The History Wars and Detachment

In her post, “A Canon Canon,” L.D. asks readers to suggest books related to the canon debates of the 1980s, which crystallized with the Stanford “Great Books” debate, L.D.’s dissertation topic. L.D. seems both excited and worried about her topic’s continued relevance, about how such relevance should or should not inform her approach. As she writes: “At some point—and I haven’t quite identified that point yet—the debate about canons and canonicity shifts from a historic moment that I am examining to a current critical discourse into which I am, as the argot of academe has it, ‘making an intervention.’ This is one of the (many!) tricky methodological challenges of my dissertation.”

In the comments section, I posted the bibliography of the most important books I used and/or analyzed in my chapter on the topic of the canon wars (one chapter of nine on the history of the culture wars). My list of books provoked this response from L.D.: “This is both informative and illustrative. Your list instantiates exactly the oscillation I see ahead—a toggling between immediacy and remove, a scholarly debate as a historic ‘event’ and ‘detached’ scholarship about the event.”

Does writing about topics in such close proximity to our lives—temporally, professionally, epistemologically, politically, perhaps even psychologically—change our approach? Are we more likely to engage our subjects as contemporaries? Are we more likely to enter into the struggles that we are seeking to understand and analyze? I find these methodological questions fascinating.

I admit that when I first chose the culture wars as the topic of my second book, I had similar concerns. I had a dog in the race, so to speak. But I did not want to write yet another culture wars polemic, yet another missive against all that is wrong in the world. To my happy surprise, once I began my research I felt less of a subjective pull. I started seeing historical subjects worthy of historical analysis. Yes, I disagree with many culture warriors (and I even agree with a few). But I also feel detached from them. I suppose this is as it should be (although my former self would be surprised not only by my detachment but also by my comfort with such detachment).

None of this is an endorsement of detachment in and of itself. Sometimes, I think, a full-throttle polemic is in order (as I hoped to make evident by the example of my very un-detached essay on Teach for America). But I also think learning how to be detached from the culture wars has improved my ability to understand them. In writing my chapter on the canon wars, I felt like a distant observer, much as I would if I had written a chapter on the Constitutional Convention. I held no more affinity for a poststructuralist obliterator of canons like Stanley Fish than I did for a traditionalist defender of them like Allan Bloom. I identified no more with Richard Rorty than with Dinesh D’Souza (this definitely came as a surprise). Of course, this does not mean I sought faux “objectivity” in the fashion of some half-wit television host like David Gregory: “Let both sides present their case, the truth must lie somewhere in the middle; or, at least we won’t be accused of bias, the ultimate sin of political reporting).” No, in writing my canon wars chapter, detachment meant I had the freedom to point out the contradictions that inevitably formed the arguments of all of my subjects, such an approach being a means to a better historical understanding.

In sum, L.D.’s “tricky methodological challenge” is not necessarily mine. For the most part. I am currently writing a chapter on a topic from which detachment is proving more difficult. The topic is the “history wars” and the chapter deals with some of the infamous controversies about public history from the 1990s, especially the brouhahas over the Enola Gay and National History Standards. It also is an intellectual history of the methodological debates about the historical discipline that were embedded in these larger public history struggles. Historians are the main subjects; historiography is the central content. In other words, this chapter hits close to home. The reason for this is not because I want to take sides, although I am more tempted here than in my other chapters. Rather, I am finding detachment more difficult because the explanations and arguments offered by historians are my own. I have been trained to think like my subjects. More than that, given that my subjects are some of the most influential historians of the last few decades, given that their books have often been de rigueur in graduate historiography seminars, it’s not too far fetched to claim that I have been trained to think like my subjects by my subjects.

By the early 1990s, a debate had ensued about the proper approach historians should take to the past. On the one hand were traditionalists, who caustically criticized the hold social and cultural history had taken on the larger discipline, to the demise of traditional political and, yes, intellectual history. They charged that New Historians were relativists who no longer believed in the longstanding purpose of the historical craft, to shed light on the truth. For instance, Gertrude Himmelfarb, one such traditionalist, maintained that privileging the “holy trinity” of race-class-gender was an ahistorical imposition of present concerns on the past. On the other hand were postmodernists on the order of Hayden White, who provocatively claimed that the work of the historian was no more than “a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse.” The contours of this debate were not new, but the political urgency of it was unique, given the larger context.

