Epistemic Anxieties Research Articles

Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense by Ann Laura Stoler (review)

Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense by Ann Laura Stoler (review)

Muybridge’s Magic Lantern

Though widely known for his contributions to instantaneous photography and studies of human and animal locomotion, the figure of Eadweard Muybridge was equally renowned during the final decades of the 19th century for his tours of the magic lantern circuit. At this time, the photographer entertained and educated audiences with a poly-generic, multi-media show alternating still views with animations produced through his projecting apparatus, the zoopraxiscope. This article examines the temporal and material dimensions of Muybridge’s lantern practice to demonstrate how it builds on 19th-century anxieties about changing epistemologies of vision and visuality, as well as time and temporality. As a dynamic process animating still images into motion, Muybridge treated animation as a palliative measure designed to bring his ungainly images of animals back into the realm of natural human vision. In so doing, he bred truth through illusion and helped prepare audiences for an emerging cinematic sensibility. By emphasizing the temporal dimensions of photographic indexicality, the author further argues that Muybridge’s endeavors amount to an archive of time, and that his lantern slides evince time made material. While the slides’ projection displayed a virtual immateriality, an examination of broken ones reveals that photographic beauty emerges from their ephemerality and fragility. The animating interchange between stillness and motion, between the material and the immaterial, functions as an indicator of the emergence of epistemic assumptions and anxieties about time and sight that took hold as cinema emerged.

Listlessness in the Archive

Listlessness in the Archive

Stoler, Ann Laura: Along the Archival Grain. Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense

Stoler, Ann Laura: Along the Archival Grain. Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense

Searching for Culpability in the Archives: Commonwealth Nuclear Test Veterans’ Claims for Compensation

In the late 1950s, Commonwealth servicemen participated in a series of British nuclear bomb tests in the Pacific. Today these veterans claim to suffer multiple health problems from radiation exposure, and seek compensation from the British and New Zealand governments. In resisting the State's control of evidential archival documents, the veterans devalue State documents and contest the truth of military records, instead elevating personal and collective memories based on notions of witnessing. Yet veterans do accept certain documents as legitimate bearers of historical truth if they emerge from the archives without the influence of powerful State agencies. From these “unfiltered” documents, test veterans create their own private archives which function as sites of memorialization, social legitimation and legal proof. Engaging with the work of Ann Stoler (Stoler, A. L. (2002), “Colonial archives and the arts of governance”, Archival Science, vol. 2, pp. 87–109; Stoler, A. L. (2009), Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, and Oxford), I argue that revealing State power requires understanding how groups outside the archives both subvert and mimic its documentary logic.

EPISTEMIC ANXIETY AND ADAPTIVE INVARIANTISM

Philosophical PerspectivesVolume 24, Issue 1 p. 407-435 EPISTEMIC ANXIETY AND ADAPTIVE INVARIANTISM Jennifer Nagel, Jennifer Nagel University of TorontoSearch for more papers by this author Jennifer Nagel, Jennifer Nagel University of TorontoSearch for more papers by this author First published: 28 January 2011 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1520-8583.2010.00198.xCitations: 55Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Citing Literature Volume24, Issue1December 2010Pages 407-435 RelatedInformation

Reading Order and Sentiment in Colonial ArchivesAlong the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Ann Laura Stoler. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.

In Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Ann Laura Stoler examines the apprehensions, epistemic uncertainties, and sentiments that shaped colonial policy in the Dutch Indies. The author presents a nuanced and meticulous reading of official nineteenthand twentiethcentury Dutch colonial archives and decenters how postcolonial scholars, feminist scholars, and historians have characteristically approached colonial texts. The aim of many postcolonial scholars is to recuperate and reintroduce the voices and agency of colonized or subaltern individuals. In contrast, Stoler seeks to elucidate the epistemologies and sentiments of colonial administrators, teachers, doctors, and orphanage directors by reading Dutch colonial archives “along the grain.” She views colonial archives as fleeting configurations of epistemological and political anxieties rather than sites of pure erasure or misrepresentation. Treating archives as ethnographic data in this way illuminates the aspirations, dissentions, epistemic anxieties, and sentiments of colonial officials and draws attention to the “fault lines and ragged edges of colonialism’s archival genres” (p. 53). In discerning the ruptures and inconsistencies within colonial common sense, Stoler explores how colonial administrators sought to assess and identify politically versus privately motivated sentiments and to classify racial and social boundaries. In pursuing this task, Stoler develops the central theoretical argument that political rationalities of administrative authorities were as equally founded in managing affective states and sentiments as they were in the mastery of specific principles of reason and rationality. Systems of scientific knowledge and reasoned management may have been the foundations of colonial authority but only insofar as they were grounded in the simultaneous governance of affections and sentiments. The establishment of a “colonial order of things,” through which colonial policies arose, was founded on a European common sense, or specific epistemic habits,

Honor, Shame, and European Definitions of MurderIn Honor of Fadime: Murder and Shame. Unni Wikan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

lurking behind what were oftentimes construed as counterfeit or misleading exteriors. Political reason did not exist in opposition to sentiment; rather, properly managed sympathies and attachments were crucial to the colonial project. The latent fear of revolt, resentment, and misplaced affections made colonial administrators’ anxieties real and spurred the implementation of colonial policies on the ground. Patricidal mixed-blood children, violence-prone plantation workers, and native nurse-maids made defining and harnessing the passions and sentiments of the colonized a principal preoccupation of colonial administrators. These epistemic anxieties and uncertainties are detailed in chapter 6. The murder of a Dutch planter and his family sparked a plethora of competing truth claims, rumors, and envisioned events surrounding counterinsurgent acts of violence. These divergent colonial narratives and rumors of “vengeful natives” and “rebel groups” delimit and subvert foundations of trust and hierarchies of credibility while distorting the margins between fiction and truth. One of Stoler’s greatest contributions in this book is her critique of Western “reason” as a founding principle of colonialist studies across the globe. Her critique of contemporary postcolonial analyses lies in the “assumption that the mastery of reason, rationality and the inflated claims made for Enlightenment principles have been at the foundation of colonial regimes” (p. 57) and should therefore be the center point of critical postcolonial studies. As Stoler states, “If reason was a hallmark of the colonial, it was neither pervasive nor persuasive” (p. 58). Throughout the book, Stoler challenges the claim that the application of European principles of reason and rationality to colonialist politics was the colonial state’s most prevailing and “insidious” form of knowledge production and technology of rule. Her criticisms belie two main points: that functional accounts of colonial reason and rationality exclude or overshadow the equal importance of sentiments and attachments and that colonialist political rationalities and epistemic paradigms were ambiguous, contingent, and highly uncertain. By attending to both the logos and the pathos of empire, Stoler underscores the ways in which “the politics of empire bleeds into the texture of the personal” (p. 278).

Archival Dis-Ease: Thinking through Colonial Ontologies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 2. Jorge Luis Borges, in Labyrinth ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: Modern Library, 1962) and “On Exactitude in Science,” in Collected Fictions (New York: Penguin, 1999), 325. 3. Giorgio Agamben, Signatura rerum: sur la méthode (Paris: Librairie Philosphique J. Vrin, 2008), 16; Michel Foucault, Surveilller et punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 206–7. Additional informationNotes on contributorsAnn Laura StolerAnn Laura Stoler is Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research. Her books include Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, 2010) and the edited volume Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006)

Reviews: Deleuze and memorial Culture: Desire, Singular Memory, and the Politics of Trauma, along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, the Comfort of Things, Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta, Military Workfare: The Soldier and Social Citizenship in Canada, Bruno Latours

Reviews: Deleuze and memorial Culture: Desire, Singular Memory, and the Politics of Trauma, along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, the Comfort of Things, Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta, Military Workfare: The Soldier and Social Citizenship in Canada, Bruno Latours

Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (review)

Reviewed by: Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense Danilyn Rutherford Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. By Ann Laura Stoler. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. By page 51 of her long-awaited Along the Archival Grain, Ann Laura Stoler has used no fewer than four metaphors to describe her topic. The colonial archive is wood, to be read along or against the grain. The colonial archive is a river, flowing silently through rapids and eddies of interest, enthusiasm, anxiety, and concern. The colonial archive is a body with a pulse that races in response to colonial fantasies and fears. The colonial archive is a palimpsest, inscribed, scratched out, and scratched over. The colonial archive is a leaf of stationary with a watermark, an indelible structure that determines the very shape of empire yet is only visible when turned to the right angle and placed in the right light. In less expert hands, this rhetorical exuberance might seem like overkill. But Stoler manages to fire this beautiful shower of figural arrows without losing sight of her mark. This combination of elegance, energy, and perspicuity has long been a hallmark of Stoler's scholarship, but in this book, Stoler's aim is particularly true. If her metaphors proliferate, this simply reflects the fertility of the insights that Stoler has arrived at through the teaching and research that led to this book. These insights are at once historical and methodological. Here as elsewhere, Stoler makes a case for attending to the affective dimensions of colonial governance. Stoler focuses in particular on the anxieties that gave rise to efforts to control the passions, not of the colonized, but of those who ruled. Stoler documents the concerns that swirled around the Netherlands Indies' so-called "Indies children" – a protean, elastic category encompassing locally born Europeans ranging from Indo-European paupers to Batavia's city fathers. "Father love" and other excessive family attachments, insolence, indolence, resentment of their superiors: these imputed passions fueled reform schemes, from the founding of agricultural colonies to the removal of mixed race children from overly "native" homes. Stoler carefully tracks the sentiments of those who initiated and engaged in these projects. In chapter 3, she analyzes documents concerning an unprecedented demonstration held in May 1848 at the Harmonie Club in Batavia. Hundreds of "Indies Children" gathered to protest a new policy that required prospective civil servants to earn a degree only available in Delft if they wanted to advance beyond the lowest ranks. Stoler traces the growing discomfort of the colony's leading bureaucrats as they tried to determine who was at work and what was at stake in this disturbing protest. Natives? Socialists? Parental love and loss? Revolutionary change? Later in the century, when other top officials organized commissions to investigate the "problem" of Indo European paupers, similar anxieties surfaced. Could the investigators trust the statistics? Did their surveys penetrate to the heart of Indo European yearnings and desires? How many impoverished Europeans were there in the colony? Were they "really" Europeans or merely "faux" Europeans – mixed race natives living above their station and means? Stoler's historical insights, while fascinating, are anticipated in her previous work. Equally striking are her methodological insights, which break new ground. In far more detail than in the past, Stoler explains the epistemological premises underlying her investigation, which have directed her to a novel object of analysis: what Stoler calls "archival form." By "archival form" I allude to several things: prose style, repetitive refrain, categories of confidentiality and classification, and not least, genres of documentation. The book's focus is on archiving-as-process rather than archives-as-things. Most importantly, it looks to archives as condensed sites of epistemological and political anxiety rather than as skewed and biased sources. These colonial archives were both transparencies on which power relations were inscribed and intricate technologies of rule in themselves (20). The intricate composition of archival files proves significant: the fact that a file included not only texts penned by officials, but also press clippings, letters, flyers, pamphlets, and interview transcripts that went beyond the pronouncements supposedly based on these data; the fact that writings could circulate...

The sins of the fathers: Freud, narcissistic boundary violations, and their effects on the politics of psychoanalysis

In contrast to the management of erotic boundaries, the institutional and clinical management of transactions across narcissistic boundaries can have far-reaching implications for how and in what ways power is wielded within our organizations. This is especially true in regard to analysts who are, or are perceived to be, in leadership positions within their psychoanalytic groups, organizations, and institutes. This paper illustrates some of the difficulties in the management of narcissistic boundaries by exploring Freud's narcissistic investment in defining the field of psychoanalysis and determining the directions of its development, his attitudes towards dissent – for example, Jung, Adler, Ferenczi, etc. – and his clinical behavior with certain analysands. The institutional consequences of Freud's failure to successfully negotiate narcissistic boundaries – and our reluctance to recognize this aspect of his leadership – have become intertwined with defenses against the epistemic anxiety that follows from the inevitably subjective nature of the analytic enterprise. Together, they have tended toward the creation of a culture of rigidity and control within organized psychoanalysis. This is a legacy – the sins of our fathers – with which our field continues to struggle.

Ann Laura Stoler, Along the archival grain; Epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense.

In this new feature we highlight a recently launched book. We invite specialists in the field to comment on the book, and we invite the author to respond to their comments. In this issue we focus on Ann Stoler’s Along the archival grain; Epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense. Those invited to comment on the book are Frances Gouda, Remco Raben and Henk Schulte Nordholt. Registered readers may participate in the debate.

Имперские Диспозиции Игнорирования

SUMMARY: This is a Russian translation of the seventh chapter, entitled “Imperial Dispositions of Disregard,” of Ann Laura Stoler’s latest book Along the Archival Grain. Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). This chapter is about the logos and pathos of empire, the durabilities of imperial dispositions steeped in matter and mind. In different guises, it wrestles with those habits of heart and comportment recruited to the service of colonial governance but not wholly subsumed by it. It seeks to broach the cast that imperial formations imposed over people’s intimate social ecologies – both the intensities and the diminished qualities of their affective lives. The author closely follows the history of a family whose lives moved in and out of colonial Indonesia in the late-nineteenth century to ask what sorts of personhoods imperial formations called forth and upon. In light of these issues, Stoler interprets letters of the Dutch colonial official Franc Carl Valck to his daughter, friends and supervisors, as well as letters of his family members to him.

Would More Acquaintance with the External World Relieve Epistemic Anxiety?

Would More Acquaintance with the External World Relieve Epistemic Anxiety?