CMS150 - Winter 2001

 1) Housekeeping
no one has asked for a review session

Monday April 9, Room 100 Pettigrew, Open Call for PB for anyone interested in participating in production or taking class [speaking, non speaking roles and production work]

2) Lecture - Why study trials?
a. good way to learn about issues involved in studying history
1. Ginzburg: the judge and the historian both seek to make evidence tell the truth
2. studying trials as a way of studying historiography has allowed us to

b. consider the trial as a cultural phenomenon:
1. Cohen: trials can be arena for feuds among elite of a society
2. Turner: trials can be a social drama in which a society raises and articulates fundamental disagreements which cleave the society, and then forces a resolution of the disagreement or breaking up of the social group

c. consider evidentiary issues inherent in the study of any historial period
1. how do you catagorize evidence: is Plato’s Apology, a transcript, a memoire, propaganda?  What about Ginzburg’s treatment of the trial of the Calebresi Three (will future historians understand it more like a work of history or more as an Apology for Sofri?
2. how do you evaluate evidence: how do the acts by which evidence is created affected the reliability of the evidence itself ­ consider the transcripts in Joan of Arc’s trial and that of the Inquistion at Montaillou and that of the trial of the Calebresi Three
a) linguistic: what good are transcripts when issue of translation inherent?
b) analysis of power relationship between accused and court -> categories of analysis and articulation imposed by court
c) philosophical question: do trials change reality?
_ What does it mean that Joan’s understanding of self and mission (of her own experience and history) changed through her experience of the trial ­ what Joan does the historian study; is the pre-trial Joan a better or worse or simply different object of history than the post trial Joan;
_ Did Beckett’s understanding of his own identity and mission change because of the pull of "root paradigms" that shaped the way he understood, and therefore acted in his conflict
_ Did the writing of a pardon tale in accordance with the narrative demands of the genre shape the articulation and hence understanding of the conflict that gave rise to the pardon request in the first place?
3. how do you supplement evidence when the historical record is incomplete
a) consider the trial of Rabirius ­ note the Riggsby, our postivist, can’t write about it in his analytical framework ­ he simply doesn’t have enough facts
b) do we supplement with theoretical models [Cohen, Turner]
note the examples of theoretical models we’ve seen that have been most impressive (Turner on Beckett, Davis on Pardon Tales and Le Roy Ladurie on Montaillou] have had an extraordinarly dense historical record to rely on  - the trial provides that
_ query ­ have Turner, Davis and le Roy Ladurie written histories at all? Or historical ethnography
_ query ­ if we don’t have a dense record, why bother read them at all?  Does the model of the social drama offer us anything for the study of Rabirius or Socrates?
perhaps just lengthen the questionaire
perhaps by learning to ask questions we can’t answer, we discover truths we can articulate

d. consider philsophical issues inherent in the writing of history
1. what is history: the truth about events in the past ­ if the identity of historical actors isn’t stable, if the truth of their lives is necessarily contingent, is history possible [what is Joan’s truth? ­ if we can’t answer this question can we write her history?  Even if the truth is stable is history "the truth" or
2. a representation of a truth in the past: can we represent the past without changing it?  consider the issues of the "story" in history, of "fiction in the archives."  Does the simple effort to understand events and then to write narrative summon "root metaphors," which shape our manner of participation in history but also our efforts to describe what we have done.  If there is a "story" in history, does the effort to tell it inevitably begin with cultural tropes and paradigms which shape and reshape our understanding and representation of events in the past?
3. Historians of trials are twice blessed because as we have seen with Pardon Tales and transcripts our "evidence" itself, especially in the case of trials, is inherently representational (transcripts as Sullivan noted, are representations of trials)  ­ modern historians are writing representations of representations

4. The trials of history
a) Luigi Ferrajoli, an Italian historian of criminal law, has said,
"A trial is, so to speak, the only case of "histioriographic experimentation" ­ in a trial the sources are forced to interact de vivo, no only because they are heard directly, but also because they are forced to confront one another, subject to cross-examination and prompted to produce, as in a psychodrama, the adjudicated event.’

