Articulating Cyber-History: Method-Based Historical Analysis and Problem-Solving

Abstract

George Santayana's adage, "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeatit” indicates a hinge between history and problem-solving, or the use of existing material and to create new solutions to contemporary problems. This paper articulates this aspect of applied history as "cyber-history” through analysis of research on historiography's emergence in Ancient Greece, finding correspondence with Michel de Certeau's concepts of productive consumption and tactical agency, and ending with possibilities for application to architecture curricula, rigorously fusing historical research, critical theory, and the projective work of the design studio. The use of history as a guide for contemporary, projective activity has been apparent since its beginnings in the writings Herodotus and Thucydides documenting and seeking an understand of the events of the Greco-Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian War of the 5th century BCE. It is the nature of this productive aspect ofhistory that cyber-history examines, specifically the production of new methods. The work of Michel de Certeau provides us with a guide toward a creative/inventive history of practices, found in his distinction between strategy and tactics. Strategy is possible when the subject can be isolated from its environment and assume a proper place defined as its own. A tactic is activity that cannot utilize apropre, where there is no clear borderline to use in distinguishing an exterior party, or when the activity must take place in the territory of the other. Tactical discourse is suited for studying the production of design methods; if a project requires establishment of new ways of operating, then the designer has no propre from which to start. Cyber-history accesses the productive and inventive content of history, founded in a rereading of Herodotus' movements and writings as fundamentally tactical, and continuing with adaptation of historical materials to similar method-generating experiments.