September 2019 – History of The Human Sciences

Some semblance of a ‘field’

In February this year, HHS published a special issue on ‘the future of the history of the human sciences, edited by Chris Renwick. That issue (and the event it drew from) brought together scholars from a wide range of backgrounds and institutional positions, to reflect on the constitution of ‘the history of the human sciences’ as a field – and also to think through its possible or likely futures. Representing, perhaps, different ‘generational’ approaches to these concerns were Roger Smith (now working independently in the Russian Federation, and a Reader Emeritus in History of Science at Lancaster University), who wrote on resistance to the neurosciences, and Alexandra Bacopoulos-Viau (a Vising Fellow at Weill Cornell Psychiatry, and associate member of the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill) who wrote on the discovery of the unconscious. Here, Alexandra puts some questions to Roger on the past and present of the history of the human sciences as a field.

Alexandra Bacopoulos-Viau (ABV): Roger, how has the history of the human science – as a field – changed since you were a graduate student?

Roger Smith (RS): There was no field of history of the human sciences when I was a graduate student (1967-70). Very little activity in the history of science concerned the non-physical sciences; and the separate social science and psychological disciplines wrote narrow histories for internal consumption. The phrase ‘the human sciences’ was uncommon (though in France, sciences humaines and les sciences de l’homme were well-established terms, each with its own connotation in intellectual life). The change, to which I contributed, was the constitution of some semblance of a ‘field’ of history of the human sciences in the second half of the 1980s, and the piecemeal spread thereafter of reference to the term. Then and now, the identity of the field, its novelty and its trajectory are issues open to debate. It was precisely the value of an umbrella term under which to debate questions roused across existing disciplinary borders that encouraged the use of the term, practices to go with it, and the founding of the eponymous journal in the first place. The way the field has developed has varied considerably in response to local institutional pressures and purposes.

Reference to the existence of the field is now much more common, though hardly general. I am not aware, however, that the identity of the field has substantially changed (however much specific content may be local). In addressing this, though, and in relation to your other questions too, readers will want to bear in mind that I have worked outside a UK institutional setting for over twenty years. I hope other answers will qualify what I say. I note, almost randomly, a few points. Many people feel that the neuro-disciplines demand new recognition, accommodation or critique, and the history of the human sciences has responded to that. Attention to Michel Foucault’s work has been remarkably sustained, relating both to his writings and to the critical lever given by pursuing ‘the history of the present’, leading to analysis of ‘regimes of truth’ in the social and psychological sciences. There has been a spate of good work on post-World War 2 human sciences, mediating between historical knowledge and current concerns. Explicit political critique is less common and there are more signs of conformity to professional standards – though it cannot be said that history of the human sciences has any standards peculiar to itself as a field. The standard of basic contextual reference in historical writing now seems well established. I would much like to know if other people think there have indeed been, or are about to be, changes.

ABV: What do you think are the biggest challenges facing the field today?

RS: Intellectually, the challenges are as they were: to provide leadership in situating ‘the human’, or the knowledge-constituting process, at the centre of the sciences. This continuously and necessarily demands open-ended debate about the ontology of these processes and engagement with notions of ‘the human’. The issues are so complex and have been discussed with such intense abstraction in so many specialised ways, that there is huge scope for collective projects and forums rendering the issues more concrete in specific historical settings. I think it is up to the history of the human science to show the work it does is central to the rhetoric (in the deep, constructive, collective sense) of taking the issues further. Work in the field provides models of ‘the golden mean’ between high theory and historical empiricism. The history of the human sciences needs to do more to bring in the intellectual riches of fields such as comparative ethnology and linguistics. I also increasingly value studies which are well written and manifestly wish to communicate (which has nothing to so with ‘dumbing down’).

I also think it’s a challenge for scholars who work in the field to restate what they think are the relations between ‘the human sciences’ and ‘the history of the human sciences’. I often do not know in what sense contributors think (if they do so think) that they work in a field under the title of ‘history’. I would welcome more studies with a long time perspective on ‘the human’. Some think that there is a contemporary ‘transformation’ of the human, and of course to describe such a transformation requires some reference to a ‘before’ as well as to an ‘after’. Certainly, disciplined history of the human sciences ought in this context to be a major resource.

And institutionally, the challenges are the challenges facing the humanities in general, and it is hardly news to say that these are large and disturbing. the history of the human sciences ought to be at the forefront of the rational demonstration that the pursuit of knowledge cannot be built on measures of production taken from the business world. But of course the argument is with political processes which reject the value or pertinence of rationally formulated knowledge.

ABV: What do you make of the promises / limits of interdisciplinarity?

RS: Interdisciplinarity (however understood) has been around for decades, if not a century or more. The history of the human sciences was constituted as an interdisciplinary field; the history of this field should therefore provide a kind of empirical commentary on the promises and limits of interdisciplinarity itself. The field houses an excellent body of practice and exemplary range of discussions to offer to those seeking to move out of narrowly disciplinary-focused studies. I think the constitution of a domain shaped by long-term assumptions about the relevance of a great range of disciplines and topics (from art history to studies of utopias) to shared problems, has a lot going for it. Publishers don’t seem to share this view, unfortunately, and work according to preconceived market slots (which of course include the slots that goes with famous names). By and large, there is no need to keep talking about interdisciplinarity while the option of doing the history of the human sciences is on the table.

ABV: What excites you most about the future?

RS: I guess this is a question about the field – the future ‘in general’, given the strident failures of political processes, is, shall we say, hard to get excited about. (Utopian ideas may be another matter.) I get excited about particular projects, rather than about ‘a field’, especially one as nebulous as the history of the human sciences. So you will have to excuse me if I call to mind my current project, a book on The Sense of Movement: An Intellectual History (in press). It would be exciting if I could, by this means, reassert the value of intellectual history, link history of science and the history of the human sciences, write the history of a sense and explain what is ‘moving’ about feeling movement (it requires wide-ranging answers). It’s exciting that there is a lot of good work being done, for example, on the history of the emotions, on the culture of the senses, on the constitution of categories like ‘depression’, and on recognition of the data of comparative ethnography about representations of ‘the human’. A lot of people, happily, see that the umbrella category, ‘the history of the human sciences’, has the intellectual and social potential to hold in constructive relation particular studies of the large issues at stake.

Alexandra Bacopoulos-Viau is a Vising Fellow at Weill Cornell Psychiatry, and associate member of the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University. With Aude Fauvel, she is the editor of “Tales from the Asylum. Patient Narratives and the (De)construction of Psychiatry,” a special issue of Medical History.

Roger Smith is an an independent scholar in the Russian Federation and a Reader Emeritus in the History of Science at Lancaster University. Among many contributions, he is the author of Being Human: Historical Knowledge and the Creation of Human Nature.

Understanding Others

Susan Lanzoni. Empathy: A History; New Haven and London: Yale University Press; 408 pages; hardback $30.00; ISBN: 9780300222685

by Sarah Chaney

A couple of years ago, I attended a colloquium on empathy at the University of Oxford. The organisers of this event were rightly concerned by the vague and varied definitions of empathy in medical research and practice and sought to remedy this. While they had found a number of clinical trials that purported to measure empathy, the introductory lecture noted, every single one of these gave a slightly different definition of what it was they were actually measuring! As Susan Lanzoni’s comprehensive history of empathy shows, this conceptual confusion around empathy is not new. Even after an explosion of interest in the term through the 1950s and 1960s, in 1979 the American social psychologist Kenneth B. Clark declared himself dismayed by the lack of “clear definition and a comprehensive theoretical approach” to the subject (p. 248).

As Lanzoni shows in this genealogy, the confusion lies to some extent in the fact that the meaning of the term has “shifted so radically that its original meaning transformed into its opposite” (p. 8). Lanzoni makes this shift clear by outlining a huge range of examples of studies in which empathy does not mean what the modern reader might expect. To take just one example of many, when the psychologist Edward Bullough found in 1908 that his subjects described coloured lights as having a particular temperament or character he called this “empathy” (p. 52). Even in the twenty-first century, many forms of empathy exist: “from emotional resonance and contagion, to cognitive appraisal and perspective taking, and to an empathic concern with another that prompts helpful intervention” (p. 252). While the book takes a chronological approach to the subject, the diversity of different meanings at play in any one period are thus made clear throughout.

Lanzoni records the first use of the term “empathy” simultaneously in English in 1908 by the psychologists James Ward and Edward Titchener, used in both cases as a translation of the German Einfühlung. Jeffrey Aronson has dated this a little earlier, finding the English word empathy in The Philosophical Review of 1895. Quibbles about the exact date aside, however, Lanzoni rightly emphasises the importance of the origins of empathy in the aesthetic Einfühlung (empathy was later translated back into German psychology as “empathie”). Empathy thus emerged from the appreciation of art and was first conceptualised as an ability to project oneself into an artwork or object; early psychological definitions also incorporated this notion of empathy as an extension or projection of the self. By the post-war period, however, empathy increasingly became viewed as a way of understanding others, a notion that was particularly prominent in the field of social work. It was this latter idea of empathy that was popularised after the Second World War.

