Historians and History-at-the-Movies

As an historian interested in film history, I've often been frustrated with the ways in which historians have tended to use history films in the classroom and to discuss them in the public sphere. 

I tend to use movies in the classroom as primary source materials, e.g., I show films made in the 1930s to teach about the 1930s.  Films can be wonderful when used this way.  Students tend to already be more sophisticated consumers of motion pictures than they are of most other kinds of primary source material.  A well-chosen film can teach us both about its subject and about the way films themselves were made and consumed at the time of its creation. Using films in this way is, of course, a luxury available to those of us who teach courses about the last 120 years or so.

Most historians, however, teach about earlier periods.  And if they use films in the classroom, it's usually as secondary sources, e.g. screening a film like Black Robe to teach about French interactions with Native Americans in the 17th century.  Films used as secondary sources in the classroom share one big feature with films used as primary sources in the classroom: students by and large prefer viewing motion pictures to reading books. But many of the things that recommend primary-source classroom films make secondary-source classroom films problematic.  For example, Black Robe is a pretty complicated and interesting portrait of Native American life, especially for a mainstream narrative film. But as a product of the early 1990s, it no doubt bares the marks both of that era of filmmaking and that era (or possibly earlier eras) of historiography.  And, of course, Black Robe wasn't filmed to be used as a textbook manqué, but rather to be a piece of narrative entertainment. Reading Black Robe in its cultural context is thus necessary, but doing so takes us far away from 17th-century Quebec.

Perhaps this latter use of films in the classroom helps explain the dominant way in which (non film-) historians have tended to write for the general public about history films.  When dealing with films about the past, historians have tended, first and foremost, to fact-check them. Indeed, volumes and websites have been dedicated to separating "reel history" from "real history" (a pun that ought to be retired, btw). 


I have long felt that such an approach to history films was problematic because of its unwillingness to seriously grapple with history films as a filmic genre.  And, especially in the last two decades, historians interested in studying film have taken more sophisticated approaches to studying history films.

But recent discussions of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln and Oliver Stone's Showtime documentary series, Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States, have highlighted another weakness of historians' fact-checking approach to movies: it does a terrible job conveying to the public what it means to do history.*

Spielberg and Stone have devoted much of their careers to putting American history on film. And though both have (often ostentatiously) employed professional historians to validate their films' take on the past, they have positioned themselves rather differently in relation to the historical mainstream. By and large, Spielberg's history films have tended to reflect the mainstream scholarly consensus about the past; Stone's have tended to be openly iconoclastic and revisionist. Perhaps unsurprisingly, academic historians have tended to prefer Spielberg's films (at least as works of history) to Stone's.

Lincoln, as far as I can tell from reading about the film, fact-checks well. But as any historian would tell you, getting the facts right, while necessary for doing good history, is not sufficient. It is perfectly possible to construct an historical narrative which is accurate, but misleading.  Historians are responsible not only for getting the facts right, but for selecting which facts are significant and constructing explanations for why things happened as they did.  Non-historians are often unaware of--or even downright hostile to--this aspect of the historical craft.**

While a number of historians have praised Lincoln, which focuses on the passage of the 13th Amendment, others have objected to the way it frames the story of emancipation entirely through the actions of European Americans, while reducing African Americans to the status of onlookers.  Prof. Kate Masur, of Northwestern University, published an editorial in the New York Times on November 12 that made this case.  And academic bloggers (and friends of this blog) Corey Robin and Aaron Bady have launched similar criticisms of the film.  All are well worth reading (as are most other things written by Robin and Bady).  But I was particularly struck by the comment thread on Corey's post on Crooked Timber.

As most readers of this blog know, Crooked Timber is an eclectic academic blog that reaches an audience that extends well beyond the academy.***   What's interesting about the comment thread on Corey's post is how many respondents don't quite get why some historians (and historically-oriented social scientists like Robin) object to Lincoln.

