“The End of Art” - ETD - University of Notre Dame

same “sequences… called stories, or histories.” For Adams, historians are at their worst
when they fail to realize that historical study must continually be revolutionized in order to
recognize and inhabit an elusive present. Adams was aware that the new forces he witnessed
at the beginning of the twentieth century did not come out of nowhere but emerged
historically from “hidden” conduits which his education must seek out: “Where he saw
sequence, other men saw something quite different, and no one saw the same unit of
measure.…but he insisted on a relation of sequence, and if he could not reach it by one
method, he would try as many methods as science knew”(E, 383).
So he renews historical study, struggling each time, as if from scratch, to uncover a more
dependable sequence between his present and the past. Only from that sequence does he
think his education, and hence his self-understanding, will be responsive to the world around
him. His well-known solution is to take everything that is disorienting about his world, its
fragmentary and disjunctive nature, or what he calls its “multiplicity,” and relate that to some
period of the past which can be characterized by its “unity.” He explains: “History had no
use for multiplicity; it needed unity; it could study only motion, direction, attraction, relation.
Everything must be made to move together; one must seek new worlds to measure…” (E,
378). The historian’s “object,” he says, “is to triangulate from the widest possible base to the
furthest point he thinks he can see, which is always far beyond the curvature of the horizon”
(E, 395). The idea is that historical sequence can be triangulated by reaching back into the
past and retracing the course of events that lead to the present. In other words, one end of
the triangulation (or the sequence) always points to himself, and hence the work of the
historian is a form of autobiography. The problem Adams found is that when you start
looking for where you come from, the answers have a way of reaching back further and
further in time: “Education went backward… Education began at the end, or perhaps would
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