My intuitions (or interests) tell me that Edouard's point about
getting a more substantial role for the historical dimension of
culture in our thinking (about anything) should lead us
somewhere. As Angel (?) said, we need to think about these issues
not just philosophically, but methodologically. And I sense that
it is just the _practical_ problems of including 'history' in our
work that forced Edouard to wonder if 'history' itself is not too
problematic a notion to rely on without reformulating it.
The 'museums of practice' theme raises some of these questions
about history: Whose history of Whom we are talking about? How
does each culture construct a different notion of 'history'
itself (not just of what happened, but of what is worth paying
attention to, of how we fit the pieces together: ala museum
displays or written texts or living continuations of practice;
whether or not ecologically, etc.) Of course Foucault has given
us some pretty good beginnings of an analysis of these matters,
at least for European historiography as itself historically
specific (esp in _Archeology of Knowledge_, and _Order of
Things_), but not many people seem to be translating these into
methodological practice.
One place where some of it is put into practice is in the Latour-
Law, etc. work of the last decade or so, an empirical sociology
of knowledge that is actually to me quite parallel to Piaget's
empirical psychology of knowledge (from genetic epistemology to
actor-network epistemology!), as was recently mentioned again. I
do think one can ask of Latour, as also of Bourdieu, whether they
should really carry their reflexive imperatives more thoroughly
into their own practice (boring as it may be to outsiders, it may
be methodologically necessary). Perhaps they have, but not in the
published literature so far as I know, and not with any startling
insights or consequences (meaning, I believe, that they have not
really done it). A reflexive analysis of the ecology (semiotic,
economic, political, material) of one's own practice is itself a
kind of historical inquiry, akin to autobiography. When we ask:
Who's history of whom? perhaps the most ethical place to begin,
and the most dangerous, but certainly _not_ the required one in
our own scholarly tradition, is with Our History of Our Own
Practice.
The substitute for this in our European scholarly tradition is
Our (usually called _The_) history of our discipline (itself
shockingly neglected in many fields today in universities, esp.
in the U.S.), which nowadays, via modernism, always has the
comforting shape of a story which leads inexorably up into the
light, and towards us and our present beliefs and agendas. It is
by now a rather boring, as well as unconvincing sort of story,
which is why many of us are ready for some sort of post-
modernism. (I recently re-read and re-taught Phillipe Aries
really quite excellent _Centuries of Childhood_ and found myself
acutely embarassed by his uncritical assurance that the attitudes
of his own day toward all issues clearly represented 'progress'
over the more 'limited' or even primitive views of a few
centuries before.)
I think we understand better today the pitfalls of 'evolutionary'
models of history (or of evolution, for that matter!): being
retrospective accounts, they tend to pay attention only to what
turned out to lead to what turned out to happen later, as if
there was some sort of natural progression or necessity or even
logic in this, and to ignore all the other things that happened
and could have happened. There is perhaps no worse case of
description masquerading as explanation (or if your believe that
all explanations are simply privileged descriptions, of one that
conceals the grounds of its claims to privilege). All history is
written backwards from the perspective of the present moment, but
it presents itself very differently: as proceeding forwards from
some remote moment in time. As Foucault points out, in these
circumstances it becomes problematic even to decide which past
events lie on 'the same trajectory' as some present ones, to
formulate criteria of 'antecedence' or 'derivation'.
So here is one methodological suggestion: to begin, explicitly,
from some point in our own current research and model-making, and
to work backwards in time, in something of the spirit of a
Latour-like ecological analysis, to discover and document the
antecedents (according to principles we must also make explicit,
considering where possible alternative principles) of how we got
to where we are now, and which past options we did not take up,
and whether the reasons of that time for not doing so still seem
valid to us today. We have the semiotic capacity to re-present to
ourselves our own past, and so to create a dialectic between this
past (however reconstructed) and our dynamic present. I suspect
we may well discover contradictions between our prior and present
Selves and may well reconsider choices.
Ultimately, of course, it would be nice to extend this approach
back into the history of our lives, disciplines, institutions,
cultures, etc., but I wonder if perhaps just a little 'shallow
archeology' might not turn up some productive surprises (or
embarassments)? History, after all, begins with yesterday. JAY.
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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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