Some examples:

EMS:  "I’m astonished, though, and rather disgusted that any would criticize this film because there weren’t enough blacks in it, or that black agency in their own emancipation seems to have been omitted. This reminds me of a huge fight I had with my wife over “Tell ‘Em Willie Boy was Here” when she accused Polonsky of anti-feminism, despite the fact the film took place way the hell before there was any such thing as Feminism (except in a few small Eastern precincts). It’s about Lincoln and the 13th amendment. Why the hell should any blacks be in it at all? One could, probably with some force, argue that Spielberg and Kushner are guilty of tokenism. I’d argue it’s just bad film-making. Does every film have to be judged by the inclusion or exclusion of blacks? How about The Red Badge of Courage? Ya wanna make that one all black? One can dislike the choices Spielberg makes, but he’s about emotion more than historical accuracy. What he’s not is a profound thinker. What he is, usually, anyway, is a superior craftsman."

Bloix: "I know all about history from the bottom up, but I believe that there are great people whose acts turned the course of history. Lincoln, Gandhi, King, and Mandela. Their stories are great stories that deserve to be told over and over again, in every era, in every form of art."

Dave: "It may not be the constraints of history or genre driving Spielberg’s choices, but presumably culture as it is presently configured and the master-narrative of the period preclude the possibility of Spielberg telling the kind of story Corey would like. At least, it’s as likely as 'Spielberg’s blinkered vision.' There is no pop culture artifact anywhere telling that story; why be outraged at Spielberg for failing to account for an academic history when no one else does?"

Mark Field: "I saw the movie yesterday and thought it was excellent. I’m not much impressed by this criticism. There are thousands of stories that could be told about the war and about emancipation. There are stories of Thaddeus Stevens, of Frederick Douglas, of millions of unidentified slaves, of Union generals, etc. No movie can easily incorporate them all. And it’s not as if Lincoln was peripheral to the story, not then and not in historical memory.
"The fact that Spielberg chose to tell one of these stories — one which fits well the nature of film — doesn’t strike me as anything worth criticizing. It just means there are lots more (good) movies to make."

Harold:  "Masur is silly (not for the first time). Tony Kushner made a decision to restrict the story to a time period of two months in the interest of narrative economy, and it worked."

Two thoughts about these (and many other similar) comments:

One repeated trope among Lincoln's defenders in the CT commentariat is the contrast between the requirements of a movie and the requirements of history (or, more specifically, academic history).   This line of reasoning is correct...so far as it goes. To the extent that historians expect or want historical dramas to look exactly like academic history, we are bound to be disappointed. And, as I've said above, in the past, many of us have not been careful enough about distinguishing the requirements of one from the requirements of the other.  But the fact that a Hollywood historical drama is not a work of academic history does not--and should not--shield it from criticism from the perspective of academic history. Though those of us who seek to criticize a work like Lincoln need to bear in mind what those differences are...and perhaps even foreground them in our criticisms.

This leads to my second thought about these comments: just as, in the past, historians have not always been very sophisticated in the way we treat Hollywood's attempts at telling historical stories, we have also not been very effective at explaining to the public what it is we do and what we expect from works of public history (broadly understood).  The crude role of fact-checker nicely fits the public's conception of us as nothing more or less than fonts of knowledge about what happened in the past.  But it is in our capacity as interpreters of the past that we have the most interesting things to say about Hollywood's historical fictions.  If we don't understand the rather complicated, shifting generic expectations of the historical film, and the various tasks it performs beyond informing its audience about its historical subject, we will not be able to grapple with historical films successfully as interpretations of the past. And if the public doesn't understand what it means to interpret the past, or even that any historical narrative necessarily entails a series of interpretations, our public interventions are likely to be misunderstood or dismissed.


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* I'm not addressing my own opinions on Lincoln or Untold History in this post for a very simple reason: I haven't seen either of them yet.  Most of this post concerns reactions to Lincoln, but for a good example of a take on Untold History that takes an unsubtle approach to Stone's take on history, see this piece from last Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

** Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) at the 1995 Senate hearings into the Smithsonian's proposed Enola Gay exhibit:  "[I]s it really the role to interpret history, rather than just simply to put forward historical facts...? ...I was a history major. In the days when I studied the text... was essentially a recitation of fact, leaving the reader to draw their own analysis..."

