something about history

so, right now i'm trying to put together my syllabus (not to be confused with syllabub, the british cream-based dessert) on western theatre history from 1650 to 1914, and it strikes me as extremely absurd that art would be divided up into movements and periods that correspond in some way with a little something called time. question: will we be able to say, four hundred years from now, that from 1980 to roughly 2080 (just to keep things in nice round numbers) there was an aesthetic movement featuring decadence (in Britain), whipped cream (in France) and eviscerated sheep (in the Low Countries)? or will things have splintered beyond movementization, as those poststructuralists would have us believe? is it, in fact, arrogant to consider oneself outside of history, when you're clearly not going to be the one writing the history? that is, is it arrogant to feel like you know as much as people will in the future, when we clearly know more than people did in the past? or do we in fact not know more - is THIS the truly arrogant move, thinking that we know more (and thus that there's been some sort of positivist development/progress narrative going on)than "they" did? what if i reverse this by claiming that knowing more actually makes us more "primitive," caught up in our own tangles of overknowledge? or is this a totally unintelligible and therefore untenable argument? okay. ohhhkay.

anyhow, it's really quaint to wrap up 500 years or so into a neat little package of "religious drama" or "realist art" or what have you. my guess would be that it's something like the rings of saturn - neat and consolidated-looking from a distance but fragmented and incoherent up close. i love that phrase, and the way that it rolls off the tongue as an explanation of chaos - "oh, rings of saturn." it doesn't even need a verb.

so, now to propose a solution to this 'rings of saturn' dilemma: let's start an aesthetic movement that consciously situates itself in history, taking place, oh, for about 40 years as a certain school attracting a coterie of talented youth of all shapes, genders, and races...so that it is at once a movement and a meta-movement, producing the documentation/archiving/historiography of itself as it exists. this is a sort of borgesian experiment, i'll grant, but i think that we should really make things easier for future scholars by inserting ourselves into history so they don't have to hunt around for us. ha-HA! this is so boring and not-funny! okay, enough.