I missed last week'‘ post so I'll combine both my posts on the material culture readings and Charles Maier’s The Project State and its Rivals.

“Material culture” seems to be a term-of-art unique in its idiosyncrasy to the historical profession. It is simultaneously a hint within a name, as well a minor contradiction in terms. How and when can the material be substantive of culture-- or vice versa?

Obviously, the oxymoron is more apparent than it is real. But it's still a curious construction of lemmas; and it ostensibly gets to a heartbeat of the AHR readings on material culture themselves, specifically the roundtable between Auslander, Halevi, Bentley, Sibum, and Witmore. “The 'truth' of an object,” says Auslander, “is not more to be found in the words than in the thing itself.” In other words, “forms,” as objects, may lack a language of their own-- but they are yet endowed by their creator(s) with a certain subjectivity that is nonetheless inherent (and prior to) to their “objecthood.” All of which is to say that a historian's focus on material culture reflects a tension between the formal experience of the word (as [a] derivative of culture)-- and the (perceived) “legibility” of objects.

Auslander, in her solo piece, opens by saying (proclaiming?) that historians, by their nature, “are suspicious of things”-- this is a curious statement to me when the notion of things derives from an appreciation for what is both historical and “material.” I have never gotten the impression that historians are reluctant to observe the past through anything “less” or other-than-textual. (I'd like to know the reaction linguists-- in my experience, very touchy about other disciplines stepping on their toes-- might have to some of the readings' comments relating to semiotics.)

I think it can be helpful to think of text-- language, it's important to remember, is not simply written-- as the analogous to the line of “natural numbers” in mathematics; language is a field along which formal experience may be plotted. But that doesn't mean objecthood is any less tangible or permanent; it's correlation to subjectivity is simply obscured. Which is to say, we can't retrieve a memory of memory-- or a consequence of a conversation-- that has been muted by a speaker's death, non-existence, or otherwise lack of legible written script.

In the AHA roundtable conversation, Bentley says something that builds on Auslander's comments slightly: “historians feel more comfortable with the written text as evidence—because it feels more permanent. Objects can decay, break, disappear; words are transferable, and even though much is lost with the original context […] words can continue to exist through another format or medium.” The low-hanging fruit in this conversation seemed to me to be the Rosetta Stone: for centuries, it was left to conjecture what pre-Ptolemaic Egyptian hieroglyphs meant-- in other words, where these pictographs stood on the text-object spectrum.

Maybe it was brought up later in the text. Nonetheless, to my awareness, the half-life of text isn't inherently more or less than that of “things.” Texts and their meanings certainly can decay, and while they can be in a sense revived, that doesn't mean they retain meaning-- except in a retrospected sense.

This brings me to Maier: whose book The Project-State and its Rivals meditates on (what Eric Hobsbawm independently called) “the short twentieth century,” and at what point(s) these less-than-hundred-years intersect with the rapid development of the post-Y2K world. How do we "get to" the point of history, and where does the past lie? Maier proposes a revised definition of the project-state as a political entity that “consciously aspire[s] to inflect the course of history.”

To my reading at least, Maier does not seem to source the emergence of the project-state in the twentieth century itself-- he takes it back to the late, “long” nineteenth. This seems appropriate, given the (largely contemporaneous) emergence of the nation-state at that time. At mere face value, the socialist states whose antecedents inaugurated the past century seem like the most appropriate candidates for the project-state category. Lenin and his Bolshevik cohort were certainly lifted by a yearning that bent toward historical materialist mastery: in other words, a notion that humanity can control its destiny (i.e., history) by understanding its arc of political/economic progression.

Project-State does take into account the Soviet Union as well as other polities that came into being in the early twentieth century--- but of course doesn't stop there. I'm encouraged by his definition, but-- as he notes-- others' can be capacious: Maier notes that Foucault regarded all states to be, in a sense, project-states.

At the top of Chapter Three, Maier asks “where does history, at least the history of political life, happen?” It is a question of scale as much as it is one of territoriality and geography. The state can, and often has been, “captured” by elites and others who seek to shape the past and future on their own terms, maybe without regard for people and history's consequences. Others, like the internationalists (a broad category, to be sure) sought to construct alternatives shaped governance on a wider scale without shirking their mandate to influence local livelihoods.

Some questions raised remain more heuristic in their analysis than others, and their answers may seem out of reach. Of those that can be asked, I might say: are politics local (anymore), were they ever, and is capital at its center and/or its margins?