Assignment #1; Glasberg's "Sense of History"

      David Glasberg’s “Sense of History” is a great book about professional history’s struggle with the modern crisis of interpretation and the public’s sense of historical identity. Glasberg describes how history is disseminated into “historical consciousness” from ideological state and cultural apparatuses (museums, textbooks, popular culture,) yet, he seems to only slightly focus on the role of modern consumer societies in reifying capitalist ideology. It seems to me that an effective means of truly describing “historical consciousness” could be a term often used in Marxist literature, “class consciousness.” Class consciousness effectively describes the fact, which Glasberg lightly touches on, that capitalist political economy necessitates certain renditions of history in both government and cultural accounts in order to protect consumer culture. Essentially capitalism in order to continually evade the threat of economic collapse must have a complacent workforce through ideological means. Due to the fact that the capitalist market continually antagonizes workers’ material conditions ideologies such as religion, media, and government sponsored nationalist propaganda are mobilized to disseminate this historical sense or “class culture” to the workers.

      I find I agree with a great deal of what David Glasberg has to say about the “historicidal” culture of modern capitalist America. Also, I fully realize that he is focused on giving a nuanced account of the problem of historical sense and sense of place as being affected by a myriad of factors (race, gender, class, religion,etc.) However, I simply question whether the fact that Americans are historicidal is simply because we live in a modern age with new media technology, disparate cultural backgrounds, and fast paced information processing demands on our society. I feel that the fact that American society is so fragmented and short of attention span is not simply due to the diversity of the people and their individual experiences or “language of place,” as Glasberg may put it. Rather, I feel that the reason Americans cannot decipher a unified “class consciousness” or “historical consciousness” is undeniably a result of modern capitalist economy and consumer culture. Particularly the features of consumer culture which engage in commodity fetishism. This is the capitalist practice of adding value to a product beyond its production value by making it into a class status symbol. This rule pretty much applies for all new technology as our culture has been pressured to own the latest and greatest gadgets in order to keep up with business, education, or leisure. Now most graduate students almost require laptops, most media won’t play properly without HD display, and everyone has windows 7 because that’s what the businesses are running. Glasberg’s book was provocative and interesting study of how individual sense of place is developed and how modern cultural institutions intertwine to create “historical sense.” Yet, he does not go far enough to point out the reason for the placelessness of American culture or a lack of common historical sense in Americans as a result of modern capitalist production techniques to drive the economy.

Welcome to the Modern Era

As a burgeoning scholar of modernism studies it is a tad ironic that I have yet to embark in the digital self advertisement that is the blog. In a vast sea of anonymous avatars plain, regular folk assert "this is what is happening to me right now!"  The anecdotes of pure strangers become the modern news feed, and now I am "they."

You may be wondering as to the chosen title of this particular blog. I chose it based upon my interests in public history and museums as modern institutions. I am interested in using Marxist social theory and the works of other critical theorists to deconstruct the exhibits of the museum. In doing this I hope to show that museums are fundamentally modern institutions based around cultural ideologies which by organizing the past, define the present. I plan to use this opportunity as an assignment for Prof Koslow's Public History course to create a public forum for my past writings and ideas on museums as well as current research.

I hope you will enjoy my blog and feel free to comment with suggestions or criticisms.

Regards
-W