The Difference It Makes:
World War I through a Postmodern Lens *
Jeffrey Hearn
We have seen that the war machine was the invention of the nomad, because it is in its essence the constituative element of smooth space, the occupation of this space, displacement of this space, and the corresponding composition of people: this is its sole and veritable object (nomos). Make a desert, the steppe, grow, do not depopulate it, quite the contrary. If war necessarily results, it is because the war machine collides with States and cities, as forces (of striation) opposing its positive object: from then on, the war machine has as its enemy the State, the city, the state and urban phenomenon, and adopts as its objective their annihilation. It is at this point that the war machine becomes war: annihilate the forces of the State, destroy the State-form.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari 1
When many contemporary historians speak of the "art" of history, they seem to have in mind a conception of art that would admit little more than the nineteenth-century novel. . . . They certainly do not mean to identify themselves with action painters, kinetic sculptors, existentialist novelists, imagist poets, or nouvelle vague cinematographers.
Hayden White (2)
I will be too simple, trying to figure out the un-figurable. This is why language is always fiction and true.
Kathy Acker (3)
I placed a jar in Tennessee . . .
Wallace Stevens (4)
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I. Here / There If one goes looking for the domestic history of World War I in America in the most readily available histories of the war, there is not much to find. This is not, as one might suppose, because they are too specialized, because they are, strictly speaking, military histories. They are not. Neither is it because, as one volume histories of a large and many-faceted topic, there simply isn't any room for such detail. They all, by and large, find some room to discuss the "home front." This was, by all accounts, "total war," and the various domestic histories of the war are understood to be a part of that totality. It isn't even because the United States, not formally entering the war as a belligerent until 1917, played a smaller role than we Americans care to admit. America's domestic history of the war is a marginal element in these narratives, but not for reasons like these. It is more complicated than that. Consider Martin Gilbert's The First World War: A Compete History(1) It does concentrate its attentions on military details, but it also tells us much about the diplomatic and political history of the war as well as the peacemaking that brought the war, in some ways, to a close. It can not be narrowly defined as military history. As for the domestic history of the war in America, what little there is to be found here is considered primarily in terms of the issue of mobilization of resources. The "home front" is found to be quite literally on the map in a companion volume by Gilbert, Atlas of World War I: The Complete History(2) One of his maps, labeled "United States' Opposition to War April 1917," is a graphic presentation of information central to any history of the "war at home" in America. Gilbert's is a very conventional, indeed, traditional, approach. It differs very little from others such as B. H. Liddell Hart's The Real War 1914-1918, or S. L. A. Marshall's World War I, or Spencer C. Tucker's The Great War 1914-18.(3) Other comparable histories of the war may do a better job of integrating, say, a social historian's perspective into the narrative (cf. Annalist Marc Ferro's The Great War, 1914-1918)(4), and some betray a certain partisan national bias which may affect how much one finds in them about things American, but they all sell themselves to the potential reader as concise, yes, but nevertheless, "comprehensive" and "balanced" treatments of the war. They are all, in important ways, of a piece. We do better if we focus in on a slightly different body of literature, those books which attend directly to the domestic history of the war in America itself. There are, in general, two styles: the popular approach of Mark Sullivan, Edward Robb Ellis, or Meirion and Susie Harries, on the one hand, and the more scholarly approach of Frederic Paxson, Donald M. Kennedy, or Ronald Schaffer, on the other. (5) But their differences are of less interest than the manner in which both approaches are the same, and even more so, the manner in which this literature, too, is of a piece with the above mentioned general histories of the total war. Consider the periodization, which in almost every case separates the "neutrality period" from what we may presume, alternatively, is "wartime." The domestic history of the war is commonly begun in 1917, when the United States formally enters the war as a belligerent. Before that it is another story, a diplomatic history for the most part. Consider the phrase "home front." Or the main title of one of the most well received surveys of the topic, Kennedy's Over Here. How do these phrases identify the subject under examination? They do so by means of a comparison to the battlefront. "Over there." In Europe. Where the "real" war took place. The "home front," by comparison, is of lesser importance. A mobilization site vital to the conduct of the war, of course, and a place where the war in Europe had very real, very important effects, most certainly, but, in the end, it is of marginal importance. It is either, in the early years of the war, not yet a part of the story, or, later, a sideshow. What all the examples mentioned above have in common, whether general histories or more specialized mid-range surveys, is the European battleground as the symbolic center of the story, and this in turn has given us a militarized history of World War I, regardless of how far from that battleground our story takes us. When I examine the domestic history of World War I in America through the lens I use, a postmodern lens, I see