The Elusiveness of Daily Life

The book is written in the belief that changes in attitudes and beliefs during the eighteenth century can be studied at least as fruitfully from the vantage point of more ordinary people--those who read newspapers, frequented coffee-houses or societies, shared in popular entertainments, became interested in current social issues, or simply walked around town with an open mind.

... Nonetheless, some points stand out. The argument that an elite, driven by fear or disdain, somehow 'acculturised' and gradually suppressed the burlesque rudeness and semi-pagan deviance of an identifiable popular culture seems quite inappropriate at least for the eighteenth century. In any case, if a distinct popular culture ever existed, we shall probably never be able to see it in anything like an authentic form. In an age of ideological and religious ferment, of continuing high geographic mobility, of increasing social mixing both formally (in public places) and substantively (in step with economic development), cross-fertilisation and assimilation was inevitable. Two important conclusions may follow from this. First, if we acknowledge that 'common culture' was in reality a great pot-pourri of mutual influences and subtle contrasts, depending on many forms of communication other than the printed word, then its muddied reflection in the great range of disparate sources that survive may be less inadequate than we thought. Second, if we accept the view that innovation, transmission of ideas and social activism could take many forms, only the narrowest and most abstract definition of the enlightenment would allow us to ignore the social and cultural layers below the educated elite. The enlightenment was socially diverse, highly complex and at times self-contradictory: to suggest otherwise would be to miss its essence.
- Thomas Munck, The Enlightenment: A Comparative Social History 1721-1794

I don't know what I was expecting from this book, but I sure as hell didn't get it. How could a volume with such an encouraging opening chapter have let me down so badly? Yes, please, tell me about the social and cultural layers below the educated elite! But alas. The narrative soon descends into a textbook recitation of Darntonian clichés and finishes on the inspiring note that "some ground had been won" (a whiggish conclusion which should remind us how close we still are to the nineteenth century). The method here is still the method of stodgy old institutional history, except the "institutions" are defined a little more broadly. (Institutional history, incidentally, was in bad need of a revival and, in the form of neoinstitutional history, has finally gotten one. But Munch does not seem to benefit from it.) This means that the voices of the people, whoever they may have been at that point in in time, are nowhere to be found in this supposed "social history."

But then, what was he supposed to do? Read court cases? That seems to be the only go-to source for social historians that yields anything even resembling the voices of the lower strata. But court cases represent a methodological problem of their own, which is rarely appreciated by social historians (who tend these days to be somewhat atheoretical). In reading a court case, what we're getting is not a picture of daily life or a voice; it's a representation of a person pleading or genuflecting or making requests to the state. Even the indirect reporting of stories is likely to be warped by the unavoidable presence of the authoritative uniformed observer, which gives us historians a Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle all our own. In Althusserian terms, reading court cases allows us to interact with people only as already-interpellated subjects. (Whatever that means. You get my drift.)

So how do we get access to daily life at all? To help clarify this question, we might construct a rough hierarchy of levels of "daily life" as it is experienced phenomenologically:

1. Liminal states of consciousness (waking up or falling asleep), moments when rational control is lost.
   
2. Fleeting thoughts, memories, emotions; sounds overheard by chance.
   
3. Cogent, structured rational conversations with oneself. ("What do I need to get from the store? Milk, eggs, onions, ground beef. OK, I will make sure to remember that.") Sustained emotions or sequences of sensations (e.g. a movie).
   
4. Abstract conceptions of events and processes relating to levels above individual experience (ideas about goings-on in one's own town, region, nation, world).
5. Abstract conceptions of theoretically-mediated processes and structures at levels above the immediate (theories of historical and social development, evolution, the natural world).

I can already hear two hundred years' worth of French and German philosophers knocking away at my poor little model, but let's assume for now that it works. The Platonic-ideal historian would have access to all five levels of the past. Of course, level 1 is off-limits even to ourselves. (Dream-journals don't count, since they are rational rearticulations and hence distortions of a non-rationally-mediated experience.) Level 2, because it is so volatile, can only be recorded in a handful of instances--but even then, even when it is written down or reconstructed by memory, it inevitably turns into something else. (If I tell someone that I had a fleeting moment in which my father's beard reminded me of the scum on the East River, I am reporting a rationally comprehended memory-version and hence not a fleeting emotion or thought.)

