Alan Jacobs

I propose to give here, in a few words, an outline refutation of historicism. The argument may be summed up in five statements, as follows.

1. The course of human history is strongly influenced by the growth of human knowledge. The truth of this premise must be admitted even by those who see in our ideas, including scientific ideas, merely the by-products of material developments of some kind or another.

2. We cannot predict, by rational or scientific methods, the future growth of our knowledge.

3. We cannot, therefore, predict the future course of human history.

4. This means that we must reject the possibility of a theoretical history; that is to say, of a historical social science that would correspond to theoretical physics. There can be no scientific theory of historical development serving as a basis for historical prediction.

5. The fundamental aim of historicist methods is therefore misconceived; and historicism collapses.

oldhollywood:

The Gorgon (1964, dir. Terence Fisher) (via)

Imagined air-raid shelters carved into the New Jersey Palisades, 1942

Say only what you believe. Be aware of your reader; don’t talk down to her, and don’t yearn for love from him. Keep in mind what he or she knows already, admires already, might believe already; those baselines will differ in different venues (the readers of the NYTBR aren’t the same as the readers for N+1, who aren’t the same as the readers for Rain Taxi). Keep your eye on the work, which in poetry reviewing means the poems; do not tell me about the poet’s life or the book cover (mysteriously, beginning reviewers often describe book covers at length) unless those things become important in the poems.

Remember that even the dullest book was written by somebody who meant well, who wanted it to stand up, though (alas) it falls down; if you are going to say that it falls down, and there are circumstances under which you ought to say so, you should, try to say so without malice, and without glee.

Yes, sometimes I still offer strong criticisms of published work, both by academics and other writers. Sometimes I say critical things in classes about the work of other scholars. Intellectual life shouldn’t be a pollyanna parade or a group hug. But neither should criticism be a habit, nor should we casually arrive at judgments about the character of other professionals from a critical reading of the work they produce. (One of my other graduate professors taught me that: an awesomely talented historian who was also a jerk.) Ad hominem is more than a logical fallacy, it’s a bad way to live. The emotion I want to feel first as an intellectual is passionate joy: what a world we have, in which there is so much to know and read and say and think.

When I re-engaged with higher education after a 20-year absence in the private sector, I felt like Rip Van Winkle: The generations were different, but the landscape remained the same. During my long self-exile, I worked primarily in media and technology businesses, including with Fathom, an interactive knowledge network in partnership with Columbia University and other institutions here and abroad. I thought then that the shift to a global, technology-based knowledge society, as well as competition from international and for-profit institutions, would force innovation.

That was 10 years ago.

I was right that the shifts and competition would create a new playing field for higher education, but the pace of change is stuck somewhere between sluggish and glacial. Those are gross generalities, of course, as you can find hopeful signs everywhere, but when observed from the 20,000-foot level, the basic building blocks of higher education—its priorities, governance, instructional design, and cost structure—have hardly budged.

This insistence that machines don’t care and won’t care about what we see, or about what seeing certain things does to us as organisms, is a deep—and I think deeply productive—problem for the New Aesthetic. There’s a yearning, a beseeching in our relation to machines, and I can’t help thinking we’ll find ourselves spurned, or cuckolded, or worse in the end. Learning to see through machines is not the same thing as learning to see as machines. Networks manifest an aloof, alien kind of omniscience—increasingly ubiquitous and radically, irredeemably insensible in crucial ways. This is off-the-charts otherness, a hyperotherness… and from some quarters there is a yearning, a gnostic peering after some event horizon, a dreamt-of ubiquity or singularity, beyond which machines and human consciousness interpenetrate, some Michelangelesque digital touch-point—all of which Sterling would say is just so much eschatology in the vein of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. We’re not in fact empathizing with machines; we’re empathizing with screens. And when you consider what’s really going on in the machine, the screen behavior is epiphenomenal.

Nelson’s hatred of conventional structure made him difficult to educate. Bored and disgusted by school, he once plotted to stab his seventh-grade teacher with a sharpened screwdriver, but lost his nerve at the last minute and instead walked out of the classroom, never to return. On his long walk home, he came up with the four maxims that have guided his life: most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong. Nelson loves these maxims and repeats them often. They lead him to sympathize, in every discussion, with the rejected idea and the discounted option.

By the time Nelson reached college, his method of combating the regularity chauvinists was quite sophisticated; he put his teachers off with the theories of writer Alfred Korzybski, who denounced all categories as misleading. But this hatred of categories did not produce in Nelson a fuzzy, be-here-now mysticism. On the contrary, Nelson loved words, which were tools for memory, but he hated the way that traditional writing and editing imposed a false and limiting order. Nelson had no interest in the smooth, progressive narratives encased in books. He wanted everything to be preserved in all its chaotic flux, so that it could be reconstructed as needed.

Nelson, a lonely child raised in an unconventional family, became a rebel against forgetting, and a denier of all forms of loss and grief.

The good news is that the human mind has a surprising natural ability to assess the kind of creativity we need. Researchers call these intuitions “feelings of knowing,” and they occur when we suspect that we can find the answer, if only we keep on thinking. Numerous studies have demonstrated that, when it comes to problems that don’t require insights, the mind is remarkably adept at assessing the likelihood that a problem can be solved—knowing whether we’re getting “warmer” or not, without knowing the solution.

This ability to calculate progress is an important part of the creative process. When we don’t feel that we’re getting closer to the answer—we’ve hit the wall, so to speak—we probably need an insight. If there is no feeling of knowing, the most productive thing we can do is forget about work for a while. But when those feelings of knowing are telling us that we’re getting close, we need to keep on struggling.

And so: Azealia Banks is the rapper who appeals to Pitchfork readers; A$AP Rocky is the rapper who isn’t homophobic; Lana Del Rey is the lovely waif whose dad is loaded; M.I.A. is the stylish blowhard whose dad is a former Tamil revolutionary. Having learned these lines, you can go ahead and tweet confidently about these artists, holding your own in the great digital scrum, even if you have no idea what the artists actually sound like. If you get drawn into an argument, you can always quickly consult Wikipedia