*** Like Spinal Tap's, our appeal is more selective.

Agnosticism, James, and the (Missing) Ontological Argument

Over Thanksgiving break, I have been reading James's Varieties of Religious Experience.  This is my first time through the text, but I am certain that I will come back to this well again, and yet again -- and not just for the scholarly uses I can make of it.  This reading has been a profoundly moving experience, in ways I can't quite articulate yet -- just like I can't adequately explain what it was like to sit in the theater on Wednesday and see Ang Lee's stunning film adaptation of The Life of Pi.   But I'll try.

At the risk of revealing the fact that I have apparently spent a good part of the last decade under a rock, I have to admit that I knew absolutely nothing about this story before I saw it in the theater.  I had never read the book, or read anything about it.  I remember seeing the title on display in Barnes and Noble -- either when the book first came out, or perhaps later.  I really don't know. 

So I did not know what to expect when I saw the film.  The poster showed an Indian boy and a Bengal tiger together in a boat.  Magical realism? A dream sequence? A single dramatic moment meant to entice viewers to watch an otherwise underwhelming film?  I just didn't know.

I didn't know.

Now that I have seen the film, all I can think of is Job, shattered at last not by any of his sufferings but by what came after them:  the terrifying presence of the living God. "I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye sees thee," says the man who can find the strength or the fury to rail against anything and everything that has befallen him, but falls into stunned silence when brought face to face with the awful terror of a God who comes near. In a similar way, when it comes to The Life of Pi, as the Battle Hymn* says, "mine eyes have seen the glory" -- and it shook me to the center of my soul. 

The Life of Pi is not a perfect film, by any means.  But the few moments of heavy-handed sentimentalism are like so much evanescent vapor -- they will not obscure the filmmaker's vision, or yours.  Go see it, I implore you.  It is likely that you will be entertained -- visually, narratively, dramatically, the film has much to recommend it.  But if your sensibility is at all susceptible to any sense of the sacred, you might also be transported, or enraptured, or awed into a sense of helpless surrender, or at least (as was my case) prompted to raise a desperate plea to no one in particular, a plea that must remain unanswered until the very end:  please, underneath it all, let there be everlasting arms.

Of course, my reaction to this film reveals much about my temperament.  I had wondered, when I started reading James, if I could consider myself to have a "religious" sensibility in the way that James describes, because I just wasn't seeing it.  Yes, this is a horribleway to read as a historian, and I generally don't make the mistake of assuming that texts written in an earlier era might somehow "speak" to -- or about -- me.  I am an intellectual historian, damn it, and we tread a lonely, lofty road.  As Laurence Veysey put it in his Wingspread Conference paper, "Alone among academics [intellectual historians] operated (if they thought carefully about what they were doing) under the paradoxical working assumption that all ideas are false but important."**  

So okay, I admit it -- when it comes to Varieties of Religious Experience, I have broken the rules.  I have been reading James in a regular riot of perspectival multiplicity, paying attention to his argument as it both instantiated and indicated his particular historical context, but at the same time  paying attention to it as a philosophical and even a polemical appeal that might (or might not) ring true for me.

Bad intellectual history?  Probably.  Good existential choice?  Definitely.

Should I bring this personal and personalized reading of James to the seminar room next week?  Probably not.  After raising hell (in a thoroughly professional and intellectually defensible manner, of course) about the methodological difficulties of dealing with both Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Women and Economics and Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class, I would do well to leave inquiries about methodology, situated epistemology, idealism, unmarked/marked gender, identity politics, and hegemonic hermeneutics alone for a week or two, if only so that everyone in the class can recalibrate their doubtless overtaxed irony meters.  Instead, I am happy to come to class next week and talk about James as a representative thinker of his time, rather than as a philosopher whose take on truth might be meaningful or helpful for this time, for this reader.

So in the remainder of this blog post -- and I promise I won't ramble on for too much longer -- let me practice my serene intellectual detachment by pointing out something I noticed in James's text that I found interesting and puzzling.  Now, just because it's interesting doesn't mean it's important.  Indeed, I would love to hear from our readers on this -- especially those of you who are particularly well versed in Jamesian thought.  Hey, if you've read the post this far, what have you got to lose?

In James's chapter on "The Value of Saintliness," he discusses how to evaluate the merit of saints or saintliness in the real world.  James writes:

...[T]he aggressive members of society are always tending to become bullies, robbers, and swindlers; and no one believes that such a state of things as we now live in is the millennium.  It is meanwhile quite possible to conceive an imaginary society in which there should be no aggressiveness, but only sympathy and fairness....Abstractly considered, such a society on a large scale would be the millennium, for every good thing might be realized there with no expense of friction.  To such a millennial society the saint would be entirely adapted.  His peaceful modes of appeal would be efficacious over his companions, and there would be no one extant to take advantage of his non-resistance. The saint is therefore abstractly a higher type of man than the 'strong man,' because he is adapted to the highest society conceivable, whether that society ever be concretely possible or not.***

When I read this passage, it occurred to me that James is making something like an "ontological argument" for the value of saintliness.  He is borrowing here, it seems to me, from Anselm and his successors.  But, in true Pragmatic fashion, James is bringing the force of the argument to bear on the world that we can see, or that we might imagine.  This is an ontological argument in the service of a phenomenological epistemology.  We are to measure the value of such saintliness as we encounter in our piebald society against an ideal society than which none greater can be conceived.

Oddly, though, when James comes to discuss systematic theology as a philosophical enterprise with a particular (and polemical) vision of truth, the ontological argument is notably absent from his later lecture/chapter on "Philosophy," in which he reviews not only of the various "proofs" for God's existence, but also various arguments for his essential qualities and attributes.  In "Philosophy," James gives a whole laundry list of theological propositions advanced by the syllogistic methods of Thomistic theology, where divine truths are demonstrable via the tools of logical argumentation and a priori reasoning.  But Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God is not among them.**** 

Of course, Aquinas was one of many theologians who found Anselm's "proof" wanting precisely (and, I think, ironically) because of its reliance on a priori reasoning -- an epistemological foundation that David Hume scorned as well.  And Hume is, it seems, something of a favorite of James.  So I find it surprising that, in setting up his straw man, a concern with abstract ontology as a demonstration of practical irrelevancy, he left out the marquee proof.  He left it out here, but he used it earlier -- he used it because it worked for the purposes of his argument, which is to establish that a world with saints in it is, on the whole, better than a world without them. 

James is not interested in ontology, in the abstract idea of things in themselves; as an empiricist, he is concerned with phenomenology, with things in relation to other things, selves in relation to other selves.  The measure of what might be ultimately true is how well it accords with the truths we can experientially measure.  Any idea of God as he is in and unto himself is of little interest to James.  After considering a few of those divine attributes asserted by Thomistic theology and its epigones, James comments:  "candidly speaking, how do such qualities as these make any definite connection with our life?  And if they severally call for no distinctive adaptations of our conduct, what vital difference can it possibly make to a man's religion whether they be true or false?" (400).

So what I'm puzzling over here is this:  given his phenomenological bent, why does James find it necessary, or helpful, or persuasive, to evaluate the phenomena of saints and saintliness against the background of an ontological argument for the (existence of? possibility of? promise of?) the ideal society?

What is he (not) doing in structuring his argument thus?  

________

*I also saw Lincoln over the break -- that's a must-see film for American historians, certainly.  And I saw it not one week after reading Foner's Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men.  The film might be "based on" or "informed by" Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, but it was Foner's text that made the movie more than just a superlative film.  And it certainly was that.  But that's another blog post.

**Laurence Veysey, "Intellectual History as the New Social History," New Directions in American Intellectual History(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 4.

***William James, "The Value of Saintliness," The Varieties of Religious Experience, in William James: Writings 1902-1910, The Library of America (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1987), 339.

****pp. 387-410.  For the laundry-list of claims about God's essence and attributes, see especially pp. 392-398.

Three Masters

"If you figure out a way to live without a master, any master, be sure to let the rest of us know, for you would be the first in the history of the world." -- Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) in The Master (2012)

I.

L. Ron Hubbard (c. 1950)

Paul Thomas Anderson's new film The Master has already received an enormous amount of critical attention...and rightly so.  Like all Anderson's other films (Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch Drunk Love, and There Will Be Blood) it's a movie that rewards careful thought. A number of his earlier films (most notably Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood), are built on a very careful evocation of a particular time and place.   Most of the action in The Master is very specifically set in 1950..though rather than being set in a particular place, The Master, as its title suggests, revolves around a person: Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), though the film's protagonist is its other main character, Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a troubled navy veteran drawn into Dodd's circle.

