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Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Longer Than I Don’t Remember: Idiosyncratic Periodization for Fun and Profit
Regardless of period and specializaton, most literary scholars are familiar with the idea of the Long 18th century (a.k.a. the only reperiodization famous enough to have its very own blog). Encompassing all things from the Restoration of 1660 or Revolution of 1688 (depending) to the 1832 Reform Act, this 172 or 200-year-old “century” calls attention to the inanity of organizing academic disciplines around arbitrary chunks of history. I embrace such lengthenings because they allow us to define epochs by meaningful events instead of the meaningless march of time. That Pynchon fellow lately in the news captures this tensions in Mason & Dixon:
“What Machine is it,” young Cherrycoke later bade himself goodnight, “that bears us along so relentlessly? We go rattling through another Day,—another Year,—as thro’ an empty Town without a Name, in the Midnight ... we have but Memories of some Pause at the Pleasure-Spas of our younger Day, the Maidens, the Cards, the Claret,—we seek to extend our stay, but now a silent Functionary in dark Livery indicates it is time to re-board the Coach, and resume the Journey. Long before the Destination, moreover, shall this Machine come abruptly to a Stop ... gather’d dense with Fear, shall we open the Door to confer with the Driver, to discover that there is no Driver, ... no Horses, ... only the Machine, fading as we stand, and a Prairie of desperate Immensity ....” (361)
This time “Machine” traverses the “Prairie of desperate Immensity” indiscriminately, Pynchon argues—only human agents and actions can punctuate that vastness with meaning. Bookending periods between significant events introduces that causality into historical time. Thing is, with causality comes arguments about the provenance of certain causal agents, ideas and events. Should Romanticism be included in the long 18th? What about France? French Romanticism?
In “Kant’s Strange Light: Romanticism, Periodicity, and the Catachresis of Genius,” Orrin N.C. Wang ably confronts one problem caused by combining calendric notions of periodicity and tropological accounts of intellectual history, but his account is limited by its specificity: “Romanticism is the figure of our investment in history, of history as cathexis” (20). Be it German, French, or English, all Wang’s Romanticisms describe a Continental situation of suspect applicability.
Folding periods into tropes homogenizes intellectual history. Just because a particular strain of thought dominated a period doesn’t mean contemporaries outside that mold were necessarily apostatical. They may not have defined themselves against anything—but place them in a period bounded by its tropes and they’ll certainly appear to. Here as before, Wang’s astute claim is needlessly particular: “Enlightenment modernity is the historical period that in its complexity resists the uniformity, the very identity, of periodicity” (19). Every historical period resists the uniformity of periodicity. How else to account for the explosion of idiosyncratic periodization I’ve encountered this week?
Scholar X’s “long (American) 19th century” terminates twenty-four years into Scholar Y’s “long first-half of the (American) 20th century from 1890-1945.” Both infringe upon Scholar Z.’s “long (American) 20th century.” Myself, I work on the “short (American) 20th century from 1877-1917,” which, for those of you keeping score, consists of the post-Reconstruction Gilded Age and whole of the Progressive Era. Naysayers may object to locating the majority of the 20th century in the 19th, but I believe the 21st century began at an undisclosed location outside Ypres sometime between July 31 and November 6, 1917 when the world, gathered dense with fear, opened the door to confer with the Driver, only to discover that there is no Driver, only the Machine ...
Comments
Nicely done! Given the importance of Wilde and James to my 20th century, I am sympathetic both to the notion of multiple intellectual directions at a given moment of history, and to a periodicity that ignores our arbitrary counting from the birth of Christ. In fact, modernism is unthinkable without the 19th century innovators—Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Poe, perhaps Melville—and all of these are better understood as fellow modernists, than merely as “influences.” Influential is probably a better term for writers like Jane Austen or Robert Browning, who exceeded their age but also embodied it.
Just yesterday I divided European history into Dark Ages (from 300 AD to 1000 AD), Medieval (from 800 to about 1500), Early Modern (from 1300 until 1800), Modern (from 1700 until the present) and Contemporary (since about 1900). You really don’t need the Renaissaince, Reformation, or Enlightenment.
My system is as precise as any system needs to be, though you need some geographical adjustments for Southern and Eastern Europe.
Joe, initially I’d called this “cherrycoking,” but the reference-to-neologism connection seemed a little too tenuous. We all combine periods, epochs and intellectual trends, if not always consciously; but outside of theorizing about the long 18th, no one really talks about it. (At least, not in literature departments. We consider periodization unself-evident, but the talk seems to stop there.) That’s why—at Speaker Y’s talk last week—I sat aghast when he jackbooted me back into the 20th century. I fled it in search of a job, and here he was insisting I lived in a Matrix-like 20th century.
John, you may want to factor Egypt into your calculations, as I’ve heard tell of its importance.
So did the long 22nd century start in 1989?
Five or six more periods would get me back to the founding of Sumeria.
I do think you bring up an important point, especially in terms of the way the literary and cultural studies function as disciplines. Literary and literary historical periods have become naturalized in a way that makes some kinds of research difficult, especially at the grad school or junior faculty level. This is becuase of what I see as an increasingly opressiveI do think you bring up an important point, especially in terms of the way the literary and cultural studies function as disciplines. Literary and literary historical periods have become naturalized in a way that makes some kinds of research difficult, especially at the grad school or junior faculty level. This is because of what I see as the increasingly oppressive expert-specialist model. While I certainly think there are problems with trying to cast too wide a scholarly net, much ends up being missed by trying to operate within these received historical boundaries. Even within short periods, British Romanticism say, there are logical and quite productive ways to move back to pre-French-Revolution thought as well as forward into what would properly be considered the Victorian period. Conversely, there is often a desire to split up this short period into the “early” and “late” Romantic period to account for people like Hazlitt.
Ian Baucom has *really* lengthened the long 18th century. It’s now a wave-formation, beginning at the close of the 17th, peaking in the eighteenth, troughing in the mid-19th and early 20th, and peaking again with postmodernity. Baucom uses Arrighi’s notion of cyclical economic patterns of commodity and speculative capitalism to tie the 18th and late 20th centuries together under the heading of a speculative economy. Provocative or bat-shit insane? You decide.
Ian Baucum’s lengthened period would be my modern age, which overlaps with the contemporary era which is as yet unnamed.
The Chinese didn’t write histories of a dynasty until it was extinct. I think that we can’t know what to call the contemporary age, beyond just “contemporary”; “postmodern” has only been around for ~20 years and may already be slipping.
Overlapping eras is like pivot chords in music. In standard practice modulation a passage in (say) C will end with a passage (however short) which is also interpretable in (say) G, but the modulation only becomes officail when you get a passage (usually D7--> G) which is not intepretable in C but only in G.
Is there really a custom of dating the long 18th all the way to 1832? Is this specific to the history of English literature? I have a hard time seeing it go past 1814 or so…
Actually, John, the poet Charles Olson was using the term “postmodern” to describe his society back in the 50s.
And what makes Baucom’s periodization different than your designation is that he sees much of the 19th century as outside the long period connecting the 18th and the late 20th, as economies shifted from speculative bases to commodity bases and back to speculative again.
Not sure if I buy Arrighi’s economic theory (I don’t know much about it), but it helps Baucom rethink the slave trade outside of commodity terms and in terms of speculation (which gets him from slavery to insurance to Romantic historiography to postmodern historiography).
I never quite understood the point of periodizing terms, myself. They basically seem like attempts to write a novel out of the past. For example, I’m currently reading James Gaines’ *Evening in the Palace of Reason*, which details the meeting between Bach and Frederick the Great that resulted in Bach’s “Musical Offering.” Gaines wants to read this as the Baroque meeting, and trumping, the Age of Reason, as Bach takes Frederick’s trick theme, supposedly impossible to develop counterpunctually, and develops it for six voices in 14 days. Basically, Gaines’ historical narrative is the same as Pynchon’s fictional narrative in *Mason & Dixon*.
Then again, I never understood why I should care that postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism. Answers, anybody?
David: Literary and literary historical periods have become naturalized in a way that makes some kinds of research difficult, especially at the grad school or junior faculty level.
Absolutely. Hence the joy when I read this a few months back.
Jacob: I’m borrowing from Frank O’Gorman’s The Long Eighteenth Century here. I’m not familiar enough with the period myself to understand why it’s divided so.
Luther: Doesn’t it all boil down to Geist?
Luther: just in case you didn’t already know of <a href="http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~tas3/bachindex.html">TASmith’s site<a> (ooo, what Pynchon could do with this! mediated thru GGould of course ...)
Yes, but Olson’s archaic-modern use of the term was pre-post-modern. It’s just a coincidentally identical collocation of morphemes meaning God knows what. Olson was drug-addled, right?
Baucom’s theory sounds pretty epicyclic. Andre Gunder Frank has a cyclic theoy of history which consists of 200-year-cycles upon which are imposed 50-year cycles, except that none of the cycles are the right length, and except that I could never tell what the cycles were cycles of. (My guess they were cycles of empire + long distance trade + economic growth, but he never bothered to say.
I really believe that all periodizations are ad hoc throwaways which are (or are not) useful for this or that transient particular purpose. But I think that kind of thing about a lot of shit.
I had always heard that in political terms the 20th century was quite short, 1914-1991. The outbreak of WWI marking the start of the century and the end of the Soviet Union marking its end.
The Sixties were about 1965--1975. Maybe 1964. Kennedy wasn’t The Sixties. Not enough dope was being smoked.
nnyhav—thanks for the link. My gift to myself today, thanks to a B&N coupon and in honor of another semester completed without killing anyone, was a seven-disc set of Bach’s orchestral works.
Every time I hear the expression “late capitalism,” I think of the old joke about the guy on the bus who asks another rider where to get off to go to the zoo. The other guys says, “Watch where I exit and get off two stops before.” Seriously, how the heck do you know that the current version of capitalism is late? Maybe it’s early.
Scott - Just a quick question (and a note that I originally intended to post this to your site, but seem to be encountering random problems...).
I’m conscious that I may be stepping into a specific disciplinary discussion, without understanding the specific issue at stake within that context - apologies in advance if I take the discussion into an arena not terribly relevant to your point. I have no problem with the basic issue that the sort of homogenous, linear dating convention maps awkwardly onto attempts to organise and interpret historical experience. If your main quarrel is with the attempt to organise fields of study into centuries, as though there is any reason to assume that our calendar should naturally provide some useful analytical category, I absolutely agree.
If this is your main claim, though, you may be freighting it unnecessarily with some rather large ontological and epistemological claims that significantly complicate the issue. Let me try to tease out some of this a bit more clearly, to see if I can articulate what worries me. Your post seems to ask two questions - (1) can there be more than one defensible way of organising historical experience? and (2) are all ways of organising historical experience essentially Weberian ideal types - convenient, but essentially random, constructs that we impose on inherently disorganised historical data?
The answer to (1), I would think, is a fairly trivial “yes” - we do, in fact, organise historical periodisation in multiple ways, so someone would be straining credulity to claim this practice is somehow a piorir invalid.
The answer to (2), though, is far more problematic - from multiple directions, and I’m curious whether you really intended to enter what I feel can be a kind of epistemological quagmire?
You don’t directly state the Weberian ideal-type concept - it’s suggested indirectly by the reference to random sense perception data in the “Machine” story. But if you intended to suggest that it’s essentially random the way we cut history at the joints, this could be problematised in a couple of ways: first, from the standpoint that, even if we’re organising the past in quite anachronistic and inappropriate ways, still the specific organisations we choose may not be random - they may be significant in terms of problems that are important for various reasons for us. From this perspective, it still might be valid to have academic discussion over the “best” periodisation, for example, regardless of what we might think about the subjective experience of those living in the periods we’re analysing.
And, second, the use of periodisation - even based on dominant intellectual history tropes - doesn’t intrinsically and necessarily have to be associated with positions that declare other historical expressions “apostatical”. I understand that some historians, in fact, do adopt such a perspective: have fun criticising them, with my blessing… But it’s important not to confuse a bad argument, with the only possible argument… One could still recognise, for example, historical periodisations that might apply at different levels of abstraction; or conflicting experiences of a time that could productively be illuminated against something like a notion of dominant intellectual trends; or an interesting contrast between the ways people wrote about their own history, and the view one could take of that same period if one looked at what people were doing, rather than what they were saying, etc. It’s possible for all of these things to have their analytical integrity - but I’m not convinced it brings us closer to understanding what that integrity might be, if we remain within the “random sense data” vs. “randomly constructed analytical categories imposed on that data” dichotomy…
Apologies if this reads very confused - I seem to be having a complex life at the moment… ;-P
I don’t think periodization is random—but I do believe it’s self-interested inasmuch as certain arguments require social/cultural continuities which the designation of a particular time-span as a “period” grants a priori. On a basic level, consider my recent struggles even trying to name a conflict, much less consider it as a bounded entity. From the Cuban perspective, it is a War of Independence, fought intermittently for thirty years, of which American involvement after 1898 marks its conclusion. From the American perspective—from which I’m writing—the war lasted a little under a year (not including the Filipino front). If even an armed conflict with discrete hostilities can be questioned, what of the period which contains and/or is bordered by it? Does the Spanish-American War mark the beginning of the 20th Century, as some have argued, since it’s (arguably) the beginning of America’s global ambitions? Or does that honor go to WWI? Depends on whether I’m a scholar of globalization or not, I would guess.
So I think we’re on the same wavelength here, in that I’m a devotee of your (1) who recognizes—but can’t altogether avoid—the dangers of your (2). And the one place I really can’t avoid them is the job market, in which so many of (1)s compete it’s easy for you and everyone you know to throw up their hands and admit the domination of (2)s.
By labelling the various periodisations self-interested (a position with which I would agree), you are, though, suggesting that you have a standpoint from which you can perceive that this is so… :-) If the point of your work isn’t theoretical, it can take you fairly far afield to try to explain what that standpoint might be, so I don’t mind when people pragmatically leave these kinds of questions to one side. I only begin to prickle when they suggest they might be “standing” on an epistemological position that wouldn’t actually allow such judgments to be made… ;-P
Surely, the job market doesn’t force you to be a Weberian… ;-P
In some ways, the Sixties ended for us on the day we sold our van - December 31, 1969.
Hmm, this reminds me of Spivak’s point in Outside in the Teaching Machine that canons are tied to institutions. I think it’s possible to combine the individual self-interest points made recently with her argument and end up somewhere near the Slaughter/Leslie Academic Capitalism argument that in a globalizing academy we’re all being trained in one way or another to think of ourselves as entrepreneurs. So rethinking a period allows you to tell and sell a story that may well end up being about how the present relates to the past in question.
Maybe this approach actually lends itself to empiricism. Take four different contexts for and stories about the American Revolution--say, Stephanson’s Manifest Destiny, Foner’s in The Story of American Freedom, Linebaugh and Rediker’s in The Many-Headed Hydra, and Bender’s in A Nation Among Nation--look at how many libraries have them, book sales, # of citations and reviews, how many syllabi they appear on, etc.--and you can get a sense of the “market share” of each “brand,” and even the “investments” in it. Not just individual, but institutional, as in what new “brand” is influential enough to show up not just in gen ed or intro to major surveys, but make departments decide to reorganize curricula and graduation requirements?
On 1898 or 1914 or ? as the beginning of America’s global ambitions...from the start, baby! But when did “America” start?