Imagine your childhood. You’re looking out a window in the early afternoon. You see the clouds in the sky, the passers-by and traffic down the street. You have no trouble differentiating a police car from an ambulance. A summary of this can be expressed in the philosophical quote, “your version of the world shows up for you, like a friend at the bus stop.”
We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers, we ourselves, to ourselves, and there is a good reason for this. We have never looked for ourselves, — so how are we ever supposed to find ourselves? How right is the saying: ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’;1our treasure is where the hives of our knowledge are. As born winged-insects and intellectual honey-gatherers we are constantly making for them, concerned at heart with only one thing — to ‘bring something home’. As far as the rest of life is concerned, the so-called ‘experiences’, — who of us ever has enough seriousness for them? or enough time? I fear we have never really been ‘with it’ in such matters: our heart is simply not in it — and not even our ear! On the contrary, like somebody divinely absent-minded and sunk in his own thoughts who, the twelve strokes of midday having just boomed into his ears, wakes with a start and wonders ‘What hour struck?’, sometimes we, too, afterwards rub our ears and ask, astonished, taken aback, ‘What did we actually experience then?’ or even, ‘Who are we, in fact?’ and afterwards, as I said, we count all twelve reverberating strokes of our experience, of our life, of our being — oh! and lose count … We remain strange to ourselves out of necessity, we do not understand ourselves, we must confusedly mistake who we are, the motto2 ‘everyone is furthest from himself’ applies to us for ever, — we are not ‘knowers’ when it comes to ourselves…
‘Jeder ist sich selbst der Fernste’ is a reversal of the common German saying, ‘Jeder ist sich selbst der Nächste’ ‘Everyone is closest to himself’ i.e. ‘Charity begins at home’, cf. also Terence, Andria IV. 1.12.
Go back to our initial example of the childhood window. On one hand, our version of the world shows up for us. On the other, since “we are not ‘knowers’ when it comes to ourselves”, we show up as an opaque version of ourselves. As he states at the beginning of the preface, we are unknown to ourselves. If asked, you would most likely not remember the point at which you could differentiate the police car from an ambulance. Imagine meeting a friend during that same period, and instead of thinking of the enjoyable conversation you will have, but the concern that all of these things are impermanent.
The DanishthinkerSøren Kierkegaard teaches us that the reason we are opaque to ourselves is that the self is a synthesis waiting to be made. This synthesis would connect the momentary pleasures of time with friends and the impermanence of these things.
Consider the opacity built into science. Science claims that ultimately, there is a logical, mathematical way of understanding what you see while looking out the window. Contrast this with the DutchhistorianPieter Geyl’s assertion that history is an “argument without end.” It could be that scientific inquiry is also a quest without end.
What is the great takeaway from all of this? On Kierkegaard’s side, we face the opacity wall and on the materialist side, we still have the opacity of what we have yet to understand. With each discovery, we continue to see more that we do not yet understand.
In an era moving towards electronicpayment systems and replacing physical currency, it can be educational to look back at checks and how we arrived here. As Winston Churchill observed, “The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.”
…In the ten years following 1850, the world production of gold was ten times greater than in the ten preceding years. As is well known, the French had always preferred metal currency, and welcomed the gold with a special enthusiasm; the state struck an impressive quantity of coins, striking five hundred million in 1845, for the world’s gold found its way more readily to France where it fetched the highest price. The circulation of gold increased in other European countries also, and the banks of issue, in particular, filed their vaults. In this gold rush the English were more cautious after their long acquaintance with problems of values, and the upheaval in the gold market brought hardly any changes in the prices of the metal there. It is true England also minted new coins, but took advantage of it chiefly to establish her banking system more firmly. The influx of gold, which was exclusively Australian, had at first little effect on the prices of goods, but it developed credit with a paper currency. The minting of this money increased England’s metallic circulation by almost fifty percent, but the use of the banknote and especially of the cheque increased by a far higher proportion. The use of the cheque became so widespread in England that shopkeepers and farmers adopted it as the only possible way of doing business although it was almost unknown on the continent. Cheques were often used for amounts of less than two pounds. Even if he had an income of only fifty pounds a year, the Englishman immediately opened a bank account. In 1885, payments in metal currency represented only one per cent of the LondonBankpayments and six per cent of those in Manchester.
The Act of 1826 granted complete freedom of issue, except in an area of twenty-six miles around London, where the privilege of the Bank was absolute. There was a good deal of argument about the exact meaning of this privilege; for example the question arose as to whether provincial banks could open an office in London, the main centre of business, without losing their rights of issue.
When it was ruled that they could not, many banks nevertheless settled in London and forfeited their privilege of printing. Only the Scottishbanks put up a firmer resistance to this extension of the privileges of the Bank of England. On the other hand, the right of issue was losing much of its significance, since the remarkable development of payment by cheque meant that there was less resort to the note. Settlements between the great depositbanks were made neither in metal nor in notes, but were transacted in the accounts of a clearing house, which dealt with transactions amounting to several hundreds of thousands of pounds every year.
Not all these new banks were as prudent as their English counterparts by any means and this point is worth dwelling on. After 1848 the Banque de France had the monopoly of issuing notes for the whole of France, because the local issuing banks created by Napoleon I and Louis-Philippe had been absorbed by the Banque de France, whose notes were the only ones in circulation. It was the state which had made this decision and had settled the problem of monetary unity by authoritarian measures. A few bankers, under the Second Empire, protested against the right of monopoly exercised by the Banque de France, which had been imposed on the whole of the country by the state. Very little use was made of payment by cheque, and compensation was meagre. The wide circulation of metal currency was a sign of a restricted paper currency, but this meant that credit was scarce and was based entirely on the Banque de France. The latter, taking no risks, consequently piled up in its coffers considerable reserves of precious metals, proud of the fact that it could now maintain a steady discount rate more easily than England. It also gained great satisfaction from being the gold-controller of Europe. Whenever a sudden drastic rise in the Englishbank rate sent businessmen, and even the Bank of England itself, as we have seen, hastening to Paris in search of precious metals, it was to the Banque de France that they turned. Although it was attacked by those who accused it of stifling credit, on the other hand it was defended by those who found its caution reassuring. It was a difference of opinion which further enlivened the quarrel between the Pereires and the Rothschilds.
As we know, Jewishbankers played a vital part in the building of the railways. Pereire, a railway enthusiast, and Rothschild, the largest holder of free capital in France, had at first been prepared to undertake the great task in complete agreement. Rothschild, content with holding the Nord and the English connections, was one of the directors whose word carried most weight in the Banque de France, while the Pereire brothers, their heads still full of Saint-Simonist projects, were interested in vast plans covering Austria, Spain and the Mediterranean. They financed the great development of the economy of the south although even so they were obliged to open a credit institution, the well-known Crédit Mobilier. But because they could not use it for the issue of paper notes, and had tied up the funds entrusted to them too quickly, the Pereires embarked on a struggle to deprive the Bank of its privilege of issue. They believed that the mere right of mintingmoney would enable them to possess the wide credit necessary for the bold financial policy on which they were launching out. It so happened that when Savoy was annexed to France, the Banque de Chambéry brought its banknotes and its privileges within French frontiers. The Pereires and their friends seized the shares of this bank and tried to turn its notes into rivals of those of the central bank. The Banque de France then asserted its rights, Chambéry lost its rights of issue, and soon afterwards the Crédit Mobilier went into liquidation.
This incident occasioned a great quarrel between theorists for or against privilege; it was above all a demonstration of the solidity of the rights the Bank had acquired, while no-one doubted the right of the state to confirm its privileges any longer. This situation was all the more paradoxical since the state was in the hands of Napoleon III who was a firm supporter of the Pereires and the Crédit Mobilier. The underlying cause of this paradox lay in Frenchscepticism about cheques, for the development of bank money lagged more than half a century behind England. It was to be chiefly the work of Henri Germain, founder of the Crédit Lyonnais. His patron of 1863 was mainly anxious to attract large deposits by guaranteeing them against theft and fire so that he insisted on the effective help the Bank could give industrialists and merchants by insuring their cash service itself. By making wise use of these deposits and by a cautious policy, the Crédit Lyonnais was able to open branches in Paris and Marseilles, so that it was soon as powerful as the Crédit Industriel et Commercial and then outstripped it. It even surpassed the Comptoir d’Escompte, and soon the Crédit Lyonnais became the leading Frenchdepositbank. From 1860 it was the major bank to introduce cheques.
But there is little reason for surprise in the difficulties encountered by the cheque between 1860 and 1870.
The Banque de France was regarded as the most reliable of all issuing authorities, and Frenchspeciereserves as the most powerful stock of gold in the world; between notes and gold as the two methods of payment, there was very little room for the cheque. It is difficult to believe that France’s reserves could not have kept the depositbanks generously supplied, perhaps as much as, and even more than, the Englishreserves. But it kept a good part of its cash-balance in gold, which held up the full development of Frenchcredit institutions until the closing years of the nineteenth century.
In England there was security and in France hesitation, but in Germany there was an irresistible wave of enthusiasm which led to the rapid growth of credit institutions from 1840. There were a great many note-issuing banks in the Germany of the confederation, because each prince had his own currency. Hamburg had one of the soundest banks of issue, whose marc banco was esteemed throughout Europe and served as a standard for the whole of Germany. Nuremberg still had its old seventeenth-century bank and its florin, while a large number of private establishments were also manufacturing notes with a restricted circulation. In this scheme of things the Bank of Prussia held a pre-eminent position which was strengthened by the place Prussia had assumed in the Zollverein, but it still could not contest the superiority of Hamburg. In short, the legal position of the Germanbanks was similar to that of the English, in that there was plurality of issue.
Bankmoney, and banknotes, increased in competition with each other, and the future of the four great and famous banks which were to dominate the destiny of capitalistGermany after 1880 had already begun to take shape.
Notice that in the discussion above, events are never monocausal. They are always part of a swirling tornado of change. If you become accustomed to this, the way the world works and the way the world changes will become more accessible to you.
For example, “The use of the cheque became so widespread in England that shopkeepers and farmers adopted it as the only possible way of doing business although it was almost unknown on the continent. Cheques were often used for amounts of less than two pounds.”
This gives us the theme of anxiety over national destiny and trajectory, which currently preoccupies the American mind.
In the second book, this antagonism question involves real and imaginary threats, and all of these anxieties and antagonisms are related. The masterpiece series, Downton Abbey, depicts a scene that takes place in the garden, where the Lord announces that they are at war with Germany, and his audience is perplexed, thinking, “How can we be at war? Germany is our biggest trading partner.” This teaches us that wars and the antagonisms that precede them are not solely based on rational factors like trade volumes.
