Big Notes from a Little Street: Historical Research at Melbourne’s “Little Lon”

Melbourne’s “Little Lon” has been called the city’s most infamous slum. The community of Little Lon vanished long ago, but its notoriety as a slum persists. This paper challenges the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of such characterizations, and discusses the teamwork between archaeologists and historians whereby the latest phase of excavations at Little Lon in 2002–2004 revealed some of the hidden actualities of this long-misrepresented community.     

中研院史语所与北大史学系的学术关系

国立中央研究院历史语言研究所和国立北京大学史学系,是现代中国史学发展史上两个极重要的学术阵地。从20世纪30年代开始,两者建立起紧密的学术关系。以傅斯年为首的史语所研究人员不仅纷纷到北大史学系兼课,而且通过对北大史学系课程进行改造,使两者在学术精神上达到一致。其结果是,一批深受史语所学术精神影响的“尖子生”被培养出来,并被选入史语所工作。北大史学系某种程度上成了史语所的人才库。另一方面,史语所的学术精神,也通过北大史学系对现代中国史学发展发生着持久性的影响。     

论沃勒斯坦的现代化思想

沃勒斯坦的世界体系理论打破了西方现代社会发展理论的主流学派———经典现代化理论与非主流学派———依附论之间的二元对立,具有“融合性”的特征。这种“融合”主要表现在沃勒斯坦对资本主义的矛盾态度上:一方面,他吸收、借用非主流派的概念体系和理论模型,对资本主义进行激烈地批判,并努力构想一个社会主义的新体系来取而代之;另一方面,他又论证了资本主义的长期性、稳定性和不可避免性,从而与主流派达成了共识。但融合的尝试只成功了一半,由于其对现代化和资本主义的片面理解和不适当的否定,沃勒斯坦在重建现代性时陷进重重矛盾,最终步入历史悲观主义、怀疑论的误区。     

孙炎“八角螫虫”之说新证

孙炎的“八角螫虫”之说见于《尔雅.释虫》“蟔,蛅蟴”郭璞注,从郭璞注可以看出,孙炎将“蟔,蛅蟴”解释为“八角螫虫”,郭璞不同意孙炎的解释。邢?、郝懿行、段玉裁、朱骏声等四家在郭璞注的基础上对孙炎的解释或否定、或肯定,但都不能令人信服。文章根据现代方言证明孙炎的解释的可信性。     

晚清商办与官办的斗争

晚清时期,围绕着近代民用企业实行商办,还是实行官办,进行了3个回合的斗争。第一回合,轮船招商局屡被弹劾,京中言官要求对其统制,乃至收归官办,被李鸿章顶住。第二回合,围绕着湖北铁政局的经营形式,张之洞与盛宣怀展开争论,结果张之洞动用官款创建,企业实行官办;然而,企业官办后经济效益太差,几年后不得不招商承办。第三回合,“轮电之争”,袁世凯将官督商办企业收归官办或对之实行统制,盛宣怀经过多年努力,终于使各官督商办企业摆脱“官督”,完全商办。经过数十年商办与官办的斗争,以及商办的不断胜利,迎来了民国初年中国民族资本主义的“黄金时代”。     

关于南京临时政府的性质问题

南京临时政府中的“立宪派”、“旧官僚”都是他们未参加革命以前的身份。武昌起义以后,他们分别放弃了君主立宪主张,投入革命行列;宣布独立光复,脱离清朝政府,加入民国军政府。他们与革命党人和其他革命志士一起组成了革命统一阵线。南京临时政府就是这革命统一阵线的革命政府,并且是按照同盟会《军政府宣言》和《临时政府组织大纲》的规定建立起来的行政、立法二权分立的民主共和政体,并奠定了向行政、立法、司法三权分立政体过渡的法律基础。其职能也发生了根本的转化,从封建专制统治转化为现代国家公共事务管理的文明政府。     

德富苏峰的断裂人格刍议

从人格角度观察,近代日本知识分子可分为独立型、依附型和人格断裂型三种。德富苏峰是近代日本人格断裂型知识分子的典型代表。他的人格在明治、大正、昭和时期的转换很复杂,且不同时期各有特点。其人格的转换过程反映出近代日本国家的发展方向。他的“皇室中心主义、思想在当今日本社会仍有潜在的影响力,是日本新民族主义思潮的思想根源。     

POTENTIAL HISTORY: READING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FROM INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGES*

Until the beginning of the twentieth century, history, as a core concept of the political project of modernity, was highly concerned with the future. The many crimes, genocides, and wars perpetuated in the name of historical progress eventually caused unavoidable fractures in the way Western philosophies of history have understood change over time, leading to a depoliticization of the future and a greater emphasis on matters of the present. However, the main claim of the “Historical Futures” project is that the future has not completely disappeared from the focus of historical thinking, and some modalities of the future that have been brought to the attention of historical thought relate to a more-than-human reality. This article aims to confront the prospects of a technological singularity through the eyes of peoples who already live in a world of more-than-human agency. The aim of this confrontation is to create not just an alternative way to think about the future but a stance from which we can explore ways to inhabit and therefore repoliticize historical futures. This article contains a comparative study that has been designed to challenge our technologized imaginations of the future and, at the same time, to infuse the theoretical experiment with contingent historical experiences. Could we consider artificial intelligence as a new historical subject? What about as an agent in a “more-than-human” history? To what extent can we read this new condition through ancient Amerindian notions of time? Traditionally, the relationship between Western anthropocentrism and Amerindian anthropomorphism has been framed in terms of an opposition. We intend to prefigure a less hierarchical and more horizontal relation between systems of thought, one devoid of a fixed center or parameter of reference. Granting the same degree of intellectual dignity to the works of Google engineers and the views of Amazonian shamans, we nevertheless foster an intercultural dialogue (between these two “traditions of reasoning”) about a future in which history can become more-than-human. We introduce potential history as the framework not only to conceptualize Amerindian experiences of time but also to start building an intercultural dialogue that is designed to discuss AI as a historical subject.     

COLLINGWOOD'S WHALE,CHAKRABARTY'S CONUNDRUM,AND BRAUDEL'S BORROWED TIME

As R. G. Collingwood noted toward the end of his life, the physiologically limited “time-phase” of human observational capacity cannot but deliver a fundamentally anthropocentric and temporally myopic conception of the world as eventful, destructive, and devoid of larger, perhaps cyclical, regularities. Developing at around the same time, Fernand Braudel's project of a history of the longue durée of human interactions with the environment aimed to subvert the short time-phase of a history accessible to immediate human experience. Although Collingwood and Braudel aimed at a conceptual merger of natural history and human history, neither of them could have foreseen what Dipesh Chakrabarty has described as their collapse into each other, which was effected by humanity's transformation into a geophysical force that produced massive, likely irreversible, and certainly long-lasting climate change. Looking at two very different examples of a rapidly growing body of literature on an extractivist orientation as a key factor in anthropogenic ecological transformations on both local and planetary scales, this review essay suggests that an “intra-active” (in Karen Barad's sense) view of human-environmental relationality might help us conceptualize forms of temporality that are capable of superseding Collingwood's anthropocentric “time-phase.”     

ON FUTURES AND ENDINGS: NARRATOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS ON CONTEMPORARY FORMS OF CRISES*

The article examines the changing relationship of the present to the future from a narratological perspective. It argues that three dominant narrative schemas structure the contemporary experiences of temporality in the Western social imaginary: the modern crisis narrative, the apocalyptic narrative, and the chronic crisis narrative. In its first part, the article shows how the modern sense of crisis, which emerged in the late eighteenth century, sedimented into a powerful narrative template by knitting together the past, the present, and the future into a unified plot. The second part focuses on the resurgence of apocalyptic stories in the Western social imaginary and humanities discourse. The final part highlights the special contribution of aesthetics of precariousness to the Western imaginary of time and temporality. It argues that the “chronic crisis narrative” deflates the teleological narrative arc of the modern crisis paradigm while also shunning the end-time discourse of the apocalyptic narrative.