The Leisurely Historian…

Mills Kelly has started a real debate in the last few couple weeks about the future of H-Net.

(Follow-ups can be found here, here, here, and here… And to see some of the response this engendered, check here, here, here, and here. Also, check out the discussion on the Digital History podcast.)

Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I have to say that, despite the advice of many professors and colleagues, I am not and never have been a member of an H-Net community. I have my reasons, though. And they have everything to do with why I’m writing this.

Mills’s article brings up the notion of email bankruptcy. People have begun declaring bankruptcy on Social Networking Sites. for that matter, too. Now, when I first heard about this phenomenon, it seemed a bit silly. But then I realized that this was exactly the same thing that had happened to me years ago.

You see, around 1998 or 1999, I declared (without using the term) listserv bankruptcy. After three or four years of being very active on several listservs, I realized that deleting messages from my lists was taking so much time I was neglecting to reply to emails from friends and family. I quit them all, and though I’ve joined one or two briefly since then, I’ve been listserv free for most of the last eight years.

So I guess I have a vested interest in coming up with a new, viable direction that H-Net could go in– it’s for the sake of my own professional development that I’m thinking about this, because I really don’t think I could face the possibility of joining one of those things again.

But it hit me the other day: there’s already an existing piece of open-source software that could do everything H-Net does now and more, that can play to its existing strengths and help improve aspects that are less than ideal.

The answer is LiveJournal.

Those of you rolling your eyes, please hear me out.

LiveJournal is a somewhat beleaguered website, a situation that is partially fair and partially unfair. It’s definitely a site where a lot of people are doing the kind of unintellectual, quotidian blogging that some opponents of leaving the listserv format seem to feel dominate blogging. So yeah, LJ is to a certain extent contributing to blogging’s bad rap. The site’s earliest adopters and most dedicated users have historically skewed young and female, too, and I think that this has also brought the site detractors within certain male-dominated circles of geekdom.

But the most important thing for this discussion is the software’s architecture– LiveJournal’s software is largely open-source,  making it relatively easy to pick it up and throw it on another server. That’s definitely a plus for a nonprofit project like HNet.

More importantly, the LiveJournal framework combines elements of blogging, message boards, and SNSs. Transmitting H-Net to this new system would give it much more functionality.

Let’s imagine what HNetJournal might look like. The H-Net Communities that currently exist as listservs could easily exist as communities like those on LJ. Various levels of moderation can be set up on these communities, so the moderated gatekeeper function that the lists currently serve could be mirrored there.

On the other hand, communities that wanted to become more open could allow more openness in their membership and posting policies if they wished. New communities could even be set up that might be more open to those who feel excluded. There could be an H-History-Undergrad community, for example. Similarly, professors could set up a community that was limited to students in a specific, encouraging discussion out of class and getting students into the habit of seeing the learning community as an important part of education.

Beyond the community feature, however, there’s the personal-journal element– the BLOGGING element of this framework. If blogging was done by the same process as posting a new item or a comment on H-Net, I’d wager a lot more academics would begin at least occasionally blogging. And those of us who already blog could easily set up our HNetJournal blog to simply be an RSS feed of our blogs elsewhere. More eyeballs, more hits, greater readership.

These blogs, like the communities, can be as open or as closed as you want them to be. Anyone afraid of prying eyes, and using that as an excuse not to blog, could blog for a closed community of colleagues that he or she has already established contact with. On LJ it’s called your "friends list." Something more professional sounding would be necessary, but the idea’s a good one.

The friends list does several things. It allows for the above-mentioned level of control over readership for those who’re still a bit weary of being "all over the internet." It’s a blog aggregater that’s less scary than dealing with RSS feed readers for the technophobic. It allows for community building across interests, as well. You may encounter a fascinating French Medievalist whose work you want to track, even though your research in 20th century Japan isn’t really relevant. You wouldn’t need to join a French Medievalist community to maintain that contact. HNetJournal could be good for interdisciplinary discussion.