Let us turn our attention to China. We are all aware, however vaguely, of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. In the recent PBS television series, American Masters, the episode “Tyrus” (season 31, episode 7, aired September 8, 2017) has the artist Tyrus Wong recounting the story of his father, with whom he immigrated to California in 1920 at the age of 9. It is hard for us to believe that, as people of Chinese descent, they were forbidden from owning property outside of Chinatown. He describes his struggle with the hassles of overt racism. He did not gain his American citizenship until 1946, after the act was repealed. He came to fame with Disney’s Bambi, where he was the film’s lead artist.
“…But all the people who live in the little shipping and trading towns along the coast are immigrants from far away, who care little about the Kashubian hinterland because there’s nothing there for them, their concerns are elsewhere. What concerns them is where their trade is, and since they trade with the whole world and are in communication with the whole world, you find people among them from all corners of the globe. Which goes for Kessin too, backwater though it is.”
“But this is delightful, Geert. You keep calling it a backwater, but now, if you haven’t been exaggerating, I find that it’s a completely new world. All sorts of exotic things. Isn’t that right? That’s what you meant, isn’t it?”
He nodded.
“A whole world, I say, with perhaps a Negro or a Turk, or perhaps even a Chinaman.”
“A Chinaman too. What a good guess. We may still have one, we certainly did have; he’s dead now, buried in a little plot with a railing round it next to the churchyard. If you’re not afraid I’ll show you his grave sometime. It’s in the dunes with just some marram grass round it and a little immortelle here and there, and the sound of the sea all the time. It’s very beautiful and very eerie.”
“Yes, eerie — I would like to know more about it. Or maybe rather not, I invariably start imagining things and then I have dreams, and I don’t want to see a Chinaman approaching my bed tonight when I hope I’ll be sleeping soundly.”
“Well, he won’t.”
“Well, he won’t. Listen to that. How odd it sounds, as if it were somehow possible. You’re trying to make Kessin interesting for me, but you’re rather overdoing it. Are there many foreigners like that in Kessin?”
“A great many. The whole town consists of foreigners like that, people whose parents or grandparents lived somewhere else altogether.”
“How very peculiar. Tell me more, please. But nothing sinister. A Chinaman, I think, is always a bit sinister.”
Notice the quote, “…I don’t want to see a Chinaman approaching my bed tonight when I hope I’ll be sleeping soundly.” This character echoes similar sentiments several more times above.
This “othering” of the Chinese in the novel continues:
Innstetten laughed. “We’re seventy miles further north than Hohen-Cremmen here and you have to wait a while for the first polar bear. I think you’re feeling the strain of the long journey, what with the St. Privat panorama and the story of the Chinaman and everything?”
“You didn’t tell me any story.”
“No, I just referred to him. But the mere mention of a Chinaman is a story in itself…”
“Oh, some nonsense: an old ship’s captain with a granddaughter or a niece who disappeared one fine day, and then a Chinaman, who may have been her lover, and in the hallway there was a little shark and a crocodile, both suspended on strings and always in motion. Makes a marvellous story, but not now. There are all kinds of other things flitting through my mind.”
All of this global antagonism-watching and paranoia is disconcertingly related to our current situation. Donald Trump and the Republicans are essentially entrepreneurs of hatred. As is widely misattributed to Mark Twain, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
Winston Churchill said, “The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”
The brilliant baseball player and coach Satchel Paige seems to disagree with Churchill when he said, “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.”
Marc Bloch, in The Historian’s Craft (French: Apologie pour l’histoire), wrote that history is obviously a backward-looking discipline, but warns against the obsession with origins.
Alain Badiou looks back from the Neolithic period to today, describing it as a “time of crisis.”
…everybody thinks there is a crisis. Is philosophy capable of seizing hold of this crisis, while maintaining its fundamental aims? That is obviously my position I certainly recognize that humanity is in crisis, which I take to be the final spasm of the whole Neolithic period, the period of classes, of private property, of the power of the state, of technology, and so on. This started in Egypt and China six or seven thousand years ago and now this ends up in what is after all a very difficult situation to control. It is the outcome of everything that this gigantic period has swept along with it. This includes the status of truths, which today are perhaps a bit domesticated by an uncontrollable situation of predation and destruction.
After all, technology is tributary to science; everything is supposed to be mediated by information, even aesthetics; love has become calculable because you can calculate scientifically the person who best matches with you. All this indeed is at the origin of a gigantic crisis in philosophy. My own position is that we can be in a position of active resistance to what is happening, while holding onto the original categories of philosophy. A form of resistance that nevertheless consists in dramatically changing into something else. We should not hope to reform the world such as it is: I think this is completely impossible. Of course, one can try to do the best one can, but little by little everyone recognizes that the world we live in is catastrophic. And that is certainly true. It is catastrophic because it is the end—and here we should think big—of several millennia. It is not just the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; it is the end of the world of social classes, of inequalities, of state power, of the subservience to science and technology, of private property colonizing everything, of senseless and criminal wars.
Badiou argues that the world has always been threatened by catastrophe and philosophy is its reaction.
Let us recall that Socrates and Plato were people who already intervened at the end of the Greek city. They too found themselves in a world threatened by catastrophe: they did not live in a stable and established world at all. That ends with Alexander the Great, who brings order to all this in the form of an imperial creation, and finally with the Romans and their monster of a state the likes of which had never been seen before. The Greek city and Greek democracy thus ended in the imperialism of ancient Rome. Thus, we may also find inspiration in Plato in this last regard. Plato is the first complete philosopher, but he already lives in a time of crisis. Of course, Athens was very famous and celebrated, but at the same time it was already corrupted and fragile. During Plato’s own lifetime, not to mention Aristotle, Macedonianimperialism is already present. Aristotle was Alexander the Great’s first tutor; he was a prototype of the corrupted and, moreover, the inventor of academic philosophy!
