Blindspots III: Modernity

PROGRESS: Always "headlong" and "ill-advised."
- Flaubert, "Dictionary of Received Ideas"

"Modernity" is probably the greatest historiographical cliché ever devised. It flexibly encompasses five hundred years of history; it concerns the entire world; it is general enough to cover the entire cradle-to-grave spectrum of human life. Any historical work that purports to be about modernity acquires ex officio a veneer of interest and significance. But since there are so many of them, no one can read them all, much less force them to agree on a sensible definition. Even when subsidiary clichés are deployed to cover up this lack of substance--for instance, "rationalization" and "industrialization"--they rarely add up to anything interesting or even workable.

My greatest objection to "modernity" as a concept, I think, is that it amounts to a resurrection of the Whig interpretation of history, albeit at a sort of otiose critical remove. To deal with this problem, several revisions have been devised, most notably the idea of "multiple modernities" and Bruno Latour's thesis that we're always relying on "modern"-"premodern" hybrids even as "modernity" insists we're dealing with pure types. None of these, however, can adequately address the central historiographical problem, which is that "modernity" is something you always move toward and never something you move away from (unless you move beyond it to "postmodernity").

Human societies can, I think, move in a variety of different directions. Let me give you an example: the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Russian economy. It was overwhelmingly an agricultural one, which is typically considered a sign of being "premodern." Yet in this case, the exact opposite was true. By the standards of the mid-eighteenth-century enlightened conventional wisdom, commerce was worthy of being ignored or restricted, while agriculture was the staff of the state and needed to be supported by appropriate economic policy. Accordingly, around the turn of the century, economic thought in Russian government circles divided into two rough groups: the "modern" free traders, who wanted to preserve Russia as a morally conservative agricultural nation, and the industrialists, who appealed to rather Petrine cameralist rhetoric and wanted the state to encourage industry by heavily involving itself in the economy. Which of these groups represented "modernity" and which did not? Show your work.

The Russian economy's eventual choice of the second path did not represent an advance along a linear path towards anything called "modernity." The choices it made, if not just then, then later, kept its structure close to its Petrine roots on the one hand and brought it to a twentieth-century crisis on the other. The real eigentlich-gewesen here, in other words, is the absence of modernity as such--a blind spot historians must accept.

Blindspots II: Morality

It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead--often not recognizing fully what they were doing--was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another--doubtless very different--St. Benedict.
- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

The proposal After Virtue presents may be the only ethical system ever devised whose credibility depends on the firmness of its historical arguments. MacIntyre's goal here is to show, among other things, that a) our moral vocabulary is senseless; b) it is senseless because it depends on a set of terms inherited without context from older ethical systems; c) these older systems had at their core the emplacement of the individual in a social role and a stable notion of human purpose. Two of these claims are historical rather than philosophical ones, and the extent to which MacIntyre's project--the revivification of an Aristotelian view of virtue--can succeed is linked intimately to the historical fate of Aristotelianism.

So can we historians sustain a MacIntyrean account of the former moral world? The question is more difficult than it looks. Certainly MacIntyre references Homer and Aristotle, authors that definitely belong to the historical period in question. But what is the relationship between these individuals and morality as it actually existed during this period? In an important way, MacIntyre conflates ideas about morality with morality itself--or, in other words, intellectual history with cultural history. For his account to be meaningful, the notion of an Aristotelian moral system based on virtue must be discovered in both fields, because if it existed only in the former, it would be yet another senseless morality.

But such a discovery is impossible even in principle. The most we can dig up from the ancient Greek period is a limited set of programmatic moral texts, asserting things about what morality ought to be. The existence of such texts proves precisely nothing, because it can be evidence for a self-confident and triumphant moral system as well as one that feels under threat. Lacking the ability to ask appropriate questions of the ancient Greek man-in-the-street, we leave a gaping hole at the very heart of what our moral systems are supposed to provide us with. The intellectual history of moral systems thus, paradoxically, leaves morality itself untouched.

It would be quite fair to object that philosophers do not have time to also be historians and cannot be held to the same empirical standards. True enough; but as it turns out, MacIntyre's substitution of intellectual for cultural history has a direct bearing on his prescriptive argument. He wants the revival of Aristotelian morality to issue ultimately in the formation of purpose-oriented communities of practice (or something). How is this supposed to work, on the unavoidable fundamental level of feelings, conversations, and behaviors? We can't tell--precisely because we lack any coherent account of how it used to work. Programmatic texts do not help us refashion communities. They only tell us about their anxieties.

Blindspots I: Terrorism

The Moscow bombings, as expected, produced the usual storm of discussion about "capitulating to terrorism," "not letting the terrorists frighten us," and so on. While the chances for any direct shift in Russian policy as a result of this or any other terrorist attack are slim, it does raise an interesting question: how will any future policy shift be interpreted, given the background of terrorism? How tightly will subsequent historical explanations of Russia's Caucasus policy be linked to this background? It seems undeniable, for instance, that the apartment building bombings in 1999 (whoever their real author may have been) were in fact decisive in shaping the decision to attack Ichkeria. Are the other terrorist attacks likely to be as influential?

We cannot answer any such question satisfactorily unless we first resolve a more fundamental one: were the patterns of daily life altered by terrorism or not? In other words, were terrorists successful, to whatever extent, in "frightening" Muscovites? It would be tempting to look for an answer in sources like Russian LJs or the press, but each of these media has its own problems. LJs are not private documents and would thus exhibit a marked reluctance to admit to fear; at any rate, they are not representative. The press and other mass media are, of course, subject to political pressure. Gossip tends to enforce conformity to the dominant viewpoint. Faced with these problems, the historian casts about, unable to discover or disprove the existence of a society overcome by widespread but concealed fear.

Then there are the statistics. What was ridership like on the Ring Line before and after the bombs? How do people prefer to move about the city? Do people go out or keep to themselves? These sources, however, have their own problems. It is doubtful that accurate statistics can be kept by line number, especially if you consider the enormous hordes of people shoving through the V. I. Lenin Metropolitain at rush hour. We cannot trace a single attack through the statistical noise produced by ten million daily public transit commuters. Surveys may help us--but if people do not admit even to themselves that they are scared, how will they admit it to the pollster? The labor involved in gathering statistical data is enormous, and the results are only a little less uncertain than before.

The truth is, we have no good way of discovering the true impact of terror. So those big, fundamental political history questions--about the relationship between public policy and public response, between governmental structure and the impact of terrorism, between terrorism as a strategy and its hypothetical results--will remain unanswerable, and more so with every passing year. As a geopolitical fact, it might be said, terrorism is the most important phenomenon of the early twenty-first century. But at its most intimate point of contact, it disappears from the view of historians.

Confessions of a Repentant Public-Sphere-Ist

Recent surveys of the Enlightenment have called into question earlier portrayals of this "rebirth of 'paganism' " as a secular, liberal critique of ancien régime political and religious values launched by a handful of great writers such as Voltaire and Diderot. Dorinda Outram, for example, has offered a different framework in which the Enlightenment is seen as revolving around controversies about gender, religion, government, science, and the exotic, in the context of the rise of new forms of sociability. This broadening of the concept of the Enlightenment to include all those involved in building the "public sphere"--a critical marketplace of ideas that forced state and Church to find new languages of legitimization--is salutary, but it nonetheless remains Eurocentric. Although Outram has gone out of her way to acknowledge that there were many "publics" outside Britain, France, and Germany, including those in the British and Spanish American colonies, Greece, Italy, and eastern Europe, the controversies she studies are those that preoccupied the great minds of northern Europe. Outram has justified her choice by pointing to the marketplace. Cheap books, newspapers, and periodicals homogenized and globalized the public sphere; the questions and controversies of the world were those that haunted northern European scholars.

