The Post-Marxist Social History of Science of Morris Berman, Pt. 3 April 21, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Book Club.Tags: David Gooding, Geoffrey Cantor, Herbert Marcuse, Joseph Priestley, L. Pearce Williams, Michael Faraday, Morris Berman, Simon Schaffer, Trevor Levere, William Thomas Brande
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This post continues Pt. 2. (Or, return to Pt. 1)
At the beginning of his preface to his book on the early years of the Royal Institution, Morris Berman explicitly states that his aim is to use history “to ask … significant questions regarding the nature and function of science in industrial society” (xi). At the end of Pt. 2, I wrote that I believe we are secure insofar as we say that “science” and “reason” were “important cultural touchstones” in 19th-century Britain.
What I meant by a touchstone is that claiming that an explanation of something was “scientific” or that a proposed plan of action was “reasonable” would have been a means of associating the explanation or plan with a high status. (These are of course still touchstones, although my impression is their present use in public discourse carries less of a sense of general virtue.) However, given the number of such touchstones any society has — many of them contradictory — and given the lack of any control over the use of such touchstones, to say that some concept was a touchstone is not to say much at all. Could, for example, an explanation deemed “scientific” trump an assessment of a plan as “unfair”? It is not clear to me that we can say anything about the interplay of these concepts that would consistently describe social and political action, or even rhetoric in 19th-century Britain.
The Post-Marxist Social History of Science of Morris Berman, Pt. 2 April 19, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Cult of Invisibility, EWP Book Club.Tags: Charles Lyell, Clifford Geertz, E. P. Thompson, Erik Erikson, Herbert Marcuse, Karl Mannheim, Michael Faraday, Morris Berman, Oskar Kokoschka, Theodore Roszak, Viktor Frankl, William Thomas Brande
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This post continues Pt. 1 without re-introduction
What I like to call the “cult of invisibility” was a staple of Marxist analysis, with its constraining socio-economic structures and its psychology of false consciousness. Invisible constraints of this sort are taken to render certain classes of actors in some sense powerless and ineffectual — their invisibility or silence or inability to articulate or perhaps even feel their own plight explains a failure of something to happen, such as the ascendancy of the working class.
In addition, historians often connect such invisible constraints to a historiographical prejudice, whereby the persistence of psychological and intellectual constraints through history restricts present ideas about what sorts of things constitute proper history, which renders certain aspects of the past systematically invisible to historical memory. This second, historiographical form of invisibility establishes a social need for the services of the critically trained historian who can identify invisible prejudices, recover systematically concealed aspects of history, and make them more generally known, possibly helping to overcome the forces of invisibility in our own time. E. P. Thompson’s (1924-1993) The Making of the English Working Class (1963) is probably the key work in this tradition.
The cult of invisibility not only survives, but thrives in the transition to post-Marxist historiographical analysis — a transition in which Thompson’s work was arguably instrumental. In Morris Berman’s book on the Royal Institution (RI), the role of science as a cultural force that creates invisibility is emphasized. His major demonstration of this point comes in his extended analysis of Michael Faraday’s (and, incidentally, Charles Lyell‘s) role in the investigation verdict that there was no fault in the 1844 Haswell coal mine explosion, which had killed 94 mine workers including young boys (pp. 179-180): (more…)
Ether Wave Propaganda 