Tonight in class we had to go around the room and give a two minute little thing about what our paper topics for the class are. Everyone was going, and they all had these topics I would never have thought of doing, but which sounded so simple and right for the kind of class this is. I’m stressing about how I’m going to explain my topic. My turn comes I get up there and this is roughly what I say. “I’m writing um about the digital archive…….. and um how historians will, um, you know, um doing historical stuff with it……. it’s really theoretical, and um, it’s about historians and epistemology, um, i mean truth, no um well maybe contexts, and um, and space and…… um the way that you know, um, provenance is affected. Um, yeah that’s what I’m writing on.”
I’m so fucking stupid. I can’t say I was embarrassed, just dumbstruck at what the fuck is wrong with me. Instead of just coming up with some archive and writing a little paper about what they are doing, and why something or other is interesting, I have to think that a good topic would be the role of the historian in an archive and the epistemological ramifications of meeting the past as an other through the archive, and running this up against what exactly is meant by the archive and the moving of something from the private sphere into the public.
Whose brain works like that? What inspired me to mash up a small part of Derrida into Levinas, and then want to top it off some with Benjamin (which isn’t even in this toned down ‘thesis’), and then run it all through a critique of instrumental reason and the culture industry? Because god fucking forbid I leave Adorno and Horkheimer out of my mental masturbation. What is it that stops me from thinking like a normal person, maybe keeping these thoughts safely tucked away in my head for when I feel like playing philosophical games with myself, and do something that isn’t trying to smash everything apart with theory? I’m an idiot.
One Comment
Hi. Don’t know you, but tripped on this entry. Just wanted to say… I don’t see anything wrong with the way you described your thinking. Maybe this means there’s something wrong with me, too, but all I heard was an insistence to give your topic the most direct human relevance possible. Not playing inside or outside the box, but explaining the box itself — if you will excuse me flinging myself into the rhetorical.
Of course, not knowing anything about your class, I could have misunderstood, but I think that’s what you were talking about, and I thought that sounded very interesting! Ambitious enough for a thirty pages, at least, but interesting nonetheless…. which is, perhaps, evidence there is something wrong with me after all.