Continued from Parts 1 and 2
This is exactly why history as critical practice is so crucial. Without a relationship to the past (historicity) we assume things like culture are natural, immutable. Something which is the product of history is naturalized as the eternal human condition and then used to justify oppressive practices, as if it is in the nature of people of colour, women, and non-Western peoples to be dominated. Marx brought this to our attention when he unmasked bourgeois man masquerading as universal man. Historicity, then, is a means of recognizing alterity. As Spivak points out, history involves the "transgression of the logical by the historical-geographical." It introduces the problem of difference into the philosophical master narrative, requiring us to be sceptical of claims to timeless truths. This opens up the possibility of changing our present and imagining a very different future. Likewise, Nietzsche's critical history means the prospect of putting a knife to the roots of an injustice, "a privilege, a caste, a dynasty." Ironically critical history lets us be in the present by loosening the hold of the past, "to shatter and dissolve something to enable [us] to live."
The difficulty is how to act without the script, without slotting our story into its place in the grand master narrative. This is more important than ever in our supposed postcolonial world. Despite decolonization and liberation struggles, the hierarchies between the West and the rest of the world are perpetuated; indeed the disparities grow wider. HIV/AIDS, conflicts and intractable poverty prompt some to say the postcolonial project has failed. Trying to follow the blueprint the West has laid out does not seem to be an option, but neither does looking backwards. Time moves forwards so there is no choice about whether or not to progress, but maybe progress must not be unilinear. Maybe, as Nandy suggests, there are alternative universalities. If the universals of the West had to so distort the difference they encountered in order to include it, are they really universal? Instead of othering difference in order to force it to fit into the universals, can we modify the universals to truly accommodate difference? In other words, can we change the script?
According to Spivak's reading, Marx was already dealing with these concerns in his critique of the intending subject. Even the capitalist, in whom we usually see dominance, power and agency, is just an instrument of capital: "capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will." If both those who dominate and those who are dominated are but playing a part, following a script, where is there any room for responsibility, agency, change? Capital may be the historical agent in Marx's historicism, but it is not alive. Indeed any script is dead without actors to breathe life into the part. It cannot function without people, humans to play the part: "the human is the living element that can be instrumental in animating (or operating) inscriptions." A script is not entirely deterministic. If there is no escape from the script, can we perform it creatively?
In some ways, this is what people are doing all the time in their everydayness, when they, "collectively attempt to make their own history as they act (in the most robust sense of agency) a part they have not chosen, in a script that has as its task to keep them silent and invisible." (Yup, her again) Chakrabarty shows us that despite how hard the British worked to enumerate and measure fixed, impermeable and discrete communities, Indians still inhabit fuzzy communities: "In their everyday lives, in negotiating the spheres of friendship and kinship, say, Indians, like human beings everywhere, are comfortable with the indeterminacies of ethnic identities." This is part of what he means by the term History 2. There are ways of being in the world that cannot be explained by even the most rigorous history of capital. All the everyday practices that cannot be captured by scripts and identities are not necessarily subject to temporizing. Because it is outside its logic, History 2 is not the Other of capital. History 2 is its limits, disrupting its totalizing force. While historicism tries to "subjugate or destroy the multiple possibilities that belong to History 2," it cannot complete the "subordination of History 2s to the logical of capital."
In a sense History 2 is simply an attempt to name the radical alterity of the past. The past is often treated as the other of the present, as if it can be captured, but in truth it escapes our grasp. The infinite fullness and diversity of the vanishing present cannot be held onto, preserved, as the antiquarian would desire. It slips through our fingers. We can never capture the past in its rich livingness; we cannot make it present. Neither can we cram it into a single master narrative, to possess its essence or meaning. Its teeming complexity will overflow even the grandest monumental account.
We can never know everything that happened in the past – Nietzsche's superhistorical perspective notwithstanding – but neither can we be outside of history. Though the past has passed, its traces remain in the present. If I have a broken leg, it is because last week's event – say, falling out of a tree – is in some way present today. There is no standpoint outside of history, outside of human experience. As temporal beings, we are imperfect, finite, embedded in a particular history and culture. This contingency of our existence, rather than discouraging, is actually cause for hope. If contingent, it can be created otherwise. We can destabilize history's all-knowing narratives of power by starting with the limits. This opens new vistas. An imaginative source for re-presentation, history can be transformative. This is history in service of life.