This approach to the Enlightenment is limiting and only partially right ... The Spanish American Enlightenment was a dual process of creating such discursive space and consolidating a public sphere.
- Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World (2001)

I was struck by this passage in what is otherwise a fascinating and compelling book. For someone who does not specialize in the eighteenth century, it might be difficult to appreciate how low its information content really is. After all, it doesn't bear the marks of traditional academic trendiness; there are no difficult words or Frenchified turns of phrase (unless you count "discursive," which has now become totally assimilated). And it seems to be making a contestable and even interesting claim. What could be wrong with talking about cheap newspapers?

The truth is, there is hardly a single piece of academic writing about the period published in the last 20 years or so that doesn't end up making some claims about "public spheres" and "discursive spaces." What was once a novel and potentially revolutionary historiographical claim has become just as rote and uncritical as any of its Whig-historiography predecessors. Of course, I've never been one to buck a trend--my senior thesis had "public sphere" in the title. Naturally, the fact that a claim is popular doesn't make it wrong. But it might be worthwhile to see what it has caused us to miss.

A historical recap. The term "public sphere" is supposed to have been introduced into eighteenth-century historiography by Jürgen Habermas's 1962 Habilitationsschrift, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. This is false. Historians don't like to admit when they've read a translation, but in this case this form of reception became a collective phenomenon. The actually important text was Thomas Burger's 1989 translation of the book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. (As my advisor pointed out to me, the highly misleading rendering of the abstract noun Öffentlichkeit as the slightly less abstract but more "spatialized" public sphere may have been the source of all the present trouble.) Because the translation arrived at a point in time when issues of space, popular culture, material culture, and print media were at the forefront of historiographical innovation, the spatialized rendering fit very nicely with just about everyone's research project. That's when the hegemony of the "public sphere" began.

In its original Habermasian terms, Öffentlichkeit was a set of norms and mechanisms for public discussion that allowed the bourgeoisie to make universalizing claims while bounded by conditions of communicative rationality. (As I argued in my thesis, and others pointed out elsewhere, this was really a manifestation of Habermas's philosophical concerns rather than any kind of well-grounded claim about history). At the height of the latest anti-Enlightenment moment in Western academia, rationality as a source of historical explanation did not have a promising future ahead of it. If the "public sphere" were to survive, it would have to be evacuated of all of its Habermasian content--and this happened very shortly. Characteristically, no one denied the existence of the "public sphere" as such--only that it was a a set of norms and mechanisms for public discussion that allowed the bourgeoisie to make universalizing claims while bounded by conditions of communicative rationality.

Thus, the end result, which continues to dominate historiographical discussion, was a "public sphere" with no specific content at all other than a vague notion of sociability, expanding print culture, and so on. When examined in its concrete usage, in fact, the phrase is nothing but shorthand for all those things that were already beginning to be appreciated before Structural Transformation arrived. (In the extract above, for example, the reference to the "critical marketplace of ideas" could be removed without any significant difference in meaning.)

What makes this so pernicious, however, is that the public sphere continues to retain a vague connotative significance as a reified historical concept. People who would never agree with Habermas's argument as it was framed in the baldfaced way he presented it in the original book use "public sphere" to connote a range of warm'n'fuzzy associations like "deliberation," "reasoned public discussion," "freedom of criticism," and so on. This enables a characteristic historiographical maneuver. First, a few venues and publications are cited as existing in a particular place. This satisfies the "shorthand" criterion for the existence of a "public sphere"--after all, if the term doesn't really mean anything beyond "venues and publications," there's no harm to using it. When the term is used, however, the historian leverages its connotations to argue about the broader significance of the "public sphere" in country x, liberated entirely from any need to prove empirically the existence of a non-trivial form of "deliberation." In this way, spurious "public spheres" have been identified everywhere from Russia to, in Cañizares-Esguerra's case, mid-eighteenth-century New Spain. Needless to say, this is a form of laziness no amount of problematization will cure.

