Breaking up Time: Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past and Future 9783666310461, 9783525310465, 9783647310466

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© 2013, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ISBN Print: 9783525310465 — ISBN E-Book: 9783647310466

Schriftenreihe der FRIAS School of History Edited by Ulrich Herbert and Jörn Leonhard Volume 7

www.frias.uni-freiburg.de

© 2013, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ISBN Print: 9783525310465 — ISBN E-Book: 9783647310466

Breaking up Time Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past and Future

Edited by Chris Lorenz and Berber Bevernage

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

© 2013, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ISBN Print: 9783525310465 — ISBN E-Book: 9783647310466

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Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data available online: http://dnb.d-nb.de. ISBN 978-3-525-31046-5 ISBN 978-3-647-31046-6 (e-book)

© 2013, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen/ Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht LLC, Bristol, CT, U.S.A. www.v-r.de All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher. Typesetting by: Dörlemann Satz, Lemförde Printed and bound in Germany by Hubert & Co, Göttingen Redaktion: Eva Jaunzems, Jörg Später Assistenz: Madeleine Therstappen Printed on non-aging paper.

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Table of Contents

Introduction Berber Bevernage and Chris Lorenz: Breaking up Time – Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past and Future . . . . . .

7

1. Time and Modernity: Critical Approaches to Koselleck’s Legacy Aleida Assmann: Transformations of the Modern Time Regime . . . . . . . . . . . . .

39

Peter Fritzsche: The Ruins of Modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

57

Peter Osborne: Global Modernity and the Contemporary: Two Categories of the Philosophy of Historical Time . . . . . . . . .

69

2. Ruptures in Time: Revolutions and Wars Sanja Perovic: Year 1 and Year 61 of the French Revolution: The Revolutionary Calendar and Auguste Comte . . . . . . . . . . .

87

Claudia Verhoeven: Wormholes in Russian History: Events ‘Outside of Time’ . . . . . . . 109 François Hartog: The Modern Régime of Historicity in the Face of Two World Wars . . 124 Lucian Hölscher: Mysteries of Historical Order: Ruptures, Simultaneity and the Relationship of the Past, the Present and the Future . . . . . . . . 134

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3. Thinking about Time: Analytical Approaches Jonathan Gorman: The Limits of Historiographical Choice in Temporal Distinctions . .

155

Constantin Fasolt: Breaking up Time – Escaping from Time: Self-Assertion and Knowledge of the Past . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

176

4. Time outside Europe: Imperialism, Colonialism and Globalisation Lynn Hunt: Globalisation and Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

199

Stefan Tanaka: Unification of Time and the Fragmentation of Pasts in Meiji Japan .

216

Axel Schneider: Temporal Hierarchies and Moral Leadership: China’s Engagement with Modern Views of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

236

William Gallois: The War for Time in Early Colonial Algeria . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

252

Notes on Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

274

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Introduction

Berber Bevernage and Chris Lorenz

Breaking up Time – Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past and Future. An Introduction

For three centuries maybe the objectification of the past has made of time the unreflected category of a discipline that never ceases to use it as an instrument of classification.1 Michel de Certeau The past is never dead. It’s not even past.2 William Faulkner Die Zeit ist ein Tümpel, in dem die Vergangenheit in Blasen nach oben steigt.3 Christoph Ransmayr

Historians have long acknowledged that time is essential to historiography. Marc Bloch famously called history the ‘science of men in time’.4 Similarly, Jacques Le Goff labels time the ‘fundamental material’ of historians, and Jules Michelet once described the relationship between time and history with the words ‘l’histoire, c’est le temps’.5 Many historians have also recognised the importance of the distinction between different temporal scales and rhythms – think of Fernand Braudel and Reinhart Koselleck, for example. Surprisingly, however, very few have investigated the subject of historical time in depth.6 1 Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (Minneapolis, 2006), 216. 2 William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York, 1951), 92. 3 Christoph Ransmayr, Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis (Frankfurt am Main, 2005), 158. 4 Marc Bloch, Apologie pour l’histoire ou Métier d’historien (Paris, 1997), 52. 5 Jacques Le Goff, Histoire et mémoire (Paris, 1988), 24. Michelet, cited in Albert Cook, History/Writing: The Theory and Practice of History in Antiquity and in Modern Times (Cambridge, 1988), 11. 6 As Peter Burke remarks, the notion of the future was placed on the historian’s agenda only relatively recently, when it was pioneered by Reinhart Koselleck in the latter half of twentieth century. Peter Burke, Reflections on the Cultural History of Time, Viator XXXV, 2004, 617–626, 620. There are, of course, important exceptions to the general absence of reflections on historical time. See, for example, Robin George Collingwood, Some Perplexities about Time: With an Attempted Solution, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society XXVI, 1925–26, 135–150; Wolfgang Von Leyden, History and the Concept of Relative Time, History and Theory II, 1963, 3, 263–285; Siegfried Kracauer, Time and History, History and

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At least this was the case until recently. In the last couple of years a number of historians and philosophers have addressed the problem of historical time in an increasingly sophisticated way. Following in the footsteps of Koselleck, several historians – in particular Lucian Hölscher, François Hartog and Peter Fritzsche7 – have started historicising time-conceptions previously taken for granted. In the philosophy of history, the relationship between past and present recently moved to center stage in debates about ‘presence’, ‘distance’, ‘trauma’, ‘historical experience’, etc.8 Independently, postcolonial theorists and anthropologists have added momentum to the growing interest in time by deconstructing the ‘time of history’ as specifically ‘Western’ time.9

1. Questions Raised This book aims to fill in the gaps in the all too fragmental literature on historical time and the temporal distinctions between past, present and future.10 Theory VI, 1966, 65–78; Pierre Vilar, Histoire marxiste, histoire en construction. Essai de dialogue avec Althusser, Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations XXVIII, 1973, 1, 165–198; Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main, 1979); John R. Hall, The Time of History and the History of Times, History and Theory XIX, 1980, 2, 113–131; Krzysztof Pomian, L’ordre du temps (Paris, 1984); Nathan Rotenstreich, Time and Meaning in History (Dordrecht, 1987); Donald J. Wilcox, The Measure of Times Past: Pre-Newtonian Chronologies and the Rhetoric of Relative Time (Chicago, 1987); Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit (Paris, 1985); David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington, IN, 1991); Elisabeth Deeds Ermarth, Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time (Princeton, 1992); Jean Chesneaux, Habiter le temps: Passé, présent, futur: esquisse d’un dialogue politique (Paris, 1996); Lucian Hölscher, Die Entdeckung der Zukunft (Frankfurt am Main, 1999); Jean Leduc, Les Historiens et le Temps, Conceptions, problématiques, écritures (Paris, 1999); Jörn Rüsen, Zerbrechende Zeit. Über den Sinn der Geschichte (Cologne, 2001); Daedalus (theme issue on time), 2003; Friedrich Stadler/Michael Stöltzner (eds.), Time and History (Kirchberg am Wechsel, 2005). 7 Hölscher, Entdeckung der Zukunft; François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité Présentisme et expériences du temps (Paris, 2003); Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA, 2004); The American Historical Review CXVII, 2012, 5, Forum: Histories of the Future, 1402–1461. 8 Eelco Runia, Presence, History and Theory XLV, 2006, 1, 1–20; Forum on ‘Presence’, History and Theory XLV, 2006, 3, 305–375; Historical Distance: Reflections on a Metaphor, theme issue of History and Theory L, 2011, 4; Holocaust und Trauma: Kritische Perspektiven zur Entstehung und Wirkung eines Paradigmas, Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte XXXIX, 2011. 9 See, for example, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000); Ashis Nandy, History’s Forgotten Doubles, History and Theory XXXIV, 1995, 2, 44–66. 10 This book originated in a workshop (7–9 April 2011) organised by the editors and hosted by the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS). We would like to express our gratitude to FRIAS and especially to Jörn Leonhard for his comments.