There’s the fear of losing even more readership to contend with, though. This concern is understandable and real. However, I think it could be overcome. First off, LiveJournal is actually fairly user-friendly and intuitive. I’d challenge anyone reading this with skepticism to set up an account, and play around on the site for a little while. It may have a learning curve, but it’s definitely no harder– and I’d argue it’s actually easier– than navigating WebCT, Blackboard, or PeopleSoft. Changing software and re-acclimating has simply become a part of being an academic anymore, and people eventually come around.

Another thing that could be done to curb this loss of eyeballs– and here I’ll defer to anyone with a knowledge of Perl– would be to set up email notification. LJ as it exists today already has a comment notification feature, where users can have (HTML or Plain Text) notifications of any responses to posts or comments they’ve made. I’d imagine it’d be doable to set up a periodic notification email system that simply relayed information about major activities on all of a user’s subscriptions. Thus those who want to have the information put in their inbox to peruse or ignore could continue to have this done.

…I’m sure I’ve got more to say on the topic, but I’m afraid that this post is already too long, and nobody will read it. Assuming it generates any interest, I’ll continue to ruminate and offer a follow-up post soon.

(Some more thoughts on two books I talked about in this post.)

James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State and David Stradling’s Smokestacks and Progressives, while tackling related topics, could not be more dissimilar in approach. Scott’s book is a sprawling history of a type of phenomenon—an account of different iterations of a problem that covers multiple continents and the entire modern era, using a strong theoretical base to tie seemingly unrelated events. Stradling, on the other hand, limits his scope, limiting his book to popular smoke abatement movements in the US between the 1890s and 1940s. Stradling’s book is virtually absent of any underlying theoretical base—his book is primarily a chronicle of the periodic and seemingly unrelated interruptions, upsets, and setbacks that the movement suffered over that time. Despite their widely divergent approaches and subject matter, the two books can be seen as working quite well in dialogue, each book shedding light on what may be perceived as deficiencies of the other.
   

Stradling’s book is an excellent chronicle of events, thoroughly researched, and gives the reader a good understanding of the history of the argument for the abatement of coal smoke. The question he often ignores, however, is why—why do the leaders of the movement for smoke abatement change over time, from progressive women’s organizations to public health experts to engineers? Why was the movement, in all its various forms, ultimately so unsuccessful—unable to abate coal smoke right up to the time that coal lost dominance and primacy as a source of fuel? Why were certain popular movements for abatement at least initially successful, while others were so quickly struck down by courts and local governments? Why were cities willing to manage sewage and drinking water, but unwilling to see smoke similarly, as a health concern that needed to be managed by governmental works and interventions? Where any answer to these questions can be found in Stradling’s account, they are singular, contingent, and local. Stradling demurs from proposing any great unifying themes that connect these events, or to give a systemic logic to it all.

This is where the strong theoretical basis of Seeing Like a State becomes a very useful tool in deepening one’s reading of Stradling. One of the key concepts in Scott’s book is that of “legibility.” As the needs and duties of the state become larger and more complex, the state necessarily begins rationalizing. The subject, the land, and the state’s resources all must be structured and reordered according to some rational method. In doing this, the state must put primacy on some things, and ignore others. Simplifications are born. The next logical step is to transform reality to more closely conform to the cartographic/statistical simplification, in order to better measure and increase efficiency. In examples from early scientific forestry to the reordering of land use within villages, Scott demonstrates that this pattern is reiterated as the modern nation state is born. Early scientific forestry purged the forests of elements that were not seen in terms of economic value, preferring single-crop forests where the trees were lined up like soldiers, and robbing the environment of necessary biodiversity. Land tenure patterns were completely reordered in order to make them more easily comprehensible from great distances—ensuring more accurate tax collections, perhaps, but also removing localized patterns that tended to be more diverse, productive, and sensitive to the local terrain.   

