History Bump

Fear not - I make a point eventually!

Gonging myself a priori, I presume that discussion of LeFebvre, Braudel, and Les Annales should be held outside of class - if at all - but

I find in Certeau's definition of historiography NOW (Certeau's now) as that which reacts against and goes beyond the Annales the missing link that's been on the tip of my tongue all semester. If you - or anyone else - feel the kind of boredom that yearns for a brain-stunning multi-volume trip down History Lane, search out a dusty copy of Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols. or the three-volume Civilization and Capitalism (1979), I can't remember which was the first I hallucinated over (hey, it's been a coupla decades). This was the first history I read that talked about something other than Great Men driving The Progress Narrative .

Braudel's kind of history asserts that history is not "events" of the kind previous historiographies polished like pearls on a string. Real history is a complex press of ordinary events and lives creating forces, of varying duration and scope, weaving themselves together. His work included data drawn from the lives of everyday people, as well as arguments about gradual shifts in culture, economy, and so on.

I mention this Now because it's relevant to the Certeau readings; Certau talks about a shift from an older kind of history-making to a kind of history-making that tries to draw a grand picture of everything (sort of like String Theory and GUT in Physics), and then says that NOW, a new kind of history-at-the-borders is emerging. That intermediate, grand-unifying-theory - that's Braudel. And if you haven't read this kind of history, but are trying to draw lines between the history we've read in American textbooks (mostly of the Great Men type) and current critical history-on-the-margins, some of what Certeau says seems... less comprehensible.

I mention this HERE (rather than in a comment about Certeau) because I think what you're talking about is somewhat analogous to Braudel's project.

A story of complex forces shifting and shaping culture in the past - and therefore present - to help frame and identify the borders and silences that need to be addressed. Something that acknowledges the long-term and medium-term and underlying, and then situates the particular as excluded for clear reasons that are part of the story, though not explicable in a simple cause/effect narrative. You think a comprehensive frame of reference says a lot about (even though it doesn't pin a unitary cause of) the rise of Comp and FYE within a backdrop of labor, race, (and ??) - and so do I. If nothing else (and I think there's a lot more than this), it provides the missing-link ground against which the re/visionist-resistance-re-discovery kinds of history can introduce new figures.

Butler's essay is also included in her newest book, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London: Verso, 2004. The title chapter of this little volume is the essay version of the talk she gave at Cornell in the spring of '03. Several CCR students attended that talk. I offer one small quote here from the introduction:

Through a cultural transposition of [Levinas's] philosophy, it is possible to see how dominant forms of representation can and must be disrupted for something about the precariousness of life to be apprehended. This has implictions, once again, for the boundaries of what will and will not appear within public life, the limits of a publicly acknowledged field of appearance. Those who remain facelsss or whose faces are presented to us as so many symbols of evil, authorize us to become senseless before those lives we have aradicated, anwhose grievability is indefinitely postponed. (xviii)

Looking at Elisa's thoughts about little brown girls, and Jen's thoughts about what community concern does and does not look like in a liberal university, this work gets more and more meaningful for me. I recommend it. Good stuff.

My thanks! Braudel sounds fascinating, Carolyn. I think I need to hardwire my brain to yours. & thanks, Chris, for the Butler citation; I need to get that book if I'm going to keep up with her, and she's one of the most powerful influences on my thinking. As for E's and J's blog entries: powerful stuff, indeed. Puts faces—and bodies—on all this talk.