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Introduction

We have invited some of the world’s foremost experts on these subjects to address a series of questions that we feel are highly relevant and that have not yet received the attention they deserve. The first question we raised was the following: How do cultures in general, and historians in particular, distinguish ‘past’ from ‘present’ and ‘future’, and how are their interrelationships constructed and articulated? Although since the birth of modernity history presupposes the existence of ‘the past’ as its object, ‘the past’ and the nature of the borders that separate ‘the past’, ‘the present’ and ‘the future’ until very recently have attracted little reflection within the discipline of history. This ‘omission’ is remarkable because cultures and societies have fixed, and still do fix, the boundaries between past, present and future in quite different ways. Moreover these differences also vary depending on the context in which this distinction is made. In the modern West, for instance, legal time functions differently from historical time and both are different from religious time.11 It has been argued that cultures also have different dominant orientations in time. ‘Traditional’ cultures are generally supposed to be characterised by a dominant (political, ethical, cultural, etc.) orientation to the past, while ‘modern’ cultures characteristically have a dominant future-orientation.12 ‘Postmodern’ cultures, however, are supposedly characterised by a dominant orientation towards the present. Yet, how these temporal orientations have changed – and whether they simply succeed each other or coexist – has not been analysed in depth. It is symptomatic that François Hartog’s thesis that Western thinking about history is characterised by a succession of three ‘regimes of historicity’ – from a past-orientation until the French Revolution, to a future-orientation until the 1980s, and then a present-orientation in the years since – has hardly been empirically tested.13 Therefore, the questions about the unity, the dominance, the spatial extensions, the transfers and the transformations of ‘time regimes’ (are there no competing or overlapping ‘sub-regimes’?) are badly in need of further conceptual and empirical analysis. The second question raised in this book is: Is distinguishing between past, present and future rather a matter of ‘observing’ distinctions that are ‘given’, 11 The difference between historical time and religious time was addressed in Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle, 1996), 40–42, and in William Gallois, Time, Religion and History (London, 2007). The focus on ‘legal time’ is central in criticisms on legal positivism. See especially Drucilla Cornell, Time, Deconstruction, and the Challenge to Legal Positivism: The Call for Judicial Responsibility, Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, 1990, 2, 267–297. 12 For a classical discussion of the past-orientation of ‘traditional’ cultures, see Mircea Eliade, Le mythe de l’éternel retour (Paris, 2001 [1949]). 13 Hartog, Régimes d’historicité.

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or does it involve a more active stance in which social actors create and recreate these temporal distinctions? Usually ‘the past’ is somehow supposed to ‘break off ’ from ‘the present’ on its own by its growing temporal distance or increasing ‘weight’ – like an icicle. Although few probably would hold that temporal distinctions are directly and unambiguously ‘given’, even fewer have paid attention to the ways in which the distinguishing of the three temporal modes can be analysed as a form of social action connected to specific social actors. The question of the historian as (social or political) actor has recently figured prominently in the debate on so-called ‘commissioned history’, as it manifests itself, for example, in the work of government-appointed historical commissions and truth commissions. Yet the issue in this case is of a more general and fundamental nature. It belongs to those characteristics of ‘doing history’ which have traditionally been repressed. Even when all appearances are against them, professional historians traditionally claim to occupy (or to strive after) the position of the distant, impartial observer and not the position of the active participant. The notion of an ever-increasing temporal ‘distance’ as automatically breaking up past and present has been of central importance for safeguarding this distinction between the ‘involved’ actor and the ‘impartial’ observer.14 The American historian Elazar Barkan recently addressed this problem when he argued in favour of an ‘engaged’ historiography in the service of ‘historical reconciliation’.15 The problem with pleas for engaged history is that participation in ‘historical reconciliation’ smacks of ‘activism’, ‘partisanship’ and ‘presentism’, all of which professional historians usually regard as deadly sins. Yet according to Barkan, ‘this is all beginning to change’, because historians are beginning to understand ‘that the construction of history continuously shapes our world, and therefore has to be treated as an explicit, directly political activity, operating within specific scientific methodological and rhetorical rules’.16

14 The stress on the importance of temporal distance was especially prominent in debates on the emerging field of contemporary history. See, for example, Gerhard Ritter, Scientific History, Contemporary History, and Political Science, History and Theory I, 1961, 3, 261–279. Also see Rüdiger Graf/Kim Christian Priemel, Zeitgeschichte in der Welt der Sozialwissenschaften. Legitimität und Originalität einer Disziplin, Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte LIX, 2011, 4, 1–30, and Kiran-Klaus Patel, Zeitgeschichte im digitalen Zeitalter: Neue und alte Herausforderungen, Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte LIX, 2011, 3, 331–351. 15 See Forum – Truth and Reconciliation in History, American Historical Review CXIV, 2009, 4, 899–913. 16 Forum – Truth and Reconciliation, 907.

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Lucian Hölscher recently pointed to the same ‘blind spot’ concerning the role of historians as actors in present-day politics and attributed it directly to a blindness for the future dimension of the past. Hölscher contends that historians have to free themselves from the traditional ‘prejudices’ that professional history is autonomous from society and politics, and that history ‘is a pure ‘observing’ discipline, that is not simultaneously directed at action’.17 He thus makes clear his view that the idea that professional history stands in a distanced (observer’s) position vis-à-vis politics is a misconception. On closer analysis, the professional historian’s concern for the past simultaneously implies a concern for the future. In view of the recent ‘performative turn’ in history and in many other human and social sciences, it is remarkable that temporal distinctions have hardly been analysed as performative distinctions – that is, as the results of linguistic or other forms of action. Although both historians and philosophers have emphasised the important role played by catastrophic political events – such as revolutions and major wars – in ‘breaking up time’, the effects of these ‘transformative events’ on notions of temporality have hardly been studied in a comparative perspective. The third and last question concerns the political nature of the borders that separate these temporal dimensions. François Hartog has rightly argued that terms such as ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ are invariably invested with different values in different regimes of historicity.18 When taken to its logical conclusions, this observation suggests that historians must ask whether historical time is a neutral medium or whether it is in fact inherently ethical and political. Ulrich Raulff is one of the few historians who has pointed out the close relationship between the political allegiance of historians and the use of periodisation in historical writing. Raulff analyses the preference of the Annales historians for the longue dureé19 and traces the origins of this preference far back into the nineteenth century. He argues that both conservative and progressive thinkers who, for different reasons, abhorred specific political events in the past – such as the French Revolution in conservative thinking and the Restoration in Marxist thinking or a lost war in nationalist thought – used periodisation for political ends. According to Raulff, the preference for long-term approaches is based on a politically motivated rejection of certain events. These events may be at a long or at a close ‘distance’ from the his17 Lucian Hölscher, Semantik der Leere. Grenzfragen der Geschichtswissenschaft (Göttingen, 2009), 146. 18 Hartog, Régimes d’historicité. 19 Ulrich Raulff, Der unsichtbare Augenblick: Zeitkonzepte in der Geschichte (Göttingen, 1999).

