So I guess I’m a neo-Whig historian.

How exciting, I get to be “neo” something. It is late at the moment and, I’m awfully tired, but I felt compelled to write something here; I’ve been meaning to get to it since about a week ago.

Last week we read a grand statement of neo-Whig history for my early American seminar, Gordon Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Wood’s book is a masterpiece; beautiful written and meticulously selective about the material it includes, it flows along with such ease you don’t have the slightest sensation of effort that is usually coupled with reading academic works. It tells this beautiful, ironic story about how a world so unfamiliar to us slowly morphed into an America we would roughly recognize.

For many, however, Wood’s work is too meticulous. The grand narrative style, after all, forces historians to make choices — and Wood chooses to leave out any substantial comment on slavery, women, or Native Americans. So of course many historians hate it, whether they be “Progressive” historians or New Left historians or whatever. You simply can’t write like that anymore — write a story about the politics and thought of white men, basically — without getting reamed. But so it goes.

Reading the intellectual debate surrounding Wood’s book was simply thrilling. The forum was very, very dicey and sharp, yet everyone brought something very convincing to the table. But it got me roused up. I’ve been raised on neo-Whig historians like Wood and, in my heart, I think they’ve got the Revolution mostly right. For me, it was the third or so time going through the book, and although I found many of his critics comments unavoidably convincing, I couldn’t help myself. I love that book.

But there are others I love more. Drew R. McCoy’s The Elusive Republic is such a book; probably one of my top five favorite books ever. We also, what luck, read this book for seminar last week. But alas, I was unable to actually reread the whole text; no time whatsoever. So, there I was, sitting in a coffee shop with an hour to spare and relying on the highlights I made over three years ago when I first read that book. Of course, since I originally highlighted this as an undergrad, nearly everything was highlighted. But I was still able to get through it pretty quickly; I realized I still remember all this. Almost every point. I know Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian political economy nearly down to a tee. And good thing. But even better was how happy it made me. I remember where those original highlights were made; while I sat in the bath and read the vast bulk of that book, and looking over it again brought back all of that original excitement. I don’t know why these particular topics get me going like no other. I can’t quite pin down what it is. But it was so refreshing to feel that rush again, that high that comes from my intellect feeling hot and bothered. I become a bit of a partisan. I made sure I held back in seminar, so that I didn’t degrade the session by dragging us into a joyous-free for-all Jefferson and Hamilton bashing session.

Having dinner that very night with a friend and colleague, we talked about how graduate students don’t seem to get very excited anymore about material their professors find fascinating. We’re over gender history, over postmodernism, and we’re very well aware that race is constructed in the light of gender and vise-versa and so on and so forth. But I wasn’t feeling too disillusioned about that. Because I had been reminded that afternoon why I had come to graduate school in the first place. I recalled an undergraduate who had come to me for advice on grad school several weeks earlier; exploring her interests, it turned out she was more hard core than me — political culture doesn’t even do it for her (I love political culture), she likes the straight-up, pure political history, no discourse nonsense or anything. She also adores Hamilton, go figure.

I made a point to warn her what she would encounter in grad school; that political history would be the last thing in many a seminar to explore, that the hottest research spots were for those doing cultural history and social history of neglected peoples and nations. That the old-fashion Whig history of European political and intellectual thought was considered archaic at best, and unavoidably imperialistic at worst. But she persisted. And, all in all, it hasn’t been that bad for me, really. Sure, I only get to read a book I really enjoy every once in a blue moon; but, eventually, I’ll be able to read and write what I want. And I’ll have a whole class full of students powerless to stop me from blabbering on about it for an hour or so. And that sounds like a pretty grand deal.

I hereby declare Derrida more personable than Foucault.

More on that later. I just wanted to put that much up.

