Modernist mythic method orders chaotic contemporary history into form

Evidence

The exhibition, I hope, can serve as a motif for the kind of order and certainty we consider natural and commonsensical while remaining oblivious to its mysterious nature. With the help of this motif, such order can be seen no longer as something natural but as a particular historical practice in which we are still caught up. My aim has not been to describe its history, even in relation to the Middle East, but to isolate it and understand its peculiarity and power. To assist in its isolation, in chapter 2 I tried to suggest what other kinds of order there may have been, in the case of the Middle Eastern or Mediterranean world, which the order of the exhibition sought to replace. I did so with the reservation that such other kinds of order risk seeming, as a consequence of this sort of analysis, simply the opposite of our own; and as such, something total and self-contained. These consequences, as I said then, are unintended. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 537 (#complicates, via linked claim)

There is a dialectical relationship between historical analogy as myth and the historical present, in which each of them shapes the other in its own image: The myth bestows significance on the present, but at the same time it is molded retroactively according to the needs of the present. — David Ohana, David Maisel , The Origins of Israeli…, 774 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Epic narrative organizes myth but dissolves it through rational order. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 54; Modernist violence is pseudoevent imposed by the novelist — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 401; Arab modernists deployed ancient Middle Eastern myths to signify modernity (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• Treating modern order as a historical practice exposes its naturalness as an effect #complicates (0.77) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 537
• The myth shapes the present while being reshaped by it. #complicates (0.76) — David Ohana, David Maisel , The Origins of Israeli…, 774
• Realist historical narrative shares the same modernist logic that produced the Holocaust #complicates (0.75)