Multimedia Blog

Tao Lin is one of those people I want to hate, but don't really, which I suppose is another way of saying 'people I envy.' There's a line somewhere with Stephen Fry one side of it; he's on the other. Anyway I like the graph idea, I'm going to incorporate it into my super-narcissistic Manifesto For My Life project, to be done in Wales next weekend (starting to love the American use of super- as an intensifier for any adjective).

"Mr Jefferson, You Are Insolent!"

The pleasures of historical research: coming accross antique and forgotten cultural artefacts that speak of an earlier time. Such as the 1976 Emmy award-winning PBS miniseries, The Adams Chronicles. Best bit of this trailer is at around 47 seconds; I quite like 1'20 as well.

Non-Lyrical Pop Music

[I've been listening to albums from the Rough Trade Top 100. Thanks Chris Maughan for the pointer.]

Is there a difference between lyric and instrumental pop music? What is it that words add to music, and do they take something away as well?

By pop music I mean everything that isn't 'classical' music; by non-lyrical I mean that there is no layer of meaning provided by words. I want to include bands like Sigur Ros, which sing in languages that very few of us understand (they're an extreme example in that they sometimes use a made-up language. They know what they're doing.) There seems to be a lot of this on the Rough Trade 100. Darkstar, Gold Panda, Emeralds, Voice of the Seven Thunders. I don't know, maybe that's not many, but they're all from the top twenty.

In a lot of music, the lyrics aren't actually about the meanings of the words. They just add a different kind of texture. So maybe there isn't so much difference between bands that sing and ones that don't. But in pop music singing seems to have been so dominant (from both work-song and choir-song roots, I guess) that not using it means something in itself. If only that we recognise the meaninglessness of the words themselves.

What kind of meaning does a song, a piece of music, express? By omitting lyrics, is there something less fixed, something less open to argument? Because we have always disputed what words mean in pop songs, or even what words actually are being sung. Are non-lyrical pop songs an escape from that arena of dispute? Are they less analytical; does that make them somehow more cowardly? There are two sides to the recognition that meaning is difficult to pin down. In this way, non-lyrical pop music is a genre of postmodern relativism.

But perhaps they are really more than that. Perhaps they are not really hiding from the problems of verbal communication, but experimenting in a way of solving them. They are brave, existential essays (tries, attempts, shots) in imagination, empathy, connection, and emotion beyond words.

Meaning and Explanation

The kinds of meaning we find in representations of the past are related to the kinds of explanation we find satisfying or plausible. Is meaning the same thing as explanation? Not quite, I think. Meaning can be tragic or triumphant, optimistic or ironic. Explanation (or causation) is more neutral, mechanistic. That distinction may be false though; they do seem inseparable. But which way does the logic run? Do we find certain kinds of explanation plausible, and therefore derive certain kinds of meaning; or do we look for certain kinds of meaning, and therefore find certain explanations satisfying?

In biography or biopic (and perhaps in film more generally, since it is more likely to focus on specific characters), both meaning and explanation are located on a personal level, more than they usually are in academic written history. That doesn't mean films can't represent 'historical forces.' Sometimes the lives of individuals seem to be tossed around by the waves of an unseen storm. It is precisely in this situation that we might find meaninglessness, or a type of meaning that is nihilist or existential. We find other kinds of meaning where we can see individual agency, especially in personal relationships (where agency at least appears to be effective).

Reading biography, or watching biopics, encourages us to locate meaning in personal relationships, those near enough to actually be visible in our lives. History on a wider scale, in contrast, emphasises the relationships that are invisible and distant. When we focus on one of these, are we avoiding the responsibilities the other entails?

Are You Smarter Than...

People think that humans are the smartest of animals, and most people do not think about other animals as being smart, or at least think that they are not as smart as humans. Knowing that other animals are as smart as us means we can appreciate them more, which could also help us to help them. (via Marginal Revolution)

If George Orwell was writing "Politics and the English Language" again today, he'd use this as an example. It's from a scientific paper written by a class of primary school children, published in an academic journal. Yes it it a bit of a publicity stunt; it's not actually about the writing, the point is that these kids and their teacher did an experiment that really did advance science. But this is one thing I take from it: I would rather write like these eight-year-olds than like most academics.

History on Page and Screen

1) Meaning is often (always?) generated through metaphor. In traditional or academic written history, the kinds of metaphors that are most prominent are those that describe large systems. The idea of historical 'forces' is the quintessential example; more generally, the metaphors link physical to social systems (geological, for example: societies can have 'layers,' or be 'fractured.') The written word allows for or encourages this more abstract mode of thought; what Robin Hanson would call far mode.

In contrast, film encourages us to focus on concrete, visible objects, and actions occurring in real-time: in other words, the small stuff. It therefore favours different kinds of metaphor, namely synecdoche, where a part represents a whole. A shot of a plane in mid-air represents a journey. That's a temporal example, but I think there are spatial or conceptual examples too. The look a wife gives her husband across the table represents a whole marriage; the atmosphere in the king's chamber represents the progress of a war. It is the different kinds of metaphor natural to each form that structure the (differences between the) ways each can presents the past.

2) The different focuses (near/far, concrete/abstract) of filmic and written-academic history entail different ways of encoding meaning in the past. Our preference for one or the other type of representation shows what kind of meanings we value most, or what kind of explanations we find satisfying or plausible. Perhaps there is also a reverse effect: our (independent) preference for one medium leads to an understanding that favours a certain kind of meaning. This is no doubt part of a process of dynamic cultural construction.

It might be that this range of focuses and types of meaning is the whole point. Academic history can get at meanings that film or biography cannot. And vice versa. There's still the question of which meanings are most valuable, though (or why meaning is valuable at all). If we are not to judge this by what kinds of meanings most people choose to pursue, then what other measurement shall we use?

Decision Day About Twitter

Oh wait I said I would make a decision today about whether or not I should start tweeting. Hmm. The Con list I wrote is longer than the Pro list. That just goes to show how tricky is the concept of Pro and Con lists. I wonder if setting decision days like this is a good practice. Doesn't it just replace once arbitary time to make a decision (right now) with another (next week)? So it's procrastination. But is my unconscious figuring it out for that whole week? Prob not, my unconscious has better things to think about. Anyway let's just say yes. Saying yes is always better than saying no. Isn't it? I actually really like Yes Man. I know you'll think that's stupid.

Great Lakes Radicalism

What is the relation of geography and politics? I love David S. Brown's book, Beyond the Frontier, where he traces a 'midwestern' historical tradition with characteristics shaped both by opposition to the eastern orthodoxy and the special quality of the midwest, or the frontier, itself. You could say it's a Turnerian approach to historiography - and Turner is of course one of his key characters. He was a Madison, Wisconsin man, until he came to Harvard for the end of his career. (Carl Becker studied there under Turner; Charles Beard went to DePauw, a member of the Great Lakes Colleges Association.)

Madison was also where William Appleman Williams and some youthful proteges started the historians' New Left, and its journal Studies on the Left. Today, Madison continues a reputation for academic radicalism. Erik Olin Wright, who's recent book I have reviewed, is there for example. Then there's Michigan, where near Port Huron the SDS was formed. And over east a bit, Vermont, with its "democratic socialist" senator Bernie Sanders. So, my question is, is there something about this place that makes it a home for radicalism in a conservative country? If so, what? Is it the proximity of Canada? The frontier tradition? The Northwest Ordinance?! Seems like a pretty interesting place, anyway.

Beard Zeitgeist

I was going to write a proper post about one of my prospective pet projects, but then I came upon this article about beards in Smart Set. It's not actually a good article, just more or less a random collection of trivia with the word beard in (also it mentions that Al Gore "got heavy" when his political career was over. She doesn't mean "heavy" like "whoa, heavy, man...," she means fat. If you're going to mention that at all, why not just say fat?) But I liked these bits:

I have never known my husband without his beard, a fact that disturbed me in the early years of our relationship. What was he hiding: a weak chin, a saber scar, a slothful nature, a psychological need for a barrier between himself and the world? But as time passed, I no longer felt the need to ask these questions. I now know my husband, and the beard is part of who he is...

It is interesting to think of the many great men in history who had beards: Socrates, Christ, Lincoln, Freud, Lenin (the first two represented at least as having them)...

The Orthodox of the religion have traditionally worn beards... But in the Talmud, the Jewish commentary on the Bible, the subject undergoes clarification and, predictably, grows more murky.

