"A profusion of entangled events"

I've taken to this quote from Foucault.  It sums up pretty much how I think about my swim through history - tangled up and confused as the past often seems to be.  Here's the longer version:

 

"The world such as we are acquainted with it is not this ultimately simple configuration where events are reduced to accentuate their essential traits, their final meaning, or their initial and final value.  On the contrary, it is a profusion of entangled events.... the true historical sense confirms our existence among countless lost events, without a landmark or a point of reference. 

Historians take unusual pains to erase the elements in their work which reveal their grounding in a particular time and place, their preferences in a controversy - the unavoidable obstacles of their passion."

Foucault, 1994. 

The quotations come from Foucault’s essay,  Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.  The first certainly sums up the trouble visiting the 19th century seems to be causing me.  The second remains an interesting counterbalance to the silence in the literature on historical method.  Certainly the major nineteenth century historiography itself increasingly seems wedded to the point at which it was created between the 1970s and 80s.  More recent work takes another tack, looking at a different range of actors from another point of view.  Foucault's point was not that historians could escape the dilemma of always writing from now, but rather that they should be upfront about their interests in re-working the past - whilst also allowing the past to speak back to us in its own terms.  I guess that is the research dilemma I'm wrestling with.