The beauty of the dead
This is precisely what historians - it is, after all, our place - can demonstrate to the literary analysts out of their alleged position as pure spectators by showing them that social mechanisms of selections, critique and repression are everywhere present, by reminding them that it is violence that invariably founds a system of knowledge. Because of this, history is the privileged place where the gaze become unsettled, even if it is only that. It would be vain, however, to expect an emancipation of cultures, a finally liberated outpouring, an unchained spontaneity to result from a political critique, as was the ambiguous hope of the first folklorists. The history of the old divisions teaches us that not one among them is neutral, that any organization presupposes a repression. What is uncertain is simply whether this repression must always function according to a hierarchical social distribution of cultures. Only active political experience can teach us what it could be - if we know how to read that experience. It is not out of place to call this to mind at a time when pressing questions about political and cultural action are being raised...
ch. 8
Certeau, Michel de, Heterologies. trns. by Brian Massumi. Univ. Minnesota. 2010.