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Real quick, because I absolutely must go pass out –

I’ve gotten through the “Introducing” series for Foucault, and am not too terribly impressed. A lot of this, I imagine, is due to the fact that my mind wasn’t exactly blown; I found out that I already understand Foucault pretty well, and I don’t think reading his actual work would contribute to that much. I actually feel this way about Derrida too. Their ideas are powerful but not impossible to convey in a simple manner, but clear writing is something their postmodern posturing leads them away from.

I don’t care to quibble with Foucault over whether or not concepts like justice or human nature are completely socially constructed and to articulate any version of them is merely to feed back into the power machine; proving this or disproving this is something pretty impossible to do, a great boon to postmodernists. But the reason so many people roll their eyes nowadays is because it is a useless thing to believe, for the most part. No single person, let alone a whole society, can even remotely function while deciding to exist in a state of total indecision and disbelief. I would know, I have somewhat tried.

I don’t believe it, in any case. Justice, for example, is something we can try to define, and try to strive for without merely being functionaries of our society’s hegemonic discourse. No, I can’t prove this really, and so to a certain extent, the entire conversation is pointless. But what isn’t pointless is a functioning society with healthy and happy people. And as far as *that* goes, you won’t get much help from Foucault or Derrida.

And Derrida is not really much more impressive than Foucault; but I find his linguistic focus to be more intriguing to me than Foucault’s historical focus (strange, no?) and I find his manner personally to be much more charming. Foucault comes off exactly as I imagined him, a man absolutely delighted by his own fame and intelligence, seeing as it is that somehow, he the intellectual, has managed to break free from and see the truth behind the all-encompassing hegemonic discourse which the rest of us should not dare challenge less we end up perpetuating it again.

Anyway. I’m not sure why I invest time in learning about these people other than I expect to have what I already know about postmodernism expanded upon and enriched; but for the most part, I find out that it is so embedded into the academic culture of which I have always been a part, I pretty much already know it by heart.

We need some sort of postpostmodernism or some other such deliciously ridiculous philosophical movement for my generation. I’ve exhausted postmodernism and I am right ready to get my mind blown by something new. Common philosophers. They’re not even that personable. Well, except for Derrida. He is somewhat charming.

Here is Derrida saying something which I don’t have time to listen to closely, and thus have no idea whether I agree or not, but I find the idea intriguing. You all can tell me if he is full of it:

The problem with hegemony.

“There is nothing outside the text.” This statement lies at the heart of Derridian analysis, and is repeated incessantly by scholars, usually right before they go into a critique of this somewhat useless idea. Useless not in that it isn’t potentially the source of an extended and ever-so-delicious intellectual debate, but useless insofar as for historians, it can serve to stop our investigations as soon as they have started. If there is nothing outside the text, why bother trying to contextualize it?

On the opposite pole of this statement however is another postmodern giant, Foucault, who would rather expand the sentence into “there is nothing outside the discourse.” What historians mean by this often repeated word “discourse” is simply how people discuss things; so when we talk about discourse, we are talking about how people talk. But any system of discourse, it is believed, is tied to the larger ideological dogma of the society – the concepts, assumptions, and ideas a society debates with, even in a moment of acute disagreement, cannot escape the shared set of assumptions and relations they all conceive to be the basis of reality and social existence. This horrific reality we call hegemony.

Whether or not this is really horrific we will return to later. Let’s begin with questioning whether or not this is true. There are several problems with the concept of hegemony, all of which I am sure scholars have been pointing out in the last decade or so but, I would like to present my own thoughts on nonetheless.

