Month: March 2012

Having outlined and criticized a style of historiographical work, labelled the “cult of invisibility” in Pt. 1, Pt. 2, and Pt. 3, this final post enumerates some of the effects of writing in this style, and how to move beyond it.

The central characteristic of the cult of invisibility is its method of proceeding by identifying prejudices — intellectual, ideological, what have you — that prevent aspects of history from being seen, or interpreted correctly.  One key implication is that diagnosing these prejudices opens a path to a more proper historiography.  But can it?

One way of approaching the question is to consider to what extent we have a proper historiography of topics that are clearly “visible”.  David Edgerton’s emphasis on how little we know about twentieth-century Britain as a scientifically and technologically sophisticated nation with a powerful military has been very influential on my thinking on this problem.  I’d also include here Sven Beckert’s work in illuminating the history of wealthy men in 19th-century New York City.

At this point, though, it is crucial not to suppose that the problem with the cult of invisibility is that it somehow renders formerly visible topics invisible in a kind of reverse discrimination against “official” or culturally “dominant” history.  The real problem is in how historians deal with empirical knowledge of history by mistaking visibility for knowledge.  This is a problem that pertains almost equally to “visible” and more classically “invisible” topics.  Notably, Edgerton (whose office is actually next door to mine, so we talk about this stuff often) will also be happy to tell you about how little we know about the use of established technologies in poorer nations.

Now, Edgerton will also go on to tell you that we know little about technology use in poorer nations because “technology” is too often taken to mean high technologies, novel technologies, or invention.  This observation is, I think, correct, but I would like to put it aside, because it is — just like this series of posts — typical of the style of argumentation that prevails in the cult.  It is another case of identifying an intellectual prejudice that prevents the historiography from rendering a topic properly visible.

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I argued in Pt. 1 of this series that historians routinely formulate research projects, and present their findings in such a way that it stresses their work’s ability to overcome intellectual or ideological prejudices that systematically prevent aspects of the past from being seen or, at least, properly understood; this is the “cult of invisibility”.

In Pt. 2, I argued that the goal of historians’ writing seems to be to produce a “sublime image” — a product that in its scope and form reflects the critical insights, which allow historians to reveal invisible aspects of the past.  Unfortunately, these writings do not easily cohere into an integrated and cumulative “understanding” of the past.

These works are typically written in a style apparently designed to introduce a critical insight permitting previously invisible aspects of the past to be seen, not to capitalize on these insights.  Most of the time, the critical insights deployed do not claim to be particularly original.  The result is the accumulation of generally competent studies with repetitive argumentative structures, which treat varied, but ultimately fragmented subject matter.

I tend to think the persistence of this style of work and presentation is mainly habit and tradition, deriving from the period in the ’70s and early ’80s when various post-Marxist critiques were fairly novel to historians.  But recent work lacks the programmatic clarity of that era — for both better and worse.  However, this post presents a few fairly satirical guesses as to why we might tell ourselves working in this way makes sense today.

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As these things are wont to do, this post has ballooned on me, so it will end up being 3 or 4 shorter parts.

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The power and appeal of the cult of invisibility is in the fact that its central insights are more-or-less correct.  How the past is viewed and not viewed is powerfully impacted by the way in which the (often-tacit) ideas are structured, which determine what we imagine the past looked like and why it unfolded in the way that it did.

Furthermore, because we correctly suppose that “culture” is central to why events unfold in one way and not another, it is should not be too surprising that the ideas we use to analyze the past often turn out to be closely related to the past and present cultural ideas that govern how people behaved and behave in politics and in society more generally.  This almost insidious intertwining of analytical and cultural ideas means that historians must constantly exercise a strong critical faculty in our efforts to interpret the historical record.

Thus, in opening a critique of the cult of invisibility, I am not criticizing critical history itself.  If anything, I would complain that — important exceptions aside — historians’ present critical standards are much lower than they were between, let’s say, 1965 and 1990.

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