Social Change and History

In this week's readings I found the last chapter of William H. Sewell Jr.'s Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation to be of a high degree of interest. Within Logics of History William H. Sewell seeks to re-characterize interactions between social scientists and historians by fostering an exchange of views and approaches to human interaction. Fundamental to the reworking of the historical-social sciences relationship, Sewell argues, is a conscious attempt to reconcile the divide between synchronic and diachronic interpretations of the past. Sewell writes "Anthropology's classical notions of culture, no less that sociology's classical notions of social structure, needs to be infused with historical temporalities" (18). I agree with the assertion that social scientists, especially those analyzing the most fundamental levels of human interaction, would benefit from treating the past as a foreign country. Historians have largely long since abandoned overarching and deterministic views of human interaction, choosing instead to emphasize contingency and agency. However, Sewell is also correct that Historians must utlilize diachronic as well as the standard synchronic contextualization to more accurately cover a historical subject. The results of Sewell's efforts culminate in chapter 9 titled "Refiguring the "Social" in Social Science." In this chapter William Sewell gives a history of the changing meanings of "social" in order to parallel its rise with other concepts like "history" and "culture" during 18th century and Enlightenment. Sewell argues that these terms have come to represent "the totality of complex interrelatedness that we understand as constituting the basic reality of human existence" and carry a mystical vagueness which belies their importance as world-view defining concepts (326). As abstract aggregates these ideas carry a wealth of meanings and uses which must be explored in a diachronic fashion and require "the search for a much wider variety of semiotic methods" (339). Sewell's argument waxes on the idea of the social as a language game with a distinct emphasis on the game aspect. Overall, I found this work to be a creative point of view for reconciling many of the far-flung differences in emphases between social scientists and historians. Sewell also effectively argues for the value and necessity of both diachronic and synchronic approaches to history.

Internet as Subject Index?

The individual accounts of historians' research and archival work in Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History peaked my interest this week. Each of these archive stories gave a different view and personalized assessment of the objectivity of archives and documentary evidence. I found each article to be interesting and informative in their own right but one article especially caught my attention and got me thinking. Renée M. Sentille's chapter regarding the use of the Internet left me pondering many questions about the utility of Internet archival methods in their present functionality, especially in regards to historians. I agree with Sentille's assertion that the Internet is a valuable tool but in essence will always be virtual. The experience and knowledge gained by physical engagement with source materials is irreplaceable and at current technological levels not recreate-able on the Internet. Also I agree with his assessment of the Internet as a shifting and ephemeral thing which in most cases of historical inquiry offers up many social and popular conceptions. This can be seen in his inquiries on Adah Menken conjuring up volumes of pages with different views of her as Jewish, African American, Feminist etc. In my opinion and experience, the Internet is representative of all who connect and use it albeit not equally or uniformly. Pornographic, business, academic, government, and entertainment sites, especially from metropole nations (primarily the U.S.) seem to dominate the sources of Internet materials. Though the 'net has the potential, if economics and technology keep up, to encompass virtually all textual, artistic, and language based human interaction, this is not the situation today. I think that for one of the most technologically engaged and computer/Internet savvy portions of the population, college students (graduate included), the Internet functions as an amorphous subject index. This is to say that it is an index which does not really tie back to any specific place but serves often as a jumping off platform for the researcher to other affiliated subjects and points of views. Open source encyclopedias like Wikipedia often serve students as 1.subject director 2. index of terms and 3. annotated bibliography. Websites such as Wikipedia can function for researchers as a gauge of popular historiography of those who connect to it and use it. The Internet can inspire some bad impressions, especially in historians who base their proof on documentary and material evidence. The fact is, though, that if things continue technologically it will most likely come to dominate most language based transferences of information. I do not think that the book will be replaced completely but research and work in history will continue to become more Internet based as more resources become available and distant connections mandate. Sentille begs the question as to whether historians should develop complex search algorithms to aid in research and I agree. The Internet is inherently nebulous and changing, requiring complex modes of categorizing and searching increasingly larger and more complex archives. However, I think that historians, especially academics and scholars, must associate and connect themselves to the Internet on a much larger and more social scale in order garner its benefits. Open source encyclopedias represent a chance to allow communities to govern and arbitrate information for themselves. I think that professional historians, too, should organize on the Internet to facilitate open discussions of historiography.