If you know anything about The Master, you probably know that Dodd is an only-slightly-fictionalized version of L. Ron Hubbard, and his movement / cult (called "The Cause" in the movie), is very closely based on Dianetics, the immediate precursor to Scientology.  Although the director--and his stars--have occasionally tried to downplay the connections between Dodd and Hubbard and the Cause and Dianetics / Scientology, Anderson very carefully researched the early days of Dianetics and changed relatively little in his movie, beyond altering some terminology (e.g., in The Cause, recruits undergo "processing"; in Scientology, they undergo "auditing") and creating some composite characters.*



But like Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood, The Master is not in any simple sense a historical picture, or even an exposé of Scientology. Instead, Anderson using his very specific historical setting to explore larger themes. And one of these themes is the place of men like Lancaster Dodd in American life.  The quote above comes from what's in many ways the film's climactic scene, the final meeting meeting its two main characters.  A number of critics have drawn parallels between it and There Will Be Blood's climactic confrontation between Daniel (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Eli (Paul Dano).  But what we are supposed to make of Lancaster Dodd's final meeting with Freddie Quell is less clear than how we are supposed to view Daniel's savaging of Eli.  For example, how seriouslyare we supposed to take Dodd's above-quoted statement about masters...and what does it tell us about Dodd and his world? 

II.

Among the many things that Lancaster Dodd shares with L. Ron Hubbard is a peculiar kind authoritarianism that presents itself as promoting radical individualism.  The Cause is about freeing oneself from the burdens of one's past lives in order to return one's mind to its "natural state of perfect."  And yet, the movement is built around the personal, and rather capricious, authority of Dodd. And the path to liberation is through often humiliating "processing" games, the content of which is tightly controlled by Dodd himself.

One of the many ways in which the film is not a simple exposé of Scientology is the extent to which Dodd is presented as a kind of representative figure.  Anderson is after bigger game than just Scientology. The film does a nice job of suggesting that the promises of the Cause are a more fanciful and extreme variation of the promises of post-War America, which are conveyed, early in the film, by more conventional authority figures, as Freddie recovers from behavioral problems in a naval hospital immediately after the war. 

Ayn Rand

Indeed, I think that Hubbard and Scientology are of interest--or at least ought to be of interest--to historians of mid-to-late twentieth-century U.S. thought and culture precisely because they are not unique.  In ways that I haven't yet entirely worked out**, Dodd also reminded me of another authoritarian leader of a movement promoting a vision of individualism in the immediate post-War era: Ayn Rand. Rand, of course, has attracted a lot more attention from historians than has Hubbard, in part because her ideas are both slightly more respectable and her impact on arenas of traditional interest to historians--especially politics--is more direct.***

The differences between Rand's Objectivism and  Hubbard's Scientology are obvious and numerous. Nonetheless, the similarities between the two "masters" are also clear: Both propounded grand, totalizing philosophies that claimed to be scientific.  Both began their careers writing works of fiction and became public figures through surprise bestsellers. Both wrapped themselves in the mantle of anti-communism. Both simultaneously proclaimed a radical version of individualism while imagining the social sphere in a deeply hierarchical way (Rand's makers and takers and Hubbard's tone scale). And each ran his or her movement in often tyrannical ways.

III.

Leo Strauss

These figures are of more than casual interest to me because I'm working on a third "master" from this era: Leo Strauss.  Strauss is obviously different from Rand and Hubbard in important ways. He was a more serious thinker than they were (even his fiercest detractors would at least grant that he was more learned).  Just as importantly, he neither attained--nor tried to attain--a mass readership, let alone conventional fame (in his lifetime, at least) or fortune.  He did, however, lead a tight group of extraordinarily devoted students. And, from very early on, critics of Strauss made note of--and criticized--Strauss's following, arguing that it was a "cult" or a "cabal."

I've always tended to view the circle of students that formed around Strauss as an example of a typical German intellectual formation.  The world of early twentieth-century German thought, in which Leo Strauss came of age, was full of such Kreise ("circles").  The poet Stefan George had one.  So did Martin Heidegger.****  What was unusual about Strauss is that he (re)produced this very typically German phenomenon in his adoptive country.

