Historians are witnessing a new wave in the massive repression of
critical reflection. It is obvious to blame the conservative shift in
the United States and the so-called "50-50" political culture. It is
also easy to blame the mass media for the problems of academic history.
Even when not intentionally misrepresenting the information for
political gain, the news media (for instance), due to the very
abbreviated treatment of any single topic, their capitalist
self-interest, and the modern assumption of the fundamentally new, more
often than not fails to provide viewers with sufficient understanding of
historical context, or of comparative examples from the past, in order
to enable them to make a critical assessment of the present. It is also
easy to blame a "consumer-oriented society" in which we must cater our
"products" as academics to our competitively-based "market": whether it
is the educated lay public who read our books or the undergraduates at
our large public institutions who evaluate our courses (or worse: add or
drop our surveys).

Unfortunately, the underlying problem lies in the condition of normalcy
that frames our everyday life, of which a consumer-oriented society, an
inadequate news media, and particularly the conservative shift in
American politics are the consequence before they are they cause. We do
not like to challenge those fundamental assumptions through which we
have learned to negotiate our status and power. Historians in this case
are themselves products of their context. As "ordinary" as our ordinary
readers and students, many historians continue to write comfortable
history: history that reinforces the myths of everyday life. Far too
many histories are still written about the past in relatively
straightforward narratives, raising questions about character, causes,
and consequence within the framework of everyday life that adds to the
corpus of knowledge about the past as such, but not taking the critical
step of using that past to dialogue with the present that can reveal,
for instance, unfulfilled promises from the past for human freedom and
dignity, potentially more humane alternatives for human relationships,
or new insight into the oppression, and innovative possibilities,
inherent in our everyday life. Without the latter kinds of reflection,
our histories are condemned to reinforce hegemony in everyday life. To
be sure, historians often pirate critical theory (Marxist, feminist,
postmodern, queer) in their investigations of the past; but after
looting theoretical texts for useful concepts, most still reduce the
concept of theory to models about how the past took place in a causal or
descriptive narrative. Rather, we need to engage in critical theoretical
reflection more broadly: narratives about the past centrally designed to
promote our capacity to view the world critically for its own sake, as
an end in itself of historical scholarship.

Some pragmatic solutions here are that historians can and should engage
other disciplines, understood not simply as departments but subfields
within historical scholarship as well as different theoretical
frameworks. Indeed, history is ideally suited to be truly integrative in
its analysis because it encompasses all of human experience and
tolerates (preferably: it thematizes) multiplicity and contradiction in
its explanations. This engagement should not take place simply in a
multidisciplinary way, in which different disciplines sit next to one
another in common conferences (like the GSA, with many panels still
being divided according to discipline) but speaking to one another in
order to clarify the different contributions of different disciplines
and in order to develop theories and epistemologies that account for the
complexity of everyday life. The GSA would do well to further promote
this kind of engagement, for instance, by rewarding explicitly
interdisciplinary panels with awards and publication opportunities. The
pragmatic challenge for critical theory lies in the fact that those
theories are often phrased in "heady" jargon that alienates ordinary
people (and self-styled "plain-talking" historians). In my brief tenure
as a public historian (when speaking to or writing for both academic and
non-academic audiences in a variety of venues: conferences, lectures,
radio interviews, books), I have repeatedly met the criticism that the
material, in effect, needs to be "dumbed down". Yet if we speak "simply"
in the "language of ordinary people", i. e. avoiding the metalanguage of
critical theory, we run the not insignificant risk of reiterating the
very myths of everyday life that it is our responsibility, as public
intellectuals, to question. After all, just because those myths persist
in our "present" (the very brief "right now") does not mean that they
were not part of our "past" (even our contemporary past). We should make
contradiction and dissonance (in which ordinary people often find the
"elbow room" sufficient for creative agency) into the subject (and the
form) of our scholarship: to move back and forth between the experiences
of ordinary people, accessible to all, and critical discussion of that
experience, both as fact-clarifying theories about the past as well as
concept-clarifying theories about humanity. Since this kind of critical
reflection about "underlying" truths is more speculative, more
politically charged, and more prone to challenge the myths to which our
audience and we remain committed, it tends to be unpopular-at least at
first. Particularly when speaking to lay audiences, however, I have
found this almost scholastic format more productive than a classic
scholarly talk, particularly when I also give them a chance to
"re-enact" historical situations in order to experience, on a more
fundamental level, the contradictions at stake in the story.

Another concrete proposal, in keeping with this very Roundtable, would
be to demystify the myth of individual authorship and the professional
aura surrounding the published article, and encourage scholars to share
their work in progress before submitting their completed publications to
journals or manuscript reviewers. Several models exist: the Midwest
German History Workshop, with its short, precirculated thought pieces on
specific topics; the Yale Agrarian Studies model for workshops, in which
the precirculated paper is discussed while the author watches in
silence. In contrast to classic lectures or panel presentations at
conferences which tend to reduce to defensive claims of individuals
(though lectures and panels also have their place in the public sphere),
these models place the ideas at the core of the discussion and can lead
to a clarification of ideas rather than the defensive rejection of
contrary notions. Yet such workshops are often locally funded, locally
attended, and therefore hardly viable means to combat oversimplification
on a mass scale. The challenge lies in reaping the rewards of these
models (the authenticity of face-to-face encounters, their focus on
ideas rather than egos) with the potential for mass distribution
afforded by postmodern information technologies. One possibility, and
this Roundtable is moving us in that direction, would be to offer offer
precirculated papers for public discussion at a roundtable or workshop
(with the author/s "silent" for most of the discussion), encouraging the
author/s to respond in a collaborative statement, and then disseminate
that statement for wider rounds of discussion on-line. Once revised,
such a group effort could not only produce powerful, rich new
scholarship but also the kind of intellectual relationships on which
future, excellent scholarship can arise. (I hope the readers of these
comments will take them in this spirit of a working draft of ideas.)

Drew Bergerson
University of Missouri at Kansas City

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