found within actions carried out between two bodies (sex and procreation).
It will be interesting to watch the fear of upsetting ingrained ideas regarding family and gendered relations of power run rampant, should Hilary Clinton win the 2008 Democratic nomination. (I bet the Germans have on long word for the phrase "the fear... rampant").


"[...]the set of relations of force in a given society constitutes the domain of the political, and that a politics is a more-or-less global strategy for co-ordinating and directing those relations"

Constructions of gender, family, sexuality and the messy way in which relations of force directs the hierarchies of power in those relationships. Politics is created by each of those relations of force and simultaneously created to direct them. Two questions: 1) How then does one direct change without the entire system coming to stamp out the trouble-maker? Or - how and why did things like the civil rights movement work and can we ever do it again? And, 2) How do each of you see this analysis of power, politic, and family (implicitly gender) playing out in your work?

What exactly does Foucault mean by "a positive economy of the body and of pleasure?" (190)

And does his assessment of West = medicalization of sex, East = sex as art, ring true? (calling Amanda as our non-Western historian....). I have a hard time buying that the repression of sexuality in "the East" only an a western imperial import. Medicalization of sexuality I'll buy (God knows, we read enough about that in Gender last quarter), but restrictions on sexuality and sexual practices seemed fairly common in both the Indian and Chinese context. He talks a good amount about the representations of sex and sexuality in both cultures, and undoubtedly the depiction of sexuality adorns some Hindu temples, but there is always a gap between representation and reality. Do more frequent cultural depictions of sex and sexuality necessarily correspond to a more open sexuality? Or, are Europeans really less hung up about sex because they show bush on TV? I think so, but can we talk about this more deeply in terms of Foucault's theory as to why.

Finally, a shout out to Foucault's appropriation of White:
"I am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions. I do not mean to say, however, that truth is therefore absent. It seems to me that the possibility exists for fiction to function in truth, for a fictional discourse to induce effects of truth, and for bringing it about that a true discourse engenders or 'manufactures' something that does not as yet exist, that is, 'fictions' it. One 'fictions' history on the basis of a political reality that makes it true, one 'fictions' a politics not yet in existence on the basis of a historical truth"

Or: "All history is myth" - Jeff
"It seems to me that the post-moderns tell us not how to do history, but how to write history." -Buck Sharp
See, history does have the power to change the future. And I'll get on it right after another cup of coffee and after I finish just one more book...

Juicy quote

From chapter 2 of Power/Knowledge, in Foucault's discussion of Discipline and Punish:

"I adopt the methodical precaution and the radical but unaggressive scepticism which makes it a principle not to regard the point in time where we are now standing as the outcome of a teleological progression...This doesn't mean not attempting to reconstruct generative processes, but that we must do this without imposing on them a positivity or a valorisation." (pg. 49-50)

Another great one is Foucault's continuing insistence that crime does not create prisons, but instead that prisons create delinquency, which justifies the existence of surveillance (broadly, the police.) It reminds me of another great inversion: Marx argued in the philosophical manuscripts that private property didn't create capitalism, but that capitalism brought about the very notion of private property.

It strikes me that the history of criminality would be a really rich, suggestive field to go into. Maybe I'll do that when I get my first tenure-track job at Harvard or Brown or wherever.

(Ha. Ha ha.)

-Chris

"competing esotericisms," or, "can't we just go get a beer now?"

As I was reading, I kept asking myself whether or not I was interested in this debate at all. Indeed, the "crosssing of swords" between Moses and White is an interesting forum in which we can address questions, not only of truth and objectivity in the field of history, but also the long term implications of widely held beliefs on either side of the theoretical and epistemic fence, and within the discipline of history in general.* Debates about what we do and its "relative" (get it?) importance are always good, but sometimes it can have such an esoteric character so as to be less than enjoyable for the reader and/or historian who only peripherally struggles with the issues that scholars such as White and Moses debate with such depth. It isn't that I am uninterested in the debate itself, but rather the (onto)logical extent to which such debates are taken. (A quick aside: if White has art, poetry, and the avant garde on his mind when he thinks of history, perhaps he should remind himself that his writing would be a lot more fun if he did it in iambic pentameter.) Anyway, I admit that the debate is, in fact, important, and that despite the tortured academic prose, each of them seem to waste few words. At the same time, I would humbly ask that they try to use better ones. But that's just me; I'm a crazy and weird simpleton. Ironically, I stand with White in the de-systematizing and de-intellectualizing of history (a charge I make of White that we can debate). All of that being said, I'll just talk real quick about the debate, give you a hint of where I stand (for now; I could be convinced otherwise), and then leave the rest of the issues for discussion.