Firstly, hegemony has the cardinal flaw of being a theory that can incorporate any evidence that could serve to directly disprove it. If a theory is immune to being disproved, even on a theoretical plane, then something is clearly wrong with the premise of the theory. Clear example: a European never making a trip to Africa can easily be interpreted as an indication of the ethnocentric culture of the reigning European discourse; the individual has no interest in Africa because their society tells them that European (and by implication white) society reigns supreme, and little else is worthy of note. However, if an individual has an acute interest in Africa, travels there and finds everything quite fascinating, the ethnocentricism, rather than being reduced, is proved again; the European is simply experiencing Africa as an exotic (and possibly erotic (scholars make this jump, not me)) ‘other’ which they subtly incorporate into their control through applying their body of knowledge to this mystified and stereotyped ‘other.’ Within the context of nineteenth century imperialism (which inspired the example) any other more nuanced interpretations are crossed out. Even if there was such a thing as a non-ethnocentric trip to Africa, you would still be able to explain it in terms of the ruling European hegemony.

Secondly, and perhaps most obviously, a theory of hegemony that considers it absolute does not account for change. However strong racism or ethnocentricism, the fact is that most Western societies today view racism as a markedly bad thing, regardless of how guilty they may be of it. If even opposing views can be interpreted as consistent with the hegemonic discourse, then that hegemony must be pretty flexible, and is soon spread so thin as to lose any significant or operative meaning.

Fortunately, most scholars are aware of this latter weakness and use hegemony as a possible element in a society constituted of many things. However, it still seems to me that the focus on discourse and hegemony works to value discoveries and analysis of power, and devalue any record of human experience or capacity. When someone writes a thesis or postulates a theory about how systems of power in society work, all ears perk up and are prepared for acceptance. However, history which gives a little room for human agency and personality outside a system of hegemony is, well, somewhat laughable; naïve at best.

Example: J.G.A. Pocock, who developed the history of the “ideology”, as he calls it, of civic humanism/classical republicanism, is on the record as arguing that human beings cannot conceive of something when they do not possess the terms to understand it; ie, a seventeenth century Englishman could not conceive of natural rights when the hegemonic discourse was based on classical, Renaissance political theory that never proposed such an idea as inherent, universal rights. Another statement of this idea is the belief, well accepted I believe by historians, that a fifteenth century subject of a medieval state could not conceive of atheism. Not, mind you, that he would not dare speak it out loud or would merely doubt his own thoughts as heretical or inspired by Satan, but could not form even the thought itself in his mind. Now that is one fucking frightening hegemony.

But back to Pocock. Apart from, again, not explaining change, Pocock all seems to assume that all terms and ideas that seem roughly familiar across time owe their similarity to some inheritance of hegemonic discourse, even in somewhat disparate points in time and space. But saying something looks like something else is hardly proof that the reason of the later author played no role in his thought. If I have an idea, even a fairly random and eccentric one, it is fairly sure that someone, some place has had the same or similar thought. This might not be entirely due to sharing in the same hegemonic discourse (indeed maybe someone in a distinctly different one had shared the thought), but simply because sharing brains that are universally constructed in the same way, it is likely when contemplating on a certain problem that two minds may arrive at roughly similar conclusions. Of course, this is no way to go about doing history, to simply assume that ideas come as moments of genius in the minds of great men, unattached from their social and historical context. Despite what delightful reading such old time intellectual history makes, at this point it would be rather reactionary. But the attempt to write humanity, essentially, out of the equation, is hardly a way to do history either. Hegemonic or not, individuals exist in society as separate bodies in space and, as such, possess at least the possibility of being an individual agent through the use of their imagination.

Of course, I must in such a spirit of skepticism admit my own biases. I am always profoundly surprised at the lack of personal reaction I see in my fellow academics over the implications of such ideas as hegemony to their own existence. Twice now I’ve openly asked a colleague why they aren’t terribly depressed, impressed as they are with the overawing power of discourse to limit us and make us unaware of our own captivity. I hardly like the idea that no matter how skeptical or critical or analytical I am, I possess ideas, experiences and beliefs which have been imparted to me so deeply and yet so subtly by the hegemonic discourse that I can never become aware of them sufficiently to rout them out and decide, with reason and predilection in mind, whether to accept or reject them. Clearly, I’ve imbibed the values of the Enlightenment and the following liberalism, which idealizes man as, above all else, rational; capable of rooting out the truth within himself.  To me, awareness has always been the antidote to almost all of life’s evils; I cannot always help thoughts, feelings and behaviors I experience that I dislike, but merely by my consciousness of them I can both make a decision to not afford them value and significance and also to accept myself as doing my best. I quite like the confessional style.

