360 VIEW

History, Herstory and the mystery of MyStory

1 June, 2008

For some time she-storians (female historians) have been bringing a homeostasis to the male gender specific statement, history, with their own term herstory. Herstory is a neologism coined in the late 1960s as part of a feminist critique of conventional historiography. In feminist discourse the term refers to history (ironically restated as “his story”) written from a feminist perspective, emphasizing the role of women, or told from a woman’s point of view. (The word history (from the Ancient Greek ιστορία, or istoria, meaning “a learning or knowing by inquiry”) is etymologically unrelated to the possessive pronoun his.)(wikiPEdia).

Today we will not delve into this feminist debate, rather look at another neologism… Mystory © Greg Ulmer. Mystory appears to be a presentation of personal information that involves not conforming to any literary or social standards that dictate how it should be expressed. For this, people who have upheld this concept have come under attack as not being credible sources to appreciate. To understand the difference between Mystory and standard, scholarly text Rodman puts the opposition to Mystory as…

‘{…} scholarship involving reason rather than passion, coherent narratives rather than discontinuous fragments, and logical chains of cause and effect rather than intuitive leaps between unconnected events.’ (Gilbert B. Rodman in http://www.comm.umn.edu/~grodman/pubs/Mystery.pdf)

After entering into discussion about Deleuze and Guattari Rhizomatic alternative, Rodman asks how can these complex theories be applied to everyday life how can we present them? This question got me thinking about a debate i was having recently about the bible. someone quoted something from the bible and i tried to explain that i believed the bible to be a complex collection of history, fables, mythology, theories and complicated and abstract philosophical writtings. Which i believed to be written by several different sources, To give an accurate description of what the truth of life was. If that was the case, she retorted, why then does god not clearly outline in almost dot point format what is truth, or the point of life. After much thought i replied, that if that had happened people throughout history would have given up on the text as being old fashioned and out dated jargen. The bibles unclear nature, and the claims of greatness that surround it make it the most powerful piece of literature in known history. What is more powerful than a book of truths that are subject to personal interpretation. It was once explained to me, that art was believed to be truer than science because over 80% of scientific research is to discover and resolve inaccurate discoveries within science. I remembered the part in Hitch hikers guide to the glaxy where they had built the supercomputer to answer their most fundamental query “what is the meaning of life? and the computer responded… 42. I imagine that the bible is perhaps god or humanities response to the never-ending series of questions directed at god about this life.

I personally think there is a place for non-linear, abstract, Dada-inspired presentations of information but not in everything. Mystory should be treated as an art from and not as the new form of information with which we should subscribe (in the very broad sense of the word).

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