Thought for the Day

Today, comes from Martha Nussbaum's blurb for the back of the updated edition of Stanley Cavell, Must we mean what we say?

'[N]ow, as then, new forms of reductionism, scientism, and sheer flight prove appealing for those for whom a complex human understanding is more than their hearts can bear.'

Thought for the Day (and a bit)

In the latest in our series of latter-day koans for the (dys)functioning twenty-first-century historian, I offer the following for you to ponder:

What is this book for, exactly?

I just read the first chapter of Narrative and History.  Not sure I'll read any more but we'll see.  Let's just say I am unimpressed.  It's not that I went into it with any particular preconception; I've not been very impressed in the past with the author's work or that of his guru, Keith Jenkins, but I've no axe to grind against critiques of traditional history.  If anyone ought to approach someone who claims to represent 'deconstructionist history'  positively it ought to be me, especially now I'm a card-carrying Derridean.  But, well ... what is the author of this tome?  Does he see himself as a historian?  If so he seems to have a very odd view of the practising historian and her/his attitudes.  Most of what he says on that score (thus far) is unsubstantiated caricature.  Or does he think he's a philosopher of history?  Because if so, his understanding of the post-structuralist philosophy he claims to advocate is shocking.  And I say that as someone, as you know, who makes no pretence at all to be a philosopher.  Or is he just Keith Jenkins' panegyrist?  The fawning over Jenkins is really quite nauseating.

So far, we have a lot of long words but our man hasn't demonstrated very clearly that he understands that many of them.  Certainly he seems not to understand what deconstruction means.  At all.  In spite of writing a book called Deconstructing History (see also here).  He also has a curious understanding of what 'historicism' is too.  He seems to see no contradiction between his premise about history being essentially 'authored' and history being inseparable from the politics etc of the writer of history ('authored history') and everything that Barthes and Derrida (whom he cites as being behind the view of history he champions) said about the author.  Thus far (this might get resolved) we seem to be told that we can identify the ideological positioning etc of a modern writer of history, but the ability of a modern historian to do something similar with his/her sources appears to be pooh-poohed.

This book is apparently a primer for history students, but I don't think it could safely be given to any undergraduates - even on a course about post-linguistic turn approaches to history - without seriously misleading them.  Maybe I'm being a bit harsh - it wouldn't be the first time after all - but this whole project seems to me to be predicated on no one knowing anything about either history or philosophy, on the assumption that practising historians mostly don't think about what they're doing (and maybe that's truer than it ought to be, but less true than many seem to think) and on the reader not actually going and checking out and engaging with the philosophy on its own terms but simply 'applying' the bizarrely cock-eyed critique  presented in the book, willy-nilly, to set texts.  I really cannot see the point beyond that.  So far this seems to me to be a very bad book, even on its own terms.  Maybe it'll get better.  I'm not confident.

Thought for the Day

Even the sincere black man (le Noir) is a slave of the past.  However, I am a man, and in that sense the Peloponnesian War is as much mine as is the discovery of the compass.  ...
The problem I envisage here is located in temporality.  Black and white people will be disalienated when they have refused to let themselves be locked up in a Tower of the Past that they've built for themselves ...
I am a man and it's the whole past of the world that I have to recover.  I'm not just responsible for the rebellion of Saint-Domingue.
Each time a man allowed the dignity of spirit to triumph, each time a man said no to reducing his equal to servitude, I feel solidarity with his act.
In no way do I have to take my calling from the past of the peoples of colour.
In no way do I have to set myself to reviving an unjustly forgotten black civilisation.  I don't make myself the man of any past.  I don't want to sing the past at the expense of my present or my future.

Frantz Fanon, Peau Noire Masques Blancs (Paris 1952), pp.182-3 (my [clunky and loose] translation)

Thought for the Day

Today, to celebrate the fact that I finally finished it a couple of weeks ago (and was rather less than overwhelmed by it!), the 'thought' comes from Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment (p.618 of the Penguin Classics translation):

The fear of aesthetics is the first symptom of powerlessness

This one goes out to all those of you out there who think that the form in which you make a statement matters more than the importance of what you have to say.  You know who you are.

Thought for the Day

Today comes from my philosophical hero, Simon Critchley, from an interview in How to Stop Living and Start Worrying, p.114:

We're sitting right now in a university, in the business school at Queen Mary, University of London.  Universities are business schools.  At least business schools say they are business schools, which is more honest than the rest of the rubbish.  And these are places where you can no longer think.  You're not encouraged to think - it's not what you're supposed to do.  You are simply meant to produce.  At a certain point, not that long ago, universities were places where thinking took place.  Perhaps this seems an absurd and ludicrous proposition.  But thinking happened, particularly in experimental universities, that developed in the 1960s, in England: Essex, Sussex, Warwick and the rest, which are now tedious and mediocre business schools.  So it has become harder and harder to think in universities.  Something has shifted in culture ...

Presumably this is why SC quit the UK for the States. 

Thought for the Day

Today's thought comes from Derrick May and can be found here.  I've loved this ever since I first heard it sampled on E-Z Rollers' 'Retro' in the late 1990s.

Some of these guys will be poor and die alone, but in the process they've been the true renegades, and the true rebels always walk alone anyway.

Now I have to make an obvious disclaimer here for the benefit of those of the hard-of-thinking elite who avidly follow this blog even though they don't understand what's going on, rather like people who watch Pobol y Cwm without knowing Welsh or those people, back in the day, who used to like Monkey.  I am not likening being a white middle class bloke in a well-paid, fairly privileged profession to being a member of an underprivileged, frequently oppressed, politically excluded, largely stifled urban ethnic minority. I'm not doing that. OK?  I can draw you a picture if you like.  Come to think of it, May himself isn't exactly from the ghetto.

Anyway, be all that as it may*, I do think that the sentiment is capable of a certain transposition into other spheres of life and creative endeavour.  Such as trying to make a difference in British academic history without being from the usual socio-educational background and having the right sort of cultural capital.  For myself I have always taken a certain amount of heart from it. 

"the true rebels always walk alone anyway"

And I also love his voice.  I wish I spoke with that mellifluousness**.

* See what I did there?
** Is that a word?

Thought for the Day

Today's rather pointed thought comes from A. Gouldner's The Coming crisis of Western Sociology (London, 1970), p.503:

The man who can voice support for Black Power or who can denounce American imperialism in Latin America or Vietnam, but who plays the sycophant to the most petty authorities in his university, is no radical; the man who mouths phrases about the need for revolution abroad, but who is a coiled spring ready to punish the rebels among his own graduate students, is no radical; the academician who with mighty oaths denounces the President of the United States, but subserviently fawns upon his own Department Chairman, is no radical; the man who denounces opportunistic power politics, but practices it daily among his university colleagues, is no radical.  Such men are playing one of the oldest games in personal politics; they are seeking to maintain a creditable image of themselves, while accommodating to the most vulgar careerism.  Such men are seeking neither to change nor to know the world; their aim is simply to grab a piece of it for themselves.

This 'thought', I admit, has a specific target (indeed it has several), but, in the immortal words of Men Without Hats, 'everybody look at your hands'.

Thought for the Day

... which today comes from ever-popular chirpy chappie, Berthold Brecht:

"What is robbing a bank compared to founding one?"

Or, as we might prefer it today, running one.

Thought for the day

Listen to the Today Programme and you'll start the day in a rage.  That inspires you to fight back, raises the blood pressure and generally gets you moving.

Ken Loach in this week's Big Issue in the North, p.21.