We have traced a very interesting genealogy from the Greek conception of community, in what we could call its global form as the politeia, to its relatively local form in the agora. The agora is, as Foucault described in his most recently translated lectures The Government of Self and Others, the scene of the politeia's actualization, via the mechanism that centers these lectures: parresia ('free-spokenness'). This has been a very interesting text for me, reading concurrently with the course, since Foucault focuses on the comparison between the events at the end of the 5th century (bc), which form the subject of works by Thucidides and Euripides, and the events at the beginning of the 4th century, when Plato is writing about contemporary events...
Leaping forward to the Enlightenment and its Late Medieval and Renaissance preliminaries, we touched briefly on Kant's rather counter-intuitive distinction between public reason, accessible as a universal function of critical rationality (of the Kantian transcendental variety, we can be sure, and albeit, as Cochran pointed out, within the bounds of the newly literate bourgeoisie), and private reason, which would encompass the machinations of private interests along the lines of a pseudo-utilitarian 'hedonic calculus'.
Next, we shall continue our quick cruise through the advent of what McLuhan called 'the electronic age' of telegraphy, telephony, radio, television, and eventually (ultimately?) computation and the 'world wide web'.
In all these cases we have seen a set of similar occurrences accompanying what in each case we have identified as an instance of technical, or technological evolution: the advent of a new medium of communication -i.e. the 'scribal culture' that sprung up around the crystallization of the Greek alphabet (for Havelock, et al.), and the 'print culture' that emerged out of the invention of the printing press and its rapid fluorescence accompanying the Reformation and the advent of the European industrial economies (for Eisenstein and Cochran, etc.)- seems to have been accompanied by a massive shift in what we might call the 'subjectivity' of those affected by the novel conditions.
This hypothesis -that the media of communication shape and govern the subjectivities of the individuals and societies they serve- has massive implications for scholarly thought; we might divide these implications into synchronic (philosophical) -What effects do our current media exert on us?- and diachronic -How might we map these transformations historically? axes. But these axes also seem to fall together, and in a deeply troubling way- under lines of questioning like: "What implications might this have for our currently accepted notions of history and historical scholarship in general?!"
more on the way...
Monday, November 15, 2010
Friday, November 5, 2010
my IGS paper, continued (last part)
Part 3: Korzybski's Style
So interdisciplinarity cannot, obviously,
be simply a matter of mastering, or overcoming discipline,
-which attempt would inevitably recapitulate
the auto-occlusive (and repressive) disciplinary gesture-
nor can it simply be a matter of simply rejecting discipline
-as if there were some procedure or method with which to replace it-
but must instead strive to find the balances between and among
the necessarily complimentary functions
of assuming, employing, and escaping disciplinary systems.
This must have been Korzybski's goal.
But the faith that he placed in symbolic logic and the mathematical sciences
is perhaps what seems most anachronistic about his work for a contemporary student.
The scientific optimism so common in Korzybski's day seems to have given way
to the widespread, if somewhat inchoate, realization that
the balance between assumption and escape -i.e. commitment and critique-
required of us in our encounters with disciplines
necessitate a fairly critical attitude
with regard our evaluation of the strong truth-claims made by scientific thinkers
throughout history.
Newton: "Hypotheses non fingo!"
The balances we seek -between contentment and freedom-
simply cannot be programmed, or preinscribed.
We can point to it, feel it, and even refer to it in conversation,
but we cannot definitively inscribe it in our languages.
Parts of its structure might emerge from analogical isomorphisms,
but it itself, since it describes their functioning, must remain, to some extent,
outside of the reach of disciplinary apparata.
I think we see this realization operating in Korzybski's work.
His famous Map/Territory distinction
is like a discipline against discipline;
it is like a metadiscipline,
which forces us, step by step, into giving up our truth fetishes,
positioning us, locating us, orienting us,
toward our individual and collective survival(s)...
Whitehead also says, in The Aims of Education, that
"Style is the ultimate morality of mind" (p.12).
I think that Korzybski's method, ultimately,
and with regard specifically to the technique that I've referred to as his
discipline against discipline,
comes down to its style.
He exhorts us both to study all that we can;
to learn all we can of the disciplines and languages that come to bear
on the problems that we find ourselves faced with,
both individually and collectively.
But he also cautions us against getting too 'caught up' in any of these pursuits;
again and again he reminds us that the map is not the territory; that we are dealing in abstractions,
and that the matters that we attempt to discuss are constantly changing,
necessitating our continual circumspection of the structures and functions of our languages,
the uses we put them to, and the world that they enter into as necessarily-imperfect descriptions.
And so this style, as Whitehead points out, is also a morality:
we must retain our autonomy as individual thinkers
without thereby losing touch with our basic continuity with the community of others
-scholars, artists, and thinkers, as well as laborers, children, spouses, parents, and neighbors-
whose ideas and actions we must, both; gratefully rely upon, and carefully scrutinize.
