Wednesday, November 5, 2014

MC Guffee, 11/4

“This historical novel can no longer set out to represent the historical past it can only ‘represent’ our ideas and stereotypes about that past (which thereby at once becomes ‘pop history’)." (417)

            Frederic Jameson posits two separate versions of history: the historical past, and “pop history.” Comparatively, the historical past is meant as the exact replication of history that harbors no agenda except the truth of the past, whereas “pop history” is meant to represent history through the popular ideas and stereotypes of the past. Working in opposition, pop history and the historical past consequently represent the rift that the loss of the referent has created. Rather than a concrete history that holds true to when that history was the present, Jameson argues that every retelling of history is selective and therefore, heavily biased.
           
“Cultural production is thereby driven back inside a mental space which is no longer that of the old monadic subject, but rather that of some degraded collective ‘objective spirit’: it can no longer gaze directly on some putative real world, at some reconstruction of past history which was once itself a present; rather, as in Plato’s Cave, it must trace our mental images of that past upon its confining walls.” (417)

To further this comparison of the historical past and pop history, Jameson cites Plato’s cave. Plato’s cave explains the relationship between the enlightened and the unenlightened, in addition to how these two will understand and retell what they’ve seen differently. Drawing from Plato’s cave, Jameson finds we “must trace our mental images of that past upon its confining walls” in order to remember the historical past. However, in doing so, we acknowledge that the history is retold from the perspective of the individual retelling it. Thus, it is virtually impossible to retell history from an unbiased, all-inclusive and accurate perspective. Meaning historical pasts are accounted for with some sort of political or ideological stance that sways the event. From this popular view of the historical past, society’s created a “pop history” that lacks referent and neutrality with the historical past.
        
            My experience in AP U.S. History in high school is exemplary of our biased relationship with history because it is history offered through the lens of the United States. Subsequently, catastrophes like the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Vietnam war, are retold from the perspective of the U.S. My teacher refused to acknowledge the Vietnam war as a loss or even a tie for the American people. Moreover, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are depicted as unavoidable and what had to be done to win the war. This style of teaching leaves students at a disadvantage because it is biased history, which in turn blurs the student’s relationship with the historical past to a point of no return.

“If there is any realism left here, therefore, it is a ‘realism’ which is meant to derive from the shock of grasping that confinement, and of slowly becoming aware of a new and original historical situation in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever our of reach.” (417)


            In summation, Frederic Jameson believes that any realism left over from the pop history phenomenon will be in accordance with the realization that society has confined itself to mere “pop images” and “simulacra” of the past. Therefore, Jameson concludes that there will be a “crisis in reality” once society realizes the historical past in its genuine form is lost forever and all that is left is the popular ideas and representations of the past.

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