Whatever this vision, it is not a child's.
It is what a child's vision can become.
(Geoffrey Hill: The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy).
In the opening pages of his fine recent book The Sounding of the Whale, D. Graham Burnett spends rather a long time describing what it lacks: 'there is not a single cetacean of any sort in these pages. You knew that, of course, since even the smallest dolphin needs much more room than the largest trim size of the most voluminous scholarly tome. And though they breathe air, cetaceans basically like being in the water, while books are mostly written on paper, a substance that fares poorly when submerged.' The lugubrious comedy here is doing a certain sort of scholarly work: it is reminding us about materiality, the difference between the traces which books can contain and the living creatures which they can't. And it is drawing a quite standard boundary around the practice of academic history; Burnett is not gesturing romantically to rhetorical evocations of a whale. Books and whales are different. But of course they are. And the historian is at some remove from the world; so that at the end of (this one's) day's labour he would go outside and wonder 'what life looked like to those who had spent the day in full career with the actual world, as opposed to bookish resignation from its affairs'; a state which raised in Burnett feelings 'approaching hysterical glee'. Part of the work these boundaries perform is to caper around some of the questions raised recently around non-human agency, particularly by Bruno Latour and his followers. Burnett's response to this is deflationary, and reasonably amusing: 'What were the whales saying? I have no idea. Do I give too much agency to (human) words? Maybe. It is ever thus with bookish folk. If it is whales you want, you have to go to sea.'
Burnett did go to sea. He writes evocatively of his experience, even while insisting that most of the work which went into composition 'involved sitting perfectly still in a chair, sometimes reading and sometimes writing. Sometimes I would lie down.' It is of course such austere discipline – and his immersion in the more lyric literature about Whales - which allows him to represent his more immediate experiences with vivid candour, to describe 'that silent and moonless night in a small kayak, paddling about in terrified awe as, somewhere impossibly near, one of those giants – a fin, presumably, sucked up sudden, room-sized breaths and expelled them in deep and plosive gusts'; when he felt 'something of the basic, unmitigated, almost suicidal fear that one does well to recall while waxing eloquent about the beauties of untrammelled nature.' Good history is not written from books or archives alone. Living can get into it.
And there was a personal story behind it, too, some 'succor' which led to this choice of career and resigned engagement: 'it is true that my mother told me whale stories as a small boy, and yes, she and my father took me out on campus at Indiana University in the mid-1970s to meet an earnest, bearded grad student who gave me a copy of the 1975 Audubon issue on whales. These things, I presume, stuck. I have a sister who was for several years my scuba-diving partner […] and much of my sense of the sea was shaped in her company.' Here the playfulness (that sighing, parenthetical 'yes') is again trying to undercut a standard, faintly romantic story: a tale of how childhood experience forms the adult experience. You may bristle very slightly at the complacent entitlement of this, the idea that none of it needs to be spelled out – one recalls that Burnett lives in Brooklyn, and is an editor for the rather achingly impressive Cabinet magazine – but it is of a piece with the general approach of his preface and introduction. History books are not personal romances. There's still something awesome about those whales.
It should go without saying that this posturing and personal positioning is one of the very least interesting things about The Sounding of the Whale, which is about as good a book as our field has recently produced. But it interests me here because of how it touches on questions of how historians construct their personas and allow their personal identification with their subjects of study to inflect their work.
At the most basic level, many of us do respond to certain interests which were formed in relatively early life: a childhood or adolescent preoccupation with, say, battlefield tanks or the behaviours of great dictators like Hitler or Stalin which remains as an interest and got the whole strange project of writing history going. Historians and philosophers of science are often, in a slightly different sense, trying to deal with discomfort with their initial professional training in the specialist sciences: sometimes this is a mourning for the sense of wide-ranging vocations which have been lost and which were in some sense available in the past. (Hasok Chang for one has been quite explicit about this as a motivation for some of his work). The prevalence of 'boyishness' as a motivating factor among historians of technology is so great that it led David Edgerton, in introducing his great book The Shock of the Old to write that 'most books about technology are for boys of all ages. This is a book for adults of both genders.' Put those childish things aside.