something very different than that to which the militarized perspective draws our attention. It appears to me that the domestic history of World War I in America was no sideshow, and that it did not begin in 1917. It began in 1914 with the outbreak of war in Europe. As soon as this event had begun, as soon as it appeared in the world as a thing to be made sense of, there was a war in America, too. That war, the war in America, has at its center the struggle to determine the meaning of the war for America. There is no "neutrality period" in this war, there is only wartime. The entry of the United States into the European war in 1917 was a policy decision made by the United States government within the confines of a discursive struggle which framed the debate over what the war meant for America. Seen this way, the military history of the war, the war "over there," was the sideshow. A horrible, bloody, tragic sideshow, but a sideshow, nonetheless. By achieving dominance in the battle over the meaning of the war, interventionists were able to define it as a war that came to "us," from "over there." Woodrow Wilson's message of April 2, 1917 is exemplary; he asks Congress to "accept the status of belligerent that has been thrust upon us." "We are clearly forced into it, " he asserts. The notion that we might reject the opportunity to become a belligerent, that we weren't being forced into anything, but rather that the U.S. Congress was being asked to install a new discursive regime "in power," such notions are pushed aside, in part, by the successful employment of rhetoric like Wilson's. Their dominant position in the war over meaning allowed Wilson and the forces he represents to police the boundaries of "legitimate" debate, to disguise the fact that "the war" wasn't just "over there," but that there was a war at home, too-and that it was this war, first and foremost a discursive struggle, that mattered most. Even the opponents of intervention were trapped within these boundaries: to identify oneself as a "dissenter" is to cede the terms of the debate. And the historians of World War I in American, every one of them, have been trapped, too; they have written within the confines of the debate as defined by its victors, the winners of World War I in America. Like a world turned upside down, that is how World War I in America looks through a postmodern lens. A world turned upside down, and then some. II. Then / Now What am I "doing" by reading "the war" in such a manner? What is my method? I offer the label "postmodern" as a point of reference, but it is an inexact characterization. Deliberately so. We might describe what I am "doing" as "theory," but this, too, is a problematically vague label. If it is meant simply to imply attention to philosophical abstractions, as opposed to a more empirically grounded practice, we might ask: what practice does not imply a particular theoretical position? Can the opposition between theory and practice survive close scrutiny, or do the two notions collapse into one another? Moreover, something more specific is often intended by the invocation of the term "theory"; it is meant to connote something akin to what C. Wright Mills characterized, some forty years ago, as "Grand Theory," as in the case of The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences.(6) In this book, editor Quentin Skinner sought to domesticate certain recent theoretical developments in the human sciences that threatened his way of seeing the world by branding them in a manner similar to Mills' withering critique of Talcott Parsons and structural functionalism in The Sociological Imagination. Mills' Grand Theory began, according to his model, with some totalizing explanatory principle, which was then elaborated through "the associating and dissociating of concepts" (7); it was almost endlessly abstract. When practitioners did get around to the business of the observation of concrete structural and historical context under the influence of Grand Theory, they sought examples to fit into preordained conceptual categories. Historical and structural reality might as well have not existed for those held under the sway of Grand Theory; their formalist lens blinded them to the "real" world, in Mills' view. Skinner, writing in 1985, was of the opinion that "the empiricist and positivist citadels of English-speaking social philosophy have been threatened and undermined by successive waves of hermeneuticists, structuralists, post-empiricists, deconstructionists and other invading hordes." (8) It is a pretty wide net that is being cast here. And it is, I think, fair to say that about the only way to categorize all these theoretical "waves" honestly would be something along the lines of: "non-Skinner's." The problem is that his "hordes," or at least those elements that we might loosely characterize as postmodern, do not practice Grand Theory. Derrida and Foucault, to take the two most important examples, are, if anything, more adamantly in opposition to anything that might reasonably be characterized as Grand Theory than Skinner is himself. Indeed, through a postmodern lens, it seems that Skinner, and those who live within the walls of his citadel, live in the same land that the Grand Theorists do (as did Mills), and it is a land on the other side of the divide which separates them all from postmodernism. No, "theory" will not do. That will not help you understand what I am up to. But there is another phrase, one more commonly put to use within the discipline, that is more telling: "the linguistic turn." To think of my project as taking place "after the linguistic turn" does get us closer to the terrain of my practice, and yet, (not surprisingly) problems remain. The phrase refers in the first instance to the widespread "linguistic turn" in philosophy in the twentieth century, a turn towards inquiry into the manner in which philosophical questions are to be conceived as questions of language. (9) In the 1980s, intellectual historians began to