Substance and Shadows

A romantic hero replaced the sentimental hero of the beginning of the century. Rather than the passive hero, whose soul became the vessel for the world's misfortune, they admired the active man, who displayed beauty in action and triumph. The romantic hero was capable not only of great feats; he also knew everything, and understood the world; he was brilliantly educated. The pravovedy, in the first decades of the school, worked hard to teach themselves, to make up for the shortcomings of the school's education ... The pupils read Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, and Belinksii, as well as many foreign writers. Several classes formed libraries, supported by the pupils' dues. They discussed their readings in endless, life-and-death "Russian-style" discussions. In the 1850s, all the classes, even the youngest, formed literary journals. "Literature captivated us all," one graduate wrote ... The pravovedy entered the service in their late teens or early twenties with a unique sense of their personal worth and superiority. They believed that they were engaged in a heroic mission on behalf of the law.
- Richard Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness

When Maximilian Voloshin wrote, brilliantly, that "The materialist grasped with probing fingers/Not substance, but the shadow of his dream," he was getting at a much more specific kind of meaning than we would normally assume. Something about the nineteenth-century Russian mindset turned even the most apparently boring subjects into the materials of personal transfiguration and poetic zhiznetvorchestvo. It was, for instance, far from incongruous for Herzen to cast Proudhon and Hegel as forges of character in the well-known quote currently at the top of this page.

"Legal consciousness," in Wortman's reading, is a case in point. The pravovedy represented a kind of intelligentsia movement in the direction of impersonal legality and an independent judiciary, one which included even a young Pobedonostsev as one of its primary exponents. Legality, in its nineteenth-century Western European context, was a thoroughly and deliberately boring idea. It was the rallying-cry of sober bourgeois jurists in black suits, early and often satirized as tedious, pedantic fuddy-duddies, but never as sentimental or romantic bohemians. It might even be said that the ideology of the night-watchman state needed to be boring so as not to seem partial and personalistic.

So how did it suddenly become romantic to be a jurist in nineteenth-century Russia? The simplest explanation would of course be the arbitrariness and lack of legal spirit among the corrupt officialdom that overwhelmingly staffed the Empire's judicial institutions. Legal consciousness thus became bohemian simply by virtue of the fact that legality represented a critical or even a countercultural stance. After all, unlike much of the rest of Europe, Russia had managed to develop a hegemonic Kafkaesque bureaucracy without the liberal legal ideology that traditionally accompanied it. A new wave of jurists could thus adopt legality without any of its customary cultural baggage.

Such an explanation, however, doesn't seem to go far enough. It wasn't just lawyers who made life-projects out of dry material. Positivism--as Turgenev showed so well--could also have the same bohemian quality. So could, for instance, industrial rationalization. (This is how I would read Chernyshevsky: not simply as a populist-socialist type, but also as a committed rationalizer.) The impulse that underlay the counterculture of these convictions in nineteenth-century Russia seems to have been a common one--and it was caused, I think, by the impossibility of effective structural change. And indeed, by the time liberalism had arrived in Russia in earnest around the turn of the twentieth century, to be a bohemian jurist was no longer conceivable; hence the rather one-sided portrayal of Pobedonostsev's alter ego Apollon Apollonovich in Belyi's Petersburg.

Everyone knows that the utopian aspirations of today often become the basic assumptions of tomorrow (as any contemporary reading of the Communist Manifesto will make clear). But might not there be also a sense in which unrealizable ideas come to define their adherents themselves? To put it another way: would today's anarchists exist in an anarchist society? If the Bolsheviks had actually made good on their first promises, would there be room for a Lenin in 1975?

