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Nothing Happened: A History
The past is what happened. History is what we remember and write about that past, the narratives we craft to make sense out of our memories and their sources. But what does it mean to look at the past and to remember that "nothing happened"? Why might we feel as if "nothing is the way it was"? This book transforms these utterly ordinary observations and redefines "Nothing" as something we have known and can remember. "Nothing" has been a catch-all term for everything that is supposedly uninteresting or is just not there. It will take some―possibly considerable―mental adjustment before we can see Nothing as Susan A. Crane does here, with a capital "n." But Nothing has actually been happening all along. As Crane shows in her witty and provocative discussion, Nothing is nothing less than fascinating. When Nothing has changed but we think that it should have, we might call that injustice; when Nothing has happened over a long, slow period of time, we might call that boring. Justice and boredom have histories. So too does being relieved or disappointed when Nothing happens―for instance, when a forecasted end of the world does not occur, and millennial movements have to regroup. By paying attention to how we understand Nothing to be happening in the present, what it means to "know Nothing" or to "do Nothing," we can begin to ask how those experiences will be remembered. Susan A. Crane moves effortlessly between different modes of seeing Nothing, drawing on visual analysis and cultural studies to suggest a new way of thinking about history. By remembering how Nothing happened, or how Nothing is the way it was, or how Nothing has changed, we can recover histories that were there all along.
264 pages, Hardcover
Published January 19, 2021
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July 10, 2023
This is a book about nothing. Or, you might say, a book about how nothing is something. There’s a lot of word plays here.
I don’t want to be a spoiler but here’s a couple examples of nothing as something. In the forward to the book, the author references an incident in which a young worker is killed by police while trying to escape some type of labor demonstration. Witnesses to the event would later recall it as “nothing happened.” What they meant by that was that there were no further, more intense demonstrations nor were there any repercussions for the killer. The fact that “nothing happened” was the something they recalled about the event.
Another example is an unusually long pause in a piece of music. During that pause, nothing is happening, but its existence is part of the piece of music and part of the experience of listening to that music. So it’s something, right?
As an historian, which Susan Crane is, nothing happened is all about what you might call “the missing years.” We have all at one time or another been taught history as a series of events: war, more war, still more war, with an occasional depression or catastrophic natural disaster thrown in. What happened between those events? There were people living their lives, laws and governments, an evolving environment. That’s not nothing. As Crane observes: “Most of the past is nothing until we notice it.”
Reading this book I’m reminded of the phrase “down a rabbit hole.” Crane catches a phrase like “nothing is as it was” and barrels down into photographs, postcards, poetry, novels, academic works and anything else she can find. Much ado about nothing.
I’m also reminded of a David Foster Wallace book, “Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity.” Everything and nothing are sort of cousins. The Foster Wallace book was one of the few I’ve ever started reading and given up before finishing. That was not the case with Crane’s book which is both more interesting and readable. It also introduced me to a branch of science called agnotology that I'd never heard of. It’s the study of ignorance. The way things are going here in the U.S., agnotology may become a burgeoning field.
I don’t want to be a spoiler but here’s a couple examples of nothing as something. In the forward to the book, the author references an incident in which a young worker is killed by police while trying to escape some type of labor demonstration. Witnesses to the event would later recall it as “nothing happened.” What they meant by that was that there were no further, more intense demonstrations nor were there any repercussions for the killer. The fact that “nothing happened” was the something they recalled about the event.
Another example is an unusually long pause in a piece of music. During that pause, nothing is happening, but its existence is part of the piece of music and part of the experience of listening to that music. So it’s something, right?
As an historian, which Susan Crane is, nothing happened is all about what you might call “the missing years.” We have all at one time or another been taught history as a series of events: war, more war, still more war, with an occasional depression or catastrophic natural disaster thrown in. What happened between those events? There were people living their lives, laws and governments, an evolving environment. That’s not nothing. As Crane observes: “Most of the past is nothing until we notice it.”
Reading this book I’m reminded of the phrase “down a rabbit hole.” Crane catches a phrase like “nothing is as it was” and barrels down into photographs, postcards, poetry, novels, academic works and anything else she can find. Much ado about nothing.
I’m also reminded of a David Foster Wallace book, “Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity.” Everything and nothing are sort of cousins. The Foster Wallace book was one of the few I’ve ever started reading and given up before finishing. That was not the case with Crane’s book which is both more interesting and readable. It also introduced me to a branch of science called agnotology that I'd never heard of. It’s the study of ignorance. The way things are going here in the U.S., agnotology may become a burgeoning field.
Displaying 1 of 1 review