notes on architectural historiography: generic history...

Describing the past with the image of paradise and the fear of wrong doing in every step taken may eventually lead to taking that step not forwards, but backwards towards a better-known past. Creative practice has to adhere to its own experience to claim that it is quite new, particular and original [characterizing the modern art the word original acquires its modern English meaning at the same time with novel aiming rigidly sticking to experience]. In Turkey, with the pressure of modal dislocation, the experiential history reproduces its belatedness, being non-original, non-genuine and cannot achieve its legitimacy. For this reason, it gives its place to the generic history. In a chapter of ‘Savage Mind’, probably through a reading on Bergson, Lévi-Strauss expresses the significance of the experiential history and reminds its relationship with the generic history. ‘(…) each corner of space hides innumerable individuals each one collecting the historical composition incomparable with the others’ he writes and continues ‘even a universal history is nothing else different from the composition of several local histories.’ As for in this societal construction, instead of experiential history, having a composition of permitting differentiation which can be read as the production of the subject and individuality in a sense, generic history is much more meaningful, hiding those differentiations and allowing to an imagination of a common history for a common ground. Because, generic history recounts the history composed by the subjects rather than respectively subjects. Each subject can take part inside the generic history merely by its name. The important thing is the entirety composed by those names. In this narrative, the featured names are either the correct subjects contributing to consolidate the entirety or wrong subjects weakening the construction, ruining the entirety. This dual construction is compulsorily produced. Because, national(ist) history removes experiential time on behalf of generic time. A third position cannot take part in the construction of national history. National history has to reduce instead of augmenting narratives of history to conserve its transcendental, entire and consistent structure.