_ A trial constructs a history of a recent event: it finds evidence, documentary and testimonial; it compels witnesses to find and tell a story about recent events in which they have participated [cf. Natalie Davis, Pardon Tales; Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, Ginzburg, Sofri case, Joan of Arc]
_ A trial compels judge/jury to compare and critique the evidence/sources, test the stories and decide, that is, to create the history of that recent event.
_ A trial does violence to the understanding and experience of actors involved in the event ­ the "verdict" [latin for "announcement of truth] offers a truth, but not the truth of any of the participants; Joan, Sofri,
_ If we are uncomfortable with the verdict in these cases, what does that mean about the viability of our project?

b) Carlo Ginzburg has said that an anthropologist is like an inquisitor, and he has said that a historian is like a judge

a) anthropologists try like inquisitors to map the mental universe of the people the study, methodology of observation of the ephemeral practice and habit  -> discovery of the symbolic world: why people think what they think: for the inquistor to understand how subject stumble into heresy: why for anthropologist ­ a timeless (synchronic) truth about the culture?

b) microhistorians like Ginzburg, Davis and LaRoy Ladurie are often accused of being anthropologists, not historians; of writing historical ethnography, not history because they have abandoned the diachronic in their work (c’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas l’histoire).

c) Before we dismiss them, we should remember what prompted them:
a desire to write a history that could not be written ­ of ordinary people, of women, of the poor ­ a history that the 19th century historians who wrote l’histoire événementielle ­ a history of individuals and events - could not write because the ordinary leave their evidence far differently than the great

d) This desire to write history about things which had never been history (women, poor, ideas, mentalities) required new tools, new questions (a longer questionaire) a broader "context" which has brought historians consciously and unconsciously to the the techniques and methods of anthropologists.

e) When historians embrace this role (and they are not wrong to ­ would you forgo the knowledge Davis or Le Roy Ladurie has obtained?) they become the inquisitors that Ginzburg spoke of, but they cannot escape the role of judge that Ginzburg has also spoken of.  We see this most acutely with the effort to write a history of a trial.  A trial as I have argued is itself the construction of a history by the judge/jury of an event in the recent past.  As philosophers of history we can question whether the "verdict" can ever announce "the truth" but shouldn’t we remember that the judge, like the historian cannot escape the burden.  A historian of a trial must analyze the evidence, the transcripts and contemporary accounts, the laws and the inscriptions, as Riggsby does for Roman criminal trials; she must establish the context for the trial as Stone does for Socrates trial and Pernoud for Joan of Arc’s; if her sources are rich enough, she may attempt to establish the mentalité of the participants in the trial,  as Le Roy Ladurie for the Inquisition at Montaillou, and Davis for 16th century French suppliants, but, in the end, she must announce her verdict

f) And in her analysis, she will like Joan’s inquisitors pose questions that impose her truths upon the sources [note how Le Roy Ladurie creates the sexual life of a town which interested the inquisitor, Bishop Fournier not at all], and compel the sources to speak in her language and her categories and so do violence to the truth she hope inhabits them.  When she announces her truth, when she writes her narrative, when creates the story part of history, she will unconsciously or consciously invoke paradigms and tropes that are inherent in the narrative practices of her own culture and perhaps not in the culture of which she writes.  And a decade or a century after she is done, another historian, with different categories of analysis and questions and narrative structures will look at her work and laugh at its unconsciously self-centered, solipsistic pursuit of truth, and decide another history has to be written.
 
 

5. The trials of the historians
a) I hope this sounds hard to you.  I hope it sounds frustrating yet tantalizing.  Tantalus was the Titan punished by Zeus with an unquenchable thirst and an insatiable hunger.  He stood in a pool of water beneath an apple tree.  When he bent to drink the water it receded.  When he reached out for the fruit, the branch lifted out of reach.
b) The historian seeks truth like Tantalus sought food and drink, wondering if, indeed as we have wondered, it exists at all or if it exists in a way that is meaningful for us; we wonder if truth is contingent and identity inherently unstable.  But, like Tantalus, the historian still reaches out for the truth.
c) The pursuit of truth ought to be extraordinarily difficult ­ if truth were easily found and easily announced would we care so much about it?  The announcement of truth ought to be extraordinarily difficult ­ what freedom would we have if truth were obvious?
d) For every generation of historians, this pursuit gets more complicated, the questionaire gets longer.  We must bear our legacy of questions to ask our witnesses, and indeed, as Paul Veyne has suggested, increase it.
e) When we do our duty as historians, when we announce our verdicts, we must do so with the knowledge that our very efforts to tell write a history may undermine the validity of the verdict, that another generation may rightly dismiss our efforts, or a more devastating blow, reduce our achievements to a footnote.
f) So why should you do it? ­  to be part of the project to construct a morally coherent universe; because history is often the ammunition (if not fodder) for contemporary political debate ­ you cannot live in an ahistorical world, you can only live unaware of the role of history in shaping your belief systems and thus be less adept than those who consciously deploy history ; because the question "why" and the effort to answer it are fundamentally human projects; because it’s fun, because as hard and demanding as history is there is very little in the life of the mind that is more exciting.
g) How should you do it? ­ Read, then write.  Read again and write again.  Then read and read and read and write and read and read and read and read.