The First Person Inversion: Conscious Engagement and the Practical Past

Abstract

Hayden White’s work has underlined that a researcher’s choice of sources, questions, epistemological frameworks and modes of representations are always already imbued with a subjective excess. If we accept this position it means that claims for objectivity are simply untenable. In the following essay, I argue for replacing this impossible demand for detachment with a difficult but nonetheless more feasible (and ethical) conscious engagement. The lynchpin of this approach is that the historian treat the past as though it were present — selecting for the focal point of this inversion the very locus at which s/he subjectively and existentially feels the past to be closest and most pressing (Benjamin’s ‘moment of danger’). This is what I am calling the ‘first person inversion’. By treating this (unpleasant and dangerous) past as present a historian might be able to consciously fall into the past while retaining a kernel of critical consciousness which is lost in the submersion constitutive of unconscious engagement.