But Strauss's circle was unusual in the American academic context. And his American students came to him in the midst of that American academic context, which viewed--and continues to view--his students' devotion to him with often quite fierce suspicion.  

Perhaps figures like Hubbard and Rand, and their followings, might provide an alternative context for understanding Strauss's American circle, though I have not yet worked out the most productive way to map the similarities and differences among them...and I certainly don't mean to imply that it is helpful to understand "Straussianism" as a "cult," either literally or metaphorically.

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* Tony Ortega, the former editor-in-chief of The Village Voice, who has written about Scientology for close to two decades, has written about some of these parallels.

** Thank goodness for blogs!

*** The other relevant difference is that Scientology is deeply secretive and rather brutally litigious. Nevertheless, serious historical work about it is beginning to get produced.

**** In the late '20s and early '30s, first at Marburg and then in Freiburg, Heidegger led a tight group of students who saw him as, in the words of Hannah Arendt (who was one of their number), "the secret king of philosophy."  Interestingly, when, in the mid-1960s, a North American organization was formed devoted to Heidegger, it called itself the Heidegger Circle.

From Rome with Love, II

By Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn

When encountering something outside one's usual experience, one's first instinct is to draw comparisons and contrasts with what one knows. Trite and true, right?

It sounds so simple.

But of course there are deep philosophical and psychological questions about what makes us us and what makes them them--and ethical questions about whether it should. Layer onto this questions from theology, cognitive science, anthropology, and history, let alone art and literature, and we must ask, in more ways than one, who do we think we are?

When we take note of so-called cultural differences, is a generalization about our own or another culture ever accurate? Many recent reviews of Woody Allen's To Rome with Love (still haven't seen it) judge it replete with superficial stereotypes. Are works of cultural history or social criticism often that different, however careful they might try to be? Isn't the risk of over-simplifying--or, obversely, of over-complicating, more au courant in academia these days--a pitfall of generalizing at all, and thus of characterizing, portraying, or observing?

I am excited about the "For the Love of Film" preservation blogathon that begins today. (Look out for the upcoming posts by some of my fellow USIH bloggers later this week.) Musing on the Italian/American film connection, I came across a blog that compared Italian and American posters for the same classic American films by setting the posters side by side (here for Hitchcock film posters). They really do seem different. As with album cover art or wine labels, movie posters become increasingly intriguing the more I see.

This blogger and those who commented on her posts see the Italian posters as largely more compelling because "more artistic/intriguing/seductive." Other people, though, argue that translation isn't always an improvement, as when Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in English becomes the equivalent of If You Leave Me, I Delete You in Italian. (For this and other amusing examples from countries in addition to Italy, see here)

If we see differences, do we automatically conclude they are the result of cultural differences? If we see similarities, do we assume cultural similarity? Or perhaps these are gross generalizations, categorical simplifications.

Study after study these days, no matter what the subject matter, concludes: it was complex. Isn't that how it always is, once one gets to know anything better? That is is more complicated than it first appeared?

Not necessarily. Some of us actually might be predisposed to think of things as more complicated than they really are, only to find out, upon closer acquaintance that they are more understandable. People whose differences scared us through their foreign-ness might have seemed complicated until we see the patterns of their lives up close. Unfortunately, a workable simplicity only comes to some people by discovering that others are "just like us." This can do injustice to others, and to ourselves, as much as the famous faux pas (or worse) of "othering." To make matters worse, an excessive fear of "othering" can actually lead to the "othering" of oneself, I think, through the self-accusation: otherer. Like Hester Prynne, only with an "O."

The aim of the Fulbright Commission, by whose good graces I am living and teaching in Rome this semester, is "to increase understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries." With so much to be wary of today in terms of self-advertisement and what institutions really deliver, it is refreshing to see the ways Fulbright actually does make this possible. By supporting scholars at all levels for different lengths of time in numerous locations, but always in service of this kind of mutual learning, Fulbright offers opportunities for intellectual exchanges of the humble, day-to-day sort. It could be an inspiration to USIH, but then it seems that this is precisely what USIH is doing.

