Uploaded 16 April 1999

Two books published in 1997 testify to the epistemological upheaval taking place within the historical profession. In Deconstructing History , Alan Munslow argues that “Because today we doubt … empiricist notions of certainty, veracity and a socially and morally independent standpoint, there is no more history in the traditional realist sense, there are only possible narrative representations in, and of, the past, and none can claim to know the past as it actually was.” [1]  In In Defence of History, Richard Evans asserts that historians have to face the question “Is it possible to do history at all” in the post-modern age. Examining such key aspects of the historical enterprise as causation, facts, and objectivity, Evans answers the question in the affirmative. “I will look humbly at the past and say … it really happened, and we really can, if we are very scrupulous and careful and self-critical, find out how it happened and reach some tenable though always less than final conclusions about what it all meant.” [2]  Both Munslow and Evans address debates about the representation of history in an era when critical theory challenges the fundamental processes of representation – language, narrative, the image. Evans’ and Munslow’s books contribute to a rapidly expanding literature on postmodernity and historiography, some, with Evans, maintaining the continued worth of conventional historical practice, and others, with Munslow, asking historians radically to reconceive historical practice. [3]

This essay attempts to “do history”, to say something meaningful about the past, whilst simultaneously acknowledging the post-modern challenge to the processes of representation. The doing history part draws upon archival evidence amassed for a book on the history of New York City nickelodeons up to the year 1913, when the city government passed an ordinance regulating all aspects of moving picture theatre construction and operation. [4] The ordinance resulted from contestation among social elites who perceived the nickelodeon and its audiences as emblematic of the larger issues of urbanisation, immigration, and the emergence of the new public sphere of the so-called “cheap amusements,” all of which were seen as posing threats to American national identity. Here I will discuss two of those elites, fire insurance underwriters and members of the medical profession. The post-modern challenge part addresses the problem of narrative, which, to paraphrase Raymond Williams on culture, is one of the two or three most difficult words in the English language. But I would argue, with some support from respected practitioners of the trade, that you can’t write a history without writing a narrative. “Every work of history has the structure of plot with a beginning, middle, and end…. Thus, to argue for a return to narrative, as some traditionalists have done, is to miss the cardinal point that historians have never entirely departed from it.” [5] A beginning, middle and end are fairly minimal components of narrative; necessary but not sufficient for a definition. Hayden White, specifically referring to historical narratives, adds two other components:

Theorists of historiography generally agree that all historical narratives contain an irreducible and inexpungeable element of interpretation…. The historian must “interpret” his materials by filling in the gaps in his information on inferential or speculative grounds. A historical narrative is … necessarily a mixture of adequately and inadequately explained events, a congeries of established and inferred facts, at once a representation that is an interpretation and an interpretation that passes for an explanation of the whole process mirrored in the narrative. [6]

White’s explanation and interpretation are again necessary but not sufficient. The kinds of explanations and interpretations that historians make often involve causality; for my purposes in this essay a beginning, middle, end, explanation, interpretation and causality constitute the minimum sufficient components of a definition of narrative. Things get a bit dodgy at this juncture, since I should now probably define causality, a problem that greater minds than I have wrestled with since at least the time of the ancient Greeks. At the most basic level, causality is a temporal connection between events. It may take the form of x produces y produces z. Of course, strictly speaking, this would be a definition of monocausality rather than causality, which might well take the rather more complicated form of a, b, c and x produce d, e, f and y produce g, h, i and z. In fact, E.H. Carr, a leading formulator of conventional historiographic practices, believed, according to Richard Evans, “that it was the historian’s duty to look for a variety of causes of any given event, work out their relationship to one another if there was one, and arrange them in some kind of hierarchy of importance. Causes had to be ordered as well as enumerated.” [7] Of course, as Evans points out, the problem of overdetermination often renders difficult the application of Carr’s injunction. Events, as Evans says, “may have several sufficient as well as necessary causes, any one of which might have been enough to trigger the event on its own.” Yet Evans concludes that historians usually “see it as their duty to establish a hierarchy of causes and to explain if relevant the relationship of one cause to another.” [8]

One famous thinker, whom we in media and cultural studies tend to think of as an historian, but whom historians themselves prefer to classify as a philosopher, rejects Carr’s hierarchy of causes in favour of a very complex notion of overdetermination. Instead of speaking of causality, Michel Foucault prefers to use the neologism of “eventilization.” The following lengthy quotation provides his best definition of the term:

[I mean] first of all, a breach of self-evidence. It means making visible a singularity at a places where there is a temptation to invoke a historical constant, an immediate anthropological trait, or an obviousness which imposes itself universally on all. To show that things ‘weren’t as necessary as all that’; it wasn’t as a matter of course that made people came to be regarded as mentally ill; it wasn’t self-evident that the only thing to be done with a criminal was to lock him up; it wasn’t self-evident that the causes of illness were to be sought through the individual examination of bodies….. Secondly, eventilization means rediscovering the connections, encounters, supports, blockages, plays of forces, strategies and so on which at a given moment establish what subsequently counts as being self-evident, universal and necessary. In this sense one is indeed effecting a sort of multiplication or pluralization of causes …. This procedure of causal multiplication mean analysing an event according to the multiple processes which constitute it…. As a way of lightening the weight of causality, eventilization thus works by constructing around the singular event analysed as process a ‘polygon’ or rather a ‘polyhedron’ of intelligibility, the number of whose faces is not given in advance and can never properly be taken as finite. One has to proceed by progressive, necessarily incomplete, saturation. [9]

Reading Foucault forced my co-author, William Uricchio, and me to confront our own breach of self evidence. When we first outlined our book a rather long time ago, we envisioned a teleological narrative that began with the chaos of the dark, dangerous unsanitary nickelodeons and ended with a triumph of administrative rationality in the form of the New York City ordinance that mandated the construction of much more salubrious moving picture venues, self-evidently preferable to that which had preceded them. But a few pieces of evidence refused integration into this triumphal narrative. Some nickelodeon owners resented the imposition of new regulations, regarding them as a plot by powerful theatrical interests to drive them out of business. Some projectionists continued to smoke despite the fire hazard or to defy safety regulations despite the real danger of injury. Two late twentieth-century film historians might consider regulatory rationality a good thing, but some of the period’s players did not share the perspective we derived from our evidence, which in turn derived from the elite sources upon which we are primarily dependent: the records left by those whom we term the professionals, fire insurance underwriters, heating and ventilating engineers and medical practitioners, together with those of their allies in city government, progressive reform organisations and the film industry. Privileging these players’ agency, we would have constructed a teleological narrative that complied with Carr’s injunction to hierachize causes. But the breach of self-evidence causes us to heed Foucault’s injunction to construct a “‘polyhedron’ of intelligibility, the number of whose faces is not given in advance and can never properly be taken as finite.”

Here we get to the crux of the vexing historiographic dilemma: the relationship between evidence and narrative structure. I shall not restrict myself to what some might term the “hard” evidence of events, or facts, or even numbers, but also take into account period perceptions, what we might term the period’s discursive formations or even master narratives. Can this discursive evidence be used to multiply perspectives on the transformation of exhibition venues in New York City? Is it possible to construct a narrative using the period’s own master narratives? And by so doing can we overcome the limited perspective derived from the elite archival record to move beyond a linear, teleological narrative to a polyhedron? We consider two of the period’s dominant discursive formations or master narratives, the discourse of risk and the discourse of contagion (in modern parlance, the spread of disease). These discourses can best be understood in terms of another Foucauldian concept, that of governmentality, the process by which the state, together with other institutions, evolves rational discourses and practices for the management of populations. To quote Foucault again, governmentality results in “on the one hand, … the formation of a whole series of specific governmental apparatuses, and on the other, in the development of a whole complex of savoirs.”[[10] Hence advanced industrialised societies form insurance industries for the management of risk and public health institutions for the management of contagion. In keeping with the Foucauldian project, governmentality implies its own resistance, though, as always evidence of resistance remains much rarer than evidence of domination. However, multiplying causes as eventilization requires might permit us to infer resistance. The discourses of risk and contagion both featured in elite efforts to regulate the nickelodeons. From a late twentieth century perceptive, both these discourses appear quite rational, ensuring the financial security and physical health of the populace. This makes it difficult to appreciate why anyone would resist such discourses or the practices that they entailed. Yet lurking behind these two supposed rational discourses was yet another of the period’s dominant discourses or master narratives, that of nativism. In the rapidly urbanising and multi-culturalizing United States at the beginning of the century, many social elites believed that the underclasses, workers and immigrants, represented a severe threat to national values and stability. With the advent of the nickelodeon in 1905, the new film medium, which elites perceived to be controlled and patronised by workers and immigrants, became linked to fears about American national identity. From a late twentieth century perspective, this discourse, predicated as it was upon racial, ethnic and national prejudice, appears quite irrational. Linking risk and contagion to nativism reveals the irrational elements in all three discourses, enabling us to understand why resistance may in fact have been the most rational response on the part of the dominated.