Just Enough Supernatural Lift

From The New Yorker:

...there is something in the amplitude and dynamic of Mario’s jumps — just enough supernatural lift yet also just enough gravitational resistance — that makes the act of performing that jump, over and over, deeply satisfying. He also cited the archetypal quality of Mario’s task, that vague feeling of longing and disappointment which undergirds his desperate and recurring quest for the girl. “It’s a story of desire,” Brophy-Warren said.

Should I Start a Twitter Account?

[Actually I have a Twitter account already and I follow maybe thirty users. About half of them are political and the other half are cultural or something. The question is shall I do tweeting myself.]

Pros

All the things I want to put as Facebook status updates and sometimes cannot justify, or feel guilty about because they are not really about my status, I can put here.

It could produce an online image of myself that is more succinct or accesible than this blog, and not walled in like Facebook. For marketing purposes.

People would be more likely to follow it than this blog or become my friends on Facebook.

It would be another way of writing and so help me improve my writing, especially flexibility of format. (It was hard to write that sentence without using the words platform, develop, or expression.)

I would be able to always follow my urge to link things, with no obligation whatsoever to add comment.


Cons

It would be joining an already heavy-laden bandwaggon.

The online image of myself that it produces could become embarassing or wildly misleading, no doubt like my Facebook page and this blog.

It would take time away from other things like showering and getting out of the door on time.

It would maybe encourage a continuing process of me taking on projected characteristics of people I read online, or somehow trying to become like them in the most superficial ways or even more.

I would have to decide whether something should be a Facebook status update or a Tweet.

I would be able to link things without really thinking about them or deciding which parts I like or why. It is like having the white space between the lines without the lines themselves.

[Decision day: Tuesday 21 December]

What is a Character?

This afternoon Failed Novelists were in my living room discussing what is characterisation. My biggest problem as a writer, said James, is creating characters. Specifically, he wanted in his story to express a character through the narrator, and by seeing through that person's eyes rather than self-analysis or self-description. Because analysis and description (either the "self-" variety, or of others) is the obvious way to make characters. It is also a bit like telling and not showing. That is I think why James wanted to avoid it.

He asked us to suggest books where particularly vivid characters are built up through the eyes of the narrator. I said, well this is kind of the point of all books, at least in first person. But it's something that happens over a novel length, it gains in intensity with time (how strange); so there is not a trick to doing it in a short story. Unless, as somebody pointed out, you make your character extreme in some way: a religious fundamentalist, maybe, someone who sees the world in an obviously abnormal way. I didn't think of this at the time but you could perhaps count the narrator of A Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time in this group.

But I don't think I would call that character 'particularly vivid.' And now I am thinking that 'vivid' is the wrong word, that is the source of the trouble. Because what we should think of is ourselves (that is the essence of first person narrative anyway, right?). Do we have vivid characters? I take that word to mean clear-cut or well-defined, bright, easy to pick out. I don't think I am like this. Far more likely maybe that other people see me like this - people who know me less well?

I am vague. I am the narrator of my own life, and my character is expressed in the way I interact with the world (including inside my head). It is also of course formed by those interactons present and past. So in fiction I think we are going the wrong way if we are trying to build 'a vivid character.' We might do so only by making a cardboard cut-out: it's in your face but it can't speak to you. Real people are alive in their own worlds, and that is what makes up their characters. When you write, don't try to build characters: build worlds.

When I Am Slightly Drunk I Can't Help Obnoxiously Correcting Americans' Pronunciation

[This seemed so touching on first read, then very little... almost nothing.]

I have started to like this website very much. I think I have linked to it here before. But I thought: let me collect the pieces on it that I really like, and maybe that will help to see why I like it. It seems hard to understand without being more aware than I am of some sort of youthful literary subculture or social network (I mean an actual network, not a web programming thing). I feel excluded a little bit. I feel anxiety of influence. But everyone is allowed to like lists.

1) Getting Used To America: this is maybe the first thing I read from this website. It is the first thing from it that is catalogued in my Instapaper archive. What attracted me to this article (which is more conventional than most things on this website) was this bit,

Americans happily blurt out the most private details of their addictions or surgeries or family dramas within minutes  to total strangers — the sort of emotional revelations that, in many other places, are held private for years, or decades, and shared only with intimates.

I think this is probably not true. I want to experience it, and believe it. Does the one who is so open long for secrets, in the same way as the one with secrets longs to be opened?

2) Taking My Younger Sister to a Belle and Sebastian Concert: "None of my sister’s friends knew who Belle and Sebastian were. And it became apparent that Olivia didn’t actually like Belle and Sebastian that much — but she knew I did. Among all those things my sister was better at than me included being a thoughtful, unselfish sibling. In truth, I hadn’t taken her to the concert so much as she had taken me."

3) Lies I Have Told: I think this is the definitive Thought Catalog piece for me. It has a sense of personality. It makes me a little bit sad to think that that personality is constructed; why? I nearly wrote "sad a little bit," because that's how the author of this piece would have written it. The lie "I don't really know what I'm looking for right now" and the truth she writes, I find, I don't know.

Quiet, but not boring. Laughs easily. Doesn’t take me or him or life in general seriously, yet has a capacity to earnestly experience emotions, and is aware of this paradox. Average sex drive. Gives compliments. Dark hair is good. Would probably not like it that I have written all of these things down about what I want him to be like, but would also understand and later make fun of me for doing it. 

 4) Updike for Beginners and How To Drink a Martini: these are by the same author. The male version of the persona from above? The Thought Catalog persona. There are some things about the person I don't want to be. I will try to write about that later. I think these stories are somewhere in between the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Truman Capote, but in the now. But how many American realist short story writers have I read? Not many.

5) Why Germans Hang Their Socks to Dry: I Made a Facebook status update out of this.

Children of Violence

I can now add Doris Lessing to Iris Murdoch and (less so) A. S. Byatt among women authors with whose work I am somewhat familiar [edit: I forgot Jane Austen. Still, I'm a bit surprised by how short this list is]. She is less similar to those two than they are to each other. I first read Memoirs of a Survivor, then The Fifth Child, both of which share what I want to call a whimsical bleakness. Her five book series Children of Violence does not have quite the same effect; it couldn't be sustained over such length. But the series, written from 1952 to 1969, does show (especially in the last book) a gradual blurring of lines of reality. Her signature, developed in the last book The Four-Gated City and appearing strongly in Memoirs, is a fantastical, or magical, conception of the inner life.

The first two books in Children of Violence read a bit like F. Scott Fitzgerald; they are set in a backwater colony (Rhodesia it would appear) between the wars, and their world, living its pale imitation of the roaring twenties, has the same intense mix of superficiality and inner desperation. The second two books switch focus from a milieu of dance-parties and "sundowners" (a kind of cocktail?) to a hilariously observed proto-Communist cell and the politics of the committee meeting and the public lecture. Of course, what we learn is that the two worlds are not so dissimilar. They are about escape from a world ruled by someone else; they are each in their way, utopian.

What made the fifth book, which is far longer than those before it, worthwhile was a moment near the end. This book is in large part about the different kinds of madness people feel. It has both love (and lust) and politics and power, and these things are linked by the pathologies of inner human lives. What we realise as Martha (the heroine of all the books) teeters on the edge of mental breakdown is that in fact she has always been there, always teetering, always so close to just drifting off or falling down broken.

This is a story of "Children," drift and development, the slow construction of a personality (recounted with pained self-awareness), which is then in this last book - maybe - broken down again, eroded, deconstructed. There is an appendix describing a global apocalypse occuring after the main action of the book, and this acts as a sort of counterpoint. It demonstrates how much more poignant is life lived always on the edge of individual catastrophe.

Robert Bolaño's Advice on Short Story Writing

Sorry but I have to quote this at length, via This Recording:

1. Never approach short stories one at a time. If one approaches short stories one at a time, one can quite honestly be writing the same short story until the day one dies.

2. It is best to write short stories three or five at a time. If one has the energy, write them nine or fifteen at a time.

3. Be careful: the temptation to write short stories two at a time is just as dangerous as attempting to write them one at a time, and, what’s more, it’s essentially like the interplay of lovers’ mirrors, creating a double image that produces melancholy.

4. One must read Horacio Quiroga, Felisberto Hernández, and Jorge Luis Borges. One must read Juan Rulfo and Augusto Monterroso. Any short-story writer who has some appreciation for these authors will never read Camilo José Cela or Francisco Umbral yet will, indeed, read Julio Cortázar and Adolfo Bioy Casares, but in no way Cela or Umbral.