ask themselves whether or not their specialty should take a linguistic turn of its own. (10) Very quickly, however, this phrase, which would seem to indicate a fairly distinct turning point, was found to be so widely applicable that, much as is the case with "theory," its usefulness vanishes upon close examination. Not that we would have needed to wait for it to become the catch-all term it has now become before we could express concern, however. Consider the range of philosophical practice that is incorporated under the original usage: it includes both the Anglo-American analytic tradition connected with such names as Wittgenstein, Austin and Ryle, and the continental line which evolved from the work of Saussure's structural linguistics into structuralism, more generally, and eventually, in the direction of poststructuralism. These turns, equally linguistic, take us in different directions. (11) But only the later points us in the direction of postmodern historiographic practice. Even if we were able to reign in the usage of the term to list original philosophical correlates, we still couldn't be sure what direction we were headed in. The Saussurean structuralist linguistic turn, however, does point us in the right direction. It leads us to the intersection of the structuralist and Nietzschean traditions in France, out of which intersection comes poststructuralism. (12) Structuralism separates knowledge from its metaphysical trappings, and from its anchor in the human subject. (13) Nietzsche's influence leads us in the direction of Derrida and the deconstruction of structuralism's attention to synchronicity, its dream of closure, and sure and stable meaning. And in the form of his genealogical method, Nietzsche offers us a return, of sorts, of history, but not in the form of a search for origins. As opposed to a narrative of progress from beginnings to the present, brick after brick in the Enlightenment's encyclopediac wall of knowledge, he instead turns our attention to the utterly contingent nature by which the present has come about. (14) The relations of power that have brought this present into being are brought to the fore, with the lesson being that the future is never written in advance. In a poststructuralist world, agency is not, as some would have it, rendered futile in the face of nihilism, or relativism, it is returned to us, more finely honed, as is necessary. Foucault provides us with examples of what poststructuralist historiographic practice might look like in the form of genealogy in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. (15) Finally, we might note in passing that recent work on a theme left largely undeveloped by Foucault at the time of his death, that of government rationality, or "governmentality" to use the Foucauldian coinage, steers one even closer to the particulars of my research topic. This line of research leads more directly than ever towards questions of the art of government, of the conduct of conduct. (16) But I have chosen to label my lens "postmodern," not "genealogical" or "poststructuralist." Why? Because, to some extent, I wish to distance myself from any such labels. Much as, for example, analogous strains of feminist theory are not so much a product of this theoretical discourse, as they are strengthened by integrating it with other ways of knowing. (17) I find poststructuralist theory/practice is, quite simply, a tool; it helps me to make better sense of the world. It works for me. But I also choose "postmodern" because there are too many other influences, influences I find difficult at this point to separate out with precision, that can't reasonably be covered by a label like "poststructuralist," even though they are by and large quite compatible. The Subaltern Studies group and the use to which they have put Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin and his Arcades Project, the Situationalist International and their practice of detournement: all these, and, no doubt, many more, have had their influence on my thinking. (18) They have taken their place among the many conceptual bits and pieces of the world I have accumulated, and that I arrange and rearrange in an effort to make sense of the work, not unlike Levi-Strauss's bricoleur. (19) All these practices have helped me grind my lens. I offer the label "postmodern" as a point of reference, but it is an inexact characterization. Deliberately so. III. What form might my postmodern history of World War I take? I can offer you only the most schematic of diagrams here today. It is composed of a variety of elements: interpretations of the war as reported in newspapers, journals of opinion, the Congressional Record. Organizations, institutions, agencies which systematically acted upon the understandings those interpretations offered. Events where understandings of the war were made manifest, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. Fights between neighbors, speeches in parks, "slacker" raids, Presidential addresses. Newspaper advertisements, alien registrations, war memorials, Suggestions for Further Reading. At the beginning we have the arrival of news of war, and the simultaneous beginning of the effort to make sense of what this information means. As interpretations began to take shape in the early days of the war, they were, for some time, framed within the confines of discourses that existed before the war. There was discussion of what the war meant for American business. What was good about it, what was bad about it and how the government ought to react to the commercial implications. Others related the situation to their sense of national identity. Some recent immigrants decided to return home to fight for their country, they left World War I in American to become involved in the European war. "Hyphenated" Americans with loyalties to warring nations might seek to maintain their neutrality as Americans, while at the same time supporting their homeland by raising money for the Red Cross, the German Red