Response II: Presentism? Wonderland sans Alice
Michael E. Sawyer
Alice in Wonderland; a dramatization of Lewis Carroll's "Alice's adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the looking glass," 1915. Source: Library of Congress, Creative Common License 2.0
I’m not a historian and am almost ashamed to admit that my first encounter with this debate regarding historical presentism and Professor Sweet’s essay came with an unfortunate social media encounter with the “thinking” of comedian Bill Maher. I put thinking in scare quotes because I abandoned the anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, misogyny, the list could go on, of Maher’s show a long time ago but somehow, I ran across the segment he called “A Unified Theory of Wokeness” that aired during his “New Rules” platform. During his monolog, which reveals itself as a full-frontal attack on the conceptualization that white people have some moral responsibility to at least acknowledge the wrongs of slavery, the genocide of indigenous people that then devolves further into an attack of the non-binary community and finally sticks the landing with what, in the not too distant future be established as the Incel motto; “women don’t get enough credit for the things they didn’t do”, conveniently leaving to the side that it is what women, among others, were not allowed to do that is the authorizing condition for the “didn’t” that preoccupies him. I reference Maher here not because he has much of anything to add but to witness the manner in which his employment of what Professor Sweet and others take to be an academic debate that centers itself around a methodological question can be employed to such devastating effect to the notion of reason by a dangerous clown like Maher. For his part, Maher compares his sea-monkey aquarium and masturbating as a kid in the barn to the, at least in his system of knowing, adolescent follies of slavery and genocide.
I began this essay by asserting that I’m not a historian and as a literature professor it is through that discipline that I am able to make sense for myself of what was so profoundly wrong about Professor Sweet’s statement in chief and the element of that problematic that continues to undermine the utility of his apology.
In my mind, the foundation of the problem with the notion that “presentism” as a feature of historical work can be present or absent from the work is the implication that an individual is somehow capable of extricating themselves from the totality of the context of their own moment in order to some type of unaffected supernumerary. What I mean here is that the desire to do “something” with events that is beyond establishing the fact of the existence and situatedness in space and time is informed by the current context of the historian not that of the historical actors. To pretend that Sweet’s anonymous [historically trained] examiners are somehow able to inhabit the space of this inquiry without the important baggage/context of this moment seems to arrogate a type of almost supernatural temporal situatedness to this practice. Literature is replete with careful demonstrations of the impossibility of just that phenomenon. I’m thinking here of William H. Glass’ 1995 American Book Award Winning Novel The Tunnel that chronicles the work of a history professor and his struggle to produce a comprehensive history of the Nazi regime. Early in the text, Glass’ protagonist, Professor William Fredrick Kohler, reminds himself that “I must remember that the memory always writes in an old man’s language.”[i] It is one thing to say substantively that an individual’s analysis is always and already a product of its moment and quite another to be serious about the consequences of pretending otherwise.