So it's only with level 3 that history-writing can really begin. Unfortunately, the detail, medium, and accessibility of people's conversations with themselves--whether in writing or in their heads--is likely to vary along any of 10 different axes, and the ones we are interested in here (18th-century, sub-elite, intellectual, and so on) are exceptionally unlikely to correspond in a single place. Only a few historians, like Darnton himself, would fail to take this as an excuse to lay down their arms, and good for them; I'm usually not astute enough to squeeze more that the prima facie out of my sources. The question then becomes: how should we feel about being unable to write about daily life the way we ought to?

The answer is: not too badly. For level 3 is a troublesome spot even for people who are in the process of living their own lives. How many times have you left your shopping list at home? How many times have you forgotten what you were thinking? This is not simply a question of esoterics, as reconstructing levels 1 and 2 would be, because we routinely manage to forget even the social, technological, and institutional structures that impinge on our self-conversations. It would be a rare human being who would be able to get her own life sufficiently in mental order that she could write a proper daily-life history of it, complete with social aspects. Autobiographies tend to demonstrate this quite well. (This is one case in which I think Carl Becker's "Everyman His Own Historian" can have a misleading effect.) So let's not blame Munck for his lack of follow-through, and let's not blame ourselves for our incompleteness! We're just doing the best we can.

Astonishing Stories

And she goes on, while her husband bends over the zinnias, to tell what Mr. Marblehall (or Mr. Bird) does in bed. She does tell the truth. He reads Terror Tales and Astonishing Stories. She can't see anything to them: they scare her to death. These stories are about horrible and fantastic things happening to nude women and scientists. In one of them, when the characters open bureau drawers, they find a woman's leg with a stocking and garter on. Mrs. Bird has to shut the magazine. "The glutinous shadows," these stories say, "the red-eyed, muttering old crone," "the moonlight on her thigh," "an ancient cult of sun worshipers," "an altar suspiciously stained..." Mr. Marblehall doesn't feel as terrified as all that, but he reads on and on. He is killing time. It is richness without taste, like some holiday food. The clock gets a fruity, bursting tick, to get through midnight--then leisurely, leisurely on. When time is passing it's like a bug in his ear. And then Mr. Bird--he doesn't even want a shade on the light, this wife moans respectably. He reads under a bulb. She can tell you how he goes straight through a stack of magazines. "He might just as well not have a family," she always ends, unjustly, and rolls back into the house as if she had been on a little wheel all this time.
- Eudora Welty, "Old Mr. Marblehall"

Fantasy itself must touch ground with at least one toe, and ghost stories must have one foot, so to speak, in the grave. The black, squat, hairy ghosts of M. R. lames come right out of Cambridge. Only fantasy's stepchild, poor science-fiction, does not touch earth anywhere; and it is doubtful already if happenings entirely confined to outer space are ever going to move us, or even divert us for long.
- Eudora Welty, "Space in Fiction"

What has Eudora Welty got against science fiction? Perhaps it is because, to her, it inevitably screams "pulp" (like the stuff Mr. Marblehall is reading). Pulp is superficial, narratively impoverished, titillating but empty; as she puts it herself, it's got "richness without taste." And yet somehow her distaste still seems a little strange; after all, there are so many things about life that she manages to successfully recuperate, despite their tediousness and banality. Why can't she locate in Amazing Stories the same narrative gusto she puts into hairdressing and family fights?

The reason, of course, is demonstrated by the ambiguity of the sentence about "richness without taste." On the one hand, it can apply to Mr. Marblehall's reading matter; on the other, it can apply to the process of "killing time" itself. The time of science fiction in some way lacks a charge of human feeling--precisely the quality that would make it "touch earth" and convert the experience of reading into something other than murdered time. In this way Welty's dismissal of science fiction becomes a self-consciously literary posture. It is, in effect, a creative manifesto that counterposes the making-literary of ordinary life (Welty's point of departure as a writer, which perhaps could better be framed as "revealing the literariness of ordinary life") to science fiction's simultaneous evacuation of literature from life ("richness without taste") and life from literature.

But look again at the brilliant sentence that describes Mr. Marblehall's reading: "These stories are about horrible and fantastic things happening to nude women and scientists." What this sentence is not describing is the content or the style of the magazines. It is describing their covers. Mr. Marblehall's wife has not really read these stories, except, perhaps, for part of the one with the leg in the bureau. Has Welty read them? How much can we really tell from her enigmatic little exclamations? Perhaps she thinks there isn't much to them besides the nude women and the scientists. She could, perhaps, be forgiven--the "Golden Age of Esseff" isn't usually called that because of its psychological complexity. [Am I conflating "golden age" and "pulp"? That's a subject for another post.]

At the same time, it's hard for me to believe that she could really be so forthrightly dismissive. After all, that "poor science fiction" in her second quote could just mean "bad science fiction" as well as "poor ole science fiction." So I coddle the illusion that this is an example of one of her favorite themes--the unconsidered action followed by undirected and fleeting regret. (Audubon shoots the bird and regrets something about this. The man at the circus did nothing but could have, and regrets it. Et cetera.) What makes this interpretation challenging, naturally, is that the perspective of Marblehall's wife remains undeveloped in this story, yielding nothing that seems to look like a desire for expiation. (In brief: Mr. Marblehall is a quiet, unassuming old man who happens to be living a double life. Unfortunately, his other life is also that of a quiet, unassuming old man. The double life is a favorite pulp theme. Perhaps if his wife/wives had been less dismissive of his pulp reading matter, they would have recognized what was going on? The materials for a classic Welty regret are there, but they remain unused.)

Anyway, it hardly matters. Welty's contempt isn't really about Esseff or pulp at all. It's about fiction that uses clichés to substitute for an intimate relationship with a place and its drumbeat of life. But it's still nice to think sometimes that Welty could have predicted that a woman writer of her own generation could have won, a half-century after that essay, the Nobel Prize for a work of science fiction. Alas, she probably couldn't have.

The Age of Linnaeuses

All that remained to the Linnaeans in their quest for tea was honor and its pursuit. They comforted themselves (falsely) that tea had first entered Europe with "a Swedish man and in a Swedish ship and to a Swedish harbor." In 1768, one student wrote in this patriotic vein from Paris to console Linnaeus: "Now, Sir, you will get a great revenge on that lie that Tea was first introduced in Europe in Trianon, which was once said in the gazettes."

From Uppsala, Linnaeus dismissed the claim that tea grew in Dutch and French botanic gardens. Yet this was of little comfort to him as he saw his specimens wilt and die, and his achievements ignored by the learned. Attempting to set the record straight, he cautiously summarized his life's work in 1773: "Tea was first seen away from China in the Uppsala Garden; from this others have learned to take care of it in such a way that within a Century Tea will be common in the fields of Southern Europe."

As late as 1791, Linnaeus' student Andres Sparrman advocated European-grown tea. Employing the fashionable rhetoric of participatory and radical politics, he urged "you Europeans! Citizens!" to "abandon the Chinese tea entirely, or plant it yourself" to help abolish slavery. Europe, through her own forests of tea bushes ... can avoid the humiliating annual tribute to the barely half-civilized Chinese Nation, of so many hundreds of thousands of measures of silver," which are obtained from ignoble commerce. "Europeans drag away Africa's Children in irons, to bring up in America that silver from the depth while abused weaker Natives are forced to wither away."

Yet the Linnaeans never could grow tea. Nor did they popularize their native substitutes for tea--sloe, bog myrtle, and pennyroyal. Even Linnaeus' exotic "Lapp tea" of 1740 was a poor substitute for real tea. Thirty years after that introduction, the aging naturalist still expected that his namesake, a frail flower some two inches high, would be cultivated as the national beverage. As if to honor this quixotic dream, Sweden's classic Linnaean flora, Svensk Botanik (1803), opens by describing Linnaea borealis, recommending it especially for tea. Yet his son's terse note on brewing it may more appropriately memorialize it: "NB, one shouldn't use too many" Linnaea leaves in the water, "for then it is rather repulsive."
- Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (1999)

When you're an eighteenth-century historian in training, you quickly discover that the field has occupational hazards which few people will warn you about, or even acknowledge. Prime among them is the period's almost unbelievable ability to make history-writing turgid, in all senses of that word. Since the great debates in this area typically revolve around the Enlightenment(s) (how many of them were there? Did they cause the French Revolution? Were they uniformly secularist in orientation?), they provide a built-in stimulus for writing enormous and comprehensive Very Serious Intellectual History books, which appear to get longer every year. The two most important in the last couple of decades total roughly 3000 pages each--one in (a projected) three volumes, one in (a projected) six. Although the last half-century has seen an growing emphasis on local and regional studies, these, far from taming the field's monstrous esprit de systeme, only encourage it. Few comprehensive studies can now afford to ignore Beccaria and the Germans.

