Greetings Economists, A beautifully written rejoinder! On Feb 22, 2007, at 12:18 PM, Sandwichman wrote:
That's why I would propose Storical Materialism (or, less neologically, narrative materialism) as a corrective to the pretensions of Historical Materialism. Such Storical Materialism could admit the class struggle theory of history as a hypothesis without positing it as the foundation of historical explanation.
Doyle; Too juicy not to riff on. Stories and narratives represent a lot to writers, but to a guy like me who makes pictures, a picture mostly is not a story. The general linearity of stories as opposed to the holistic picture is a big chasm. What I see in common between people like us is the production of information. I think socialism has a wholism in it that is not storical. It has a lot to do with a vague notion of what connects millions of people. I don't see tv with it's emphasis on story entertainment of all sorts as a good model of how to 'know' the working class. As you write elegantly it is a Naked City with all happening at once. I think the massive expansion of making pictures leads to a shift in the paradigm of stories. I think re-use of pictures, a very fast way to exchange pictures, and a culture of wholism production will not look or feel storical. Stories are short little vignettes of something or other. When we have tons of pictures, videos, and audio files sitting in the archive, putting all that together (Googles one big library for all) suggests strongly a different work process. Perhaps connection with all at once? So I'm not much of a narrative kind of guy. Doyle