My point of entry to a taxonomy of these ramifications is Saidiya Hartman’s recently revised volume Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, where the author writes:
I don’t try to liberate these documents from the context in which they were collected, but instead augment the surface of archival fragments and slave testimony to write histories at odds with the constellation of values undergirding racial slavery and regard the lives of the enslaved and the forms of practice created and enacted inside the enclosure.[ii]
What Hartman points us to account for is the “constellation undergirding racial slavery” which I take to be a charge to push forward an analysis that puts at stake what informed the event in question beyond saying “this happened” and to go further following the admonition of Sweet and others to even say; “this happened and it’s just the way things were”. As a practical matter, a person like Maher, having his desire to evacuate the notion of generational accountability for crimes reduces or even perhaps exposes Sweet’s argument as positing historical events as locatable, when they have gone awry from a contemporary perspective, as located in some space of ever-recurring historical adolescence. This state only seems to appear when historical actors have enacted some form of harm. Otherwise, and here let’s take, what I will label “social contract informed enslavement of human beings” by thinkers like Jefferson and Madison, their evolved understandings are still being grappled within our contemporary moment while their desire to buy and sell Black people for their personal gratification and profit is the result of peer pressure akin to Maher recalling the way he shoplifted gum as a kid. This is preposterous and effectively renders it impossible to conduct a posteriori characterization of events as crimes against humanity. It rather leaves these horrors as predictable result of a system of natural moral evolution that is either something that happens for individuals as they grow older, morally, even as adults, or for society write large that seemingly has complex structures but still operates with respect to the radical other, like a 10-year-old who abuses animals. The fact that this abuse is understood to be problematic, even for children, would seem not to be a possibility based upon Sweet’s first cut at the presentism debate. Therein, Professor Sweet proposes the following:
This new history often ignores the values and mores of people in their own times, as well as change over time, neutralizing the expertise that separates historians from those in other disciplines. The allure of political relevance, facilitated by social and other media, encourages a predictable sameness of the present in the past. This sameness is ahistorical, a proposition that might be acceptable if it produced positive political results. But it doesn’t.[iii]
So let us take Professor Sweet at his word and examine a historical actor in his contemporary moment and resist political correctness or Maher’s “Unified Theory of Wokeness”. I’m thinking here of Thomas Thistlewood and his voluminous account of his day-to-day life in Jamaica in the 1700’s where he, apparently, according to the careful analysis of his diaries by Trevor Burnard, “engaged in 3,852 acts of sexual intercourse with 138 women in his thirty-seven years in Jamaica”[iv] all but two of whom were enslaved. Additionally, we find in his writings that Thistlewood was also a particularly innovative creator of punishments for misbehaving enslaved people, most prominently his go to, “Derby’s Dose”. This punished those who would steal food from him with another enslaved person defecating in the mouth of the offender the wayward individual had been beaten and their wounds treated with lime juice. Am I to understand that Historical Presentism might understand this to be the work of a criminally insane and cruel man whose acts should be universally understood as crimes against humanity as opposed to recognized as a predictable result because people of African descent were generally mistreated in the 1700s so there is no reason to belabor consideration with the mores of the 21st century?
Hartman requires us to examine a phenomenon such as this as an historical event and an event informed by a system of values that apparently is dedicated to the abjection of others. It seems that critics of history that would characterize Thistlewood as a rapist and torturer might simply understand his behavior and those who facilitated it as products of the phenomenon of moral adolescence, we have identified here that would see this grown man operating along some continuum of personal development that may or may not result in him knowing better.
I am perhaps more concerned with what this says about the victims (if the “professional” historians will allow that loaded term) of these people-driven events. Are they understood to be grist for the mill of moral development and to the extent that they resist this or find it to be representative of a problematic in excess of whatever personal discomfort they might experience from Derby’s Dose actually the problem. Somewhat akin to a flat-earther who, despite manifold evidence to the contrary, has an idiosyncratic and anti-social view of the current moment and what Sweet indexes as the “values and mores of people in their own times.” Note here that I have coded these as “people-driven events”. This is important in my thinking because it seems to me that what Sweet’s apology to his initial critique qualifies as “teleological presentism” is encumbered with its own brand of inevitability. In this, I am pointing to the appearance, in my reading of the critiques of the methodology that is in question here that events like racial slavery exist as something akin to natural phenomenon, like the eruption of a volcano, that no matter how much damage was done to the people of Pompei there was simply nothing that could be done about it. Or it is really the stupidity of the people of Pompei for putting themselves in harm’s way. I do not presume that Professor Sweet’s thinking suffers from this sort of fallacious internal logic but the methodological critique he has joined certainly allows the space for those with a particular political agenda to use the slope of this argument to plumb the depths of their desire to absolve certain people of certain responsibility.
Another of the manifold concerns here that I am alerted to by my colleague Ajay Skaria is that my own argument in Black Minded: The Political Philosophy of Malcolm X gives the professional historian a place to look for something we can index as “historical futurism”. This seemingly paradoxical formation insists that a person embroiled in an overwhelming context of oppression have to imagine a way out of it in order to assemble a coherent project of radical action of whatever form. I say radical action to resist the notion that the overused and broadly misunderstood term “revolution” might allow us to miss the small muscle movements of something like tool breaking. A quotidian form of resistance like this, that leaves the larger system unmolested but symbols the possibility of imagining a future otherwise, troubles the baseline assumption of critiques of “presentism” in that internal to a system they need to believe is monolithic there are obvious fractures. In the parlance of Maher, wokeness however in the past not imposed by the future.