Most professional historians sought to carve out a middle ground in these historiography wars. In their 1994 book, Telling the Truth About History, Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob sought to “take on both the relativists on the left and the defenders of the status quo ante on the right.” Eschewing both epistemological (if not political) extremes, they argued in favor of “a democratic practice of history [that] encourages skepticism about dominant views, but at the same time trusts in the reality of the past and its knowability.” But, while charting this middle ground, Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob offered a compelling analytical framework that explained how historiographical developments had contributed to a traditionalist-postmodernist binary that seemed false. Social historians, who came of age in the 1970s on the heels of the sixties liberation movements, wrote histories of marginalized groups, predominantly blacks, women, and workers, that complicated traditional, often triumphalist narratives of the United States. But they accomplished this with traditional methodologies and epistemologies. “Social historians did not oppose the standards of objectivity or the codes of professional discipline; they used those very standards to challenge the traditional interpretations which had excluded marginal or nonconforming historical groups.” That said, no matter their objective intentions, social historians undermined the premise of historical objectivity by revealing that historical narratives were always partial, always political. “It is as if the social historians with their passion for breaking apart the historical record had dug a potentially fatal hole into which history as a discipline might disappear altogether.”

I can’t detach from these subjects because their analysis seems, well, truthful. As such, I see Telling the Truth as both a primary and secondary source. (The same goes for a few other sources, especially Peter Novick’s brilliant That Noble Dream, which emerged from the same historiographical crisis about the "objectivity question.")

A Canon Canon

As I have described it in my Blogger profile, my dissertation will present "an intellectual history of an infamous, emblematic but still inadequately understood battle in the so-called Culture Wars of the 1980s: the 'Great Books' debate at Stanford University."

One of the major ideas I am/will be paying attention to is the idea of canonicity -- literary canons, cultural canons, disciplinary canons.  This is why both E.D. Hirsch and Allan Bloom, the Mutt and Jeff of cultural literacy during the 1980s, are on my reading list.  They are two among many primary sources that I will be using in order to sketch out the broader cultural landscape within which and/or against which the particular debate at Stanford took place.

At some point -- and I haven't quite identified that point yet -- the debate about canons and canonicity shifts from a historic moment that I am examining to a current critical discourse into which I am, as the argot of academe has it, "making an intervention."  This is one of the (many!) tricky methodological challenges of my dissertation.  In order to manage this move -- and I think it will be an oscillation, a move back and forth between what I might call "the historic debate" and "the current debate about the stakes of the debate" -- I need to develop my own canon (or, if I simply must abandon irony for the good of the collective, my own list) of works that address notions of canonicity and cultural value since the 1980s.*

So far, my list includes such authors as John Guillory, Evan Watkins, Walter Benn Michaels, Gerald Graff, and Henry Louis Gates. I should probably add Stanley Fish too.  Lawrence Levine fits here as well -- Highbrow/Lowbrow was published after the Stanford kerfuffle, though very close to it.  And the wonderful anthology edited by David Richter, Falling into Theory,  points toward a number of authors with whom I will need to be in conversation.

But I would be more than happy to hear from our readers (and my blog colleagues!) on this question.  If you can think of other works that ought to be on my radar screen, feel free to add them in the comments section below.
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*Now, my canon on the canon question before the 1980s is an entirely separate list.  So far it includes, among others, guys like Matthew Arnold, F.O. Matthiessen, Leslie Fiedler, Lionel Trilling.  And yes, they are all guys.

Guest Post: Andrew Seal on Canon Formation and the Sight & Sound Poll

Guest blogger Andrew Seal follows up today on my post from last week on the 2012 Sight & Sound poll. Andrew is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Yale.  His dissertation concerns politics and print culture in the twentieth century Midwest. His other research interests include Jewish studies, queer studies, and 20th/21st century US literature.

Thanks, first of all, to Ben Alpers for allowing me to respond at greater length than a comment might allow to his very sharp and insightful post about the 2012 Sight & Sound poll. He is very right to see the poll as a valuable resource in trying to get a handle on many of the kinds of questions which intellectual historians might ask about film criticism and (mostly elite) film consumption.