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torian in a chronological sense. In Braudel’s case, his political rejection was of the sudden fall of France in the 1940s. He wrote his Méditerranée as a prisoner of war, and the longue dureé enabled him to discount both the French defeat and the later collaboration of Vichy-France as merely ‘ephemeral’ events in history. Thus the choice historians make when they focus on either ‘events’ or ‘structures’ is ‘not just a choice between two modes of temporalisation, but also a choice that has aesthetic, ethical and political consequences’.20 Very recently Frank Bösch came to similar conclusions in a short reflection on the influence of break-ups and caesurae on periodisation in contemporary history.21 He criticised the tendency to regard only (national) political events as borderlines of periodisation and argued that longer lasting (transnational) ‘silent revolutions’ – such as the oil crisis of 1973 and the economic crisis of 1979 – may have been experienced as more important by contemporaries. Therefore, claims about ‘breaking events’ and corresponding periods often also involve political aspects. Because of the plurality of possible points of view and their implied caesura, Bösch argues in favour of Geoffrey Barraclough’s definition of contemporary history as a problemoriented – and thus not period-oriented – discipline.The period which is relevant for the contemporary historian depends only on the particular present-day problem he or she is trying to clarify.22 Raulff and Bösch provide us with good reasons to ask whether historians too engage in a ‘politics of time’, as the anthropologist Johannes Fabian and the philosopher Peter Osborne held to be the case in their respective disciplines.23 We believe it is time to start scrutinising how these politics of historical time function in practice. As a first step toward such an analysis of the performative ‘break-up’ of time, we focus on the way historical time has traditionally been related to modernism and progress. We contend that this connection was recently questioned – partially under the influence of the so-called ‘memory boom’ 20 Ibid., 48. 21 Frank Bösch, Umbrüche in die Gegenwart: Globale Ereignisse und Krisenreaktionen um 1979, Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, OnlineAusgabe, 2012, 9, http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/16126041-Boesch-1–2012. According to Goschler and Graf, the very concept of contemporary history is based on the experience of unexpected ruptures in time and the need to interpret the present in the light of these ruptures. See Constantin Goschler/Rüdiger Graf, Europäische Zeitgeschichte seit 1945 (Berlin, 2010), 15–16. 22 See Forum – The 1970s and 1980s as a Turning Point in European History?, Journal of Modern European History IX, 2011, 1, 8–26. 23 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York, 1983); Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London, 1995).

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Introduction

and the development of new ways of dealing with the legacy of historical injustices. Secondly, we observe that, although many historians have noticed these developments, only few have developed new conceptualisations of historical time. Even though the traditional notion of (linear) time has been heavily criticised in the decades since Einstein’s relativity theories, the time-concepts of historians, as well as philosophers of history, are still generally based on an absolute, homogeneous and empty time. Not accidentally, this is the notion of time presupposed by the ‘imagined community’ of ‘the nation’, as Benedict Anderson famously suggested.24 There are, however, some important exceptions – thinkers who did theorise the ‘historical relativity’ of time. We briefly discuss the cases of Koselleck, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Hölscher. Next, in the third section of this introduction, we demonstrate how some historians and philosophers of history reacted ambiguously and defensively or even with outright hostility to the new forms of historical consciousness and the questioning of classical notions of historical time. By discussing the work of, among others, the French historian Henry Rousso, the Dutch historian Bob de Graaff and the German historian Martin Sabrow, we argue that claims about ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ approaches to time (or about historical and a-historical time) are used to guard the borders of the discipline of academic history. These claims are used to draw a line between ‘real’ and ‘pseudo’ history and to protect the former against ‘intruders’, such as memory movements and surviving contemporary witnesses, alias Zeitzeuge. We point out that this disciplinary ‘protectionism’ is typically accompanied by a taboo on the very question of how to draw the borders between past, present and future. This boils down to whisking away the performative and political dimensions of historical time. In the last section, we argue that the cultural and political roots of the memory boom increasingly call on historians and philosophers of history to elucidate the basic assumptions that underpin their notions of time. This holds most importantly for their assumptions concerning the ‘past-ness’ of the past and the ‘present-ness’ of the present. Again we discuss some exceptional thinkers – in particular Preston King – who do reflect on the basic notions of modern Western historical consciousness. Their conceptual apparatus can be put to use in future analyses of how and why historians break up time in historical practice.

24 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991), 22–26.

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2. History in/and Changing Times Philosophers of history have often remarked that academic historiography fits very well with ideas of modernism and progress. Paradoxically, scientific history flourishes in an intellectual environment that stresses the constant emergence of the new and the ‘supersedure’ of the past by movement towards a more advanced future. Koselleck argued that modern historical consciousness came into existence towards the end of the eighteenth century, when social and technological innovations and changing beliefs about the novelty of the future created a new ‘horizon of expectation’ (Erwartungshorizont) that increasingly broke with the former ‘space of experience’ (Erfahrungsraum).25 According to Koselleck, the historical and the progressive worldviews share a common origin: ‘If the new time is offering something new all the time, the different past has to be discovered and recognised, that is to say, its strangeness which increases with the passing of years.’26 Koselleck pointed out that the ‘discovery’ of the historical world and the qualitative differentiation between past, present and future had great methodological implications for historiography. Temporal differentiation and concomitant claims about the ‘otherness’ of the past allowed historiography to present itself as an autonomous discipline that required methods of its own. Although the idea of the absence of the past has often been presented (usually by empiricists) as a challenge to the epistemological credentials of historiography, historians were able to use the idea of an ever-increasing temporal ‘distance’ to their advantage. They did so by presenting distance as an indispensable condition for attaining ‘impartiality’ and ‘objectivity’. Similarly, the progressivist idea that time does not bring random or directionless change but a cumulative change directed at a more advanced future has successfully buttressed historians’ claims concerning the ‘surplus value’ of the historical ex post perspective and their related claims of epistemological superiority over the perspectives of contemporary eye-witnesses (Zeitzeugen). Michel de Certeau has likewise suggested that modern historiography traditionally begins with the differentiation between present and past: It takes 25 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York, 2004). 26 Idem, The Practice of Conceptual History (Stanford, 2002), 120. The claim by Koselleck mentioned here did not remain uncontested. Niklas Luhmann, for example, argues that the development of the modern time perspective started with a reconceptualisation of the present rather than the future. The ‘open future’, according to him, was preceded by more than a hundred years by a ‘punctualisation’ of the present, which gave rise to an experience of instantaneous change. Niklas Luhmann, The Differentiation of Society (New York, 1982), 273–274.