In order to explore the historiographic problem at issue, I shall first tell the story of nickelodeon regulation using evidence from the fire insurance industry and the medical profession, which fits neatly into a teleological narrative of increasing rationalization. The professionals believed that their discourses and practices were instrumental in safeguarding the population from the threats to social well-being and continued productivity posed by fire and contagious disease. The fire underwriters argued that their industry contributed to the safety and financial prosperity of the nation, allying their practices to the logic of capitalism. The author of a 1911 book about property insurance declared, “Fire insurance is closely and inseparably interwoven with every scheme of profit and trade, a strong, continuous warp-thread which lends security to the fabric, and without which it is doubtful if the temerity of the capitalists would meet the necessities of the poorer population for employment.” [11]

The main professional body of the fire insurance industry propagated practices and discourses central to the management of risk that had a profound impact upon the process of urbanisation. In 1911 the National Board of Fire Underwriters said:

The general office of the Board …. is the distributing center of thousands of the rules and requirements for the installation and construction of almost every device of a hazardous and protective nature employed in the construction of equipment and buildings … and it is by virtue of its authorship of a model building code, considered the authority on which should be enacted by municipalities if the building regulations and requirements are to be improved along modern lines, having as their aim the lessening of the conflagration hazard. [12]

The underwriters did not know it, but their words constitute a very clear example of governmentality. How did this governmentality extend to the new moving picture venues of New York City? The 1906 San Francisco fire had shown the devastation that an urban conflagration could wreak upon lives and, perhaps more importantly, property. The 1908 Boyertown, Pennsylvania, opera house fire served as the primary exemplar of the dangers of moving pictures even though the film equipment had not, in fact, caused the fire. These events formed key components of the perceptual framework through which elites – particularly, of course, those in the fire insurance business – perceived nickelodeons. Crowded urban conditions, such as those which existed in New York City’s Lower East Side, site of many nickelodeons, in conjunction with the dangerously volatile motion pictures, could spell disaster for the nation’s largest metropolis. A national board of fireunderwriters expert reported in 1911: “‘After such a conflagration, said the president of one of the great fire-insurance companies last year, ‘there would not be a fire-insurance company left in the world.’ A general conflagration in New York would not only bankrupt the fire-insurance companies: it would precipitate a financial panic both in New York and throughout the entire United States.” [13]  The fire underwriters set themselves to drafting model ordinances to control the key problems that the nickelodeons posed: the presence of the volatile celluloid; inexperienced projectionists ignorant of safety rules; an audience composed of panicky women and children and unscrupulous nickelodeon owners unwilling to observe safety rules.

Conflagration and contagion were the twin spectres haunting the great metropolises of the early twentieth century. State officials had been aware since the early nineteenth century that contagious diseases posed great dangers to urban well-being, stability and productivity. The Paris cholera outbreak of 1832 and subsequent epidemics in other major urban centres had revealed the great industrialising nations’ vulnerability to contagion. [14] Nickelodeons figured just as prominently in the discourse of contagion as they did in the discourse of conflagration. Their air laden with germs, their floors dirty and covered in sputum, and their seats crowded with unhealthy people who had minimal knowledge of disease prevention, nickelodeons were seen as constituting a hazard to urban populations’ well-being. Wrote Dr. Howard King in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1909:

An evermoving stream of humanity, constantly passing in and out, stirs up dust and dirt that verily reeks with tubercle bacilli…. The audience is confined within these ill-ventilated and poorly sanitated amusement resorts … breathing in air which has become befouled and disease-laden through lack of sufficient air-capacity. [15]

As did their fire underwriter brethren, public health officials and medical practitioners saw regulation as the solution and collaborated with other professionals, such as heating and ventilating engineers, to draw up sanitation guidelines.

The professionals saw themselves as the heroes of rationalisation, fighting the forces that threatened to undermine their late-industrial societies through regulatory discourses and practices. But more closely examining the discourses of risk and contagion may reveal their irrational components. Francois Ewald tells us that insurance industries invented the neologism of risk to mean the statistical probability of certain kinds of events happening to certain segments of the population:
The term designates neither an event nor a general kind of event occurring in reality … but a specific mode of treatment of certain events capable of happening to a group of individuals – or, more exactly to values or capitals possessed or represented by a collectivity of individuals: that is to say, a population…. As a technology of risk, insurance is first and foremost a schema of rationality, a way of breaking down, rearranging, ordering certain elements of reality…. It is the practice of a certain type of rationality: one formalised by the calculus of probabilities. [16]

But a normative bias underlies the supposedly value-free description and prediction of the discourse of risk. Insurance schemes only work if populations accede to their regulatory practices, an accession which includes the adoption of what we might refer to as bourgeoisie patterns of behaviour. As Daniel Defert says about social insurance schemes related to life span or the risk of accident, “Only the client’s subscription ensures the provident cover: it therefore implies regular work, ordered time, disciplined consumption, individual responsibility.” [17]  The discourse of risk produced its own subjects, the insurance industry collaborating with the state in manufacturing citizens suited to the requirements of industrialising nations. But New York City’s fire underwriters worried that some segments of the city’s population failed to meet the required standards of responsible citizenship. Extracts from the National Board of Fire Underwriters’ 1905 report on New York City forcibly make this point. Speaking of the Lower East Side Tenement and Manufacturing District they said that it had for tenants “all the poorest and cheapest classes, as well as practically all the foreign quarters, as Chinese, Italian, Jewish, etc.” The values were lowered “by virtue of the cheap class of buildings and occupancy. The probability feature, on the scores of moral hazard and the lack of sufficient fire-alarms, is also high….” They concluded that:

The most serious menace to the city as a whole is the lower east side. This area, a square mile in extent, subject to practically any fire getting beyond department control, with its crowded tenements full of foreign, low-grade and ignorant communities, … forms to the high-value sections west a menace, the seriousness of which has not been appreciated. [18]

The normative aspects of the discourse of risk become inescapable here, “probability feature” and “moral hazard” given equal prominence in the fire underwriters’ official report. The interpenetration of the discourses of risk and of nativism is clearly apparent in phrases such as “the poorest and cheapest classes” or “foreign, low-grade and ignorant communities.” These poorest classes, these foreign communities, were exactly what the clergyman Josiah Strong, leading proponent of nativism and author of the best seller Our Country feared: “Immigration tends strongly to the cities, and gives them their political complexion. And there is no more serious menace to our civilisation that our rabble-ruled citizens [in the cities].” [19] But what might these “rabble-ruled citizens,” these potential subjects of the discourse of risk, have thought?

Of course, the paucity of evidence requires sheer speculation. But might not an immigrant proprietor of a nickelodeon have felt perfectly justified in resisting discourses and practices that so clearly aimed to transform his culture and his way of being? Might he have been understandably reluctant to purchase fire insurance or to comply with the underwriters’s safety standards?
The connection between the discourses of risk and of contagion can be seen in a 1908 book on the philosophy of fire insurance. Said the author:

There is a strong analogy between the spread of contagion and the spread of conflagration. The individual who is likely to spread smallpox, scarlet fever or diphtheria through a community, is no greater menace to the public welfare than the individual who by carelessness or intent originates the fire that destroys a Chicago, Boston, Baltimore or San Francisco… [20]

In other words, dangerous individuals, whether potential incendiaries or carriers of disease, must be controlled by the discourses and practices of governmentality. Connected as it was with the discourse of risk, the discourse of contagion also had its irrational and moralistic components. Paul Delaporte’s study of the Paris cholera epidemic of 1832 examines the origin of social control mechanisms intended to combat the spread of contagious diseases. Delaporte reveals the connection between fear of contagion and fear of the underclasses, whom the ruling classes perceived not only as carriers of disease but as lazy, dissolute and irresponsible. Their proneness to disease was seen as a “consequence of underdevelopment that was at once material, biological, and intellectual.” [21]

The connection between contagion and the underclassses first established in 1832 remained remarkably constant over the intervening decades. In the early twentieth- century United States the presence of large numbers of immigrants in the nation’s urban centres exacerbated the ruling classes’ fears of a supposedly disease-ridden underclass. In 1907 New York City’s public health officials discovered that the threat of contagion was literally embodied in the person of an Irish immigrant cook called Mary Mallon, better known to history as Typhoid Mary. Mary Mallon carried typhoid bacteria, never herself succumbing to the disease but passing it on to her employers. Priscilla Wald, in her excellent article “Cultures and Carriers: ‘Typhoid Mary’ and the Science of Social Control,” strongly relates the discourse of contagion to the discourse of nativism:

The discovery of human vectors of disease fleshed out the contours of contact phobias, explaining the easy enlistment of typhoid in the discourse of “race suicide.” Typhoid epidemics typically struck the affluent as often as the destitute. Thus they served as a convenient analogue for the extinction of the white race that was to attend the competition offered by the cheap labour of migrants and immigrants. Physically and economically, in other words, white middle-class America was under siege. [22]

She continues later in the article: “The threat of national disaster, articulated in the language of nativism, constitutes a consistent refrain in the typhoid literature of the period.” [23]
I speculated above that nickelodeon proprietors might have had good reason to resist the discourse of risk. Typhoid Mary constitutes a rare recorded instance of the under-classes’ resistance to a discourse of governmentality that sought to strip her of her livelihood and her freedom. She refused to cooperate with public health officials who forcibly removed her to a hospital in order to conduct tests. Released as a result of a change in the administration of New York City’s Department of Public Health, she assumed an alias and disappeared for several years, resurfacing in 1915. The nickelodeons produced no equivalent to Typhoid Mary, no individual whose resistance to governmentality left traces in the historical records. But, like Mary Mallon, might the nickelodeon proprietors and employees subject to the discourse of contagion have suspected that something more than the public health was at stake? Might they have thought that they themselves, rather than the diseases they supposedly produced or harboured, were the problem for the professionals who sought to impose regulatory practices upon them?

The 1913 ordinance mandating regulatory practices for the construction and operation of New York City’s moving picture venues profoundly transformed the experience of cinema going, conforming it to the expectations of those middle-class patrons whom the industry desperately desired to attract, but created difficulties for the poorer nickelodeon proprietors who were financially unable to comply with the new regulations. The agency and perspectives of the professionals, fire insurance underwriters and medical practitioners played a crucial role in this transformation. As I have suggested, the employment of conventional historiographic practices might use the archival evidence left by the professionals to construct a straightforward teleological narrative of regulatory rationalisation. Given the paucity of evidence, such a narrative might slight the perspective, motivations and agency of the dominated, viewing resistance to regulatory discourses and practices as irrational. By contrast, the multi-perspectival polyhedron of eventilization predicated upon connections among the period’s master narratives of risk, contagion and nativism, permits speculation about the rational resistance of the underclasses. Conventional historiographic practices insist upon the best possible interpretation of a series of historical events, while the polyhedron of eventalization permits multiple access points and multiple interpretations, one no more valid than another.

Footnotes:

[1] Alan Munslow, Deconstructing History (London: Routledge, 1997), 16.

[2] Richard Evans, In Defence of History (London: Granta Books, 1997), 3, 253.

[3] Some recent and important books on historiography include F.R. Ankersmit,  History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American historical profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1994); and David Harlan, The Degradation of American History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
[4] See the following articles all co-authored by Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio: “‘The formative and impressionable stage’: discursive constructions of the nickelodeon’s child audience,” in Richard Maltby and Melvyn Stokes, eds., American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era (London: British Film Institute, forthcoming), “Corruption, criminality and the nickelodeon,” in John Fullerton, ed., Celebrating 1895 (London: John Libby, 1998), 82-93; and “Constructing the mass audience: competing discourses of morality and rationalization in the nickelodeon period,” Iris 17 (Autumn, 1994): 43-54.
[5] Appleby, et al., 231.
[6] Hayden White,  Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 51
[7] Evans, 129
[8] Evans, 158.
[9] Michel Foucault, “Questions of method,” in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 76, 77.
[10] Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in Burchell et al., 103.
[11] Solomon Huebner,  Property Insurance (NY: D. Appleton and Company, 1911), 9.
[12] Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the National Board of Fire Underwriters, 11 May 1911, p. 45.
[13] Arthur E. McFarlane, “The conflagration hazard in New York,” McClures, December 1911 [153-175] p. 155.
[14] On the Paris cholera epidemic see Francois Delaporte,  Disease and Civilization: The Cholera in Paris, 1832 (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1986).
[15] Howard D. King, “The moving picture show: a new factor in health conditions,”  Journal of the American Medical Association , v. 53 (1909), p. 519.
[16] Francois Ewald, “Insurance and risk,” in Burchell et al., 199
[17] Daniel Defert, “‘Popular life’ and insurance technology,” in Burchell et al, 231.
[18] National Board of Firewriters Annual Report, 1905, 89.
[19] Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Present Crisis (New York: Baker and Taylor, 1885), 43.
[20] A. F. Dean, The Philosophy of Fire Insurance Vol III (Chicago: Edward B. Hatch, 1925), 176. (piece first written in 1908).
[21] Delaporte, 198
[22] Priscilla Ward, “Cultures and carriers: ‘Typhoid Mary’ and the science of social control,” Social Text 15, nos.3 and 4 (Fall/Winter, 1997): 191.
[23] Ewald, 193.