Freedom of thought, balanced by access to instructional resources,
represents a difficult -because dialectical; non-programmatic-
moral issue for us as teachers, scholars, students, parents,
-and generally as members of a species with cultural traditions.
Rather than thinking of our culture as a set of materials
to be passed along carefully, like so many baskets of eggs,
perhaps we can begin to think of it as what Hegel called Geist;
a spiritual essence, unbound by the specific laws of material objects;
a general semantics of partial exchanges and continual transformations.
I suspect that an educational system that was taking these notions into account
would be a much different, much more interesting one in which to live and work,
and I suspect that future generations will feel the same way...
Perhaps by recognizing that in an interdisciplinary methodology like Korzybski's,
style must play an indispensable role,
we can begin to correct the severe imbalances, not only in our systems of education,
but in our appreciation of the work of Korzybski as well.
I think that from this perspective, any function that we could recognize as the power of language
would have to lie in its ability to extract itself from the traditions that it nonetheless depends upon;
to start from scratch, again and again,
rather than always having to build on the same, insufficient foundations.
The ability to pour new foundations, to create new concepts with which to think our situations,
to devise new ways of reading the same texts, new ways of interpreting the old thinkers and ideas;
this must become an essential foundation of any system or method of education that we would be able to call moral,
and for which, geist willing, 'interdisciplinary' would become an unnecessary synonym.
Blake Victor Seidenshaw, October 31st, 2010.
Part 3: Korzybski's Style
So interdisciplinarity cannot, obviously,
be simply a matter of mastering, or overcoming discipline,
-which attempt would inevitably recapitulate
the auto-occlusive (and repressive) disciplinary gesture-
nor can it simply be a matter of simply rejecting discipline
-as if there were some procedure or method with which to replace it-
but must instead strive to find the balances between and among
the necessarily complimentary functions
of assuming, employing, and escaping disciplinary systems.
This must have been Korzybski's goal.
But the faith that he placed in symbolic logic and the mathematical sciences
is perhaps what seems most anachronistic about his work for a contemporary student.
The scientific optimism so common in Korzybski's day seems to have given way
to the widespread, if somewhat inchoate, realization that
the balance between assumption and escape -i.e. commitment and critique-
required of us in our encounters with disciplines
necessitate a fairly critical attitude
with regard our evaluation of the strong truth-claims made by scientific thinkers
throughout history.
Newton: "Hypotheses non fingo!"
The balances we seek -between contentment and freedom-
simply cannot be programmed, or preinscribed.
We can point to it, feel it, and even refer to it in conversation,
but we cannot definitively inscribe it in our languages.
Parts of its structure might emerge from analogical isomorphisms,
but it itself, since it describes their functioning, must remain, to some extent,
outside of the reach of disciplinary apparata.
I think we see this realization operating in Korzybski's work.
His famous Map/Territory distinction
is like a discipline against discipline;
it is like a metadiscipline,
which forces us, step by step, into giving up our truth fetishes,
positioning us, locating us, orienting us,
toward our individual and collective survival(s)...
Whitehead also says, in The Aims of Education, that
"Style is the ultimate morality of mind" (p.12).
I think that Korzybski's method, ultimately,
and with regard specifically to the technique that I've referred to as his
discipline against discipline,
comes down to its style.
He exhorts us both to study all that we can;
to learn all we can of the disciplines and languages that come to bear
on the problems that we find ourselves faced with,
both individually and collectively.
But he also cautions us against getting too 'caught up' in any of these pursuits;
again and again he reminds us that the map is not the territory; that we are dealing in abstractions,
and that the matters that we attempt to discuss are constantly changing,
necessitating our continual circumspection of the structures and functions of our languages,
the uses we put them to, and the world that they enter into as necessarily-imperfect descriptions.
And so this style, as Whitehead points out, is also a morality:
we must retain our autonomy as individual thinkers
without thereby losing touch with our basic continuity with the community of others
-scholars, artists, and thinkers, as well as laborers, children, spouses, parents, and neighbors-
whose ideas and actions we must, both; gratefully rely upon, and carefully scrutinize.
Freedom of thought, balanced by access to instructional resources,
represents a difficult -because dialectical; non-programmatic-
moral issue for us as teachers, scholars, students, parents,
-and generally as members of a species with cultural traditions.
Rather than thinking of our culture as a set of materials
to be passed along carefully, like so many baskets of eggs,
perhaps we can begin to think of it as what Hegel called Geist;
a spiritual essence, unbound by the specific laws of material objects;
a general semantics of partial exchanges and continual transformations.
I suspect that an educational system that was taking these notions into account
would be a much different, much more interesting one in which to live and work,
and I suspect that future generations will feel the same way...
Perhaps by recognizing that in an interdisciplinary methodology like Korzybski's,
style must play an indispensable role,
we can begin to correct the severe imbalances, not only in our systems of education,
but in our appreciation of the work of Korzybski as well.
