roachboy

modern history--you know, history in the modern period, capitalist-style rationalized history, professionalized as a "science"--relies almost entirely on documents--all the more the further back in time you go. this is not open to dispute: it's simply how the form operates.
so this distinction between "what happened" and "what people write" is a kind of throwback. like a serious one.

anyone who is not an idiot (and many are idiots, trust me) who does history knows that something written down is more often than not problematic, and much of (to my mind) the fun of doing history lay in tinkering with the status and meaning of documents--and playing around with the status of this idea of "the document"--and playing with the conceptual frameworks that let you talk about history at all--but i digress---so anyone who writes a history is going to be entirely aware that written=written not that written=definitive or "true" because it is written.

this is linked to the importance of argument and procedures for building them in a piece of historical writing--the argument and procedures generate a distance from particular pieces of writing (necessary for critical appraisal, however that runs) and the integration of an interpretation of these pieces of writing back into an image of the world or what happened in the world or in that particular region of social being at that particular time.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite