ABSTRACT
Ask what history does. The usual reply is: it shows how things turned out as they did; it shows how things got to be the way they are. The world we live in today has been shaped by history. History has made the world we live in what it is: our history tells us who we are and where we are from. Thus what was, produces what is; what is, comes from what was: historypresent historical thinking and past historical acting alike-is coercive, incarcerating. It inculcates not just (1.) a coercive thought-style, but also (2.) rhetorical strategies of incarceration. Hence, historicization-the history-focussed behaviour and the cognitive practice that produce historical knowledge-imposes itself as (3.) a technology for incarcerating people, communities, societies, or states, for these historical agents to incarcerate themselves. As will become clear, through reinforcing a split between experiential truth [aesthesis] and social “reality” [illusio], it generates ‘a socially shared hallucination’, a ‘pseudo-reality’ that persuades everyone to believe everyone else believes in it (cf. Laing 1968: 11ff., 61, 66).