I think that from this perspective, any function that we could recognize as the power of language
would have to lie in its ability to extract itself from the traditions that it nonetheless depends upon;
to start from scratch, again and again,
rather than always having to build on the same, insufficient foundations.
The ability to pour new foundations, to create new concepts with which to think our situations,
to devise new ways of reading the same texts, new ways of interpreting the old thinkers and ideas;
this must become an essential foundation of any system or method of education that we would be able to call moral,
and for which, geist willing, 'interdisciplinary' would become an unnecessary synonym.
Blake Victor Seidenshaw, October 31st, 2010.
Monday, November 1, 2010
General Semantics
Also this weekend, while I'm getting caught up, or at least attempting to explain this need to, I gave a paper at the Institute of General Semantics' annual symposium, called "New Languages, New Realities", and hosted by Fordham University. I was unfortunately unable to attend much of the conference, and I'm sorry I didn't give you all a heads-up about it. My head has been seriously down for the past little bit. But I did manage to get a talk together about Korzybski (The founder and Guru of the IGS) -'s method of interdisciplinary scholarship, which I'm going to reproduce for interest's sake here. You can check out the Institute of General Semantics here; they have lots of good stuff on the site... Basically Korzybski was concerned with the role played by language in human collective organization, communication, and thought. Have any of y'all heard of this guy? I read about him a lot as a young'n, in books by my favorite sci-fi authors, like Philip K. Dick and A. E. Van Vogt, William S. Burroughs and Robert Anton Wilson. Also some really genius scientists, like R. Buckminster Fuller and Gregory Bateson; all really inspired and influenced by Korzybski's work. I have been reading a lot of Korzybski himself since getting involved with the General Semantics organization here in New York. They have been quite generous, inviting me to lecture frequently, and they run a really nice little quarterly journal called ETC. which is very amenable to publishing the work of students, artists, and 'non-specialists', and some neat out-of-the-ordinary kinda stuff. So it was pretty good fun, and here's my paper. Note that I didn't write the last section; I improvised that part live, lol! Which turned out well. I plan to write it up and submit it with the following for publication in ETC. I think it touches on themes we've been exploring in class too. I opened with this joke: "Happy Halloween everyone; I hope you all like my Justin Bieber costume."
Language Power: Korzybski's Interdisciplinary Methodology
Intro:
My name is Blake Seidenshaw. I'm a doctoral student at Columbia University Teachers College, where I'm working in Interdisciplinary and Cultural Studies in Education.
I'm coming to this presentation with two essentially convergent concerns.
The first is the current national -if not worldwide- crisis in education. This problem is not new, but it has recently begun to get some more attention in the media. Its roots, however, are the same ones that scientists and philosophers have been attempting to excavate for centuries.
A. N. Whitehead identified the problem as a kind 'mental dry-rot': a "paralysis of thought induced in pupils by the aimless accumulation of precise knowledge, inert and unutilized." (The Aims of Education, 1929: p.1 & 37.)
We know that Korzybski, along very similar lines, attempted to identify the stultifying effects of what he called 'semantic environments' on human thought and behavior.
But my second problem is a kind of microcosm of the first, and follows from opinions that I've recently heard expressed in the General Semantics community: GS is having its own crisis, it seems to be following closely the same pattern of manifestation.
I want to propose a way to tackle both of these problems in one go:
By focusing on education, and specifically by clarifying Korzybski's contribution to what I propose we can identify as an interdisciplinary methodology, General Semantics can at once both revitalize itself through renewed application, and contribute to the more general, and much more pressing, overall revitalization of our system of education as a whole.
Part 1: What is Interdisciplinarity?
To answer this we need to first ask: What is discipline?
On one hand, the word 'discipline' refers to a set of practices. Disciplines are comprised of things that we actually do: they are arts, techne.
But on the other hand, practices are always inscribed in registers of meaning practices are always interpretable; they are directed towards preconceivable aims.
As such, the disciplinary forms
are created as syntheses between:
systems of practice,
and systems of interpretation.
Disciplines, like signs, basically dyadic.
And we can reframe them accordingly, as consisting of:
a syntactic component;
-of dynamic, functional practices, techniques, and vehicles-
and a semantic dimension;
-of meanings and purposes; the 'feel' and style of the technical functions.
Which brings us to the reciprocal analogy:
discipline is linguistic,
and language is disciplinary.
And these reciprocal elements resonate;
The integral form of the discipline 'sets-up' like a standing wave,
balancing syntactic and semantic registers.
In other words,
sets of practices and sets of meanings
achieve
structural isomorphism
Korzybski: "[General Semantics] establishes structure
as the only possible content of of knowledge."
(p.9 in Science and Sanity, 5th ed.)
This interreciprocal structure,
-whereby sets of practices retain stable structures
by appealing to similarly stable sets of meanings-
is what allows these interdependent, 'doubled' sets of practices and meanings
to reproduce themselves,
creating what we refer to colloquially as intellectual 'disciplines', but the same principles underly the reproduction of cultural forms in general, as traditions, lineages, identities, and I would argue also, biological organisms, ecological 'scapes, etc.
Part 2: Language Power
Now,
as language-users,
or what Korzybski called 'time-binders',
we human beings tend to assume and inhabit these
disciplinary and linguistic apparatuses;
as what Korzybski called semantic environments.
disciplines are thus both:
our tools; syntactical, functional objects
that we can observe and utilize rationally and consciously,
and,
our selves; the semantic structures that unconsciously support our operations,
and enable us to cooperate with other, complimentarily-structured entities.
Thus,
when we talk about the 'power' of disciplinary entities,
we need to recognize again that
this power is essentially dual:
On the one hand, for the reasons already outlined,
disciplinary networks tend toward a kind of closure;
they occlude themselves from their larger contexts,
the more inclusive spectra of practices and meanings,
thereby inherently dissimulating events whose structures
fail to correspond with their own.
On the other hand,
language allows us to build our own semantic structures,
by assembling sets of practices, syntactic techniques,
which we can then inhabit provisionally and temporarily
(via awareness of abstraction),
in order to purposively navigate what we might call the ecosemantic spaces
of our immense, complex, and dangerous world.
Furthermore, our disciplines allow us to perform this task cooperatively with other humans, other language-using time-binders.
So interdisciplinarity cannot, obviously,
be simply a matter of mastering, or overcoming discipline,
but must instead
find the balances between what we might call
the necessarily complimentary functions of
assuming and escaping
disciplinary and linguistic systems.
Part 3: Korzybski's Style
~to be continued!
Language Power: Korzybski's Interdisciplinary Methodology
Intro:
My name is Blake Seidenshaw. I'm a doctoral student at Columbia University Teachers College, where I'm working in Interdisciplinary and Cultural Studies in Education.
I'm coming to this presentation with two essentially convergent concerns.
The first is the current national -if not worldwide- crisis in education. This problem is not new, but it has recently begun to get some more attention in the media. Its roots, however, are the same ones that scientists and philosophers have been attempting to excavate for centuries.
A. N. Whitehead identified the problem as a kind 'mental dry-rot': a "paralysis of thought induced in pupils by the aimless accumulation of precise knowledge, inert and unutilized." (The Aims of Education, 1929: p.1 & 37.)
We know that Korzybski, along very similar lines, attempted to identify the stultifying effects of what he called 'semantic environments' on human thought and behavior.
But my second problem is a kind of microcosm of the first, and follows from opinions that I've recently heard expressed in the General Semantics community: GS is having its own crisis, it seems to be following closely the same pattern of manifestation.
I want to propose a way to tackle both of these problems in one go:
By focusing on education, and specifically by clarifying Korzybski's contribution to what I propose we can identify as an interdisciplinary methodology, General Semantics can at once both revitalize itself through renewed application, and contribute to the more general, and much more pressing, overall revitalization of our system of education as a whole.
Part 1: What is Interdisciplinarity?
To answer this we need to first ask: What is discipline?
On one hand, the word 'discipline' refers to a set of practices. Disciplines are comprised of things that we actually do: they are arts, techne.
But on the other hand, practices are always inscribed in registers of meaning practices are always interpretable; they are directed towards preconceivable aims.
As such, the disciplinary forms
are created as syntheses between:
systems of practice,
and systems of interpretation.
Disciplines, like signs, basically dyadic.
And we can reframe them accordingly, as consisting of:
a syntactic component;
-of dynamic, functional practices, techniques, and vehicles-
and a semantic dimension;
-of meanings and purposes; the 'feel' and style of the technical functions.
Which brings us to the reciprocal analogy:
discipline is linguistic,
and language is disciplinary.
And these reciprocal elements resonate;
The integral form of the discipline 'sets-up' like a standing wave,
balancing syntactic and semantic registers.
In other words,
sets of practices and sets of meanings
achieve
structural isomorphism
Korzybski: "[General Semantics] establishes structure
as the only possible content of of knowledge."
(p.9 in Science and Sanity, 5th ed.)
This interreciprocal structure,
-whereby sets of practices retain stable structures
by appealing to similarly stable sets of meanings-
is what allows these interdependent, 'doubled' sets of practices and meanings
to reproduce themselves,
creating what we refer to colloquially as intellectual 'disciplines', but the same principles underly the reproduction of cultural forms in general, as traditions, lineages, identities, and I would argue also, biological organisms, ecological 'scapes, etc.
Part 2: Language Power
Now,
as language-users,
or what Korzybski called 'time-binders',
we human beings tend to assume and inhabit these
disciplinary and linguistic apparatuses;
as what Korzybski called semantic environments.
disciplines are thus both:
our tools; syntactical, functional objects
that we can observe and utilize rationally and consciously,
and,
our selves; the semantic structures that unconsciously support our operations,
and enable us to cooperate with other, complimentarily-structured entities.