This is the process of the state rendering the illegible legible. Illegible groups, institutions, and patterns are localized, contingent, and lack uniformity, and are thus confounding to modern statecraft, which requires a large economy. The process of rendering legible—of simplifying, ordering, and making uniform—allows the state to rationally tax, assess, and predict its assets and its subjects. It is this process that is the essence of “seeing like a state.”

Of course, it’s not just states that see in this manner. In fact, Scott’s Yale colleague John Lewis Gaddis, in his book The Landscape of History, has noted that the process of simplification, rationalization, and rendering legible is actually quite close to the work of Historians. More to the point, any large organization or corporation must do essentially the same work in order to maximize profit or efficacy. In the era that Stradling is analyzing, the great industrial oligopolies of the time certainly sought to rationalize and make uniform the resources within their domain, including their employees. Frederick Winslow Taylor’s notion of Scientific Management is quite similar to early Scientific Forestry as Scott describes it. The movements of the bodies of workers, like the forests of eighteenth century Germany, were seen as unnecessarily complex and therefore wasteful. Taylorism was an attempt to rationalize the process of production, to simplify it. The worker was the subject of the corporation, almost as much as he was the subject of the state. And the gaze of both sought legibility.
   

We can see, then, that there were multiple “states” viewing the problem of coal smoke. While they have different and sometimes competing interests, they were united in a modality of seeing, in their inability to comprehend multifaceted complexity and preference for the legible. The problem of coal smoke in the progressive era into the 1940s, however, was multifaceted and complex. The propensity of the progressive women’s groups who began the campaign for smoke abatement to intermix health, ecology, economic cost, and quality of life concerns in their rhetoric, while it probably came closest to the complex truth of the issue, likely only served to undermine their arguments. Likewise, while it is always hard to put hard numbers to environmental health concerns, the disagreements among the medical community as to the effects of smoke on health, positive or negative, undercut the arguments of medical “experts” who took up the issue. In a particularly unfortunate irony, the discovery of the bacterial origin of tuberculosis seems to have been a blow to this movement that sought goals that would have only contributed to overall respiratory health. 

Looking at the issue of coal smoke like a state—or like a corporation—the maneuvers made to counter and set back the smoke abatement movement were quite rational. Discounting the unquantifiable (illegible) moral and quality of life issues, and setting aside the still-debated public health concerns, smoke abatement didn’t seem to warrant the same type of radical intervention as the issues of sewage or potable water had not long before. The economic cost of the “smoke tax” on cities with high levels of coal smoke in no way matched the economic benefit brought by coal-based industry. Legislation enabling cities to regulate emissions and fine the worst polluters allowed for the potential of an offset of sorts to the (legible) cost of over-pollution. Likewise, the gradualist approach toward decreased emissions—and thus increased efficiency—made the most economic sense, as it led to eventual improvement and greater productivity without overburdening industry with regulation to a degree that it would harm the overall economy. As Scott repeatedly illustrates, the simplifications implicit to the process of rendering activities and processes legible often leads to lacunae in comprehending those activities—omissions that can cause changes in problem-solving strategies, and horrible miscalculations.

If Scott’s book can be used to provide a richer theoretical understanding of the events Stradling describes, what can Smokestacks and Progressives tell us about Seeing Like a State? Briefly, I think that there are three main insights that can be made about Scott from reading Stradling.

First, as I discussed before, you don’t have to be a state to “see like” one. Scott limits his discussion to the modern nation-state. While this suits the purposes of the book well, the insight into the manner in which the leaders of large, complex institutions render complex events legible can certainly be applied to corporate management. In Stradling we see the state frequently siding with corporations, even allowing corporate-appointed overseers to police corporate activities. There is an ontological symmetry at work here. The economic mode of perception that favors legibility and rationality is at work in both the state and corporate interests.