5. I’ll repeat this once more in case it’s still not clear: don’t consider Cela or Umbral, whatsoever.

6. A short-story writer should be brave. It’s a sad fact to acknowledge, but that’s the way it is.

7. Short-story writers customarily brag about having read Petrus Borel. In fact, many short-story writers are notorious for trying to imitate Borel’s writing. What a huge mistake! Instead, they should imitate the way Borel dresses. But the truth is that they hardly know anything about him—or Théophile Gautier or Gérard de Nerval!

8. Let’s come to an agreement: read Petrus Borel, dress like Petrus Borel, but also read Jules Renard and Marcel Schwob. Above all, read Schwob, then move on to Alfonso Reyes and from there go to Borges.

9. The honest truth is that with Edgar Allan Poe, we would all have more than enough good material to read.

10. Give thought to point number 9. Think and reflect on it. You still have time. Think about number 9. To the extent possible, do so on bended knees.

11. One should also read a few other highly recommended books and authors— e.g., Peri hypsous, by the notable Pseudo-Longinus; the sonnets of the unfortunate and brave Philip Sidney, whose biography Lord Brooke wrote; The Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters; Suicidios ejemplares, by Enrique Vila-Matas; and Mientras ellas duermen by Javier Marías.

12. Read these books and also read Anton Chekhov and Raymond Carver, for one of the two of them is the best writer of the twentieth century.

The Mad Economist's Children

Bryan Caplan via Marginal Revolution:

...normal people can expect to be like their kids. But that's not saying much, because normal people can expect to be like any random person they meet! The story's very different for weirdos. By definition, weirdos never have much in common with random strangers. With a zero parent-child correlation, weirdos will feel equally alienated from their children. As the parent-child correlation rises, however, weirdos' incompatibility with strangers stays the same, but their expected compatibility with their children gets stronger and stronger.

Now let's look at these facts like a mad economist. There are two ways to surround yourself with people like you. One is to meet them; the other is to make them. If you're average, meeting people like yourself is easy; people like you are everywhere. If you're weird, though, meeting people like yourself is hard; people like you are few and far between. But fortunately, as the parent-child correlation rises, weirdos' odds of making people like themselves get better and better.

Caplan concludes the analysis by pointing out that as weirdness rises so does incentive to have children. He could have also said that, entailed in that, weirdos have more incentive to find and keep a long-term mate. Does this help explain non-standard mating patterns in weird people?

Only Pretending

1) The listener: why did you pretend to be asleep? If you had shown that you were awake, if you had spoken, done something, what would be different? Would the whisperer still have left?

2) The whisperer: were your words for the sleeper, or for yourself? Did you think you could be heard, that whispering would have an effect on the sleeper? Did you know that the sleeper was not really asleep, was really the listener?

3) If so, why did you accept the fiction of sleeping, why did you whisper as if to a sleeping person? Did you wait, hope for a response? If you spoke, whispered, knowing that the listener was not asleep, then you were both pretending. If you were both pretending, then in what sense was what you spoke, whispered, true?

Education for Empire

[This is a draft proposal for the RAI's annual graduate conference, Building an American Empire, 1783-1861]

Education for Empire: visions of order and reason in the 1780s

The decade following the 1781 victory at Yorktown was characterised by instability - political, social, and cultural - in the void left by British imperial rule. Institutional reforms culminating in the constitution of 1787 were championed by leaders and thinkers who wished to restore order and hierarchy, to build in America an empire that would both reflect (or perfect) and rival that of Britain. The movement for constitutional reform was thus part of a wider intellectual and cultural persuasion, which gave an important place to ideas and proposals for the future education of Americans.

This paper will look at the works of Noah Webster and Benjamin Rush, two leading Federalist thinkers, who devoted much of their attention to the cause of education. Webster's Grammatical Institute (1783), his Sketches of American Policy (1785), and Rush's Plan for Establishment of Public Schools (1786) form key texts for the Federalist educational vision, which can be compared with Thomas Jefferson's contemporaneous proposals for a public school system.

These ideas should be situated both in their contemporary social and political context, and also in the broad tradition of philosophy of education. The ideas of John Locke, in his widely printed Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), are especially important. For the promoters of America's Enlightenment empire, reason and order were the foundations of glorious ambitions. But building an empire was as much about moulding a people as it was about conquering territory. Federalists' attitudes to education help us reimagine their conception of the new nation's future.

One In Ten

"I am the one in ten, a number on a list.
I am the one in ten, even though I don't exist.
Nobody knows it, but I'm always there,
a statistical reminder of a world that doesn't care."
- "One In Ten," UB40

"a total of 90 percent of women, almost all of them, will have one partner or more during their lives, and some many, many more." - Diane Johnson in the NYRB

Is it only me? Is this not a painful statistic? Doesn't it imply that one in ten U.S. women will never have a partner in their lives? One in ten! So casually dismissed in the phrase 'almost all of them,' surely a misunderstanding? I would like to just dismiss this as the vicissitudes of stupid stats; it must be that. It must be something to do with mortality rates, voluntary celibacy (nuns!), emigration, lying to survey-takers, and so on. But now I can't stop thinking, how many? How many people go through their entire lives without that kind of love?

Update: later in the article she writes, "Gottlieb’s underlying assumption is that every girl wants to get married; and the statistic that 90 percent of American women do get married at some point—a higher percentage than in any other country—supports this." So by partner she meant husband (or wife)? I guess that makes me feel better.

Update II: A different perspective, from the Christian mag Relevant: "But I know couples in loving relationships who remain lonely. Why? After all, they've found a perfect mate who has taken great strides toward fulfilling their need for intimacy. But that's a heavy load for one person to bear, despite the stories Cameron Crowe tells. Lonely single people become lonely married people. If your goal in marriage is to satisfy your need to belong, your next stop may be heartbreak."

A metapost

With this post, November becomes the most prolific month of this blog so far! I was thinking that when I reach 100 posts, which will probably be around New Year, then I will a) release the address of this blog on my Facebook page or something, and maybe actually get some readers, and b) do a roundup of the 'best' posts, to act as an introduction. It'll be interesting to see how the thing develops from there. I'm sometimes (like right now) very tempted to divert onto personal ground; but I'm resisting the temptation.

Now I am taking the week off writing here. Eighth week is just too much for me!

Yet Somehow the Whole Game

On J.R.R. Tolkein's anarcho-monarchism, and the virtue of kings:

But a king—a king without any real power, that is—is such an ennoblingly arbitrary, such a tender and organically human institution. It is easy to give our loyalty to someone whose only claim on it is an accident of heredity, because then it is a free gesture of spontaneous affection that requires no element of self-deception, and that does not involve the humiliation of having to ask to be ruled.

The ideal king would be rather like the king in chess: the most useless piece on the board, which occupies its square simply to prevent any other piece from doing so, but which is somehow still the whole game. There is something positively sacramental about its strategic impotence. And there is something blessedly gallant about giving one’s wholehearted allegiance to some poor inbred ditherer whose chief passions are Dresden china and the history of fly-fishing, but who nonetheless, quite ex opere operato, is also the bearer of the dignity of the nation, the anointed embodiment of the genius gentis—a kind of totem or, better, mascot.

And this, from the same article:

There are those whose political visions hover tantalizingly near on the horizon, like inviting mirages, and who are as likely as not to get the whole caravan killed by trying to lead it off to one or another of those nonexistent oases. And then there are those whose political dreams are only cooling clouds, easing the journey with the meager shade of a gently ironic critique, but always hanging high up in the air, forever out of reach.

By Birth or Consent

The other day I was talking to a visiting scholar who had given a paper to our seminar; I gave a brief and garbled explanation of my project (in its new form), and she said, 'have you read Holly Brewer's book?' No I hadn't! Turns out, it's extraordinarily relevant and useful! Also, thankfully, it's nothing like the book that I want my thesis to be. It is a story of changing attitudes to childhood, in relation to political theory, in the Anglo-American world from the 16th to late-18th centuries. By Birth or Consent (great, evocative title):

...in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a fundamental shift occurred in the legal assumptions about childhood, adulthood, and responsibility [p.1]... During the late sixteenth century, children became a metaphor for obedience and submission to church and kingdom... [but] political reformers of seventeenth-century England distinguished children's political identities from adults', emphasizing experience and reason as requirements for the exercise of political power. Their distinctions grew out of attempts to justify a form of government based on consent [p.2]... This paradigm shift, from authority based on birthright to authority based on reasoned consent, reconstituted the nature of legitimacy and power [p.5].