Of course, the distinction is not so clear or neat in practice. Indeed, Lanzoni cites the German psychologist and philosopher Theodor Lipps as having suggested that Einfühlung was a way to understand the emotions of others as early as 1903, while modern neuroscientific definitions often hark back to aesthetic empathy through the links made to visual images and movement (p. 265). For ease of narrative, however, Lanzoni divides the history of empathy into nine historical stages. She begins with empathy in the arts as a way of “feeling into objects” and closes with mirror neurons as an expression of empathy in the modern neurosciences. On the way, the book takes in the experimental laboratory, art and modern dance, the psychiatric hospital, social work, psychometrics, popular depictions of empathy and the politics of social psychology. While the early chapters, on the introduction of the word, include aesthetic and psychological research across Europe, the second half of the book tends to focus more closely on the United States. This is perhaps the opposite of what one might anticipate, as the post-war era moved towards a supposedly international culture. Further explanation of the reasons for the chosen focus would thus have been helpful to the reader, or the occasional reflection on how the North American field complemented or differed from research elsewhere.

The chapters vary in their presentation: some chart changes over a period in a particular area such as social work, others focus in more detail on a specific person or theory. A good example of the former approach is chapter six, on the post-war measuring of empathy, a comprehensive account of North American efforts to test for empathy in the wake of Rosalind Dymond’s student test at Cornell University in 1948. These tests are highlighted by Lanzoni as they marked a shift in understanding of empathy from a creative enterprise to an “accurate understanding of another’s thoughts” (p. 176). In contrast, chapter 8 on the 1960s relationship between social psychology, race and politics, focuses largely on the social psychologist Kenneth B. Clark. This seems to be a particular interest of Lanzoni’s (she has also written about Clark for the Washington Post) and she sensitively weaves Clark’s concerns about the centrality of capitalist greed in White American society, and prejudice as a social disease, into his psychological research on the topic of empathy. This culminated in the publication of Clark’s Dark Ghetto in 1965, an ethology of Harlem explicitly aiming to “inform, to engender feeling, and to galvanize social action” (p. 240).

At times, the sheer amount of content means that Lanzoni veers into a rather descriptive style. Some chapters are heavy on chronological lists of contributions with less focus on how these fit into a broader picture. Chapter 3, on empathy in art and modern dance, for example, might have been edited down and combined with the previous chapter to indicate the links between experimental psychology and aesthetics in a more directed way. And while the material on Clark is undoubtedly interesting, a greater degree of contextualisation into the contemporary civil rights movement (which is merely nodded at in passing) would have been useful. There are also some significant absences. For instance, while occasional debates around the distinction between empathy, sympathy and compassion briefly surface (such as Edward Titchener’s claim that sympathy referred to fellow feeling, whereas empathy reflected an imagined but unfamiliar feeling [p. 66] ), the reader is left wondering why more attention was not paid to the interplay and conflict between these ideas.

Overall, however, Lanzoni’s book ably charts the complex changes in meaning that empathy has undergone over the last century, and convincingly argues that much of this confusion remains today. This is important, given how often empathy is invoked in a wide range of arenas in the modern world – from politics to education to health and medicine. As Lanzoni recognises, empathy is frequently emphasised as a vital human capacity, something that has the power to shape society for the better. Does it matter that we remain unable to convincingly explain what exactly it is or how it functions? Perhaps not, Lanzoni concludes, so long as we are aware of this complexity. Across all its definitions, empathy is characterised as a “technology of self”. This means that understanding its complex history can serve to increase our ability to make connections.

Sarah Chaney is a Research Fellow at Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions, on the Wellcome Trust funded ‘Living With Feeling’ project. Her current research focuses on the history of compassion in healthcare, from the late nineteenth century to the present day, and includes an exhibition to open at the Royal College of Nursing Library and Heritage Centre in December 2019. Her previous research has been in the history of psychiatry, in particular the topic of self-inflicted injury. Her monograph, Psyche on the Skin: A History of Self-Harmis published in paperback in July 2019 (first published 2017).

