Back in the 60s, the German emigre Fritz Ringer published The Decline of the German Mandarins. It was a massive survey of the intellectual currents running through German academia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, leading up to the Nazi takeover in 1933. It was an important book; it redefined intellectual history, in part, by introducing the notion of doing field-surveys rather than just a series of intellectual biographies of important thinkers (which is how intellectual history had always been done previously.)
With the rise of cultural history in the 1970s, intellectual was again redefined as people started blurring the line between the "intellectual" and the "cultural" and arrived at the "conceptual." People started writing books tracing notions or curents or discourses through time (a recent one by a very big name is about changing ideas of what "experience" is.) The history of cultural practices, say, how death is remembered and commemorated in Germany from 1945 to the present, land somewhere between intellectual and cultural methods, since it's always easiest to just read what some smart person has said about something and call it history.
I bring all of this up because I've been feeling pissy and resentful about history lately. The insane fetishization of archival research by historians leaves little room for traditional intellectual history (since most of the sources for intellectual historians are, by definition, published) but I'm completely underwhelmed by conceptual history. Simply put, who cares how the notion of "experience" has changed over time? What possible social or political impact can that have, or have had?
This is probably coming to the surface because of a field trip I'm participating in on Friday to the Bancroft Library at Berkeley. Surprisingly enough, there is nothing there that I need to look at, because Simone de Beauvoir didn't accidentally leave a valise full of unpublished papers in the foyer.
Anyway, back to work on the latest pile of boring articles saying the same things.
10.24.2006
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5 comments:
I heard from my landlady about an archive run by some Armenian monks that no one visits and no one really knows about. They were refugees from the Turks during the early modern period. Now THAT is a find. But I can't read Armenian, so a good half of the archive is useless. Anyway, could be interesting, who knows? Good luck finding any unpublished Beauvoir papers...
Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): empiricism versus idealism, specie praeteritorum, english marxists, pragmatist aesthetics, absolute experience, instant field, skeptical implications, dialectical notion, american pragmatism
Heh. "english marxists" is a statistically improbably phrase? I guess it is kinda redundant.
Well, "American pragmatism" certainly isn't improbable...it's entirely likely, assuming one is reading a book about early 20th c. American philosophy. I guess it's less likely in, say, a graphic novel about sex.
Rachel, please stop finding archives. You are one of the few of us smart enough to have gotten the fuck out out of them. We need you to tell us how much fun you are having, not finding more of them for us - unless you plan on launching anarchist attacks on them. Just think of how much fun it would be to light a match in an archive full of dry brittle papers.
Ack! That just made me cringe. Literally. And I only talked about archives a little bit - they're interesting! Unlike those dull secondary readings y'all are constantly writing about. :P
sorry, Chris - I happen to LIKE social/cultural history. Intellectual history, not so much. It takes all kinds...
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