Nothing Happened

It is well known that the July 14, 1789, entry in Louis XVI's diary is “Rien.” He did not mean the word as a philosophical statement. Louis just thought that nothing much had happened on that day. Of course we may disagree, and those disagreements are often the stuff of history and history writing. Crane is at her best when she is being a historian—that is, when she understands the phrase “nothing happened” as implying that “most of the past is Nothing until we notice it.” Unfortunately, she also succumbs on occasion to the temptation of extracting philosophical mileage from her concept of choice, thus waxing quasiphilosophical about “Nothing” and “historical consciousness.” On those occasions, she becomes mincemeat for the likes of Parmenides and Heidegger. As another unphilosophically minded monarch once remarked, “Nothing can come of nothing.”That historians “don't usually spend a lot of time talking about what didn't happen” is an interesting problem; at least, it has been since Ranke's day. Crane puts together a substantial, if at times meandering, catalog of objects of choice, phrases, practices, and ways of going about problems that suggest one's interest in what no longer is the case, or in what may never have been the case, can become a bona fide historical problem. She discusses photographs of ruins, then-and-now postcards, Andy Warhol's Empire, millenarianism, the Gregorian calendar reform, the concept “Dark Ages,” and much else. Most of her examples, however, only become examples when one can make sense of what they are examples. As Crane remarks about Roger Fenton's celebrated photographs of the Crimean War, “Unless some caption was provided, the viewer would have to be knowledgeable about history to understand who or what caused the ruination.” She wryly and correctly remarks that “those who cared, knew and sighed; everyone else could sigh over the aesthetics and melancholy of being reminded about humanity's self-destructiveness.”Crane is making a distinction of interests. Historians, as opposed to civilians, are not much given to merely sighing over things, or over nothings, because they know, or care about, what really was. The trouble is that they do not always seem to agree about what really was. Crane mentions a chapter in a book written in the 1960s by Elizabeth Stevenson, titled “The Year Nothing Happened—1925.” Some decades later, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht wrote a book about the year 1926 predicated on a very similar notion. Comparing the range of examples that each author discusses, one may conclude that they are talking about different things (Stevenson's book is about American history; Gumbrecht's is primarily not). Note, however, that claiming direct acquaintance with what examples refer to is of no help in deciding whether the books are or are not about the same thing. In an essay of 1950 quoted by Crane, Hannah Arendt comments on how, “amid the ruins, Germans mail each other picture postcards still showing the cathedral and market places, the public buildings and bridges that no longer exist.” This practice was surely a form of “sighing over.” To Arendt it was also a sentimental way for natives to evade consideration of the acts of the Nazi regime, and certainly a way for them to assert that nothing much had actually happened during that period, except for some damage to the furniture, mostly inflicted by foreigners. When civilians claim that nothing happened, historians pay attention; when historians claim that nothing happened, other historians raise eyebrows

Epistemology · Nothing · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · History · Philosophy · Philosophy, History, and Historiography · Photography and Visual Culture