To be clear about what I believe are the implications of this for this argument about a purity of methodological approach is that we must think through the reductive logic of imagining that the regime of rationality in a particular time is the unique providence of those in power. This renders the necessary and actual predictable response of those in harm’s way demonstrably irrational out of synch; product of a form of Quixotic thinking that finds its way exposed in the historical narrative as reified oppression posing as comedic monologue or methodology. Malcolm X, as exemplar of the type of thinking in dynamic response to the manifold force of oppression we are describing, elaborates a political philosophy for “(1) living within the dominant political system, (2) methods for disrupting that system, and (3) imagining a future both within the coercive system (that is, the system of stasis in phase one) and a future in a “new” revolutionary political reality in phases two and three.”[v] What Professor Sweet and the advocates of their historical method must necessarily do is to figure out how to account for the fact that, perhaps reductively, somebody thought that what was going on, what he calls “the values and mores of people in their own times”, was bullshit. What then allows is the tracing of the genealogy of radical thought that isn’t a figment of the political imagination of the future.
At the end of the methodological day isn’t this the point after all? The imperative to assert the political agenda of one brand of historicism while acting as if the oppositional methodology is only about getting the record into the archive without what is understood to be disforming context while failing to interrogate what work that critique is doing for the political agenda of those who are deemed here to be “professional historians” seems insufficient and harmful. I am pointing here to where Professor Sweet begins his intervention by referring to the decline in students who are doing pre-modern history, which is the substance of Lynn Hunt’s bizarre dyad, that relates to “our increasing tendency to interpret the past through the lens of the present.” This necessarily seems to propose at least three difficult to defend propositions in my mind. First, that students who are interested in the pre-modern world are not thinking from their temporal situatedness. Second, that our current moment is not directly traceable to the past; pre-modern or otherwise, and third, there is something necessarily wrong with a 4% decline in students focused on pre-modern history.
In closing, the feeling of intellectual utopia troubles me here and is the motivation for the title. Some people want a Wonderland without Alice to take us there and translate it for our understanding. Isn’t that the point of Lewis Carroll’s work? That Wonderland is only wonderful because it is viewed in relation to the world that Alice visits from otherwise it is just “Land” qua itself. Incidents of historical moral depravity are not isolated and only to be properly understood vis-à-vis the moment in which they occur because, and here I’m reluctantly returning to Maher, the reason he stashed the gum in his pocket rather than take it to the cash register is because he knew then as he knows now that what he was doing was wrong. The same goes for Madison et al no matter how good it might make some feel to pretend otherwise under the guise of methodological rigor.
Michael E. Sawyer, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor with tenure at the University of Pittsburgh, specializing in African-American Literature and Culture. He earned his Ph.D. from Brown University in Africana Studies with a dissertation titled "Homo Liminalis: The Tears of the Caterpillar." Dr. Sawyer has published notable works, including "An Africana Philosophy of Temporality: Homo Liminalis" and "Black Minded: The Political Philosophy of Malcolm X." His interdisciplinary research spans Africana Political Thought, Critical Race Theory, and Political Philosophy, marking him as a significant figure in contemporary scholarly discourse on race, ethnicity, and migration studies.
-Prepared with the editorial assistance of Charles Milne-Home
Endnotes
[i] Glass, William H. The Tunnel. Dalkey Archive: 1995. 62.
[ii] Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. W.W. Norton & Co.: 2022. 14
[iii] Sweet, James. “Is History History: Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present”. https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/september-2022/is-history-history-identity-politics-and-teleologies-of-the-present
[iv] Krise, Thomas W. “Reviewed Work(s): Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World by Trevor Burnard.” Early American Literature, 2005, Vol. 40, No. 1 (2005), pp. 202-205.
[v] Sawyer, Michael E. Black Minded: The Political Philosophy of Malcolm X. Pluto Press: 2020. 32.