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Introduction

the ‘perishable’ (le périssable) as its object and progress as its axiom.27 Although many feel uncomfortable by the idea of living in a world in which ‘all that is solid melts into air’ (Karl Marx) and in which the present is continuously ‘contracting’ – what Hermann Lübbe has called Gegenwartsschrumpfung – most historians simply presuppose this worldview as ‘natural’.28 The reason for their blind acceptance of this worldview may well be that precisely this (alleged) condition of an ephemeral or even contracting present has enabled historians and philosophers of history to legitimate the writing of history as a necessary form of ‘compensation’. 29 It is a matter of ongoing controversy when exactly the modernist and progressivist worldviews came into existence and whether they were ever dominant enough to legitimise claims about the existence of modernity in an epochal sense, or whether this historical category simply resulted from a self-legitimising ‘politics of periodisation’.30 This issue will be discussed in several of the contributions to this volume. Yet, whatever the periodisation and the precise historical status of modernity, two observations seem beyond dispute: That the modernist and progressivist ways of conceiving historical time and of the relationship between past and present have been fundamental and constitutive for academic history writing. However, it is also clear that these very same modernist and progressivist worldviews have been severely questioned during the last few decades – ‘postmodernism’ is the catchword here – and that this has important implications for historiography. This recent questioning of progressivist worldviews in academic historiography can be fruitfully examined in relation to a similar scepticism about the nature of time which has emerged in juridical contexts in the last few decades. If there is one feature that characterises current international political and juridical dealing with the past it is the combination of an increasing distrust of progressivist notions of time and doubt about presumptions of 27 Michel De Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire (Paris, 1975), 18. 28 Hermann Lübbe, Die Modernität der Vergangenheitszuwendung. Zur Geschichtsphilosophie zivilisatorischer Selbsthistorisierung, in: Stefan Jordan (ed.), Zukunft der Geschichte. Historisches Denken an der Schwelle zum 21. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2000), 26–35, esp. 29. 29 Hermann Lübbe, Der Streit um die Kompensationsfunktion der Geisteswissenschaften, in: Einheit der Wissenschaften. Internationales Kolloquium der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (Berlin, 1991), 209–233. For a fundamental critique of the ‘compensation theory’, see Jörn Rüsen, Die Zukunft der Vergangenheit, in: Jordan (ed.), Zukunft der Geschichte, 175–182. Rüsen emphasises the orientational function of the past vis-à-vis actions aimed at the construction of the future (Zukunftsentwürfe). 30 Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia, 2008).

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‘temporal distance’, or about an evident qualitative break between past, present and future. Many of the salient phenomena in international and domestic politics of the last decades – reparation politics, the outing of official apologies, the creation of truth commissions, historical commissions and commissions of historical reconciliation, etc. – revolve around a growing conviction that the once commonsensical idea of a past automatically distancing itself from the present is fundamentally problematic, and that the belief that the past is superseded by every new present has been more a wish than an experiential reality.31 This changing experience of time is of course not confined to the spheres of jurisdiction and politics: The challenging of classical historicist conceptualisations of temporal distance is a central feature of the so called ‘memory boom’32 – that again is related to the growing recognition of universal human rights and of historical injustices33 – and of the growing influence of memorial movements.34 ‘Since roughly the end of the Cold War,’ John Torpey claims, ‘the distance that normally separates us from the past has been strongly challenged in favour of an insistence that the past is constantly, urgently present as part of our everyday experience.’35 According to Torpey this development directly relates to a ‘collapse of the future’, or a growing inability to create progressive political visions. As he puts it, ‘When the future collapses, the past rushes in.’36

31 Berber Bevernage, History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence: Time and Justice (New York, 2012). Typically, compensation theorists such as Lübbe interpret the practice of offering apologies for historical injustices differently: as a category mistake for historians and as a ritual of repentance for politicians. See Hermann Lübbe, »Ich entschuldige mich.« Das neue politische Bußritual (Berlin, 2001). 32 Expression from Jay Winter, The Generation of Memory: Reflections on the ‘Memory Boom’ in Contemporary Historical Studies, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute XXVII, 2000, 3, 69–92; Geoff Eley, The Past Under Erasure? History, Memory, and the Contemporary, Journal of Contemporary History XLIV, 2011, 3, 555–573. 33 See Jeffrey K. Olick, The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility (New York, 2007), 121–139. 34 Another important challenge to the classical notion of historical distance, according to Bain Attwood, comes from oral history because it stresses the entanglement of ‘then’ and ‘now’ and ‘because its very practice brings the historians into closer proximity with the past’. Bain Attwood, In the Age of Testimony: The Stolen Generations Narrative, ‘Distance’, and Public History, Public Culture XX, 2007, 1, 75–95, esp. 80. For the rise and fall of the Zeitzeugen in German history, see Wulf Kansteiner, Dabei gewesen sein ist alles, 29 Dezember 2011, Die Zeit, 21 35 John Torpey, Making Whole What Has Been Smashed (Cambridge/MA, 2006), 19. 36 Torpey, Making Whole, 23.

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3. Historicising Historical Time Many academic historians have clearly sensed the trend towards a questioning of the notions of historical distance and of the break between past and present. A mere look at the frequency of expressions such as ‘present pasts’,37 ‘everlasting pasts,’38 ‘pasts that do not pass,’39 ‘unexpiated pasts’40 and ‘eternal presents’41 in recent academic works gives an indication of this growing preoccupation with the ontological status of the past and the relationship between past and present. The enigmatic and paradoxical wording of some of these expressions reveals, moreover, the puzzlement that issues of time and temporal breaks continue to create. Yet puzzlement about the ontological status of time of course goes further back than the twentieth century, at least as far back as Ancient Greece, and it is still with us today. In 2008, Lynn Hunt could still begin her book Measuring Time, Making History by quoting the two fundamental questions about time that Aristotle asks in his Physics: ‘First, does it belong to the class of things that exist or to that of things that do not exist? Then secondly, what is its nature?’42 Many historians probably would think that Hunt’s question – ‘Is time historical?’ – is a weird one, because, as we saw earlier, they simply identify history with time or with temporal change and take it for granted that time is somehow ‘real’. Most historians seem to have assumed that time is what calendars and clocks suggest it is: 1. time is homogeneous – meaning every second, every minute and every day is identical; 2. time is discrete – meaning every moment in time can be conceived of as a point on a straight line; 3. time is therefore linear; and 4. time is directional – meaning that it flows without interruption from the future, through the present to the past; 5. time is absolute – meaning that time is not relative to space or to the person who is measuring it. Stephen Hawking in his A Brief History of Time characterised absolute time as follows: ‘Both Aristotle and Newton believed in absolute time. That is, they believed that one could unambiguously measure the interval of time between two events and that this time would be the same whoever measured it, provided they used a good clock. Time was completely separated from

37 Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford/CA, 2003). 38 Eric Conan/Henry Rousso, Vichy, un passé qui ne passe pas (Paris, 1994). 39 Luc Huyse, All Things Pass Except the Past (Kessel-Lo, 2009). 40 Wole Soyinka, The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness (Oxford, 1999), 20. 41 Michael Ignatieff, Articles of Faith, Index on Censorship V, 1996, 110–122. 42 Lynn Hunt, Measuring Time, Making History (Budapest, 2008), 4.