Time with a capital T

In the April 2019 issue of History of the Human Sciences, Allegra Fryxell, from the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge, published ‘Psychopathologies of time‘ – a paper that opens up the tole of time both a methodological tool and a site or clinical focus in early 20th-century psychiatry. Here she talks to Rhodri Hayward about the psychopathological functions of time in this period.

Rhodri Hayward (RH): Allegra, in your article, you draw the reader’s attention to a neglected tradition in Western psychiatry which sought to explore the connections between mental disturbance and the corruption of time consciousness. In particular, you draw attention to the work of Henri Bergson and Eugène Minkowski showing how they explored the tensions between lived time and clock time to build what you call a ‘futurist’ psychiatry. As I understand it, this contrasts with the contemporary psychotherapies of Freudian psychoanalysis and Janet’s dynamic psychiatry. Whereas psychoanalysis is concerned with an individual’s inability to integrate their past, and Pierre Janet’s methods that aimed to orientate consciousness toward the present, Minkowski’s followers were concerned with the idea that patients were alienated from the future. Could you say a little more about this ‘futurist’ psychiatry and why you think it flourished in the interwar years?

Allegra Fryxell (AF): I think it is perhaps unsurprising that a ‘futurist’ approach took root in psychiatry at the same time as a variety of avant-garde movements like Italian Futurism were engaging with ideas about the future. Many historians have understood interwar Europe and North America as a period characterised by dramatic social changes following the Great War, which catalysed a discussion about the ‘shape’ of possible new futures — particularly in Europe, where the revolutions of 1917-1919 ushered in a period of political instability. The futurist emphasis of the phenomenological psychiatrists upon whom I focus in this article is a natural facet of this socio-historical context. That being said, I don’t think the history of psychiatry that I am attempting to unravel is simply an interwar phenomenon. Psychological research on time started in mid-nineteenth-century experiments on the time of responses to physical stimuli as well as memory. Interwar phenomenological psychology was in conversation with these earlier developments as well as concurrent discussions about time in philosophy and science — like Einstein’s theory of relativity or Bergson’s philosophy of duration — in which time had occupied a central place since at least the 1890s. We need only think of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) to see evidence of this temporally focused discourse in modern literature.

Indeed, ‘Time with a Capital T’ (as contemporaries wrote) was a major focal point of discussion transcending physics or philosophy in western culture. Historians have admirably uncovered some aspects of this phenomenon, including Jimena Canales’ work on ‘microtimes’ and the debate between Einstein and Bergson in 1922 (in A Tenth of a Second: A History (2009) and The Physicist and the Philosopher (2016)), or Vanessa Ogle’s masterful exploration of the uneven implementation of standardised clock time, The Global Transformation of Time, 1870-1950 (2015). My own work, however, complicates the long-standing historical interest in the proliferation of clock-time and time standardisation by uncovering a deeper and far more complex debate about time across the arts and sciences. The phenomenological psychiatry that I bring to the fore here is part of a larger project in which I attempt to tease out a conception of time that challenges or resists the simple quantification of clock-time in philosophy, drama, music, and science fiction—I’m hoping to address sociology and economics, too, in the final monograph!

What I find especially interesting is how deeply this ‘time discourse’ penetrates late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century understandings of lived experience and the universe. While we tend to view ‘modern’ time in terms of relativity theory or the triumph of clock-time (tied to experiences of industrialization and now globalization or the information economy), my research suggests that a far deeper exploration of what it means to be-in-the-world was at play in this period (thus we must read the phenomenological tradition in Western psychiatry as a counterpart to intellectual approaches such as the philosophies of Edmund Husserl or Martin Heidegger). Part of my goal is therefore to bring psychiatrists such as Minkowski into discussion when considering the zeitgeist of the 1880s through the 1930s, in order to demonstrate how time was central to modernist understandings of the world—not simply in the form of ‘clock-time’ or linear ‘acceleration’, as Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, Michael O’Malley, Hartmut Rosa and others have argued. The futurity at work, then, in interwar phenomenological psychiatry is part of a broader discussion regarding the meaning of time: what is it? How do we experience it? How do temporal disorders cause illness? And what constitutes a ‘temporal disorder’? The ‘futural’ answer put forth by psychiatrists like Minkowski and Erwin Straus is not exclusively about the future—it is about integrating or orienting oneself in time towards the future, while remaining mindful of the present and in full possession of the past. It is their resolution to address all three dimensions of time that distinguishes their approach from the past-orientation of Freudian psychoanalysis or the presentist discussions of Pierre Janet.