It is especially valuable, as he notes, as a snapshot of contemporary cultural politics surrounding canons, which has certainly changed in the past twenty or even ten years, although perhaps not quite, I think, the way that Ben argues it has. Ben makes the case that the positive responses to the Sight & Sound canon reflect an embrace of a sort of DIY approach to canon formation, where even the most authoritative canons are seen more as “conversation-starters,” and less as tools for indoctrination or discrimination. Furthermore, he very compellingly links this new attitude toward the massive increase in casual availability of all kinds of films—an increase which has made it possible for an avid cineaste to feel that she is, as Ben says, “no longer constrained by the programming choices of others.”

Yet I would argue that, far from reflecting a “mixtape” approach to canon formation, the 2012 Sight & Sound poll still shows all the fingerprints of a quite deliberately programmed approach to the cinema and to its history. Less important than the relatively anarchic, “make-your-own-queue” influences of YouTube and Netflix have been the still quite top-down institutions like the Criterion Collection of DVDs, the New York arts cinemas like Film Forum and the IFC Center, and prestigious film festivals like those at Cannes, Telluride, Toronto, and Venice.


First let me say why I think it has been rather difficult to see this less anarchic spirit in the coverage of the release of the 2012 poll. First of all, a huge percentage of discussion of the poll has centered around what is, in my opinion, a non-issue: the toppling of Citizen Kane from the number one spot in the critics’ poll (by Vertigo) and in the directors’ poll (by Tokyo Story). As Ben noted in the comments to his post, “no film came close to appearing on a majority of ballots,” but not only that, the difference between Kane and the two films displacing it was, proportionately, pretty small: Kane appeared on only 4% fewer ballots than Vertigo in the critics’ poll, and less than 2% fewer than Tokyo Story in the directors’. Yet this switch has been granted enormous magnitude: in the words of the Scott Tobias of the Onion AV Club, it’s “like having to orbit around a different sun.”

Secondly and somewhat contradictorily, as that Onion AV Club article also points out, the rest of the top of the list has remained remarkably steady (or stodgy) over the decades and resolutely resistant to more recent films: the “newest” film in the critics’ Top Ten is 2001: A Space Odyssey, which came out two years before Paul Thomas Anderson, director of There Will Be Blood, was born. Together, these two factors—the Citizen Kane shake-up and the stodginess—make it seem as if the voters are collectively both a little capricious (why the ascendancy of Vertigo after all these years?) and also not paying close attention to the ongoing development of cinema (can it really be the case that nothing since 1968 deserves the hyper-immortalization of Top Ten status?). The picture one might be forgiven for forming is of a voter exploring the back catalogue of films somewhat idiosyncratically, championing a few favorites, but generally insulating herself from newer, fresher currents, or, more charitably, remaining aloof from trendy directors-of-the-moment and cause célèbres.

 I think this picture is inaccurate, though, and a closer look at the whole 2012 list compared to the whole 2002 list shows why. First off, it’s important to note that Sight & Sound itself has made impressive efforts to adapt to a quite different landscape of film criticism and production; most significantly, it has massively expanded its voting pool: from 145 critics in 2002 to 846 in 2012 (a nearly six-fold increase!) and from 108 directors in 2002 to 359 in 2012 (about three-and-a-third times larger). This expansion has meant that the total number of films voted for has increased abundantly as well, but not quite in line with the ballooning of voters: from 884 films in 2002 to 2556 in 2012—an impressive enlargement, but less than three-fold.

Moreover, a detailed look at what the new films on the 2012 list are indicates that this healthy but not overwhelming expansion of the canon also seems to be along some definite, and relatively specific, lines. As Tobias notes in the Onion AV Club article cited above, the one big change in the Top Ten is the introduction of the Soviet documentarian Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, and this greater enthusiasm for non-narrative film extends strongly to the broader field. While I can’t, unfortunately, be precise in quantifying how many documentaries, avant-garde shorts, and pieces of filmic installation art have been added (Sight & Sound doesn’t have a column for genre, and it would be rather laborious—and subjective—for me to supply it), I can approximate it by listing some of the non-narrative or experimental directors who gained the most from the poll’s expansion: Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, who had no films in 2002 and now have fifteen; Stan Brakhage, whose tally increased by nine; the documentarian Frederick Wiseman, who went up from a single film to ten; and Robert Beavers, Jan Svankmajer, and Bruce Baillie, none of whom were represented in 2002, but who each have seven films listed in 2012. By contrast, Federico Fellini, whose films are artsy but not, I would argue, truly experimental, lost four films from 2002 to 2012. (For more, I have created a spreadsheet with all the data mentioned above and below in this post; it can be found here.)

