Today, just as doctoral applications were opening at Tsinghua University, I only learned of the bad news from a student’s reminder: Tsinghua University had suddenly changed its policy again and taken back the admissions rights of assistant professors and pre-tenure associate professors. In other words, at least for these next two years, I won’t be able to take students—unless I wait until I’ve slogged my way into a tenured position……
As for the policy change, I don’t want to comment too much. In fact, the overexpansion of doctoral admissions really is not a good thing, and there is reason to tighten it. But to announce the change only at this juncture is extremely cruel. Doctoral admissions are not exam-oriented education; they are not something decided by one test alone. Applicants are supposed to contact the supervisors they hope to work with well in advance, exchange ideas thoroughly, and try to establish a good fit. The application materials also include a doctoral research proposal, which likewise needs to be prepared in a targeted way according to the specific situation of the school and teacher being applied to. Although the final review lasts only a few weeks, the preparation time beforehand may be half a year or even more than a year.
What Tsinghua has done now is not to notify people after one admissions cycle has been completed, but only when admissions have already opened for the submission of materials—or, to put it plainly, not to notify people at all. At least, I did not receive any formal notice; it was only after students discovered the problem that I asked around and learned of the new policy. This situation can be said to be quite irresponsible.
But I am powerless to do anything about it. I can only express my deepest regrets to the students who applied to me, and hope that you will find another good mentor and that everything goes smoothly.
Of course, all the previous exchanges were out of genuine academic interest, and I believe my exchanges could also offer the students some help and inspiration; the students did not completely waste their time on me.
I also hereby promise that students who have exchanged with me about their intention to apply—especially the two who both came to meet me in person and had multiple rounds of email correspondence—may continue to contact me at any time in the future, and I promise to provide whatever help I can, treating them as my students or younger fellow disciples.
Looking back on the exchanges with the students, I am filled with mixed emotions. After consulting Yang Ling’s意见, I am showing the record of my exchange with him here.
He was not in contact especially early, but after he began contacting me at the end of May, within three months there had already been multiple rounds of correspondence, along with quite a bit of WeChat communication and one face-to-face meeting. Although his foundation could not be said to be especially strong, in the course of our exchanges one could clearly see the process by which he kept adjusting, reading more deeply, and improving step by step in response to my suggestions and opinions.
In fact, from the exchange it can be seen that he had been trained in empirical history and had a certain foundation in history, but that there was indeed a gap between that and my way of doing intellectual history/philosophy of technology. In fact, had admissions proceeded as usual, I might not necessarily have accepted him in the end, since he would still have had to compete with other applicants. But now even the chance to compete is gone, and that is what makes me very regretful. Some students who intended to apply exchanged less with me, so I do not feel as guilty about them, but with Yang Ling I feel most indignant on his behalf.
A sufficiently full process of exchange can reflect not only a student’s academic foundation and capacity for understanding, but even more the possibility of adjustment between student and teacher. We can see that I criticized him harshly many times; his response was neither to immediately accept everything submissively nor to remain unmoved, but rather, after thinking, reading, and arguing, to gradually adjust his own views, and even where he still adhered to his own position, he kept trying to find common ground with me. This is a very good attitude, and it proves that my guidance can have an effect on him.
In the exchange, I also clarified my general understanding of “intellectual history,” “intentional history,” and “media history” (in the later part), which has some academic significance, so I excerpt it below.
The following are the email correspondence records,
What follows is the content of my replies during the exchange, totaling nearly 15,000 Chinese characters. His emails also contained many words, as well as many attachments, so I will not excerpt them here.
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Thank you for your interest. I am very interested in the research direction of the history of telecommunications, and we can continue to exchange ideas. Your survey review is already pretty good, but I would be more eager to see more argumentation.
I have a very deep impression of the book 《Speaking to the Air: An Idea of Communication》; the part on the telegraph is very interesting. The author connects the telegraph with spiritualism and discusses the changes in ideas that accompanied the telegraph, including new understandings of matter and soul. I don’t know whether you have read it; I think this book displays a unique way of writing a “history of ideas” about technology, and one that we can learn from. Of course, sorting out the social dimensions of telecommunications technology itself is also very worthwhile, and I look forward to seeing further work from you.
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Your outline looks pretty good. Of course, as you said, the topic may be a little too broad. I am not very familiar with the research style in the discipline of history, but from the standpoint of history of science, we generally do not encourage students to write “narrative history” works; a thesis should be chiefly about making an argument, not telling a story. You can refer to my article on how to write a thesis: https://yilinhut.net/2015/07/11/5427.html A thesis needs an imagined opponent; it should engage in debate with academic peers, not introduce a stretch of history to the general reader. Your current outline has the danger of turning into a historical story rather than a thesis; from the outline alone, it is not yet possible to see what arguments you are making, or what counterarguments you have.
You should already have quite a bit of reading under your belt, but your feasibility analysis mentions too little of it. You say you can find databases on Google; which databases, exactly? Western scholars have already achieved considerable results; which results, exactly? You should know that in this age of information explosion, the problem one faces is often not too few resources, but too many resources. Therefore one needs discrimination and discernment: for example, if many scholars have relevant research, who among them is the most authoritative? What are the most cutting-edge controversies? Who is closest to your own views? Who can serve as the target of your critique? Once you sort and discriminate among the resources, further focusing becomes easier. But right now, the range of topics you are throwing out is very broad, and the usable resources are also many, which may precisely lead to poor focus and an unclear sense of primary and secondary issues.
Of course, I myself am completely an outsider when it comes to the history of telecommunications. The Patrice Flichy you mentioned, I seem to have read before, but I had not thought of consulting him when preparing the course; before preparing the course, what I mainly read was The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood and The Victorian Internet, along with some scattered materials I found on Wikipedia and Google.
As for the intellectual background of “visual reporting,” especially its connection with the spirit of the age before and after the French Revolution, that is something I am speaking off the cuff myself—or rather, I base it on my general understanding of the history of science. According to the phenomenological historian of science Jacob Klein, one key thread running through the entire Scientific Revolution is the advance of “symbolic abstraction”; people’s ideas about symbols gradually transformed step by step from the late Middle Ages onward, accompanying the rise of the new worldview of modern science.
“Visual reporting” is very worthy of attention because, at the technical level, it does not involve anything new. By around 1800, even the telescope was already nearly two hundred years old, and the mechanical arm was by no means some cutting-edge technology. So why was visual reporting only invented at that time?
From the perspective of technological evolution, technology is not created out of thin air by genius individuals; rather, it develops step by step in response to the environment. So looking at the example of visual reporting, what had changed between the environment of 1800 and the environment of 1650, such that visual reporting did not appear in 1650 but did emerge around 1800? That is worth investigating. On the one hand, there is the background of ideas; on the other hand, there is the background of social needs, both of which can be explored.
Of course, it is certainly possible to distinguish visual reporting from the telegraph, but it is not meaningful merely to distinguish them for the sake of conceptual analysis. It is not very important to get hung up on whether there was electricity in the literal sense of the word. The key is to see whether, historically, the application of electricity brought communications something entirely new—something that cannot be compared on the same level—so that the history of “telecommunications” needs to be discussed separately. In evolutionary theory there is the notion of an “ecological niche.” If visual reporting and the telegraph occupied the same niche, then they can be narrated as a continuous thing; but if the emergence of the telegraph caused a reorganization of the ecological structure, then they must be treated separately.
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Overall, your reading notes look pretty good, though some of the critical parts feel a bit off the mark, or rather, you did not understand what I meant by “avoiding the important and dwelling on the trivial.”
“Avoiding the important and dwelling on the trivial” is of course a pejorative term, but what I want to say is that any historical writing is bound to be accused of this: why do you only talk about the simple aspects? Why do you avoid the deeper and more complex things? But if I emphasize this thing, or emphasize that thing, there will always be things I do not manage to emphasize. Rather than trying by every means to be comprehensive and touch on everything, it is better simply to insist on “avoiding the important and dwelling on the trivial,” and arrange the level of detail according to one’s own rhythm.
I think a good work should let the reader extend and supplement it for themselves, rather than try to take care of everything on its own.
Your criticisms can basically all be summed up by “avoiding the important and dwelling on the trivial,” that is, you are saying: ah, where have I oversimplified, or where could I have said more? For instance, you say I simplified Whig history too much, should have considered Butterfield’s complexity, should have mentioned curiosity, was a bit arbitrary, overlooked Lloyd’s other contributions, treated Aristotle too briefly, should have added social aspects……
Almost every one of your criticisms follows this line of thought—I did not write about the things you think are important; I avoided certain things you consider “heavy.” But this is something all historical narratives inevitably have to do. Every book has questions it passes over and sidesteps, and clearly those questions are also meaningful. So you can write another history; he can write another history too. I would rather see many history books, each partial in its own way and each with its own emphasis, than one history book that tries to cover everything. If all your objections amount to nothing more than the four words “avoiding the important and dwelling on the trivial,” then in fact you do not really have much of an objection.
You may continue reading my books, but there is no need to praise or criticize them deliberately. The main thing is still to focus on your own understanding and confusion. My books are certainly abbreviated, and many issues are not explained clearly. What have I failed to explain clearly but you yourself have understood? And what have I not explained clearly, and you yourself also have not understood? You can exchange your insights or confusions with me, and I can elaborate further.
The main focus should still be on other related works, including Mumford, McLuhan, Eisenstein, Postman, and also the classic works in the history of science translated by Zhang Butian. Read them slowly according to your own interests and affinities.
As for communicating with Zhang Butian, you can write directly and ask him. My suggestion is that you can look for literature by scholars Zhang Butian particularly likes that he has not yet translated, and use that to practice, such as Peter Harrison, Cohen, and so on.
As for English, the score is not important; practical application is what matters. Doctoral admissions are application-based, but there will ultimately be a written exam and interview, and there will be an English component.
Regarding thesis versus narrative, I am of course not saying that narrative texts cannot be excellent academic texts; what I mean is that in the stage of a “degree thesis,” the question is whether it can be accepted. As I feel it in the field of history of science, after you graduate you can of course let yourself loose and write however you like, but a degree thesis generally still requires you to write a “thesis,” not tell a story.
To be frank, my impression of you is pretty good at the moment, but I have not reached the point of being astonished and feeling I must admit you. I generally do not state admissions intentions very far in advance either; I just say that I certainly welcome further exchanges. If I think someone is unreliable, I will be fairly candid and say that their chances are not great and their prospects are dim.
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《History of Scientific Culture》 was written during my doctoral stage, and some chapters were even articles from my undergraduate years. Overall, it is rather immature. 《Obsolete Wisdom》 can be seen as an upgraded version, so I generally do not recommend my 《History of Scientific Culture》. If you are interested, you can directly find many related articles on my blog, and you are welcome to comment directly online on the blog; there is no need to keep writing reading notes. My doctoral dissertation has just been published recently, in the Tsinghua History of Science, Technology, and Philosophy series published by the Commercial Press, and you can also refer to it, but there is no need to write reading notes for it.
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To discuss the relationship between electricity and technology or science, one still has to start from the eighteenth century. You mention that “the rise of printing led Bacon to propose induction,” but do you mean that, or do you mean that Bacon’s induction happened to coincide with the flourishing of printing, which then allowed this method to spread widely and have a far-reaching influence? This point is also precisely one of the parts my 《History of Scientific Culture》 discusses more than 《Obsolete Wisdom》 does. You also mentioned the metaphor of a “catalyst.” I said: “I do not mean to establish a causal relationship between printing and modern science, or to prove that printing was either a sufficient or necessary condition for the birth of modern science. Just as it is also hard to say that the force of the wind is the cause of a fire.” So, with respect to natural history, printing was neither a sufficient condition nor a necessary condition, but rather a catalytic and facilitating “driving factor.”
Second, Bacon’s work of course includes the work of natural history. My book mentions that his 《Sylva Sylvarum》 is called 《A Natural History in Ten Centuries》, and that it was also one of his most widely printed works.
I have always hoped that you would not keep digging around in my books, but would instead look at my blog and write comments directly on the blog itself. You don’t seem very willing to do that; that’s fine, but when you run into some related question, in fact you can search my blog to see whether there is already an existing discussion. As for Teacher Liu Huajie, I have written at least two pieces discussing him, such as https://yilinhut.net/2011/08/26/3370.html. My view of Teacher Liu’s ideas is a critical one. He thinks that natural history is some kind of universal learning, that “natural history existed in ancient and modern times, in China and abroad, and natural historians can be found everywhere,” but I think this is not right. From the Western point of view, “natural history” is a discipline that took shape only in the print age; the very establishment of this discipline marks a drastic change, brought about by print culture, in the understanding of “nature” and “history.” That is why I have always advocated translating “natural history” as “自然史” https://yilinhut.net/2010/11/07/2575.html https://yilinhut.net/2015/09/23/5491.html. In those years I was locked in intense debate with Teacher Wu Guosheng, and in the end Teacher Wu actually accepted many of my views. Jiang Che, a junior fellow in Wu’s circle, went even further and carried out in-depth research, discussing “the reconstruction of nature by early modern European naturkunde” https://item.jd.com/12608370.html. These reflections are not on the same level as Teacher Liu Huajie’s straightforward advocacy of natural history. Of course, Teacher Liu Huajie and his students have also done deeper research, and Jiang Che has participated in exchanges with Teacher Liu and others; Teacher Liu’s views are also changing.
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These last two days I’ve been rushing to finish a piece of work, so I haven’t looked into it in depth; I only gave your plan and notes a rough skim. As for the research plan, I don’t quite understand why you want to study photography and telecommunications together. Do you mean that there is some key internal connection between them? If so, then that idea should be the title of your dissertation, but you haven’t stated your logic, which leaves me completely unable to grasp your point of departure. It cannot be that one master’s thesis does a history of one technology, and then two histories of technology are simply pasted together to make a doctoral dissertation—that would be ridiculous. My feeling is that either you should keep working devotedly on the history of telecommunications, or else you must make the internal logic explicit.
As for technological evolution, in a book I’m preparing for publication, there is a chapter discussing related issues; see the attachment. In “3. Gradual Change and Sudden Change,” I briefly discuss the relationship between revolution and gradualism. Sections 5 and 6 contain ideas that I personally value relatively highly; you can take a look and then we can discuss further.
Personally, I hope to combine theories of technological evolution with media ecology; the core of evolution theory is “environment,” so combining them should be a matter of course.
As for meeting, I may have something to do at the end of the month, but it should also be possible to work around it. You first set the time with Teacher Bu Tian, and I’ll arrange accordingly. At present, around the 22nd should probably be fine. Also, June 26 and 27 are the history of science department’s summer camp, and I will definitely be there; accordingly, I should also be there on the 25th and 28th.
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As for the meeting time, I’ve already confirmed that I’ll be leaving Beijing for a few days on the evening of the 27th, so before that I’m available. As for the 25th, you can come in the afternoon.
Regarding technological evolution, you said that “the discussion should focus on arguing how technology can be analogous to biological evolution.” I don’t quite understand what exactly you are asking for. I think that in order to establish an analogy, one first has to make clear what the thing being analogized is. What exactly does so-called “the theory of biological evolution” include? Then each of those contents can be mapped over one by one, and once that is done, the analogy as a whole of course becomes coherent. So when I elaborate on the five core propositions of biological evolution, how is that not “arguing how technology can be analogous to biological evolution”?
Besides, you said that what is needed is a “somewhat more detailed analogy.” I still find that rather helpless. You are again asking me to write more, but the other side is a whole book, whereas I have only one small chapter—how could I possibly compare with them in detail? Yet you say that “their examples are also mainly technologies rather than organisms.” The implication seems to be that my examples are organisms rather than technologies, which is strange. Since this is an analogy, of course one must first take biological evolution as the starting point, and then use technological evolution as the examples. I mentioned the differentiation of stone tools, humans’ anticipatory consciousness, inventors’ disputes over priority (Watt, Edison, the Wright brothers), processes of technological transfer (the rifle, writing, gunpowder), large-scale “interruptions” (the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution), mule machines, structural unemployment, the environments of agriculture and nomadism, the environments of automobiles and horse-drawn carriages, the iPhone replacing Nokia, printed books/handwritten books/sound films/silent films/animation/comics/television/radio, the different fates of porcelain and glass, the Easter Island statues… I feel that in this short little chapter of mine, every line is full of examples of technology, and these examples are also all interpreted by directly applying several core principles of biological evolution. How can that still be not enough?
Of course, I have said before that “not enough” is the most shameless kind of criticism, because there is no way to respond to it. The real question remains: is there anything wrong or inappropriate in the part I have already written? If what I have written is valid, then exactly to what extent have I actually argued my case?
In fact, rather than regarding biological evolution as a “suggestive analogy” for technological evolution, I would say that I am doing “strict comparison and projection.” I do not need to provide an extra principle of “technological evolution”; my “evolutionary principle” is the principle of “biological evolution,” which is Darwin’s principle. I think Darwin’s theory of evolution (the five core propositions) can be applied directly to the history of technology. But Basalla, and especially Brian Arthur, are in fact trying to establish a separate theoretical model of technological evolution. So as they talk, they stop talking about biology and focus only on technology, which is why you may feel that I keep returning to biological evolution and therefore seem not to pay enough attention to technology?
Brian Arthur’s so-called theory of “combinatorial evolution” is already not very closely related to Darwinian evolution. Of course this theory has its significance, but I do not think it is all that novel either; in fact, it could just as well be called “combinatorial development” or “combinatorial innovation.” But how much guidance this theory actually offers for the history of technology is something I rather doubt. For example, even if we had never heard of combinatorial evolution, when we analyze the invention of a certain technology, would we not still break it down into various more basic elements for examination? What practical perspectives can his view really add to general research in the history of technology? That still needs to be flexibly applied in actual work.
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It’s not really criticism of you, strictly speaking; it’s just a response to criticism. You really do need to put forward more controversial material so that I can truly criticize it. Your research plan is not clear enough yet; merely telling a historical story is not sufficient. For example, if you want to use theories of technological evolution in discussion, that is a feasible direction, but how to use them is the key question. So when you read Basalla or Arthur, you should always be thinking about how to combine them with your own case studies, and especially about what new things actually emerge when one uses evolutionary theory versus when one does not.
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Writing so many notes is, of course, worthwhile, but you need to consider one question: these notes may of course be worth writing for yourself, but are they worth it for me to read? When you send them to me, do you hope that I will read your notes cover to cover? What do you want my feedback on?
You need to change your mindset. After university, the teacher-student relationship is no longer the model of primary and secondary school. When a student reports homework to a teacher, the meaning of sending the homework to the teacher is to prove that one has worked hard and completed the task. But the university teacher-student relationship, especially in the case of doctoral students, is nothing like that. Leaving aside the fact that you are not even my student, even if you were, I would not be interested in checking his “homework.” What I hope for is exchange and dialogue. What the student shows me should not merely be a matter of “turning in an assignment,” but an invitation to dialogue and discussion with the supervisor. In this sense, think again: when you send me so many notes to read, what exactly do you want me to do with them?
I am familiar with Mumford. I would rather read Mumford again than specially read through a pile of notes. You should adjust your mentality: do not report work to me, but talk with me.
You yourself also said that your objections may not be all that important, so there is no need to force objections. But at least, combining them with your own line of thought and talking about your reflections and impressions is not bad. Don’t use that “shameless” mode of criticism that I have repeatedly told you about: “He didn’t write enough.” Since you think his evidence is not sufficiently ample, can you add evidence for him? Or can you produce counterevidence? Extending his argument and adding a few pieces of evidence for the author is also dialogue with the author; putting forward contrary evidence is even more dialogue with the author. But if you neither extend, nor supplement, nor correct, and just stand aside coldly saying: not enough. It makes you look as if you have an imposing attitude, but in substance you have not entered into a state of dialogue with the author at all.
For example, where you feel that the line of thought is strained, you can think about what is implicit here, what default assumptions or habitual ways of thinking lead him to think that a place you find not very smooth is perfectly logical? Then do the things he has taken for granted actually make sense? From what angles could you help supplement them? Or present contrary evidence? You need to enter into communication, to open a dialogue, rather than standing off to one side with your arms folded, coolly and lightly saying “strained.”
As for your point that Mumford uses the blanket term “human” to refer to all classes, that may indeed be a criticism, but you need to be more precise: is this problem local to Mumford, or is it overall? Does Mumford as a whole have this problem, or does he merely commit this generalizing error when he is beautifying the technological life of the primary age?
In fact, in the analytical notes you made earlier about the bourgeoisie and so on, when Mumford says that “tools were meant to enlarge the power of the ruling class,” in that part he is clearly distinguishing among different kinds of “human.” Tools bolster the power of one segment of class. When he discusses the “megamachine,” he is referring to the order of social organization. Most importantly, when Mumford discusses the meaning of the city, he emphasizes very strongly that the city separates people: superficially it gathers people together, but at the same time it also promotes division of labor and class differentiation. The city makes the life style of the individual more monotonous, but makes the life style of humanity as a whole more diverse. These are all key claims of Mumford’s, and clearly it is not appropriate for you to say in these respects that he treats “human” in an indiscriminate, undifferentiated way. So looking at the local level in reverse, does he have this problem there? If so, because of what kind of bias or habitual mindset did Mumford make the error here? And how can you correct him?
Of course, there is also another possibility: that in a certain local context he merely omits a complicated issue, speaking in general terms about an overall characteristic, without needing to explain every last detail. Let me emphasize again: one cannot criticize an author simply by saying “not enough.” The key is whether that “not enough” can be supplemented in other texts, or whether it leaves room, in an open attitude, for readers to provide additions.
