On Thu, 30 May 1996, Joe Cronin wrote:
> Am i missing
> something - should I be looking "beyond the event"? Does he
> not care what factors contribute to the historiocal shifts
> in discursive practices which he so often describes?
>
If you're looking for an architectonic impetus or a teleological outcome
by which the 'factors that contribute to historical shifts' might be
distinguished, then the answer is probably no -- neither archaeology, nor
geneology are concerned with such formations. But in a more general
sense, or maybe it a more specific sense, the factors which contribute to
historical shifts are precisely what archaeology and geneology are
concerned with. But if this is the case then events are not things which
can be revealed by theory, they are not occurences which have been set
irrevocably within the fabric of time, and temporality does not compose
an absolute barrier which would seperate the historian from history in
the manner in which subject and object become seperated from one another
in the Cartesian cogito. Rather, archaeology and geneology _are_ events,
they are an activity which the objects of examination can be delimited but
never clearly seperated from the analysis which enfolds them. If you
will, archaeology and geneology are not an historical theory but an
historical practice -- they do not treat events as static objects, but as
the site of a dynamic interchange.
At least this is the only way that I can make any sense of the notion of
the history of the present. I suppose that such a statement could be
applied to Ranke, but that distinctly not what's going on here.
Archaeology and geneology are not attempt to span the distance between the
past and the present, forcing the past to reveal itself in all its
minutia, rather they attempt activate the present as history, which at
the same time would be to make history present.
Flannon