Thus,
when we talk about the 'power' of disciplinary entities,
we need to recognize again that
this power is essentially dual:
On the one hand, for the reasons already outlined,
disciplinary networks tend toward a kind of closure;
they occlude themselves from their larger contexts,
the more inclusive spectra of practices and meanings,
thereby inherently dissimulating events whose structures
fail to correspond with their own.
On the other hand,
language allows us to build our own semantic structures,
by assembling sets of practices, syntactic techniques,
which we can then inhabit provisionally and temporarily
(via awareness of abstraction),
in order to purposively navigate what we might call the ecosemantic spaces
of our immense, complex, and dangerous world.
Furthermore, our disciplines allow us to perform this task cooperatively with other humans, other language-using time-binders.
So interdisciplinarity cannot, obviously,
be simply a matter of mastering, or overcoming discipline,
but must instead
find the balances between what we might call
the necessarily complimentary functions of
assuming and escaping
disciplinary and linguistic systems.
Part 3: Korzybski's Style
~to be continued!
ecogradiant
hello all.
i've been sadly remiss in keeping this up.
the past couple weeks have been so busy that i haven't had time to transfer and edit my notebook scribblings into proper blog posts...
but I have a few things to share:
first, I should plug the brand new website that I have cocreated on behalf of the student organization "teachers and writers for a public voice"; the site is http://ecogradients.com and we've posted the first in what will be a series of, probably quarterly issues, thematically organized, in which we, the ecogradiant editors, will assemble and publish works in multiple media, submitted by none other than you: our diverse and enterprising readership.
seriously!
check it out: the first issue is called "ghostlines", for a seasonal vibe.
we got some really nice submissions for it.
I do really hope that some of you might like to participate by submitting work for consideration for the next issue, to be called "musicalities"; we are TC based and oriented, so we'll definitely try to reach out to and include lots TC peoples.
Its been pretty fun getting it together, and it's exciting to imagine where it will go!
=b
i've been sadly remiss in keeping this up.
the past couple weeks have been so busy that i haven't had time to transfer and edit my notebook scribblings into proper blog posts...
but I have a few things to share:
first, I should plug the brand new website that I have cocreated on behalf of the student organization "teachers and writers for a public voice"; the site is http://ecogradients.com and we've posted the first in what will be a series of, probably quarterly issues, thematically organized, in which we, the ecogradiant editors, will assemble and publish works in multiple media, submitted by none other than you: our diverse and enterprising readership.
seriously!
check it out: the first issue is called "ghostlines", for a seasonal vibe.
we got some really nice submissions for it.
I do really hope that some of you might like to participate by submitting work for consideration for the next issue, to be called "musicalities"; we are TC based and oriented, so we'll definitely try to reach out to and include lots TC peoples.
Its been pretty fun getting it together, and it's exciting to imagine where it will go!
=b
Sunday, October 10, 2010
epistemontology
I think you pose an interesting question Ruthie (in your response to my 'Thucydotus' post). Does the fact of these works' composition indicate a major shift in the subjectivity of humankind? Are people with oral history so different than people with written history? I agree that Havelock's work -and Parry's, and Ong's, and especially McLuhan's, etc.- is/are brilliant; this is a very interesting object of study. I guess we'll get even deeper into this when we look at the printing press stuff, with Eisenstein... I wonder though, if we aren't making a kind of error here; what I've been trying to argue for is that while the means, the mechanisms, whereby culture is transmitted might change, and while we might identify a series of major epochal shifts in our historiography of these changes, this doesn't necessarily mean that what is being transmitted has changed as much as it might appear. In other words, while the means and modes of transmission have indeed undergone a series of stochastic mutations, and while this series of formal ruptures has undoubtedly had profound effects on human history, I still think that it is quite possible -and indeed, I think it is probable- that the meanings of these messages, the substance of human culture itself, its semantic content, has not in fact undergone a similar series of discontinuities, but has actually evolved much more continuously than our research would lead us to believe. I think that Latour's work supports this view, for example; I guess we're getting there...
To take another tack: when we identify these discontinuities in the technical sphere, we impute their structure onto lived experience itself, thereby seemingly to demonstrate that lived culture is not as continuous as we seem to believe, on the basis of our personal experience. So we are using history to demonstrate a level of discontinuity beneath the supposedly smooth surface level of our lived experience. This approach has perhaps emerged and constituted itself as a necessary corrective to the whiggish classical historiography of the post-enlightenment period, in which where all evidence was gathered in to the eurolinear scheme of progressive evolution...
But doesn't this approach, by taking this eurocentric, hegelian continuity of whig history its enemy, so to speak -the object of its motivating anxiety- actually privilege the very assumption of lived continuity that it purports to problematize? In effect, by saying, "look, history is not as continuous as the present!" do we not thereby fall for the 'trick' assumption precisely of the continuity of the present?!