Of Noteworthy Things

Hübner defined history as the science of noteworthy things (merkwürdige Dinge) that have occurred since the creation of the world. The dictum that the historian investigate things worthy of note could and should imply the operation of some sort of selective principle. Not so with Hübner, however; he took his principle to heart and found that all things were noteworthy. The only balm Hübner offered the historian who had to resolve the problem of selection was a six-part system of classification. Each of the six categories of "things" had its own type of history: (1) Historia Politica ("things pertaining to worldly regimes"); (2) Historia Ecclesiastica ("things pertaining to God's church"); (3) Historia Philosophica ("things of scholarship"); (4) Historia Physica or Naturalis ("things of nature"); (5) Historia Technica or Artificalis ("things pertaining to artists, artisans, and craftsmen"); (6) Historia Mixta or Miscellanea ("things pertaining to common life"). Hübner gave the reader an example from each category to make his divisions clear. The only clarity the examples offer the modern reader is a realization of the distance separating Hübner's assumptions from our own. At best, the examples appear as simple stories with an obvious moral; at worst, they are irrelevant anecdotes. The most incredible example illustrates category 5, Historia Technica or Artificalis. Hübner relates that a magician at the court of Emperor Wenceslas was competing with an imported Bavarian jester. The magician won by "eating the jester whole, as though he had been a piece of bratwurst." Because this outcome infuriated the Bavarian king, Emperor Wenceslas ordered the magician to bring the jester back unharmed. The magician obeyed the command by ordering a large pail of water, squatting over it, and expelling the jester per posteriora, unharmed, in one piece. Hübner concluded that if one still had difficulty in classifying "noteworthy things" it was because one had not mastered the system of each class ("daß man das eigentliche Systema von einer jedweden Classe noch nicht in Kopf hat.") Needless to say, the Aufklärers proved incapable of mastering, or unwilling to master, the secrets of Hübner's system.
- Peter Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism

Reill, earlier in this chapter, heaps scorn on Hübner's "mediocrity," and this is supposed to be its crowning demonstration. Hübner, in this reading, is such a non-philosophical antiquarian that he has lost all sense of what is noteworthy in history, ranking worthless anecdotes on the same level as real and significant historical events. But Reill's stance in this case is accompanied by a curiously self-undermining gesture, for he has in fact recounted both Hübner's "system" and one of his anecdotes. By implication, when the anecdotes are part of Hübner's own work, they are a sign of antiquarianism and the absence of historical perspective--but when they are part of Reill's, they are the legitimate material of intellectual history.

There is nothing per se wrong with this position, but it does force us to consider an especially pressing problem: what is noteworthy in history today? A century or even a half-century ago, this question might have been somewhat easier to answer, since the development of cultures, ideas, and institutions could be seen as the vital force driving the progress of nations. History thus had an indispensable role to play in giving substance to nationalist ideas and thereby helping individuals to understand their place in time. When accompanied by a sufficiently degree of confidence in the powers of the historian, such an understanding of history could neatly sweep away all of the problems associated with the selection of noteworthy historical facts.

By the 1960s (or earlier), this was no longer a going concern, and a different justification needed to be thought up. It was provided, ultimately, by politics: history would both demystify the mythologies of the national past and recover the various suppressed voices "from below." The intention behind this, whether it was consciously articulated or not, was the resuscitation of a sense of communal power and revolutionary heritage among marginalized classes and, eventually, the creation of a counter-history to back their movements of resistance. (The final, and perhaps definitive, incarnation of this impulse was the late Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States.)

These movements, of course, failed to materialize in any significant or effective form. Yet today, many of us are still articulating our projects in the no longer credible terms of politically-grounded history. Others, in increasing numbers, have renounced any such grounding. From one point of view, this is a good thing, since it represents a kind of refusal of political illusions. This, however, leaves an important question unanswered: what can now make a historical datum noteworthy? Do we even possess a criterion by which we can differentiate Hübner's anecdotes from, say, the rise of the middle classes? In the current historiographical moment, we do not, and the only meaningful yardstick in practice has been the interests of the individual scholar.

To be clear, I think this is a good thing. But historians must now confront a more sobering reality, which is that, given their failure to provide a self-generated criterion, one has been provided for them. Academic books on average sell fewer and fewer copies every year; it is harder and harder to be published with a "legitimate" press. What will henceforth determine the notability of historical work will be its marketability, an evaluative paradigm, in the end, no better and no worse than its predecessors. This is bad news for Reill, and good news for Hübner--for entertaining anecdotes sell better than anything else.