Historicizing the desire of historicize

Abstract

The desire to historicize called upon by Lavin was not fulfilled. Quite the opposite, the convergence of anthologies that she analyzed can almost be read today as the swan song of a genre. The best known anthology on the next period (Sykes) is a strange device filled in with its own emptying as its strongest guiding thread was the debate about the extinction (“once and for all”, as Kipnis pointed out with unusual rage) of the theory.

The historical facts of such anthology cluster, i.e. the end of global capitalism, the generalized computerization, the triumph of the French Theory (Cusset), or the Deleuzian turn of the theory (Spencer), will help us to describe how the anthology’s desire to historicize ended up in its object’s death.

In 20 years, the economic cycle has taken the turn. The competitive, assertive, publicity-oriented apologetics which, after replacing criticism, drove the most unscrupulous period of postwar architecture, was followed, the theory left behind, by a sheer simulation of criticism as a sort of historical combinatorics, an outcome of both the closure of the capital and its opponent.

And when a new cycle was seemingly starting, a call to anthology, a new desire to historicize. Needed, almost urgent to assimilate both the exultant positivity and the disabled negativity of the recent periods, how can un-thology (inescapably negative, fractional and critical as shown by the deconstruction of the term) re-establish the lost bonds between the irrational, autonomous, symmetric exuberance (Greenspan) of practice without a discourse and a discourse without practice? How to sail on that abundance of emptiness? But, above all, how can un-thology know that its new desire to historicize, periodized on a point parallel to the previous one, offers any chance of escaping an equally parallel destiny? Maybe un-thology’s true desire (this is why it bounces back against itself, mutates into its opposite) is to be able to run away from its own dangerous historization.