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Monday, November 25, 2013

Is historicism a problematic position?

...because the more and more that I look at works that in some way are about global capitalism, the more and more I cant stop thinking about Borges version of pascals sphere, and his conjecture that all work is but a contribution to the "universal history" consisting only of the history of a few metaphors.



 

3 comments:

  1. It is if you're a strict Marxist, but theres something so mythically pleasurable when an artwork aestheticizes the present within the continuum of history

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  2. Ok so I thought about this and I think the emphasis of the Borges story is not to historicise in such a way as to reduce history, but to emphasise particularity through difference. This might be similar to Deleuze's reading of Eternal Return. So as an artistic strategy, especially in relation to making linkages (historical or formal), maybe the political way to do so is to somewhat emphasise difference and particularity through contradistinction. What was absolute for Lucretius, liberation for Bruno, was a labyrinth and abyss for Pascal. Without mentioning particular artists, I then run into political opposition to those works that reduce all the specificity of history to a indistinguishable pile of ruins (surely a poor reading of Benjamin).

    So maybe I see myself as trying to chart the movement from say, “that intellectual sphere, whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere, which we call God,” to “that economic sphere, whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere, which we call the Economy.”

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  3. That's really '

    great...I'd only add 'global economy

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