A new double special issue of History of the Human Sciences edited by Felicity Callard and Chris Millard has just been released. Chris Millard spoke to Hannah Proctor about how the special issue came about and how the contributions responded to, extended and celebrated the work of John Forrester.

HP: The special issue celebrates the work of the late John Forrester and specifically his essay ‘If p, then what? Thinking in cases’, published in History of the Human Sciences in 1996. The introduction to the special issue contends that the essay transformed understandings of what a case was – could you explain what was so significant about the essay?

CM: I think the essay managed to bring into focus the case, which is a particular part of the armory of the human sciences, a way of talking about a particular life or even a particular instance that has significance. Forrester ranges across disciplines looking at cases, looking at case law and, of course, looking at the psychoanalytic case that was extremely close to all of his work. And it gave people a way into a whole host of questions about how cases do the work that they do.

I don’t necessarily think that Forrester, answered the questions he posed. I don’t think that the essay was intended to answer questions. It was intended to to provoke. I still find the essay challenging and incredibly rich – new things come up whenever I reread it. The real power of it is that it doesn’t pretend to settle any questions, but it makes you aware of questions you were only half aware of before.

HP: Do you also think the essay is significant in terms of how it chimes with the overarching concerns of the journal?

CM: Yes, as I said I think it was about one particular weapon in the armory of the human sciences and so absolutely it resonates with the concerns of the journal. You can’t think of the human sciences without thinking about the relationship of cases to broader ways of understanding human beings, understanding human nature, understanding humanity. I think it’s quite rare that you get such a fundamental part of that way of understanding humans that’s so fundamentally brought to light in one essay and that spawns so many lines of thought that shoot off in different directions. Actually part of the problem with putting this special issue together was that it almost became unmanageable in its fertility, in the way that it provoked so many different people to run off with it in different directions. There’s just so much richness that it became almost bewildering at times, but in a good way.

HP: How did this special issue come about?

I was the reviews editor at the time and the essay collection Thinking in Cases landed on my desk. I didn’t know John Forrester personally but knew that he had died recently and I thought there were so many people that I knew working in and around the human sciences and around the history of psychiatry and psychosis who were working in ways that connected with this book so I thought let’s have a review symposium responding to it. And because the original essay was first published in History of the Human Sciences I thought that would be really apt. It’s all just snowballed from there. We ended up asking for contributions, I think of 3000 words, and people came back to us asking if they could write more. It was really driven by people who wanted to contribute and who had so much to say. It powered itself foremost. Scholars gave their time so freely, gave so much of their time and effort to producing these pieces and that’s what made it difficult, but also really wonderful to work with.

HP: I was struck re-reading Forrester’s essay that he emphasises in his discussion of psychoanalytic cases that the disclosures in any case are always matched by silences. Perhaps in some sense no case can ever really ‘succeed’ and failure is a theme that unites several of the contributions to the special issue – what is revealed when cases fail? Can failure take different forms? Can failures be generative?

CM: Yeah, I think when things fail or break down it’s almost more interesting than when they succeed, because success doesn’t lead you to question your premises but failure often does. Failure is a really emphatic event that lays bare the machinery of how the case is supposed to work. I think Erik Linstrum’s piece especially is about failure and it helps understand things like power. Sometimes in a Foucaultian idea of power, it ends up being so all encompassing that you wonder how things ever change at all. And yet when they fail you don’t have to look very hard for grounds for resistance or grounds for agency, which are the things that normally recede in that crude Foucaultian telling.

So, yes, failure is significant, but the impossibility of success is also significant, and I think they’re usefully kept distinct. I think what Matt ffytche’s article on the ‘impossible case’ of Luisa Passerini shows is that success isn’t always possible. But that impossibility is more interesting than thinking of it necessarily as a failure in conventional terms.

HP: Yeah, it’s such a good example of a new genre that emerges because the existing genres are not really adequate to the material.

CM: Yeah and ffytche’s article is a wonderful analytical survey of this these kinds of writing and the ways that when you push at the boundaries of autobiography or self-case making or autoethnography, or examine the way human beings narrate about themselves, it’s such a rich vein that spans disciplines. You know, you tend to think ‘oh this is about psychoanalysis and it’s probably about anthropology’ but there are so many other ways of human beings writing themselves and narrating themselves that show how even your most secure sense of who you are just collapses under the slightest bit of interrogation.

HP: The pieces in the special issue are striking in terms of their disciplinary range (which is also reflected in Forrester’s essay) – does this say something about the relative hetereogeneity of ‘case thinking’?

CM: The real gift in that paper and in all the essays in the book, was the ability to show that in any place where human beings are being talked about or are talking about themselves you can you can start to break them down to see how they work.

