In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx famously observes that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past”. Immediately after this frequently paraphrased line comes a remark just as evocative and interesting: The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. He was drawing attention to the ways in which the conflicts of the present are furnished by the ideas of the past:
And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language
But it also draws my attention to the way in which our present intellectual work is shaped by the past conflicts of those who have influenced us. Not only are we influenced by their work but we are influenced by the way they have been influenced, regardless of whether they are aware or not of those influences. The scholastic conceit is to imagine ourself as autonomous thinkers floating freely in our undisturbed balance, but the reality is that our scholarly dispositions were accumulated in a messy and contingent way obscured by the self-indulgent loquaciousness* which eventually emerges from it. To the extent we approach our work systematically, there is a convoluted story of how that systematicity came into being:
If one stands back from the day-to-day demands of professional routine, it becomes clear that an intellectual trajectory is not organised in advance, we do not begin by surveying the intellectual ground before deciding upon a line of enquiry; rather, as Hans-Georg Gadamer might put it, we fall into conversation; our starting points are accidental, our early moves untutored, they are not informed by a systematic professional knowledge of the available territory, rather they flow from curiosity; we read what strikes us as interesting, we discard what seems dull. All this means that our early moves are quite idiosyncratic, shaped by our experiences of particular texts, teachers and debates with friends/colleagues. Thereafter matters might become more systematic, we might decide to follow a discipline, discover an absorbing area of work or find ourselves slowly unpacking hereto deep-seated concerns. It also means that we can bestow coherence only retrospectively. This idiosyncratic personal aspect of scholarly enquiry is part and parcel of the trade, not something to be regretted, denied or avoided; nonetheless systematic reflections offers a way of tacking stock, of presenting critical reflexive statements in regard to the formal commitments made in substantive work.
Peter Preston, Arguments and Action in Social Theory
Keynes famously suggested that “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”. The problem with academics I think is that we underestimate our formative influences, in the sense that we regard ourselves as inspired or persuaded by people rather than shaped by them. The influences which enables us to develop the capacity to be inspired or persuaded (i.e. to be quasi-autonomous thinkers) are much earlier and more formative, in a way that is difficult to reconcile with the scholarly conceit of autonomy.
But we simultaneously place the people who influenced us on a pedestal and forget that they too had formative influences. They didn’t emerge as fully formed thinkers writing the books and papers which shaped how we approach our work. They too had messy formative trajectories. Their starting points were accidental, their early moves untutored, to use Preston’s language. To the extent we have been shaped by their work, we have also been shaped by the way their work was shaped. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. There’s an unconscious to the texts we are working with**, a network of influences, assumptions and associations which exceeds the self-conception of our mentors and the narratives we habitually share about them. This is the nightmare of our intellectual influences, at risk of taking Marx’s metaphor*** too literally, in which we are bound up in unresolved conflicts we don’t apprehend, let alone understand.
What does this mean in practice? It means understanding your intellectual influences:
- Who influenced you? How did they influence you? Why did they influence you?
- What do you find helpful about their work? What do you find restrictive? What does it help you see? What do you suspect it obscures?
- Who influenced them? How did they influence them? Why did they influence them?
- What did they find helpful about their work? What did they find restrictive? What did it help them see? What do you suspect it obscured for them?
- How does their intellectual trajectory fit within broader traditions of thought, both ones they consciously subscribed to and ones they did not deliberately engage with?
I’m writing this in a slightly nostalgic mood a year after my mentor died. I did have these conversations with her and I did understand her influences, without realising why I felt so compelled to do so. But I wish I could still have these conversations. If you’re working with someone’s work after they’re gone, trying to keep it alive as a tradition rather than simply reproduce it as a body of authoritative sources, it’s crucial to understand this I think. But it’s also part of enjoying writing in the sense in which I focus on in this series because it’s the writerly equivalent of traversing the fantasy. If you understand these influences, if you understand the networks which have constituted you as a thinker and writer, you open up a space for freedom within them which is more substantive than the imagined autonomy of scholarly conceit****. You won’t cease to have a writer’s unconscious, that undercurrent which ‘rejects nothing’, but you will have changed where you stand in relation to it.
*The fact this phrase spilled out of my mind unprompted rather illustrates the point I was trying to make.
**Thanks to James Slattery for forcing me to (begrudgingly) accept this notion.
***It is a metaphor right, even though it looks like a simile? I need to leave for work so I’m not going down this rabbit hole.
****I keep using this phrase for some reason. I’m roughly gesturing towards the idea of humanistic creativity in which your work is an expression of individual particularity, with all influences being external and contingent in ways exhaustively registered in the machinery of citation.
Mark Carrigan 