Commence rambling:

Something that I think both Moses and White agree on, though to different degrees, is that history is not about the events, but trying to find a way to attach meaning to these events. The problem becomes when there are a number of different understandings and interpretations of the meaning of a particular event (to take their exhausted example, the holocaust), "which one achieves primacy?," Moses might ask. It seems to me that Moses is saying that historians, as professionals, possess the credentials that enable us to interpret and assume fact. In a sense, then, (dare I say) we get to be the arbiters of right and wrong in the historical record-- this is our intellectual responsibility. White, on the other hand, appears to argue that there can be many interpretations and many meanings, and that the important thing is not to create an historical record, but rather a collection of records through which subsequent readers, should they be so inclined, can divine their own meanings, just like we, as historians, have divined our own. Of coourse, as Moses argues, this is dangerous-- especially given the use of historical interpretations and revisions for genocide, ethnic cleansing, and visions of new nationalisms that are violent and exclusionary. Dangerous though it may be, perhaps it is a calculated risk. I mean, if history does hold such power through narrative and factual construction, would it not, then, be best to disinvest ourselves from the discipline as it is today? I think with his allusions to the avant-garde, poetics, and the fictive nature of history, White might agree with this, while maintaining that there is still some power in the divining meaning of historical events. Obviously, this does not mean that we should all quit history and categorize it as a useless exercise in ego (although I can't help thinking...). No, the meaning that we interpret from historical events is, I think, an important job. I just might agree with White, though, when I say that it isn't as important as historians themselves might believe.

Another quick point is that both arguments stem from a premise of the elite construction of history, a common assumption that presupposes the invisibility of regular people. I really don't know what to do with this point besides be unhappy about it. Give me a couple days to think about it, and maybe I'll come up with something.







*Truthfully, the whole thing makes me tired.

Moses-White, mostly questions.

I think I have a hard time reading heavily theoretical debates between historians because I’m not sure what the outcome of the application of the theory would be. Such is the case when I read these articles, given that there seems to be little explicit application by professional historians of what White calls “conscious meaning creation.” While historians today often do not claim to offer a definitive narrative on any particular topic, they would probably say that what they do offer is a more objective and therefore less subjective narrative on a particular topic. But where is the line drawn between the creation of history as myth, history as conscious meaning creation, and history as simply less subjective? Here is where I struggle with what both authors have to say. Though I think it’s important for historians to be aware of their own subjectivity in the creation of meaning (and realizing that meaning is by far more important than knowledge to most people) I don’t necessarily think that it’s fair to conclude that historians must write “morally responsible” history in order for history to be ethical. After all, who determines what is “morally responsible”? While I think historians will inevitably try to practice cultural relativism, I question if one can be somewhat more objective (realizing that complete objectivity is a fallacy) without having a political agenda (conscious or unconscious). At the same time, there is the question: if not morally responsible history, then what? If history is ethical but does not have to be moral then what should history be?

I would like to know how others feel about White’s final line about how it is unfortunate that historians only have professionalized history “to provide insight into the greater existential questions posed by time, aging, absence, loss, violence, and death.” What is wrong with using history as a possible means to answer these questions? If it generates a sense of meaning for people –whether it’s the general public or just professional historians—can we not conclude history is functioning in some relevant way? This ties into the final response from Moses where he is concerned with White’s practical vs theoretical history. To what extent are we as historians responsible for creating a practical history? Can the line between practical and theoretical history easily be drawn? Moses seems to think that we do not have to resort to White’s solution of myth creation and that we can continue to produce and use research methods for history (the implication being that science and empiricism do still have value). Though this research is important and relevant, I myself am questioning the validity of all research-driven history these days. The methods of research and the narratives that are produced from them are a product not only of an historian’s subjectivity but also of a particular time period. Hence, would it not be better to analyze why certain types of history have endured over others?

I also have some questions I'd like to bring in to our discussion, like how can we use these theories to broaden our discussion of history beyond the nation-state and national histories.

Look forward to hearing what you all have to say next week!

~Amanda

Moses-White exchange

Instead of discussing one or more of the major arguments set forth by Moses and White, I’m going to look at a tangential issue, and then work my way toward center. I’d like to focus for a moment on the use of the word “science” in these debates about the construction of history.

The use of the word “science” troubles me in this context because I wonder if it perpetuates the disciplinary hierarchy that increasingly privileges the sciences over the humanities. During the Cold War’s arms race and space race, universities, and even high schools pumped funding into science and mathematics programs, while humanities departments lost support among potential sponsors. While the situation may not be as drastic today, I faltered when I saw that the UCSC Humanities Division used the word “science” repeatedly in a recent advertising brochure. Are people still more likely to value the humanities if we call it a “science?” And if so, would historians, therefore, reach more people with the “scientific” approach that Moses suggests?

