notes on architectural historiography II: history and power...

Every work the historian puts into circulation is received within a network of different power relations. While the historian’s narrative is neither absolute nor given, these networks of relations continuously shatter, disorder and organize its meaning. The plurality of punitive discourses/powers who desire to establish a fixed meaning to a text that circulates within such a network, or to decrease the number of historical texts that are put into circulation also increases the number of meanings that are aspired to be secured. This quantitative increase secularizes the text, rather than assigning it a transcendental quality. Such secularization gives a text disputability. Different ways of relating to the past amplify the powers in a given context. This increase in powers, in turn, leads to an increase in different historical narratives. This interactive disrupts the powers that aspire to minimize the number of narratives in a given context. The destruction of the delusion of transcendentalism and the loss of the desire for totality can only be attained through the crisis of those narratives that believe to construct such a transcendality or totality.