One of the particularly interesting things for me is the questions it raises about what defines childhood: as I expected, we see some elitist politicians (e.g. John Adams) equating certain classes of adults (e.g. the propertyless) with children. What I also found interesting, though, is where Brewer's project differs from how I envisage mine. She ignores or tacitly refuses psychological implications, and builds her argument on corrolations and parallels between childhood issues and political issues.

A review on H-Net complains that "the connection between changing theories about civic authority and childhood often seems more theoretical and corollary than experiential and causal." I agree, Brewer shows that the two discourses seem to be connected but fails to find that connection. Surely it is psychological. At the very start, she touches on it: "On some level this image [of "children as metaphors for obedience"] transcended metaphor, became, in its pervasiveness, a structure through which many people understood their world [p.2]." But she doesn't follow this point up. The book would have benefited from a deeper theoretical appreciation of conceptual metaphor.

Writing: Autism Compensation Effect

I incline to this. From the New York Times blog, The Stone:

Consider, for example, Sartre’s classic one-liner, “Hell is other people.” Wouldn’t autism, with its inherent poverty of affective contact, go some way towards accounting for that? The fear of faces and the “gaze of the other” that Sartre analyzes are classic symptoms. Sartre recognized this in himself and in others as well: he explicitly describes Flaubert as “autistic” in his great, sprawling study of the writer, “The Family Idiot,” and also asserts that “Flaubert c’est moi.” Sartre’s theory that Flaubert starts off autistic and everything he writes afterwards — trying to work out what is in Madame Bovary’s mind, for example — is a form of compensation or rectification, could easily apply to his own work.

Planning an Essay (Continued)

[Continued from here]

5) applying this approach to aspects of Federalist thought. The most important issue in the politics of the 1780s was [financial] debt and responsibility: there is a clear metaphorical connection to family relations and its notions of freedom and control, which can be analysed. Intergenerational justice more broadly is also key. Western expansion is a difficult issue for Federalist thinkers. So is the question of slavery. Finally, conceptions of representation and government, the overarching constitutional issue, can now be approached in this new light. Federalist impulses cherished freedom and social control; it was part of their coming of age.

6) return to the historiography. All this relates to the problem of liberalism and republicanism, and relates the two to each other in a new way. Both can be seen as forms of social control, but while the latter is overt the former is covert: it thus offers a mirage of freedom. Federalists' contradictory impulses spurred the imaginative political innovation of the 1780s, as they sought a way to resolve the tension between freedom and responsibility/order. Both liberal and republican elements were necessary, but the tendency was necessarily a movement towards liberal, covert forms of social control, which seemingly created order out of freedom.

Planning an Essay

1) the key problems in 1780s politics. The big problem is the apparent 'counter-revolutionary' nature of Federalist politics. Is it an outcome of power-struggle between pre-existing groups? If not, then what? What brings together the undoubtedly diverse set of groups that support the Federalist constitutional project in the late 1780s? What best characterises Federalist politics as a unit or type? An equally big problem, this time from a historiographical angle: why are historians still able to disagree so radically and strongly about the motives and intentions of the Federalists?

2) how can we solve these problems? Existing analyses are evidently flawed. What do they fail to take into account? They have looked at material factors and ideological, either in their relation to the material or in splendid isolation. Human motives are inadequately theorised: this is a general problem but particularly applicable here. Note how biographies of founders so often fail to fit them easily into general narratives. We need a psychological approach that shows how founders attitudes to power changed in tandem with historical/political context: this is coming of age.

3) language, metaphor, psychology: theory. We must connect the inner to the outer world before we can attempt to analyse the former through the latter. Metaphor provides this link because it is a cognitive reality that structures both thought/psychology and language/culture. Americans commonly used language of child-adult relationships to refer to politics. But this does not imply that the metaphor does not influence their thought when they are using different language. It acts unconsciously to shape conceptions of freedom, responsibility, justice, and government.

4) conflict, change, rhetoric: practice. We can attempt to analyse the kinds of political conflicts that occurred, and the rhetoric in which they were fought, in terms of this structuring metaphor (and see if it works). On the other hand we can look for clues in sources that are not explicitly political, but approach from the other side, i.e. that deal with child-rearing and the responsibilities of adulthood. Both these types of evidence will help to understand precisely how the metaphor of coming of age works politically in the 1780s.

[Continued here]

Contradiction and Dialectic Imagination

"Contradictions imply more than mere conflicts, and they are logically (and perhaps psychologically) less easily shelved than are many other kinds of problems. Indeed, if Hume is right, 'the Heart of Man is made to reconcile Contradictions.'" - James Farr, "Understanding Conceptual Change Politically," in Ball, Farr, & Hanson eds. Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (1989).

The political development of the 1780s was not simply a matter of leaders shifting from an anti-authoritarian to an authoritarian (or responsible) stance. Neither, of course, does the shift from childhood to adulthood follow this pattern. Revolutionaries who, in their own eyes, acted to keep social and political order as the new republic came of age, did not forget their revolutionary principles. They did not reject liberty in favour of tyranny, despite Jefferson's later criticisms.

Rather, they came to appreciate more powerfully and personally than before their contradictory impulses, to be free and to be responsible. While every generation faces such a contradiction, American leaders in the 1780s were in a unique historical position to play out their reconciliation in the politics of the republic. The feats of conceptual imagination in the 1780s, in the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, were the results an attempt to ease a tension psychologically associated with coming of age.

Metaphorical Thought and Politics

I have already written that metaphors have power over us. I want to go a little further in exploring the ways literary and linguistic metaphors might relate to historical psychology. Previously I had assumed that the power of familial metaphor over thought had come from a long period in which that metaphor was developed culturally and linguistically. However, there is another possibility: that the psychology comes first, and the development of language is a secondary phenomenon. That is the contention, as far as I can tell, of Johnson and Lakoff in Metaphors We Live By (1980):

Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature [p.3]... Metaphors... are among our principle vehicles for understanding. And they play a central role in the construction of social and political reality [p.159].

Moreover, as they point out, "metaphorical thought is unavoidable, ubiquitous, and largely unconscious [p.272]." This understanding of conceptual metaphor, and its deep unconscious influence, is important to my project. I don't need to show that Federalists in the 1780s always spoke about politics in terms of family relations. Rather, I need to establish only that it was a dominant metaphor, unconsciously shaping thought. I can then structure my own exegesis around such a metaphor, without becoming detached from the inner lives of Federalists themselves. At the least, I will be helping understand an aspect of their thought.

"Always Historicise!"

- Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, 1981

In my writing about coming of age so far, I notice I've been treating this phenomenon as static or eternal. But of course like everything, it also changes. Although perhaps this needs more proper clarification, which I haven't achieved yet, I want to use coming of age both as a psychological reality and as a cultural metaphor: both are inextricably linked in ways I will explain later. But should those two forms be historicised in different ways?

The question of historical, or 'evolving' psychology is worryingly close to the philosophical question about what is 'human nature' and can it be seen as fundamental. Freudian (or any psychological) ideas seem to imply certain levels of unchanging-ness: that everyone is affected by the same types of complexes. But that is perhaps a superficial reading: we can be affected in different, changing ways; complexes can take different, changing forms. I need to confirm that my model of the child/adult shift in thought could be applied to eighteenth-century minds. How much will my argument here be circular, pointing to the ambivalences in the sources to show that the psychology exists, and then using the psychology as an explanation? Is such an approach illegitimate?

Historicising texts and metaphors is much more familiar to me, and historians generally. That said, it sometimes seems that readers - of Quentin Skinner for example - find this concept strangely novel and awesome. Perhaps all Skinner does is lend authority and credibility to techniques literary scholars had long understood, but that historians had shunned, until a grand old Cambridge man could show the way. I'm sure that is selling him very short. Anyway, I have been reading about changes in the literature of child/adult relations in the eighteenth century, which must be taken into account by my work. We are shooting moving targets from a moving train.

Psychology and Metaphor in History

Here are some further, but still preliminary, thoughts about how the psychology of coming of age might relate to a historical explanation of the Federalist movement in the 1780s. Clearly, people are going to be pretty skeptical about this as an approach. To be accommodated it has to be carefully defined.

To begin with, I agree with Peter Hoffer that "the strongest justification for psychohistory is that it can unravel riddles of motivation and expression which have resisted (or escaped notice in) conventional treatments." [Revolution and Regeneration, 1983, p.13] The unsolved problem of the Federalist movement, in my view, is its ambivalence towards power. Conventional histories either assume basically power-seeking or altruistic motives, without accounting for what seems to be an inner conflict. That is why I think psychology is relevant. (Such an inner conflict would need to be demonstrated, but it can already by inferred from historians' disagreements with each other, and their use of paradox and irony.)

