In my last installment, I outlined how a few colleagues, a couple of podcasts, and a book (pictured) have helped revitalize my identity as an intellectual historian. Deep training and habits as a historian helped me survive strong personal setbacks in 2018. But I needed other sources to help me turn a fresh stream of thought on how I think about myself, in particular, as historian in the field of ideas. Those sources, and American Labyrinth in particular, have reinstalled a sense of solidarity that had been missing. The book’s lessons have enabled a personal revival.
However complicated our personal and political times are, those complications arise from ideas—in competition, hidden, or evidenced by certain material things. They infuse the world around us. As Dan Rodgers tells us in Atlantic Crossings, an awareness of the “agenda-setting role of ideas” gives meaning to our social and political experiences (Harvard Press, 1998, p. 6). And as Livingston asserts in American Labyrinth—inverting William Carlos Williams line from the 1927 poem, “Paterson”—there are “no things but in ideas” (p. 12). All social movements, he continues, are both permeated and constituted by ideas (p. 13). All who think of themselves as intellectual historians are navigating “the difference, and the relation, between material circumstance and intellectual prescription.” We want to know “how and why…idea[s] make a difference” (p. 14). We long to know what myths, symbols, metaphors, assumptions, language, and texts are taken for granted—assumed into the background, unexamined and invisible to most (p. 19).
American Labyrinth offers the careful reader a number of lessons on methodology and theory. In my recent reading, I was most affected by the essays from Livingston, Jonathan Holloway, K. Healan Gaston, Ben Alpers, Andy Jewett, and Dan Wickberg. Even so, I enjoyed and found great value in the pieces by Kevin Schultz, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Ruben Flores, Amy Kittelstrom, Andrew Hartman, Ray Haberski, Lisa Szefel, Angus Burgin, David Sehat, Christopher McKnight Nichols, and Chris Cameron. Burgin’s essay even tweaked me to want to reread a little Foucault—a desire I thought I’d never have after the Foucauldian fatigue felt after late 1990s graduate school. Despite also being annoyed to high heaven by Kevin Mattson’s essay, it still provoked me. At the very least it made me appreciate Hartman’s essay that followed. I will have more to say about Holloway later, in a few weeks.
So what about the essays from Livingston, Holloway, Gaston, Alpers, Jewett, and Wickberg inspired me? What did I learn from them, or about what did they remind and invigorate me?
They helped update my algorithm, as it were. They’ve updated my process of approach to historical phenomena—the kinds of questions I’m asking myself. It’s not that I haven’t asked these questions before, and don’t ask them still, but life and distractions disrupt one’s attention to the full scope of tools one can, or might, use.
Questions are, indeed, tools for the historical kitchen. They enable the right kind of cooking about historical works and phenomena. The right utensils, pots, and pans enable one appropriate mixing. They help you create a certain flavor of story. My cooking, however, had grown stale and a bit confused. It had become uninspired. I wasn’t happy with my ingredients, methods, and the dishes served.
Without citing a specific point, necessarily, from the essays that inspired me most, I want to show how the readings are renewing my approach. The lessons I’ve learned have taken the form, below, as a list of questions. I offer them here, publicly, because I think the question may help others.
I’m starting with a core reminder: Look For The Ideas (LFTI). From there I plan to run down this series of questions–listed here in no particular order:
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Basics
- What ideas are in play?
- How are multiple ideas interacting or competing?
- What special terms are attached to this idea or these ideas?
Origins, Structures, & Power
- From where do these ideas arise? Are they international or transnational? … As Haberski notes, “A mark of a rich idea is that it travels well” (AL, p. 187).
- How are the ideas institutionally situated?
- What is structuring those those ideas?
- What are the hard and weak objective claims?
- Where is the power in those structures?
- How do race, gender, and class enter, or fit into, the picture?
- When did a sense of contingency, agency, or “what if,” come into play?
People & Texts
- Who is talking or writing about them? What is the discursive context?
- What texts matter most in relation to these ideas or this idea?
- Who has been most influential or powerful in the cast of players?
- How are people conversing about those ideas? What concepts are invoked and what linguistic choices made?
- How are people agents, or not, in relation to those ideas?
- Which people or groups have been most affected by these ideas?
- Warning: To quote Kevin Mattson, beware of “reduc[ing] people to their worst moments” (AL, p. 124).
- Where are the people of color? What are they saying or doing? Who is struggling to be recognized or visible?
Chronology & Change
- When was this idea, or set of ideas, in play?
- How did the ideas change over time? How long did certain iterations remain continuously viable, or overlap?
- How did the complexity of these ideas vary over time?
Other
- How are facts and values mixed, meeting, or intersecting in relation to the idea or ideas?
- What are the dominant narratives around these idea? What is the historiography?
- Where is capitalism? How are the ideas being used, commodified, or instrumentalized?
- How popular are they?
- How are the ideas enmeshed in a reification process?
My Interest
- Why do I care about these ideas? Be sure to situate, interrogate, and contextualize my present interest in these ideas.
- How am I in the fray?
- Where are the points of my critical and/or empathic engagement?
- What are the potential “coercive” tendencies, to use Gaston’s framing, in my interest? Or, how might I “do violence to the complexity of the past”? (Gaston, 231).
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This is probably a good place to stop. I can ask these questions, or some portion of them, in every (intellectual) historical inquiry. The answers will help form the outline of my intellectual history narrative.
So these are my lessons. I’ll keep this list of questions posted next to another sheet on writing—located near my desk. Hopefully the list will remind me of the feeling of revitalization experience during and after completing American Labyrinth. Feelings are fickle, subject to distractions and rest and structures sometimes out of one’s control. But the book will always be on my shelf, not far from the list, as a symbol and reminder of my deeper commitments to the field.
My next, and probably last, installment directly related to American Labyrinth will be reflection inspired by Jonathan Scott Holloway’s essay. – TL
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