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Narrating the Neoliberal Moment: History, Journalism, Historicity

Narrating the Neoliberal Moment: History, Journalism, Historicity Claudio Lomnitz Of Tiger’s Leaps and Lullabies, and Historical Excess History, it has been said, is a sign of the modern, and subsistence “without history” or “on the margins of history” was long a metonymic sign of backwardness and a pretext and justification for colonial occupation.1 A somewhat less noted fact is that an excess of historical invocation — or a historical obsession — is a diagnostic sign of failed modernities, and especially of what Wolfgang Schivelbusch has called “the culture of defeat,” that is, the process of mourning and recovery that follows national trauma. To the extent that it is attributed to external forces, economic collapse such as that suffered in Mexico in 1982 and again in 1995, or in Argentina in 2002, can also be assimilated as national trauma and has spurred this kind of historical excess.2 In such contexts, the present all too frequently exposes the wounds of the past and thereby prompts the sort of historical stance that Walter Benjamin favored when he wrote: “The historical materialist approaches a historical object solely and alone where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he cognizes the sign of a messianic zero-hour of events, http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Public Culture Duke University Press

Narrating the Neoliberal Moment: History, Journalism, Historicity

Lomnitz, Claudio
Public Culture , Volume 20 (1) – Jan 1, 2008
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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
© 2008 by Duke University Press
ISSN
0899-2363
eISSN
0899-2363
DOI
10.1215/08992363-2007-015
Publisher site
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Abstract

Claudio Lomnitz Of Tiger’s Leaps and Lullabies, and Historical Excess History, it has been said, is a sign of the modern, and subsistence “without history” or “on the margins of history” was long a metonymic sign of backwardness and a pretext and justification for colonial occupation.1 A somewhat less noted fact is that an excess of historical invocation — or a historical obsession — is a diagnostic sign of failed modernities, and especially of what Wolfgang Schivelbusch has called “the culture of defeat,” that is, the process of mourning and recovery that follows national trauma. To the extent that it is attributed to external forces, economic collapse such as that suffered in Mexico in 1982 and again in 1995, or in Argentina in 2002, can also be assimilated as national trauma and has spurred this kind of historical excess.2 In such contexts, the present all too frequently exposes the wounds of the past and thereby prompts the sort of historical stance that Walter Benjamin favored when he wrote: “The historical materialist approaches a historical object solely and alone where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he cognizes the sign of a messianic zero-hour of events,

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Public Culture – Duke University Press

Published: Jan 1, 2008

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