Archive for April, 2004
Keith told me to:
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
From a book called What is History Now? by David Cannadine
April 16th, 2004“Without time there is no history, but what sort of time is the time of history, and more specifically of social history?”
‘In Historians view, texts were arbitrary assemblages of words that themselves had come into being only through an arbitrary process of human invention. Each time we read a text, therefore, we put the meaning into it ourselves. So it was with the historian also. Thus what historians wrote was their own invention and not a true or objective representation of past reality, which was in essence irrecoverable’
or
the loss of history. As Baudrillard puts it in “History: A Retro Scenario,” “History is our lost referential, that is to say our myth.” He goes on to say that “The great event of this period, the great trauma, is this decline of strong referentials, these death pangs of the real and of the rational that open onto an age of simulation”
or
“Television, film, and the internet separate us from the real even as they seek to reproduce it more fully or faithfully: “The hyperreality of communication and of meaning. More real than real, that is how the real is abolished”
Sources:
Jean Baudrillard
What is History Now Edited by David Cannadine
Bugger this - I’m off for the Easter holidays, back home to the garden of England (or new ‘Gateway to Europe’) to see the folks and sister. At least the satan of train operators aren’t running things any more.
I am going to Sittingbourne (The Meaning Of Liff: (n.) One of those conversations where both people are waiting for the other one to shut up so they can get on with their bit.)
Bye
April 8th, 2004