To Be a Some Thing: The Desire-to-History

Drawing on the burgeoning field of affect theory, this article problematizes the possibilities of historical discourse in the slowly collapsing sense of disciplinary efficacy in the social sciences. Not satisfied with any sense of "method," which reduces the effectiveness of critiques in the suspension of their own becoming, the article insists on a poetic form with which to explore the interstices of memory in the supposedly rational, knowledge producing economy of history's own becoming. Deflecting the reduction to sign producing systems with which to coral the past in neoliberal political ontologies and regimes of knowing, the article suggests that much greater openness is required to consider the affective force of history as a mode of seeing peculiar to modernist desires to make some thing of the past and its passing. Interweaving personal and public memory in a manner that attempts to deconstruct the boundary between the two, the article argues that perhaps what is most prominent about the desire-to-history is the temporal passing of its forms and their materialization (and striation) across time(s). Written in "parts," the article evokes the fuzzy boundaries of the fragment and the whole to provoke a poetics of the in-between form.