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and independent of space. This is what most people would take to be the common sense view’.43 This also holds for historians.44 From Einstein’s theory of general relativity physicists know that this presupposition of an absolute time is erroneous, because time is relative to the spatial position of the observer. Since Einstein, physicists also know that time is not independent of space. What Newton did for space – proving against Aristotle that all spatial movement is relative to the observer’s position, and that therefore there are no absolute positions in space – Einstein did for time: proving against Newton that all temporal movement is relative to the observer’s position. Relativity theory, however, has not yet prompted many historians to rethink their conception of absolute time.45 Nevertheless, since the path-breaking work of Koselleck in the 1970s, some important insight into the historical relativity of historical time has developed. Koselleck argued that the modern notion of historical time originated only in the second half of the eighteenth century because it was directly connected to the modern notion of history as an objective force and unified process – with, in his phrasing, Geschichte as a Kollektivsingular. Since the end of the twentieth century, modern historical time has also been relativised by postcolonial theorists. They criticised this time conception as being fundamentally calibrated to Western history – in its periodisation, for instance – and as being inherently teleological, positing the course of the West as the implicit historical destiny of the rest of the world. This implicit teleology is, according to postcolonial critique, not only presupposed by all brands of modernisation and globalisation theory, including Marxist versions, but by the Western ‘historicist’ conception of history as such.46 Thus, what is happening in the modern Western conception of time and history, according to theorists such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, is the ‘spatialisation of time’, meaning: the implicit connecting of space and time by di43 Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (New York, 1988), 18. 44 In Le Poidevin’s words most people – including historians – are ‘objectivists’, meaning that they assume that time is somehow real and not an entity that does not exist independent from what clocks measure by some standard. The latter position is taken by socalled conventionalists. See Robin Le Poidevin, Travels in Four Dimensions: The Enigmas of Space and Time (Oxford, 2003), 5–8. 45 This question of the possibility of a ‘post-Newtonian’ historical time is interestingly raised in Wilcox, The Measure of Times Past. 46 See for the inherent teleology of national history writing, Chris Lorenz, Unstuck in Time. Or: The Sudden Presence of the Past, in: Karin Tilmans/Frank van Vree/Jay Winter (eds.), Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe (Amsterdam, 2010), 67–105, esp. 71–81. See for the argument that globalisation theories are a branch of modernisation theory, Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley/CA, 2005), 91–113.

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viding the world in regions that are ahead in time and regions that lag behind, waiting to ‘catch up’.47 So how historians measure time is apparently dependent on where they are located in space. With a bit of imagination one could regard this ‘spatialisation of time’ as a delayed reception of Einstein’s relativity theory in history. However this may be, Koselleck’s student Hölscher has taken the historisation of time a step further by pointing out that the abstract and empty time and space that historians have taken for granted actually did not exist before the modern era.48 Notions of empty space and of empty time developed slowly, between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries. For people living in the Middle Ages, events and things had concrete positions in time and in space, but they did not have a concept of empty, abstract time and space as such. In other words: things and events had temporal and spatial aspects, but time and space did not exist as realities. Space and time referred to adjectives, not to substantives. For Christianity, time was basically biblical time, meaning that it had a clear beginning (God’s creation of the Earth) and a fixed end (Judgment Day). Time was basically ‘filled in’ by the creation plan of God. There was no time before nor any after. Therefore, the modern notion of an infinite history, as expressed in our calendar, which extends forwards and backwards ad infinitum, cannot be explained as a secularised version of the Christian idea of history, as both Hans Blumenberg and Hannah Arendt have argued against Karl Löwith.49

4. History, Memory and Time The reactions of historians to the problematisation of time have been ambivalent. Some have taken the changing and alternative visions of time underlying reparations politics and the ‘memory boom’ as a welcome opportunity to critically rethink classical notions of historical time. More often, however, historians have focused precisely on allegedly ‘non-historical’ or ‘deviant’ approaches to time in order to fence off their discipline visà-vis memory or reparation politics, and to support its claims to ‘hegemony in the closed space of retrospection’.50 It is remarkable how often historians 47 However, see Frederick Cooper’s critique of Chakrabarty’s ‘homogenisation’ of ‘the West’ in his Colonialism in Question, xxx. 48 Hölscher, Semantik der Leere, 13–33. 49 Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeut (Frankfurt/Main, 1966); Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York, 2006), esp. 68. 50 Paul Ricoeur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris, 2000), 458.

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are claiming different, ‘improper’ temporalities as an implicit or explicit argument for the ‘objectification’ of memory and its presentation as ‘mythical’ or ‘pathological’ – or at least as not providing a viable alternative to ‘real’ history.51 Even an unconventional historian like Hayden White, for example, seems to pay tribute to traditional temporal divisions by subscribing to Michael Oakeshott’s distinction between the ‘historical’ and the ‘practical’ past.52 Gabrielle Spiegel, too, rejects theories that posit a reciprocal relationship between history and memory by claiming that the ‘differing temporal structures’ of history and memory ‘prohibit’ their ‘conflation’. Memory can never ‘do the ‘work’ of history’ or ‘perform historically’ because ‘it refuses to keep the past in the past, to draw the line that is constitutive of the modern enterprise of historiography.’ Indeed Spiegel writes: ‘The very postulate of modern historiography is the disappearance of the past from the present.’53 Similar claims about the proper conceptualisation of historical time and about the relationship between past and present have figured prominently in Henry Rousso’s arguments against the judicialisation of history and in his refusal to function as an expert witness in the French trial against Maurice Papon. Rousso’s refusal to appear in the courtroom was based, among other considerations, on his conviction that historians have to improve the ‘understanding of the distance that separates [past and present]’54 or on the 51 Martin Broszat’s remark about the supposedly ‘mythical’ character of the – ex post – centrality of the Holocaust in ‘Jewish’ history writing on Nazi-Germany, as opposed to the supposedly ‘distant’, ‘scientific’ character of ‘German’ academic history writing, induced Saul Friedländer to compose his opus magnum: Nazi-Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination 1939 – 1945 (New York 2007), in which linear time is supplanted by nonlinear, ‘modernist’ time in a pathbreaking way, as Wulf Kansteiner has argued. See Wulf Kansteiner, »Success, Truth, and Modernism in Holocaust Historiography: Reading Saul Friedländer 35 Years after the Publication of Metahistory«, History & Theory 47/2 (2009), 25–53. This tendency to stress the particularity of ‘historical time’ in order to institutionally defend professional history is of course not new. See Thomas Loué, Du présent au passé: le temps des historiens, Temporalités: Revue de sciences sociales et humaines VIII, 2008. 52 Hayden White, The Public Relevance of Historical Studies: A Reply to Dirk Moses, History and Theory XLIV, 2005, 3, 333–338. Typically time hardly plays any role in his Metahistory. Also see Hayden White, The Practical Past, Historein 10, 2010, 10–19. Frank Ankersmit has argued that time does not constitute a proper object for the (narrative) philosophy of history. See his Over geschiedenis en tijd, Groniek, 1989, 11–26. Oakshott was clear about the temporal status of the ‘practical past’, which according to him was not ‘significantly past’ at all. Michael Oakshott, On History and Other Essays (Oxford, 1985), 39. 53 Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Memory and history: Liturgical Time and Historical Time, History and Theory XLI, 2002, 4, 149–162. 54 Henry Rousso, The Haunting Past: History, Memory, and Justice in Contemporary France (Philadelphia, 2002), 8.