RH: You quote Wyndham Lewis on the ‘time mind’ of the interwar public but arguably contemporary academia shares this same ‘time mind’ with a rich stream of books, special issues, conferences and seminars on temporality appearing now, as well as a formidable array of conceptual tools for addressing time (multiple modernities, chronotypes, pluritemporality, heterotemporality etc.).

AF: Most certainly! I started my doctoral research before temporality had become the current vogue in academic research, so I find the recent focus on time simultaneously surprising and enriching. As I suggested in my recent article on modern time in Past & Present, part of the attraction to time lies in the fact that the history of Western modernity has been entangled with the fetishisation of controlling or measuring time since the Enlightenment — one might therefore interpret the resurgence of time within the academy as another feature of this aspiration to define time. On the other hand, I think the ‘temporal turn’ is a natural product of the various ‘turns’ in historical research; linguistic, cultural, and particularly spatial. It makes sense that, after scholars have attempted to understand the significance ‘space’ holds in experience and theory, they have turned to its concomitant ‘time’ in seeking to understand the world. In fact, if we consider history as the discipline par excellence concerned with time, it is surprising — as Keith Moxey underscores in Visual Time: The Image in History (2013) — that historians have not questioned our epistemology of time given its centrality to our discipline and to our methodology. Working on time has made me more aware of the work that seemingly neutral labels like ‘Renaissance’, ‘early modern’ or ‘1848’ do to shape our understanding of the past. Consequently, I think the temporal turn is partly a legacy of postmodernism, encouraging us to reconsider time as a tool of historical research as well as an intrinsic part of historical experience. Everyone, after all, lives within and through time, even though our individual experiences of time are subjectively different and even though we might live within multiple simultaneous ‘time cultures’ (the religious calendars of Judaism or Islam, for example, compared to the predominantly Christian-inflected social calendars of the West; or the rhythms of semesters and birthdays, of gestation and menstruation, of childhood, ageing, and disease). If we think about the oscillation between ‘utopian’ and ‘dystopian’ views of the future in Western thought across the twentieth century, too, then the current vogue for temporality in academic research may also reflect a widespread unease or anxiety regarding the future.

RH: I’d like to come back to that idea of contemporary anxiety, but just focusing for a moment on the growing interest in phenomenological psychiatry (in the work of Matthew Ratcliffe and Gareth Owen for instance), what role do you think that the ideas of Minkowski and Bergson have to play in psychiatry today? I’m struck by the contrast between the current emphasis on being in the present which seems central to the contemporary mindfulness movement (see Matt Drage in HHS from last year) and to the phenomenological urge to recover a lost connection to the future.

AF: This is an excellent question, and happily I think these ideas are indeed resurfacing in psychiatry today. You are absolutely right that the mindfulness movement brings renewed attention to presence, and although it might seem ostensibly ‘presentist’, I think it harks to the same project that Minkowski et al are trying to achieve: orienting the body within time. Although mindfulness practitioners emphasise a focus on the present in meditation, mindfulness is arguably about relaxing the mind and body in order to approach the future with vitality and direction — the orientation that Minkowski and his colleagues saw lacking in individuals suffering from schizophrenia or depression. While interwar psychiatrists failed to offer a solution (unlike mindfulness practitioners), both groups are striving to understand how time shapes existence and how individuals can better relate to time in order to be healthy and successful.

As far as academic research goes, phenomenology appears to be re-entering experimental paradigms and theories in current psychology. There is a lot of recent research indicating that Minkowski’s ideas are resurfacing as alternative means of exploring psychiatric disorders, suggesting that the turn toward analytical philosophy and pharmaceutical psychiatry in the latter half of the twentieth century no longer holds validity for addressing lived experience.

RH: So on our current anxieties. You’ve drawn from people like Reinhart Koselleck and François Hartog the idea that technological modernity has led to a shrinking of the present, but I wonder if there is also a political process under way. In reading Minkowski and his colleagues’ descriptions of patients’ alienations from the future, I’m reminded of the radical claims made by critics such as Mark Fisher and Ivor Southwood that contemporary working conditions with their inbuilt precarity create a situation in which planning ahead/or imagining a future becomes impossible. At the same time we see similar arguments being made around the triumph of neo-liberalism (which is seen as obscuring the possibility of a radical future) and environmental degradation (which is seen as robbing us of any future at all).