As we often see others as though through veils of our own past, present, and hopes or fears of the future, it is amazing we can ever see anyone at all. (As the Dylan line goes, "It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves." And of course, it remains to be seen if we can. In an upcoming post, I hope to describe my experience in Pollenzo, where the Slow Food movement took root.) As in an earlier Woody Allen film, in a bedroom scene in which he cannot abandon himself to love making because of the superimposition of the image of his mother on his lover's face, our imaginations--whether from guilt or another state--often make it impossible to glimpse one another at all. Other people become figments of our fantasies, whether pleasant or horrifying, and another place at best a mere utopia, from the Greek, meaning "no place."

To get beyond this might be a worthy goal, but it might also be an impossible one. And it may be undesirable, in any event. Worse than superficiality and stereotyping, it casts the multitudinous veils, which are just as much a part of anyone as anything else, as irrelevant. Drawing them back is a particular technique of observing. But it is when we strive for abstracted knowledge (abstracted from them, yes; abstracted from ourselves as well) of other people and places, we are prone to over-simplify or over-complicate. Understanding is another thing entirely.

[Updated: 5/14/2012, 7:40 am CST]

Symmetry (or Complementarity)

Since it's the end of the semester and I'm otherwise occupied, here's a video that I thought worth passing along.

Symmetry (or Complementarity)

Since it's the end of the semester and I'm otherwise occupied, here's a video that I thought worth passing along.

Rachel Carson Docudrama

Do you use film in intellectual history courses?

I hadn't thought about it before, though I did see a fairly interesting film on Gertrude Stein. However, I just flipped to PBS and there is this stunning docudrama about Rachel Carson on. It is an actress portraying Rachel Carson in the last year of her life, delivering all of her ideas. Might make interesting watching in a class (though it might be slow for undergrads. I love films with careful characterization and interesting dialogue, but not all undergrads do).

Rachel Carson Docudrama

Do you use film in intellectual history courses?

I hadn't thought about it before, though I did see a fairly interesting film on Gertrude Stein. However, I just flipped to PBS and there is this stunning docudrama about Rachel Carson on. It is an actress portraying Rachel Carson in the last year of her life, delivering all of her ideas. Might make interesting watching in a class (though it might be slow for undergrads. I love films with careful characterization and interesting dialogue, but not all undergrads do).

Reversing the Vector of Intellectual History

One of the many memorable moments of our second conference was the first: James Livingston’s plenary address, “Seeing, Hearing, and Writing the End of Modernity: From Reading Pragmatism to Watching Movies.” I found intriguing the way he used Warren Susman’s theory about “reversing the vector of intellectual history” to frame the discussion. Livingston explicitly referenced Susman’s framework in his introduction, stating: “Ideas cannot be ahead of their time.” In other words, intellectuals merely express preexisting modes of understanding already out there in the ethos. In his conclusion, although he did not reference Susman by name, he rephrased this “bottom up” theory of intellectual history, arguing that the end of modernity was already deeply felt, exemplified by the turn in film history that began in the 1970s—a turn to more graphically apocalyptic visions that accompanied the implosion of modern narratives, such as patriarchy and nationalism. Postmodern theorists merely put such popular sentiments into word.

Had Livingston stuck to a historical narrative that began in the 1970s, his talk would have been pretty conventional, at least from a film studies perspective. But Livingston extended his historical analysis back, in ways both provocative and confusing. For he also argues that pragmatism, which predates the 1970s transformation in film by almost a century—and is the topic of his last two books—is the most eloquent expression of the postmodern normalization of nihilism. For, according to Livingston, James and Dewey’s anti-subjectivity were more radical than any of the more recent postmodern theorists, including Deleuze and Guattari, who are often considered at the extreme end of postmodernism.

The question I posed Livingston at the conference, and that I now pose to you, the reader: How does this make sense, at least chronologically, if we are to hue to the Susman theory that reverses the trajectory of intellectual history from the bottom to the top? In other words, if the turn in film history is the major piece of evidence that the end of modernity was already felt prior to the explosion of postmodern theorizing in the 1980s, then where does pragmatism fit in this order of things? Livingston responded that cultural forms predated pragmatism, in the form of money, which was conceptualized as “a sign of a sign,” and that Dewey and James put such seemingly banal market relations into a philosophical framework.