Sometimes the formative interest is relational. Mine is, to a pretty significant extent. I work on the history of lowly inventors and improvers, many of whom improvised simple and minor improvements and tools. Not many people have thought this group worth studying in their own right – and I can't say whether I would or not if my grandfather, Peter Paskins, hadn't been a tool-maker during the Second World War (he made razors for skin grafts). (He also made toys for his grandchildren). I'm aware of working out something about the legacy of bookish men in relation to their handy ancestors; a kind of personal provocation which is, I suspect, far from rare in families which have only had the opportunity to become bookish within the last couple of generations.
That I feel this is important is my business, and doesn't justify the significance of my research. At the same time, the fact that historical passions may start in forms of relational knowledge is far from contemptible, and worth talking about – if only as a way to clarify some of our prejudices. If you ask me what it means to have that motivation, then my entirely sincere and extremely annoying response is to quote John's Gospel, 4.23: 'I sent you to reap that whereon ye bestowed no labour: other men laboured, and ye are entered into their labours'. The point of going to scripture at this point is my own way of trying to demarcate those feelings, and the imagined community which they project, from the actual practice of my history.
That academic history needs to be above such concerns is part of its self-image and professional vocation. When historians want to claim to speak with authority, they do so partly on the basis that scholarship is able to resist the romances which our personal inclinations might want to offer as a vision of the past. This is one reason that much academic historical writing takes the forms it does. It is also why so much of it is so extremely boring. But there is no question that this is the most major part of how the work proceeds, historians' equivalent to Kuhnian normal science. And as with other forms of knowledge, the prejudices of the past are easier to detect than those of our own period, so that we're more than aware of the fantasies of collective political action which shaped a work like E. P. Thompson's The Making of the Working Class but far less certain about the determinants of the more cultural works which have, generally speaking, succeeded Thompson's form of social history.
At a certain point in his great essay “Science as a Vocation”, Max Weber argues that if you can't dedicate the whole of your life to a single textual emendation, you have no business being an historian. (At UCL, we've been hoping to match the signs in the natural scientists' laboratories which say 'what gets me up in the morning is trying to save the world' with our own: 'what gets me up in the morning is the possibility that somebody told a lie in 1762, and there is reliable textual evidence in support of this claim.')
Paul Ricoeur summarised these issues in a paper published in Annales long ago by saying that though we may think of history and memory as closely aligned, they are in many senses actually opposite. History provides the checks which memory seeks to betray; history acts as a kind of reality principle; whereas memory is looking helplessly for relation, recognition, presence. In reading a history book, Ricoeur says, we can never have the moment of saying 'it is you!' (Although, of course, by gesturing at such absences, histories can recall the longing for such immediacies, as Burnett does in the passages about direct encounters with whales which I quoted above). There are no tool-makers in my thesis, only words and pictures and the occasional painting of grass.
And yet, and yet...though we must be scholarly, and impartial, and above our own romances, historians retain a certain fascination for the workings of identification – with subjects and with people - and how it informs our concerns. This is one reason why historians who are concerned with historiography often return to the work of Jules Michelet, the great romantic of France who imagined himself inhaling and re-embodying the dust of the past. Michelet's necromantic pretensions are fun and enticing, and writing about him (perhaps) provides a way of expressing certain longings of our own not readily available in the present state of our art.
Among recent historians who have dealt with Michelet's legacy – and reflected more broadly on what it means to identify with the subjects of the past – the one who has moved me most is the Warwick social historian Carolyn Steedman, particularly in her recent books (which I think of as a trilogy) Dust, Master and Servant, and Labours Lost. Psychoanalytically knowledgeable and theoretically omniverous, though sceptical, Steedman writes about what it means to want certain forms of identification, even when the historical evidence will not allow for them. I tried to dramatise my response to the major subject of Master and Servant at a recent performance: if you're interested, there is a link to it here.
You may object that all of this is relatively remote from the concerns of history of science. But I hope it prompts some reflection on the subjects we choose, and how we articulate their absence in our work. If it's whales you want, you have to go to sea. Yet other men (and women) have laboured; and we are entered into their labours. Expand post.
