The Leisurely Historian…

I have to say, I’m somewhat surprised that this book didn’t seem to invite more controversy in my historiography class…

The issue of agency among the oppressed is one that has come up several times in discussions for this class, and has proven quite contentious each time. Some in the class welcome models that give agency to those in oppressive situations or in states of subjection, and others find it to be overly optimistic, pie in the sky thinking, that can be used as justification to blame the victim.

Given that, when I realized that our reading for this week was a book about gender relations in which the author discusses domestic violence at length, and that Stern posits that degrees of contestation and complicity can be found on both sides of the gender line, I expected a flurry of responses to show up on WebCT on the
topic.

Maybe it’s a stroke of good fortune that this book comes on the reading list in the midst of the end-of-semester crunch. I wasn’t really looking forward to a tempest in a teapot. That said, I feel that Stern, throughout this book, presents through his example a very well-made argument for the position that even in the face of oppression, violence, and denial of many civil or human rights, people find ways to exercise their own agency and negotiate their situations.

These negotiations don’t end in ideal solutions—indeed, in the very first case study offered in the book, it ends in manslaughter. Nevertheless, the book’s thesis is founded on the belief that infrapolitical response and
negotiation can be found even in dire circumstances—and that in some examples at least, these resistances and contests for the meaning of hegemonic discourse can lead to favorable (if contingent and based on compromise) results.

Perhaps the argument being couched in domestic relations is part of the reason for the lack of controversy—people may be more comfortable understanding that certain degrees of negotiation occur within the family or household, where they may be less comfortable ascribing agency to (to use examples from a previous conversation) black slaves or people in concentration camps. However, if this is the case, it’s somewhat surprising as the book is throughout haunted by the specter of violence against women.

Another possibility is that it’s simply the strength of Stern’s argument, coupled with his seemingly exhaustive cataloging of case study after case study. I think this is one of the book’s main strengths. It becomes much harder to dismiss the notion of agency among subjugated women when the author couples strong theory with powerful, personal accounts of various individuals and the ways they dealt with, contested, toed the line of, challenged, or even rejected dominant notions of masculine superiority and the power of paterfamilias.

In doing so, he was also able to carefully avoid ascribing to these women any sort of anachronistic overt (or even proto-) feminism. They didn’t reject the basic ideology of patriarchy, but asserted themselves in contests over its meaning, its limits, and its extent.

Despite the rather grim subject matter, I was so impressed with Stern as both a writer and a scholar that I found this book to be one of the most enjoyable we’ve read all semester.

First off, I had to post this when I found it: apparently, Nial Ferguson was so impressed by the Calm and the Storm that he went and got a job with them. It’s not really a conflict of interests or anything, but I found it very interesting.

That said, I’m still not loving Myst. I’m not exactly an avid gamer, but I do enjoy some games in moderation. I’m not one of those anti-video game people. But I do not find Myst particularly enjoyable.

I’m still trying to beat it, though, as Prof. P promises that there’s payoff at the end… I doubt it, though.

While reading the Gee article, it occurred to me that Gee has this almost platonic ideal of the "good video game," which he then contrasts with a bad classroom. But his thinking about what good video games are made me realize that Myst falls short.

Yeah, I said it: Myst is not a good video game.

I’m not going to belabor the point, but a couple of principles of "good video games" that Myst V (the version I’m playing) violates:

• Verbal information is seldom given "just in time," but rather well in advance and often in a different location.
• While there is a fish tank/sandbox in the form of the first couple rooms, it’s essentially useless, except for understanding the very basics of navigation.
• This may just be me, but I know it’s not me alone: the game isn’t "pleasantly frustrating." It’s just FRUSTRATING. The puzzles are very difficult, which may just be my unfamiliarity with the series, but they’re also often quite hard to FIND. This leads to situations like wondering around for a long time trying to find something to DO (this game is so action-less I find it PAINFUL. I can accept a nonviolent video game, but a game where you can’t even JUMP, get your feet wet in the ocean, or TALK TO ANYONE becomes pretty stagnant pretty quick), or, conversely, completing a puzzle without being aware that a puzzle had been there in the first place. (This latter situation occurred to me more than once.)
• The game doesn’t go through "cycles of expertise," it just stays at a fairly stable level of difficulty, with the occasional easier problems sprinkled throughout. When I had to resort to a walk-through at one point, I realized that I was doing the game essentially backwards. And the thing of it was, some of the earlier stuff was far more challenging than some of the later.