Cross as likely as any other. For the most part, it was old battles being fought, even if the ground was new and unfamiliar. In time, discourse concerning the war emerged as what we might think of as a primary discourse in its own right. A new category of identity, a form of subjectivity, came into being; one could be identified not simply within the confines of a nativist discourse, or by ones position in the preparedness debates, but by reference to ones position on the question of whether or not the United States should enter the war in Europe as a belligerent. Not only could your views get you into a bar fight, or fired for not buying war bonds, it could bring you to the attention of the State. It could get you arrested. People were killed in this war as a result of the ability of others to identify them on the basis of their beliefs concerning the war. At the beginning of the war virtually no one thought the U.S. should get involved; by April 1917, an interpretation of the war once held by the overwhelming majority had become subordinated to one calling for intervention. One could argue that the course of the war had dictated a change in views, as, for instance, Woodrow Wilson did, but events do not, in and of themselves, determine their meaning for us when you look at the world through a postmodern lens. It is, instead, the construction of such meaning, and the manner in which such understanding is legitimated and defended that we must make the object of our inquiry. And if we put such discursive practices at the center of our research, the war does not end, as conventionally assumed, with the Armistice. World War I in America continues as long as the discourse within which it has been defined continues. In the years following the Armistice, at least up to the point at which the last political prisoners were pardoned, in 1933, we might argue that war in America remained a very real phenomenon. It still manifested itself in a visceral manner on individual human bodies. But in the years that followed the pardons, perhaps, we might begin to see a new phase taking shape; the battle to determine the meaning of World War I becomes a preexisting discourse for a new struggle: for the example, the fight to determine what contemporary events in Europe, events that would lead to World War II, meant for the United States. Just as, for example, a long-standing discourse concerning nativism provided grounds for the articulation of a new discourse about World War I in America, by the mid-1930s that very same discourse on World War I was itself providing grounds for the articulation of a whole new discourse of war. "Theoretically," if I might use that term rather innocently at this point, we might look for all the ways that World War I in America has continued to be wielded in service to the construction of new and different discursive practices, in monuments, memorials and museums, or in novels, films or other art forms. But I believe we need to pay special attention to one practice in particular: historiographic practice. It is in our practice mainly that the war continues. We are now the police that patrol the boundaries of this discourse. For that matter, we have been on the case from the start. So, we might conclude our study of the war with a history of the history of the war. From the official histories that were written soon after the war, local, state, and federal, to the unofficial, yet authoritative histories written by insiders of all types, and the various examples of professional, disciplinary history which have taken the framework established during the war for granted as they elaborated upon specialized aspects of the war, all the way through to the synthetic overviews mentioned at the beginning of this paper which are built upon all those more narrowly structured monographs. All of this work, every bit of it, down to and including my own, is an act of war if we take the discursive struggle to be the heart of the matter. IV. Here / Now If this is what we do, if this is how we practice history, is it still history? What becomes of the discipline of history if it becomes the history of the present? Does the discipline of history, as traditionally constituted, cease to exist as the source of a meaningful body of knowledge if it is no longer anchored to the Enlightenment, or can it be reconstructed? What is the place within the discipline of those who practice postmodern historiography? Much of the most important work to date has been produced outside of the discipline. Michel Foucault came to hold the chair in the History of Systems of Thought at the College de France only after years of politicking and a career spent far from the power centers of an exceedingly centralized academic world. Even the prestigious forum afforded him by his chair gave him less clout in important ways than would have a position at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, the institutional base of the Annales school historians. Hayden White, after tours of duty in departments of history at Wayne State, Rochester, and UCLA, spent the largest portion of his career in the interdisciplinary History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his path-breaking work, Metahistory, was, for the most part, ignored by historians. Michel de Certeau taught in French and Comparative Literature while a visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego. Jacques Ranciere is a professor of aesthetics in Paris. Admittedly, the scope of these scholars' work makes it easy to understand why they ended up in other departments. And they were not, in most cases, holders of Ph.D.'s in history. But if their work has such tremendous reach as to speak directly to the matter of what it is that historians do, not just at the theoretical level, but also by example in their monographs, why is it that history departments are not home to such scholars more often? Why do scholars capable of such border crossing so rarely find a base of operations within the