A Useful Understanding of History

This post will contain unfinished reflection on the following quotation:

"When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them." – Out of Africa, 1937

It is true that storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it, that it brings about reconciliation and consent with things as they really are, and that we may even trust it to contain eventually by implication that last word which we expect from the "day of judgment." -Arendt, "Isak Dinasen"

My own work is informed by an approach to historiography taken by Hannah Arendt.  It tries to balance an appreciation for storytelling and history with a deep fear of potential uses.  This approach is shaped by life experiences of growing up in the south, research in history of rhetoric, and an attempt to teach historical judgment.

A child of the South Carolina lowcountry, I am deeply attracted to the aesthetics of tradition.  The beautiful slave plantations in still-active cotton fields called out for some sort of judgment, as well as reverence and awe.  Like other events in human history, their terrible beauty also cries out for reconsidering the past and how it is made to speak to the present.

Traditions give folks a way to understand the plausibility of events in succession and, at the same time, have the tendency to make events seem necessary and even inevitable.  This is clearly true with political traditions that create "blinders" to others' viewpoints.  It is also true in rhetorical studies, when unexamined "tradition" looks like inevitable replies in a series of theoretical exchanges between great minds.

My recent project on Cicero and his reception by Kant is an attempt to unhinge this feeling of inevitability while also accepting "tradition" as a path of influence and exchange.  If Kant had embraced more of Cicero's Stoic writings, he might have taken Cicero's emphasis on eloquence into a conception of philosophy and, in the end, human rights.  These sorts of projects, that at times verge on the counterfactual, have the ability to display the rupturing aspects of a tradition while admitting their influence.

One reason why I enjoy reading Arendt is her emphasis on the "new" and its ability to influence the present.  Using Benjamin's imagery, Arendt compares the storyteller (~historian) to a pearl diver, digging into the debris of the past to find pearls and bring them to the surface.  In the midst of our public memory stands vast areas of historical forgetting, and the storyteller has the position to make these forgotten moments known, and, in this way, to make the past relevant in the present.  Over the past few years of scholarly work, I have increasingly seen success in bringing the heretofore little known into the present in a way that reshapes the past-present link.  Archival projects and detailed textual explication are central to this process for me.

One of the other principles I take from Arendt is the avoidance of a teleological philosophy of history in my writing--destroying the concept that history is the inevitable working-itself-out toward a (progressive) end.  Especially in public address studies, my other "home," there is a tendency to write about American political movements (esp. African-American and women's movements) in a way that forgets their exceptional nature to the majority of political discourse.  Economic debates, the focus of my dissertation, show the cyclical and radically fragmentary nature of most political debate.  Making this insight convert into a convincing and readable history, vis-a-vis those social-movement-works that incorporate a stronger telos of progress, is a difficult and frustrating project.  My audiences, to at least a small extent, want to read about a triumphant tandem expansion of deliberation and equality through speech.  This democracy-enlarging impetus is embedded across rhetorical studies.

Finally, I try to teach historical judgment without teaching high-minded moralism in the classroom.  This is also a perilous task.  Arendt separates such judgment from empathy, insofar as we can never fully know the world of the past.  However, Arendt provides a resource to pull modern readers out of liberalism's abyss of suspended judgment, affirming that, through storytelling and radical histories, we can come to critique the world and the people of a time through taking up the position of a spectator, and imagining their world through shared stories and meanings to see it "through their eyes" insofar as we are capable.  A notion of rhetorical history--of seeing the world through exemplary speakers meeting a major exigence--first attracted me to this field and is not something we should cast aside.  I always try to read such persuasive dynamism back into the study of rhetorical theory as it becomes inflected by contextual social needs of an era.

To conclude, I'll come back to the opening quotation.

It is true that storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it, that it brings about reconciliation and consent with things as they really are, and that we may even trust it to contain eventually by implication that last word which we expect from the "day of judgment."

I tend to see rhetorical history not as a perfect solution to the ills of "defining," (i.e. ideas of an "essence" of something or its "true nature"), but at least a step in the right direction by highlighting artistry in contingent, unpredictable moments.  The expanded "tradition" provides many moments of exemplary practice to do this, as well as just a bizarre canon.  To study a term, "rhetoric," that was coined by its archenemy following a potential myth (Corax & Tisias) with an influential woman who was hated and loved for her role in rhetoric (Aspasia) in a field that wars with "the love of wisdom"--this has to tell you something about all knowledge as storytelling!

When Arendt says "as they really are," I read her as not being an essentialist, but instead saying that we come to reconcile ourselves with the (sometimes-radically) contingent realm of action and symbols "as it is."  In other words, we become anti-essentialists while knowing that worse views of reality preach one teleological view of history and admit the possibility of complete empathy and understanding of the past.  Instead, the "reconciliation and consent" she advocates is an acknowledgement of unpredictability and imagination that always play a role in our necessary and necessarily-incomplete judgements of the past.