Lewis Lapham Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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As editor you have written a column, and your new book, Pretense to Empire, which will be on sale outside, is a collection of those essays that you've written during this period. How do you write? I'm curious about that. I know that in the recent issue of Harper's you have a piece on private armies and their role in history, looking at our present use of the privatization of the military, and going back in history. How long did it take you to write that piece?
Well, I write slowly. I write, first of all, longhand, and then I dictate it to my secretary and she gives me back the typed copy and I correct that. I probably write six or seven drafts. I also keep a journal of what I read. Whether it's newspaper or whether I'm reading whatever book I happen to be reading, I keep a daily log. I'd been reading a number of books about the private armies, most wonderfully one by a woman named Frances Stonor Saunders called The Devil's Broker, which is about a mercenary captain with a private army in northern Italy, in the fourteenth century, named Sir John Hawkwood. Actually, the early private bandit armies of the late fourteenth century are the early models of our modern corporation. They were set up in very similar ways, with very similar objects in view. And so, I'd been reading her book and making occasional notes on what she had been saying. And then as the Halliburton story became more prominent in the news I made the connection. But it's like that. Something comes out of the news and I usually have some odd historical -- or not-so-odd historical reference in mind.
In that essay, and in the book, it's very clear that history is very important for you as you think about issues and place them in a broader context in the present. But also, sarcasm and irony are powerful tools in your hand.
The sarcasm and irony are helped by a sense of history, because you can get a juxtaposition that's in either a not-so-idealized past or possibly an idealized future. The irony and the sarcasm work because it's a dissonance, but you have to have at least two elements going for you before you can have the dissonance. I started out wanting to be an historian -- after Yale I went to Cambridge -- and have always learned from history. Cicero makes the point that not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child. And then there's Twain's wonderful line where he says, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes." I find it a way of learning something, and it gives you a context.
I'm now going to start a new journal. I left Harper's magazine in order to start something called Lapham's Quarterly -- God willing, the first issue will come out sometime next spring or early summer -- where I will take an idea that's in the news, perhaps states of war, or predicament of women, or dream of empire, or a failure of economy, and so on, and write a brief introductory essay and then run out a series of texts, maybe forty, fifty of them, on that theme, taken out of a historical record. So, I'd be editing people like Seneca or Thucydides, but I'd also do fictions, I'd allow myself to do Shakespeare and Balzac and Cervantes, as well as Gibbon. We will try to give the reader a sense of the historical context, that we'd been there before and we can learn from the past. We have nothing else, really, with which to build the future, except the lumber of the past.
I find that a lot of people today lack that context. If you don't have that context and if you're lost in the perpetual present of the television -- television is a form that there's really no past and no present, there's no cause and effect, it's the eternal now -- that is a very frightening place to live. It instills in people a sense of credulous anxiety. If you have a sense of your own history it gives you a place to stand.
I have a quote from you: "Print allows for narrative and continuity, for a beginning, a middle, and an end, for cause and effect, straight lines and novels of Jane Austen, etc. The electronic media dote on the emotions, on discontinuity, impressions, improvisation and pattern recognition."
I was borrowing those ideas from McLuhan. He says this in his book Understanding Media, which was published in 1964. When I read it in 1964 I didn't understand it because he has a tendency toward an oracular style, but then in 1994, three [decades] later, I [was] asked to write an introduction to a new edition of Understanding Media and learned a great deal from it.
He is distinguishing between the different forms of sensibility that come about in response to different forms of media. He begins with a premise that we shape our tools and then our tools shape us. The electronic revolution is, to his mind, equally as important as the revolution that took place after the invention of movable type by Gutenberg in the fourteenth century. So, we learn to look at the world through a different lens, and what he says about the electronic media seems to me to be so. It is a circular; it's about emotion. The content isn't as important as the surge of emotion, and it really doesn't matter what the emotion is about. One of our problems is how to make a coherent idea in the new forms of media.
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