So I have predilections, myself, for hoping to reconstitute the human experience a tad over the sometimes overweening presence of hegemony in scholarship. It has been said that the job of historians is to make clear and acute the differences between the present and the past; to show us how different are our conceptions and world-views from those of people in other places and time. Why, I ask, must this always be the case? Do we all truly believe in the total non-existence of human nature? I, for one, do believe in some basic existence of human nature, roughly shared across time and space, if not in any totalizing, uniform way (ie, it does not have to apply to every human being who has ever been.) I believe that despite all the difference and disparities, someone across time and space has felt many things I have felt, and thought many thoughts I have thought*; and that some of those experiences cannot merely be reduced to hegemony or coincidence, but rest in some grain of similarity we shared in our particular humanity. How this opinion of mine could influence my history writing, I cannot say. It would seem largely irrelevant to any larger point I would be trying to make about society, culture and class. But then again, I suspect there is some secret despair in going about writing history really believing there is not anything that unites us all. For if one thing for sure can be said about history, is that it is a human story; and if we listen closely enough, I believe we can hear the people before us speak to us in ways more meaningful than a strict belief in hegemony could possibly allow.

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* This could be an incredibly despairing thought, leading to an intense sense of loneliness, but it could also be a self-congratulatory moment of egotism; if you and your time are so particular, then you become completely unique and in some sense, original. I wonder if this hasn’t played some psychological role in the theories of postmodernists. The problem of the existence of an author is another point; if historians really believe that hegemony was complete, they would negate their own work; simply through the exposure of systems of discourse and the effort they put in to revealing them, historians show that, on some level, they think that critical thinking can allow humans to escape the bounds their society has laid down for them.

I suppose I care more about teaching than I thought.

Or less about feeling smart. I had this reflection while overhearing a TA counsel a student on a paper in a coffee shop yesterday. Something about various US wars, Iraq compared to Vietnam, etc. Perhaps a history TA, more likely political science, or something to that extent. I certainly didn’t recognize him.

The TA overwhelmed the student with detail. He spoke in a lecturing tone — literatley, as though he were talking to a room full of people — and repsonded to her questions with long monologues that opened with statements like “Well, can we really say that…” or, “Well, what happens when you compare this to…” or “Well, something I think it would be good to consider…” This would be all and well if he then went on to make some clear, simple and helpful pointers, some guidelines to this poor girl about what she could do with this paper of hers. Instead, he meditated on the various causes and nature of war in such an ostentatious and labyrinthine way that she almost certainly couldn’t have followed much of what he said. Hell, I couldn’t, even though I was trying depserately to block out his loud, annoying voice.

It seemed clear that this man cared more about having a chance to exhibit his extensive learning and thoughtful analysis than helping this girl write her paper. And this pissed me off. It really did. It made me want to turn around and tell him to shut up and provide her with something constructive to start with. I also have trouble not going into tangents with my students, but I stop myself and simplify, (or tell them “don’t worry about that addition I just made, it’s not important”) not because I *want* to dumb down the history for them, but because it will do them and the learning of history no good to overcrowd and confuse their minds with details of varying importance just so I get a chance to display. That’s what this blog is for, folks.

At the end of his magnum opus, the TA finally paused. “So, how are you feeling about this now?”

“Actually,” replied the besiged student, “I feel really really nervous, even more so than before.” Off to the side, I grinned and grimaced at my suspicions confirmed; and the TA said a surprised “Really?’ and embarked on another round of “clarifications.”

Note: I’m discovering office hours make for great writing time. Interesting.