AF: Undoubtedly. In fact, I would say that most histories of time focus on power and time or technology and time, thus reinforcing an emphasis on the ‘compression’ of the present and the ‘acceleration’ toward the future that is understood to be central to modernity. It has been shown that precarity — whether financial or otherwise — can halt or stymy consideration of longer durations like the future. Researchers have proven, for example, that individuals who live in poverty find it difficult to save money because they cannot adequately conceive of the future when they are focusing on making enough money to survive a 24-hour-cycle or having enough to eat (psychologist Eldar Shafir calls the cognitive effects of scarcity ‘bandwidth poverty’, and economist Sendhil Mullainathan locates the same bias in busy professionals whose stress limits effective time management). The conclusions that Minkowski and his colleagues drew from their research in the 1920s and 1930s indicate that any number of stressors can prohibit an individual from achieving ‘syntony’, their word for the temporal integration of conceptions of the past, present, and future requisite for an active and healthy life that scientists are now starting to understand as impairments in neurocognitive function. They also underscored how an inability to synchronise the time of individual experience with the tempo of social life (much as Bergson suggested the need to synchronise duration within the social fabric of daily life his philosophical writings on duration) prohibits healthy existence. If there is one lesson to be learned from this research, it is that experiences of trauma or stress — including the stressors of living within authoritarian regimes, extreme neoliberal societies, or environmental catastrophes — can have a profound impact on individual syntony. Indeed, one of my students has recently finished a dissertation on the intrinsic relationship between the pathologisation of anxiety and the rise of neoliberalism since the 1960s.

RH: I guess the strong claim that you — and your students — are making about the relationship between social organisation and the experience of time raises a larger question around the writing of history — a question you’ve already touched upon in your reference to Keith Moxey. If our conception of temporality is based upon a particular culture or economic structure then how might the writing of history — and the history of the human sciences — be done differently?

AF: If we accept François Hartog’s claim that the relationship between past, present, and future determines the configurations of possible histories, then the temporal assumptions of our own culture significantly condition the possibilities of writing history in the present. When approaching my own period (roughly 1880 to 1940), attentiveness to the radically different relationship between past, present, and future has led me to interpret the seemingly ‘anachronistic’ juxtapositions of historical eras in modernist literature, for example, as a serious gesture – one that moreover resonates with the religious revivals of the nineteenth century or beliefs in the afterlife in Victorian and Edwardian spiritualism and occultism, such as theosophy. It also shifts the epistemological foundations of fields like archaeology, as my work on popular Egyptomania in British culture elucidates and offers new insight for understanding the relationship between explorations of multiverses in geometry and physics (the fourth dimension, relativity’s space-time, etc.).

Overall, the connections that are newly underscored by attending to the temporal assumptions at work in a given historical moment offer us new ways of understanding seemingly transformative moments (such as the development of relativity theory) within longer-term cultural perspectives that do not always ‘fit’ into existing paradigms (such as the surge in spiritualism following the Great War alongside the secularisation thesis). It also compels us to read our own histories in a different light. I wonder, for example, whether the determination to find examples of schisms or ruptures between epochs (like the First World War) or experiences of ‘acceleration’ in the nineteenth century – when the majority of Europeans and North Americans did not have access to new technologies like the telegraph until much later in the century – is tied to globalization and the rise of cybernetics, and thus rather more reflective of our own time culture and social anxieties.

Having said that, I suspect that I am skirting around your question rather than directly resolving it. The temporal turn behoves us to evaluate past histories from the perspective of that culture’s specific temporal assumptions and attend to how past time cultures shaped the possibilities of existence. The latter includes belief systems including science, experience of childhood and ageing, models of the body and society, and perspectives on past and future. Given the centrality of time to human experience, I think the human sciences in particular can benefit from a temporal approach to understand its disciplinary histories.

Allegra R.P Fryxell is a Trebilcock-Newton Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge. She is a cultural historian of modern Europe, focusing on the interactions between the arts and sciences in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France, Britain, Germany, Italy, and America.

Rhodri Hayward is Reader in History at Queen Mary University of London, and an editor at HHS.

Include everything

The December 2018 issue of The History of the Human Sciences presents a collection of essays dedicated to understanding the historical, political, moral and aesthetic issues in totalizing projects of late modernity – ‘The Total Archive: Data, Identity, Universality.’ Here the issue’s editors, Boris Jardine and Matthew Drage, discuss the origins of the project and some of their ideas about the image and pragmatics of universal knowledge.

Matthew Drage (MD): Boris, tell me a bit about how the idea for this special issue came about?