Some historians have drawn on psychology to help explain the revolution itself, and I find their ideas interesting and fruitful. However, in some ways I think the Federalist movement is a more appropriate field for this type of analysis, because it is more closely tied (it seems to me) with a few individuals' thoughts and actions. That does raise a question: is the 'conspiratorial' or 'reform caucus' interpretation of the consitution movement correct, and if so how should we explain the constitution at a popular level? That question, though interesting, is outside the main scope of my concern.

In the 1780s, American elites (and presumably others!) reflected on the experience of revolution and the next steps for the nation and themselves. There is less question here of 'the heat of the moment' or the press of events than there is in the revolutionary crisis of the 1770s: we can give even more concern to thought, and therefore to psychology. The real problem is, how do we access the psychology of proto-Federalists, even those who wrote a lot?

In "The American Revolution: the ideology and psychology of national liberation," (1972) Edwin Burrows and Michael Wallace stress "symbolic collective identity" [p.274]: they find such an identity in the language of parent and child that was common in the rhetoric of the revolutionary period. Drawing that point out, we can say that the metaphor of child/adult relations, with its long period of development in the American political vocabulary, had the power to shape thought in the 1780s. It is all the more powerful for being a deep metaphor, acting primarily on the unconscious, rather than an element of rational or ideological thought. As literary scholars and now scientists tell us, metaphors indeed have power over us. It is the implications of this metaphor, and its workings in the Federalist mind, that I want to explore.

Republicanism, Liberalism, and Social Discipline

My conception of the coming of age in the 1780s has a lot to do with social discipline. Federalists who had fought "arbitrary" British authority came to feel that their responsibility was to establish and enforce order in the independent nation. These ambivalent drives relate to the classic problem of republicanism and liberalism in the political thought of the revolutionary period, for both sets of ideas contain strong but opposing prescriptions for social discipline.

Classical republicanism emphasises virtue, which is in most cases another word for self-discipline: moderation and disinterestedness are central. Republican institutions are meant to encourage or enforce these kinds of self-discipline - so that in fact we are really talking about social discipline (on this general point see Robin Hanson). Classical republican government is highly visible, and citizens are supposed to be acitvely engaged. Its forms of discipline are structured by mutual surveillance and the threat of censure.

Liberalism is obviously quite different: in fact, it appears to offer a great relaxation, or even elimination, of social discipline. Liberal capitalist citizens have few responsibilities: they are supposed to act in their own best interests. Yet the liberal society exercises its own, social discipline, beginning with the rule of law but extending to a set of conditions that organise people and communities around economic markets. The contraction of the public sphere, and loss of positive liberty, restrict citizens in general to acting out their roles as rational producers and consumers. This liberal, capitalist social discipline is invisible; the penalty for disobedience is poverty.

Ten American Books

So many books, so little time! Here are ten I want to read, in an effort to consolidate my credentials as an Americanist... Five from the 19th century, five from the twentieth. Setting myself a deadline: the end of the academic year.

1. Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 1840
2. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 1850
3. Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 1851
4. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, 1881
5. Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884
6. Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, 1920
7. Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1940
8. Saul Bellow, Herzog, 1964
9. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, 1973
10. David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, 1997

What is interesting?

Robin Hanson against sophistication:

Interesting folks, in contrast, get so far into a particular topic that they become at risk of violating conversation etiquette, by talking too enthusiastically for too long on topics of minor interest to sophisticates. Yes, interesting folk are at risk of being distracted from dress or hygiene, or from carefully climbing their local status ladder. But they are also at risk of making a unique contribution to the world.

Responsibility and the Public Sphere

One of the many ambivalences in the Federalist experience of the 1780s was towards the public sphere, or as George Washington would probably have called it (he was fond of theatrical metaphors) 'the national stage'.

Retirement fantasies were common and acted-upon to different extents: Washington 'retired' but continued his political involvement on many levels - whether or not entirely by his own choice. Hamilton retired from political life in favour of his legal practice, but he of course re-entered the scene in 1786. Madison and Jay were very much engaged in the public life of nation and state. Jefferson and Adams were away from America (but acting on its behalf), and so had a different relationship again to the public sphere.

The question of a proper relationship to public life and the public sphere is (I now see!) closely bound up with the problem of adulthood, and coming-of-age. Not to get too speculative, but we can presumably link childhood with privacy and adulthood with being in public - even more so in the eighteenth-century, I would imagine. For revolutionary leaders in the 1780s, facing the idea that they were now responsible for the country's wellbeing, their renegotiation of the public sphere was an important part of coming of age.

Supervisor as Safety Net

So I pitched the Coming of Age idea to my supervisor yesterday over dinner. He was pretty skeptical, but he was at least 'intrigued'. 'If I thought it was completely ridiculous, I wouldn't be sitting here in silence,' he said. On the other hand, he also actually said, 'The 1930s called, and they want their pychology back!'

As I remember it, he had two main points to make: 1) child/father language is one of the vocabularies of development used in the 1780s, but to make it the whole thesis would be distorting; 2) my previous work emphasised material reality and I shouldn't abandon that: Federalism was a coalition of groups whose outlooks were shaped in a continental direction by their political and material circumstances. I'll give responses (in the sense of discussing how I could incorporate this advice) soon.

Federalists and the Coming of Age

Over the last few days I've been thinking about a new alternative way to approach the Federalists and the 1780s in America, which is quite different from my previous formulations. It stems to some extent from my thinking about sympathy, and the potential novelistic qualities of history.

My thesis (as you know!) intends to examine the social, cultural, and intellectual background of the movement for the Constitution. My thought is that this can be done through the lens of 'coming of age,' the moment of achieving - or the struggle to achieve - adult status. This approach seems to have many possible overlapping and not-mutually-exclusive forms, encompassing both various levels of metaphor, and various levels of psychological experience. I hope to draw out my thinking on all of this over a series of posts here, which I might then be able to turn into some sort of coherent plan.

This idea did not occur to me in a systematic way: like perhaps most ideas, it was presented to me as an answer without a question. So the first job is to work out what the question is. I don't think that's so backward and facile as it might sound, though; I imagine that this is only a process of expressing questions that already existed unconsciously, based on my reading and work so far. The cart cannot have come entirely before the horse! These are the questions I think might generate fruitful answers using this new approach:

What drove the leaders of the movement for the Constitution? What linked them together, and relatedly, why was the politics of this moment so transient (preceding comprehensive realignment in the 1790s)? And, perhaps most interestingly, how can we explain their ambivalence to power, and the tensions in their thought over aristocracy and republicanism, inheritance and independence, conservatism and revolution?

The Safest House of Present-Day Utopias

Fred Inglis (who, as it happens, wrote a biography of R.G. Collingwood, the opening chapters of which are quite beautiful, although I never read the rest) on "Toytown Utopias" in THE:

The safest house of present-day Utopias is, however, to be found in the 50-year-or-so history of television tales for five-year-olds. Trumpton and its sister villages, Chigley and Camberwick Green, all still easily available on DVD, plus the work of the recently deceased but always immortal Oliver Postgate and his utopian planet-home for The Clangers, these noble classics, together with Bob the Builder and Postman Pat, have for two generations taught their solemn audiences the lineaments of the good place...

These tales all corroborate the news from nowhere. Postgate's mouse-people on their distant planet do the same. Nature and industry combine in the harmonious provision of nurture (the Soup Dragon, the Iron Chicken), the denizens of the planet, speaking a language of melodious whistles perfectly endorsing Noam Chomsky's deep-structural theory of meaning, are impelled in all their doings only by kindness and curiosity. Their planet dances also, to the music of the spheres as played by little orchards of bell-bearing trees ... and hardly any lower in the nursery ratings, Bob the Builder and Postman Pat ply the politics of politeness with their unfailing kindness and consideration, the latter in the perfect landscape of the Yorkshire Dales.

In these places, and in their many descendants, the companion books often including their own DVD, the idea of Utopia lives staunchly on. Indeed, it is an agreeable and rational place for it to do so, for what are the stories we commend to our children and grandchildren for, if not to say implicitly and unplonkingly, "Here is how the world ought to be. We grown-ups haven't managed to make things come out like this. Remember these tales and see whether you can do better. One day, they will give you occasion for thinking the best possible thoughts.

