Stock Images

“All of us, even when we think we have noted every tiny detail, resort to set peices which have already been staged often enough by others.  We try to produce the reality, but the harder we try, the more we find the pictures that make up the stock-in-trade of the spectacle of history forcing themselves upon us [...] Our concern with history [...] is a concern with performed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered”

-WG Sebald, 2001 (Austerlitz.  New York: The Modern Library.  Pg 71-2.)

competing monsters

“…this man was not only irritating but ridiculous, with the particular ridiculousness of self-dramatizers and poor fools convinced they’ve been present at a decisive moment in history, when it’s common knowledge…that history, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.”

-Roberto Bolano, 2008 (2666.  New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux.  Pg 794)

Photographic certainty

“…my horror and my fascination as a child came from this: that there was a certainty that such a thing had existed: not a question of exactitude, but of reality: the historian was no longer the mediator, slavery was given without mediation, the fact was established without method.”

-Roland Barthes, 1980 (Camera Lucida.  New York: Hill & Wang.  Pg 80)

Colonial-Style

“Under the colonial regime, anything may be done for a loaf of bread or a miserable sheep.  The relations of man with matter, withing the world outside and with history are in the colonial period simply relations with food.  For a colonized man, in a contest of oppresion like that of Algeria, living does not mean embodying moral values or taking his place in the coherent and fruitful development of the world.  To live means to keep on existing.  Every date is a victory: not the result of work, but a victory felt as a triumph of life.”

-Frantz Fanon, 1963 (The Wretched of the Earth.  Middelsex, UK: Penguin.  Pg. 249)

On the Need to Forget

“Perhaps too much value has is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking.  Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value, in and of itself.  Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead…But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of a collective history.  there is simply too much injustice in the world…To make peace is to forget.  To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.

If the goal is having some space in which to live one’s own life, then it is desirable that the account of specific injustices dissolve into a more general understanding that human beings everywhere do terrible things to one another.”

-Susan Sontag, 2003 (Regarding the Pain of Others.  New York: Penguin.  Pg. 103)

problematization

“But what I am attempting to do as a historican of thought is something different.  I am trying to analyze the way institutions, practices, habits, and behavior become a problem for people who behave in specific sorts of ways, who have certain types of habits, who engage in certain kinds of practices, and who put to work specific kinds of institutions…The history of thought is the analysis of of the way an unproblematic field of experience, or a set of practices, which were accepted without question, which were familiar and ’silent,’ out of discussion, becomes a problem, raises discussion and debate, incites new reactions, and induces a crisis in the previously silent behavior, habits, practices, and institutions.  The history of thought, understood in this way, is the history of the way people begin to take care of something, of the way they become anxious about this or that”

-Michel Foucault, 1983 (Fearless Speech.  Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).  Pg. 74)

Another tack

“I start from another tack: from the premise that these discrepant stories provide ethnographic entry into the confused space in which people lived, to the fragmented and incomplete knowledge on which they relied, and to the ill-formed and inept responses that knowledge engendered.  Coherence is seductive for narrative form, but disparties are ethnographically more compellingly powerful.”

-Ann Stoler, 2008 (Along the Archival Grain.  Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.  Pg 185.)

Fail

“Those historians who draw a firm line between history and philosophy of history fail to recognize that every historical discourse contains within it a full-blown, if only implicit, philosophy of history.”

Hayden White, 1985 (“Fictions of Factual Representations” Tropics of Discourse.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.  Pg 126-7)

Emergency history

“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency; and our position in the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve. Not the least reason that the latter has a chance is that its opponents, in the name of progress, greet it as a historical norm. – The astonishment that the things we are experiencing in the 20th century are “still” possible is by no means philosophical. It is not the beginning of knowledge, unless it would be the knowledge that the conception of history on which it rests is untenable.”

-Walter Benjamin, 1940 (‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’)

Surprise!

“If it is really true…that what makes us human is above all our capacity to make history, and if history consists of actions that could not have been predicted beforehand, then that would mean that the fundamental measure of our humanity lies in what we cannot know about each other. To recognize another person as human would then be to recognize the limits of one’s possible knowledge of them. Their humanity is inseparable from their capacity to surprise us”

-David Graeber, 2007 (Lost People.  Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.  Pg 388)

Critical Pens

“The echo is heard immediately: but always as a ‘critique’…The work never produces an effect but only another’ critique ; and the critique itself produces no effect either, but again only a further critique…At bottom, however, everything remains as it was…The historical culture of our critics will no longer permit any effect at all in the proper sense, that is an effect on life and action…But their critical pens never cease to flow, for the have lost control of them, and instead of directing them are directed by them.  It is precisely in this immoderation of its critical outpourings…that the modern personality betrays its weakness”

-Friedrich Nietzsche, 1874 (“On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” Untimely Meditations.  Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. 1983)
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