Saturday, February 26, 2005

oblivia technica

Via Allied, wood s lot: Forgotten work:



Via AKMA: The work of forgetting:
Memory, History, Forgetting - Ricoeur: Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France's role in North Africa stand distantly behind?...

Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering...

4 Comments:

Blogger Kombinat! said...

The forgetting of foregetting has been creeping up on me. I live in a culture where forgetting is a given unless heavily propped up by advertising. - The first thought hit me while reading your post is that it seems the history exists strong in hour bones when we live by nonlinearity of linearity. We relate to history as linear events but our bones know the world by nonlinear relationship to linear events. - not sure if I make sense here. Imagine that looking at today's world we can in fact relate to it pulling historical events as they occured linearly yet we mix them to cook up a non linear view. It's like picking linear events of history as raw ingredients and cooking up a soup which has all parts in it as we were adding them yet tastes completely non linear.

Perhaps the challenge is that we hardly cookk any more. We get meals prepared for us by someone else and we never check what ingredients went into making it.

I hate this peasant food analogy but I think that ingredients are so important or we forget about them when we are fed ready made meals.

Done rumbling.
Thanks for writing.

3/03/2005 12:49 PM  
Blogger Tom Matrullo said...

Thanks K! - I went looking for the cite in Benjamin where he talks about fragments and how they explode history. Of course that led to a somewhat more dense articulation of the idea via other authors, part of which reads:

Between the moment and the monument, the narration of historical structures the mature Mandelstam calls culture, and which Agamben calls the Marxist concept of history, exists the explosion, the rupture, the break with the past that overcomes the illusion of the continuum and its timepoints, causalities, laws, as though history behaved like a language, whose transformations are imperceptible and which occur across an expanse of time historical materialism interprets as widely as the rise and fall of civilizations and as narrowly as the objective struggles for political power at specific conjunctures within an organized framework of practical and theoretical activity.

“The original cohesion of poetry and politics in our culture was sanctioned from the very start by the fact that Aristotle's treatment of music is contained in the Politics, and that Plato's themes of poetry and art are to be found in the Republic; it is therefore a matter beyond dispute. The question is not so much whether poetry has any bearing on politics, but whether politics remains equal to its original cohesion with poetry.
From here - which bears reading in full. More on this to come I hope -

3/04/2005 8:44 AM  
Blogger Kombinat! said...

Shit, This is rich. Thanks for the link. I sent a quote to the EGR gang.

Time. I guess all revolutions are designed to conquer the nature of Time, and therefore History as Past-Future. I love this sentence "The subject of History is State" - wow.

So little Time to read it all.

3/04/2005 11:37 AM  
Blogger Tom Matrullo said...

yes. we have to kill Time.

"...just imagine an airplane (ignoring the technical impossibility) which in full flight constructs and launches another machine. Furthermore, in the same way, this flying machine, while fully absorbed in its own flight, still manages to assemble and launch yet a third machine. To make my proposed comparison more precise and helpful, I will add that the production and launching of these technically unthinkable new machines which are tossed off in mid-flight are not secondary or extraneous functions of the plane which is in motion, but rather comprise a most essential attribute and safety to no less a degree than its properly operating rudder or the regular functioning of its engine.”

Magee is in Lodz, it seems -

http://hypobololemaioi.com/bio/bio1.html

3/04/2005 12:41 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home