EducationMart

Stefan Collini on the Browne Review, in the LRB:

The single most radical recommendation in the report, by quite a long way, is the almost complete withdrawal of the present annual block grant that government makes to universities to underwrite their teaching, currently around £3.9 billion. This is more than simply a ‘cut’, even a draconian one: it signals a redefinition of higher education and the retreat of the state from financial responsibility for it...

The report includes various ‘access’ regulations intended to mitigate the more extreme effects of this reallocation of students by family wealth, but differential fees are, of course, absolutely central to its conception of the way the market mechanism will operate, and it is a necessary truth about markets that they tend to replicate and even intensify the existing distribution of economic power. ‘Free competition’ between rich and poor consumers means Harrods for the former and Aldi for the latter: that’s what the punters have ‘chosen’.

History and the Novel

In fiction-writing there's a lot of talk about empathy, which isn't really any different from what I meant by sympathy the other day. Novels are often about the possibility of entering another mind. That idea seems very similar to R.G. Collingwood's conception of what history should be: the rethinking of past thoughts (my understanding of Collingwood comes not yet from reading his books, but from a great lecture by George Garnett). To me, it seems that written history normally fails at this task - or, rather, few historians attempt it - while fiction has been capable of amazing things. To enter someone's mind in fiction is always moving; history rarely is.

What's the different between what novelists are trying to do and what historians are trying to do? Is there a difference between what they should be trying to do, or in what they succeed in doing, or are capable of? From the reader's side, how do we use history, and how do we use novels?

History appears to work on a rational level as opposed to novels working on an emotional one, but I think that distinction is misleading. People use history books to develop and buttress their ideas and beliefs about the world; and they do the same with novels. There's no meaningful way to draw a line between the 'factual' or rational element of those ideas and beliefs, and the emotional or irrational element. One kind of difference could be in scale: histories are macro, novels micro. But that obviously doesn't hold universally: compare War & Peace with The Cheese and the Worms. What does this kind of scaling even mean, and how do novelists, historians, and readers make choices about it?

This problem of scale is central to the greater problem that both history and fiction share: how are we different from each other, how the same? Across time, space, culture, and every other kind of division, what unites us, what divides? The possibility of sympathy must be part of our answer.

Sympathy in History

What does it mean to be sympathetic to someone? Can you sympathise and condemn at the same time, or is a refusal to condemn inherent in sympathy? I saw a play yesterday whose protagonist I loved (or 'sympathised with') but who did something - I was going to write unforgivable, but is anything unforgivable? He did something I condemn. Perhaps the solution is to, as Christians say, love the sinner, hate the sin.

I think the same rule should apply in history-writing; by which I mean I hope to apply the same rule to my work. But how does non-fiction and historical writing work when it comes to things like sympathy and condemnation? It seems not to work in the same way as novels (or plays), generally. Often the affectation of appearing impartial, and relaying the facts, makes real sympathy impossible. But ironically it makes condemnation easier. In history, past actors are made of their acts: the sin becomes the sinner and vice versa. Is this because in history the range of attributable causes is so narrow, in comparison to fiction? How can we solve this problem?

More on the Post-Revolutionary Public

Privacy... underwent a shift in this period from a classical conception of seclusion and withdrawal to a more recognizably modern notion of independence and intimacy [p218]... Discussions of solitude and retirement in the revolutionary period represented fantasy narratives of self-liberation from the public sphere, even as they address that public sphere [p219]... In one sense, private withdrawal made thought about public things possible. Narratives about individuals who chose to leave society had a social function, of course, and one way to account for the prevalence of hermits in the print culture of late eighteenth-century America is to consider them as exemplary figures of the public sphere [p220].

Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art (Chicago, 2009)

Public and Private After the Revolution

The Revolution transformed the landscape of public space in America. People's conceptions of their own and others' public roles were challenged, redefined, and threatened. Elites were in a sense at the forefront of this change, because it was they who were most exposed by the removal of previous colonial elites. They had to radically adapt their conceptions of their own public and private lives. This seems to have resulted in all sorts of exagerrations and contradictions, which shifted and settled through the early national period. As Peter Thompson points out in Rum Punch and Revolution:

Lurking behind this contradiction between self-interest and community development was a fundamental tension between the values and imperatives of private life and those of an idealized but imperfectly realized public world. [p8]

During the 1780s, i.e. after the first great public test of the war itself, revolutionary elites faced anew the challenge of negotiating between private and public roles. The idea or ideal of retirement to private life was strong for men like Washington and Hamilton, both of whom spent the 1780s mostly out of public office. Others like Madison, remained in public life but shifted between national and local spheres.

How did questions of public and private spheres affect other future Federalists; did their answers differ from future Antifederalists? What was the relation between emerging conceptions of the public sphere and the constitutional project? Can that movement perhaps be defined as a deliberate attempt to shape a public sphere - or to define a public/private relationship - for the new nation?

Wisdom and Scholarship

THE on Cardinal Newman and the university:

Wisdom should be pursued for its own sake, alongside its attendant virtues of patience, forbearance and magnanimity. This general cultivation of mind was, Newman believed, the best way a university could promote professional and scientific study and serve wider society.

He saw knowledge not as accumulated facts, still less argumentative ability, but as an "acquired illumination...a habit, a personal possession, and an inward endowment". This was attained by enlargement of mind: the "power of viewing many things at once as one whole, of referring them severally to their true place in the universal system, of understanding their respective values, and determining their mutual dependence". To instrumentalise knowledge would be self-defeating, producing students unable to find their feet or make a contribution in the real world - better, Newman suggests, the rounded if mundane education of a poor farming boy...

The university was, for Newman, primarily a place of teaching and scholarship. Research also had value, but could not be equated with the pointless proliferation of low-quality debate and comment. A better model for research is Newman's own work on early Christian writers: intelligent, intense reflection on primary sources that, avoiding both utilitarianism and dogmatism, interrogates questions of fundamental importance to life.

Two Cultures?

In the succeeding quotations of diminishing lengths, here's the next. A Catholic view:

Today's greatest moral battle involves abortion, which is at the very epicentre of the struggle between the Culture of Life and the Culture of Death.

So much for C.P. Snow.

The Ideal Curriculum for the Ideal Student

From Daniel Mendelsohn on Oscar Wilde, in NYRB:

[At Oxford] one can be, simultaneously, brilliant and unreasonable, speculative and well-informed, creative as well as critical, and write with all the passion of youth about the truths which belong to the august serenity of old age.

What is humour?

From the LRB:

But it is also hard to avoid the thought that Blair is himself shirking the real question. He faced two serious and determined enemies during his time in Downing Street: al-Qaida and Gordon Brown. One, he concluded, represented a force so strong and rooted that it had to be uprooted and destroyed, since confrontation was inevitable; the only question was when and how. The other had to be contained, because stepping over the line would have been crazy and made war inevitable. But why on earth did he think that al-Qaida was an example of the first, and Gordon Brown of the second, rather than the other way round?

What's a job?

I was thinking about the job market, not something I have any authority to comment on, but here we are. I want to keep my options open while I'm still here studying. Not only do I not know if I want to be an academic, it might be moot anyway: if things keep on like they are, there won't be any academic jobs in the humanities in three years' time.

So here is my tip (to myself, really) on how to be something when you grow up: start being it now. I'm already doing it in academia, obviously: I am a historian now, the work I do is researching, teaching, and writing history. But if you want to be a publisher, what makes more sense than to go and publish something? If it's economically impossible to publish on paper, well that's part of the industry itself, you have to find some other way to make it wor, but it can definitely still be done. If you want to be a writer, write; we all know that one. If you want to be a teacher, teach! There are a load of projects that want volunteers for helping out in schools and stuff like that.

This is the beauty of the student period of life: there is an opportunity to do these things, to build experiences, and to try things out. That's something everyone should have, and something I should try to make the best of.

Research Approaches, 1

One potential way of organising not only research but the thesis itself is to focus on specific close-knit groups of Federalists. That will presumably mean focusing on certain locations, and the idiosyncracies of place would form part of an explanation of the differences within Federalism. The thrust of the thesis would be towards understanding why, when, and how those different groups and networks came together for the constitution.

What I'd hope to do with this approach is to avoid just talking about politics, whether local or continental, but to include the whole range of cultural, social, and intellectual experience. There is a question there, about whether Federalism is just a political persuasion, a surface preoccupation, or if it is something deeper or more complex. So what I would hope for in terms of research is to bring together local newspapers and pamphlets, correspondence, records of meetings and local politics, social and economic trends and networks, cultural productions like books, poems, and plays, civic organisations like museums and philosophical societies, even things like fashion. It may be a matter of establishing local Federalist mentalities before fitting them into a continental collage.

Gathering Time

I'm about to go and talk about my 'military influence' ideas with the graduate seminar. Then I'm going to put them away for a while. So far this term, I've been reading secondary literature, and thinking about theory. I've found that 'theorising' can slip quite easily into the realm of 'guessing,' especially when up against some sort of deadline for the production of work. At the beginning of term, I set myself up to present papers, giving myself deadlines, so that I would work. After this, I have one more thing to write, 'a geographical interpretation of the constitution,' which again will be based on theory, secondary sources, and work done last year. I'm hoping to write that this week, although it's due to be presented in three weeks' time.

When I've done that, I'm going to devote myself to primary research. I want to build up an archive, maybe even on paper but at least on computer files, of original sources to read and draw on in my work. Part of this may also mean noting archives that are not available to me here in Oxford, which I'll have to travel to in order to use. Working out, literally, where I want to go in my research, will be useful for funding application stuff next spring, and for my own sense of planning. Of course it's not completely simple, and 'research strategies' isn't something I know much about. But I intend to learn by doing.

Post-War Militarism

Yesterday I asked about the military-nationalist campaign's links to politics and ideas later in the decade. Now I want to think about the whole question of the military and how it relates to politics and ideas in the 1780s.

Periodisation] There are three key phases of military existence in the 1780s. First, while the war is still going on - and early 1781 was by all accounts a low-point in the rebel campaign. Second, the period after Cornwallis' surrender at Yorktown in October 1781, until the army was disbanded through late 1783. Third, from then onwards. The middle period is obviously critical; the Newburgh Conspiracy is the dramatic crux; Washington's resignation is the moment of resolution.

Groups within the army] It clearly can't be seen as a homogenous whole. Continentals are different from militia. Within the Continental Army there are still separate state lines, as well as Northern and Southern departments. There is also obviously a division between officers and men. Among the officers, there are differences in rank, and between field and staff officers. Among rank-and-file, some enlisted for the whole war, some for only a year or two; different men had had different wartime experiences. To what extent, then, can we speak of a 'military mindset,' or 'militarism' and who did it effect?

Relations with civilians] This complex internal structure is reflected in complex relations with the outside world. Because enlistment periods were often short, and movement in and out of the army (or from the militia to the army) was relatively fluid, rank-and-file soldiers were not always easy to distinguish from civilians. Yet soldiers and civilians were mutually hosile over issues like supply, biletting, and behaviour. This could translate into animosity towards the civil government, Continental Congress. On the other hand, lack of power in Congress was blamed for the supply and support problems. Likewise, state governments at different times seemed to both hinder and help soldiers, Continental and militia.

On this basis, it's hard to envisage a clear-cut military perspective emerging or surviving after the war's end. This is borne out, perhaps, by the way pro-military policies waned during mid-decade. The ideology of citizen militia was in a sense fulfilled by the soldiers' return to the fields during 1783. However, at the officer level there was a conscious effort - in the Society of the Cincinnati - to prolong and reproduce the military brotherhood. Public memory and historical writing must also have played a continuing role. How did these processes interact with politics and ideas in the 1780s?

Federalists' Military Precursors

[Continuing a military thread. Starts here.]

In the early 1780s a powerful group in the Continental Congress, including James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, as well as Superintendent of Finance Robert Morris, pursued expansion of Congressional power. Their priority was to achieve a revenue independent of state grants. The rhetorical focus of their campaign was military: the succesful prosecution of the war depended on Congress' effectiveness in military administration. After the war, duty to the soldiers and (more importantly) the officers who fought became a key theme, as well as the continuing security of the states. Yet this campaign faded in the middle of the 1780s without having achieved its core goal: strengthening the Continental Congress.

Does the movement for the constitution in the late-1780s represent a re-emergence of the same campaign? How similar or different were its aims, rhetoric, and support? Why did the later campaign succeed and the earlier one fail? How were the ideas and mentalities behind the earlier campaign reproduced - and how did they change - during the fallow period at mid-decade?

Diversity and Conflict

Further to yesterday's thoughts on post-revolutionary instability, here is Carroll Smith-Rosenberg (who, by the way, wrote an article that I found moving when I read it for a seminar on gender history last year, "The Female World of Love and Ritual," Signs, 1975):

Diversity and conflict existed not only on the demographic and economic register, but on the discursive plane as well... [In the new republic there were] multiple divergent, at times warring, political, social, and economic discourses... During these troubled and changing times, divergent speakers battled over the meaning of even such basic political terms as "independence," "republican virtue," "citizenship," and "popular sovereignty."

... Composites of diverse and shifting personas, of the gentleman and the hardworking tradesman, the Lockean liberal and the slaveholder, the classic republican and the fiscal capitalist, identities in the new Republic were dynamic productions informed by their social location and interactions. [This Violent Empire, 2010, pp.14-18.]

I think her use of the word 'bourgeois' for the new republican elite, elsewhere in this book's introduction, is disingenuous. Also she is concerned with the concept of a centripetal nationalism, which I suspect is an obstacle more than a goal for my own work. Those disagreements make me even more glad that her speculation seems to match mine on the point quoted here. It feels better to relate to other scholarship obliquely than to face it head-on, or merely agree.

Post-Revolutionary Consensus

I have previously hypothesised that the Revolution had a destabilising effect on American thought, breaking up old hegemonic patterns and creating a more open field for change. However, there is also a reverse effect which is perhaps also implicit or dialectially linked. That is the intellectual and social desire to create consensus and stability precisely at the moment when it is weakest. Perhaps it is precisely these countervailing forces that characterise all cultural change.

In the 1780s, the idea of 'union' and what might be called American nationalism was the subject of this consensual movement. Union symbolised American strength in the world, it served to justify the Revolution itself, and ironically it actually united Americans who were together in search of a sense of union and uniformity. If the model outlined above is right, then this type of nationalism also obscured the division and confusion in post-Revolutionary thought. How can historians find their way between these layers?

One approach is to look for differences within the 'union' consensus, among different notions of American nationhood. Yet by exploring its variants, that method might keep the particular issue of union in the foreground, and foster the assumption that it is the most important. It seems more likely to me that it is one of the least important issues, in terms of examining difference, precisely because it is capable of sustaining consensus. This is also why 'union' achieves such prominence in campaign propaganda like the Federalist.

If the question of union is a red herring that can tell us little about the Federalists or anyone else, will it be possible to look behind it to deeper problems of government, society, and liberty?

The Meaning of Blogging

Without comment:

Before writing this article, I was worried, because I didn’t have the idea for this article. I had no idea what I would do, but I knew I had to do something relevant that would drive traffic. As I struggle to come to any logical conclusion in this piece, I hope that I have at least driven an amount of traffic that only I can deem sufficient to feel satisfied.

In 2007, on brandon-alien-fine.blogspot.com, I blogged for hits because I was lonely and insecure and I wanted people to recognize me as a deep individual that knew something mysterious and special that they would never be able to understand, even if I were to offer them a sufficient explanation. Now I am not as lonely as I once was, and I have written this article on Thought Catalog to attract your pageview with the hopes of one day making money from it.

Results in History

I hope my thesis will have two kinds of results. Both of them are common types of results in works of history, yet often they are to be merely implicit. First, I hope that my work will give an account of how ideas and mentalities work in society. It would be useful to better understand how thought spreads and changes through society and over time. I hope my examination of a specific case will challenge old and suggest new ways of thinking generally about these processes.

Second, I hope to frame or reveal hidden dilemmas and connections between values or between ideas. The ways Americans in the 1780s thought (for example about liberty and power) are different from how we think now; the changing uses of words both obscure and reveal, in different ways, changing relationships between concepts. Such differences are 'hidden' in the sense that they're immanent, or inherently possible but absent: revealing them could lead to changes in our own thought.

I think both these types of results characterise the usefulness of historical study. At their centre is the typically historical ambivalence between continuity and change, or similarity and difference - the same ambivalence that haunts all human action, not least political action.

Yet most historians seem to prefer to stress an evolutionary or developmental vision. When they explicitly justify their work or point out their results they tend to suggest a linear relationship between their field of study and the present or the future, which is more or less facile or tenuous. Historians who, on the contrary, try to avoid this shadow of the Whig interpretation shy away entirely from the idea of justifications or conclusions. I want my own work to be both meaningful and sincere. Hence the need for theory and reflection.