The Sexual Contract

Within the reading for this week I found Carole Patemans's The Sexual Contract to captivate my interests the most. I've always been interested in social contract and specifically its political ramifications but Pateman argues a novel view. I am inclined to agree with her that there has been a historical neglect of the source and influence of private sphere. Most interesting, to me, though, is Pateman's assertion that "political right originates in the sex-right" (3). Carole Pateman argues that from the very beginning the social contract was superseded and in a manner determined (in its future exercise) by the core assumptions of the contract itself. Out of the language of individualism and common rights of the social contract era Pateman identifies the mode by which patriarchal control was replaced with paternal right in contract, labor, and gender relations. Pateman identifies the rationalization and obfuscation of the male paternal right as a function of the historic idea of the individual and free contracts. By clarifying the historical birth of the idea of individual as a male dominated perspective, Pateman gives creedence to the necessity of a reformulation of contract theory. To learn that there exists a purposefully embraced disconnect in the historical formulation between ideas of the individual and the female should give any ardent believer of social contract theory reason to pause. The inherent inequality of the original sexual contract which was re-manifested in all of social contract has resulted in a warped and obscured presentation off equal individuals. Just as Pateman asserts, in this manifestation of social contract men's sexual desires are fulfilled in the capitalist market while the division of female into the private sphere denotes prostitution as a vice and crime, rather than business contract. This example does not to seek to judge on the morality of prostitution, rather, it manifestly shows the disconnect between females and their "individual" right to their bodily labor. As historians, and specifically those focused on what is termed "Western" history, Pateman's argument is necessary to grasp how and why both the public and private are politically relevant. Even more, Pateman's argument suggests that we must not bind our understandings of social and political interactions to primarily private or public in nature.

Sexual Determinism and Conceptions of Gender

Within the first few paragraphs of Joan W. Scott's "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis" the author offers up the a growing definition of contemporary conceptions of gender. Academics and feminists alike have begun to approach gender "as a way of referring to the social organization of the relationship between the sexes" (1053). In reading this it struck me as a congenial definition considering the implications of Denise Riley's argument in Am I that Name? Riley flushes out the historical conceptions of sex and gender by analyzing the multifarious character traits attributed to the female sex in English society since the 1500s. In the course of this exposition Riley shows that that sex, in her case specifically female, has been characterized as closer to Nature, more in tune with social activities, equal in religious rights but not intellectual, and a host of other ascribed beliefs about gender. Deterministic and historically specific beliefs about the female sex, for Riley, have caused a rift to form in Feminism. Riley identifies feminists across the temporal spectrum as torn between characterizing women as different and singular because of their sex and arguing that gender and femininity are complete constructs and sexual differences are ephemeral. Riley argues that this division has prevented feminists from seeing the manifest ambiguity of sex. Feminists must recognize the socially constructed nature of sex as well as the all too real effects gender determinism has had on perceptions of sex. I think that Riley has the right idea when she writes that to engage this ambiguity "a history of several categories...would be demanded in order to glimpse the history of one" (14). Though Scott provides an excellent definition of gender as a social organization it does not accommodate for the many other social facets which affect gender perceptions. If gender truly is not a social construct, the only method by which we can determine this is to treat gender as a construct and attempt to delineate the variety of other factors which inform and define sex.

Cusset and French Theory

This week’s reading imparted a closer view of the way theory and academic thought is transformed as well as informed by foreign readings and exportation. Francois Cusset emphasizes the transformative nature of the capture, transmittance, and re-evaluation of theory and knowledge. Concomitantly, Cusset demonstrates the contextual specificity of those interpretations and various methods by which theory may be transmitted across societies and cultures. Within the conclusion of Francois Cusset’s French Theory a quote from Oswald Spengler simplifies this view; “The more enthusiastically we laud the principles of an alien thought, the more fundamentally in truth we have denatured it” (337). I took this to mean that the more one understands and applies a foreign produced taxonomy to one’s own context, the less it tends to resemble the insider’s view of the theory. Alternatively, this means that theories, like those of Derrida and Foucault, which, over time, lost much of the power and essence of their traditional understandings in France were not exhausted theory. Cusset effectively demonstrates the way theory, imported into a different social and academic context in the United States, was interpreted and understood in alternate and viable mode. Consequently, whereas at the time Foucault and Derrida were marginalized in France, an understanding of their theories, birthed in the American context, allowed for a reapplication of those ideas. According to Cusset, not just the contextual mode of interpretation can affect a change in theoretical orientation and application. The mode of transmittance plays a large role in how theory is received and applied (90). Cusset identifies the literary vessels by which French Theory took hold in the United States as an exemplar of this principle. Though French Theory was also academically introduced to Americans, the multilateral reality of the literary and artistic expressions of this theory largely contributed to its altered American form. Cusset does well to remind us to question whether we can look beyond the criticisms inspired by our own experiences as well to show that theory is permenantly understood in the eye of the beholder.

