Chen Mengyu sorted
This article is excerpted from the audio recording of the "Crisis under History and History in Crisis" free talk, at which more than ten scholars in the fields of history, sociology, and anthropology made speeches and conducted interdisciplinary discussions. Participants included Chen Dandan, Associate Professor of the Department of History, Politics and Geography at the State University of New York Farmingdale and Adjunct Chair Professor of the Faculty of Letters of Henan University, Fan Xin, Associate Professor of the Department of History at the State University of New York fredonia, Chen Li, Professor of the Department of History at the University of Toronto, Wang Yuanchong, Associate Professor of the Department of History at the University of Delaware, Song Nianshen, Associate Professor of the Department of History at the University of Maryland, Zhang Yang, Assistant Professor of the School of International Service at American University, Xu Xiaohong, Assistant Professor of the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan, and Zhan Yang, Assistant Professor of the Department of Applied Social Sciences at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Shuang Chen, Associate Professor of History at the University of Iowa, Taisu Zhang, Professor of Yale Law School, and Qian Zhu, Assistant Professor of History at Duke Kunshan University and Assistant Professor of the Global Research Center at Duke University. Due to its length, it is divided into two parts, the first part is the discussion of history and crisis by the participating scholars in combination with their own research, and the second part is the mutual response and dialogue.
Zhan Yang: I would like to respond to the statements of several teachers just now. The speeches of Zhang Yang and Xiaohong just now remind me of William Sewell. William Sewell calls capitalism "eventful," and he criticizes Wallerstein's view of history, saying that Wallerstein's view of history is too structured and sees history as a "big bang." It seems that once the big bang occurs at a base point, it will go straight to the established route. Sewell thinks contingency is important. Naomi Klein also talks in his book that neoliberalism is achieved through the "shock doctrine," in which every crisis and catastrophe can become a point in time to expand the established order. This is also related to the time series just mentioned by Xiaohong, who just questioned that the crisis may be a more conservative cognitive framework. I think crises can also bring about change, even revolution. I recently chatted with my friend Wu Yiqing on WeChat about Bakhtin's historical concepts. Bakhtin was a critical theorist in the field of literature, and his view of history and his understanding of the time of revolution were interesting. In his view, both revolutions and crises can bring breakthroughs. He does not consider time to be sequential, but emphasizes its diffuse nature. That is to say, important historical revolutionary moments and historical time, which divergence not only affect the future, but also affect the past, are not empty, but valuable. Such moments are revolutionary moments. Perhaps, his thinking is helpful for how we understand time and crisis.
In 2008, the investment advertisement on Broadway Street in New York, USA.
Zhang Yang: This inventive sociology that Zhan Yang talked about is well related to sewell at the University of Chicago. When I went to Chicago in 2008 to study, I was during the financial crisis, and in the spring of 2009 I took a course with him on "The History of Capitalism." At that time, Sewell had already begun to reflect, saying that I was still talking about events. If we only talk about events and accidents, and we can't grasp the overall situation and structure, then how do we understand the global financial crisis? So at the time he wanted to find a balance between structure and event, and he later co-wrote an article with Peter Evans to reflect this change. Of course, this line of thinking tries to reconcile structure and event, to find mutual construction between the two; I think there is also a problem with this dualistic line of thinking, we have to go beyond this, we are looking for a third way, and we should not always be in this Bourdieu-like structure construction or construction of structure.
Then back to Xiaohong, it's very interesting. He criticizes it a bit like the so-called theory of intermittent equilibrium, such as Kuhn's The Structure of the Scientific Revolution. Scientific development is divided into two stages: conventional science and paradigm revolution, and the paradigm crisis connects the two. This is the dualism of time: conventional science/revolutionary science, conventional period/revolutionary period. But as Xiaohong said, is it really this binary form? Or is it that most of our daily lives are not static, nor are they revolutionary dynamics, but a normal dynamic, a regular change. For example, such a long period of reform and opening up is neither static nor revolutionary dynamic, but there are changes that break the tradition every year. So, how do we define reform and opening up, which is something that is between static and revolutionary dynamics? It's a very essential thing.
I'd like to write an article next, "Rebellion and Scientific Rebellion." On the one hand, the two are very similar, and on the other hand, I also want to challenge this dualism. There are a lot of rebellions between conventional and (scientific) revolutions, and how do you define that thing? So I think that in order to move beyond this dualism of structure/event and the dualism of temporality, we need to develop a more productive third way of thinking.