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slightly, but markedly different conviction, that a good historian ‘puts the past at a distance’. Rousso, however, believed that the attempts at retrospective justice in France were influenced by a politics of memory, or even a ‘religion of memory’ that ‘abolishes distance’ and ‘ignores the hierarchies of time’. In contrast: ‘The historical project consists precisely in describing, explaining, and situating alterity, in putting it at a distance.’55 The historians’ craft, according to Rousso, therefore offers a ‘liberating type of thinking, because it rejects the idea that people or societies are conditioned or determined by their past without any possibility of escaping it.’56 Historians must resist the role of ‘agitators of memory’ and the growing societal ‘obsession’ with memory. They must do so by allowing what many want to avoid: ‘the selection of what must remain or disappear to occur spontaneously’.57 Similar claims about the task of historians are made by Dutch historian Bob de Graaff in a tract on the relationship of the historian to (genocidal) victimhood – a text visibly influenced by his experiences as a member of the research team that was commissioned by the Dutch government to scrutinise the Srebrenica massacre. Again, the argument focuses on proper and improper understandings of (historical) time. Victims or survivors, de Graaff claims, often live in an ‘extratemporality’,58 or in a ‘synchronic’ rather than ‘diachronic’ and ‘chronological’ time. For them the ‘past remains present’, to them it seems as if atrocities ‘only happened yesterday or even today’.59 In this regard de Graaff follows Michael Ignatieff, who held that ‘victim time’ is ‘simultaneous’ and ‘not linear’.60 Of course the historian recognises the fact that the past can be ‘called up’ again, but in contrast to the survivor, he does this voluntarily. Moreover, he ‘registers’ that facts of the past are ‘bygone’, ‘definitely lost’ or have ‘come to a downfall’.61 In reality, de Graaff claims: ‘Victimhood is historically determined. It comes about in a particular period. It has a beginning, but it also has an end.’ In this context it is the task of historians ‘to place events, including genocide, in their time, literally historicising them.’62 The historian has to do this by trying to ‘determine the individual character of particular periods/epochs and by that demarcate one period vis-à-vis the other’. To cite de Graaff once again: ‘[The 55 Rousso, The Haunting Past, 26. 56 Ibid., 28. 57 Ibid., 3. 58 Bob de Graaff, Op de klippen of door de vaargeul: De omgang van de historicus met (genocidaal) slachtofferschap (Amsterdam, 2006), 27. [Our translation] 59 Ibid., 28. 60 Michael Ignatieff, The Nightmare from Which We Are Trying to Wake up, in: idem, The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (London, 1998), 166–190. 61 de Graaff, Op de klippen, 28, 71. 62 Ibid., 28.

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historian] brings the past to life or keeps it alive and kills it by letting the past become past. With that he not only creates a past but he also offers a certain autonomy to the present.’63 ‘Historisation’ in this sense of ‘closing an epoch by recognising its entirely individual character’ is not only a professional duty of historians. There also is a social justification to ‘draw a line under victimhood.’ De Graaff therefore concurs with the literary author Hellema: ‘It became about time to put the past in its place.’64 As the above examples illustrate, one could metaphorically describe historians’ recent approaches to their profession as involving a kind of ‘border patrol’65 of the relationship between past and present. Yet the examples also show that, although these historians are quite clear when declaring the need for ‘border guards’, they are much less clear when it comes to assessing what this ‘guarding’ actually consists of and how it relates to the borders it claims to patrol. Indeed, although there can be little doubt that these historians oppose an ‘open’ border policy when it comes to relating past and present, it is not clear from their arguments whether they can best be metaphorically represented as merely observers watching over borders between established ‘sovereign’ states, or as activists aggressively engaged in a repatriation policy, such as the one that intends to defend the ‘fortress of Europe’ against ‘illegal’ intruders, or as implying a more straightforward, performative setting of borders that creates new states, such as the ones that created West and East Germany or, more recently, North and South Sudan. When it comes to relating past and present, historians increasingly seem to waver between a merely contemplative stance and a more active one. Rousso, as we have seen, sometimes defines the role of historians as that of ‘understanding’ the distance between past and present, while on other occasions he describes it as one of ‘distancing’ past and present. On the one hand, the historian has to allow ‘the selection of what must remain or disappear to occur spontaneously’; on the other, the historian’s liberating potential is situated in ‘putting [the past] at a distance’. It is also far from clear what the precise status is of the ‘hierarchies of time’ that are not respected by memory. De Graaff ’s approach, despite his references to the drawing of lines, seems equally ambiguous. At first sight, his thesis that it is necessary to demarcate periods by recognising their ‘entirely individual’ character seems quite unproblematic, but it is amply shown in critical theory on periodisation that on a historiographical level the very notion of the individuality or particularity of periods is (at least partly) dependent on their demarcation alias 63 Ibid., 28. 64 Hellema ‘Een andere tamboer’, cited in: ibid., 30. 65 Expression used by Joan W. Scott, Border Patrol, French Historical Studies XXI, 1998, 3, 383–397.

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their ‘periodisation’ – which in its turn relates to a particular cultural, religious, gendered or ethico-political logic.66 From a ‘nominalist’ perspective, it is indeed quite senseless to even speak about ‘periods’ before time is somehow periodised. Yet even from a more ‘objectivist’ or ‘realist’ perspective, it is as puzzling as it is important to know what exactly historians are doing when they are ‘letting the past become past’, and how historians can tell ‘when’ exactly ‘it is time’ to ‘put the past in its place’. When, indeed, is this act ‘timely’ and thus ‘legitimate’? The German philosopher Hans Blumenberg argued that the question of the legitimacy of breaks in time is strongly entangled with the concept of the ‘epoch’ itself.67 This quandary, for Blumenberg, was especially latent in modernity’s claim to realise a radical break with tradition – a claim that, according to him, was incongruent with the reality of history ‘which can never begin entirely anew’. ‘The modern age,’ Blumenberg argues, ‘was the first and only age that understood itself as an epoch and, in doing so, simultaneously created other epochs’. Due to this performative aspect, an adequate understanding of the concept of epoch cannot be reached so long as one starts from a historicist logic of ‘historiographical object definition’ – which according to Blumenberg, can never transcend the longstanding dilemma of nominalism versus realism. Though Blumenberg primarily focuses on modernity (and intellectual history) his argument applies to all attempts to understand the change of epochs in ‘rational categories’. The fact that the problems of historicist logic are still very prominent today can be illustrated by Martin Sabrow’s recent attempt to come to grips with the problem of time in contemporary history. Sabrow thoughtfully develops historicism to its logical end – without transgressing its borders, however.68 Starting from the (at least in Germany) classical definition of Zeitgeschichte by Hans Rothfels as the ‘epoch of the contemporaries and their handling by academic history’, he observes that this definition does not ‘fit’ the current practice of contemporary historians in Germany anymore. Sabrow’s argument is the fact of ‘1945’, a ‘fact’ he describes as follows: ‘The end of contemporaneity [Zeitgenossenschaft] did not succeed in bridging the epochal caesura of 1945 in German contemporary history, although this had been predicted just before the collapse of the Soviet dictatorship in 1989/90 and even more afterward.’69 Because the criterion of having experienced the ‘contemporary’ past does not hold water anymore – World War One, in Sab66 Irmline Veit-Brause, Marking Time: Topoi and Analogies in Historical Periodization, Storia della Storiografia XXVII, 2000, 3–10. 67 Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt/Main, 1966). Hereafter cited in its English translation The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge/MA, 1983). 68 Martin Sabrow, Die Zeit der Zeitgeschichte (Göttingen, 2012). 69 Sabrow, Zeit der Zeitgeschichte, 2.

