revisionist histories in progress

How many of you have heard of Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh?

She and her sister were artists in Glasgow in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They attended the Glasgow School of Art and then formed their own independent art studio. You can see some of Margaret's work in the Hunterian Art Gallery's Mackintosh Online Catalogue, courtesy the University of Glasgow.

But hold on... whose photograph is that there in the banner at the top of the site?

This is the other Mackintosh, Charles, whose surname Margaret shares because they got married in 1900. Charles Rennie Mackintosh did some cool things too. A bit of cursory digging around in the same online art catalogue brought up over 500 artistic/design artifacts under Charles's name. In comparison, there are 122 under Margaret's.

Maybe Charles was generally and honestly the more prolific creative, or maybe this collection is skewed his way for some other set of reasons. I do not know.

When we visited the Glasgow School of Art last week, our tour guide Lili explained along the way that though we celebrate Charles and his influence much more thoroughly today, it was his wife Margaret who garnered more fame during their working lives. How do we know? Mackintosh himself called Margaret a genius, but so often the work they did was collaborative--not easy to divide satisfactorily into his and hers. Both exhibited work at the 1900 Vienna Secession, both worked on plenty of architectural and design projects around Glasgow, together. Without doing a lot more research, I can't say who was really more regarded then vs now, exactly. But simply the idea that Charles has come to overshadow the female artists he worked with brought to mind a headline I noticed weeks ago: 'We Have Always Fought': Challenging the 'Women, Cattle, and Slaves' Narrative, an article by Kameron Hurley. In turn, Hurley's writing led me to others' on similar themes: Your Default Narrative Settings are Not Apolitical by Foz Meadows, and then from there to Tansy R. Roberts's unravelings of so-called Historically Authentic Sexism. Admittedly, these are not the most academic or theoretical or 'official' sources or platforms to turn to--they are concerned primarily with fantasy settings and the market for fiction, but before I knew all those details, the Hurley piece came to mind. So I went back to find it, read it through and followed a few of its links, and now I am applying some of the points from these pieces to some of the history and story we've encountered in and around Scotland so far.


Like Hurley, I too have "been nurtured in the U.S. school system on a steady diet of the Great Men theory of history." The notion of women's history as a separate field altogether--a separate set of classes, a separate set of textbooks, a separate level of influence--almost feels normal to me. It makes sense... But separateness isn't the only problem here. As Hurley explains, "pretending there’s only one way a woman lives or has ever lived--in relation to the men that surround her--is not a single act of erasure, but a political erasure. Populating a world with men, with male heroes, male people, and their 'women cattle and slaves' is a political act. You are making a conscious choice to erase half the world."

Erasure is a strong word. We couldn't really say that Margaret Macdonald has been erased, can we? And plenty of Scottish women haven't been fully erased by history--we can read about and visit a handful of memorials to women here in Dundee, if we like--and one even might argue that surely plenty of men's lives have been erased over time too. History can't make room for everyone, can it? Some people must be forgotten along the way, or nobody will feel very important. Some people just have to lose. Not everyone can have a plaque in the town square, right? Is any of this really a problem? Is it worth worrying about? I don't know.

Margaret Macdonald's wikipedia page is 1/3 the length of her husband's. Do we just happen to have more to say about him? Maybe.

I don't know.

Hurley writes, "Half the world is full of women, but it’s rare to hear a narrative that doesn’t speak of women as the people who have things done to them instead of the people who do things." In her conclusion, she acknowledges that "so what?" question, anticipating the "is this really worth worrying about?" objections, and widens the lens: "Stories tell us who we are. What we’re capable of. When we go out looking for stories we are, I think, in many ways going in search of ourselves, trying to find understanding of our lives, and the people around us. Stories and language tell us what’s important."

In German, the words story and history are the same word: Geschichte. I like to remember learning and being somewhat astonished by this idea. We consider the two from such varying perspectives most of the time, and sure, there are some differences between the things we call in English stories and the things we call histories... but not many. Neither is pre-determined and neither is ever unbiased.

While the analogy of cannibalistic llamas in Hurley's essay feels extreme to me, it is a successfully gripping introduction, at least. And the way Hurley uses the example, in some ways, brings me back to Andrew Feenberg (I wrote a little bit about his book last week) and Katie King (I wrote about her book last month) talking about black boxes. Hurley is seeing a single, lazy narrative concerning her example llamas and by analogy, concerning women. The shape of that story is so easy, so common, so normalized, that "our eyes glaze over, and we stop seeing [...] anything else." Once the differences get smoothed away, we can box up all the expected, traditional, standard things we "know" will be there--the elements and characterizations that seem to have worked so well for so long--into a shiny black square. We won't need to unpack any of it anymore--it works however it works and life goes on.

