17.11.08

PHRASE: History now organizes he document, divides it up, distributes it, orders it...

History is made history by historians whose job it is to make sense of all the things that have happened in the world in the history of the world. This appears to be self-evident. What else would it do? Well, Foucault suggests that the first history was designed to find the relation between things. To find a relationship between two events. This doesn't seem so strange. One need only read the first page of the first history written to know this. Herodotus researched why the Greeks and barbarians were in such a fight with one another. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault then goes onto suggest that history has turned into a secretaries job. Each document is filed and organized by what is categorically relevant. But who decides that? The executive? And what does he know about it?

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