BTW, I put the points I consider most important in bold - is it helpful or distracting?
Friday, August 1, 2008
(08.01.08) Recommends:
Admitting That Driving In Los Angeles, Though We're Convinced It's Giving Us Ulcers, Still Occassionally Makes Us Happy.
Those who do not live or spend a significant amount of time in Hollywood probably think of it as a very glitzy and glamorous place. And there are certainly places in Hollywood -- e.g., the area around Hollywood Blvd. and Highland Ave. -- that give off what one might presume to be the Hollywood Feel (even though we imagine when people think they're thinking of Hollywood they're probably actually thinking of either Beverly Hills or the Sunset Strip in the incorporated city of West Hollywood, neither of which are Hollywood The District). So a dirty local secret is that Hollywood - the Physical District as opposed to Hollywood - the Idea is, not necessarily dirty, but very utilitarian, with lots of non-descript big box buildings that house the sets and stages that create the glitzy and glamorous images. Hollywood is where the sausage is made and we're told from the time we're Very Young that one need not see where the sausage is made.
The point of this story is that often times we find ourselves driving around Hollywood, in the shadows of cavernous yet unmarked buildings and wondering what is going on inside. And then other times we find ourselves driving around Hollywood, stopped by a red light at the intersection of Bronson Ave. and Santa Monica Blvd. only to turn our heads to see these gigantic tiki head statues. There's usually about a dozen of them. Just lined up neatly along the side of the road. As if it's completely normal to see gigantic tiki heads on the way to work. "There's the neighborhood coffee shop, newsstand, tiki head statues." With little tiki head statue seat belts (which are supposed to defy inertia but we have our doubts).
We see these once or twice a week. Whenever we see them we think of the episodes of the Brady Bunch when the family goes to Hawaii. For some reason we also always think of the Price is Right. But mostly they just always cause us to giggle -- partly because they're gigantic and funny looking, partly because it reminds us that we're just country folk from Kansas now living among tiki-heads and weirdos in Hollywood.
Those who do not live or spend a significant amount of time in Hollywood probably think of it as a very glitzy and glamorous place. And there are certainly places in Hollywood -- e.g., the area around Hollywood Blvd. and Highland Ave. -- that give off what one might presume to be the Hollywood Feel (even though we imagine when people think they're thinking of Hollywood they're probably actually thinking of either Beverly Hills or the Sunset Strip in the incorporated city of West Hollywood, neither of which are Hollywood The District). So a dirty local secret is that Hollywood - the Physical District as opposed to Hollywood - the Idea is, not necessarily dirty, but very utilitarian, with lots of non-descript big box buildings that house the sets and stages that create the glitzy and glamorous images. Hollywood is where the sausage is made and we're told from the time we're Very Young that one need not see where the sausage is made.
The point of this story is that often times we find ourselves driving around Hollywood, in the shadows of cavernous yet unmarked buildings and wondering what is going on inside. And then other times we find ourselves driving around Hollywood, stopped by a red light at the intersection of Bronson Ave. and Santa Monica Blvd. only to turn our heads to see these gigantic tiki head statues. There's usually about a dozen of them. Just lined up neatly along the side of the road. As if it's completely normal to see gigantic tiki heads on the way to work. "There's the neighborhood coffee shop, newsstand, tiki head statues." With little tiki head statue seat belts (which are supposed to defy inertia but we have our doubts).
We see these once or twice a week. Whenever we see them we think of the episodes of the Brady Bunch when the family goes to Hawaii. For some reason we also always think of the Price is Right. But mostly they just always cause us to giggle -- partly because they're gigantic and funny looking, partly because it reminds us that we're just country folk from Kansas now living among tiki-heads and weirdos in Hollywood.
Rotaliana - Drink
Drink F1
De design simples, conico, em forma de calice iluminado. Com estrutura cromada ou de metal pintado, com regulador de intensidade, disponivel em varias cores. Entrega imediata.
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