I am very familiar with Livingston’s argument about the relationship between the “Money Question” and pragmatism from his 1994 book, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940. In fact, I find this argument extremely convincing in that specific historical context, as I make clear in the first chapter of my book, Education and the Cold War, where I frame Dewey’s pragmatic theories of education as transformational, and in opposition to otherwise astute critics, such as Randolph Bourne and Christopher Lasch.

But, to me, Livingston’s recourse to the money example is not an answer to my question, because I find the turn in film history gives expression to a much more radical break with subjectivity, or at least a much more widely felt break. So, if pragmatism was the extremity of end-of-modernity nihilism, as Livingston maintains, then it predates the turn of film history by many decades, thus rendering the Susman thesis less plausible. What I was looking for is more specificity with regards to historical context. My thinking is that pragmatism does not decenter subjectivity to the degree Livingston maintains.

This is hopefully the first of several posts I plan to write on the conference, which was a resounding success from my vantage point. I will be taking a much more active role in organizing next year’s conference. I only hope we can duplicate some of the energy we created this year.

Andrew

Reversing the Vector of Intellectual History

One of the many memorable moments of our second conference was the first: James Livingston’s plenary address, “Seeing, Hearing, and Writing the End of Modernity: From Reading Pragmatism to Watching Movies.” I found intriguing the way he used Warren Susman’s theory about “reversing the vector of intellectual history” to frame the discussion. Livingston explicitly referenced Susman’s framework in his introduction, stating: “Ideas cannot be ahead of their time.” In other words, intellectuals merely express preexisting modes of understanding already out there in the ethos. In his conclusion, although he did not reference Susman by name, he rephrased this “bottom up” theory of intellectual history, arguing that the end of modernity was already deeply felt, exemplified by the turn in film history that began in the 1970s—a turn to more graphically apocalyptic visions that accompanied the implosion of modern narratives, such as patriarchy and nationalism. Postmodern theorists merely put such popular sentiments into word.

Had Livingston stuck to a historical narrative that began in the 1970s, his talk would have been pretty conventional, at least from a film studies perspective. But Livingston extended his historical analysis back, in ways both provocative and confusing. For he also argues that pragmatism, which predates the 1970s transformation in film by almost a century—and is the topic of his last two books—is the most eloquent expression of the postmodern normalization of nihilism. For, according to Livingston, James and Dewey’s anti-subjectivity were more radical than any of the more recent postmodern theorists, including Deleuze and Guattari, who are often considered at the extreme end of postmodernism.

The question I posed Livingston at the conference, and that I now pose to you, the reader: How does this make sense, at least chronologically, if we are to hue to the Susman theory that reverses the trajectory of intellectual history from the bottom to the top? In other words, if the turn in film history is the major piece of evidence that the end of modernity was already felt prior to the explosion of postmodern theorizing in the 1980s, then where does pragmatism fit in this order of things? Livingston responded that cultural forms predated pragmatism, in the form of money, which was conceptualized as “a sign of a sign,” and that Dewey and James put such seemingly banal market relations into a philosophical framework.

I am very familiar with Livingston’s argument about the relationship between the “Money Question” and pragmatism from his 1994 book, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940. In fact, I find this argument extremely convincing in that specific historical context, as I make clear in the first chapter of my book, Education and the Cold War, where I frame Dewey’s pragmatic theories of education as transformational, and in opposition to otherwise astute critics, such as Randolph Bourne and Christopher Lasch.

But, to me, Livingston’s recourse to the money example is not an answer to my question, because I find the turn in film history gives expression to a much more radical break with subjectivity, or at least a much more widely felt break. So, if pragmatism was the extremity of end-of-modernity nihilism, as Livingston maintains, then it predates the turn of film history by many decades, thus rendering the Susman thesis less plausible. What I was looking for is more specificity with regards to historical context. My thinking is that pragmatism does not decenter subjectivity to the degree Livingston maintains.

This is hopefully the first of several posts I plan to write on the conference, which was a resounding success from my vantage point. I will be taking a much more active role in organizing next year’s conference. I only hope we can duplicate some of the energy we created this year.

Andrew