In the opening pages of his fine recent book The Sounding of the Whale, D. Graham Burnett spends rather a long time describing what it lacks: 'there is not a single cetacean of any sort in these pages. You knew that, of course, since even the smallest dolphin needs much more room than the largest trim size of the most voluminous scholarly tome. And though they breathe air, cetaceans basically like being in the water, while books are mostly written on paper, a substance that fares poorly when submerged.' The lugubrious comedy here is doing a certain sort of scholarly work: it is reminding us about materiality, the difference between the traces which books can contain and the living creatures which they can't. And it is drawing a quite standard boundary around the practice of academic history; Burnett is not gesturing romantically to rhetorical evocations of a whale. Books and whales are different. But of course they are. And the historian is at some remove from the world; so that at the end of (this one's) day's labour he would go outside and wonder 'what life looked like to those who had spent the day in full career with the actual world, as opposed to bookish resignation from its affairs'; a state which raised in Burnett feelings 'approaching hysterical glee'. Part of the work these boundaries perform is to caper around some of the questions raised recently around non-human agency, particularly by Bruno Latour and his followers. Burnett's response to this is deflationary, and reasonably amusing: 'What were the whales saying? I have no idea. Do I give too much agency to (human) words? Maybe. It is ever thus with bookish folk. If it is whales you want, you have to go to sea.'
Burnett did go to sea. He writes evocatively of his experience, even while insisting that most of the work which went into composition 'involved sitting perfectly still in a chair, sometimes reading and sometimes writing. Sometimes I would lie down.' It is of course such austere discipline – and his immersion in the more lyric literature about Whales - which allows him to represent his more immediate experiences with vivid candour, to describe 'that silent and moonless night in a small kayak, paddling about in terrified awe as, somewhere impossibly near, one of those giants – a fin, presumably, sucked up sudden, room-sized breaths and expelled them in deep and plosive gusts'; when he felt 'something of the basic, unmitigated, almost suicidal fear that one does well to recall while waxing eloquent about the beauties of untrammelled nature.' Good history is not written from books or archives alone. Living can get into it.
And there was a personal story behind it, too, some 'succor' which led to this choice of career and resigned engagement: 'it is true that my mother told me whale stories as a small boy, and yes, she and my father took me out on campus at Indiana University in the mid-1970s to meet an earnest, bearded grad student who gave me a copy of the 1975 Audubon issue on whales. These things, I presume, stuck. I have a sister who was for several years my scuba-diving partner […] and much of my sense of the sea was shaped in her company.' Here the playfulness (that sighing, parenthetical 'yes') is again trying to undercut a standard, faintly romantic story: a tale of how childhood experience forms the adult experience. You may bristle very slightly at the complacent entitlement of this, the idea that none of it needs to be spelled out – one recalls that Burnett lives in Brooklyn, and is an editor for the rather achingly impressive Cabinet magazine – but it is of a piece with the general approach of his preface and introduction. History books are not personal romances. There's still something awesome about those whales.
It should go without saying that this posturing and personal positioning is one of the very least interesting things about The Sounding of the Whale, which is about as good a book as our field has recently produced. But it interests me here because of how it touches on questions of how historians construct their personas and allow their personal identification with their subjects of study to inflect their work.
At the most basic level, many of us do respond to certain interests which were formed in relatively early life: a childhood or adolescent preoccupation with, say, battlefield tanks or the behaviours of great dictators like Hitler or Stalin which remains as an interest and got the whole strange project of writing history going. Historians and philosophers of science are often, in a slightly different sense, trying to deal with discomfort with their initial professional training in the specialist sciences: sometimes this is a mourning for the sense of wide-ranging vocations which have been lost and which were in some sense available in the past. (Hasok Chang for one has been quite explicit about this as a motivation for some of his work). The prevalence of 'boyishness' as a motivating factor among historians of technology is so great that it led David Edgerton, in introducing his great book The Shock of the Old to write that 'most books about technology are for boys of all ages. This is a book for adults of both genders.' Put those childish things aside.
