{"id":7123,"date":"2010-10-19T08:51:08","date_gmt":"2010-10-19T12:51:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/etherwave.wordpress.com\/?p=7123"},"modified":"2010-10-19T08:51:08","modified_gmt":"2010-10-19T12:51:08","slug":"narrow-and-broad-historiography-and-the-problem-of-interested-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/2010\/10\/19\/narrow-and-broad-historiography-and-the-problem-of-interested-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Narrow and Broad Historiography and Self-Interested History"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the beginning of the year, I posted on the “instrumental uses of history”<\/a>,\u00a0intending the post\u00a0to set the tone for this year’s blogging.\u00a0 It referred to the polemical and heuristic uses to which history is put, and the likely distorting effect these uses have on historical portraiture.\u00a0 The post\u00a0supposed the inevitability of this state of affairs and the futility of sustained work against it.<\/p>\n

Subsequent posts have focused on the importance of taking the history of polemics seriously, as well as on the history of science community’s strong interest in the history of polemics.\u00a0I have argued that\u00a0this interest relates to how those polemics are seen as arising from, and revealing of, how science and technology operate in society: by securing the cultural and political, as well as intellectual, assent.<\/p>\n

I have argued that these ideas are thought to run contrary to past and popular historiography, which\u00a0is imagined to render systematically invisible<\/a>\u00a0not only these polemics, but the social and material circumstances\u00a0that so often give\u00a0rise to polemical encounters.\u00a0 In this way, the past and popular historiography is thought to depend on a false (or at least deeply selective) image of science, technology, and society to assemble its history.\u00a0 The image is one wherein the final form of ideas and the criteria on which they are judged acceptable are taken-for-granted in specifically self-interested ways.\u00a0 Accordingly, recovery of a realistic image of science is thought to\u00a0be not only an imporant\u00a0historiographical <\/em>task,\u00a0but also\u00a0a form of portraiture with innate virtues\u00a0(as I argued<\/a> at Whewell’s Ghost).\u00a0<\/p>\n

One\u00a0of\u00a0this portraiture’s key virtues is its ability (consistent with\u00a0SSK’s idea of symmetry, and the activist STS concern with inclusivity),\u00a0to recover alternative intellectual regimes with alternative sources of cultural and political support, as well as to query the conceptual infrastructure on which prior scientific work was built.\u00a0 In this sense, the history of science claims a sort of meta-perspective, which stands contrary to others’ error-prone, self-interested\u00a0histories, which are, in turn,\u00a0rendered more something to be mined for tidbits of data and studied for their revelatory polemics, than as a genuine part of the historiography.<\/p>\n

I had previously entertained the idea that the ‘normative’ quality of professional historiography informed its portraiture of the past (see esp. her<\/a>e and here<\/a>), but I thought of this as a sort of quirk resulting from the history of our historiography.\u00a0 The idea that it might actually\u00a0result from\u00a0a systematic conflict of interest<\/a> occurred to me as I was reading Arne Hessenbruch’s piece, ‘The Trials and Promise of a Web-History of Materials Research’ in\u00a0the Science-Industry Nexus: History, Policy, Implications <\/em>volume (2004).<\/p>\n

In that piece\u00a0Hessenbruch discusses the prospect of developing a history of materials science in collaboration with scientists, and refers to his work as a graduate student on a history commissioned by Siemens, observing: ‘My supervisor at the time, Simon Schaffer, called my remuneration “blood money”‘ (408).<\/p>\n

Now, this bugged me, because, having been through<\/a> a good chunk of Schaffer’s oeuvre, I had begun to view him as having sold out his unique early vision<\/a> for a historiography of natural philosophy to the bland, homogenized, but\u00a0united\u00a0historiography of the 1990s.\u00a0 This was the historiography that conceived of itself increasingly in terms terms of combating the aforementioned false visions of science and technology, leading to every damn thing you read being not an argument about the past, but,\u00a0on one level or another,\u00a0a learned sermon (directed at no one in particular)\u00a0about trust, authority, and iconography.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I believe the trend can, at least in part, be explained in terms of the conflict of interest attained while trying to wash oneself of conflicts of interest.\u00a0 The historian purports to have a meta-perspective, but the meta-perspective itself becomes a deeply entrenched, and, in its own way, myopic perspective.\u00a0 The things that are of most interest in history are now\u00a0the same things that we\u00a0purport to be able to\u00a0see that\u00a0prevent us from being taken in by others’ narratives.<\/p>\n