This leads directly to the second issue raised: one of the four conditions Scott contends are present in all the worst examples of state-sponsored social engineering is the inability of civil society to resist such plans. Stradling’s account of a popular movement repeatedly thwarted by state and corporate interests brings to mind a rather harrowing question: in our current state of late capitalism, with the multiple and multivalent forces of the state and corporations both “seeing like states,” as it were, is there any hope for civil society to actually force change when necessary? Do we possess the ability to resist social engineering that has the power and money of both state and corporate interests behind them? Stradling’s agents, the proponents of smoke abatement, don’t offer much hope. But it begs the question.

Finally, and on a similar note, as we watch the futile struggle of the smoke abatement activists, one must ask about the efficacy of the sort of “metis” that Scott celebrates in confronting the state, which is incapable of such fluid, contingent modes of knowledge. While the progressive women’s groups rhetoric proved ineffective, it was so in part because it reflected the sort of complex reality that the rationalist mode of seeing preferred by the state and the corporate interests. We watch the movement’s proponents snake, parry, and dodge—practicing a discursive metis, as it were. Ultimately, however, this constant movement only resulted in a repeated reframing of the discourse into terms that more and more closely resembled that of the state—and even still, it was ultimately not effective. Once the ontology inherent to “seeing like a state” reaches a sort of critical mass, are contingent, complex modalities of knowledge simply outmoded and ineffective?

If anyone hadn’t gathered from my multiple cartographically-themed posts in the last couple weeks, I’m taking a course on History and Cartography this semester.

I want to take this opportunity to praise two of the websites we visited this week– TypeBrewer and ColorBrewer. Both of these projects quite successfully combine several elements that seem to be essential to good use of new media for pedagogical ends.

For one thing, they’re quite well-designed– they’re easy to use, the interface is straightforward and easy to use, and there’s not much of a learning curve. Similarly, they do what new media does best– they take something quite nuanced and complex and make it simple. The lessons you get experientially from toying with typography or colors in mapping, if you had to do this by trial-and-error, or even worse by hand, would be quite time-consuming and difficult, and you’d risk losing the forest to the trees.

The phrase I just used, "lessons you get experientially," leads me to the next thing I really liked about the sites. Neither was didactic or painfully "educational." I grew up with teachers for parents in the eighties, and I was exposed to my fair share of "educational toys." The ones that I learned the most from were the ones that put the emphasis on "toys" rather than "educational." The interface of these sites is quite pleasing, the "work" you do is quite entertaining… You PLAY with these websites, rather than being instructed by them. And even the most nose-to-the-grindstone, masochistic grad student would rather PLAY than WORK. The element of play encourages continued, protracted use, and thus a more nuanced understanding than a site that simply tells you that A is more effective than B but less successful than C. Moreover, these are somewhat intuitive, aesthetic "lessons," not simple right/wrong issues. The protracted play gives a better SENSE of best methods– and sensibility is more important than dualistic right/wrong treatment of the issues.

Finally, by keeping the options limited and embracing the KISS principle, these projects could be put on the web as free flash tools. If the creators had made them too cumbersomely complex, or if they had been created in 1997, they probably would have ended up as expensive CD-ROMs that would have had less impact on fewer people…

Both pages are doing some of the most important things right when it comes to online pedagogy, and I was just blown away, honestly.

I know that the mere mention of the word "theory" makes some people’s eyes roll and their ears flap shut, but history needs theory.

I read Black’s Maps and History last year, and I have to say I rather liked it. But reading it again after reading The Landscape of History and James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State in the last few weeks, the lack of any underlying theoretical structure in Black’s book really stuck out like a sore thumb.

It’s probably not helping that last week I was required to read another book, David Stradling’s Smokestacks and Progressives, that had essentially the same problem. That book sensitized me to how annoyed I can get when there’s a lack of theoretical underpinning to a work of history, even one on an interesting topic.

