"All societies are historical"
About this Quote
“All societies are historical” lands like a shrug that doubles as a provocation. Queneau, the poet-novelist who helped found Oulipo, wasn’t a grand theorist in a tweed jacket; he was a formal prankster with a philosopher’s itch. The line is plain enough to pass as sociology, but its bite comes from what it refuses: the fantasy that any society is natural, timeless, or self-justifying.
Queneau’s intent is to drag “society” out of the realm of abstractions and back into time, where things are made, contested, and revised. Calling a society “historical” sounds obvious until you notice how often politics relies on the opposite claim: that hierarchies are eternal, that traditions are destiny, that the present order is simply how humans are. Queneau punctures that alibi. If societies are historical, then they are authored; if they are authored, they can be edited.
The subtext is also a jab at intellectual vanity. Moderns love to imagine they’ve escaped history, that they’re post-ideology, post-everything. Queneau implies there is no outside. Even the pose of being “beyond” history is a historically specific pose, with its own fashion and self-flattering metaphysics.
Context matters: Queneau writes in the wake of European catastrophe and political reinvention, when “society” was being reengineered by force and by theory. His sentence is a minimalist antidote to totalizing myths. It’s not comfort; it’s accountability. Time is the one membership no society can cancel.
Queneau’s intent is to drag “society” out of the realm of abstractions and back into time, where things are made, contested, and revised. Calling a society “historical” sounds obvious until you notice how often politics relies on the opposite claim: that hierarchies are eternal, that traditions are destiny, that the present order is simply how humans are. Queneau punctures that alibi. If societies are historical, then they are authored; if they are authored, they can be edited.
The subtext is also a jab at intellectual vanity. Moderns love to imagine they’ve escaped history, that they’re post-ideology, post-everything. Queneau implies there is no outside. Even the pose of being “beyond” history is a historically specific pose, with its own fashion and self-flattering metaphysics.
Context matters: Queneau writes in the wake of European catastrophe and political reinvention, when “society” was being reengineered by force and by theory. His sentence is a minimalist antidote to totalizing myths. It’s not comfort; it’s accountability. Time is the one membership no society can cancel.
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| Topic | Deep |
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