So identifying these ruptures in history, in a way, only strengthens the basic illusion that it is intended to dispel: namely, that the present moment is immediately present to consciousness, and that on the basis of the information available to us 'here and now', we might approximately (with a reasonable, computable margin of uncertainty) make judgements about the truth of states of affairs inhering elsewhere, on whose interference our own identities must depend, and vice versa. In short, do we not have to raise this, not only as an epistemological issue, but as an ontological one as well? What are the natures of occurrence and determinacy? These questions are far from settled, especially in the realms -like physics- where they are studied in a rigorously scientific fashion... More on this perhaps, a bit later... I'm currently reading Ilya Prigogine's "The End of Certainty", which I highly recommend for a beautiful exposition of the contemporary scientific status of these questions about time and occurrence; he points to deeply-set, persistent habits of thought within which we cannot possibly handle these matters effectively, and suggests a fascinating solution...
To take another tack: when we identify these discontinuities in the technical sphere, we impute their structure onto lived experience itself, thereby seemingly to demonstrate that lived culture is not as continuous as we seem to believe, on the basis of our personal experience. So we are using history to demonstrate a level of discontinuity beneath the supposedly smooth surface level of our lived experience. This approach has perhaps emerged and constituted itself as a necessary corrective to the whiggish classical historiography of the post-enlightenment period, in which where all evidence was gathered in to the eurolinear scheme of progressive evolution...
But doesn't this approach, by taking this eurocentric, hegelian continuity of whig history its enemy, so to speak -the object of its motivating anxiety- actually privilege the very assumption of lived continuity that it purports to problematize? In effect, by saying, "look, history is not as continuous as the present!" do we not thereby fall for the 'trick' assumption precisely of the continuity of the present?!
So identifying these ruptures in history, in a way, only strengthens the basic illusion that it is intended to dispel: namely, that the present moment is immediately present to consciousness, and that on the basis of the information available to us 'here and now', we might approximately (with a reasonable, computable margin of uncertainty) make judgements about the truth of states of affairs inhering elsewhere, on whose interference our own identities must depend, and vice versa. In short, do we not have to raise this, not only as an epistemological issue, but as an ontological one as well? What are the natures of occurrence and determinacy? These questions are far from settled, especially in the realms -like physics- where they are studied in a rigorously scientific fashion... More on this perhaps, a bit later... I'm currently reading Ilya Prigogine's "The End of Certainty", which I highly recommend for a beautiful exposition of the contemporary scientific status of these questions about time and occurrence; he points to deeply-set, persistent habits of thought within which we cannot possibly handle these matters effectively, and suggests a fascinating solution...
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Historicism
It seems to me that we have really cracked this can of worms open in the past couple of weeks, with regard to the questions of history and time, power and justice... And academic scholarship, of course (we can't forget ourselves ; )...
I'm unable to spend a great deal of time on this just at the moment, but I wanted to share a couple of things:
First, there is this video from one of the most brilliant dudes working on this stuff: Daniel Kahneman. He starts out here talking about happiness, but what this is really about is our relationship to time. Specifically, Kahneman describes two different ways of handling, or relating to time; an experiencing self and a remembering self. They handle information very differently, and relate with one another in very specific tendential ways...
Here is a little article about brain research that supports Kahneman's theories. Basically; the parts of the brain that we use to remember are the same as the parts that we use for imagination.
I think this stuff raises some very important considerations (I would call them interdisciplinary) regarding our study of Thucydides, Herodotus, and Plato. For example, how does our handling of history affect our experience of contemporary reality? What about vice-versa?
I'm unable to spend a great deal of time on this just at the moment, but I wanted to share a couple of things:
First, there is this video from one of the most brilliant dudes working on this stuff: Daniel Kahneman. He starts out here talking about happiness, but what this is really about is our relationship to time. Specifically, Kahneman describes two different ways of handling, or relating to time; an experiencing self and a remembering self. They handle information very differently, and relate with one another in very specific tendential ways...
Here is a little article about brain research that supports Kahneman's theories. Basically; the parts of the brain that we use to remember are the same as the parts that we use for imagination.
I think this stuff raises some very important considerations (I would call them interdisciplinary) regarding our study of Thucydides, Herodotus, and Plato. For example, how does our handling of history affect our experience of contemporary reality? What about vice-versa?
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
herodides/thucydotus
We could, perhaps, draw a contrast between the approaches of Thucydides and Herodotus with a statement like; if Thucydides was our first historian, Herodotus was our last mythographer. Along the lines of such a statement, we could tabulate and emphasize the differences between Thucididean and Herodotean techniques and/or styles, compiling these differences as a proxy for our notion of a discontinuity, or rupture, in the evolution of rational thought. This would perhaps accord with Thucydides' own presentation of his work as a factual account: "Anyone . . . will conclude that my research, using the clearest evidence available, provides a sufficiently accurate account considering the antiquity of the events" (27 / p.12); his complex, analytic style (very difficult to translate, we heard from Mary Beard in her review of Kagan and Hornblower) furnishes a project which, in many ways, seems to take its stance in direct opposition to the work of Herodotus.
