Henry Adams and the History of Postmodernism

Canadian Review of American Studies Volume 24, Number 2, Spring 1994, pp. 23-60 23 Henry Adams and the History of Postmodernism Aubrey Neal Henry Adams (1838-1918) 1 complained in his famous autobiography, The Education of Hemy Adams, that "in the want of positive instincts, he had drifted into the mental indolence of history" (1918, 36). Adams's self-deprecating irony is hard to take in the right proportions. Underneath the wit, reticence, and good manners, Adams was enormously vain. When, with patrician arrogance, he turned his cynical wit against himself in The Education of Henry Adams, he portrayed his own life as a simulacrum of modern civilization. Fascinated by politics, but unwilling to seek office, he subsumed the course of American history under the subtext of his cultural autobiography. He admitted to his friend, Francis Walker, that, "he rather liked having his head in the clouds" because he was able "to see over the crowd" (Samuels 1958, 19). There is an elite tone in Adams's language, but it cannot be reduced to class advantage exacerbated by artistic sensitivity. Adams's style was also a moral criticism of his modern role, the political and economic status which he and the other members of his distinguished family could never escape. What Adams had, in addition to an impeccable Boston pedigree, was a strong perception of a serious problem in the research method and narrative style of the social sciences. The problem which concerned him is a methodological problem which Heidegger and Husserl criticized very strongly in the 1920s and 1930s. Murray (1970), Schutz (1973), Luckman (1978), Gillespie (1984), Kolb (1986), Poggeler (1987), Barash (1988), Rapaport (1989), and Rosenau (1992) have continued the critique more recently. The Headland, Pike, and Harris retrospective (1990) 2 on the interdisciplinary use of the 24 Canadian Review of American Stu.dies terms 'emic' and 'etic' points toward it. These studies indicate that the historical relations between a culture as a philosophical system and its politics are not only poorly examined, but very difficult to examine at all in the research method and narrative style of the modern tradition. The German founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl,3 also chose historiography as a signal example of a generic methodological problem in the humanities and social sciences. Buckley (1992) explains that he criticized history that was geared towards establishing "how it really was," calling rather for a history which helped to determine "the point of it all" (39). In his opinion, the positivist attitude which had colonized what the Germans called the spiritual or intellectual sciences (geisteswissenschaft) had not succeeded in limiting science in order to make room for questions about meaning, purpose, and value in life. It had debased those questioned and declared them out of bounds. 4 The result was an explanatory style in which the phenomenon of 'lived experience' were split off from the discourse of 'objective' verification and description. To Husserl, this was a crisis in the literal Greek etymology of the word which meant, 'a split.' In Husserl's analysis, the split between science and experience threatened the integrity of modern thought. John McCumber (1989) calls it "the inarticulate and irreducible solitude" (122) between art and politics. 5 Adams believed that this blind spot in conventional narrative style was the critical flaw of the modern age.6 A highly articulate, sensitive, and emotional man, Adams found his emotional lifestonewalled in public affairs. His skill and experience as a political historian were dammed off from his rich store of psychological and cultural experience. The one-sidedness in the mode and mood of modern descriptive narrative drove Adams to construct code words about his life and work which were "a paradigm of embodiment." "These can,UThomas J. Csordas (1990) suggests , "be elaborated for the study of culture and the self" (5).7 The embodied 'truth' left over from a closed system of discourse is performatiue, 8 dramatic, and gestural. The word (logos, Rede, in Heidegger-'discourse,' of course, to postmoderns) already has the effect of drawing being into itself9 like a work of art. As it has become the task of postmodernism to demonstrate, the circumlocutions of a closed discourse often leave embodiment as...