Mentality and Motive

Sometimes Federalists say they're glad about the economic crisis, or Shays' Rebellion, because it will convince the public to favour stronger government. Sometimes they go to the extent of seemingly wishing any number of calamities on themselves for that purpose. This obviously makes their public rhetoric suspect, when they say, 'but of course we must have stronger central government, in order to deal with the economic crisis.' It seems not to be the real reason they want reform. Historians have often responded to this double talk by positing a hidden, anterior motive: namely, consolidation of elite power for its own sake.

Is there an alternative conception? Instead of dismissing ostensible motives in favour of implicit ones, perhaps it will be possible to give the former weight by making them part of a mutually supporting framework of thought. In such a framework, each individual prop (economic crisis, military weakness, and so on) may seem insufficient and therefore suspect, but we need not necessarily look beyond or beneath the framework itself - as an interrelation of parts - for a stable explanation of the Federalists' thought. Not only might that work from a historian's perspective, but it is also characteristic of mentality itself: the structure of thought may (or must) be hidden from the mind in which it operates. How many of us are aware of our true motives?

Military Influences in the 1780s

To judge by their own figures, the correlation between army officers and Federalists isn't actually as strong as often is implied by the historians of military influence, like Richard Kohn. Likewise, the Society of the Cincinnati clearly doesn't represent a proto-Federalist organisation: future Federalists like John Adams and James Madison were suspicious of it, and even Washington was anxious and ambivalent about it. So these groups played complex roles in the construction of a Federalist persuasion. They did not simply carry military values into the new politics of the republic. Rather, they participated in a dialectic that produced shifting patterns of values, and new visions of the world.

For one thing, the debate around the idea of inherited prestige in early versions of the Cincinnati did more than demonstrate that such a notion was not anathema to some revolutionaries: it also helped set Federalist politics against that idea. Congressional wrangling in the 1780s also acted to shape Federalist thinking on the issue of militia and the standing army. In the Federalist, Hamilton (the militarist par excellence) was even able to use fear of standing armies as an argument in favour of the Constitution. One thing both these examples show is how negotiation and shifts over values and institutions was continuous throughout the 1780s, not just at the Philadelphia Convention.

After all, there seems to be a fundamental contradiction in the basic militarist case, as made around the end of the war. The idea that such a weak central administration, and such limited support for the professional armed forces, could not effectively defend the country or protect its interests, was belied by the very victory those forces had achieved. Civilians and anti-militarists could effectively rest on their antagonists' laurels. Meanwhile, real American weakness was being revealed by issues like the Northwest forts and Barbary states piracy, but these could be seen as beside the point. The same counter-point could even be made about Shays' Rebellion: it was, after all, put down relatively easily and swiftly.

Max Edling may not, then, be totally correct to say that "Federalism would create a state focussed on the fiscal-military sphere." We should ask in what ways Federalist notions of the fiscal-military sphere developed, and what they entailed. How much and in what ways did Federalists want to replicate their European cousins, and how much fulfil the promise of the new?

To Change the World

More social reproduction. Pierre Bourdieu, "Social Space and Symbolic Power:"

To change the world, one has to change the ways of making the world, that is, the vision of the world and the practical operations by which groups are produced and reproduced...

The power of imposing a vision of divisions, that is, the power of making visible and explicit social divisions that are implicit, is the political power par excellence: it is the power to make groups, to manipulate the objective structure of society.

The Unintended Constitution

How Gordon Wood's thesis of the unintended and ironic Constitution has become reality in the minds of political commentators:

Do “the protection of slavery, the restriction of suffrage and so on” mean that “the framers’ constitution represented values that Americans should abhor or at least reject today”? I’m not so sure. It is certainly the case that many of the framers had values Americans today abhor and should and do reject. I tend to support those who argue, however, that most of those values were not, in fact, found in their Constitution...

...Yes, the Framers as a group were afraid of what they thought of as democracy; feared the masses and did nothing specific in the Constitution to enfranchise them; and had ideas about citizenship and virtue that were interesting but also deeply problematic... Yet it’s also the case that the ideas of self-government they derived from liberalism and republicanism turned out, in practice, to be intensely democratic. In other words, whatever they thought about “democracy” at the time, and whatever their own personal prejudices about elites and masses may have been, what they actually put into the Constitution was extraordinarily democratic. [The New Republic]

Virtue's Self-Sacrifice

Sacrifice is part of virtue: if corruption is submission to temptation, its opposite is self-denial. Revolutionary leaders wanted to be seen to practice this trait; in the early years, the Revolutionary movement thrived on sacrificing British vices like tea and fine clothes; soldiers and officers after the war held that they had made great sacrifices for an insufficiently grateful people. In Gordon Wood's Creation of the American Republic, he presents the Constitution as an ironic finale to this Revolution based on virtue, for contrary to the aims of its designers, it provided for a system that rejected the idea of virtue in favour of libertarian freedom and interest politics.

But if we, alternatively, pay attention to the sacrificial aspect of virtue - perhaps its Christian rather than its classical face - we can also interpret the 'end of classical politics' as no less paradoxical, but more deliberate: the framers offering their virtue to create a system that would not rely on virtue in the future.

Man's domination over himself, which grounds his selfhood, is almost always the destruction of the subject in whose service it is undertaken... This immense though superfluous sacrifice is required - against sacrifice itself. Odysseus, too, is the self who always restrains himself and forgets his life, who saves his life and yet recalls it only as wandering. He also is a sacrifice for the abrogation of sacrifice. His dominative renunciation, which gains mastery over itself not in order to coerce itself and others, but in expiation. [Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp.54-6]

Virtue and Domination

The concept of virtue is a problem in America's critical period. Historians of the 'republican' school emphasise its importance as a civic ideal: the virtuous republic vigilant against the threat of corruption, to both leaders and the whole community. But this seems inaccurate when we see how little concerned leaders like Washington were with encouraging virtue (and fighting corruption) among ordinary people. Perhaps we should instead see virtue as a particular quality that an elite saw in themselves, inaccessible to the majority.

In Dialiectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer discuss the episode when Odysseus has himself tied to his ship's mast by his crew, so he can listen to the Sirens' song without being lured to his death. Their interpretation seems to offer a model for an elite bourgeois concept of virtue in the Age of Revolutions:

The other possibility Odysseus, the seigneur who allows the others to labor for themselves, reserves to himself. He listens, but while bound impotently to the mast; the greater the temptation the more he has his bonds tightened - just as later the burghers would deny themselves happiness all the more doggedly as it drew closer to them with the growth of their own power... [H]is men, who do not listen, know only the song's danger but not its beauty, and leave him at the mast in order to save him and themselves. They reproduce the oppressor's life together with their own, and the oppressor is no longer able to escape his social role. [p.34]

Defending Higher Education

I'm not very good at debating politics, or more accurately, policies. When I look back on these conversations, I realise that the problem was setting the stage at the very start. It's so easy to be trapped into arguing expediency and incrementalism within a system when it's actually the system itself that needs change. What I need to learn to do is frame the argument around the principles that are worth fighting for. If we're not fighting for principles then what are we doing anyway?

It seems like the debate over higher education is stuck in a similar kind of rut. Universities have plenty of defenders, but they all seem to be making broadly the same points as the attackers. There's a vital principle that they seem to have conceded, and that's to do with the purpose of university: essentially, there's a consensus that the whole point is the pursuit of economic growth. So the debate hinges on an apparently technical question, does higher education promote growth, and if so how can it do so more effectively?

Of course the answers are generally ideological: if you support universities you'll say that expanding education creates more highly skilled workforces and boosts the economy; you might even say that higher education is "the powerhouse for economic growth." You might also find yourself in a debate about which subjects are best at promoting growth. It creates (for government-funded higher ed systems like ours) what libertarians will tell you is a classic central planning problem: how do you work out what you're going to need? If you're on the other side of the issue, you'll say:

"What's the point, you end up with a lot of debt and you may not get a job out of it anyway - what good is university?" (@ 23.38)

When we're trying to answer that question - what good is university - we shouldn't let ourselves be trapped into all these arguments about jobs and skills. Because we all know it: if that's really the point of university, then what we have is a monumentally wasteful and inefficient system. After all, they weren't thinking much about economic growth when they started founding universities in the middle ages. That was never what they were for. We need to start making that point again. Our answer should have no dollar value attached. It should start with something like this (from the same radio debate linked above):

"The purpose of university is to encourage students to think, to be critical, to be informed."

What Twitter Isn't Good For

Different forms of social reproduction have different strengths and weaknesses; what matters isn't just their intellectual, social, and cultural content, but also their form and structure. Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker (via Marginal Revolution) on online social media:

Shirky considers this model of activism an upgrade. But it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.