Oh– and just another desultory thought, here… Where do walk-throughs stand in terms of academic honesty and honor codes? Is it more like plagiarism, or more like a study guide? 

Responses:

Here and here.

I really enjoyed this book, but I’m finding it very difficult to talk about. It’s deceptively simple, an easy read, and I honestly had trouble reading it critically, because so much of what he said seemed pretty intuitively right.

I don’t want to just write a book report, though.

So I’ll comment on the one thing that I took any real issue with, that engaged me beyond an "amen"– the use of the word "unthinkable."

I think the term is kind of misleading. I don’t think anything is truly unthinkable. The more you look at marginalized opinions, the more you realize that at least certain individuals are pretty uninhibited by what is generally socially bounded as quot;thinkable" or "unthinkable."

And that’s what I think Trouillot was talking about– the limits of acceptable discourse. Chomsky talks about this a lot– how dominant groups and especially media limit acceptable discourse, set the terms of what can and cannot be said– at least within the public sphere, limited by the terms of what arguments will be seen as on the limits, the borders of discourse, and by setting the center.

I simply think the argument that any single idea is "unthinkable" in its time is a dangerous one. It presumes to speak for the entire range of possible thought within  the entire populace. We can’t presume to know that, and it’s dangerous to assume that there weren’t any people capable of thinking that. They may have been labeled crazy, and may have been prohibited from participating in the polite discourse of the public sphere, but that in no way prohibits them from thinking that thing. A clumsier phrase like "inexpressible within the dominant society," while ineloquent, would be more honest and to the point.

Springing from this is a broader argument about the irresponsibility of any historian presuming to speak for the full range of potentialities of the past. But that would be a digression.

And this whole post is really just a nitpicking little point taken with word choice. Overall, though, while I have little I feel the need to say about the book, and will probably incorporate it into my dissertation…

Lynn Hunt’s “The Family Romance of the French Revolution” is a fascinating book. The author makes a series of fascinating observations, but I feel her approach undermines the work, to an extent.

Now, I’m not one of those historians who see Freud’s name and read it as a red flag , but at the same time, I find myself uncertain what specific advantage was had by using Freudian terminology—especially when one uses them so loosely.

The family romance is, in Freud, an ideation of another, better family in childhood, one that also can be understood to give permission to Oedipal conflict—these are not your real parents, you are absolved from guilt for lusting for your mother or wanting to kill/displace the father. Yet Hunt does not focus on individual subjects, but instead looks primarily at broad public political discourse. With this sort of strange synecdoche, Hunt has to radically alter the meaning of the phrase to adapt it to the broader “political unconscious.” Despite the terminology, Freud’s work is very quickly relegated to the status of a jumping-off point of sorts. Much of the depth of the phrase’s meaning is sapped, and with that depth, the level to which this writing-large of a personal mindstate is lost. The comparison can’t really go into other parts of Freudian theory—and she admittedly avoids most Freudian theory (7-8).

Moreover, the key elements of her thesis—that there are strong parallels and connectivities between ideas of regicide and patricide, republicanism and being orphaned brothers, that the revolution represented a moment where ideas of femininity and motherhood had to be re-thought and re-cast, and that pornography represented at that time a liminal space for both politics and social mores—all can be demonstrated by looking at the texts she considers. If the terms, connectivities, parallels, and conflations that make up her argument can all be proven by analyzing the rhetoric of the times, why introduce the muddled Freudian theory? What does it really add?

Hunt wrote this book in the 1990s, looking at the 1790s, and to me, doing so through the filter of a book written in 1913 seems a sort of double-anachronism. Freud had already fallen largely out of favor by the time of this writing—even in France, analysis hasn’t fallen by the wayside to pills and counseling as it has in the US, most traditional analysts had moved past Freud to Lacan. When the methods of cultural theory and textual analysis would suffice—and one might argue, would give more room for the voices of the historical subject to speak their own truths—why insert this bastardization of Freudian theory?

(I don’t feel like going into this in any depth at the moment, but another trend in the academy that was rising at the time this was written that could have greatly strengthened this book would be reader-response. While Hunt acknowledges certain factors that could make this difficult—namely the paucity of information regarding circulation, publishing numbers, etc, looking a bit more closely at what groups the key texts seem to have interpolated could have given a richness to the analysis that would have been interesting.)