As for Herodotus, he seems to take a kind of delight in conflating what we would today identify as historical and mythical elements. His account in many ways hinges on the appearances of omens -portents of fate, or of divine int(erv)entions- and their interpretation. See for example the account of the omens that appear to Xerxes in the form of dreams before the war (12-18 / p.421-424) and strange births directly prior to the invasion (57 / p.438), or the extended account of the Priestess Aristonice's prophecy beginning at 140 / p.460-461. The gods are very much present in Herodotus' history, if indirectly, through the agency of the human agents who believe in them, or fail to take their messages, in the form of omens, into account.
But as much as Herodotus appeals to fate and divinity, Thucydides works as hard to dispel myth and replace it with rational explanation. Interestingly, given the course of our reading so far, Thucydides' own conception of his efforts seem to parallel Plato's in this regard, particularly in his emphatic criticism of the oral poetic tradition: "All men show the same uncritical acceptance of the oral traditions handed on to them, even about the history of their own country." (20 / p.11); "...anyone accepting the broad facts of my account on the arguments I have adduced will not go wrong. He will put less faith in the glorified tales of the poets and the compilations of the prose chroniclers, whose stories are written more to please the ear than to serve the truth, are incapable of truth, and for the most part, given the lapse of time, have passed into the unreliable realms of romance" (21 / p.12); "It may be that the lack of a romantic element in my history will make it less of a pleasure to the ear..." (22 / p.12).
So while there is much, particularly in Thucydides' work itself, to support our notion of a rupture in the development of rational thought, I think that on the other hand, there are a slew of fascinating continuities between these works; similarities that would tend to be obscured by a Thucydidean emphasis on the differences. First, with regard to method, it is clear that the works share many important features. Indeed, when Thucydides describes how he derived the contents of the speeches on which his prose so heavily relies, he appeals to his "laborious research" (22), and to the relative recency of the events described as proxies for the accuracy of his admittedly inexact account. His methods here do not seem to differ all that greatly from those employed by Herodotus, who also -though, interestingly, dealing with less recent events- collects various accounts and relies on his own judgement and experience to compile them (see for example his account of the Persians' discovery of the secret cart-track which led to the defeat of the Spartans at Thermopolae; 214 / p.490-491).
But Herodotus spins his tale like a true storyteller; he follows the development of Xerxes' thinking, and we identify with him despite his tyrannical outbursts. The Persians come to Greece as an "incalculably great" force (147 / p.465); and Xerxes is no straw man: "There was not a man who, for stature and noble bearing, was more worthy than Xerxes to wield so vast a power" (197 / p.481). This makes it all the more astounding when the fragile Greek alliance is eventually able to triumph. Herodotus' tale is spell-binding; despite the fact that it is written, it reproduces the characteristics of the oral tradition as Havelock describes it; the audience is drawn into the story, and is thereby compelled to accept it uncritically. This is presumably what makes Thucydides, like Plato, so scornful. But doesn't Thucydides' own account reproduce these same dramatic structures? Don't Plato's dialogues, for that matter, draw us in as entrancingly as Herodotus' histories? If there is a rupture between these modes, it seems to be drawn more from the accounts of the revolutionaries themselves than from a clear reckoning with the materials themselves. Perhaps, with this in mind, another, more tacit reason for this rupture can be found in the question of religion.
Following our line of thinking about Greek drama, whereby the gods are taken to represent the passionate, unconscious, and/or chaotic forces motivating human behavior while remaining beyond the scope of rational control, we could read Herodotus' omenological account of the Persian war almost as a proto-psychoanalytical study. How can history be objective if its agents -Xerxes, Leonidas, Artabanus, Demaratus- are not only inspired by rational considerations, but also by dreams and ideals; of revenge, conquest, glory, fate, and wealth? Are the unconscious realm of human passions not worthy of the attentions of historians? The answer of Thucydides, as it turns out, may not itself have been motivated by the clear light of reason alone; doesn't it seem obvious that his and Plato's emphasis on the novelty of their approaches, and rejection of the oral and religious tradition, were political maneuvers, motivated, in all likelihood -at least in part- by the same unconscious drives and forces that Herodotus so aptly -if not exactly objectively- describes? I am not trying to argue that the development embodied by the texts of Herodotus and Thucydides do not represent an increment of progress in the evolution of reason. Perhaps they do; the truth emerges from them as that which can be verified independently, presaging the emergence of our modern scientific method; certainly these are very important developments. I am only attempting to suggest that this rupture, this increment, is skin deep; it lies on the intelligible surface of what is in fact a seething, chaotic mess of historical causes and effects, influences and sympathies. I think that our academic quest to identify particular movements in this symphony is wonderful, so long as we don't lose sight of the relative triviality of our abstractions vis a vis the immeasurable vastness of the totality from which they are derived.