(For an interesting comparison read NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen on what he calls the ‘Church of the Savvy’<\/a>, which is part of his analysis of the modern journalistic ‘ideology’<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Immediately following his\u00a0observation about his Siemens project, Hessenbruch goes on:<\/p>\n

All this relates to the vaunted status of the scholar as independent and objective: Only by not having a stake in the matter under investigation, by being unbiased, can one conduct research of genuine quality.\u00a0 In the case of history of science, collaboration with scientists automatically taints the project as having an interest and as such lacking objectivity.\u00a0 The resistance to such a collaboration is probably particularly strong in the discipline of the history of science because it regards as professionalization the very process when retired scientists were replaced by trained historians, branding the genre of the retirees as ‘whiggish.’\u00a0 To this day, ‘whiggish’ connotes both naivet\u00e9 and wrong-headedness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, Hessenbruch was discussing his perceived need to enlist scientists in the construction of a history of materials science, via a website (now abandoned, but still accessible<\/a>), and\u00a0the attendant\u00a0need to escape the notion that this was somehow a dangerous idea.<\/p>\n

It is an idea I now openly embrace.\u00a0 What I want to do, for my own research purposes, is\u00a0redefine the worth of historiography not in terms of its ability to evade certain kinds of error, but in terms of its ability to aid me\u00a0in learning\u00a0about the past.\u00a0 In my work on 20th-century science, I have found myself increasingly enjoying memoirs and official histories because they tend to be so much more informative<\/em>\u00a0than historians’ literature, whatever the idiosyncracies inherent to these kinds of works.\u00a0 Even if there are\u00a0a lot of\u00a0simply\u00a0bad <\/em>histories out there, many are OK, and all can lead someplace new.\u00a0 Because it has become evident to me that the professional literature is not much less idiosyncratic in its reliability and informative capacity, the time seems ripe to throw the doors open and to embrace a ‘broad’ vision of what constitutes the <\/em>historiography.<\/p>\n

As Hessenbruch saw, perhaps several years prematurely, the present is an exciting time to reopen the question of the breadth and mechanics of useful historiography, mainly because the internet makes the accessibility of past works and evidence much easier than in the past.\u00a0 The ability to handle diverse resources and arguments should be augmented, though we will need to design new scholarly technologies to do so.<\/p>\n

Importantly, I think\u00a0that embracing the ‘broad’ vision will not be\u00a0well-served by simply adhering to an ‘anything goes’ attitude.\u00a0 The ‘broad’ historiography must be accompanied by a ‘narrow’ one.\u00a0 However, the priorities of the narrow historiography will be quite different from the current professional historiography.\u00a0 In particular, its task will not be to define itself against <\/em>the broad historiography: it will not police or filter its content, or diagnose and correct its errors.\u00a0 The narrow historiography\u00a0will\u00a0not preoccupy itself with the failures of uninformed and\u00a0instrumental histories, it will abandon its preoccupation with the ‘invisible’, and will instead seek to make available, summarize, and collate what documentation exists, extend that documentation wherever possible, and, at the highest level, ask a large number of\u00a0focused questions relating to specific portions of the historical record.<\/p>\n

This notion is not a hegemonic idea of what historiography must or should be.\u00a0 It is an unoriginal (but\u00a0not nostalgic)\u00a0program, distinguished, but not separate from, the\u00a0prevailing program.\u00a0 It\u00a0is meant to have an appeal, and, on the basis of its appeal,\u00a0to compete with the status quo.\u00a0 Future posts will discuss what factors might add to this appeal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the beginning of the year, I posted on the “instrumental uses of history”,\u00a0intending the post\u00a0to set the tone for this year’s blogging.\u00a0 It referred to the polemical and heuristic uses to which history is put, and the likely distorting effect these uses have on historical portraiture.\u00a0 The post\u00a0supposed the inevitability of this state of<\/p>\n

Continue Reading… Narrow and Broad Historiography and Self-Interested History<\/span>Continue Reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[124,1359],"class_list":["post-7123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-arne-hessenbruch","tag-simon-schaffer"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7123\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}