Temporal Layering in the Long Conceptual History of Sexual Medicine: Reading Koselleck with Foucault

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Alison M. Downham Moore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Theoretical Development ◽  
Sexual Medicine ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Concepts

AbstractThis paper reflects on the challenges of writing long conceptual histories of sexual medicine, drawing on the approaches of Michel Foucault and of Reinhart Koselleck. Foucault’s statements about nineteenth-century rupture considered alongside his later-life emphasis on long conceptual continuities implied something similar to Koselleck’s own accommodation of different kinds of historical inheritances expressed as multiple ‘temporal layers.’ The layering model in the history of concepts may be useful for complicating the historical periodizations commonly invoked by historians of sexuality, overcoming historiographic temptations to reduce complex cultural and intellectual phenomena to a unified Zeitgeist. The paper also shows that a haunting reference to ‘concepts’ among scholars of the long history of sexual medicine indicates the emergence of a de facto methodology of conceptual history, albeit one in need of further refinement. It is proposed that reading Koselleck alongside Foucault provides a useful starting-point for precisely this kind of theoretical development.

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

Lam Time

Killing Times ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 185-216
Author(s):  
David Wills
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Past History ◽  
Criminal Defense ◽  
History Of ◽  
Court Proceedings ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Multiple Homicide ◽  
Time Frames

This chapter puts the instant of execution into contrast with the different time frames of the crime itself and of court proceedings. The analysis works through a particular nineteenth-century multiple homicide in France—studied by a team led by Michel Foucault—committed by Pierre Rivière. The case is distinguished by the memoir that Rivière wrote as a justification for his crime but that, in various ways, became part of the crime itself. The murders occurred when “extenuating circumstances” were being accepted as a criminal defense and when psychological testimony was finding its way into proceedings. Both those tendencies extend the crime into the past history of the criminal mind and show how the moment of committing a crime becomes part of a longer narrative—or even literary—fantasy that is in some respects indistinguishable from what we understand as a motive. The chapter ends with a discussion of Kafka’s “death penalty” fiction.

Ambiguous Play

2016 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Nathan Hulsey
Keyword(s):  
Secondary Task ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Concepts ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Cultural Shifts ◽  
Cultural Turn

This chapter is a critical-conceptual introduction to the topic of gamification from the standpoint of game studies (the study of games) and ludology (the study of play). A secondary task is to move the definition and conceptual history of gamification away from essentialist notions of play and games and towards a more nuanced understanding of gamification as a philosophy of design with situational outcomes. By examining the controversy surrounding gamification as a complex history of concepts, the chapter aims to give the reader an overview of how gamification aligns with or deviates from various definitions of games and play. Gamification can be controversial when using traditional ludological concepts largely because traditional ludology is pre-digital, and does not account for the current technological and cultural shifts driving gaming and gamification. Finally, the chapter ends with the suggestion that the current cultural turn in game studies provides a way to analyze gamification as an example of the “gaming of culture.”

Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe Reloaded?

2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 78-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann ◽  
Kathrin Kollmeier ◽  
Willibald Steinmetz ◽  
Philipp Sarasin ◽  
Alf Lüdtke ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Concepts ◽  
Basic Concepts

Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe Reloaded? Writing the Conceptual History of the Twentieth Century Guest editors: Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann and Kathrin KollmeierIntroduction Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann and Kathrin KollmeierSome Thoughts on the History of Twentieth-Century German Basic Concepts Willibald SteinmetzIs a “History of Basic Concepts of the Twentieth Century“ Possible? A Polemic Philipp SarasinHistory of Concepts, New Edition: Suitable for a Better Understanding of Modern Times? Alf LüdtkeReply Christian Geulen

scholarly journals Dueling, Conflicting Masculinities, and the Victorian Gentleman

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 605-628 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margery Masterson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Interpersonal Violence ◽  
Multifaceted Approach ◽  
Multiple Modes ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThis article takes an unexplored popular debate from the 1860s over the role of dueling in regulating gentlemanly conduct as the starting point to examine the relationship between elite Victorian masculinities and interpersonal violence. In the absence of a meaningful replacement for dueling and other ritualized acts meant to defend personal honor, multiple modes of often conflicting masculinities became available to genteel men in the middle of the nineteenth century. Considering the security fears of the period––European and imperial, real and imagined––the article illustrates how pacific and martial masculine identities coexisted in a shifting and uneasy balance. The professional character of the enlarging gentlemanly classes and the increased importance of men's domestic identities––trends often aligned with hegemonic masculinity––played an ambivalent role in popular attitudes to interpersonal violence. The cultural history of dueling can thus inform a multifaceted approach toward gender, class, and violence in modern Britain.

Dealing with an Ocean of Meaninglessness

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 7-28
Author(s):  
Margrit Pernau ◽  
Sébastien Tremblay
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Simple Analysis ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Concepts

During his prolific career, Reinhart Koselleck left his mark on a myriad of topics beyond the history of concepts: iconology, memory, and temporality. The first part of this piece is a never before published English translation of one of Koselleck’s numerous public interventions. Second, taking as a starting point his reflection about the end of the war and the impossibility to collectivize certain memories, this article links his considerations about the unsayable with his work on images and political sensuality. Going beyond a simple analysis of Koselleck’s writings, the article opens a dialogue between the history of concepts and affective memories, offering news ways to link experiences, emotions, and practices while underlining the limits of communication and collective memory.

GIUSEPPE FOLGHERAITER: THE ITALIAN PIONEER OF ARCHAEOMAGNETISM

2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-335
Author(s):  
CLAUDIA PRINCIPE ◽  
JONAS MALFATTI
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Magnetic Properties ◽  
Secular Variation ◽  
Rock Magnetism ◽  
Volcanic Rocks ◽  
Magnetic Inclination ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Variation Curve ◽  
History Of ◽  
Macedonio Melloni

ABSTRACT The history of the science of archaeomagnetism conventionally starts in 1600 with the publication of William Gilbert's monumental work De Magnete, but the theoretical basis of this scientific field has to be positioned at the end of the nineteenth century. In Italy at that time, a number of scientists such as Giambattista Beccaria, Macedonio Melloni and Silvestro Gherardi, were working on magnetic field characteristics and their work variously contributed to the early study of Earth and rock magnetism. A major contribution to the birth of paleomagnetism as a science, and archaeomagnetism as a dating technique, was produced by Giuseppe Folgheraiter (1856–1913) by means of his research on the magnetic properties of volcanic deposits and his attempts to date ancient pottery of different epochs based on the magnetic properties of clay materials. Initially, Folgheraiter studied the rock magnetism of the volcanic rocks of Latium where he replicated the findings of Macedonio Melloni, who had studied Vesuvius lavas, and found that volcanic rocks are affected by a permanent magnetization. In addition, Folgheraiter verified the discovery by Filippo Keller of the Punti distinti. Folgheraiter also made the innovative proposal that lightning strongly influences the magnetic properties of lavas resulting in magnetic disorder. The main analytical effort of Folgheraiter at the end of the nineteenth century was dedicated to the study of the variations of magnetic inclination in different epochs as registered in archaeological pottery. He produced archaeomagnetic sets of analyses on 191 samples grouped into 10 epochs, that resulted in the first reconstruction of a geomagnetic secular variation curve (SVC). Even if nowadays the Folgheraiter analytical results have been replaced by more precise measurements, a great portion of the development of modern archaeomagnetic techniques originated with Folgheraiter’s experiments and intuitions. Many of those advances were improved upon only during the first half of the twentieth century by Emile Thellier (1904–1987). Actually, the well-known work by Thellier, resulting in the birth of the Saint Maur archaeomagnetic laboratory at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, had as a starting point the theories and suggestions developed by Giuseppe Folgheraiter. Based on the studies by Thellier, the well-known secular variation curve for France was derived, later to be perfected by Ileana Bucur in 1994.

Constant differences: Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, the concept of the observer in early nineteenth-century practical astronomy and the history of the personal equation

2007 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPH HOFFMANN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
Observational Error ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Personal Equation ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Perspective

AbstractIn 1823 the astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel gave notice of an observational error which is now known as the personal equation. Bessel, however, never used this phrase to characterize the finding that when noting the time of a certain event observers show a considerable ‘involuntary constant difference’. From this starting point the paper develops two arguments. First, these involuntary differences subverted the concept of the ‘observing observer’. What had previously been defined as a reference point of trust and precision turned into a source of an error that resisted any wilful intervention. Second, and contrary to later suggestions, Bessel's findings did not initially lead to discussions and measures of permanent control. In everyday astronomical work the influence of such differences could be avoided by comparatively simple means. Taking this into account offers a new perspective both on the history of the personal equation and on the significance of Bessel's findings. Whereas the former has to be read as the history of a rather particular reaction to the phenomenon of constant differences, the latter is connected with a rather fundamental transition in the epistemology of the observer.

History Matters: A Reply

2002 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-151
Author(s):  
Mark Pluciennik
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Preliminary Note ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
Primitive Society ◽  
Noble Savage ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Concepts ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Many ◽  
Anthropological History

First of all let me wholeheartedly thank all those who have responded for their helpful comments and careful readings. In this reply I would like first to discuss points dealing with the history of concepts related to ‘hunter-gatherers’, before pursuing the implications for contemporary prehistories. One preliminary note: van de Velde and Bogucki both point to the many advantages of Enlightenment thought (or reason). There are many political and scientific reasons to concur. I certainly have no desire to throw out the baby with the bathwater and return to metaphysical speculation as a substitute for archaeological and historical practice. I would also like to respond directly to van de Velde's comments about Adam Kuper (1988). Kuper's book, though also a work of critical anthropological history, is concerned with the later nineteenth century onwards and the idea of ‘primitive society’ characterised by certain forms of social and religious organisation, rather than subsistence (Kuper 1988, 5–7). I have argued elsewhere (Pluciennik 2001, 744–746) that this is typical of certain nineteenth-century European anthropologists and highlights a moment of divergence between ethnologists and archaeologists. Van de Velde also queries the omission of the ‘noble savage’ strand of Enlightenment thought from the paper. Certainly the recognition that there could be markedly different societies was sometimes used to critique the perceived excesses and artifices of the writer's society or of ‘civilisation’ more generally (Berkhofer 1978, 72–80; Carey 1998). However I would argue generally that the ‘noble savage’ has tended to be a minority construct adopted for strategic rhetorical and literary purposes (even if there was a revival from the 1960s with the ecologically noble savage: Buege 1996). Indeed Ellingson (2001) has recently proposed that even the trope of the noble savage was largely a 19th century invention, a myth constructed by racists to provide a stick with which to beat ‘liberals’. I disagree, in that the image of ‘Others’ supposedly without the corruption and vices of modern civilisation has long been utilised to construct alternatives to contemporary conditions and to progressive social evolutionary scenarios, with foragers supplying ‘evidence’ of an Edenic place, a Golden Age past, or degenerative human histories.

scholarly journals The Birth of International Conceptual History

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Jan Ifversen
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Concepts

In March 2020, Melvin Richter, one of the founders of international, conceptual history passed away. This sad occasion makes it timely in our journal to reflect on the process that turned national projects within conceptual and intellectual history into an international and transnational enterprise. The text that follows—published in two parts, here and in the next issue—takes a closer look at the intellectual processes that led up to the founding meeting of the association behind our journal, the History of Concepts Group. It follows in the footsteps of Melvin Richter to examine the different encounters, debates and protagonists in the story of international, conceptual history. The text traces the different approaches that were brought to the fore and particularly looks at Melvin Richter’s efforts to bridge between an Anglophone tradition of intellectual history and a German tradition of Begriffsgeschichte.

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