Fan Xin: I think from the course of this dialogue just now, we can see that historians and sociologists have made two different analyses of this issue. Historians are more focused on the analysis of the event itself, while sociologists offer us more theoretical and paradigmatic thinking. I think both are good. Since we are discussing the crisis today, I, as a historian, am interested in sociological theory, so I ask a few questions. I think maybe you can help me answer. The first question is crisis as a concept, what does "machine" mean in it? Some teachers have just mentioned that there is an opportunity brewing behind the crisis, that is, there is opportunity after crisis. However, I just read an article, which should be mentioned by Professor Victor Mair of the University of Pennsylvania, that in ancient times Chinese "danger" and "machine" actually mean crisis, there is no opportunity. So when we go to grasp the word, what is the crisis, I want to hear everyone's opinion, this is the first point. Second, can the crisis emerge as an independent event? That is to say, when we mention a crisis, do we mention one thing, and does a certain thing itself be a crisis? Of course, in diplomacy, we often use this term, for example, so-and-so crisis is basically so-and-so event, right. But if we grasp it from the perspective of sociology, history, and from a general direction, has the crisis ever appeared independently? If it is said that the crisis is not a separate event, but a time when many clusters emerge in clusters, this brings me to my third question, that is, when we think about the problem, do we just need to look for the causal relationship of the crisis? That is, one event raises another event, and then the next one? I think this may be a common method in history textbooks, but in addition to this, can we think about it from other angles?
Xu Xiaohong: From the perspective of historical research, no matter how you define "crisis", we should include the question of how people subjectively understand the temporal nature of the crisis. In any experience of time, there will be some time that we think is everyday, and some that is non-daily, such as the duality of time as Durkheim said, winter is the "religious season", and in the summer it is the "economic season", which is what the Basic Forms of Religious Life call the dual time. But in modernity, many times the drama and means of crisis handling in our lives are not necessarily completely sufficient, and sometimes we cannot judge whether the things we deal with are completely new, or whether we already have the drama and means to deal with things, or whether it is just a daily thing. These three possibilities are all problems that historical individuals encounter and need to deal with, so when we study a large uncertain event, whether this event is a crisis or a revolution, how historical actors imagine time should be what we need to incorporate in the study of history and social change, rather than as a completely different external dimension.
When we talk about crises, we need to know that crises are also a means of daily capitalism, which is one of the problems I wanted to talk about earlier, that is, risk. In the modern global capitalist system, there are a large number of people, such as insurance companies in the economic field or crisis management technocrats in the field of political governance, and dealing with crises is their source of livelihood, that is, in fact, many crises are profitable and capitalizable, in fact, they have a large number of technical means to deal with these crises. This is not the same as some of the fundamental uncertainty we want to talk about.
Zhang Yang: Crises don't have to be macroscopic, they can be everyday life. I think that zhanyang is the most relevant topic today, because everyone can have a crisis in every period. If we analyze it from the point of view I have just made, then life is not facing a structural personal crisis, but a sequential crisis. You know that there can be a possibility of crisis at any time, and if it is not handled well, it will become a real crisis, and if it is handled well, it will be temporarily suppressed. In sociological terms, it's called repeated problem solving, and each of us is solving problems repeatedly. My line of thought in analyzing individual crises also involves the repetitive, sequential, and recursive nature of the crises just described; the theories of these crises can be applied to very microscopic individual problems.
Song Nianshen: I would like to respond to the judgment on the nature of this crisis that Zhang Yang and Teacher Chen Li said. I think that whether it is structural or temporal, I always think that the crisis should be historicalized, that is, we need to see what kind of historical trend, a certain structure and a certain time crisis, it is not something that we can decide in the present. There are crises everywhere in life, depending on whether you handle it well or not, if you handle it well, it may not be a crisis, and if you handle it well, it will become a crisis, but it may become a crisis in the back. For example, the fifteenth year of the Wanli calendar, you can say that the fifteenth year of the Wanli calendar is a very ordinary year. You could say that there was no particular crisis, but it was probably because of the lack of alarm that it laid the groundwork for a larger political ups and downs. So my core concept is still to say that the crisis should be recognized in a temporal dimension, and it should be historically and culturally recognized, so that we can better talk about what its structure is, what temporality is.
Zhou Yisu (Associate Professor, Faculty of Education, University of Macau): I would like to ask a question on this subject. I would like to expand on what Zhang Yang and Xu Xiaohong just said about "the concept of crisis has a clear temporality." Temporality is reflected in whether it is a macroscopic crisis, such as the First and Second World Wars, or a micro personal crisis that Zhang Yang mentioned. For example, Uncoupling is a very well written book, and one of Diane Vaughan's points is that the temporal dimension of crises is reflected in our constant "definition of the past through the present." In her book, couples go to see marriage counselors during divorces, and they often say things like , "You know, I never really loved you, " as a strategy to rewrite the definition of an entire marriage. Similarly, we are now studying what led to the formation of World War I and World War II, and scholars are redefining that period of history by digging up new historical sources. But the problem is that the "past" also has a so-called "stickiness", which means that something really happened, can no longer be changed, can be reinterpreted historically. So I would like to ask historians how you deal with this tension in empirical research. That is, on the one hand, research should give new meaning to historical materials, but on the other hand, it should also respect what has happened in the past.
Fan Xin: I think in a sense I agree with Teacher Song's view just now, but I am also thinking about the problem mentioned by Teacher Yisu just now, the historical events have been completed, then for us it is the past that has already happened, what kind of mentality we should have when we study historical events, or what we can expect. In my view, historical events have been completed, but the mechanisms that shape the development of historical events remain—whether this mechanism can be a social system, a cultural mechanism, or an economic structure. I think from this point of view, historians and historical sociologists do need to respond to the large-scale long-term continuity mentioned by Professor Zhang in the process of studying historical events, and at the same time deal with the contingency of short periods of history. But in this process, in fact, the most interesting, at least my personal research interest is the most important thing, what if this structure collapses? That is to say, this economic structure, social system, and cultural mechanism collapse in a certain period of time, which will trigger a series of conflicts and sudden events, that is, the crisis in this situation just mentioned by Teacher Zhang is a series of events . In this regard, I think everyone's ideas are the same, the expression is different, and I think I prefer to use the concept of structural fracture. Only when we are in a fault layer will we continue to look for comprehensive solutions to new problems.
Crowds of demonstrators in Paris, France, May 30, 1968. On the same day, French President Charles de Gaulle dissolved the National Assembly and postponed a nationwide referendum.
Xu Xiaohong: Teacher Yisu's question is particularly good. It is the tension between the subjective world in which the actor himself finds himself, the crisis of his understanding, and our understanding of him as researchers. In my opinion, the best way, or bourdieu, is to reconstruct the field in which the actor is located, what the basic structure of the field is, where his position in this field is, who his position corresponds to, and where his habits come from. For example, in his own study of the Crisis of 1968 in France, he used the same method. Of course, it may not be so successful, but this idea should be the direction of our social scholars. Because what we can do is to re-outline the social space, the possible fields, because these things shape some of the ways in which the individual actor acts. We admit, of course, that history will have a lot of contingency, for example, if Duke Ferdinand had not been accurately hit by the assassins, it might have changed a lot; if the Japanese had dug up oil in the northeast, history would have been very different, and these possibilities would have been. But when we study this actor, we reconstruct the space of that social structure and the history of the individual, and then in this sense, what we can see in the historical data is the relationship between the individual and such a social space. Although this is a bit abstract and not a concrete and helpful approach, I think this is an ideal, a job that our sociologists all hope to do.
Zhan Yang: The question that Teacher Zhou just asked is that historical events have already happened, and then how do we deal with it now? I'm throwing my thoughts out here, and I specifically agree with what I just said about historicization, but at the same time we are also living people living in history, so our research is actually a kind of narative, a narrative that we start from our own point of view. So how we talk about it, how we look at history, is also a very political thing, and it is also a matter that is highly related to narrative. That's how I understand it. I know that many people may disagree, but I remember that I was trained in literature very early on, and when I read Hayden White's talk about history, he said that the boundaries between literary theory and historical theory, including literary texts and historical texts, may not be so obvious, and narrative plays a big role in it.
Chen Dandan: I quite agree with Zhan Yang that in fact, research is also a kind of narrative. As I said before, I think that there may be no only truth in the interpretation of history (so if it is too postmodern, then add that on the basis of basic facts and truth, there may not be only one absolutely correct interpretation or truthful interpretation), you can emphasize this factor in the historical process, I can emphasize the factor in the historical process, as long as there is no major distortion of facts and self-justification. In this way, on the basis of the narrative/interpretation of different people, we can spell out a whole. I also agree that behind the study of the War Ocean is a material thing (the political in the broad sense), behind the research is my concern, what I want to say to the world. I think there is still this ultimate care and emotion behind academia, or the ultimate value appeal.
Battle Ocean: Actually, how do we arrange this sequence between different events? Our understanding and interpretation of a crisis does not mean that we have data that we will put this sequence together, and no matter how we arrange it, the understanding or interpretation of this can be relatively easy to agree on. Although I think there is a lot of convenience here, of course I don't want to use this word, we have many ways to understand and define the crisis. For example, we may understand the same thing of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and there are many different perspectives on the narrative of the event itself (not to mention cause and effect). For everyone, the same crisis as we understand it is actually different.
Chen Shuang: I agree with Zhan Yang's point of view that the narrative of historical events is actually influenced by each person's point of view, position, and situation. I would also like to respond to what Teacher Chen Li just said, everyone's understanding of the crisis is actually different. So just now everyone talked a lot about what is the crisis and how the crisis arises. From the macro level, I agree with Professor Fan Xin that the crisis is a structural fault, that is to say, when the existing structure has undergone very large changes, the original structure can no longer be maintained, that is a crisis. But although such a macro-structural crisis will affect everyone, different people's feelings about the crisis are different. Some people will feel an opportunity because a new structure is about to be constructed; some will feel that there is great uncertainty; and then some people will feel insecure. I think that for the individual, it is only when the individual is insecure about structural changes that it is a real personal crisis.
Zhu Qian: We all talked about how events become crises, whose crises they are, and then the temporality and spatiality of crises, the diversity and multi-layeredness of crises, the relationship between crises and contingency and continuity. What is more important for a historian is the point in time at which the collective consciousness of crisis of this crisis emerged. Including the current coronavirus, how did it come about as a collective consciousness of a crisis? Who produced it? It is a process of knowledge production, it is a process of consciousness formation. This process tells us more than the crisis itself where the complexity of the historical moment lies, where its pluralism lies, how diverse narratives and knowledge production are integrated, and how they become a collective consciousness.
Zhang Yang: Let me briefly respond to the question of narrative causality of Teacher Zhan Yang. In fact, anthropology is not so different from the scholars who do narratives in our sociology part, everyone is the same. There is a philosophical tradition of French philosophy of history, from Raymond Aron to Paul Rico's three-volume Time and Narrative in 1984, and then influenced Sommers' 1994 article on narrative causality in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan. So, a lot of the causality of our history and social sciences is based on narrative. Now there are several different points of view. First, Paul Rico and Sommers set the magnifying screenwriting theory (emplotment). They argue that historical narratives are similar in nature to novels written by novelists or Shakespearean plays, and that causal stories are woven into our narratives. Of course, we in history and the social sciences have to look for evidence, not to make it up, but the causal emplotment itself is similar. Second, as Teacher Zhu Qian said, narrative, as a memory of the past, itself will provide cause and effect for the subsequent historical development. This is recognized not only by our historical and social sciences, but also by economists. You know of a recent translation of a new book, Economist Shearer's Narrative Economics, that discusses how narratives such as the Great Depression affect decision-making. For example, Friedman wrote a book called "The Monetary History of the United States", which reinterpreted the Great Depression, pointing out that the Great Depression was not caused by the inherent causes of capitalism, but more caused by the subsequent government bailouts, which completely subverted the understanding of the Great Depression. Later Friedman's narrative became mainstream and became part of the intellectual base of the neoliberal revolution. Third, narrative as a more fundamental and profound way of shaping our imagination of cause and effect. We grew up listening to our parents tell stories, which contain cause and effect, and temporality. We accept this timeline and causality from an early age, so that we have formed a narrative-based imagination of cause and effect in our minds from an early age, so that when we look at historical events later, we will unconsciously use this set of deep-rooted cause and effect to understand, and even our actions will follow such a "causal" rhythm.
Cover of The Monetary History of the United States
Xu Xiaohong: I think the last thing to say is the relationship between narrative and cause and effect. On one level, the actor's narrative has a great influence on a historical process, which is the so-called narrative constitution of reality of social reality, a very important contribution of my predecessor colleague Margaret Somers. This level is a different level from the narrative we weave when we study history. When we study history, of course, we need to use many different evidences to clarify and distinguish which are historical facts and which do not conform to historical facts, and thus outline a better narrative that can be said more roundly at the level of historical facts. What I want to emphasize is that these two narrative issues belong to two different dimensions.
Editor-in-Charge: Fan Zhu
Proofreader: Yijia Xu