In that context, Koerner's book is a great relief. Not only is it a scant 193 pages long; it's also unpretentious in a way that only a good local study can be. Koerner treats her subject with gentle levity instead of moral righteousness or high seriousness. She doesn't drown him in historiographical cliches or attempt to fit him into awkward preconceived schemata. We come to the book to learn about Linnaeus, and we come away actually having learned something about him.

The thesis of the book is that Linnaeus’s central concern over the course of his long scientific career was the promotion of Swedish autarky and economic development, which he thought about using the mental categories of German cameralism. Implicit in this is the fact that he was not an Enlightenment man, not a man of the Scientific Revolution, not a "modern" man in the sense in which we use that word today. For all his popularity in amateur scientific circles in Western Europe, he remained a locally-rooted, traditionalistic relic; he dreamed of a Sweden rich in tea plantations and pearl farms, not of liberty, fraternity, and equality. As Koerner puts it, he was in pursuit of a "local modernity" that would never arrive.

To a much greater extent than is usually appreciated, the eighteenth century (I would hypothesize) was full of Linnaeuses; for, in a certain sense, he was also very much a man of his time. The spread of basic scientific knowledge (or knowledge regarded as scientific) provided intellectual resources for an enormous stratum of people whose hobbies and casual interests thereby acquired the aura of a fight for progress. Few of them ever got beyond this, of course. But it's impossible to look at all the local histories and minor experiments produced in the period and not conclude that the age had given lots of people something to keep themselves busy.

If the field is to properly appreciate these kinds of people, it needs to experience an aesthetic shift as much a strictly historiographical one. Today's Enlightenments, even outside of the work of Jonathan Israel, remain mired in triumphalist and pseudo-heroic narratives of intellectual conquest and moral struggle. Linnaeus and his kind, who were almost inevitably bad scientists and produced useful knowledge only by sheer accident, demand a different point of view--one which can properly grasp their failure, ignorance, and self-delusion. Only this, in the end, can cure our turgidity.

(Although, given Robert Darnton's general lack of success in pushing the field in this direction, I'm not holding out much hope.)

Crises

The critic stands above the parties; his task is not to "destroy" but to "establish" the truth. He enters into competition with a rational State that sets itself above the religious groupings. Not that he creates a new order here and now; the reign of criticism is non-partisan only in an infinite process of renewal. Thus Bayle's critic also knows only one obligation: his duty towards a future in which truth is found only through the exercise of criticism. The claim to impartiality propelled the process to the same extent that its end was still not in sight. The self-assurance of criticism lay in the connection of the critic to the yet-to-be-discovered truth. Every error discovered, every hurdle overcome reveals fresh obstacles; thus the human compulsion to unravel finds ever more subtle methods to seize on evil and do away with the continuous flow of confusion, until finally there is nothing left for reason to do. Criticism transformed the future into a maelstrom that sucked out the present from under the feet of the critic. In these circumstances there was nothing left for the critic but to see progress as the temporal structure appropriate to his way of life. Progress became the modus vivendi of criticism even when--as in Bayle--it was not deemed a forward movement but one of destruction and decadence.

In every instance the self-made link to the future enabled the rational judge to become a critic of the present. It made available a sphere of absolute freedom in the present to the executor of criticism.
- Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (1959)

Despite its Germanic bombast, Koselleck's argument is original and compelling, if only because it manages to turn the hoary Counter-Enlightenment narrative about conspiratorial Freemasons and seditious philosophes into something genuinely worthy of notice. In brief, he argues that the civil wars of the seventeenth century brought about the rise of a theory of politics (Hobbesianism) that divorced morality from the political and made obedience into the central duty of the individual. Unlike most scholars, however, he does not see this development as either lamentable (because it destroyed the organic bond between church and state) or praiseworthy (because it prefigured modern liberalism). Koselleck, you see, is a Schmittian--and so he needs only the amoral State for complete happiness.

Of course, the Hobbesian utopia couldn't last. The pesky philosophes, self-defined in contradistinction to the state, insisted on the primacy of the moral conscience. With the French Revolution, moral conscience actualized itself as a political force and destroyed any possibility of Hobbesian obedience forever. The rest, as they say, is history: the Cold War represents the inevitable return of civil war, based, as in the seventeenth century, on competing moral visions of politics. Koselleck lets the reader draw out the baneful consequences by herself.

He didn't know, of course, that the Cold War would end, and that history would end with it. This unexpected dénouement should undermine our faith in all such speculative metaphysical roadmaps of world history. The USSR, it turns out, was never an abstract ideological unity, but a deeply troubled regime that in many ways continued imperial traditions instead of overturning them. Plus, all in all, the end of history has had remarkably few substantive consequences for us. Under these circumstances we might even be able to say that the moral-conscience model of politics has borne itself out quite well.

