Pynchon's "muse" (was ...

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> ----------
> >From: Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
> >
> 
> > History is something that belongs to the past and the past
> > is the time before the present.
> 
> This is just semantics. History as text and "the past" are different
> propositions altogether.

Sure, semantics. As are your "propositions." 

Fun, fun, fun Malign, here we go....Why claim that some
Revolution or Turn, some paradigm shift is at hand? Why add
"Post" to Modern and set up another agon? Why put it all on
the Moderns and call ourselves the Postmoderns? Why all
these semantic schemata, conceptual contraptions,
unstructured structures, ontological relativity's,
philosophical styles, meta-philosophical styles,
retro-hermeneutics, and so on?  



> If two historians disagree about what happened, or about why it happened,
> then *at least* one of them is writing something which might also be called
> "fiction", isn't she?
> 
> best


Why? 

Do you claim that the past is one and therefore only one
history of that one  past  can be history while all others
must be fictions? You say, that if two authors write
different histories, different in either what that claim 
happened or why that *at least* one version of the past or
one written history  must be fiction, but you don't mean to
say that do you? 


My guess is that implicit in your semantics is the notion
that all "history as text" is fiction. I hardly think that
you would be arguing that the past is one and therefore all
accounts of the past should be the same. I have only given
this a little thought but my own common sense tells me that
the past is one, but we have many histories of that one past
and that all attempts to reconcile those different histories
by refuting all others is not destined to succeed. We might
as well stop playing around with semantics, like "history as
text" and "fiction as history" and "history as fiction" and
admit that history belongs to the past and the past is the
time before the present and that the past admits of more
than one valid formulation and that the reason for this fact
is to be discovered not in the semantic juggling of terms or
the collapsing of conventions  of thought  but in the nature
of thought itself. If two people disagree about the past,
what happened and why, must one be fiction and one history? 
Must all differences about the past be considered
substantive and resoluble by an appeal to an "either or"
formulation or logic and the facts? You seem to be admitting
that history, like fiction is a product arbitrary and
conventional, but refusing to appreciate the fact that this
is not simply a matter of who gets to say what about the
past and what they say, and what causes they attribute to
the events they choose to include, but a noetic quality:
arbitrary and conventional,   like thought itself.  

The problem as I see it, is not about fiction being history
or the other way round, but communication across and between
different theoretical formulations.  Rather than collapsing
all the so called rigid boundaries by renaming everything
with quotation marks, i.e., "history as fiction," and
setting up agons, like the one you started with--if two
historian don't agree at least one might be said to be
writing fiction--why not recognize the urgent need to toss
the jargon and semantics and  language games out in the
interest of communication so that achievements made possible
by one framework or formulation may be incorporated in
another. 

Pluralism works, but even the Sophists must have a place at
the table. The Sophists like Agons and they are the measure
of all things and the world is their world and they are the
great creators.  

Malign wrote: 


"I fear the next stop in this discussion to be the "history
is a fiction" 
argument, which can be fun and all but ..."