Current Issue

THE OPENING OF HISTORICAL FUTURES

ZOLTÁN BOLDIZSÁR SIMON & MAREK TAMM

With a touch of irony, the project-closing piece of the “Historical Futures” collective research endeavor pulls together the threads of its four years of explorative work by showcasing an opening of historical futures. Against the persisting myth of the closure of the future in contemporary societies, it claims that, as long as the future remains contested by virtue of the multiplicity of historical futures that societal practices and discourses entail or advocate, there can be no closure of the future. In support of this claim, the project-closing piece outlines the reasons why the future is more radically open than ever and surveys the findings of the project contributions with the frame provided by the contemporary opening of historical futures. Read more →

INVENTING THE ALPHABET: THE TECHNOLOGIES OF KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION

JOHANNA DRUCKER

The Ninth History and Theory Lecture. Read more →

THE EYE AND THE MIND: MARY CHEVES WEST PERKY, IMAGINATIVE PHENOMENOLOGY, AND THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF REVERSE HALLUCINATION

D. GRAHAM BURNETT

Revisiting the remarkable experimental work of the pioneering early twentieth-century psychologist Mary Cheves West Perky (1875–1940), this article argues for the historiographical significance of her counterintuitive findings concerning the human imagination and the phenomenon of “reverse hallucination.” By means of an exhaustive and forensic archival inquiry, this article reconstructs Perky's heretofore (essentially) unknown biography . . . Read more →

LANGUAGE—HISTORY—PRESENCE

LUIGI ALONZI

This article deals with the use of language in historiography and with this usage's implications for the conception of history and the historiographical operation/practice. Whereas theorists of “presence” believe that “presence” and “reality” can be grasped in spoken language and written texts, thus generally considering them as a medium that enables access to a “reality” that lies beyond texts and language, I argue that language and texts should themselves be considered as a “reality.” We need to distinguish the process of “presentification” performed by words from the presence of language as a lexical and physical reality . . . Read more →

VALIDATING HISTORICAL INTERPRETATIONS: AN APPROACH FROM CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

LAWRENCE ROSEN

Historians and anthropologists share a common problem of setting criteria for the validation of their interpretations. While many features are shared and explicit—for example, that a full range of data needs to be considered and that information should be reliably sourced—the actual criteria for assessing supportable interpretations are frequently left unexamined. Following consideration of schemes that have been put forth for validating interpretation in literature, this article considers the criteria applied to the history of an Indonesian town and those employed when scholars have revisited the site of a predecessor's research. . . . Read more →

PAINTING HISTORY: PICTURE, WITNESS, AND ANCIENT HISTORIOGRAPHY

LUUK DE BOER

This article treats an analogy that is used persistently in the history of historiography: the equation of historiography with painting and the identification of the historiographer with the painter. In examining the conceptual stakes of this (auto)identification, the article mobilizes the analogy in order to explore larger issues of historical theory and, through the prism of historical painting, reflects on the problem of representation and narrativist approaches to history as text. . . . Read more →

IF YOU COULD READ MY MIND: ON THE HISTORY OF MIND AND OTHER MATTERS

CHRIS LORENZ

Review of The Primacy of Method in Historical Research: Philosophy of History and the Perspective of Meaning, by Jonas Ahlskog (New York: Routledge, 2021).

In The Primacy of Method in Historical Research: Philosophy of History and the Perspective of Meaning, Jonas Ahlskog presents a critical and lucid engagement with contemporary philosophies of history and makes a sustained case for a return to the ideas of history and social science as developed by R. G. Collingwood and Peter Winch. What philosophy needs again is, first, a recognition of the “primacy of method”—that is, the insight that what one knows about reality depends on how one knows it. Second, philosophers need to take “the duality of method” seriously again and to recognize that the modes of explanation in the human sciences and the natural sciences are categorically different from each other—especially now that this difference has been blurred in recent debates about the Anthropocene. . . . Read more →

WHAT ARE “TEMPORALITIES” IN HISTORY?

LUCIAN HÖLSCHER

Review of Time and Power: Visions of History in German Politics, from the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich, by Christopher Clark (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).

The question of which “temporalities” underpinned historical processes in the past has increasingly become the focus of historical interest in recent years. In his brilliantly written study of Prussian history, Time and Power: Visions of History in German Politics, from the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich, Christopher Clark attempts to answer this question by turning to four Prussian statesmen and politicians who each followed different temporalities in their private and public lives. The benefit of his study lies not least in a better understanding of the concept of “temporality” and its significance for historical processes. . . . Read more →

NARRATIVITY, EXPERIENCE, AND MEANING

OVIDIU STANCIU

Review of Historia fallida, by Kalle Pihlainen, translated by Rodrigo Zamorano (Buenos Aires: Palinodia, 2023).

This review essay aims to reconstruct the main tenets of the “narrative constructivist” position defended by Kalle Pihlainen in his book titled Historia fallida and to lay out some of the ambiguities this position generates. I begin by exposing the core commitments underwriting this theoretical project and insist upon the centrality of the distinction between constructivism and constructionism and upon the arguments he advances against the contemporary approaches in the theory of history that advocate the idea of an experience or a presence of the past. Then, I outline the criticism he levels against the understanding of historians’ work as a “conversation with the past” and highlight that, on Pihlainen's account, a responsible historical enterprise must necessarily assume the unavailability of the past and, hence, the ontological distinction between the present and the past. In the final part of the essay, I formulate three interrogations with regard to the overall orientation of this project. . . . Read more →

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