Personally, it seems to me that, just for the passage you excerpted in your notes, Mumford is talking about the life of humanity as a whole. The sentence you quoted—“in all the fields of people’s activities, between the dynamic and the static, between the countryside and the city, between the force of life and the force of the machine, there is a state of balance”—actually contains distinctions among different classes and different groups of people, such as city people and rural people, rulers and the ruled. His so-called “state of balance” obviously does not mean a balance internal to each individual person, but rather a balance among different people. It could be said that social stratification is an implicit premise. Mumford’s praise of ancient technology is also expressed from an overall perspective. Slaves are of course miserable, and for every person fixed into a certain profession and a certain class, life is also unfree; but on a higher level, the capital-H “Human” is rich and balanced. In *The City in History* (Chinese translation, p. 116), he wrote:
“If the city dismembered the total personality of man and forced him to spend his life in a single task, it was also through the agency of a new group entity that it restored him, thereby making possible a rich and varied urban whole where the life of the individual man might seem narrow and drab, because woven into it were all kinds of threads. The specialized groups not only flourish in the city, but in the city’s daily give-and-take they discover the immense wealth of human capacities that the earlier primitive level could not reveal.”
Mumford’s general line of thought is “organic.” He thinks one should not study technology in isolation, nor should one study individuals in a fragmented way. So in many places, when he speaks of “human,” he means the overall way of life organized in a particular manner under a particular technological environment. Your criticism should target this basic style.
Regarding clocks and time, https://yilinhut.net/2009/11/08/2511.html has some discussion worth referring to (McLuhan’s criticism of or supplement to Mumford).
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The plan has been received. I think the general direction is basically fine, but the details still need to be refined. The main thing is to build a tighter connection between “materials” and “ideas,” for example, which parts of your line of thought correspond to which key materials, which materials can be directly used as a foundation, and which materials your work may be able to improve or correct. In addition, some sections can be tentatively drafted into preliminary prose; that will make things look more solid.
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Since you have already read Innis and McLuhan, and then come back to my chapter in *A Strong Program for Media History*, which discusses Innis and McLuhan, what do you think of my interpretation? Do you have any different views?
You raised two major criticisms. First, chronological misplacement: you think they misplace the effects of media in the modern age onto antiquity. This is a very serious criticism, and I hope you can make it more specific, laying out the concrete texts and critiquing them. That could be written as a critical paper. Of course, you can first write something preliminary and discuss it with me.
Second, a lack of sufficient historical evidence. This criticism is reasonable. It was precisely because Eisenstein felt that McLuhan lacked historical evidence that she went on to write a history of print; but Eisenstein’s own work may in turn be faulted for lacking historical evidence.
But the question here is: how much historical evidence is “enough”? Can you provide some examples to show what degree can be achieved by a proposition with sufficient evidence? If one is discussing the truth or falsity of a thing, then perhaps relatively “enough” evidence can be found; but if one is discussing the “causes” of history, then what about that? Whether media or any other factor, to regard any factor as a historical “cause,” how much evidence is needed before it counts as sufficient?
In a sense, evidence is always insufficient. This gives rise to a historical style that holds that historians can only record facts, not discuss causality. Whether it is media determinism or technological determinism or political determinism or economic determinism, in any case nothing can determine history; history is just a mélange of countless events, and there is no such thing as any decisive trend.
This leads to a split between intellectual history and empirical history, with intellectual historians being regarded only as philosophers, no longer as historians.
But I do not agree with this split. First, intellectual history as a kind of philosophy has its own independent significance. But for ordinary empirical historical study, intellectual history still has programmatic significance. For example, I put forward a claim and propose a certain interpretation of causality or trend. Of course, my historical evidence is insufficient; indeed, I might even have almost no historical evidence at all (examples below). Then of course you can criticize me for insufficient evidence, but does that negate my interpretation? Not at all. In fact, an interpretation with insufficient evidence opens up a thematic field; afterward, both you and I can gather evidence around that thread. I incline to believe this interpretation, so I can go and look for supporting evidence; you are instinctively opposed to this interpretation, so you can go and look for counterexamples. Isn’t historical research driven forward in just this way?
Just like the development of the natural sciences: there are experimenters and there are theorists. The conjectures put forward by theorists often do not initially have sufficient evidence, and may even be accompanied by some counterevidence; what they pursue may be a kind of internal self-consistency or harmony. Those who think a conjecture has promise then go and design and seek empirical evidence. Some conjectures may ultimately be falsified, or may have to wait decades or even a hundred years before they acquire sufficient evidence, but they also drive the development of science.
However much the history of science may emphasize truth and empiricism, must it be stricter than the natural sciences, leaving no room for the existence of “theorists”?
This happens to touch on what “intellectual history” actually is. In the field of the history of science, intellectual history has a special meaning; it refers to the “idealism history” represented by Koyré, rather than simply “history of ideas” or “history of thought.” It does not merely mean “the history of thoughts or ideas,” but rather “the history of idealism,” or, if you like, “the history of spirit.” It has a strong Hegelian philosophical flavor, holding that in some sense thought has its own “internal logic.”
What is meant by internal logic? For example, Newtonian mechanics and Maxwellian electromagnetism certainly must come before quantum mechanics; quantum mechanics cannot simply appear out of nowhere, without any conceptual preparation. That is determined by the internal logic of ideas. But in concrete actual history, whether the person who proposed Newtonian mechanics was Newton or Marton, and whether the one who unified electromagnetism was Maxwell or Mixwell, is accidental. If you discover that Newton was in fact plagiarizing, and that Newtonian mechanics was really Marton’s mechanics, that does not in any way invalidate the logical judgment made above.
For example, when we look at the concept of motion in Aristotle’s natural philosophy and then at Galileo’s concept of motion, we feel that there is a logical gap between the two, and that there must have been at least some transitional change in between for the concept to develop so radically. Then we can guess that such a change was completed among the Arabs or in medieval scholastic philosophy. But exactly which people did what, and played the role of this transitional link? That is something historical evidence can be further used to verify. Even if the documents for those intermediate stages have all been lost, we can still put forward this view. If one day we discover some text from that period whose concept of motion happened to deviate from Aristotle and move toward Galileo’s transformation, then we can say that our conjecture has been confirmed. But even if we have not yet found any evidence, this construction of the history of ideas is still meaningful.
If we further extend the standpoint of the history of ideas, we can discover that the history of ideas can break through the internal domain of “ideas” themselves. What we discuss may be a certain thing as the “condition” of another thing, but this “condition” need not be a necessary-and-sufficient relation between propositional concepts; it can be understood in the general sense of Condition: “environment.” When we say that my family background is prosperous, or that my physical condition is poor, what we are talking about is also some kind of prior-and-posterior relation between things, but it is not limited to the interior of concepts. In this sense, we can consider the technical conditions of a certain idea, or the conceptual conditions of a certain technology, or the economic and social conditions of a certain idea or technology, and so on.
At this level too, there is a relation between conjecture and empirical verification: for example, the statement that “the printing press prepared certain conditions for the rise of modern science” is a synthetic conclusion. First, we examine modern science and find that it broke with ancient science and required changes in certain ideas—such as attitudes toward experiential knowledge, attitudes toward ancient scholars, and so on—and if these ideas did not change, modern science could not have risen. Second, we also find that the spread of printing happened to encourage these new attitudes and inhibit other older ones. From this we draw the conclusion: “The printing press was one of the conditions of modern science.”
After that, we may be able to find more empirical support for this, for example, how Tycho Brahe used printing houses to disseminate new discoveries, how Copernicus’s works were spread by the printing press, and so on, which can serve as examples to support the above view. Of course, if we find places where the spread of printing was slow but modern science developed rapidly, that can in turn constitute contrary evidence. But all of this is for later.
Why do we need to put forward these historical conjectures? Isn’t it more solid to say only as much as the evidence allows? On the one hand, Kuhn has already shown that the natural sciences do not proceed like that; if everyone really insisted on evidence in a strict sense, Copernicus would never have prevailed at all. As I keep saying: must the empiricism of history be stricter than that of the natural sciences? On the other hand, what are we ultimately paying attention to when we study history? Is it merely curiosity, erudition, hearing many historical stories and then being satisfied? Fundamentally speaking, all scholarship is ultimately concerned with ourselves—where do we come from, where are we going, who are we? Through historical tracing, we investigate our origins and development, investigate where we “came from” and “how we arrived here.” So if history entirely excludes “causality” and only tells stories, how can it ultimately be connected to the fate of our own present age?
This is my understanding of the history of ideas (or the historiography of idealism). I do not require that you personally abandon empiricism and do the work of the history of ideas, but I do hope you can understand this orientation.
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I still hope you pay attention to this distinction: between what a paper or a book does, and what a person does in a lifetime or what an entire discipline does.
History as a discipline ought to be based primarily on historical materials; if one does not attach importance to sources, how can one speak of history?
But within a discipline there are countless scholars with differing styles, and within each scholar’s life there are countless papers and books with different themes.
So the question is, when we come down to a particular piece of work by a particular person at a particular stage, do we still need to require that he provide enough historical evidence, that he must “say only one sentence for every one point of material”?
This is a bit like the debate between rationalism and empiricism in the history of modern thought. Descartes believed that one could construct the foundations of knowledge starting from pure “I think,” emphasizing deduction within concepts; Bacon, by contrast, believed that everything must begin from empirical material. So Bacon collected countless “true phenomena” in an attempt to induce scientific principles from them.
But who was right? In the end, both Descartes and Bacon failed; neither of them produced all that many scientific principles. Actual scientific research proceeds neither solely from reason nor entirely from empirical material.
Because “material” is infinitely abundant. Without a prior “intention,” we simply do not know exactly which materials to collect, and piling disordered materials together will not automatically generate theory. Likewise, if one only emphasizes logical deduction within theory, that too is just one hand clapping.
Shouldn’t history be like this too? The arrangement of historical materials and the construction of concepts ought to be parallel processes.
The “empiricism” emphasized by the strongest “positivists” in philosophy of science also refers to “verifiability”; they believe that for a theoretical proposition to have scientific significance, it must in principle be possible to verify it empirically. But they would never say, “Only propositions that have actually been empirically verified may be spoken.” Because they acknowledge that science advances in the mode of “hypothesis—verification,” rather than in the form of “evidence—conclusion.”
Positivism has long been waning in the philosophy of science, and later philosophers of science even refuse to accept this requirement of verifiability. But what I want to say is that even this school, which is already outdated in philosophy of science and most strongly emphasizes “empiricism,” does not endorse “one sentence for every one point of material”; instead, it endorses “bold conjecture, careful verification.”
So what I want to ask is: in the historical profession, is there room for research based on “bold conjecture” at all?
For example, traditionally historical scholarship has collected historical materials while paying attention only to the content and value carried by media as neutral carriers of information, without paying attention to the different biases of different media with respect to different classes or different ideas. Innis believed that the historian’s field of vision should be broadened and that one should pay attention to the bias of media themselves. So he put forward “bold conjectures” and wrote some programmatic ideas.
Of course, he was calling for verification; before his death he had been trying to compile a History of Communication, but unfortunately he died too early and did not complete it. Inspired by him, later scholars can, under the guidance of the “bias of communication,” fill in more historical materials to corroborate it.
So can you really say that he should not have put forward a programmatic framework in the absence of sufficient materials? That he should first have compiled the History of Communication and only after finishing it would he have had the right to speak?
Of course, as a “small” student, you must not reach for what is beyond your grasp; when writing your own paper, you should prioritize solidity. But as another small student, you should also be able to respect the “masters,” especially those masters who founded a school or established a tradition. The reason they could found a school or establish a tradition is that their works played a “guiding” role, opening up territory for later generations and opening up lines of thought. When reading these works, you should understand them in terms of how much empirical research their ideas can inspire, rather than being unable to read them at all because their ideas lack empirical research.
As I keep saying: if you think there is a lack of evidence, then add it; if you think what is said is wrong, then refute it. Whether by supplementation or refutation, once you follow the master’s horizon, you enter a new research space.
I do not hope that you will abandon an empirical style and turn toward research in the history of ideas. But I do hope you can form a complementarity with it. When you read media environment scholars and feel that they are lacking in empiricism, isn’t that just perfect? You can use empirical work to enrich them. If you read inspirational works with the attitude of being ready at any time to provide enrichment or correction, then you can truly gain something from them. If instead you examine these masterworks harshly by empirical standards, in the end you will at most congratulate yourself a little, but what significance would that have for your own research?
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What you have been saying all along is actually the second issue, namely the lack of evidence. But you are mixing that up with the issue of temporal misplacement, as if the reason for the temporal misplacement is the lack of empiricism.
What you are now calling “theory first” or “using theory to lead history” is not a matter of temporal misplacement.
It is like accusing someone of embezzlement and prostitution. In the end, all the evidence you cite is about how he engaged in prostitution, as if once prostitution is established, embezzlement is automatically established too. That is your misplacement.
Let us not discuss for the moment whether Innis was theory-first, or even “purely speculative”-first. What I want to ask is: how exactly did he make a temporal misplacement?
You also said that his last book was The Changing Concept of Time, and then you think that “he powerfully demonstrated the extreme spatial bias of modern media and its consequences, as well as the resulting monopoly of knowledge,” and then you say that he extended these analyses of the modern environment to antiquity, which is a temporal misplacement.
But as you yourself said, that was his last book; Empire and Communications and The Bias of Communication came earlier than that. How could he possibly have projected the final conclusion back onto the earlier argument?
The situation may have been like this: Innis first wrote a book on ancient empire and the communications environment (including Theory A—Evidence A), and finally wrote a book on the modern state and the communications environment (Theory B—Evidence B). Then you think the evidence in the earlier book was insufficient, while the evidence in the later book was somewhat stronger. Then you forcibly help him “make it coherent,” thinking he must start from the place where evidence is strong and then argue for conclusions where evidence is weak. So you forcibly assume that the logic of his argument is: Evidence B → Theory B → Theory A. But you think Theory A must be supported by the ancient Evidence A, and cannot be supported by Evidence B. Using Evidence B to support Theory A is what you call temporal misplacement.
But the problem is that Innis himself never tried to use Evidence B to support Theory A at all; he clearly wrote Empire and Communications first. It is you who insist on forcibly inserting evidence for him, and then accuse him of temporal misplacement.
According to Innis’s own logic, what he obtained was a cross-temporal “Theory X,” which could be used both for ancient empires and for the modern state. He then tentatively applied it in both directions. You can criticize him for proposing a theory that is in fact not universal, but only applicable to some situations. But that is still not temporal misplacement. Because he did not do the thing of “directly extending today’s enormous impact of media on society to past eras.”
For instance, Innis’s Theory X is: “Media have a tremendous impact on society.”
Then its branch conclusions are many: A, “Papyrus as a medium had a tremendous impact on ancient Egyptian society”; B, “Parchment had a tremendous impact on medieval society”; C, “Newsprint had a tremendous impact on American society”; and so on.
If he uses C to argue for A, that of course would be temporal misplacement. But when he speaks about ancient Egypt, he speaks about the characteristics of the priestly class, and does not mention a single word about modern newspaper reporters. Where is the misplacement there? The most you can criticize him for is: C has some evidence, B lacks evidence, A has counterevidence, and so on. Those are the criticisms that are truly targeted.
Since you lean toward empiricism and emphasize evidence, you yourself should set an example and base your criticism on evidence rather than on supposition.
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In fact, what I previously told you about the relation between “theory/hypothesis” and “empiricism/historical materials” in history can roughly also be understood as a crude expression of the relation between “intended history/actual history.” Or one could also say it is the relation between “form” and “matter.”
Philosophy of science holds that “observation is theory-laden.” Of course, theory is also grounded in observation; there is no absolutely neutral observation, and no purely fixed theory. In actual discourse, theory and observation are always interpenetrating and interwoven. But scientists’ contributions always have different orientations. For example, Einstein did not reject experiments, but his main contribution was entirely in theoretical science; even if experiments did not support him, he still believed his theory was right.
History is the same. A purely “intended history” cannot be written, just as an absolutely neutral collection of historical materials cannot be compiled. One cannot discuss theory without linking it to historical materials, and one cannot compile historical materials without a guiding horizon. But historical works also always have their own biases and emphases. For example, the main contribution of one book may be the organization of historical materials, while the main brilliance of another may be its distinctive intention (or, one might say, its view of history).
Intended history applies first and foremost to the history of science, because the “historical materials” of the history of science are themselves highly theorized. But I think that in a broader sense, any history has its dimension of “intention.”
In the history of science, Alexandre Koyré and Jacob Klein are exemplary figures of intended history. Jacob Klein’s historiographical essays have already been translated into Chinese by Zhang Boten. Koyré’s Studies of Newton, Galilean Studies, and From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe are all required reading in our history of science program. If you are interested, you can look them up as references.
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After a rough reading of the research plan, the overall direction looks very good. Using media ecology to explain the significance of telecommunication media is a very meaningful undertaking. Of course, the problem is that beyond the broad direction, the substantive part still does not seem very clear. Saying that the telegraph changed “the concept of space and time” — exactly how did it change it? For example, McLuhan says that print culture strengthened the shift from acoustic space to visual space, and Postman says that “childhood” is a product of the print age. These are all relatively clear claims, though many of them are questionable and perhaps biased. Still, around these focal points one can organize the argument more effectively. At present, you do not yet seem to have found a relatively concise but penetrating “thesis” or “claim.”
Of course, this can gradually take shape in the next stage of research. But before that, your thesis still feels rather scattered, lacking a bit of a “spine.”
For example, you still try to bring in photography and also railways, but the word photography appears only once or twice in your entire plan, which makes one worry whether you can really integrate telegraphy and photography organically in discussion.
Also, from illustrated newspapers to telegraphy to telephones, you want to include them all. Their common point is point-to-point communication, but this commonality is very external, because what we need to examine is the conceptual change they reflect and the impact they have on society and culture. For example, letters are also point-to-point, while books are one-to-many; telephones are point-to-point, while broadcasting is one-to-many. So does that mean letters and telephones are closer to each other, while books and broadcasting belong to one class? But if we look from the transition from print culture to the telecommunication era, the historical context of letters and books is much more similar, and their social meanings are also more consistent. In this sense, to clarify the environmental significance of media, the classification (letter—book) → (telegraph—newspaper) → (telephone—broadcasting) is probably more effective than the classification (letter—telegraph—telephone) / (book—newspaper—broadcasting). Letters and books together constitute the media environment of the print age, while telegraphy and newspapers dominated the media environment of the nineteenth century.
Of course, one can also speak of something by taking “point-to-point” as the core, but then you need to further excavate their unity at the cultural and conceptual level, and not simply lump them together just because of a similarity in technical structure.
My personal suggestion is: there is no need to involve telephones; focus on the telegraph alone, and explain clearly the causes and consequences of this one technology, and that will be enough. Telephones and newspapers can both be mentioned in the background as references or contrasts, but there is no need to make them the main topic of research.
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After a quick look, I feel that it has indeed become much clearer. Of course, an initial plan is hard to make very precise, because many ideas have to gradually take shape only after reading all kinds of key texts. There is no need to rush. You can now continue along the line of thought and do some specific work, such as taking reading notes on some key texts, or writing small papers on some issues that may be involved, thereby gradually deepening your understanding. Questions encountered in reading the literature on media ecology can always be discussed with me. I am not familiar with other literature on telecommunication history, but you can also sort it out, summarize it, and then share it with me.
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Your understanding of the strong program of media history is roughly accurate, but your understanding of its “positioning” is slightly off.
You say that “media environmental theory” is difficult to use as guidance for specific research in media history; on this point I cannot agree. The key question is: what does it mean to “guide” specific historical research? Obviously, what directly guides a person in historical research should properly be another historian, not some philosopher. As an independent discipline, history has its own ways of “guiding”; in that sense, media environmental theory, as a grand theory or philosophical thought, of course cannot bear the charge of guiding. But if this “guidance” is not so specific and merely means “pointing out a direction,” “leading the gaze,” or “opening up lines of thought,” then media environmental theory can naturally play a role.
First, there is the emphasis on “media history” itself. Traditional history focused on military history, political history, and heroic history. With the development of historiography, the daily life of ordinary citizens began to enter the historian’s field of vision. As for “media,” traditionally it may have been regarded as a minor part of history, something that could be mentioned as an extra, but without core significance. Media ecology, however, places “media” in a certain core position, replacing in a sense the traditional centrality of military or heroic figures and becoming the key thread for understanding the origin and development of human civilization. This status would be inexplicable without the support of media philosophy.
Second, in terms of specific media history, media ecology also changes the focus of our attention. Traditionally, if we were to write a history of a medium, the focus might be on when, where, and by whom it was invented, when it spread to a certain place, when it was improved, and so on, as well as how much information this medium transmitted in its first year, its second year, and so on (for example, how the printing press led to an explosion in the number of books published), and so forth. But from the perspective of media ecology, these contents instead become secondary issues. What becomes central, by contrast, is the impact and reshaping that media bring to human thought, culture, and communication. It is like writing a history of the printing press: are the key figures really Bi Sheng and Gutenberg, or are they Martin Luther and Tycho Brahe? Traditional history of technology focuses on inventors, while media history pays more attention to users. This perspective too is guided by media philosophy.
Finally, the history of media can influence not only historical research that takes specific media as its subject, but also other thematic histories. For example, when doing military history and political history, we also need to think one layer further: by what medium was military intelligence and military orders conveyed at the time? How would a system of transmitting orders organized by different media affect the way wars were fought? Did media play a role in political change? For instance, how did newspapers support the American system of universal suffrage, and how did television and Twitter change it? In the history of science, does a change in the media through which scientists communicate have an effect on scientists’ understanding of scientific knowledge? (In the chapter on printing in my On Obsolete Wisdom, I talk about precisely this aspect.) Countless new lines of thought can be opened up under the program of media history.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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