Abstract
‘What does all will to truth mean?’Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality For Rethinking History's ‘invitation’, I consider some inseparable actions linking academic and artistic institutions with historical representation and its politics. This involves discussion of how publication and institutional conditions are historicized. To historicize is the key linkage: academic/intellectual labor and writing often ‘plays for’ the future, in which such endeavors require sanitizing a past-present so as to select and rank – ‘history’ serves, and services, present-future institutions and subjects. Institutions are historical because they historicize. Continuity of institutions and roles incorporates breaks and breakdowns. I make a critique of the historicization performed by the institutions where I have worked and published: the University of California and The California Institute of the Arts and Academic Presses. In this, I link to historicize with capitalization and some politics of university-driven knowledge.