Boris Jardine (BJ): I was visiting the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for the History of Science (Berlin) in 2014, as part of the working group ‘Historicizing Big Data’ – but I was only at the MPI briefly, and when I was back in Cambridge I wanted to do something that drew on what I’d learnt there, involving some of the fantastic scholars I’d met. It seemed to me that the idea/reality of ‘The Archive/archives’ supervened on notions of ‘data’, and that there were philosophical, ethical and historical issues around classification, privacy and knowledge that became pressing when the concept of ‘totality’ came into play. I was also talking to historians in different fields – economic history, history of bio-medicine, art history/aesthetics – and wanted to do something that connected those. With some colleagues I proposed a conference at CRASSH (Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities) in Cambridge, which happened in March 2015. So this has been a while germinating!

MD: I know might be is a slightly strange side of the story , but my recollection is that it was also connected to an art project that we were both involved in.

BJ: Yes, ‘UA’, or ‘Elements of Religion’ as it was originally known. That was how I/we got to the idea of the aesthetics of totality, as a (quasi) religious idea. I wrote about that in the special issue of LIMN that came out soon after the conference. But you’re better placed to explain what that project was…

MD: I’ll do my best! So at the same time that Boris was thinking about the historical questions surrounding the emergence of the first really huge data projects of the 21st century – we were both part of an Arts Council project which aimed to consider totality from a rather different perspective. We were thinking and talking about the ways in which religions sought to encompass totalities, and how the productive modes that religions often house (text-writing, ritual, song, architecture, healing practices, contemplation) are arranged to create all-encompassing institutional wholes. And we were trying to produce our own productive systems styled on religion, as a way of making and viewing artworks. John Tresch, a historian of science who influenced mine and Boris’s introduction to the special issue, writes at length how the Auguste Comte sought to create a ‘religion of positivism’ – a religion built entirely on the ideal of total human knowledge. Our work on the aesthetics of total knowledge as parts of ‘Elements of Religion’ gave us a perspective on the emergent debates about big data that we then went on to explore in the conference in 2015, and then the special issue.

BJ: So a large part of what we were/are thinking about is to do with ‘images’ of totality – that can indicate literal images, but it also has a broader meaning. Perhaps you could say something about that, and how the contributors addressed it?

MD: I think this was what I found most exciting about the contributions – the range of ways in which the authors dealt with and understood ‘images’ of totality. In the case of Judith Kaplan’s work, for example, sometimes this took the form of poetic images. Her article examines (in part) the work of a group of Russian historical linguistic scholars, who collaborated with Americans in the 1990s to attempt to uncover the deep pre-history of human language. One of the field’s founding fathers, V. M. Illich-Svitych, Kaplan tells us, pieced together a projected ‘Nostratic’ language, which, he claimed, gave birth to eight major world language groups. In the language he had devised, he composed poems. In one, he wrote,

Language is a ford through the river of Time,
It leads us to the dwelling place of those gone ahead;
But he does not arrive there
Who is afraid of deep water.

I think this typifies the kind of visionary, sometimes even mystical perspective that, as the authors in this issue show, seem to emerge when people take the image of the total archive very seriously as a model for human knowledge. It seem to draw those who are involved into (and perhaps sometimes past) the limits of human subjectivity, and then to confront them, sometimes violently, with the political, moral, aesthetic and spiritual consequences.

BJ: I love that this example is also about pragmatics. Kaplan explains how Illich-Svitych was trying to resolve quite a difficult technical issue in historical linguistics when he came up with this hypothesis about a single overarching language family. That seems to be a typical move – or one of two kinds of move: sometimes people start with a problem they want to solve and realise that they’ve come up with a procedure before coming up with a classification, at which point they end up with problems of scale, manageability, even moral issues to do with representation and ownership. This is striking in the case of Alan Lomax, as described by Whitney Laemmli. That’s also what I found with Mass-Observation. And it’s obviously a very contemporary concern in the age of social media, genetic data etc. The other direction is also interesting though: the ‘Casaubon method’, where you have a ‘key to all mythologies’ and collect or order everything within that system, or find a way to order everything in such a way that nothing can be added or taken away. Just thinking of Edward Casaubon from Middlemarch though, do you think there are important issues of gender and gendered knowledge in this collection?

