My apologies up front for the criminal lateness of this post.
I think my contributions to our actual presentation will likely deal with the relationship between philosophy(ies) of history and method, so I'm going to divert from the instructions and the theme of the previous posts to talk a bit about method. My quote is from the article "Hegel and Haiti" by Susan Buck-Morss, the article I handed out at our summer workshop, for those of you who were there. Simply (simplistically?) put, this article seeks to rehabilitate the highly unfashionable Hegelian idea of 'universal world history' (arguably the first modern 'philosophy' of history?) by showing that Hegel is not referring to a metaphysical entity when theorizing the 'master/slave' dialectic, but is instead inspired by the struggle for freedom in Haiti (the successful slave revolt against the French led by Toussaint Louverture) at the turn of the 19th century (1804, I think?). The quote:
"Hegel's moment of clarity of thought would need to be juxtaposed to others at the time...There are many examples of such clarity [of thought] and they belong to no side, no one group exclusively. What if every time that the consciousness of individuals surpassed the confines of present constellations of power in preceiving the concrete meaning of freedom, THIS were valued as a moment, however transitory of the realization of absolute spirit? What other silences would need to be broken? What UN-DISCIPLINED stories would be told?"
This statement is clearly deeply wedded to the dialectical thought of Hegel's historical philosophy, but it also indicates a historical methodological commitment that I value. Buck-Morss is describing here (indicated by the all-caps word I've denoted) an innovative, politically and socially important breakthrough in intellectual history that she was able to make explicitly because of a break with and challenge to the traditional tools of intellectual historical work (referred to earlier in the essay as the 'only one place intellectual historians know to look for answers: the writings of other intellectuals' ). Rather than relying on scholarly texts that tell a sanctioned story, she turned to the artifacts of material culture (diaries, newspapers, travel logs, etc) to make her innovate, provocative claim.
What this has to do with me/my work/our project: as an emerging scholar in 18th century rhetoric, and the history of rhetoric generally, it is my contention that there is a too-strong intellectual history methodology that governs much of the work in rhetorical history. This general history-of-ideas approach holds us back from really interesting, innovative, interdisciplinary work that *could be* germane to more contexually situated conceptions of rhetoric. My whipping boy for this complaint is, of course, W.S Howells "Eighteenth Century British Logic and Rhetoric". Though many disavow or dismiss this book, I think there are signficant traces of its' methodological commitments that go undetected and therefore perpetuated in historical work in rhetoric (and I should qualify here: I'm primarily talking about 18th century rhetoric. In fact, i think studies of 19th century rhetoric scholars have got away from this history of ideas quite nicely and do some excellent historically situated work). Buck-Morss' quote, offered above, reminds me how to do the intellectual work I want to do (which could be reasonably described as intellectual history) with more situated, less hermetically sealed tools.
These ideas will get more concrete, clear explanation and exploration in the dissertation I've just now begun to write. I expect my other presentation at RSA, on one of the history panels will explore some of the ideas here in more detail as well. Until next time.....
Sunday, January 10, 2010
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The alternative to the monolithic "history of ideas" being our sifting of ideas out of the rhetorical practices of that era, the 18th century? Or just better methods of interpretation of those "great ideas" by rhetoricians? Or an approach that attempts to blend those two?
ReplyDeleteNot necessarily any of these (what I'm talking about, anyway--all these are good methods, so to speak). What I'm talking about here, is more about the injection of synchronic historical moment(s) into our interpretive framework for historical rhetoric. This is best illustrated with an example: W.S.Howell's history of ideas method causes him to dismiss (rather visciously, I might add) Thomas Sheridan as a rhetorical figure. This arises, i would argue from a too-narrow history of ideas approach, because, I would argue, if you forget about Howells' interpretation for a minute, and go to the text, read with an interpretive framework that is more situated in a historical moment, Sheridans work become the most significant (i would argue) eighteenth century texts on rhetoric, in terms of the way they respond to all the changes and challenges to rhetoric that have gone on for 150 years before. Another illustration, coming from Howell: his book title, "Eighteenth Century British Logic and Rhetoric", effaces much of what was happening to rhetoric since 1650: the 'early modern' period of rhetoric was one of logic and rhetoric being sundered time and again by scientists and 'moderns'. The very title of Howell's book suggests a classical framework that is actually nowhere present in the primary texts of 18th cen. Brit. rhetoric. I would suggest an 'hisotry of ideas' approach causes this framework and results in an overly-classical interpretation of 18th cen.rhetoric. BTW: this is what my diss. is on.
ReplyDeleteLiz --I am with you. I worked through all those texts myself (including Howell's contemporary counterparts) and finally made a decision about the work I was going to do in my dissertation: I was going to make the Howell stuff just one facet of a whole range of rhetorical practices, essentially taking the technique of so much good nineteenth-century research (for example, Elizabeth McHenry's Forgotten Readers or J. J. Royster or Carr, Carr, and Schultz) and applying to the times pre-1830 (in other words making a _very_ long eighteenth century). The problem then --which I find to be a good problem to have --is that we don't have the range of preserved texts that we do after 1830, and therefore we've got to get creative. In that sense being a historian of rhetoric in this period is that I feel more like Susan Jarratt contemplating Sophists than Nan Johnson contemplating the Grimke sisters.
ReplyDeleteSo, how are you going to get creative? I'll be watching to see how your work moves along since we obviously have a lot of overlap.
I've found that I'm really glad I know the stuff that Howell et al have taught me, but that it's just such a small part of the bigger picture. It's like visiting New York and thinking you've seen America. But most of the time I don't even find myself needing the term "rhetoric" in the sense of a historical rhetorical pedagogical tradition. I rely on "literacy" and "learning"and "discourse" and (of course, given my topic) "language" more often.