kevis goodman waning medical discourse waxes as a nascent aesthetic one – is not tautological or repetitive in the static sense The awareness here seems different and relatively clearer, even if it is as apparently minimal as the difference between attending to a particular “case” history (this sick sailor, that unhappy soldier, etc.) and widening the frame to apprehend as external the motions that partly guide the boat’s ways – forces in excess of any single pilot, voyage plan, or act of volition, forces that Marxist historiography has sometimes called an “absent cause.” (They not, however, preclude steering the boat – Wordsworth’s nuanced version yields neither to total determinism nor to a simple faith that the free spirit precipitates itself forward.) I would suggest, then, that those physiological motions, or more precisely those motions that the earlier writings had rendered in organic terms, here yield up an image or figuration of the historical content they misrecognized there (see “Motion sickness,” above) It is as if we catch a physiological materialism (in this case, the waning medical discourse of “motions”) yielding its place to, yet also producing, the grounds of a proto-historical materialism, a nascently historicist kind of thinking Of course, from a tidy and positive historiographical perspective, one might want a fuller account or contextual mapping of the conditions of a modern mobility Yet historians are rarely in the boat – the owl of Minerva, as Hegel observed, takes flight at dusk, and the historian’s perspective, like necessity, is apparent only after the fact, or from the shore They have a harder time identifying what Raymond Williams, with an aptly scientific metaphor, called history “in solution,” or what I have called, with an intentionally double sense, history in motion.28 But it is in just such a situation, where a full view of history lies beyond immediate sense experience at the same time that its conditions exert a tangible, if mediated, pressure on sense, that figures can carry on a particular and important kind of semantic work The point here is that the choice of figure is not arbitrary, for the nostalgia subplot supplies a kind of context – a long and charged genealogy of voyagers parted from their true dwelling and therefore crossing everywhere the gleam of its image NOTES William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed R L Brett and A R Jones, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p 288 Hereafter LB Paul de Man, “The Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p First published in 1960 (in French) 214 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008