Similarly, if we take the greatest philosophers—Plato, Descartes, Hegel—we again find the same type of figure. Hegel is obviously the philosopher caught up in the French Revolution and its fundamental transformations; Descartes, for his part, is caught up in the emergence of modern science. All these philosophers are caught up in considerable shakeups of their time, in the fact that an old society is on the verge of dying and the question of what is going to appear that is new. We too find ourselves in the same situation: we must continue along these lines, by taking inspiration from what those philosophers did. Thus, they considered that the moment had come to work on a renewed systematicity of philosophy, because the conditions had changed. So, based on the conditions as they existed, it was time to propose an innovative way out of the existing constraints, an individual and collective liberation. From this point of view, we can find inspiration in the great classical philosophical tradition: we need not reject it, nor claim that all this is finished and find solace in an insurmountable nihilism, nor adopt the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics going back all the way to Plato. All this is pointless, and finally becomes incorporated into the disorder of the world. On the contrary, we must hold onto the fact that philosophy has always been particularly useful, possible, and necessary in situations of grave crisis for the collective, and from there pursue the work of our great predecessors.
Contrast “What was the Neolithic world that led to the unleashing of technology?” (Badiou, Badiou by Badiou, page 25) and “Yesterday don’t matter if it’s gone.” (The Rolling Stones, “Ruby Tuesday”). Perhaps we can conclude that wisdom is knowing when the past is useful in understanding the future.
“Oh that. We just took some undergraduate history students on board as interns. They provided the content and it was done.”
The co-founder of a digital heritage initiative promoting interactiveuser interfaces offered these opening remarks. Speaking at a Delhi-based museum, he had been asked about the information provided to users as they moved their hands across an interactive board, revealing images and narratives relating to the Indian freedom movement. His response clarified that the physical and digital components of such installations—for example, the 3D-modelingsoftware and hardware, scanning equipment and its resolution and the user interface—were more carefully designed and calibrated than the content they provided.
Contemporary cultural heritage (CH) is rife with digital innovation. The COVID pandemic accelerated this transformation as archivists and curators worked to develop content that would reach remote, locked-down audiences. Within significant limits, digital platforms can democratize and facilitate access to materials previously inaccessible. Instead of being physically siloed, digitized material—as data components and not just content on culture—can be reproduced, combined, and circulated infinitely to achieve a reach previously considered impossible. Accessibility and malleability remain one of the great boons of digital formats. But here, we consider the information economy of CH practice as it exists—and not its extraordinary and often hypothetical potential—in two, overlapping realms of digitized CH: for-profit business enterprises and academic side-hustles, related to more mainstream academic research.
In the former, questions of what is shared are often less significant than the appeal of the format. In the latter, innovation is often the result of short-term projects that languish, abandoned after project completion, and rarely find audiences. Our research builds on our individual experiences and the findings of a scoping exercise examining a number of India-based heritage projects conducted in 2021-22. It suggests the need for more careful consideration of the implications of transforming CH materials into forms of data; the change impacts everything from how we understand “originality” to the reliance on for-profit services to deliver heritage material to the public.
As digitized representations of CH and access to such formats become more widespread, are we, as CH practitioners and academics, giving enough thought to how digital technologies are reshaping the nature of CH and its audience? Beyond questions of wider reach, are we sufficiently acknowledging how these changes challenge a continued focus on originality and notions of academy as primary controllers of access to knowledge and its validity, both in research and practice?
Digitizing for Dissemination
In 2019, one of us—Deborah Sutton—developed a software platform, Safarnama, including an app and authored experiences around Delhi’s CH. The project subsequently extended to Karachi. Generating “original” content, such as audio-visual clips and old photos, to be hosted on the app platform, was key to its attractiveness and usefulness, but permissions proved tricky. Some collaborators who were initially keen to contribute content quietly withdrew, likely due to the unfamiliar format and unknown reach. The app format also raised other questions. Would incorporating content from non-digital but publishedscholarship require authorial permission or only acknowledgement?
In 2020, Krupa Rajangam held a sponsored incubation at the NSRCEL, a business incubator located at the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore, to develop a web interface that would host geo-locationed stories of marginalized histories by drawing on both historical facts and lived experiences. Corporate mentors remained skeptical of her ability to source “original” content on an ongoing basis, i.e., content that was both authenticated and validated. They repeatedly advised her to focus on the format, user experience, and appeal for “mass markets” so her prototype would find audiences. Both projects equally raised questions over who would consume the content and what constitutes the public or audience.
Our exploratory surveys firmly established the divergence in interpreting both CH and digital technologies, which was not surprising. Some projects defined and treated CH as fixed pre-existing material, to be interpreted and presented to audiences through digital technologies. Others re-framed digital formats of CH as components of data, assembling, manipulating, and representing extant archival and other materials. The rest generated digitizedCH, effectively altering its nature. Typically, such projects dealt with more ephemeral or less conventional forms of CH.
Fundamental Transformations
Notions of originality remain central to art, architectural and art historical training, and CH practice. Digitization transforms the access and retrieval value of “original” material in physical archives, such as old maps and letters, much lauded in traditional “analog” scholarship, to use value as data. Once the end-user (audience) accesses this data (whether historical facts or stories), it becomes nothing more than bytes occupying valuable space, to be deleted once consumed rather than stored, making it easy to overlook or disregard the source and its context.