Sometimes the formative interest is relational. Mine is, to a pretty significant extent. I work on the history of lowly inventors and improvers, many of whom improvised simple and minor improvements and tools. Not many people have thought this group worth studying in their own right – and I can't say whether I would or not if my grandfather, Peter Paskins, hadn't been a tool-maker during the Second World War (he made razors for skin grafts). (He also made toys for his grandchildren). I'm aware of working out something about the legacy of bookish men in relation to their handy ancestors; a kind of personal provocation which is, I suspect, far from rare in families which have only had the opportunity to become bookish within the last couple of generations.
That I feel this is important is my business, and doesn't justify the significance of my research. At the same time, the fact that historical passions may start in forms of relational knowledge is far from contemptible, and worth talking about – if only as a way to clarify some of our prejudices. If you ask me what it means to have that motivation, then my entirely sincere and extremely annoying response is to quote John's Gospel, 4.23: 'I sent you to reap that whereon ye bestowed no labour: other men laboured, and ye are entered into their labours'. The point of going to scripture at this point is my own way of trying to demarcate those feelings, and the imagined community which they project, from the actual practice of my history.
That academic history needs to be above such concerns is part of its self-image and professional vocation. When historians want to claim to speak with authority, they do so partly on the basis that scholarship is able to resist the romances which our personal inclinations might want to offer as a vision of the past. This is one reason that much academic historical writing takes the forms it does. It is also why so much of it is so extremely boring. But there is no question that this is the most major part of how the work proceeds, historians' equivalent to Kuhnian normal science. And as with other forms of knowledge, the prejudices of the past are easier to detect than those of our own period, so that we're more than aware of the fantasies of collective political action which shaped a work like E. P. Thompson's The Making of the Working Class but far less certain about the determinants of the more cultural works which have, generally speaking, succeeded Thompson's form of social history.
At a certain point in his great essay “Science as a Vocation”, Max Weber argues that if you can't dedicate the whole of your life to a single textual emendation, you have no business being an historian. (At UCL, we've been hoping to match the signs in the natural scientists' laboratories which say 'what gets me up in the morning is trying to save the world' with our own: 'what gets me up in the morning is the possibility that somebody told a lie in 1762, and there is reliable textual evidence in support of this claim.')
Paul Ricoeur summarised these issues in a paper published in Annales long ago by saying that though we may think of history and memory as closely aligned, they are in many senses actually opposite. History provides the checks which memory seeks to betray; history acts as a kind of reality principle; whereas memory is looking helplessly for relation, recognition, presence. In reading a history book, Ricoeur says, we can never have the moment of saying 'it is you!' (Although, of course, by gesturing at such absences, histories can recall the longing for such immediacies, as Burnett does in the passages about direct encounters with whales which I quoted above). There are no tool-makers in my thesis, only words and pictures and the occasional painting of grass.
And yet, and yet...though we must be scholarly, and impartial, and above our own romances, historians retain a certain fascination for the workings of identification – with subjects and with people - and how it informs our concerns. This is one reason why historians who are concerned with historiography often return to the work of Jules Michelet, the great romantic of France who imagined himself inhaling and re-embodying the dust of the past. Michelet's necromantic pretensions are fun and enticing, and writing about him (perhaps) provides a way of expressing certain longings of our own not readily available in the present state of our art.
Among recent historians who have dealt with Michelet's legacy – and reflected more broadly on what it means to identify with the subjects of the past – the one who has moved me most is the Warwick social historian Carolyn Steedman, particularly in her recent books (which I think of as a trilogy) Dust, Master and Servant, and Labours Lost. Psychoanalytically knowledgeable and theoretically omniverous, though sceptical, Steedman writes about what it means to want certain forms of identification, even when the historical evidence will not allow for them. I tried to dramatise my response to the major subject of Master and Servant at a recent performance: if you're interested, there is a link to it here.
You may object that all of this is relatively remote from the concerns of history of science. But I hope it prompts some reflection on the subjects we choose, and how we articulate their absence in our work. If it's whales you want, you have to go to sea. Yet other men (and women) have laboured; and we are entered into their labours. Expand post.
Malheureusement je ne traduis plus tous les posts que j'écrit sur ce blog. Si vous voudriez lire les posts qui ont été traduits, veuillez cliquer ici.
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