TOUCHED BY FIRE

Popular culture, in the guise of the media,is now hosted into a notion of history which offers our gaze a place of safety populated by people just like ourselves,yet at the same time untouched by the reality of the past.Like Heritage Culture,this contrived vision,entwined with the problem of perspective that a way of life that as come down to us,with all its disturbances and distinctions,is linked to a place and a time,an object, a building which allows us a sense of pleasure, a homesickness for better times linked into the past.A remembrance of the past which is manufactured for our gaze in the studios of the corporate media institutions.Popular history, in the guise of serious investigation and Heritage Culture are the results of an increasingly conformist society seeking out a release from a normalizing sensation and delving into a sentimentality, a regretfulness for better times in a better place somewhere in the past. The future is lived in the ever present whilst reality becomes a horror show. The past is not reconnected with its disappeared shadow.
We, the passive observer,are fed information and sensation filtered through a dominate system which entraps our attention in order to offload the commonality which yesterday as become.
It is also a propaganda technique which subtly appeals to the emotions.In propaganda as in advertising the important consideration is not whether information accurately describes a objective situation but whether it sounds true.History like art ,now,represents part of the mass production of commodities in ever increasing abundance which demands a mass market to absorb them.History and Art are now dominated by appearance.
"in the period of primative accumulation,capitalism subordinated being to having,the ME value of commodity's to their exchange value,as a commodity's capacity to confer prestige-the illusion of prosperity and well being."when economic necessity yields to the necessity for limitless economic development"writes Guy Debord"satisfaction of basic and generally human needs gives way to an uninterrupted fabrication of pseudo needs.Propaganda of commodities serves a double function.Its up holding of consumption turns alienation itself into a commodity..
CHRISTOPHER LASCH.
This is a victory of conservative centralisation over the examination of a more mysterious procedure....the very act of creativity itself,the act concerning the process of creation,rather than its effects,on motives rather than consequences;and as a corollary of this "on quality of the vision" on the state of mind or the soul,of the acting agent-accurate correspondence of the given,the emphasis on the activity and the moment,those actions that cannot be reduced to static segments.
These are the sentiments of the Romantic movement,which gave rise to to Modernity.As the sensiblities interact,where does one begin and end,where does the end close?History is not dead,it is simply redefining itself in the methodological reflections of the Great Leap Backwards.