I don't have a quote that epitomizes what I am trying to say, so instead I'll describe my thinking and perhaps someone will be able to refer me to someone.
When Daniel asked who we'd offer up as a philosophy of history, I turn most naturally to Susan Jarratt and Rereading the Sophists. She does three key things that are models for all of us now: she grapples with the practical problems of scant evidence; she speaks to the tradition from a revisionist perspective afforded by feminism and other voices of the margins; and she lets the Sophists speak to the current critical moment. It's this last part that works so well for her study, because the Sophists, of course, anticipate all the post-structuralist questions that add the problem of language to the usual philosophic problems of the origins of knowledge, reality, and thought. So in a way she writes such a memorable book because she chooses such an ideal subject in the first place.
Yet as much as she does for historians of rhetoric, she does leave it up to us to figure out what to do with our own respective times, places, and communities which we study. And it is here that I am moved by Brandon's description of his own roots in the South, and the compelling and insistent way that the past forces itself into the present. My parallel is that I'm writing about early national Philadelphia. There are a number of ways the research has opened up personal resonance for me, but that's not what I am talking about here. Instead, what I am trying to say about multilingualism in this period is supposed to work as a case study; I'm proposing a method that could be transplanted to any other place and time. But the fact is that it's early America I'm talking about, which has so many symbolic and rhetorical meanings for us as a nation, and I can't seem to escape the fact that I _am_ making a historical argument, writing a new story, about how our country looked when it was new and therefore we have been wrong about our monolingual English origins. So I'm writing a new story. And it's _not_ transplantable because it's the soil that counts. (horrific metaphor I know!)
This in itself is not unusual but my point is that...Point not yet made. I have to go get kid at school. Should have started this elsewhere and then pasted in. Will continue tomorrow!
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
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Ok, I'm sorry about the weirdness here. I thought I could edit but it doesn't look like I can, so I'm continuing in the comment box.
ReplyDeleteWhat I was about to say is that the way in which we have a dialogue with our subjects in history is what matters. I'm trying to get beyond a truism that "you have to let your subjects speak to you." What I mean is that we need a better theoretical framework for coping with the contingencies of place, one which would help us cope with moral dilemmas (these plantations are beautiful but they are the site of humans holding other humans in bondage) and ideation (these native American children were little angels; the founding fathers were pure visionaries).
So I am gratified to learn more about Arendt on all this, someone I’ve been wanting to read for years (btw our Temple predecessor Jess Restaino is about to publish a book on Arendt and comp practice; don’t know if you know her Brandon but she’s great). I will add my vote that Brandon has identified something key for all of us: Arendt’s conception of the danger and promise of story telling. Am I right in thinking that it’s oversimplification that worries Arendt, at least in part?
To add to this, Kenneth Burke has the notion of the dialectic of constitutions, in which the text is able to speak to future contingencies because of its dialogic or agonistic nature. For example, the US Constitution was written to address problems of British sovereignty; later, it speaks equally well to problems of social inequality. Dana Anderson writes about this in his book Identity’s Strategy and his point is that Burke is going beyond the idea that interpretations changes over time –obviously –to argue that there is a motivated aspect to all of it. And I’ll take an unexplained leap here and say that history writing can easily be made analogous to political constitutions. The key terms of dramatism introduce variables that let us understand narrative in more interesting ways than that of good-and-bad, tragic-and-triumphant.
So let me end on that note: the means for handling this weapon of historical narrative more ethically, carefully, and usefully is by watching out for the motivated nature of interpretation, whether at the time of our subject, in the intervening times as the narrative was developed, and in our own time as we write.
I love the post, both because of its currently fractured structure (so in the spirit of the blog!) and for some of the points raised. By the way, for some reason I had never thought about simply characterizing a lot of what I am saying in my post as shifting from tragic to comic frames in historical analysis. My apologies to Burke, the KB Society, and Burkeans worldwide!
ReplyDeleteWe'll have to return to this question of over-simplification for Arendt. I'm not sure that question was particularly worrisome for her, because even in the way she characterizes it as a "story," and her own extremely brief histories of things like Revolution (french and US), things are dramatically reduced from any "thick description." If anything, her approach (I'm looking for corrections if anyone wants!) would be "Que Sera Sera" on this matter. People are going to record events in many different ways. And she does not have a way to restrain speech, except the old republican concerns of reputation/character-in-public. Rather, with what I take as her pluralistic/communitarian worldview, she would accept this open possibility for interpretation and stress that, most importantly, these narratives should not impede/restrict further action. [This last point is the only one I can prove with textual evidence as of now. The rest may be extrapolation.]
You also bring up the READING of history as an open, interpretive practice, rather than just focusing on the researching/writing of history. This might be a useful point to come back to later and show that our anxieties as researchers/writers is clouding our view of the larger process of interpretation/mediation: artifact--symbolic interpretation-- emplotment/authorship--symbolic interpretation--reader. Then we can get into further issues of creating imagined audiences as we write, etc. Somebody else can probably do this better than me--colleagues in English/Composition?
Hmm--I wonder Brandon--and Liz also--it seems to me that Arendt is worried about this question, maybe not of oversimplification, but of the way narrative especially as teleological shapes authority--I'm thinking of the Human Condition (it must be early on in the book (because I'm a lazy reader)) and her discussion of the relationship between authorship and authority--I don't get the sense of her (I may be misinterpreting you here Brandon) as just letting the question of narrative and interpretation slide--it seems--though I'm no Arendtian if that is such a thing--that she's very worried about the insertion of an author/ity into historical narrative and the question of who takes control of interpretation; I do see how she's not concerned w mis-interpretation insofar as she's not seeing these narratives as truth bearing--but she does see them, or at least I see her seeing them, as having an impact on the world. All this may speak to your last paragraph Brandon, and be more a disciplinary question (another bugbear!)
ReplyDeleteLiz I'm struck by the way you move from Jarratt to your work on Philadelphia and place in general as shaping our historical work. It's a good tonic for me, because I think I have always tended to make of Rereading the Sophists whatever I want of it, in a sense--and most of all I think what I go to that book for is actually a sense of placelessness--and yet as you say some kind of sense of something historical shaping the work (I mean our work, not Jarratt's necessarily) always seems to interfere. I find it interesting that you scan Jarratt's engagement with place as coming in the form of an engagement with post-structuralism, and I wonder if you see her influence on your understanding of place in the fact of that "theroretical" (my scare quotes) engagement coming through a fairly specific discussion of the practical place of the composition classroom. Is our philosophy of history determined by a pedagogical imperative? Does that make us different from our brothers and sisters in Communications? (for Brandon) Can Arendt's discussion of theoria and praxis lend us some insight here?
This is getting kind of fun.
I am finally back in action --glad to see at least that not quite a whole month has gone by before I managed to reply. My apologies; it's been a crazy winter (Daniel do you realize how lucky you are to have moved to a place that actually knows what to do with large amounts of snow??).
ReplyDeleteSomeday I'll know enough about Arendt to reply to that part of the discussion, but as for your last question, that pedagogical imperative is everything for me in terms of my own starting "place" --it's the way I learned to make sense of a tradition that would otherwise have been disembodied and abstract. (And a big hug of gratitude to all the 2005 RSA Institute folks --we spent the whole week working this out and it changed everything for me). I'd like to hope that it's _merely_ a starting place and by no means limits the kind of thinking or the kind of work I'll do, but to me having an ethical orientation in the center of my work --that ethic being, we shall do all we can to educate well --gives me a purpose that keeps me going. Of course teaching people is totally contingent and prone to error, but like the hypocratic oath, it means that you've promised to do the best you can for other people.