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© April 2004
revised 26 June 2008
the site concept
she-philosopher.com was conceived as an experiment in e-scholarship. While there is a great deal of original research housed here — including archival data, images, and scholarly interpretations not available elsewhere — the site was never intended as a databank or publishing warehouse for academic materials, or as a comprehensive source of links and pointers to everything ever written on related subjects. Rather, I have made a concerted effort to move beyond an orthodox “academic voice” to a more “public voice,” and with it, a new model of “open research.”
Phil Agre, whose own experiments with this sort of thing I’ve followed with great interest, has observed that “success in research depends” on “actively seeking out a community of interlocutors whose agendas can be brought into productive dialogue with one’s own.”
That is a most appropriate mission statement for she-philosopher.com, which I have tried to design as an invitational rhetoric.
I hope the site will invite mutual inquiry and collaborative scholarship of the sort I’ve come to value on a couple of favorite listservs. Phil Agre has already named this phenomenon “Internet-mediated collective cognition,” and described in detail how the Internet can provide a means of “thinking together” and building new communities of practice, each with its own public sphere, language, agenda and traditions (“a shared situation provides the basis for shared thinking, passing information, telling stories, naming feelings, solving problems, and figuring out whether one’s own experiences are strange and unique or, more commonly, not”). Although not without its problems (e.g., restricted and unequal access, or the fact that “an in-group can become even more of an in-group if it wants to”), the Internet can also facilitate pluralism (via our membership in multiple communities) and democracy (via the formation of more lateral than hierarchical connections), even in scholarly endeavors.
Back in 2001, a colleague on one of my favorite discussion lists asked me about the relevance of my 17th-century studies for busy 21st-century (mostly new media) professionals: “I’m having trouble,” he wrote, “seeing the relevance of anything that happened in the Renaissance to C21.”
It remains a valid question, and one which I think deserves to be addressed in this space, as well.
In his Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford, 1621), Robert Burton recommends reading history because it is “the inspiration of public activity.”
Burton had a rather old-fashioned take on history, associating it with an art of character (the art of living well) that is no longer a focal point of public education today. What we might call “personal growth” (or human development) was, for Burton, inextricably bound up with an understanding of past, present, and future as an integrated whole:
As in travelling the rest go forward and look before them, an antiquary alone looks round about him, seeing things past, etc., hath a complete horizon. —Janus Bifrons.
— Robert Burton,
Anatomy of Melancholy,
marginalia to Partition 2,
Section 2, Member 4
The Janus figure to which Burton referred — in Roman mythology, guardian of portals, and patron of beginnings and endings, whose temple was never closed except in times of universal peace — was usually pictured with two faces, symbolizing the double consciousness of the human condition. Today, we associate the two-faced Janus with deceitfulness, but in Burton’s day, a Janus-like ability to think multiply about one’s position in time and space (a characteristic of prudential reasoning) gave one a certain advantage when having to adapt rapidly to changing circumstance or manage contingency.
I believe it still does.
Studying the past is always more about the present than anything else. Historical study does not so much recapture “real” persons and events as it does “reflect back to us a set of contemporary concerns.” (Jarrett & Ong 1995, p. 10) In the case of she-philosopher.com, those concerns have to do with contentious issues of cultural politics, especially regarding gender, science, technology, and modernity.
The new historicisms that most of us practice today call for a “kind of dialogical, intertextual reading” that
requires us to be aware — as aware as we can be — of our own historical situation and its effects on our perception of the text or past.
— Janet Smarr, Historical Criticism
and the Challenge of Theory 11
With this, we become increasingly sensitive to that dialectic of freedoms and constraints (sociopolitical, cultural, and natural) which defines the human condition, and within which the historian, like everyone else, must work.
Those with whom I have debated historiography, even summarily, will recognize here the Marxian notion of humans as conditioned creators of their conditions:
[women and] men make their own history, but ... they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves.
— Karl Marx, The 18th
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
This is one of my core beliefs, and guides my own historical research.
An improved understanding of how we live and act and come together within a given dialectic of freedoms and constraints is, to me, the most valuable thing that historical study offers.
There are important life lessons here — whether we work in new media and high-tech or outdoors digging ditches — that can’t be learned any other way.
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