Perhaps, but since I wouldn’t characterize UCSC’s humanities courses as scientific myself, I also question whether or not Moses’s suggested methodology actually is “scientific.” Kelly and I discussed this aspect of Moses’s use of the word “science” yesterday: Scientists collect data, analyze it, and present results, without necessarily stating their beliefs, morals, or ethics based on that data. While they may seek a certain outcome or set out to prove an ethically or morally charged hypothesis, in the end, it seems that ideally, scientists produce results, and everyone else decides, individually, what those results mean to them based on their own morals and ethics. This is, I suppose, how some historians work as well, to an extent.

“Individual.” “Their own morals and ethics.” By now you can tell that I’m more of a “cultural relativist” than not, but while there may not be one grand truth out there, as a historian, I feel that I am working toward some version of a truth, if the word “truth” must be used. And while I’d like to think that my reasons and methods are morally sound, people have different moral values. Maybe it’s hubris to think that historians can or should influence morals and ethics. Maybe it’s hubris to think I have the ability to revise what I see as misrepresentations of gender in early America, which is the “moral” direction of my own work. Still, I’m going to try to get at something “true,” or at least something different, while I maintain a level of awareness that this is just the “truth” as I see it. Perhaps then, the goal, for me, is to present truth-as-I-see-it “poetically” or “aesthetically,” as Hayden White says, drawing attention to the constructed nature of my work, while I attempt to convey a different perspective of a truth that may or may not exist. A quixotic endeavor, to say the least.

- Heather

Ethical Discoveries

I think that you pose a valuable but very tough question Chris. If Moses is claiming that the ethical must be linked to the moral in order for it to be efficacious and meaningful then he is also narrowing the directional possibilities of the historical narrative - perhaps leaving out histories that are socially seen as immoral by many but whose content may deliver paradoxes and revelations that point to a desired ethical end. Moreover, doesn't Moses' call for the coupling of the moral and the ethical limit the capacity for discussions that have no moral marking but which are still ripe with analtyic possibility and insight?

While I question the 'moral' stringency of Moses claims, I do believe he may have a point in that if historians are to believe that the ultimate goal of their work is to create social activism and improve humanity through the brilliance of historical narrative, then we must find ways to shock and realign moral thought. But to do so we must explore ethical issues that humanely rearrange our debased sense of what is truly moral. I must admit that I am elevating the status of the ethical over the moral purely based on my belief that moral issues are often couched in religiousity while ethical ones are less predicated upon assumptions about what is evil. If I understand him accurately then, Moses is saying that if you aren't going after moral issues that can be influenced positively by ethical anecdotes of historicity, then you are doing the discipline a disservice - for you are sidestepping the fact that prescribed definitions of morality are what is creating the obstacles and the barriers to influence the kind of change that we historians want to see happen in human civilization.

I'll close by saying that I applaud both White and Moses for devoting such deep attention to the question of, 'what' are the goals of history, and 'what' obligations should historians feel compelled to fulfill within their craft? However for both of these men the issue appars to be both personal and professional, ie. how can historians can go about consistently creating work that is as revolutionary and influential as the work being done by "science?" While I respect the discussion, I inevitably think that such lofty goals are for rare minds that can grapple with an issue that at present has no beating heart and renders no immediate answers, ye is still an issue that has substance and the early makings of something that will one day beat quite vigorously. May we write to the beat of our own narratives and attack moral issues that will be compelled to rearrange themselves through ethical rhetoricism.

In my own work with Japanese American baseball players during the 1930’s and 40’s in the United States I have been confronted with the issue of “sportsmanship”. Past and present scholars have defined sportsmanship as an ideology built upon the precepts of fair play, justice, fairness, and loyalty. Thus, the concept of sportsmanship is surely one of ethics and for that I hope Hayden White is proud.


What do you want Dirk Moses? What do you want White, Weber, and Nietzsche? Should I even be saying sportsmanship – or should I be saying sportspersonship? I’ll tell you what I think great minds, I think that sportsmanship is the eternal link – the moral and ethical solution to the competitive commodification of modernity – it is the panacea to all human ills because it is the most tangible expedient of democracy. Sportsmanship is the truest cousin to democracy and it can be measured – and it will be measured. I will judge, analyze, interpret, and hammer down eternal truths through the dialectic of sportsmanship. Why? Because I want to change the world by tackling moral issues with an ethical beauty that will rewrite the flaws of humankind.

Jamie Logan

History as Science v. History as Art; White-Moses Debate - Kelly

This is late, because I'm always late.. but in fairness I wrote it on Friday and just forgot to post it until discussion today. I'm working on JST or TST (Jewish Standard Time, Theater Standard Time, you get the idea), so roll with me and I promise to be less remiss in my postings.

