Historiological Notes

Storytelling and higher education

For the Text and Communication course we are reading a Labov and Waletzky article from the time when an article was published in typewriter pages. It is called "Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience". I did not manage to tread the article when the lecture on it was held in February, but I remembered the discussion whilst I now read the article.

The article is strongly structuralist and the authors try to make a structural pattern of narratives. They have written down transcripts of 26 narratives all told by uneducated, urban Americans. In their opinion, it is only in those condition you will find pure narratives. The lecturer was strongly against this thesis. In her opinion, narratives is something of the human nature and we all tell narratives of the structure Labov and Waletzky investigates. Her comment started a discussion in class on whether education influences storytelling and narratives.

In my opinion, I am not a terribly good storyteller. And long before taking this course I had come to the conclusion that I thought to much about what to say, so that the narrative never came as a steady flow. In the discussion my mind became a bit clearer and I came to see my problem as me being to analytic. When I start telling a story, I start with good intentions, but as I go along I start to question my mission. Is this a proper story to emphasis what we are no discussing? Am I biased in what I am telling? Do this story give away my political view or does it show prejudice? Should I round of this story with a better ending? All this questions makes it necessary to make diversions in the story and the story becomes a mess and quite often I will manage to make it into a complete story. I would therefore be a hopeless case for Labov and Waletzky.

Many other in my class had similar experiences as me and were thus of the opinion that higher education might ruin the ability to be a good storyteller. At least, it would be necessary to learn again how to tell as story and start training to be a good storyteller. The lecturer started to wonder if she was wrong.

Then we started to find some modifications to our theory. We found that our experience of storytelling, and probably the experience of most other well educated people, was in a discursive context, whether it be the classroom, the lunch break or the pub. In such a context one usually tell a story to make a point and one then has to be sure the story fills a lot of other criteria in addition to being a good story. It has to be relevant and it has to be quite concise.

Labov and Waletzky, on the other hand, ask their cases: "Were you ever in a situation were you were in serious danger of being killed?". If one retell a story of great importance to ones life, it is probable that one focus more on the events than all other analytical aspects. And this might be true for both uneducated and well educated people. If I had almost drowned whilst swimming this morning, I might still be quite shaky when arriving at work, and I would probably not think about structure, political correctness and point of view when telling my colleagues.

Any opinions?

Foucault Studies vol.2

New edition of Foucault Studies. This is just a link, I have not read any articles yet.

Shanks

Via PLSJ I found this article by Michael Shanks: The Life of an Artifact.

He writes:

I am arguing that the archaeological experience of ruin, decay and site formation processes reveals something vital about social reality, but something which is usually disavowed. Decay and ruin reveal the symmetry of people and things. They dissolves the absolute distinction between people and the object world. This is why we can so cherish the ruined and fragmented past.

This article argues for interpretive archaeology/postpocessual archaeology and has an interesting theorietical framework. Though he focus on the wider context of the artifact, I feel some of his implications must affect historiography too. Shanks point of view is inspired by social constuction of scientific knowledge. This affects historiography too.

Ideology and Discourse Analysis

I have just recieved an e-mail with a link to a new webpage:
IDA World: World Network in Ideology and Discourse Analysis.

I new that Essex was a good university for this sort of thing, but I did not they had a program and that there was such a thing as a network on this. The webpage is still quite simple, but I hope it will fill up with information.

Kierkegaard and female despair

I have written a commentary to Søren Kierkegaard's Sickness unto Death. I wrote the paper in Norwegian and it follows further down. Here are an English abstract:

In Sickness unto Death Kierkegaard tries to argue that despair is a human condition. There are several stages of despair and the deepest, existential despair makes it necessary to turn to the Christian faith. Kierkegaard believes rationality causes despair and true faith is giving it all up and handing all responsibility to God. Here is a paradox in Kierkegaards writing, on the one hand he values all good Christian women; he seems to believe that women's naïve attitude makes them perfect Christians. On the other hand, he writes (§1.C.B.b.α) that women do not possess the ability to reflect and think rational and thus will never reach existential despair. How does women reach their faith?

Erudite about madness

Whilst reading Foucault's Madness and Civilization this afternoon. I kept thinking how well read Foucault must have been. He is refering to paintings and poems in great numbers and makes everything fall neatly into his line of though. I also remember how he started The Order of Things with a description and comment on Velasquez' Las Meninas and how impressed I was by his understanding of art and art history, not only of the context in which the painting was made.

