I was re-reading William Sewell’s Logics of History this week, in particular his attempt to theorize “events” in an attempt to rescue them analytically from being the province of mere storytelling.
At the same time, I found myself reading over a really interesting 2022 article by the historian Richard Bell called “Peepholes, Eels and Pickett’s Charge” (Bell, Richard. "Peepholes, Eels, and Pickett's Charge: Doing Microhistory Then and Now." The Journal of the Civil War Era 12, no. 3 (2022): 362-387. doi:10.1353/cwe.2022.0045) that is trying to engage the historiography of microhistory in the American academy, the premiere genre of “the event”. Bell is interested in particular in the derision expressed by Carlo Ginzberg and other European historians towards American-style microhistory, starting with the first monograph to include “microhistory” in its title, a 1959 study of Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg.
Bell observes that the issue for Ginzberg and his emulators is that American microhistory is just a bunch of details assembled into a story, that it is besotted with narrative but absent of analysis. In short, it’s rather like Sewell’s worries about the event. What Sewell does in the end is rather reminiscent of Anthony Giddens’ theory of “structuration” that tried to describe the relation of agency and structure as a perpetual feedback loop. Sewell sees the event as arising out of underlying structures but also as a rupture in those structures, a source of change and transformation.
On some level this is obvious enough, just as Giddens’ structuration is. (That’s one reason why I think Giddens never really took hold as an enduringly generative social theorist, just as a kind of much-referenced purveyor of theoretical common sense and as a court thinker for Third Way politicians in the moment of their 1990s ascendancy.) It’s hard to get a full sense of what the problem is, or who thinks of events as unrelated to or uncaused by predicated structures.
And yet I do know what’s going on (as does Bell): this is just another front in the vast jumble of battles and collaborations between a style of humanist thinking that wants to leave room for people to come up with ideas, desires, identities, representations that are not reducible to their prior causes, to have novelty not only be possible but for it to be the result of unpredicted inspiration and agentive will, both individual and collective and a style of social thought that sees that view as being at best pointlessly whimsical and at worse as being a deliberate distraction from the hard, necessary work of managing and transforming human life for the better through systematic and deliberate labor and the evidence-driven re-engineering of fundamental and determinative infrastructures.
Some years ago, I took a strong interest in a branch of thinking associated with emergence, complex adaptive systems, network structures and to some extent (somewhat inaccurately, I now think), chaos theory. In part what drew me to those concepts was the hope of a different way to reconcile agency, events and structure, the thought that what we call “structure”—some kind of complex system that determines or governs many actions—might be an emergent and accidental consequence of the simultaneous interactions of many “events”, many individual activities, which were previously unrelated and which were not undertaken with any thought of building a complex system of the kind that they ultimately contributed to making.
Used vaguely enough, those ideas are just as truistic as many other attempts to relate local or particular actions that seem highly intentional with vast determinative systems that control and direct what people do and are. But I think the suite of concepts associated with emergence and complex systems end up on one hand undercutting the humanist aspiration that what we mean to do as individuals and groups might end up interrupting and transforming the world we live in for the better, on purpose and at the same time those concepts interfere with the hubris of the social thinker who believes sustained attention to the determinative power of structures combined with evidentiary rigor can produce a serious vision of how to systematically change human life for the better.
When you look at emergent forms of complexity in human history (and possibly in the wider physical and natural world) it’s hard to think that they are always optimal or rational or matched to some fitness landscape. They’re accidents in multiple senses of that word. It’s very hard to imagine how agents might undertake actions with an emergent outcome in mind because of the scope of the simultaneities involved as those actions move towards the gelling of some new complex system. Even in retrospect, it’s almost impossible to rigorously describe a history in terms of emergence except through witnessing it in some kind of multilayered simulation or through immersion in the vastness of a well-studied historiography. There is in this sense a kind of politics behind the appeal to emergence as a conceptual frame, a politics of anti-hubris, of no longer tinkering not just with the machinery of death but of many other things.
But there’s an empirical validity to it too, whether or not the politics seems like some form of surrender, some kind of reduction of agentive humanity and programmatic reason all at once. I don’t think all structures and systems that shape (and misshape) human life in the present are emergent or complex in this sense. And I don’t think all deliberate actions by individuals and groups go awry or produce unexpected systems that no one wanted. But plainly there are some systems which are emergent and more importantly, they’re on the rise because the scope of human life is beyond what any of us can apprehend and because that scope is now being handled in part by technosocial infrastructures that are not only sometimes the outcome of emergence but are sometimes operating as complex adaptive systems in their technologies.
All of which is a long prologue addressed to today’s “event” involving the Federal Aviation Administration’s malfunction of its NOTAM system designed to inform pilots and airlines of conditions that might affect their operations. In the wake of such malfunctions, we’re quick to repopulate the space of this kind of news with histories of design that explain the system that failed, with calls for deliberate reform or redesign of the failed system, and often with retroactive assignments of blame or responsibility—the identification of some pastward moment when the malfunction could have been avoided.
Sometimes I think all that analysis is completely appropriate, even with technological or governmental systems of great intricacy and scope. Sometimes I’m really sure that we’re talking about a system that nobody’s really responsible for that fits a rigorous and parsimonious definition of “emergent”. Sometimes it’s in the grey area in between.
I think the NOTAM malfunction feels like one of those in-betweens. And I think the class of events that are in factually in that in-between are growing. And I think that growth is contributing to the sense that the modern nation-state is institutionally inadequate in the face of 21st Century life at the same time that mainstream capitalism increasingly feels like the visible and mostly fake mask of a vast subsurface network that moves material substance, immaterial value and human subjects all around the world without any conscious agent apprehending more than a small fraction of that network’s functioning.
The problem is that we don’t know how to write about any of this in the news, or how to imagine our own subjectivity in relationship to these kinds of events and the structures they relate to and affect. It feels sometimes as if all of those arguments in the scholarship, still going on this very moment, are still rooted in the period between 1700 and 1980, that we might come up with the most sophisticated synthesis of how to think about events, agency and structure just in time for that synthesis to be nothing but historical.
Image credit: "NOTAM - Bird activity on or near runway" by jitze is licensed under CC BY 2.0.