chad black 💚

Chart of the uses of monstruo in 216 articles from the late Spanish empire in the Americas

There’s even a chart! Of the instances of monstruo categorized by what is described as monstrous in late 18th and early 19th century periodicals in the Spanish Americas. Turns out politics and political violence became the monster.

Image of the first page of an article titled “On private and public violence: Joseph Garcia de León’s ideology of rule (1780)

Happy for this article to be in the wild at last. In it, I look at the use of the language of horror in a speech delivered by the president of the audiencia of Quito in 1780.

Fuck right off.

And as such, it cannot be fought only by historians proclaiming "Historian here" with the authority to correctly put the chain of causation back in order.

In our desire to undermine metanarratives or whatever, we've missed the real insight of Hegel's Owl of Minerva-- which is that all meaning in the past is retroactive. The political struggle over history is not a struggle (only) over accuracy.

The historical question at hand was not about the proper chronology of confederate statues and their periods in which they were erected. It was the question of "why this issue now, why these statues now"? That's not merely a question of the present, but of the recruitment of pasts into the present.

To give a very simple example-- in the wake of the Unite the Right catastrophe in Charlottesville, there was a very understandable response by historians online and on the ground that sought to correct the record about the statues, as if correcting the chronology of their christening was enough.

The hand-wringing and demonstration over presentism is a disavowal of the truth of history-- which is that there is no history, only conflict over the recruitment of history.

*Generally speaking*, historians dismiss or even recoil in horror at the actual historical question that matters in our work because it is a presentist question. Why this history now? Or, rather, why the recruitment of this past now?

The type of around-the-margins meddling that has been acceptable to the profession (transnational history, for example) does nothing to undermine the legitimacy of the nation-state. And I think that's because the mode of thought itself is thoroughly imbued with the social formation.

This truth is largely disavowed by both the discipline and practicing historians, who for decades now have imagined that they were doing something different. I think we've been wrong about that.

The *discipline* of History is a product of the nation-state, and exists for its purposes. This isn't to say that all historians are doing the bidding of the nation-state, as much as to say that the disciplinary mode of historical thought and research has always been captured by the nation-state.

One of my main takeaways as a historian of both our current moment and the rise of AI is that more people in my business need to revisit and take seriously Walter Benjamin's theses, born of a similar moment in time.

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bsky.app/profile/chad...

You know, this is irritating. UNM required submission of PhD Dissertations to ProQuest, which acted as an important archiving service in the years before the web. The terms under which I submitted this dissertation did not include ProQuest using it for its own AI product.

Oh look, ProQuest is doing it to dissertations too...

I noticed this recently looking up a book through our uni library, which includes many many books now only available to students and profs through ProQuest’s Ebooks Central.

One of the ironies in this Sidney Sweeney kerfuffle is that she also gave us on of the better reproductive rights films of recent years with the horror flick Immaculate (2024).

And even if it was ALL digitized, it wouldn't close the gap between the historian's act of historicization and the machine's.

We've seen already how decades of treating universities like any other business has brought the discipline of History to the point of collapse. The last professors may be done off by AI or fascists or fascists using AI, but the lions share of that work was already done.

The craven and dumb people here will include politicians and credulous AI users, but they'll also include a generation of higher ed professional administrators seduced by the capitalist desire to be free of the dependence on labor power.

The danger of AI isn't that it will become super intelligent, it's that we redefine intelligence as what AI can do. And then craven, dumb people use that redefinition against our collective, social interest. Capital desires liberation from labor. The nation-state desires liberation from history.

(sorry for all the typos/parapraxes)

But people... this is not how History or historians work or how the past relates to the present, in a single chain of causation accessible through the conscious choices recorded in the documentary record.

We can posit a further homology with history at this same level of experience. To remix Freud, we could say that everyone—or almost everyone—is agreed that what is history really has a common quality in which its essence is expressed in its correct orderly summation.

To fix a psychological problem, one just need to focus on realizing conscious intention, be that through ego psychology or cognitive behavioral therapy-- that truth is located in conscious experience.

That is to say, the commonsense version of the subject of psychology is Cartesian, the result of a conscious identification of the individual with the everyday experience of their thinking interiority.

"namely the quality of being conscious—unique, indescribable, but needing no description. All that is conscious, they said, is psychical, and conversely all that is psychical is conscious: that is self-evident and to contradict it is nonsense."