That, of course, gives the lie to Koselleck's entire project. Like Hazard, like Adorno, he assumes as historically-absolute a despair that has turned out to be contingent. (Does anyone, even the most enthusiastic Adorno apologist, still believe that "after Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric"?) If we are still reading these people, it is only because our lack of imagination prevents us from inventing a new despair proper to our own age. There was an attempt, fifteen years back or so, by Enzensberger. It is barely remembered.

In our quest for a new despair, we'd be wise to remember that Koselleck was right about one thing. Enlightenment criticism really was all about writing checks it could never cash. The bright future that loomed proleptically in all those books and pamphlets has still not arrived, which means the file on the Enlightenment Project will always remain open. Maybe this, at the very least, could make us despair again? Utopia, in at least one way, was closer to us then than it is now.

From the Annals of Soviet Cryptozoology

I don't have any pithy analysis for you today, just sweet, sweet archival goodness. I found this while poking around in the archives of the Department of Science and Higher Education of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which are here in microfilm form. So, without further ado, a document from GARF fond 5, opis' 35, delo 73:

U S S R A C A D E M Y O F S C I E N C E S

21 February 1958
No. 1-680

To the TsK KPSS [Central Committee of the Communist Party]

Regarding the yeti

We wish to report that the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences, at its meeting on January 21, 1958, considered the question of the yeti. ["snezhnyi chelovek"]

After hearing the reports of a number of scientists concerning some data that permit the possibility that the so-called "yeti" may exist on USSR territory in the mountainous regions of the Pamirs, as well as several statements denying that possibility, the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences, in order to take appropriate action for deciding the question, ordered a Commission under the chairmanship of corresponding member S. V. Obruchev to prepare materials for a request to be presented to the Government about the protection of the appropriate mountain regions of Pamir against amateur expeditions and hiking groups.

In addition, the Commission was ordered to submit proposals for the organization, this year, of a well-equipped expedition to the Pamirs in order to study the yeti question from all sides, as well as for a joint expedition to the Himalayas with India and China.

The Commission has not yet examined the extant materials concerning the possibility of the yeti's being found in the Pamirs, but the announcements that have been published in the press over the course of the previous month regarding encounters with the yeti in this region of the USSR cannot be considered entirely truthful. At the same time, the existence of a large number of stories, spread among the local population, about encounters with the yeti, as well as the physico-geographical resemblance between the Pamirs, Karakorum, and the Himalayas, permit the possibility that the yeti may have migrated west from its primary habitat in the Himalayas and reached the Pamirs.

Consequently, the commission has concluded that a full expedition must be organized for a full-scale scientific examination of the two most unreachable and poorly studied sectors of the Pamirs, the basin of Sarez Lake and the basin of the river Muk-Su (including the river Baliand-Kiik). Aside from studying the question of the yeti, the expedition should provide materials to determine the botanical, zoological, and physico-geographical characteristics of the region. The commission has submitted a plan of operations and a budget to the Presidium.

Because of the wide range of discussion about the question of the yeti's existence in the Pamirs, it is likely that, starting this year, a large influx of tourists, hikers, and amateur scientific groups to this mountain region will take place. In the belief that the appearance of a large number of people in the regions of the yeti's possible habitation, combined moreover with poaching activity, represents a serious danger to the work of the planned expedition, the Commission has deemed it necessary to create a forbidden zone in the basin of Lake Sarez and the Muk-Su river.

After discussing the question of the yeti's range of habitation in foreign countries, the Commission has determined that, aside from the southern slope of the Himalayas in Nepal (for which we possess the most detailed and reliable materials), reports of encounters with the yeti and its footprints are available for two regions of the People's Republic of China--for the southern border of Tibet (the northern slope of the Himalayas) and the mountainous country adjoining the Soviet Pamirs from the east (the Sarykolsk ridge or Mustag-ata in Xinjiang).

With this in mind, the Commission considers it useful to raise the question of organizing complete Soviet-Chinese expeditions for a full-scale study of the Himalayas between the southern border of Tibet and the Sarykolsk ridge in Xinjiang before the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Reporting the above, the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences requests instructions.

Academician A. N. Nesmeyanov, President of the USSR Academy of Sciences

Academician A. V. Topcheev, Chief Scientific Secretary of the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences