Cats? Ew. Sick.

The actual cat massacre chapter from Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History gave us a good look at the power given to people who decide what stories will be told.

The beauty of cultural history is its desire to reconstruct the cultural climate within which historical narrative is set. The chapter we read illustrates the circumstances of journeymen printers in 18th century France. It is significant to understand their situation because it fills in the contextual holes that a review of the French Revolution can leave. It by no means suggests that the French Revolution was caused by ruffian printers on Rue Saint-Severin. Its scope is much more limited than that, but with large implications. Instead, it attempts to recreate the workaday circumstances that the printers lived with and show an episode illustrative of their ability to manipulate symbols and humiliate their boss, to live life and experience the occasional triumph. A hundred years before Marx was writing and generations before the Industrial Revolution would sweep across Europe, it is significant to read about the glory of a printer in the early 18th century France. The reader may feel surprised to find out that it wasn’t all about plotting to overthrow the monarchy and gain rights, but more about being tricksters or besting their masters. Other accounts in cultural history from the time period show that the journeymen would often control much of the pace of the work and were not the disparate batch of robots that some historians would lead us to believe.

Such is the problem with historical writing generally. In trying to “make sense of the past,” historians almost always go too far and present a convincing case that allows a person to apply the story into their own lives. While it is beneficial and necessary to apply stories from the past into one’s life, it must be done with care. If an author has made the past’s socio-political landscape any more decipherable than the present’s, a red flag should go up. It would be ignorant of anybody to assume there were ever “simpler times,” thus necessitating every reader to bear in mind what lies at the heart of every historical battle: an argument not of existence, but of emphasis.

So.

There seems to be a correlation between the fields of science and humanist research insofar as pioneering projects are able to probe only a proscribed amount of what its scope surveys, thus creating more arenas for future research, and the political jockeying that getting research published entails. The question becomes what manner of institutional or cultural constraints could be used to create more of a home-boy congeniality between different researchers?

Noting the evolution of social corps (“groups,” not classes) disparity (from journeyman vs. master to consumer vs. the exploited) and its juxtaposition with the impressive body of information that we have amassed in the modern world, the paradox brought up a question of the Virtuous Move Forward, the VMF. Is it a race of creating a virtuous world and hoping that the injustices that are being enacted upon people doesn’t create too large of a hate complex to the point that folks want to blow folks up?

Getting deliciously apocalyptic, Joe highlighted the journeymen’s use of symbols to vent tensions felt toward their masters as “writing on the wall.” As was stated before, this incident didn’t cause the French Revolution, though it displayed cultural quirks that were at work in the time period and explained a great deal of how these things could have happened. He mused on his own indifferent feelings when he sees folks at home or abroad burning American effigies and carrying on. Is there some sort of writing on the wall that we would do well to take notice of? Has the age of capitalism and nationalism given the developed world a furtive dose of sleeping pills that will presage its demise? Does it scare us at all to see instances of rather barbaric mid-modern Europeans moving with the social dexterity that they do? Does it scare us to see how folks with seemingly futile capacities for defiance experience their moments on top?

Giant parentheses! (This set of questions is probably more inimical to Americans with a big A than the ones we discussed during Pamy’s previous presentation, though the answers are certainly further from potential reconciliation. I vonder vhat zis means…)

Shameful as it is to see no trace of distinctly female representation in this collection of stories, we must wonder just how silenced the feminine role was in this time. Could the people of the time even possessed the channel capacity to engage in gender issues?

Reverting back to sexual violation, we agreed that sex should be something that both parties want to engage in together (what would Freud have to say about this move?). That is to say that if a person doesn’t want it, the situation should end right there. So how do you get the passive characters, the ones that are so responsible for the others’ sexual comportment, to be able to express themselves and light fires? Seems a little bit weird in our eyes, I suppose.