In Defense of Taking Things Out of Context
Lately, I’ve had the feeling that the push to contextualize and historicize in the humanities and some of the social sciences has become a stumbling block to thought itself, to new ideas and original thinking.
This is on my mind, I suppose, because next year, I’ll be giving the keynote address at the annual meeting of the Society for US Intellectual History; I’m thinking of titling it “Against Context, Against History” or perhaps just “In Defense of Taking Things Out of Context.”
That needn’t be the case: ideally, historicism and contextualism should alienate us from a familiar past, should push us beyond conventional interpretations. They should force us to grasp the past in its pastness, and thereby render our present strange.
But things don’t always work out that way. Some of the historical impulse that seems so alive in academia today works against surprise, dulls our receptivity to the unexpected, makes both past and present unremarkable. I’ll admit this is an odd thought for me, since I’ve always considered myself a historicist. Yet…
Anyway, this March 10, 1948 entry from Alfred Kazin’s Journals crystallized some of my concerns about historicism and contextualism:
The primary type of originator, like Marx and Freud, who isolates a cause or phenomenon from the context of custom and analyzes it to the point where it gives us a new illumination of life. It does not matter how they may exaggerate this, how ungenerously they will denounce their opponents, or refuse to concede any qualifications of their thought from the outside. They have created a key image of ourselves which we can never lose. Their own enemies know it, too, for they continually pay tribute by draping their criticisms on the structure already provided here for them.
I never quite felt the urgency in Arendt’s famous discussion of the pearl diver in her introduction to Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations. But I’m finding that the impulses at the heart of that essay are becoming increasingly felt in my work, as I try to think, for example, about economic theory as a mode of political thought, as I try to wrench that theory from its context and put it in dialogue with something outside the conversation of which it partakes.
So, some more Arendt (who was, incidentally, a close friend of Kazin) on Kafka and Benjamin, and a way of thinking about history that doesn’t make us slaves to context:
…he [Kafka] knew, on the other hand, that there is no more effective way to break the spell of tradition than to cut out the “rich and strange,” coral and pearls, from what had been handed down in one solid piece.
…
Thus the heir and preserver unexpectedly turns into a destroyer. “The true, greatly misunderstood passion of the collector is always anarchistic, destructive. For this is its dialectics: to combine with loyalty to an object, to individual items, to things sheltered in his care, a stubborn subversive protest against the typical, the classifiable.” [Benjamin] The collector destroys the context in which his object once was only part of a greater, living entity, and since only the uniquely genuine will do for him he must cleanse the chosen object of everything that is typical about it.
…
Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the corals in the depths, and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past—but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things “suffer a sea-change” and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living—as “thought fragments,” as something “rich and strange,” and perhaps even as everlasting Urphänomene.