MD: Something that comes through very strongly in a lot of the articles in this issue is the relationship between ambitious, utopian institution-building and patriarchal power. This is something that Jacques Derrida talks a lot about in his long essay, Archive Fever, which has a lot to say about how psychoanalysis – one of the 20th century’s defining knowledge projects – was very strongly structured by a Jewish patriarchal logic that valorises ritualised transmissions from father to son. Many of his conclusions there could, I think, be justly extended to cover the cases covered in this special issue. The dream of universal knowledge was often also a dream of extending the agency of individual men, institutions, nations, to encompass totalities which would then be pressed into their service, and a the same time used as a means of by which to draw in ever-greater quantities of data. Rebecca Lemov’s article, which describes the data-gathering practices of the American military in the South Pacific, is particularly good at showing how this masculinist, almost “conquestadorial” urge plays out in practice in the human sciences.

BJ: Another way to think about it – though maybe it raises more questions than it provides answers – is in terms of subjectivity: the archival subject, as (on the one hand) an organizer, possibly even a heroic or all-knowing organizer, then (on the other) an invisible labourer, cleaning up, sorting the data, enlisting subjects, becoming a subject (as in Mass-Observation), and finally (on the third hand?) the knowing subject – but I think this is where we kept hitting up against this idea of ‘pathology’ in totalizing projects. There is often ‘too much to know’, too much to organize, no place to start. I use the term ‘bathos’ to describe this for Mass-Observation but it’s definitely also present in Lemov’s piece in the figure of Tarev (a Micronesian person who displays behavior that baffles the measurement systems of the Americans sent to study him) and how he can’t quite find his place in the social data project run by Melford Spiro. The thing that links these is the critique of universality, which is there in our introduction and in some of the essays, but is probably best articulated in Cadence Kinsey’s piece on Camille Henrot and her work Grosse Fatigue.

MD: Maybe this brings us to an important point: there has been a lot of discussion recently, following electoral scandals in the US and in Britain, of the power of enormous data-gathering projects like those of Google and Facebook, of the political dangers of the dream of total knowledge. Shoshana Zuboff has written about this in a particularly provocative and urgent way in her recent book, Surveillance Capitalism. What do you think this special issue has to contribute to that debate?

Bullock’s Museum, (Egyptian Hall or London Museum), Piccadilly: the interior. Coloured aquatint, 1810. Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, 1793-1864. Credit: Wellcome Collection – CC-BY.

BJ: Probably the most obvious point is that the collection of huge amounts of data is also an issue of subjectivity, so that like it or not there is a fundamental connection between the self and its ‘data doubles’, and this isn’t something that can easily be ignored or avoided. Sometimes this is because there is a direct relationship between data and possibility, like in Daniel Wilson’s article about the kinds of information insurance companies offer and the attitude towards mortality that they engendered. In that case there’s a very clear connection between self-conception, financial possibility and particular ideologies of data. In other cases the connection is less clear cut but still decisive, and this seems to hinge on that idea of ‘totality’. One thing that Zuboff brings out really well I think is the way that Surveillance Capitalism is indiscriminate in a certain sense: these companies don’t really care exactly what kind of data they can accumulate. This gives a scary sense of randomness to the kind of (radically multiple) data doubles that we are all already accumulating. It’s also a kind of positivism in reverse: the data constitute the reality, but not because there is any kind of empiricist system, rather because there are massively accumulative technologies that just happen to latch on and then re-present different parts of the world.

MD: The way you put it just there suggests that maybe what the special issue adds to the debate is an important element of reflexivity. It’s not a new idea that those who are measured are changed by the process of measurement – it’s a point that Michel Foucault has made very thoroughly. Perhaps what the authors in this issue show is that there are some marked patterns in the way large-scale knowledge projects affect the human subject when those projects aim to include absolutely everything – an ambition which has never been so nearly reached as it has been by Google.

BJ: Definitely. There are clearly issues of the limits of these projects, what they exclude, who gets left out and so on, that are common whenever the idea of totality is brought into play. But I also think the strength of the issue is in the historical specificity of the case studies. The point in each case (I take it) is that something as seemingly universal as universality has its own complex history. So there are useful points of continuity and also discontinuity – it has to be ‘both/and’ I think.

Matthew Drage is an artist, writer and postdoctoral researcher. He lately completed his PhD at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge, and is now Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the History of Art, Science and Folk Practice, at the Warburg Institue, in the School of Advanced study, University of London.

Boris Jardine is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow, supported by the Isaac Newton Trust, at the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. His project is titled, “The Lost Museums of Cambridge Science, 1865–1936.”