ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes various primal scenes from the eighteenth-century discourse of history. These scenes attempt to justify the act of research by displaying the moment of it receives validity. The chapter describes how they unleashed an emulative structure of substitution, both within the scene itself, but also between the represented scene and an instituting presence diffused across the elements of that representation. Through the process of reduction to individual units of knowledge, these units (facts) were believed to gain a sense of immediacy and self-evidence: that is to say that it thereby opposed itself to the generalities of reflective thought, and thus outstripped any chance of finding referential possibilities of validation. Such mediation is not simply a matter of loss and abridgement with relation to the original material, but it also gives that material to the reader as knowable, congenial, and above all, useful data.
