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ANDREW ZIMMERMAN |
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The Theses on Theory and History call, crucially, for a two-way relationship between history and theory, for "theoretically grounded history and historically grounded theory." History grounded by theory, not merely decorated, as with a clever epigraph, or even just informed, borrowing a concept or an analytic gesture. Theory grounded by history, not merely contextualized.
The Theses specify what history gains from this two-way relationship with theory: a history that is not merely "tales told by victors and moralists"; a history that reveals "the operations of power and sources of injustice"; a history open to "alternative epistemological inquiries"; a history, above all, unburdened from the bad empiricism that renders the archive, with its ignorances and inequities, an image of reality.
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INDRANI CHATTERJEE |
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Kleinberg, Scott, and Wilder's call for a closer relationship between critical thinking and history-writing (III.1–III.10) so closely resonates with my own training in postcolonial Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru Universities in India that I feel impelled to engage the essayists even though the audiences the authors address are very different from mine.
Let me begin with a caveat. The contextualization that the essayists distance themselves from is perhaps ever more necessary for this essay to make sense to readers who may not share the space that I inhabit. This space-time is that of northern India in 1984–85.
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OMNIA EL SHAKRY
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In Thesis III, the collective reflects upon the interconnected practice of critical theory and history. "Critical historians. . . recognize that they are psychically, epistemologically, ethically, and politically implicated in their objects of study. . . psychically, historians should acknowledge and try to work though, rather than simply act out, their unconscious investments in their material. . . ethically, historians bear a responsibility toward—are in some way answerable to—the actors and ideas, as well as their legacies and afterlives, being analyzed. . . ." (III.6)
What, then, is the role of ethics within the writing of history? And how might our ethics be connected to the psychic stakes we hold in our objects of study? As historians, what is our responsibility to the dead in our present historical moment of danger, what Freud termed "the times of war and death"? In cultivating an ethics of listening to, and learning to speak with, the dead, how can we attend to the gravitas of this encounter, in which we are inherently implicated, both consciously and unconsciously?
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JOHN MODERN |
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The archive is a haunted place, they say. Where the dead speak to the living. Where human contact becomes a transcendent matter. Where the living are left suspended even after they leave. All those loose pages, pamphlets, photocopies, tracts, and trinkets that comprise the archive becoming, in the moment of encounter, conduits of other-worldly communiqués.
The dream of communicating with the dead and their letters, of telling their story on their own terms has only intensified since the nineteenth century. Indeed, the séance table and the science of history were but two harbingers of this secular age—often sites of tragic recognition—in which attempts to experience the real presence of history have been foiled, frustrated, demystified and debunked. But finally, once and for all, this dream will soon be realized. Everything, historically speaking, will change with the coming "appearance of an intercommunicating network of archives." Everything will be known as it should be known. The past as it really happened. History shorn of petty bias and human foible. Forever and ever. Amen.
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MATTHEW CROW |
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The text of Theses on Theory and History is a potential turning point in the field, and for that I am grateful to its authors. While there are potential pitfalls in the text, there is no question that in their criticisms of the intellectual culture of modern professional historical practice, the authors are on to something. In naming anti-intellectualism as pervasive and as nothing less than a threat to the profession, the text opens up space for us to challenge the reigning orthodoxy of chasing an audience in the form of some idea of the public we seem largely to have imagined for ourselves. That is not to challenge or dismiss the importance of ideas of the public, of public institutions, or of the goal of being a public intellectual, but rather to insist that if we let ourselves be governed by a fear of being seen as 'inaccessible,' etc., we are walking into a trap that we might not ever get out of. In a discipline that is too often enamored of what the Theses bitingly refer to as "impotent story-telling," any insistence on time and space for some critical introspection is a welcome one.
Historians love to contextualize everything but themselves. If context and contextualization are the most fundamental keywords for historical practice, Section III of the Theses (On Theory and Critical History) can be read as an important attempt at bringing our collective investment in an often-murky concept to light. There is a tension, I want to suggest, between the vision of theoretically informed historical practice as "worldly," which begins Section III's reflection on context, and the critique of the "workmanlike" approach ascribed to dominant modes of practice in the profession. The rote contextualization or historicization rightly critiqued today seems to me to be less "workmanlike" than bureaucratic (the duck-hunt model of critical scholarship: your task in the game as a licensed historicizer is to find something insufficiently historicized, get out your context gun, and shoot it). But from the standpoint of disciplinary politics, setting up an antithesis between theory and work is a misguided argumentative move, and more importantly, it threatens to elide a materialist account of historical knowledge production where the activity of theorizing might be imagined as a particular kind of worldly work, of work of and on and in the world. To embrace a worldly and "workmanlike" approach in this sense would be to highlight 'context' as the term for dynamic fields of possibility and limit—not simply as a given, nor simply as a choice.
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