roachboy

general point: if there is one thing i wish i had not said in this thread, it would be to specify my day job. i think it advanced very little when i said it and hasnt really helped anything else. if i could erase it, i would.


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lebell:

well at least there is a definite point at which things split between us:

there is a way in which i guess you are right----in the way implied by memorial parks and battlefields, postage stamps and other such: that history is something tied up with Extraordinary Events and Great Individuals--but what do people do during periods where there are no Big Adventures to be had?

what do you make of--o i dunno--the development of Agricutlure, of capitalism, of the workers movement, etc.--are they not history? are they not historical because they cannot be reduced to a Great Event or a series of Great Events which can be associated with or attributed to an Individual?

what do people do when there is not Great Event happening? what do they live through every day? nothing? a waiting room? "life"?

it follows that for you there is probably an a priori order to the world that human being are somehow shaped by in their actions. i would expect that your suspicion of the notion that history is made by people as they live every day runs up against an assumption of the priority of the individual. both of these probably connect back to a set of religious assumptions. at one level or the other.

i think this view does several things:

1. it implies that everyday life involves nothing fundamental. history is great events, big changes--the rest is the running of a machine put in place presumably by a creator of some type or another. i think such meanings, such orders as are understood to exist in the world are the results of human activity. i also understand assumptions that the order of the world exists a priori to be ideological. that in the marxist sense.

2. it would appear that for you, lebell (and i am transposing some of your terms into what seems to me a convenient alternate version), one model for thinking about history in general might well be the Incarnation--it is about ruptures that can be attributed to a single Individual. at best, this view leads to a kind of christianized aristotle (in the politics)--hierarchies are natural, etc. btw, this view of aristotles, as influential as it may be, was developed out of plato, who in turn was opposed to democracy on fundamental grounds--as violating "human nature" because it assumed hierarchies were malleable, were functions of actual human practice.

another way of seeing the same thing: the view that there is a natural or a priori order that shapes human beings and their collective actions trades away what people do for a metaphysical double of what they do, the question of thinking about how groups move through shifting, ambiguous spaces for the possibility of certainty--which has everything to do with the psychological needs of the observer and nothing to do with the nature of that which is observed.

i do not subscribe to your position.


the idea that a history focussed on individuals and great events is more capacious than a history that sees it as unfolding across everyday life seems surreal. it seems to me like the kind of thing one would simply repeat, that would function as a simple statement, and would not have anything like a material correlate.

a bit on questions of detail (sort of--detail given the abstract character of this exchange i guess--pseudo-detail maybe):

1. your view of fascism as the work of a diabolical individual is, i think, debilitating. but i have said this two or three times in these discussions:
1. fascism is not identical with germany in the 1930s-1940s: there were other variants, there are other variants.
2. if you think about it, your view would lead you to think that the consent of the population to fascism was a simple result of--well what?--it does not seem to me that your view could explain it--i am not sure that you would find the question interesting, even.
i guess i could understand how this position could operate--i would reject it out of hand for myself---but what i really dont understand is how you could possibly claim that yours is the more capacious position. (this is the last time i'll raise this--it occurs to me that this tack could degenerate into a size queen conflict (mine is bigger than yours) displaced onto this question...which seems tedious)

second example:

do you really imagine that you would understand the russian revolution by focussing on lenin? you do know that by 1916 lenin was in exile, almost totally isolated in the context of the 3rd international, etc....the position the bolsheviks found themselves in in 1917 has to do with all kinds of factors--lenin's organizational conceptions were among these--but they did not have to do with the person of lenin himself in the period immediately leading up to it--if you focus on lenin, you do not even have a way to introduce the general character of the reovlution: an urban coup d'etat grafted uneasily (and ultimately problematically) onto a peasant revolt (the conditions of possibility of which extend back to 1860 land reforms) compounded by the economic and miltiary implosion of the czarist regime under the pressures of world war 1. lenin as a human being was writing in a parisian cafe as these factors were beginning to converge.
all the above is at the level of plot summary, but i think you can see my point---you cannot explain anything about the origin, course, outcomes, conflicts within the russian revolution by focussing on lenin as an individual.

the irony is that the exclusive focus of an understanding of the russian revolution as a result of the actions of lenin the Heroic Individual does have a precedent: stalin's "short course of the history of the soviet communist party" runs out such an interpretation--but to confuse that with history is something i dont think even stalin would have done (read the text--it is just insane).

this is not to say that lenin is unimportant of course--and there is nothing about the approach to the revolution outlined above that would lead to erasing lenin--quite the contrary.

this is nice but i do not know that it is other than mythology.

once again, you have what seems to me an unacceptable tradeoff between the desire to see History as shaped by Exemplary Individuals and a far messier reality. focus on franklin in this way lets you say nothing about the actual course of the american revolution, for example: the very real question of whether it was an extension of the wars between england and france by the end (an extension that bankrupted the french state and which is a nontrivial precondition for the french revolution at this level), the period of the articles of confederation (which most histories of america like to pretend never happened)...it does not let you talk about the problems encountered by the colonists themselves in fashioning connections between themselves (which required that they break with the whole social and economic organization generated by the english, which routed economic and social relations back through england, not through each other)---it is only by erasing huge swatches of complexity that you get to a position where franklin can be associated with the unity of some nation. the same holds for setting up a space in which it makes any sense to reduce the activities of the framers of the constitution to a conclave of Great Men to whom the only coherent relation is something just short of worship that a cynical chap might understand as fetishism.

as for the long digression about affirmative action: i do not know how you got to that--i did not speak about it. i find it an interesting turn in your argument in that it is the point where what you say crosses over into the conventional "wisdom" of the conservative ideological apparatus. suffice it to say three things:

1. i do not accept anything you say about the matter.
2. you should not be either surprised or outraged if, in speaking to you across the medium of this board, you find that i invoke the larger framework of conservative ideology--your position is to a siginficant extent, coincident with it.
3. it seems that the main point of your digression into affirmative action is that you do not like it, that you feel somehow put upon because it exists and that you move from this sense of being-victimized to a view of the role of history that i find to be other than compelling.
but i do wonder if this is the central trigger for the entire debate we have been having from your side, lebell.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite