More trying to tie threads between things. Hollowentry sent me a great quote from Thompson a while ago:
“I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘Utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties.
Our only criterion of judgement should not be whether or not a man’s actions are justified in the light of subsequent evolution. After all, we are not at the end of social evolution ourselves. In some of the lost causes of the people of the Industrial Revolution we may discover insights into social evils which we have yet to cure. Moreover, the greater part of the world today is still undergoing problems of industrialization, and of the formation of democratic institutions, analogous in many ways to our own experience during the Industrial Revolution. Causes which were lost in England might, in Asia or Africa, yet be won.”
I’ve still not read Thompson’s big old book yet, a deficiency I plan to rectify. Eventually.
Hollowentry also said this in that same email, which I’ve been wanting to think more about for quite a while. (Just for the record, I asked him before posting from his email, I didn’t just cull and paste w/ out permission.)
He wrote that “philosophical analyses of history” and related debates “are often oversimplistic: history is truth vs. history as fiction is kind of scholastic and banal in my opinion. The actual practice of archival work, working through certain records to tease out patterns and lives of people who are forgotten, rather than a few great philosophers, is something that historians do. For instance, at the archives of the prefect of police in Paris, where you have to be interviewed by police to even see the archives, plenty of Algerian historians have profitably used these archives to recover true things that happened to Algerians in France.”
He also wrote in a rather heated argument at Long Sunday a while back:
“‘The West’, European thought, etc… are made up. They are not real things. They are not a borg-like machine. There is no European thought bubble. This european tradition, is really a repetitive, boring, over-simplified, and racist tradition of quarantining anything that might be foreign sounding, and/or domesticating it within a racist and supremacist canon.”
And:
“People in power are able to efficiently detain, imprison, deport and murder other people on a mass scale in European, and other, states. They also burn them. These people are, or were, unlike your Europe, breathing caring annoying loving people, until their lives were stolen or extinguished in profitable state-administered genocide.”
This touches on a lot of things I’m compelled by but I’m not sure what I want to say, exactly. First, it links with things I’ve read and liked in Chakrabarty, like the quote at the end of this post. (Before I forget, I found another article co-authored by Mezzadra that I want to remember to read.) It also links with questions about delegation and homogenization in Schmitt and about the individualism Benjamin puts forward in his essay “The right to use force.” (I’ve commented on that a bit here, here and here, in the third also in relation to Virno on Marxism and individuation.) Schmitt polemicized against the idea, of course. There’s a similar aspect to Schmitt on this in certain Marxisms, I think, and in certain types of thinking about the working class. It’s to do with issues of political representation and representation in words and theory. It also connects with stuff I’ve been thinking about reading Althusser and Sewell.
What I like about the comments on history and entities like Europe that Hollowentry makes is that what functions as the ontological baseline is a heterogeneous set of individual people, existing in - but not reducible to - social contexts and relations. This strikes me as possibly useful for, or at a minimum resonant with, trying to think through things in a way that doesn’t do at the level of thought what often occurs at the level of organization and politics - delegating and so on. Of course the latter is much more problematic and bloody and I don’t want to say it’s simply caused by the former, but I also don’t want to say there’s no relationship between them. I also want to think there’s a potential use to work produced based on this other idea (in my head I want to call it methodological individualism, but not as a positive content so much as a negative one operating against overly or too neatly aggregative perspectives) in producing collectivities and actions. This is connected with things I’ve tried to say and think through before about class hatred and history writing (dialectical images) that serve to produce that in the present.
“I’ve still not read Thompson’s big old book yet, a deficiency I plan to rectify. Eventually.”
Get with the program Nate. ‘The Making …’ is absolutely fundamental to revolutionary politics.
Comment by svejk — June 17, 2006 @ 9:13 am
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Comment by Nate — June 18, 2006 @ 5:19 am
Hi Nate,
“methodological individualism, but not as a positive content so much as a negative one operating against overly or too neatly aggregative perspectives”
Yeah, I think there is something really true in starting with a demand that history not radically dehumanize certain groups of people–in spite of, of course, that is how a lot of the historical record survives, in administrative documents, literates’ writings, etc… And this obvious demand is not going to be met by people who are more interested in the “great voices of the past.” But there is all the difference in the world between dehumanizing aggregations of people as imagined by elites: “the rude sort”, “the immigrant infection”, “islamofascists” etc… and not taking seriously people’s avowed commitment through their own generative collective organization, that Thompson points out, were generated by them in certain historical circumstances: “the working class” in his case. But this also applies to LGBT communities, landless peasant movements, or people of colour–these are not fictive aggregates, or no more fictional than individual identity anyway. Events, and voices that survive from the past, are not always easy to reduce to an individual either: union activism for instance.
And the danger which you point out is to invert this demand against dehumanization for a call for a new humanism or something. I agree, really sketchy. The individual is as much a historical construct as anything else, and reducing history to the level of the individual, risks (I suspect demands) according to a liberal logic, the condensation of different forces or collective actions upon a single person, forces that were socially constituted, which is then followed by the erasure of those forces (by that I mean material conditions, social organization, ideas, etc…): an individual from the past who, instead of being enshackled in overly-neat aggregates from the past, thus becomes a dummy for a present-day ventriloquist–and a ventriloquist who is dumb to their own performance, itself a routine that is the product of historical forces, materially produced, and found in academia for example.
This happens too often in the history of ideas, where it is assumed that Spinoza was the first to think so, Marx the first to think thus, forgetting that these are the names attached to the surviving documents. How many people in a small town or large city, perhaps learning only a ‘little latin, and less greek’ in school, or working on a plantation and drawing from oral traditions, song or story, confronted with certain historical conditions, could or did think so first, in conversation with others? There just aren’t the documents to prove it—most of the time: but that doesn’t mean that was the reality. I think a lot of ideas are not reducible to one person—it’s just shorthand, or as Chabert has pointed out elsewhere, an enclosing of the commons, our universal commons, upon a few great men.
Comment by hollowentry — June 19, 2006 @ 3:28 am
It’s like we know Machiavelli read Livy and other historians, that he conversed with other statesmen as a diplomat and advisor himself, that in exile from his beloved Florence he wrote to Guicciardini, and so people can trace his influences. but when he was writing il principe or discorsi, in exile in a village, he details his quotidian routine: he would get out of bed, converse with the swineherds through the day, gamble and argue into the evening at an inn, then return at night, go into his study, put on his old robes of office, then ‘commune’ with the great men of the past, and thus write his work. But how much of those conversations with swineherds or gamblers, that he does not narrate, does not cite, found their way into those books, how he writes his commentaries on Livy, etc…
I think it’s sadly easy for academics, who spend so much time as cenobites locked in their rooms, to imagine that human creativity is easily citable and reducible to a string of books in conversation, rather than people.
Comment by hollowentry — June 19, 2006 @ 3:50 am
All well put mon Hollow ami. One of general questions bound up in this has to do with the uses of history in the present. For me, there’s two main ones, related but not identical. One is a source for inspiration, not something to be laughed in such a depressing world, both in terms of a general “things are possible” kind of a way and on occasion in a more specific and practical sense of providing grist for the mill for activities I get up to with others. The second is providing a sense that the world as it is wasn’t always this way, both in the obvious and depressing aspects (not that the world’s ever been free of depressing elements, as far as I know) and in some of the assumptions behind categories and such. In both senses it serves a largely negative role, helping me to disentangle from things I get stuck in.
Comment by Nate — June 19, 2006 @ 6:16 pm