As for Herodotus, he seems to take a kind of delight in conflating what we would today identify as historical and mythical elements. His account in many ways hinges on the appearances of omens -portents of fate, or of divine int(erv)entions- and their interpretation. See for example the account of the omens that appear to Xerxes in the form of dreams before the war (12-18 / p.421-424) and strange births directly prior to the invasion (57 / p.438), or the extended account of the Priestess Aristonice's prophecy beginning at 140 / p.460-461. The gods are very much present in Herodotus' history, if indirectly, through the agency of the human agents who believe in them, or fail to take their messages, in the form of omens, into account.
But as much as Herodotus appeals to fate and divinity, Thucydides works as hard to dispel myth and replace it with rational explanation. Interestingly, given the course of our reading so far, Thucydides' own conception of his efforts seem to parallel Plato's in this regard, particularly in his emphatic criticism of the oral poetic tradition: "All men show the same uncritical acceptance of the oral traditions handed on to them, even about the history of their own country." (20 / p.11); "...anyone accepting the broad facts of my account on the arguments I have adduced will not go wrong. He will put less faith in the glorified tales of the poets and the compilations of the prose chroniclers, whose stories are written more to please the ear than to serve the truth, are incapable of truth, and for the most part, given the lapse of time, have passed into the unreliable realms of romance" (21 / p.12); "It may be that the lack of a romantic element in my history will make it less of a pleasure to the ear..." (22 / p.12).
So while there is much, particularly in Thucydides' work itself, to support our notion of a rupture in the development of rational thought, I think that on the other hand, there are a slew of fascinating continuities between these works; similarities that would tend to be obscured by a Thucydidean emphasis on the differences. First, with regard to method, it is clear that the works share many important features. Indeed, when Thucydides describes how he derived the contents of the speeches on which his prose so heavily relies, he appeals to his "laborious research" (22), and to the relative recency of the events described as proxies for the accuracy of his admittedly inexact account. His methods here do not seem to differ all that greatly from those employed by Herodotus, who also -though, interestingly, dealing with less recent events- collects various accounts and relies on his own judgement and experience to compile them (see for example his account of the Persians' discovery of the secret cart-track which led to the defeat of the Spartans at Thermopolae; 214 / p.490-491).
But Herodotus spins his tale like a true storyteller; he follows the development of Xerxes' thinking, and we identify with him despite his tyrannical outbursts. The Persians come to Greece as an "incalculably great" force (147 / p.465); and Xerxes is no straw man: "There was not a man who, for stature and noble bearing, was more worthy than Xerxes to wield so vast a power" (197 / p.481). This makes it all the more astounding when the fragile Greek alliance is eventually able to triumph. Herodotus' tale is spell-binding; despite the fact that it is written, it reproduces the characteristics of the oral tradition as Havelock describes it; the audience is drawn into the story, and is thereby compelled to accept it uncritically. This is presumably what makes Thucydides, like Plato, so scornful. But doesn't Thucydides' own account reproduce these same dramatic structures? Don't Plato's dialogues, for that matter, draw us in as entrancingly as Herodotus' histories? If there is a rupture between these modes, it seems to be drawn more from the accounts of the revolutionaries themselves than from a clear reckoning with the materials themselves. Perhaps, with this in mind, another, more tacit reason for this rupture can be found in the question of religion.
Following our line of thinking about Greek drama, whereby the gods are taken to represent the passionate, unconscious, and/or chaotic forces motivating human behavior while remaining beyond the scope of rational control, we could read Herodotus' omenological account of the Persian war almost as a proto-psychoanalytical study. How can history be objective if its agents -Xerxes, Leonidas, Artabanus, Demaratus- are not only inspired by rational considerations, but also by dreams and ideals; of revenge, conquest, glory, fate, and wealth? Are the unconscious realm of human passions not worthy of the attentions of historians? The answer of Thucydides, as it turns out, may not itself have been motivated by the clear light of reason alone; doesn't it seem obvious that his and Plato's emphasis on the novelty of their approaches, and rejection of the oral and religious tradition, were political maneuvers, motivated, in all likelihood -at least in part- by the same unconscious drives and forces that Herodotus so aptly -if not exactly objectively- describes? I am not trying to argue that the development embodied by the texts of Herodotus and Thucydides do not represent an increment of progress in the evolution of reason. Perhaps they do; the truth emerges from them as that which can be verified independently, presaging the emergence of our modern scientific method; certainly these are very important developments. I am only attempting to suggest that this rupture, this increment, is skin deep; it lies on the intelligible surface of what is in fact a seething, chaotic mess of historical causes and effects, influences and sympathies. I think that our academic quest to identify particular movements in this symphony is wonderful, so long as we don't lose sight of the relative triviality of our abstractions vis a vis the immeasurable vastness of the totality from which they are derived.
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