Nearer the end of Between Reason and Experience, Feenberg summarizes the black box concept again, specifically with respect to technology. He writes, "Standard ways of understanding and making devices are called 'black boxing' in constructivist studies of technology. Many of these standards reflect specific social demands shaping design" (178). Along with technological devices and gadgets, Feenberg mentions the market and bureaucratic systems as places where black boxing happens. I want to expand the idea even more; what if black boxes, as they make magical/invisible the design and standardization of devices, engines, markets, etc. also do the same to stories, as Hurley seems to see, and to groups of people and relationships in real life?

The women, cattle, slaves narrative is another instance of a black box. Women within that narrative become invisible bits and pieces--not because they aren't there, but because they fit a certain set of preconceptions which signal a certain level of insignificance, or at least lesser significance. Any kind of discriminatory prejudice could work the same way, not just the kinds based on gender. Sexism is complicated enough on its own, but it isn't on its own. It comes overlaid with plenty of other oversimplifying, reductive, unthinking prejudices. Our biased expectations of people based on any random characteristic, from hair color to gender to age--all of them take advantage of our tendency to put things in neat, tidy, little boxes.

Another word Feenberg uses for these sealed black boxes is "design codes." It has less of the great imagery of the black box metaphor, but it does gesture importantly to the non-tangible and more discursive manifestations of similar phenomena. Design codes. Official specs. Standard procedures. Traditional recipes. Ways Things Are Done. Sometimes such codes are incredibly useful, and they acknowledge important standards, guidelines, and functional patterns. But sometimes they need to change. Feenberg says so, too, admitting that "design codes are durable, but they can be revised" (178). Humans are good at revision. Change is a thing we've gotten pretty decent at. All the histories and stories, after all, yours and mine and the whole planet's, are still in progress. 

boxes, wheels, and needles

Last week I wrote about the ways places/artifacts/work in progress are hidden and covered and/or announced or displayed, to various degrees. Those ideas and some of the other readings I’ve been doing have led me to a really great and useful-seeming metaphor: the black box. I have classmate Ben (plus the ever-handy Wikipedia) to thank for enlightening me as to the surprisingly simple origins of this term. It comes from electronics, where a black box is literally an opaque box of wires that do magical, unseen (but not un-detectible) things. The general definition gets a bit fancier: “a device, system or object which can be viewed in terms of its input, output and transfer characteristics without any knowledge of its internal workings.”

Black boxes are everywhere. Almost anything can be interpreted in some black-box-ish way for someone. Part of what modern life is all about involves some things being mysterious to some people but not to others; specialization allows us to safely ignore a lot of stuff in favor of becoming an expert in a more manageable amount of stuff. The deceptive simplicity of the black box concept makes it easy to apply and fairly easy to talk about. How useful will it be for me and my as-of-yet wild, untamable research interests? I'm not sure.

A seemingly-tangential thought on black boxes and all the frames in which they show up comes from Andrew Feenberg's collection of essays Between Reason and Experience. He uses the example of steamboat boilers in the early 1800s. At first, there was no regulation, no legally enforceable standards for boilermakers. Society seemed fine with the risks of exploding steamboats for years... until, finally, when laws were eventually passed to enforce safety measures, the standards those laws enforced became part of what made the technology of the steamboat boiler what it from then on was. No other kind of boiler could be considered a "proper boiler" (22). No other way of making this thing was acceptable, so the standard solidified into a default technical code. The code itself was never questioned, rarely examined at all. The process whereby it was decided upon faded away and allowed the code to function as a closed book, efficient and nigh-invisible. According to Feenberg, standardization is a black-boxing process. Once a standard forms, it tends to become an unquestioned, unexamined packet of the Way Things Are.

From here, it gets a little bit easier to see whole networks of infrastructure, whole paradigms and vast ideologies as black boxes. They are at work in the way things happen in our lives, but we don't often notice them, much less look inside them. Almost nobody questions whatever gets put in the boxes, especially if some official, complicated, voted-on ruling put it there. it’s settled. That system becomes dominant and invisible.

That doesn't mean we absolutely can't see them though. Electricians un-black-box light switch wiring and fuses all the time. That's their job. Academics un-black-box (or attempt to) ideologies all the time, too. That's their job.

Interestingly, the black box has an opposite: the clear or glass or white box. These are systems or objects that open themselves up to every scrutiny, eager to show off their inner workings. The clamor for transparency is a hunger for more (and hopefully friendly) white boxes and fewer (monolithic and scary?) black boxes.

But I wonder if no matter how transparent or open we try to make the boxes we work with (and/or within), maybe we’ll always find more black boxes inside. I'm indebted to classmate John for the wonderfully allusive phrase "Black boxes all the way down" to describe this. He responded (via good old facebook) to my post over here with the thought that "transparency largely depends on perspective. For example, opening the (sometimes literal) black box of a printer, with the goal/perspective of fixing a paper jam, repairing a component, salvaging electronics, getting at scrap metal, etc., means different versions of transparency." I love the word matryoshka for describing these arrangements, even if I do occasionally misspell it. The matryoshka-ness of black boxes specifically is very possibly one of the most mind-bendingly fascinating things I've thought about for a long time.

Now I want to ask questions about when and why certain ideas or technologies get black-boxed and when they get un-black-boxed. What kinds of influences make us stop at which black box (or painted doll)? As John mentioned, there are varying layers and motives for cracking open a black box. Maybe it's your job, maybe its a toy, or maybe both. Everyone has a different level at which they might need or want to understand or be proficient with any given technology. But on a general paradigm-sized scale--say on the scale of general knowledge and expectations about the world--what should we consider black-boxed and when?

{ photo by this kind soul on Flickr. }

Does this spinning wheel count as a black box? Do you know how to use the thing? You see them in movies and maybe at a historical re-enactment or two. Does that mean the technology is accessible?

I'm not sure. I don't know if I could use a spinning wheel, though I've seen it done. How much do I need to know to be inside the black box? Even if you spend hours watching somebody sitting at this wheel with a basket of flax or wool, feeding fibers through and around and into the machine, does that mean you really get it? This is where the levels come in, I guess. You might sort of get it--at least moreso than anyone who had only ever seen flax and thread (or fabric--but that's another machine/box altogether) on totally separate sides of the process.

Last week on Wednesday I visited Dundee Contemporary Arts for their weekly knitting workshop. Two others were there and we sat for an hour and a bit chatting about Scotland, the referendum, the world cup (are you supposed to capitalize the world cup? are there rules about that?), cars, and housing developments. I don't knit, really. But I have learned (and forgotten) how to do it more than once. I wouldn't call knitting expertise a total black box for me. Even though crochet is more my thing, crafts of this kind are part of the world I regularly inhabit and interact in. I can see and recognize how knitting happens--not just that a ball of yarn can become, somehow, a sweater, but that needles of a certain size, the number and position of those needles, plus a very particular pattern of stitches all matter in that process. This knowledge goes some way to un-black-boxing all kinds of knitwear and other knitted/crafted material for me. I can read those parts of the manufactured world at a basic level.

Out of curiosity, I did some research on knitting, past, present, and future. In the beginning, we humans wanted to keep our feet warm, so we invented an intricate way of looping and knotting string into fabric shapes. But sock-making is not why I keep yarn and a crochet hook around today. Like hand-spun thread, hand-made socks are a rarity. You probably don't have a spinning wheel sitting in your living room and you probably buy your socks from a store. We don't need to make our own socks or anyone else's. We have giant industrial knitting machines for that.
Even after watching a very cheesy video about how this process works, computerized knitting seems much more of a black-box than hand-knitting does to me. All those machines probably contain their very own individual galaxy of black boxes, too, not to mention the protocols and standards set up for spool widths and sock sizes and all the electricity it takes to run such a factory.

Is this what industrialization means? An exponential increase in the black-boxiness of even the making of a sock? Assigning most of the work to machines and divvying up the rest among specialists and technicians?

If so, perhaps post-industrialization means unearthing the black boxes of the past and returning to pre-industrial methods out of non-industrial, non-commercial, non-essential motives. Today, in this arguably post-industrial century, most people don't knit because they need to. Knitting is a lovely, relaxing hobby. If you get a pair of socks out of it, cool. But that isn't the primary end. The end and the means overlap here: you enjoy knitting for its own retro/crafty/creative sake.

The morning after my visit to Dundee's knitting circle, we went to see the Falkirk wheel. This is a peculiar project, one of many funded by the Millennium commission over the past dozen or two years. There is a lot to be learned at the site. Seeing the wheel itself and getting a sense of its place between the Forth and Clyde and Union canals is much cooler than reading about these things on the Scottish Canals website, though there is plenty to be learned there, too. The connection between these canals and knitting came to me over the course of our long Thursday excursion up and back down the wheel and then along the canal itself.

The Falkirk wheel exists to be looked at, not really to accomplish anything. Much like the warmth of my feet does not depend directly on my crochet projects, the economy of Scotland doesn't directly depend on this magnificently engineered section of a long series of canals. There are industries and markets surrounding these two technologies, sure: tourism, novelties; Etsy and craft supply stores. These are markers of post-industrial society as well, perhaps. More and more specialization, more and more extended niches where money can be made and life can be spent.

Both the Falkirk wheel and the DCA knitting group have their deepest roots in the technologies and crafts of pre-industrial life. Canalboats and hand-knitting aren't technically extinct technologies (yet); so far their boxes can be easily unearthed, un-blacked, and we can access/support these avenues, processes, and skills if we want. But we'll probably do so for the sake of the things themselves. For leisure and not as a means to some other, more essential end.