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row’s view, did not stop being part of ‘contemporary’ history even though the last (French) war veteran died in 2008 – Sabrow proposes a new criterion based on controversial nature and intensity of memory: The capacity to produce social meaning of counter-narratives, based on experience and memory, distinguishes contemporary history fundamentally from other periods in history. This capacity endows contemporary history with a changing temporal position, crossing over the borders of any specific period and defining its particular unity. The time of contemporary history is rather oriented by the intensity of memory or by the public confrontation with the past as a mix of memory and knowledge.70

So again, it is allegedly not the historian who decides where the borders of Zeitgeschichte are to be drawn because the borders, according to Sabrow, are somehow out there to be ‘registered’. Because the failed German revolution of 1918–19, the Weimar Republic and Hitler’s rise to power are no longer hotly debated, they are no longer part of ‘contemporary’ history. The persecution of the Jews, the Holocaust and totalitarian rule, however, are still objects of ‘hot’ controversies and therefore, in Sabrow’s view, ‘contemporary’ – even though they are in part chronologically simultaneous with ‘Weimar’ and Hitler’s rise to power. Sabrow, therefore, is obliged to draw the surprising conclusion that some parts of the history of the twentieth century belong to ‘contemporary’ history, while others do not, and that their chronological location is not the deciding criterion. Only their being part of ‘hot’ memorial controversies is decisive. Zeitgeschichte, according to Sabrow, is therefore fundamentally Streitgeschichte. As long as that is the case, the contested parts of the German twentieth century are like ‘remaining islands of contemporary history in a sea of progressing historisation’.71 Only after having deconstructed the temporal borders of the object of Zeitgeschichte does Sabrow shift his attention to the constructive activities of the Zeithistoriker. In this respect he is less original because he holds with the eighteenth-century German historian Johann Martin Chladenius that historians develop an organising point of view – a Sehepunkt – in their reconstructions, which lends an ex post narrative unity to temporal diversity. This unity, according to Sabrow, is fundamentally dependent on a certain ‘closure’ in time. Therefore clear-cut ruptures or ‘break-ups’ in time – as in 1945 and in 1989 – are of crucial importance for the contemporary historian. Again, according to Sabrow, the Zeithistoriker does not actively ‘break up’ time; rather he ‘registers’ what is ‘out there’. Therefore Sabrow suggests that we think of Zeitgeschichte as: ‘ … the period or those periods that precede the latest fundamental change of the point of view and that can therefore be dis70 Ibid., 5. 71 Ibid., 6.

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tinguished from the succeeding period by the presence of different political, economic and cultural societal norms.’72 In the end, therefore, Sabrow, in spite of himself, presents a new – and temporal – definition of contemporary history, beginning with ‘totalitarian’ Nazism in the 1930s and ending with the end of the Cold War in 1989 – which he apparently regards as the latest ‘objective’ break in time.73 What is also remarkable here is that after he has thrown the (linear) temporal borders of contemporary history out the front door, Sabrow reintroduces them through the backdoor – by assuming that epochs and breaks apparently are ‘out there’ and succeed each other. It is therefore only logical that Sabrow needs to introduce a new epoch and new kind of history succeeding ‘contemporary’ history – that is, after the last ‘objective’ break or caesura in time, the so-called ‘history of the present’ or Gegenwartsgeschichte – which in Germany begins in 1989. Its distinctive characteristic is that because this part of history is not yet ‘closed’ by a recognisable ‘break’ in time, there is no point of view to orient the historian who might wish to write it. As a result, the history-writing of the present is … impossible: ‘Without a break between experiencing and understanding, which is produced by a change in point of view, the writing of history remains a speculative activity based on shifting sands of interpretation, because its parameter and storylines can change continuously.’74 No ‘objective’ break in time, according to Sabrow, means no break between the experience (Erleben) of the contemporary eyewitnesses – the Zeitzeugen – and the ex post understanding (Verstehen) of the professional historian, and thus no break between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’, that is: ‘real’ history.75 With Sabrow historicism has come full circle: The arguments he formulates against the possibility of Gegenwartsgeschichte are identical to the arguments historicists have traditionally advanced against the possibility of Zeitgeschichte.76 Again we observe the clear and typical wavering between the historian’s passive ‘recognising’ and his active ‘producing’ breaks in time.

72 Ibid., 7. 73 Ibid., 8. 74 Ibid., 8. 75 Also see Martin Sabrow, Die Historikerdebatte über den Umbruch von 1989, in: Martin Sabrow et al. (eds.), Zeitgeschichte als Streitgeschichte: Große Kontroversen seit 1945 (Munich, 2003), 127. For the notions of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ history, see: Chris Lorenz, Geschichte, Gegenwärtigkeit und Zeit, in: Dietmar Goltschnigg (ed.), Phänomen Zeit: Dimensionen und Strukturen in Kultur und Wissenschaft (Tübingen, 2011), 127–135. 76 See Alexander Nützenadel/Wolfgang Schieder (eds.), Zeitgeschichte als Problem: Nationale Traditionen und Perspektiven der Forschung (Göttingen, 2004); Zeitgeschichte heute – Stand und Perspektiven, Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, 2004, 1.

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This issue also pops up when Sabrow tries to draw a border between Zeitgeschichte as a discipline and the rest of the Erinnerungskultur in which contemporary historians participate by joining in public debates. By his or her participation in public historical culture, the Zeithistoriker/in is not only observer but also actor according to Sabrow.77 He insists, however, that the public activities of the Zeithistoriker/innen should not be conceived as political action. His main argument in this regard seems to be that historians, in contrast to other carriers of memory culture, have a ‘method’ and a reflected relationship to time that enables them to keep ‘distance’ and avoid ‘partisanship’ vis-à-vis the past, even when the past is very present. Two rules of conduct in my view are extraordinarily important. The first consists in adopting a conscious partisanship in favour of a distancing historisation of the past and against a partisan making present of the past. The task of the discipline of contemporary history is to explain the past and not to produce a normative evaluation, and even less a public advise. The second strategic rule of conduct that would guarantee contemporary history a legitimate existence within the general culture of memory instead of in opposition to it, consists of the capacity of metahistorical self-reflection. Contrary to the other ‘players’ in the field of ‘working with the past’, contemporary history disposes of an armoury of methods that enable it to create a distance to its own activities, that makes up for a lack of temporal distance with analytical distance.78

How exactly the ‘analytical’ distance of the Zeithistoriker compensates for a lack of temporal distance is not clarified. Apparently, a good Zeithistoriker – in contrast to the Zeitzeuge and the memorialist – just knows.

5. ‘Past-ness’ and ‘Present-ness’ The cultural and political reality of the ‘memory boom’ has compelled historians in search of a new professional role and theoretical legitimation for history to make explicit what was previously based more often on implicit presuppositions than on formal arguments – e.g., such notions as the pastness of the past and the present-ness of the present. As Ulrich Raulff convincingly demonstrated, novelists were well ahead of historians in problematising the relationship between the past and the present. On the basis of his study of fictional literature, he characterises the twentieth century as ‘the century of the present’ (Gegenwart) in contrast to the nineteenth century, ‘the century of history’ (Geschichte). Instead of the questions about origins that dominated nineteenth-century historical reflection, the problem of

77 Sabrow, Zeit der Zeitgeschichte, 20: ‘Zeithistorie agiert in unserer Gegenwart notgedrungen als Beobachterin und Gestalterin zugleich.’ 78 Ibid., 20–21.

