ABSTRACT
It’s not just such fictions as ‘‘historical periods’’, ‘‘historical contexts’’, or ‘‘long traditions’’ that historicize the world. These explanations work only because the world is already historicized. What historicizes the world, is a historicizing reflex in human cognition. To look for sense and meaning means looking historically. Historicizing is the default setting of human self-reflection – as postmodernist theory particularly shows. It assumes history to be a ‘narrative meaning production process’, since ‘creating moral meaning for the conduct of our lives today’ is ‘one of the most important’ reasons for historians doing history (Munslow 2003: 174, 177). Mind, personal behaviour, and social practice are tuned in to history because they themselves have adapted to a historicized world. However, far from being illuminating, history is actually occluding. Apprehensively enough, it shows there never was anything except what there was: there never will be anything except what there will have been. The following essays indicate history’s occlusive effects in the
symbolic sense formations it constructs – in (a) its understanding of itself, (b) its capacity to make human existence unviable, and as (c) the rationalizing, commodifying instrument of a totally instrumentalized, commodified society, and (d) the compulsive, symbolic perpetuation of traumatic experience.
