Microhistories of Composition (McComiskey)

A nice sum up from ME on micro history that might be useful elsewhere:

Key elements of microhistorical historiography include 

a) a reduction in the scope or scale of inquiry, 
b) an attention to the complexity of historical contexts and events,
c) using the macro and micro to inform one another, 
d) a focus on context or contextualization, and 
e) methodological self-consciousness. 

Let’s take these one at a time.

"Introduction"

The established narratives of composition history served an important function during the 1980s and 1990s, transforming a little-respected course into a full-fledged academic discipline that rejected past formalisms in favor of complex social epistemologies. However, by the turn of the twenty-first century, the stale terminology of these older histories no longer represented the realities of the discipline, as specialization both fragmented rhetoric and composition into a variety of sub disciplines and also provided its specialists opportunities to develop complex knowledge not possible in the previous century. (9)

• Social history: assumes that relatively unified social forces determine individual actions (14-15)
• Cultural history: assumes that individuals act according to their own free will (15)
• Microhistory: assumes every act is conditioned by multiple forces at varying levels, some imposed socially (by institutions) and others emerging personally (from desires), all in a complex dialectic (15).

The intention of these early microhistorians was to negotiate a methodological middle ground, emphasizing the concrete details characteristic of cultural history but also placing those concrete details back into the larger contexts of social history. (15)

What Is Microhistory?

...it is best to understand microhistory as a negotiation of social history and cultural history. (17)

Microhistory is neither solely abstract, like social history, nor solely concrete, like cultural history. Instead, microhistory's dialectical negotiation of these two positions results in a methodology that is multiscopic, equally valuing and dialectically employing both abstract narrative and concrete description in the service of historical arguments. (17)

"The specific aim of this kind of historical research should be ... The reconstruction of the relationship (about which we know so little) between individual lives and the contexts in which they unfold." (Ginzburg qtd in McComiskey, p. 17).

The goal, in other words, is not multiscopic co-presence but the dialectical and analytical integration of multiple layers of scope in any historical interpretation. (17)

These levels are the best present in the experience of everyday life, with actors sometimes performing highly personal and individual acts and other times participating in highly overdetermined and institutional acts. To understand only personal acts through cultural history or only overdetermined acts through social history results in an incomplete understanding of historical action generally. Since microhistory moves dialectically on all levels of experience, its analyses are more complete. (18)

Microhistory seeks neither the "normal" (hegemonic strategies) alone nor the "exceptional" (marginalized tactics) alone; microhistory, instead, seeks the exceptional normal (or the normal exception). The exceptional normal is a particular case in history that is exceptional from the perspective of social history but may reveal a hidden normal from the perspective of cultural history. (19)

As Kathleen Blee points out, “Microhistorians accrue significant explanatory power by moving between attention to the particular and the wider context, between the small details of social life and the large context, between the micro level and the macro levels of society (Blee 2008, 41; qtd in McComiskey 19)

The point of microhistory is not to narrate the normal or describe the exceptional but to interpret their relationship, shedding light on the normal and lending more than anecdotal significance to the exceptional. (19)

Seeking the exceptional normal, which reveals the intersections between social systems and cultural activities, is a central starting point in micro historical methodology (20).

On Individuals in Microhistory

Szijarto explains that “social actors appear in different contexts, micro- and macro- at the same time” (Magnusson and Szijarto, 2013, 31; qtd. in McComiskey p. 18)

When the exceptional normal is a historical person, as it so often is, this person is understood by micro historians to have contextualized agency, or a certain ability to act according to the exigencies of personal desires, though this ability is not comprehensive and some exigencies may be conditioned. Levi explains that in microhistory, "all social action is seen to be the result of an individual's constant negotiation, manipulation, choices, and decisions in the face of a normative reality which, though pervasive, nevertheless offers many possibilities for personal interpretations and freedoms" (Levi 2001, 98-99). And Muir writes, microhistory seeks to understand "individuals making choices and developing strategies within the constraints of their own time and place" (Muir 1991, viii). (20)

Levi explains that micro history is "the study of events or persons in context, that is to say, within the complex interplay of free choice and constraint where individuals and groups perform in the interstices of the contradictory pluralities of the normative systems that govern them" (Levi 2012, 126). The social formations that grand narratives unify through abstraction are actually messy and contradictory in practice, leaving individuals to negotiate these contradictions based, at least in part, on personal motives. (20)

Since social structures are formed through collections of individual decisions, and since individual decisions are actually responses to contradictions in social contexts, then a deep understanding of individuals' actions and motives, especially those who resist social structures, reveals complex dynamics that neither abstract social history nor descriptive cultural history can reveal. (20)

On the "Exceptional-Normal"

Individuals:

The subjects of social history are powerful individuals (politicians, rulers) and hegemonic institutions (empires, monarchies) since these are the forces that push history along on its grand temporal path. The subjects of cultural history are marginalized people (peasants, criminals) and popular culture (family, entertainment, work) since these are the constituents of immediate experience. Microhistory seeks neither the “normal” (hegemonic strategies) alone nor the exceptional (marginalized tactics) alone; microhistory, instead, seeks the exceptional normal (or the normal exception). The exceptional normal is a particular case in history that is exceptional from the perspective of social history but may reveal a hidden normal from the perspective of cultural history… The point of microhistory is not to narrate the normal or describe the exceptional but to interpret their relationship, shedding light on the normal and lending more than anecdotal significance to the exceptional. (19)

Documents:

The case of the exceptional normal can be extended from historical individuals and their actions to historical documents as well. Muir writes, “If documents generated by the forces of authority systematically distort the social reality of the subaltern classes, then the exceptional document, especially the one that records the exact words of a lower-class witness or defendant, could be much more revealing than a multitude of stereotypical sources” (Muir 1991, xvi; see also Ginzburg and Poni 1991, 8). Seeking the exceptional normal, which reveals the intersections between social systems and cultural activities, is a central starting point in microhistorical methodology. (20)

On Method and Sources

For microhistorians, sources are not objective or biased, salient or manipulative; all sources are rhetorical, and source plurality is the goal. As Marjatta Rahikainen and Susanna Fellman explain, the micro historical practice of "combin[ing] different kinds of source materials" is "more fruitful than repeated re-interpretations of the same contemporary texts" (Rahikainen and Fellman 2012, 22) and results in what Richard D. Brown calls a more "contextual, three-dimensional, analytic narrative" (Brown 2003, 18). Incorporating a plurality of sources not only gives a better total picture of the object or event in question, but since each source is part of a particular context (legal, familial, etc.), this plurality of sources also reveals "systems of contexts of the observed particular case" (Szijarto in Magnusson and Szijarto 2013, 44).

Microhistorians do not apply generalizations to evidence; they apply the lessons of evidence, sought as clues to something hidden, in the construction of new generalizations. (22)

Multiscopic analysis, the evidential paradigm, and the method of clues all assume a dialectical movement among grand narratives and little stories, among social elites and cultural subalterns. (23)

Microhistory reclaims this second dimension of hegemonic processes by viewing everyday life and commonsense understandings through a microscopic lens and then placing these understandings back into the context of power and authority. (23)

"...our understanding of official institutions can be redefined through microhistorical studies of persons who were subject to their influence." (Muir p. xvi qtd in McComiskey p. 23)

Micro histories thus "show in particular how the behavior of marginal persons can be used to clarify the nature of authority" (xv). Historians can only understand the evolution of hegemonic power if they understand how hegemony has evolved in direct response to resistance and to what microhistorians call the exceptional normal. (23)

One final characteristic of microhistory is the self-conscious presentation in the narrative itself of methodological assumptions and difficulties in the evidence. (23)

In microhistory, in contrast, the researcher's point of view becomes an intrinsic part of the account. The research process is explicitly described and the limitations of documentary evidence, the formulation of hypotheses and the lines of thought followed are no longer hidden away from the eyes of the uninitiated" (Levi, 110; also see Levi 2012, 124-25). Methodological self-consciousness places microhistorians in dialogue with the historical sources they interpret, not in a position of power over them, and it places the audience of the historical text in dialogue with the past (24).

Situating Microhistory within Composition and Composition Historiography

Thus, among choices of historiographic methodologies, micro history is ideally suited for the complexities of a discipline like composition, which emerged and developed in local sites yet also shows signs of more general social and historical influences. (26)

Microhistory's proclivity for the margins, the exceptions, the uncommon (but always viewed within larger contexts) makes it an ideal methodology for exploring composition's other histories... (24)

Microhistory, more than any other historiographic approach, can account for the dialectical interaction of local and general historical forces in the formation and development of composition studies in all of its myriad varieties and contexts (25).

...they shift their purpose from recovering marginalized figures to reinterpreting central individuals, reframing their work by placing them into institutional and historical contexts available only through archival research and oral history. (25) --THIS CONNECTS TO MURRAY

In the process of narrative abstraction in search of disciplinary origins, the contexts (the textual environment and personal motives) of real historical actors are replaced with the contexts (progress, development, democratization, rationalization) of historical writing. (26)

Microhistorians seek historical sources known as outliers, sources that tend to get ignored by writers of grand narratives because they are messy, inconsistent, and difficult to reconcile with established stories. Since microhistorians seek outliers, their narratives are often centered less around the story of composition and more around the journey of discovery. (32)

Throughout the pages of this collection, the authors all engage in the dialectical processes of microhistory, integrating cultural history's interest in isolated acts, events, and people with social history's interest in broader contexts for social action. (34)

Others on Microhistory

Lerner


Mendenhall ("'At a Hinge of History' in 1963")

Microhistory serves as a useful analytical stance for this project because it changes the scale of analysis from entire decades or centuries to moments and individuals. (40)

More importantly, microhistory attempts to account for the complexity of historical contexts by maintaining "sensitivity to the language of and the categorization made by the actors themselves" (Alapuro 2012, 141).

To answer these questions, I examine what Sigurour Gylfi Magnusson and Istvan M. Szijarto refer to as the "textual environment," in other words, a text's pretext, sponsorship, and discursive connections to other contemporary texts (Magnusson and Szijarto 2013, 135). Attention to the textual environment (and what it suggests about actors' institutional relationships and perspective on their own work) is part of what micro historians refer to as contextualization. Identified by Magnusson and Szijarto as one of microhistories' key commitments, contextualization is especially valuable for scholars trained in rhetoric who already possess a rich set of tools for analyzing texts and attending to the rhetorical and situated ways individuals and groups use language. Adapting microhistory to a rhetorical approach, I reread the field's research turn in 1963 as a response to a national investment in education research rather than a concerted disciplinary movement. (41)

Because our understanding of historical context is always mediated through texts, we can never completely reconstruct context from the perspective of individuals who lived it. But the point of contextualization is not to construct a complete account of history; rather, this approach seeks to bring texture to grand narratives of the past by studying "events or persons in context, that is to say, within the complex interplay of free choice and constraint where individuals and groups perform in the interstices of the contradictory pluralities of the normative systems that govern them" (Levi 2012, 126). The work of contextualization proves particularly useful for rereading disciplinary history because disciplines function as normative systems impacted by a web of individuals, organizations, and governing bodies. Given their complexity, the application of a broad concept like discipline or disciplinary origin to the past always simplifies and obscures the motives of individuals and differences across fields of knowledge. "(42)

Using the macro and micro to inform each other, microhistory reframes categories by illuminating a small object of study--a year, individual, or text--and providing insight that changes our understanding of events, places, work, or disciplines. Changing the scope of analysis makes space for disruptions and contradictions that do not necessarily present tidy conclusions about the past. (55)

As Giovanni Levi argues, microhistory should not simply focus on objects or individuals, nor should it uphold grand narratives; rather, he argues, "what the historian can and should generalize are questions" (Levi 2012, 127). (55)

Logan ("Going Public with Ken Macrorie")

Micro historians [aim] to knock the rust off of corroded concepts and categories by reconsidering the historical particulars and by reinserting the individual into history. One of the ways microhistorians combat conceptual and categorical corrosion is by reducing the scale of their inquiry. Levi, in fact, argues that a reduction in the scale of inquiry constitutes the "unifying principle of all micro historical research," as micro historians are united in "the belief that microscopic observation will reveal factors previously unobserved" (Levi 2001, 1010). (256)

Microhistoral inquiries--the present one included--often begin with some uncertainty about an inconsistent source that does not neatly line up with some other sources, established histories, or disciplinary concepts. Micro historian Sigurour Gylfi Magnusson refers to these inconsistent sources as "outliers" (Magnusson and Szijarto 2013, 152)... "micro historians specifically search out the outliers" (152) (256-257)

For the microhistorian, outlying source material provides an opportunity to investigate particulars otherwise lost to corrosion--that is an opportunity to ask "new questions from an unexpected perspective" (Magnusson and Szijarto 2013, 153). Important to note is that the unexpected perspective from which the microhistorian views source material foregrounds the microhistorian's own position--as scholar and interpreter--with respect to source material. Although Magnusson suggests that the initial positioning of the microhistorian with respect to the outlying source material is deliberate--that microhistorians "specifically search out" this material (152)--my own experience suggests that microhistorical inquiry can begin when a scholar accidentally or inadvertently finds outlying source material that challenges disciplinary histories and concepts. (257)