So yeah, Stradling and Black fall into the same trap– they give very authoritative and in-depth accounts of activity over time, without any theory unifying their books. In one case, it’s the history of smoke abatement movements in the Progressive Era and into the Depression, and in the other, it’s the evolution of historical atlases. Both are fascinating topics. Both books seem quite well-researched. But neither author really puts much effort into demonstrating commonalities over time– whether they be commonalities in causes of change, effects, methods, forces that repeatedly influence the historical narrative, commonalities over time…

And that’s what I’m talking about when I say theory.

History needs theory. Not necessarily big-T Theory, you don’t need to include Foucault or Derrida or Althusser or something to write history… although I often get a kick out of it when historians do. But you need something to unite the events you describe. Otherwise, you have books like these two, interesting at times and even informative, but not fully doing the "work" of History, if you ask me. As Gaddis points out, building on Scott, Historians necessarily must simplify for the sake of legibility.

What this means is that we don’t compile a list of causes and effects– writing History is more than creating a timeline, although even that action is of course still a simplified cartography of the historical landscape for the sake of legibility. But historians, writers of Good History, go a step further– they seek unities, they create theories that express links, similarities, continuities, and even ruptures. Without this, history becomes a confusing mess of discontinuity and unrelated events.

I’m arguing that theory is necessary to the work of History, but but as I said before it need not be the kind of totalizing, absolute Theory that supersedes fact and lobs confusing jargon at the reader.

Gaddis seems to think that Hayden White is one such writer of Theory. While Gaddis acknowledges the utility of the concept of narratization and emplotment in Metahistory, he seems to feel that it falls under the weight of its own jargon. All this is stated in a couple throw-away sentences, and the footnote indicates another book rather than Metahistory… This was one of the few things in the book that really rubbed me the wrong way.

I’m digressing, here, and anyway, White himself has acknowledged in an interview with Ewa Domanska (published in her wonderful collection of interviews, Encounters: Philosophy of History after Postmodernism) that few people read the book in its entirety, and that it is "long and repetitive," and he seems fine with both. The reason I brought this up, though, is that in  the same interview, White argues that his theories in that book are not techniques to be applied, but a sort of contingent, contextually-based structure set up to explain what was going on in a particular set of texts. He seems almost put off at the concept of younger authors trying to continue with his theories laid out in that book in other works. "It is not meant to be applied. It is analytical. It does not tell you how to do something."

White also repeatedly praises Roland Barthes as a diverse and inventive thinker in that interview. The next interviewee, Hans Kellner, seems to put his finger on what it is about Barthes that might be so appealing to White:

From Mythologies to the last essay, he was always changing… in each work… you get this enormous structural framework poised in order to do a quite small job… Then Barthes goes on to his next work and says in effect: "Oh, I’m all done with that. I am never going to use that system again."

So even among these people who are associated with arch-structuralism are nevertheless proposing the primacy in Historical work of theories over Theory.

You don’t need to get married to a single theory and apply it to every event– you don’t have to be a Marx or even a Derrida. You don’t even need your theory to be applicable in any other historical context. But you need theory to really make sense of history.

I liked, on a certain level, both Smokestacks and Maps and History. I’ll keep both for reference. I wouldn’t even be surprised if I ended up incorporating either of them in a bibliography or reading list one day. But the experience of reading both left me unsettled, full of questions.

I never got a clear sense of why Stradling thought that smoke abatement movements over those fifty years ultimately failed, only learning more about the periodic and seemingly unrelated interruptions, upsets, and setbacks that the movement suffered over that time. Likewise, I don’t have a clear answer to the "so what" question as far as Black’s treatment of historical atlases. I don’t have a clear concept of why he feels these atlases are important enough to merit the in-depth treatment he gives their changes over time.

I can propose answers on my own– both authors give their readers enough information to form theories of their own– but the lack of a theoretical base to their books leaves me unclear on how to read certain passages, and generally unsatisfied.

Theory, as well as making the reading more interesting, also gives a reader a map to reading the book, an easy "in" to understanding the authors biases and assumptions, and deepens the feeling of coherence in history.

And after all, coherence and symmetry are things that humankind seems hard-wired to seek out.