I agree with Chris, that our generation of scholars, growing up after the cultural-turn, literary-turn, post-modern-turn, struggle less with the understanding of our own subjectivity. We work within the recognition that we are subjective, thinking creatures that carry with us our own personal baggage/privilege. As academics, the challenge is to be aware of and work with the societal, cultural, and personal influences on the creation of our selves and our work. We are aware that we are writing (constructing) history through the interpretation of data, not through some objectively inspired revelation of the "true past". We are intimately caught up in the literary resurrection of the dead, whether the deceased be people, time, places, or ideas.

I think there is something to reclaiming History as an Art/Humanities. Although there are issues with White's ultimate dream of the "better narrative" rising to the top and essentially beating out all other options (i.e. Holocaust deniers would be ignored and written off when their narratives of the Holocaust are placed against better-written, better-defended versions produced by assumably historians or other scholars of the period), I think there is something to reclaiming a use of an artistic writing style and non-obfuscating language. As someone who studies the Holocaust, I think White does have a valid point when he raises the issue that we can unearth more and more facts about the Holocaust, but do they necessarily, especially at this point, make the atrocities any worse? They flush out the details of this particular genocide, but do they inform us on a deeper level? As someone in the field I think, "Of course! Give me details..." but stepping out of historian mode I'm left wondering, "What good is the produced information regarding this atrocity is all is does it reproduce that data?" And I think that's what White is getting at: we as historians try to gather and contextualize events in a way that will *hopefully* give some deeper insight into the human experience in a particular historical context. Moses' example of reexamining Israeli/Palestinian history in an attempt to create a bridging narrative and try to mediate a currently explosive and deadly situation answers that question very nicely. We work to bring peace today and build a better tomorrow. But this then leads me to ask, "What about those fields like Classical or Ancient Studies? Or research on women in convents in the 10th century?" How does a historian approach a subject matter of no immediate relevance to the present and still justify its relevance as a subject area without falling into facts-for-fact's-sake or writing too much of the present back into the past?

Moses - White exchange, Post 1

I submitted this exchange when we were formulating the idea for the group because I think it nicely summarizes White's major ideas, apparently (per Moses and endorsed by White himself) stretching back to the early 60s.

It strikes me that White is relatively unconcerned with the methodology of professional history. I'm as much of a skeptic about the "neutral" status of archives as anyone, but White does seem to conflate the fact that to write professional history is to write a narrative and the idea that to write a narrative involves a more-or-less arbitrary selection of facts with which to populate it. In other words, since we necessarily pick and choose historical facts (archivally-derived or otherwise) to support our arguments, White seems to argue that all narratives are equally arbitrary and thus their value must be judged aesthetically or inspirationally (i.e. in terms of their inspirational quality vis-à-vis social or political activism.)

I think Moses is correct in pointing out that A. the very facts White alludes to, in his discussion of the Holocaust, are based precisely on traditional western historical research and B. that within scholarship, meaning-claims are predicated on fact-claims and that both meaning and the facts themselves are subject to informed debate. In other words, the facts used and the conclusions reached in historical narratives as crafted by historians are not, in fact, arbitrary (nor are they ever definitive, obviously.)

That said, what I like about White's reading of professional historiography is that he forces historians to acknowledge their own subjectivity and to interrogate their own biases. I think our generation of graduate students takes that for granted, but we may be among the first to do so. Furthermore, I'm sympathetic to both Moses's and White's claim that history ought to be concerned with ethics (as well as be an ethical concern), but unlike White, and like Moses, I don't think it's responsible to craft ethical myths out of history without a kind of Weberian concern for self-criticism. In other words, I think that there's an inherent value in trying to be disinterested; I endorse an inductive rather than a deductive method in one's research, because despite his caveats about relativism = ethical responsibility, I'm not convinced by White that it's impossible to create historical narratives that are "better" because they're more factually accurate, not just more poetically/rhetorically skillful.

What do people think about Moses's claim that the ethical must be linked to the moral in order for it to be efficacious and/or meaningful? I'm skeptical about that.

-Chris

Readings for Jan 12 Meeting

January 5: Before and After: Early theoretical influences of Foucault, and key theoretical
debates after.

Dirk Moses, “Hayden White, Traumatic Nationalism, and the Public Role of History,” in History and Theory 44 (October, 2005); p311.

Hayden White, “The Public relevance of Historical Studies: A Reply to Dirk Moses,” in History and Theory 44 (October, 2005); p333

A. Dirk Moses, “The Public Relevance of Historical Studies: A Rejoinder to Hayden White,” History and Theory, 44 (2005).

January 12: Questions of the Body

Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings, 1972-1977
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1980); Chapter 3, “Body/Power”

Nietzsche may come back into play later.