The Leisurely Historian… Old and New Media, Leisure, and Entertainment Through a Historic Lens

What We Talk About When We Talk About History, Part II: Atheoretical History?

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.

What We Talk About When We Talk About History: (Hopefully) Part One in a Series…

I’m not an Historian.

At least, not yet.

I’ll tell people this proudly, because I think it means I’m not coming at this project with any artificially "naturalized" concepts– I like to think I don’t have as many assumptions about what history is or how one goes about it. This is because academically, I’m not from an historical background. And I honestly just don’t completely grok what people talk about when they talk about history. Since coming to George Mason, though, I’ve been trying to work through what it means.

But sometimes someone will say something that makes me realize that I have fairly definite beliefs, or at least suspicions, about what I think History is– or should be. These moments are wonderful, because sometimes my beliefs come crashing down, and other times they’re reaffirmed, but these moments are always times when I realize that I’m starting to become an historian– to become someone who cares deeply and holds strong opinions about the nature and methods of Historical work.

A couple of the students in my Historiography course last semester kept bringing up the idea of history as a science. This seemed, to me at the time, to be patently ridiculous. Science means reproducible results, controlled experimentation, objectivity (a term I’m so loath to use that I almost always write it bracketed or under erasure or in scare quotes)… History is simply not like that, I felt.

History is interpretive, it’s subjective. It’s narratizing. The way that it’s done in the academy today, History is something deeply intertextual– it takes place in the footnotes, dialogically.  When you look to the origins of historical writing, it doesn’t come out of the sciences, it comes out of the tradition of bards, chronicles,  and heraldry. It’s a poetic tradition.

Moreover, there’s the problem of sources. Sciences are, I thought, the product of direct observation. Most of History’s sources are just textual traces, documentary remnants from unreliable narrators. When we write history, we do so placing trust in those sources. We may have standards of critical skepticism, we may demand plausibility and require that sources support one anothers’ assertions, but we essentially are interpreting texts, and when we talk about History in terms of "reality," we’re really placing a lot of trust in our sources or our own critical faculties.

I’m starting to open up to the idea that there are strong similarities between History and certain scientific disciplines. One reason for that is a conversation with a friend from my old alma mater– who is, incidentally, also a Mason grad. In a conversation over the summer, talking about History over Thai food in DuPont, he presented a quite strong argument for History as a Science. I wasn’t converted, but it was the first time someone made the argument so convincingly to me. I’ll talk more about that conversation in a later post.

But the argument made by John Lewis Gaddis in The Landscape of History is what I want to talk about here. Gaddis’s book is one of the most incredibly clever books I’ve read in a long time. And I mean "clever" in both the complimentary and pejorative sense of the term.

Gaddis argues that History is much closer in its approaches to Physics or Evolutionary Biology than to the Social Sciences– History, like those "hard sciences," is deductive, multicausal, complex. It’s a strong argument.

But like Gaddis’s entire book, it’s also deeply metaphorical. The whole book is awash in strange metaphors– my favorite being the image of the SS Jaques Derrida bearing down on the British coastline. And this is part of the insight of the book– that scientific insight is often deeply metaphorical. It’s thought experiments, insights gained from suddenly recalling the image of the snake that eats its own tail.

So I would say that Gaddis influenced my oppinion insofar as he has helped convince me that History is like many sciences. I’m just not completely convinced that it falls into the category of science, that it IS Science.

Of course, I’m biased. I don’t want History to be a Science. I’m not interested in being a scientist. I came to History because I wanted a way to do the kind of textual interpretation and theory that I came to love in college… and make it Mean Something. Because I sort of stopped believing, after a certain point, that Joyce changed the world. But I can’t believe that William Randolf Hearst didn’t.

I love the idea of History as the Art of the Footnote. As a practice of navigating between texts, sailing through a sea of traces and scraps of the past. I know that Historians can’t throw out the concept of Historical Truth, but I don’t want to stop asking why. Many people seem to feel that microhistory represents the postmodernization of historical practices, but I don’t know if that project goes far enough. I want to see Derridian history– history that attacks the authority to make Historical Truth Statements. I know that this sort of project would quickly become tiresome and difficult and of questionable utility, as Derrida’s work itself did, but I think that it would only strengthen History as a discipline. I think Historians need to make the postmodern turn, if only to turn away from it.

And, as a final note, I do want to add that if there is one criticism I would have of Gaddis’s book, it would be that– I think he sets the social sciences up as a bit of a straw man, creating an unfair comparison between more contemporary Historical Theory and a fairly Modernist, mid-twentieth century view of what the social sciences "do." From some of the sociologists I’ve met, I get the feeling that they’re further along in making the postmodern turn than a lot of Historians. (Of course, the handful of Economists I’ve talked to have seemed to fit fairly well within his characterization of that discipline.)

I have a lot more to say, and I know that this is somewhat muddled. But I’m trying to tease out an argument, a way of explaining what I think, or at least suspect, when it comes to the theory of History, the philosophy of history, whatever you want to call it.

So… More thoughts on this later.