For example, in the Safarnama project, the app contained carefully collected and authenticated narratives on “partition memories” in Delhi and Karachi. However, the bite-sized media format meant that users would only explore content once, as snippets. This realization led the team to develop the software and incorporate the ability to download content, which at least meant that users could collect, organize and store (archive) the assembled media.
Digitization also takes away the materiality of the archive, making it more ephemeral. Non-digital materials through, and into which we render CH can (in endless combinations and cycles) be lost, forgotten, sold, recovered, collected, displayed, and stored. Such capacities of digital files are obvious, but maintaining access depends on varied and dynamic software ecologies for existence and sustained end-user access. Digital files created within one software-architecture can be incompatible with, and therefore rendered obsolete, by another. The ethos of software development is constant change.
In another paper, we examined questions of quantity, quality, and reusability of data related to digitization of building-crafts knowledge alongside CARE and FAIR principles of data management. The principles were proposed and adopted by an international consortium of scholars and industry, the former focused on responsible collection, use, and dissemination of data, especially related to vulnerable people and the latter on sustainable data management.
As an example, one AHRC project experimented with methods to capture detailed 3D images of heritage sites and structures in dynamic crowded environments. They used one set of methods to capture the interiors and another for the exteriors, hoping to merge both together and develop holistic imagery for audiences. This proved impossible at first due to issues of software compatibility. Once that was partially resolved, the new software couldn’t handle the sheer volume of data captured—and it was unclear where and for how long such volumes of data would be stored.
New realms of intellectual property remain fuzzy. While the content on digital platforms is governed by licensing and proprietary legal frameworks, it is often hosted on open platforms, through web repositories such as GitHub. Prima facie, such openness appears to challenge the proprietorial nature of archives and other repositories as keepers of knowledge. However, it raises a host of questions about how to maintain a critical understanding of archives.
Digitization may, and should, transform access but should it obliterate the regimes through which the materials were generated and organized and what’s included or excluded? For example, a local coordinator of one project that engaged with artists commented that digital technologies are typically used to document technical skills as forms of intangible heritage and develop artistencyclopedias, saying that “they are hardly used to interrogate the reality that many ‘traditional’ artists hail from marginalizedcastes.” Similarly, the local coordinator of another project that engaged with communities living in and around a protected heritage site commented on how digital technologies often end up being used to create a record of heritage structures without any reference to their day-to-day setting.
Any and all digital enterprise in CH, we argue, needs to integrate the ambition to use digital methods to not just present but also counter and interrogate the material, its creation, and purpose. Digital platforms and web- and app-based software are now able to manipulate and re-situate information in unprecedented ways. The novelty of such formats can displace original, provocative, and timely considerations of the material. Often, we are so taken by the visual and structural attributes of these formats, that we accept it at face value and lose sight of the tone and content of heritage as a curated message about the past and the present.
Alongside this, digital augmentations and iterations of CH, including storage, have significant financial and infrastructural implications. The creation and maintenance of digital platforms requires either developing “in-house” digital specialization or, more commonly, reliance on private, for-profit platforms. Paying for external provision introduces complexities. Funders, including the AHRC, struggle to devise guidance or policy in relation to software licensing. However, a persistent challenge to projects, and partnerships between academic and non-academic partners, is devising data and software strategies that subsist beyond the life of the funded-research project. Often, the adverse effects of the paucity of longer-term planning around IP issues, sustainability, and data archiving falls disproportionately on the non-academic stakeholder.
While digitization foregrounds the potential and promise of complete openness and equity, maybe this is lost in practice. Or digitization may merely mark the displacement of one set of ethics with another. There is a need for more careful consideration of the implications, complexities, and risks of taking CH materials out of boxes and off shelves and transforming and generating it into data files, which are, in turn, dependent on digital platforms to provide end-user access. However, the question remains of whether heritage-related disciplines are adequately prepared and willing to confront such new ways of working, which have begun to dislodge some of the privileges extant in current forms of research and practice.
Krupa Rajangam is nearing the end of her tenure as a Fulbright Fellow at the Historic Preservation Department, Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. Her permanent designation is Founder-Director, Saythu…linking people and heritage, a professional conservation collective based in Bangalore, India.
The great price revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries provided a powerful lever for the specifically capitalistic tendencies of seeking profit through cheapening production and lowering the price. This revolution is rightly ascribed to the continuous inflow of precious metals, in consequence of the great overseas discoveries. It lasted from the thirties of the 16th century down to the time of the Thirty Years’ War, but affected different branches of economic life in quite different ways. In the case of agricultural products an almost universal rise in price set in, making it possible for them to go over to production for the market. It was quite otherwise with the course of prices for industrial products. By and large these remained stable or rose in price relatively little, thus really falling, in comparison with the agricultural products. This relative decline was made possible only through a shift in technology and economics, and exerted a pressure in the direction of increasing profit by repeated cheapening of production. Thus the development did not follow the order that capitalism set in first and the decline in prices followed, but the reverse; first the prices fell relatively and then came capitalism.
Notice the last sentence above, Weber explicitly describes price revolutions exactly as Fischer argues.
In the history books we read, the emphasis is always on colorful personalities, inventions and other more theatrical events. This obviously omits the idea of phenomena like price revolutions. We cannot explain history merely by these personalities; we need to zoom out and view the larger picture.
Augustine, the chief author of Christianorthodoxy, wrote in The City of God, “there have been discovered and perfected, by the natural genius of man, innumerable arts and skills which minister not only to the necessities of life but also to human enjoyment.” Augustine recognized the “astonishing achievements” that had taken place in cloth-making, navigation, architecture, agriculture, ceramics, medicine, weaponry and fortification, animal husbandry, and food preparation; in mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy; as well as in language, writing, music, theater, painting, and sculpture. But he emphasized again that “in saying this, of course, I am thinking only of the nature of the human mind as a glory of this mortal life, not of faith and the way of truth that leads to eternal life… And, remember, all these favors taken together are but the fragmentary solace allowed us in a life condemned to misery.”5
Note that Augustine wrote The City of God in 426 AD, meaning that even 1600 years ago, they had already made colossal advances. The prejudice that we have, given our scientific training, is utterly misleading. Rather than being blinded by Biblical explanations of how the world came to be, Augustine lauded these scientific advancements. We think of Thomas Edison and the lightbulb, rather than, “Let there be light.”
There are various levels of empirical and artisanal knowledge. In cooking, we rarely worry about molecules that make up ingredients. All these daily life pillars Augustine lists cannot be overlooked, even as we unlock the submicroscopic world of quantum mechanics.
The famous GermanfilmmakerRainer Werner Fassbinder, wrote and directed Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. In the original German, the word is not fear, but rather anxiety (angst). We want to argue that the corrosiveness of powerlessness in world society destroys minds, hearts and souls that has never been explored in the depth it deserves.
History books usually talk about the rise of empires, Assyrian, Spanish, British, etc. and the conquests of famous military leaders. It’s also true that fiascos and defeats are mentioned (e.g., Napolean at Waterloo).
Israel and the right-wing Zionists currently going into a destructive fantasy.
All of these behaviors are social, psychological pathologies with roots in a long exposure to powerlessness. By contrast, Napolean’s defeat at Waterloo is a single instance in time, not an extended period of crushing mental defeatism. This becomes a haunting ghost that never really goes away.
There are nuances to be explored here, for example the Civil War defeat of the South as expressed in A Stillness at Appomattox. Resentments festered in the South’s psyche, and could be argued to linger to this day.
The Jews have chosen the modern nation-state in the form of the state of Israel or American democracy, as the best guarantee for their survival. That they have identified with the nation-state is no surprise, for they have always demonstrated a shrewd understanding of the political forms of each age, from partial sovereignty in imperial antiquity to corporate power in the Middle Ages. Identification with the state is the modern version of Jewishpolitics; different strategies pertained in the past. To suggest that modern Jews should adopt some other strategy for survival-to argue that nationalism or democratic pluralism are foreign to Judaism—is to ignore the political legacy of Jewish history, a persistent tradition of political imitation and accommodation, but never of passivity or retreat from politics. Zionism and Diaspora nationalism in their modern forms may be new in Jewish history, but they represent no more and no less than the latest incarnation of this political tradition.
These contemporary strategies for survival, for all their limitations and failures to fulfill messianic expectations, have still proven to be largely successful. The Jews of Israel and the Western Diaspora face less of a threat to their physical survival than at any other time since the end of the Holocaust and certainly less in comparison to the Jews of Europe before the Holocaust. To say that these Jews are secure would be foolhardy in light of Jewish history, but they are certainly more secure than many allow themselves to believe.
The discrepancy between contemporary Jewish power and the insecurity many Jews feel owes much to the inverted image that modern anti-Semites have of Jewish power. If Jews typically see themselves as less powerful than they really are, anti-Semites, since the nineteenth century, portray them as much more powerful: a secret cabal in control of the world. The state of Israel has not diminished this paranoia; on the contrary, anti-Semites now see Zionism as a force equal to twentieth-century imperialism. Afraid of feeding these bizarre delusions, many Jews shrink from acknowledging the actual power they possess. The reality, as I have argued throughout this book, lies somewhere between Jewish fear and anti-Semitic fantasy.
Traumatic historical memories play as great a role in the Jews’ misperception of their contemporary power. Every nation labors under the burden of its own history, caught in the tensions between its understanding of history and current political realities; these tensions are often the cause of misguided political decisions. The United States, torn between conflicting legacies of isolationism and interventionism, and fearful of being perceived as a “paper tiger,” became entangled in Vietnam. The Soviet Union, invaded repeatedly by the West, holds tenaciously to the countries of Eastern Europe as a buffer against imagined Western threats. The Germans, fearful of their neighbors and obsessed with national unification, repeatedly launched wars against the rest of Europe, only to hind themselves after World War II permanently divided and the most likely battlefield for a war between East and West; by succumbing to paranoid tears and messianic appetites, the Germans brought down on themselves exactly the situation they most dreaded.
None of these examples sheds direct light on the dilemma of the Jews, for no other nation has a history analogous to theirs. But each of these cases suggests that the burden of history is a problem common to all nation-states, even as the shape and content of the burden differs. For Jews, contemporary political problems return inevitably and fatefully to the Holocaust, the final denouement of European Jewish history.
The Jews have classically defined their history as unique, and in many ways it is. Their victimization by the Nazis revived anew this sense of uniqueness, at a time when ideologies of “normalization” had begun to undermine the concept of a Chosen People. For many, the return of the Jews to sovereignty could be understood only against the backdrop of the Holocaust, the epitome of the powerlessness of a powerless people: the Holocaust became a metaphor for the special character of all of Jewish history, and only Jewish sovereignty could be a response to this condition of impotence. I have argued that the extremes represented by the boundless terror of the Holocaust and by the victories of the state of Israel should not distort our perception of the Jews’ relationship to power throughout Jewish history; neither should they blur our vision of politics today. To see both past and present realistically without forgetting or suppressing the memory of the Holocaust remains the Jews’ particular burden from history.
When they consider their past, the Jews have no choice but to grapple with the Holocaust. But the Holocaust may also convey a different message with respect to the future: it may signify that the fate of the Jews is no longer unique, becoming instead a symbol for the fate of all mankind. In the twentieth century, the promise of the nation-state, which the European Enlightenment believed would free mankind, has been irrevocably compromised. With the murder of the Jews, the nation-state went mad, reducing some of its subjects to powerless pawns and, finally, corpses. The Nazis were by no means the only twentieth-century rulers to terrorize and murder those they ruled, but they did so with a systematic efficiency and industrial rationality never imagined before.
The total deprivation of human rights and utter degradation suffered by the Jews are not a closed chapter buried in history. Throughout the world today, dictatorships of widely different ideological persuasions have remembered the lessons of the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s and 1940s. In the atrocities committed by governments against their own citizens, the terrifying legacy of the Holocaust lives on. The very powerlessness of the Jews under the Nazis is a warning of the possible fate of human beings anywhere in the world.
The powerlessness of the Jews during the Holocaust also points to the fate of all humanity in the face of nuclear war. It is now possible for governments to deliver the ovens of Auschwitz to all corners of the earth, to make a holocaust of all mankind. Like the Jews of Nazi Europe, the people of the world will be utterly impotent in such a war, neither soldiers nor even innocent bystanders, but, again like the Jews, intentional victims.
As a metaphor for a new politics of irrationality, the Holocaust contains a message of inescapable relevance for a nuclear world. For the first time in human history, a government sought to eradicate a whole people from the earth for reasons that had nothing to do with political realities. In a similar way, the idea of nuclear war lacks the most elementary political rationality, for it would necessarily destroy everything it meant to save: it would take genocide, invented in its most systematic form by the Nazis, to its global and ultimately suicidal conclusion.
The urge toward a normal existence in a Jewish state grew out of a profound desire to escape the “unique destiny of a unique people.” Yet, if a “normal existence” today means confronting the terror of global nucleargenocide, then instead of the Jews escaping their historical destiny, it is the world that has become Jewish; the Jews have entered the world of nations only to discover that all mankind faces the holocaust they themselves already suffered. In this world, power is no longer a complete antidote to powerlessness. Possessed of the power to destroy this world, the nations of the earth have become the prisoners of their own might, limited in their sovereignty by forces of their own making: power has created its own vulnerability.
In this dialectic between power and vulnerability, the long history of the Jews may unexpectedly serve as a beacon to the nations. From biblical times to the present day, the Jews have wandered the uncertain terrain between power and powerlessness, never quite achieving the power necessary to guarantee long-term security, but equally avoiding, with a number of disastrous exceptions, the abyss of absolute impotence. They developed the consummate political art of living with uncertainty and insecurity; their long survival owes much to this extraordinary achievement. Jews today must struggle to come to terms with this history in light of their present power, to see both past and present through a realistic lens, neither inflating their power nor exaggerating their powerlessness. The lessons this history can teach are necessary for their own continued existence and are equally relevant to the continued existence of mankind.
If you combine Fassbinder’s notion of fear eating the soul with Baldwin’s warning against chronic marginalization, we begin to see the phenomenon of powerlessness as an under analyzed variable in world history.
There have been all kinds of “voices” in the history of Western civilization. Perhaps the loudest voice is that of monomaniacs, who always claim that behind the appearance of the many is the one. If we illustrate the West, and at its roots, the intersection of Athens and Jerusalem, we see the origins of this monomania. Plato’s realm of ideas was supposed to explain everything encountered in our daily lives. His main student and rival, Aristotle, has his own competing explanation, based in biology instead of mathematics.
Currently, the monomania impetus continues full-force. For example, Professor Seth Lloyd of MIT tells us that reality is the cosmos and not chaos, because all of reality together is a computer. His MIT colleague, Max Tegmark, argues in his books that the world is not explained by mathematics, but rather ismathematics. Perhaps the climax of this kind of thinking is given to us by the essay “Everything Is Computation” by Joscha Bach:
These days we see a tremendous number of significant scientific news stories, and it’s hard to say which has the highest significance. Climate models indicate that we are past crucial tipping points and irrevocably headed for a new, difficult age for our civilization. Mark van Raamsdonk expands on the work of Brian Swingle and Juan Maldacena and demonstrates how we can abolish the idea of spacetime in favor of a discrete tensor network, thus opening the way for a unified theory of physics. Bruce Conklin, George Church, and others have given us CRISPR/Cas9, a technology that holds promise for simple and ubiquitous gene editing. “Deep learning” starts to tell us how hierarchies of interconnected feature detectors can autonomously form a model of the world, learn to solve problems, and recognize speech, images, and video.
It is perhaps equally important to notice where we lack progress: Sociology fails to teach us how societies work; philosophy seems to have become infertile; the economicsciences seem ill-equipped to inform our economic and fiscal policies; psychology does not encompass the logic of our psyche; and neuroscience tells us where things happen in the brain but largely not what they are.
It is the notion of computation. Computation, at its core, and as informally described as possible, is simple: Every observation yields a set of discernible differences.
These we call information. If the observation corresponds to a system that can change its state, we can describe those state changes. If we identify regularity in those state changes, we are looking at a computational system. If the regularity is completely described, we call this system an algorithm. Once a system can perform conditional state transitions and revisit earlier states, it becomes almost impossible to stop it from performing arbitrary computation. In the infinite case that is, if we allow it to make an unbounded number of state transitions and use unbounded storage for the states—it becomes a Turing machine, or a Lambda calculus, or a Post machine, or one of the many other mutually equivalent formalisms that capture universal computation.
Computation is different from mathematics. Mathematics turns out to be the domain of formal languages and is mostly undecidable, which is just another word for saying “uncomputable” (since decision making and proving are alternative words for computation, too). All our explorations into mathematics are computational ones, though. To compute means to actually do all the work, to move from one state to the next.
Computation changes our idea of knowledge: Instead of justified true belief, knowledge describes a local minimum in capturing regularities between observables. Knowledge is almost never static but progresses on a gradient through a state space of possible worldviews. We will no longer aspire to teach our children the truth, because, like us, they will never stop changing their minds. We will teach them how to productively change their minds, how to explore the never-ending land of insight.
A growing number of physicists understands that the universe is not mathematical but computational, and physics is in the business of finding an algorithm that can reproduce our observations. The switch from uncomputable mathematical notions (such as continuous space) makes progress possible. Climate science, molecular genetics, and AI are computationalsciences. Sociology, psychology, and neuroscience are not: They still seem confused by the apparent dichotomy between mechanism (rigid moving parts) and the objects of their study. They are looking for social, behavioral, chemical, neural regularities, where they should be looking for computational ones.
Friedrich Nietzsche rebelled against this type of thinking the most profoundly. If scientism represents the modern, then Nietzsche was the prophet of postmodernism. Nietzsche’s famous phrase, “God is dead.” is not about a creator or divinity, but rather finality itself. There is no final explanation.
The question of human history and what de Tocqueville called “the world’s destiny” are described as follows:
l wrote histories without taking part in public affairs, and politicians whose only concern was to control events without a thought of describing them. And I have invariably noticed that the former see general causes everywhere, whereas the latter, spending their lives amid the disconnected events of each day, freely attribute everything to particular incidents and think that all the little strings their hands are busy pulling daily are those that control the world’s destiny. Probably both of them are mistaken.
For my part I hate all those absolute systems that make all the events of history depend on great first causes linked together by the chain of fate and thus succeed, so to speak, in banishing men from the history of the human race. Their boasted breadth seems to me narrow, and their mathematicalexactness false. I believe, pace the writers who find these sublime theories to feed their vanity and lighten their labours, that many important historical facts can be explained only by accidental circumstances, while many others are inexplicable. Finally, that chance, or rather the concatenation of secondary causes, which we call by that name because we can’t sort them all out, is a very important element in all that we see taking place in the world’s theatre. But I am firmly convinced that chance can do nothing unless the ground has been prepared in advance. Antecedent facts, the nature of institutions, turns of mind and the state of mores are the materials from which chance composes those impromptu events that surprise and terrify us.
De Tocqueville warns us that the world’s destiny is always murky and what he calls a labyrinth and a whirlwind. He says:
Mentally I reviewed the history of our last sixty years and smiled bitterly to myself as I thought of the illusions cherished at the end of each phase of this long revolution; the theories feeding these illusions; our historians’ learned daydreams, and all the ingenious false systems by which men sought to explain a present still unclearly seen and to foresee the unseen future.
Shall we reach, as other prophets as vain perhaps as their predecessors assure us, a more complete and profound social transformation than our fathers ever foresaw or desired, and which we ourselves cannot yet conceive; or may we not simply end up in that intermittent anarchy which is well known to be the chronic incurable disease of old peoples? I cannot tell, and do not know when this long voyage will end; I am tired of mistaking deceptive mists for the bank. And I often wonder whether that solid land we have sought for so long actually exists, and whether it is not our fate the rove the seas forever!
Despite de Tocqueville’s warnings about the slipperiness of historical judgement, he arrives at an extremely precise interpretation of his own:
Seen as a whole from a distance, our history from 1789 to 1830 appears to be forty-one years of deadly struggle between the Ancien Régime with its traditions, memories, hopes and men (i.e. the aristocrats), and the new France led by the middle class. 1830 would seem to have ended the first period of our revolutions, or rather, of our revolution, for it was always one and the same, through its various fortunes and passions, whose beginning our fathers saw and whose end we shall in all probability not see. All that remained of the Ancien Régime was destroyed forever. In 1830 the triumph of the middle class was decisive and so complete that the narrow limits of the bourgeoisie encompassed all political powers, franchises, prerogatives, indeed the whole government, to the exclusion, in law, of all beneath it and, in fact, of all that had once been above it. Thus the bourgeoisie became not only the sole director of society, but also, one might say, its cultivator. It settled into every office, prodigiously increased the number of offices, and made a habit of living off the public Treasury almost as much as from its own industry.
Reviewing the first sentence from the quote above, one can see a deep characterization of an era, with the conclusion “in 1830 the triumph of the middle class was decisive…” Notice the profound paradox that on one hand de Tocqueville spoke of the elusiveness of history despite providing the definite description of this period. Contrast “seen as a whole from a distance” with one of the themes of his recollections, that it is not given to us to understand history.
