After History Quotes

“Covering” may have been cultivated at its inception using commercial justifications, but it was not commercially inspired; it was used to manage hatred with silences. Profits became the only source of meaning to fill that social void, but they were not even the primary source of the void itself.”
― Martin Procházka, After History

“For understanding Shakespeare’s confrontation with L.A, it is important to see how these practices helped make L.A into a wasteland. Since American popular culture was self-consciously constructed as only novelty, action without precedent, or form without tradition, L.A., as the emblem of American media, was transformed into a cultural black hole (forgive the colour-coding of the metaphor). L.A., like “covered” music, seemed not only to have no taste for humanly-felt culture but even to drain authenticity from culture. American media forms, derived from this world of premeditated amnesia, seemed to reproduce on their own as formulaic knock-offs of current hits. The banality of this way of making popular culture was palpable, but the social sources of it were profound. Knock-offs were echoes of the covering processes that obscured the roots of pop songs in heart-felt working class, folk culture.”
― Martin Procházka, After History

“Utopia, I argued some years ago, was a profound exercise in imaginary self-cancellation, an attempt by More to conceive of a radical alternative to his own way of being in the world.”
― Martin Procházka, After History

“One can learn how fiction as document, fiction used as fact was made for the archive.”
― Martin Procházka, After History

“Exploring microhistories, cultural history can “track the changing interplay among schools of thought and language patronage and power of financing and control, teaching traditions and elites,” that is, make us aware of the discursive workings of power.”
― Martin Procházka, After History