After the Fall (was Re: religious crackpots in public life)

kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca
Tue Jul 11 13:04:18 PDT 2000


Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:


> >That's exactly it. The "lost" object was never possessed. It is imagined.


> Why don't we leave it at that? It is no "transhistorically human"
characteristic to obsess over the object that gets retroactively posited as "lost" but was never there to begin with.

I didn't claim it was transhistorical, I claimed it to be constitutive of subjectivity. From your reading, simply claiming that human beings are alive is transhistorical. If that's the case - transhistoricize me!


> For instance, the "loss of childhood innocence" trope is a post-Romantic
business, not a transhistorical one. Ever read Phillipe Aries?

Intimately (Aries is one of my favourite theorists - _western attitudes towards death_ is one of the most important thanatological texts). I was only using popular expressions to capture an idea, not to express the whole truth nothing but the truth.


> ***** Phillipe Aries' contention that medieval society lacked the
> idea of childhood stimulated the historical study of children.

Doesn't this contribute to my point?!? "Childhood" is invented to conceal the a specific social-historical lack. Ie - childhood is an imaginary category which has become near foundational for 'western' society --> from voting, drinking, driving and prosecution.


> Historicize The Thing!

Of corset! [diva victoria]

Kell wrote:


> appeal to the rhetorical strategy: "look! see how it speaks to our cultural
expressions. look there and here and over there. lacan is getting at the same experiences as the paleolithic wall carving, the figures etched in the pottery, the legends, the rennaissance fairy tales, the 20th c film.... SEE. it's got to be true!"


> don't sit well with me, particularly when it's coming from someone who
despises Jung!

I'm stunned, Yoshie and Kell seem to agree in their disagreement with me - that I'm guilty of promoting trans/a/non-historical analyses. As much as I'd like for them to both be correct, and sign a treaty of reciprocity and agreement, both attribute to me a mistaken premise and a false conclusion.

The mistaken premise being that I'm talking about universal structures of world-historical cognition. I'm not. I'm talking about the specific ways in which subjectivity has been conceived in very specific enlightenment traditions. Furthermore, I'm not claiming my inspid illustrations are "true for everyone everywhere." Such plasicity would be nonsense. The structure of 'western' subjectivity is of a specific sort and the analytic model I'm drawing on is a response to these conceptions. At best I'm providing a discourse through which we might try to think through powerful representations and images in the culture in which we are situated. My frame of reference isn't objectivistic, it's invertentionist.

Regarding the false conclusion, that these kinds of analyses are ahistorical. I have a feeling that it won't matter what I write, but here goes:

Researching history is a bit like a detective novel, you know the kind, where everyone knows a murder has been committed but no one can find the body... well... history is like that. We all know (in the most profound epistemological sense) "history happens" but we don't have the body, we've got symptoms, clues or excesses. So we create a body (representations) in its (ultimate) absence. In doing so we occilate around the missing body by taking up a variety of positions (historian, sociologist, proletariat and so on) in relation to its absence. Each of these positions is imagined. In the worse cases, we imagine ourselves to be the body of history looking outward (historicism, objectivism, positivism). We can ask ourselves whether or not any of these perspectives make a difference in our ability to represent the past. But there is a hidden paradox in the question. The question: can we represent the past assumes that there is a Past to represent - but that's precisely the problem! (if we take the question literally: then we end up with a kind of theoretical paranoia --> History [capital H] is hiding on me!). The smuggled premise here seems to be that there is a Past (capital P) that we can or can't get at through studying "history." However, there is no Past, that's the dilemma (in Lacanian terms: History is Real). The body does not exist (if existence is "for us"). The more appropriate question might be: to what extend can contingency ("our clues") become aware of itself withoult losing sight of the fact that this insight itself is still contingent? What this means, essentially, is that we recreate the semblance (unity) of the past through its pieces. This is we generally call meaning - which denotes an objective absence (ie. meaning does not exist, it is always imagined, we might say meaning is always nonobjectively present in language). In short --> history is imagined, but our imagining of history is dependent upon clues.

Now, I'm pretty sure someone is thinking: so Ken, history is all imagined, right? So it doesn't exist? Reality doesn't exist? Eh? Huh? What?

That's not what I'm saying. The "stuff" of history is *material* - things, objects, objective reality. This "stuff" is what makes the creation of meaning possible (and necessary). We don't have clues without material - and in the production of meaning there is always an excess: meaning itself is *transformed* into the materiality of history (what we think / do about the clues becomes the missing body of history). We write about the missing body, we shape our lives by it, but we also put "ideas" into material (why are ceilings the height that they are? why do we have men's and women's washrooms?). In a way, our very seach for the missing body *is* the body of history. The reason we can't find it is because it is us! (this is, I think, what it means to be embedded and embodied / historically effected).

And, so as to avoid the criticism that will come, THIS SAYS NOTHING. There, now I can't be accused of anything more than being a blathering idiot.

ken

"Memory... is just dead men making trouble" - Cowboy Junkies



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