Most of these non-narrative directors’ films are not available via Netflix, and one would have to look fairly hard to find many of them on YouTube or other free streaming sites (I’m speaking from experience here). And that’s also the point—if one is on one’s own, one has to look hard for them, and to know where to look and what to look for. The presence of so many non-narrative films on the 2012 list suggests to me that the changes between 2002 and 2012 are not due to casual exploration, but rather to focused and guided recuperation of certain films and certain kinds of films.

The Criterion Collection is probably the most famous and most admired effort along these lines and, while it doesn’t have a large number of experimental or documentary films in its inventory, its influence on the list is fairly evident. Alongside the more mainstream re-releases of fairly well-known classics, Criterion runs a series called Eclipse, which “is a selection of lost, forgotten, or overshadowed classics in simple affordable editions. Each series is a brief cinematheque retrospective for the adventurous home viewer.” Almost every Eclipse series contains a film that was new on the 2012 Sight & Sound list. A striking number of other new Criterion releases also joined the 2012 list.

The films selected for the Criterion Collection have often been recovered first at New York art cinemas like IFC or Film Forum: a sensible connection, after all, because the curatorial and technical restoration of a film is an expensive and labor-intensive process, and, while the Criterion Collection’s yearly output is impressive, the number of films that can be restored is quite limited, and it is wise to get both a theatrical re-release and a deluxe DVD/Blu-Ray out of each restored film print.

Finally, I think it’s worth putting some numbers out there to check whether the poll’s reputation for stodginess holds over the broader list. (Again, the data for this can be found in the spreadsheet linked above.) Over the full 2012 list (all critics and all directors), the median year of production is 1973, and the average year for the 2012 list is about 1972. So both the median and the mean for the list as a whole are four or five years later than the “newest” film in the Top Ten. Not only that, but both figures represent a full seven-year advance over the 2002 list (median: 1966; mean: 1965). Moving a list this size seven years in just a decade is fairly impressive, and suggests a much more than random movement in the voting pool.

Which leads me to my last, and most conjectural, point, which, like my sense that there are many more non-narrative films in this poll’s results, is more impressionistic than quantified. It seems to me that there are far more films in the 2012 list which are from the global south and from the old Soviet bloc than there were in 2002, and I think it is this, largely, that is pushing the median year forward in time, as more of these nation’s film industries only really took off in the last third of the 20th century, or at the very least only after World War II. This shift is paralleled by what I believe to be a (proportional) decline in the number of films in the 2012 list which could be considered products of Classical Hollywood Cinema, and I would point to this chart to back this claim up.





The decades of greatest change between 2002 and 2012—other than the 2000s, for obvious reasons—are the 1950s and the 1940s. The percentage of films from these two decades declined from 15.3% and 10.2% (respectively) in 2002 to 10.1% and 5.8% in 2012. Now, not all of these films are necessarily Hollywood products, but if we’re talking the 1940s and 1950s, a lot of them are. Furthermore, I did a little bit of checking, and only about three-fourths (663 of 884) of the films on the 2002 list repeated on the 2012 list (in the spreadsheet, I’ve marked the years of those films in italics), and it seems to me that Classical Hollywood Cinema is over-represented in those that didn’t return.

The availability of films from the global South and from ex-Soviet bloc countries on DVD or streaming has swelled since 2002, but it is still much more difficult to view even some of the most acclaimed products of these parts of the world than it is to see a product of Classical Hollywood Cinema. It’s a little easier if one has a multi-region DVD player (which I imagine many professional critics do), but I would offer that the best possibility for seeing these films is not home viewing and not even an arts cinema, but at one of the many international film festivals.

As much as I love Classical Hollywood Cinema, I personally find these shifts very healthy, and I hope they do presage greater availability of some of these (for now) obscure classics. But the shape of the 2012 Sight & Sound list is not really the product of critics and directors programming their own viewing. At festivals, through the Criterion Collection, at arts cinemas, the choices are very much decided, not deliberated. I think most cineastes are happy with that—Criterion and the others do an exceptional job of dusting off mouldering gems. But it is important not to confuse satisfaction with the current arrangement of taste-making and gate-keeping institutions with autonomy. If the Sight & Sound poll teaches us something about how canons work today, I’d say it tells us that the institutions which form canons have gotten better at selling them, not that they’ve ceded authority to make—or re-make—them.