discipline of history? Work taking place in the wake of Foucault's notion of governmentality, mostly by members of the "Anglo-Foucauldian" History of the Present research network, is almost never conducted within departments of history. More often than not these scholars are sociologists by training and by departmental affiliation. "Real, existing" postmodern historians, meaning those who would be identified by themselves and others as members of the discipline of history, have, by and large, come to such work in mid-career, after first achieving secure standing doing something more traditional. Mark Poster's publication record suggests a common path: modern European intellectual historian (admittedly specializing in the western Marxist tradition at a time when that wouldn't have won him many points with the elder statesman of the discipline), moving on to do (still today, most of the time) conventional intellectual history about unconventional modern European intellectuals. And those who have translated the theory into monographic practice so far have, like Poster, been established historians. In Gender and the Politics of History one can see Joan Wallach Scott's journey from the "new social history" towards a practice shaped by her encounter with poststructuralism, among other influences, as it took place article by article through the mid-1980s. The course of labor historian Patrick Joyce's development in his most recent books reflects a movement in a similar direction. But what if we attempt to begin our careers outside the paradigm? What will happen to those of us who do not practice "normal science"? How many of us will make it to the end of our dissertations without compromising our vision? How many departments will decide "Yes, we should have one of those" and offer us jobs? How many of us will find work in research universities, where we might have some hope of more productively doing the kind of scholarly work we are determined to do? How many of us will receive tenure and the measure of academic freedom it provides? How many of us will simply grow tired of the struggle and walk away? How many of us will be asked to leave before we are ready to? If this is what I do, if this is how I practice history, am I still a historian? I don't know. I am less and less concerned to invest my time and energy in figuring out how best to identify myself professionally. I think I have as much right to call myself "historian" as any other, but I also see myself as a marginal presence within the discipline. This is not a bad thing, however; it is, I think, a very good thing, given the conventions of historiographic practice as they stand today. It is my hope that many more historians will one day learn to read against the grain, to take much less for granted, to pay close attention to that which is taking place at the margins. To encourage such practice, that is my project. This is the difference a postmodern lens makes for my scholarly practice: I leave it to the discipline to see if my papers are in order; I am no longer interested in policing myself. I have more important work to do. |
"Discourse" provides a privileged entry into the poststructuralist mode of analysis precisely because it is the organized and regulated, as well as the regulating and constituting, functions of language that it studies: its aim is to describe the surface linkages between power, knowledge, institutions, intellectuals, the control of populations, and the modern state as these intersect in the functions of systems of thought. Paul A. Bove(5) War is a discourse system, but each type of war has different rules of discourse. Chris Hables Gray(6) Discourse is discourse, but the operations, strategies and schemes played out there are real. Jean Baudrillard and Sylvere Lotringer (7) Our aim is not to denounce the factitiousness of other discourses, but to induce them, so far as possible, to take into consideration what they have allowed themselves to overlook. Jacques Donzelot (8) There is no war, then, without representation, no sophisticated weaponry without psychological mystification. Weapons are tools not just of destruction but of perception. Paul Virilio (9) It is a domestic struggle in the end, a battle for the homefront. Through rhetoric, conflict can be made "natural." Chris Hables Gray (10) The real victory of the simulators of war is to have drawn everyone into this rotten simulation. Jean Baudrillard (11) Good, yes, you've done well. Here is a small prize: the history of the world. Gang of Four (12) Resistance to pure war ... can only be based on the latest information. Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer (13) My purpose in all this is to help grand theorists get down from their useless heights. C. Wright Mills (14) I am not interested in Theory. I am interested in going on theorizing. Stuart Hall (15) What has been called the "linguistic turn" might for these purposes better be termed the hermeneutic turn, or just simply interpretive history, which may be to create a new foundationalism, but if so it is a strange one, where the only true foundation is that there is no true foundation, only the making of meaning. Patrick Joyce (16) Genealogy is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary. Michel Foucault (17) Genealogy is history without constants, tracing not developments, but struggles, not the reconciliation of knowledge and things but the violent appropriation of interpretation, not the process of coming to fulfillment, but the processes of contingent unities and dispersions. For the genealogist, the epistemological lesson of history is "its affirmation of knowledge as perspective." There is no outside from which to view history, since all history is struggle. Todd May (18) Foucault quite explicitly denies that he is interested in writing a history of the conventional sort. In fact, he regards history less as a method or a mode of thought than as a symptom of a peculiarly nineteenth-century malaise which originated in