I don’t think we consciously decided this was going to be an interdisciplinary project. I don’t actually particularly like the word, which I think has become diseased by funding calls, going back 30 years, where you’re prizing interdisciplinary just because. But it’s a real credit to the flexibility and the richness of that essay that when we sent the call out and people responded, that we had no idea that people were working with and around cases or on Forrester in those ways. I think that’s one of the real bonuses of doing an open call but also having channels of circulation through a mailing list that can reach out to places and get cross posted in ways that that wouldn’t have been possible 25 years ago.

Mary Morgan’s paper, for example, is a really challenging and a really fantastic riffing off Forrester’s title in a way that I just found almost virtuosic and she wasn’t somebody who we would necessarily have had in mind to approach as our original call was aimed at early career researchers, but she responded. It was that enthusiasm where people, even though they weren’t necessarily being spoken to, wanted to come on board. They wanted to contribute. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that really before. People really love this essay, even if they have problems with it, they really want to talk about it.

HP: Many of the contributors reflect on the case history as a genre – both in terms of what that opens up but also in terms of its limitations – Maria Böhmer discusses the capacity of the case to ‘travel’, while Michael Flexer emphasises the linearity of case thinking and points to historical instances that ‘thinking in cases’ acted as a constraint – how do these interventions extend or challenge Forrester’s work on cases?

CM: I think the way that cases travel is really quite basic to their utility, in that they are a nice sort of parcelling up of either an exemplar or as an illustration of a particular principle. What Maria Böhmer’s essay does is it puts really useful empirical flesh on those bones. People wouldn’t be necessarily surprised that a case travels and circulates in networks, but when you have to dig down and find the examples, those examples can push back on how you thought the case travels: across from medicine to the more journalistic. The sensational ways in which the particular case of the man who crucified himself that she discusses were talked about. Getting into those empirical examples can be really useful.

Michael Flexer’s paper, which I’ll admit I found difficult, rattled around in my head for weeks after reading it because he’s trying to strip the case back to its bare bones. He’s asking, what is it that makes something emerge as something that might be made into a case in the first place? So it’s not taking the case as the starting point but is asking, how do we even know how the raw material emerges to get made into a case? What he does really clearly is show how even before you think you have a case you’re getting locked into a particular direction of travel, where a lot of other assumptions can very easily plug you in and push you forwards. He discusses the example of the AIDS pandemic, where all those prejudices around particular communities of men were just laid bare, especially because people could not understand where their case reasoning was pushing them.

HP: Erik Linstrum’s contribution discusses colonial cases and the challenge the kinds of individual traumas they documented posed to colonial rulers. Linstrum discusses how the kinds of testimonies contained in cases conflicted with the ideologies of the colonial rulers, suggesting that the case might be a disruptive genre that can exceed or confound attempts to generalise. Does this analysis point to ways case histories be treated as historical documents?

CM: Often when people talk of power in the human sciences, they’re talking about thoughts and ways of thinking and expertise and advice. All of that is real and effective, of course, but we’re not often talking about machine guns and police forces that keep people in place. I think part of what what Erik Linstrum’s paper does is it looks at the – I don’t want to call it soft power because I mean something quite different – but it look at the intellectual power relations that are involved in making people into cases and subjecting them to expertise.

And that just doesn’t work in an environment that is strafed by a very different kind of power and a very different kind of resistance. When you put different kinds of power and different kinds of attempts to enforce governance together – so here there’s the governance of the psychoanalytic overarching framework that puts people into a particular relationship with power but there’s also the militarised imperial power – and those just don’t fit. That really shows us, I think, something quite important about how power works, but also how it doesn’t. I think that what’s really in illuminating there is that failure of the case to do anything but sort of say, ‘Well, here’s some ‘natives’ and they have very strong murderous impulses towards their leaders. Oh, well, hang on a minute. No, we can’t say that.’ The colonial elite simply can’t use the case they’ve produced because it documents something that is impossible for them to acknowledge.  

This essay, like many in the Special Issue, I’ve read and proofed and been very close to and every time I re-read it I notice different things and find my head is spinning with connections. I don’t know if that’s solely a testement to Forrester’s work but it’s amazing that it’s generated such generorous and constructive responses. They bring his insights to their work. You don’t have to pull Forrester out of shape to have him talk to your work because it’s so open.

HP: Matt ffytche approaches the question of genre from a slightly different perspective, by focusing on an example of what he calls an ‘exploding’ or ‘impossible’ case – Luisa Passeri’s Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968. Here the individual case history is destabilised by the forces of history, which seems to demand a different kind of narrative.  In Autobiography of a Generation, ffytche oberves, ‘the personal and the social… act as metonyms for each other’, but I wondered if that was also true of all cases in some sense?