The Habitus and Directionality

In his Outline of a Theory of Practice Pierre Bourdieu approaches questions of objectivity, acculturation, and societal reproduction in a different way than the past authors and philosophers we have studied. Though Bourdieu rejects the primacy of agency of the individual, referring to single humans more as organisms, he does not fully embrace the structuralist and deterministic ideal. From the beginning Bourdieu accepts and expounds upon man's inability to achieve an objective point of view and also identifies some of the inherent limitations in reaching for Objectivism. One such objection to this practices which Bourdieu offers is the potentially huge gap in understanding and meaning between native participants and trained secondary speakers of a language. Bourdieu also identifies the propensity of observers to naturally and unknowingly project their own socially constructing meanings and assessments of behaviors onto the observed. Conversely, though, Bourdieu asserts that individual humans both acculturate to and through language contain limitless potential to rationalize their own behavior and personal understanding. In this way Bourdieu recognizes the weaknesses of applying subjectivity and objectivity to the overarching recreation and perpetuation of human society.

Rather than seeking to wholly prove or disprove either side of the historical dialectic regarding individual agency and structuralism, Bourdieu uses the concept of habitus. Habitus, for Bourdieu, is a range of "systems of durable, transposable dispositions"(72). Or, in reference to the remaking of social reality, habitus is the adaptations to goals based on objective circumstance without the prior skills to obtain those goals and without the totalizing control of a third party or structure (72). Unlike objectivist in the past, Bourdieu argues that though there are objective forces acting upon and acculturating individual humans, the habitus is a historically specific with changing features due to constant chronological reconstruction and rebirth. In this machination, humans are acculturated mostly through imitation and literal experience in the habitus which they were born or socialized. By shirking the emphasis on overarching and deterministic structures, the habitus provides a more full and organic view of societal perpetuation. Bourdieu only refers to habitus in reference to non-totalitarian systems because of the dual importance of habitus in recreating society from the bottom up as well as the top down. I found Bourdieu's comparison of habitus to organizations and societies like the military, which emphasis deconstructive de-culturation combined with teaching and re-culturation, to be especially striking. Most interestingly, these organizations imitate some of the outward influential capacities of the habitus in the "most insignificant details of dress, bearing, physical and verbal manners" (94). Bourdieu impresses upon the reader the importance of the arbitrary nature and irrational enforcement of these facets of appearance in mimicking the rationale enforcement of the habitus.

Overall, I found Bourdieu's assertions regarding objectivity and subjectivity to be very convincing. Though he leans towards some to the tenets of objectivity in his pronouncements, the author does not follow them to an undue length and hit the same obstructions as other philosophers. Rather, Bourdieu is able to show how individual agency is a factor in the change of culture by demonstrating the ceaseless chronological reformulation of culture and society which is constantly occurring. Objective forces may act upon and influence individuals but the perpetual reassessment of those forces by individuals in the habitus provides a directionality and a means of sociocultural change.

Discipline, Power, and Their Manifestations

Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison present a novel and overarching view of the exercise of coercive disciplinary power and its effect on individuals and manifestations within societies. In my opinion, especially interesting within this reading is Foucault's argument concerning individuals' souls. Foucault identifies the non-corporal effects of power on human beings as a "soul" and a socially malleable human feature. Individuals being punished as well as those who are presided over by disciplinary and order imposing power structures are "unlike Christian theology..not...born in sin and subject to punishment but...born out of methods of punishment, supervision, and restraint" (29). Foucault recognizes and argues that the ramifications of power and the exercise of disciplinary coercion upon human populaces become manifest in those individuals. In reading this characterization of power, I am reminded of our discussion in last week's readings on the historio-anthropological value of seemingly fantastic stories and beliefs. Through colonial power and discipline structures foreign racial values both infiltrated and were reacted against within the superstitions and beliefs of the larger society. This resulted in the construction of a belief which valued human body parts, especially those of certain racial attributes, for luck. In turn a reactionary belief and understanding of monkeys as the servants of malevolent forces seeking to steal body parts resulted in a single, seemingly fantastic event of the killing of a monkey for carrying a plastic bag. Foucault's characterization of the relationship between individuals and the overarching power and coercion schemes invites us to be able to research and understand the source of such social practices and behaviors. By identifying the many dimensions that power interacts on humans down to the individual level, Foucault shows us another point of view for understand human behavior. Also, reading Foucault's conception of the social power practices which affect human behavior is reminiscent of Max Weber's characterization of the Protestant Ethic. I do not think that Foucault represents a fundamental disagreement with Weber's assessment of the rise of capitalism. Although Foucault identifies disciplinarian practices such as time and space regimentation which could have directly informed the rise of capitalistic production, his argument about the abstract effects of power still ring true. Weber's assessment of a Protestant ethic could arguably be a representation of a religious power structure rather than strictly a faithful belief. I do not see a direct conflict between then two points of view but I welcome any comments.