the discovery of the temporality of all things. The vaunted "historical consciousness" of the nineteenth century (and a fortiori of our own time) is nothing but a formalization of a myth, itself a reaction-formation against the discovery of the seriality of existence. Foucault thus regards the works of professional historians with much the same attitude of contempt with which Artaud regarded the works of all modern dramatists or as Robbe-Grillet regards the work of all novelists. He is an antihistorical historian, as Artaud was the antidramatistic dramatist and as Robbe-Grillet is the antinovelistic novelist. Foucault writes "history" in order to destroy it, as a discipline, as a mode of consciousness, and as a mode of (social) existence. Hayden White(19) I would like to write the history of this prison ... Why? Simply because I am interested in the past? No, if one means by that writing a history of the past in terms of the present. Yes, if one means writing a history of the present. Michel Foucault (20) To be entitled to say that politics is the continuation of war by other means, it is not enough to invert the order of the words as if they could be spoken in either direction; it is necessary to follow the real movement at the conclusion of which the State, having appropriated a war machine, and having adapted it to its aims, reissues a war machine that takes charge of the aim, appropriates the State and assumes increasingly wider political functions. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (21) This reversal of Clausewitz's assertion that war is politics continued by other means has a triple significance: in the first place, it implies that the relations of power that function in a society such as ours essentially rest upon a definite relation of forces that is established at a determinate, historically specifiable, moment, in war and by war. Furthermore, if it is true that political power puts an end to war, that it installs, or tries to install, a reign of peace in civil society, this by no means implies that it suspends the effects of war or neutralizes the disequilibrium revealed in the final battle. The role of political power, on this hypothesis, is perpetually to reinscribe it in social institutions, in economic inequalities, in language, in the bodies themselves of each and every one of us. Michel Foucault (22) Articulation is the construction of one set of relations out of another; it often involves delinking or disarticulating connections in order to link or rearticulate others. Articulation is a continuous struggle to reposition practices within a shifting field of forces, to redefine the possibilities of life by redefining the field of relations-the context-within which a practice is located. For the effects of any practice are always the product of its position within a context. The significance or effects of an event or practice cannot be gleaned from its origin or guaranteed by the structure of its surfaces. Articulation is both a practice of history and its critical reconstruction, displacement and renewal. Lawrence Grossberg(23) We usually think of historical agents' freedom as being manifested in the launching of projects into a future, with the past serving as a repository of a certain knowledge about human actions, and the present, as the base from which the project into the future is to be launched. Actually, however, human beings can will backward as well as forward in time; willing backward occurs when we rearrange accounts of events in the past that have been emplotted in a given way, in order to endow them with a different meaning or to draw from the new emplotment reasons for acting differently in the future from the way we have become accustomed to acting in the present. Hayden White (24) The struggle over the meaning of the Vietnam War is not over. Vietnam has become a rhetorical figure in itself, and the conflict over exactly what it proves and implies may last for decades. ... A key part of this process is showing how certain metarules that are sacred in discourse in the United States (freedom, justice, the American way), do not really lead to the rules that framed discussion of the Vietnam War. In turn, the metarules themselves can be questioned and even changed, slightly, in the very process of remaking the Vietnam discourse. Chris Hable Gray (25) Why should anyone care, finally, about locating the sources of human misery? There is enough misery for all of us to confront in many places, in many different forms, much of it not obviously economic. Finding a single source, if there is one, won't make those miseries go away any faster. The point is to work where we are without at the same time regretting that those who struggle elsewhere may never hear our voice. Frank Lentricchia (26) Every discipline, I suppose, is, as Nietzsche saw most clearly, constituted by what it forbids its practitioners to do. Every discipline is made up of a set of restrictions on thought and imagination, and none is more hedged about with taboos than professional historiography. Hayden White (27) What's that I hear? The sound of marching feet? It has a strange allure, Has a strange allure. Mission of Burma (28) And it follows that the burden of the historian in our time is to reestablish the dignity of historical studies on a basis that will make them consonant with the aims and purposes of the intellectual community at large, that is, transform historical studies in such a way as to allow the historian to participate positively in the liberation of the present from the burden of history. Hayden White (29) |
Now, Ariel, rescue me from police and all that kind of thing.
Wallace Stevens (30)
I just want to get out on the floor and do the Cuban Slide
slide slide slide
Chrissie Hynde (31)
In kitchen, right before leaving. "I thought we had agreed you'd decide whether wanted anything to do with me." Said no, thought he might disappear for four or five months. "I always return."
IN MEMORIAM TO IDENTITY.
Kathy Acker (32)