CM: I’m fascinated by how people use ‘the social’ and the things that they think inhabit it and the power that it has and also doesn’t have. It’s sort of like a case in the way that it’s this incredibly amorphous thing that explains everything and therefore explains nothing.

I love Passerini’s book partly because it’s such a traumatic and chaotic mess that I think, well, if you can turn a chaotic mess into something brilliant then I’ve got some hope for some of my life. It’s so – I don’t want to say honest because honest makes it seem weirdly confessional – but it lays bare its own wiring in a way that I think is really powerful. And I think it makes it difficult because you’re never quite sure that you’ve got it. It never closes, it never satisfies, it never gives you that neat finish. And that’s life.

Being able to put that into a book – when every sinew of you when you’re writing a book is trying to close it and finish it and get it into this disciplined form – for a book to manage not to do that really impresses me.

I’m going to go back to the original thrust of the question about the comparison with the social. Whenever you write a human or a group of humans you’re always in the middle of personal agency and social/structural agency. There are so many frames of reference that are always already there, pulling out of focus. Going in and being able to think about the person and the social and history, about the way history impacts individuals without collapsing the social when you go down to the individual and without erasing the individual when you go to the structural but existing in neither and both of these spaces at the same time, I think that’s what she what she’s trying to do. She does have to flip between her psychoanalysis and her interviews and a broad sense of the history and it is chaotic but it’s not chaotic because she is a bad writer. It’s chaotic because the project she is trying to do can never actually succeed (to go back to the point we were discussing before).

It really illuminates the case by sort of showing it up, by showing how it is both inadequate and also kind of super adequate in that there’s too much in it. It’s like that classic Joan Scott thing about gender being an empty and overflowing category. I think of cases as telling us nothing and everything. They tell us nothing at all and far too much because of the way that they can connect to everything. They can explain everything and they can be explained by everything in a way that makes you really have to make some pretty serious choices analytically before you even start. You’ll never exhaust the case.

I think one of the things that used to annoy me when I was an undergraduate and postgraduate student when I looked at psychoanalytic practitioners who I was researching is that everything is so overdetermined. It used to really annoy me that there are 5678910 reasons for why one thing happened and then more and then more and more. That irritated me for whatever reason, but then you begin to see how everything makes some kind of sense because of the power of that that reading strategy, the strategy of reading everything through it and I ended up not hating it quite so much, but just being being really interested in what that does for your analytical possibilities.

HP: Did revisiting Forrester’s essay and reading these responses to it change or nuance how you think about cases?

CM: I think it has to have done. I mean, one of the things I think we haven’t touched on is how long this project has been in the works. Initially I think we sent out a call at the very beginning of 2018 so it’s been a long time. So yeah my thinking has absolutely changed.

I first read the essay, I think in the first year of my PhD ,and then again during my postdoc, and then again teaching. Every single time new things leap out to me and that isn’t always the case with even very good articles.

Having this group of people writing in their own different directions has really shown is the impossibility of case thinking even though it’s a very useful and usable concept. I still think it’s an impossible concept because case thinking is far too broad. It’s almost as if it’s so broad that it should collapse on itself and become useless but somehow it isn’t and so somehow it doen’t. I’m trying to write a book at the moment about how personal experiences of the things you’re studying might impact or be made clear or be made explicit in writing histories and how personal experiences are always already there and your case, the case of yourself, that’s always there in every history. And I think I’d go as far as to say, at least if this were on Twitter, I would say all history writing is displaced autobiography. I’m not ready to defend that actually but I still believe it and I think that ‘Thinking in Cases’ has really helped me show up what’s important in history writing and writing in general about humans in a way that I never would have imagined when I first downloaded it. This is a difficult essay. It’s really interesting but my god I don’t really get it and here I am still not really getting it 10 years later. Some essays are difficult because they’re difficult and some essays are difficult because they’re brilliant and I think Forrester’s essay is the latter.

I love Julie Walsh’s re-doing of Forrester’s essay ‘Inventing Gender Identity: the Case of Agnes’. I’ve read and reread it. I would never have thought that something as chaotic [as a case] could be as generous and as meaningfully generous that it could generate that reading of how gender identity is a process. There’s an awful lot of heat and not a lot of light around that issue at the moment. Julie Walsh’s essays cuts through that so beautifully and, again, in a way that reading Forrester’s original essay you’d think, where the hell’s that come from? I love how open and generous complexity and nuance can be, how the impossibility and the unfinishedness of cases can be bewildering and chaotic but it can be generous and open and compassionate.