I suppose Foucault's great knowledge in many field was what made him capable of writing the broad histories he wrote. He has been accused of stupidity of writing macrohistory in a time when most historians are doing microhistory. However, our lack of great macrohistoric stories might be the lack of erudite people. Academic life seems to produce professionals with knowledge within one specialized field rather than erudite general scholars.

Foucault - a postmodernist?

When writing intellectual history, I think it is important to remember Skinners word:

No agent can eventually be said to have meant or done something which he could never be brought to accept as a correct description of what he had meant or done.

('Meaning and Understanding in the history of ideas' inHistory and Theory vol. 8 (1969)) [I wrote on this in September 2003]

When I now work on Foucault, I wonder if he can be seen as a postmodernist and what he would have thought of being classified as one.

Some historians make the mistake of defining postmodernism in historiography to be the same as poststructuralism. I do not agree with this definition, because postmodernism has a much wider meaning. However, I would agree that most postmodernist historical writing – done by historians, not historical theorists – are poststructuralist. Even though Foucault easily can be seen to be in a structuralist tradition, he did say that he was neither a structuralist, nor a poststructuralist. Foucault probably said this because he did not like classifications, and because he did not want to be compared with structuralist and poststructuralists. And he was probably right; his “structuralism” is of another kind than structuralism.

However, when it comes to the question of postmodernism, he is a bit more difficult to define. His interest in structures is best categorised in a modernist scientific tradition. It is his view on history that I find it most likely to classify as postmodernist. He views the past as something defragmented. The defragmentation is most clear in his earlier texts where he uses the episteme as a knowledge unit. I am not quite sure if a defragmentation of the past can be linked to deconstruction. And would Foucault agree that this was what he was doing.

Link to Rorty's Background

'THE COMING ONLY IS SACRED Self-Creation and Social Solidarity in Richard Rorty’s Secular Eschatology' (via Gnostical Turpitude) is an article on Richard Rorty backround but also on how the author Scott Holland feels Rorty's philosophy have something to give him as an anababtist. The first part of the article is a good short introduction to Rorty. The second part is Holland's own argument.

Sartre and the philosophy of history

I did not know that Sartre had been interested in the philosophy of history; and neither did I know that he had published anything on that field. However, I only have a superficial knowledge of Sartre. In Thomas R. Flynn’s Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason I read that Sartre wrote about history in his War Diaries. Sartre was criticizing his friend Raymond Aron, who had published several influential books on the philosophy of history and a doctorial dissertation Introduction to the Philosophy of History: An Essay on the Limits of Historical Objectivity.

According to Flynn, Sartre’s most important contribution is a methodological prescription that the historian must move on three planes:

That of the for-itself, where he tries to show how the decision appears to itself in the historical individual; that of the in-itself, where this decision is an absolute fact, temporal but not dated; finally that of the for-other, where the pure event is recaptured, dated and surpassed by other consciousnesses of being ‘of the world’.

This is supposed to be the way from relativism into reality. The main thing is the focus on the situation that is acting on the man, where the man projects himself though situations and living them in the unity of human reality.

If I understand anything of this; Sartre believes in one human reality, so each historical situation is not just a situation, but recaptured existence of reality. Hence the need for the historian to act as the philosopher/psychologist Sartre wants him to be.

I must admit that I do not really see what this approach can be used for, but perhaps further reading will give some clue.

Humanistic theory and method

Jill/txt has a post today (No Method) on method in the humanities. She refers to an article on this topic in Medietidskriftet (in Norwegian). Jill Walker’s point seems to be that the humanities do not really have any method; at least not a unifying one. Methods used are usually taken from social sciences. When I read this it though: “But what about hermeneutics? Has she forgotten about interpretation and understanding?”

However, when reading Arne Fetveit’s article ‘Den trojanske hest - Om metodebegrepets marginaliseringav humanistisk medieforskning’ a differentiation appears. Fetveit argues that social sciences have method while the humanities only have theory. He claims that combining narratology, semiology, rhetorics and hermeneutics as humanistic method is just a disguise of the fact that the arts does not have a method. I think he has an important point in reminding us of the fact that we neither should join allsorts of theory and method from the humanities and social sciences and try to see them as one, nor desperately try to make a set of methods for the humanities just because the social sciences define themselves by method.