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presence (Präsenz) and actuality (Aktualität) have come to dominate the literature of classical modernity. 79 It is remarkable that historians have rarely engaged in explicit reflection on the problem of the present and of presence, for it is clearly central to their notion of historical time and, through the logic of negation, to their notion of the past. Their failure to address the problem may partly be explained by the longstanding taboo among professional historians on the writing of contemporary history or any historiography that does not respect a certain waiting period – defined most often by the opening up of archives or the dying of Zeitzeugen, but sometimes defined in straightforwardly chronological terms, e.g., forty years. So, despite the fact that they include the words ‘time’, ‘contemporaneity’ or ‘present’ in their very names, the breakthrough of the subdisciplines of Zeitgeschichte, contemporary history and histoire du temps présent has not led to much critical reflection on these notions. A few exceptions notwithstanding, the widespread tendency among historians is to focus on evermore recent events. This trend, which Lynn Hunt has criticised as ‘presentism’,80 has paradoxically rarely led historians to raise the question whether, and in what sense, their object of study can still be called ‘past’. Philosophers of history have also not reflected much on the meaning of the notions ‘past’ and ‘present’. It is significant that, although philosophers of history are very fond of pointing out that the word ‘history’ is polysemical – referring both to historical events (res gestae), as well as to narratives about these events (historia rerum gestarum) – and that this is no accident but a meaningful fact, they seldom note that the same can be said about the word ‘present’, which can refer both to the (temporal) presence of an ‘instant’ or a ‘now’, as well as to the (material) presence of objects. Again, there are exceptions. Recently Zachary S. Schiffman has offered some innovative insights in his The Birth of the Past based on the argument that a differentiation has to be made between the common sense idea of the past as ‘prior time’ and the historical past defined as a time ‘different from the present’.81 Earlier Preston King offered a profound reflection on the different meanings that are attributed to the notions of ‘present’ and ‘past’.82 King differentiates between four distinct notions of ‘present’ (and correlative notions of ‘past’), which are based on a ‘chronological’ notion of time as an abstract temporal sequence on the one hand and a ‘substantive’ 79 Raulff, Der unsichtbare Augenblick, 10. 80 Lynn Hunt, Against Presentism, Perspectives XL, 2002, 4. [www.historians.org/perspectives/…/0205pre1.cfm] 81 Zachary S. Schiffman, The Birth of the Past (Baltimore, 2011). 82 Preston King, Thinking Past a Problem: Essays on the History of Ideas (London, 2000).

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notion of time as a concrete sequence of events on the other. Relying on chronological time and depending on their duration, two senses of the present can be discerned: a first called the ‘instantaneous present’ and a second called the ‘extended present’. Both presents are boxed in between past and future and have a merely chronological character. While the first, however, defines itself as the smallest possible and ever-evaporating instant dividing past and present, the second refers to a more extended period of time (e.g., a day, a year, a century) whose limits are arbitrarily chosen but give the present some ‘body’ or temporal depth. Because of the meaninglessness and arbitrarily chronological character of these presents and corresponding pasts, historians often use a more substantive frame of reference based on criteria that are themselves not temporal. One of these substantive notions is that of the ‘unfolding present’. As long as a chosen event or evolution (e.g., negotiations, a depression, a crisis, a war) is unfolding, it demarcates a ‘present’. When it is conceived of as completed, the time in which it unfolded is called ‘past’. King remarks that this is the only sense in which one can say that a particular past is ‘dead’ or ‘over and done with’. Yet, he immediately warns that any process deemed completed contains ‘sub-processes’ that are in fact not. So, it is always very difficult to exclude any ‘actual past’ from being part of, working in or having influence on this unfolding present. In addition to the three presents already summed up (the instantaneous, the extended and the unfolding), King names a fourth which he calls the ‘neoteric present’. Drawing a parallel to the dialectics of fashion, he notes that we often distinguish things that happen in the present but can be experienced as ‘ancient’, ‘conventional’ or ‘traditional’, from phenomena we view as being characteristic of the present, which we designate ‘novel’, ‘innovative’ or ‘modern’. Historical periodisation on first sight primarily depending on the extended present, according to King, is primarily based on the dialectics of the neoteric present. While every notion of the present excludes its own correlative past, this does not hold for non-correlative senses of the past. The present can thus be penetrated by non-correlative pasts that in a substantive sense stay alive in the present: ‘The past is not present. But no present is entirely divorced from or uninfluenced by the past. The past is not chronologically present. But there is no escaping the fact that much of it is substantively so.’83 King’s analysis is important because it offers an intellectual defence against arguments that posit or, as usually is the case, simply assume the existence of a neat divide between past and present, and portray the past as 83 King, Thinking Past a Problem, 55.

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‘dead’ or entirely different from the present. On the basis of his inquiry into the nature of past and past-ness, as well as his critical analysis of notions of present, present-ness and contemporaneity, he is able to counter both arguments that represent history as entirely ‘passeist’ and arguments that represent history as entirely ‘presentist’. In other words, King on the one hand rejects arguments that claim that the writing of history is solely ‘about’ the past, but on the other hand he also dismisses the claim that historiography is exclusively based on present perspectives or that ‘all history is contemporary history’. On an analytical level, King’s sophisticated differentiation between diverse notions of past and present seems to ‘solve’ the riddles of historical time and the relationship between the past and the present – and we could add: the future.84 However, King does not say much about the extent to which his analytical categories can be found in the work of historians or in broader social dealings with historicity, nor does he point out the concrete (epistemological, cultural, political, etc.) implications of his insights. In this book, we are interested precisely in the question of these more complex ‘actual’ dealings with and performative creations of pasts and presents. Focusing on ‘actual’ pasts and presents means transcending their clearcut analytical descriptions and looking at how they emerge in impure forms, and how they are entangled and confounded. On this ‘actual level’ one may, as Peter Burke rightly observes, expect to find out that ‘times are not hermetically sealed but “contaminate” one another.’85 It may thus be worthwhile to pay attention to the way chronological conceptualisations of time combine with and influence more substantive concepts of temporality in historical practice. It can be asked, for example, what status exactly should be accorded to ideas about ‘short centuries’ or ‘long centuries’, and how experiences and expectations of a ‘fin de siècle’ influence the way historians and historical actors ‘consign’ events and processes to history.86 Focusing on the empirical level implies asking what we actually do when we talk about past, present and future and their ‘borders’. How is the naming and demarcation of these categories politically and ethically charged, and to what extent are they actually a matter of contemplation or rather of performativity? Can we any longer take for granted the common idea, as expressed for example by Nathan Rotenstreich, that our relationship to the past is one of reflection,

84 Helge Jordheim, in his recent article Against Periodization: Koselleck’s Theory of Multiple Temporalities, History and Theory LI, 2012, 2, 151–171, offers an interpretation of Koselleck’s theory of temporalities which points in the same direction as King. 85 Burke, Reflections, 625. 86 Expression used by Charles S. Maier, Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era, The American Historical Review CV, 2000, 3, 807–801.

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while we relate to the future through ‘intervention’? Or does our relationship with the past involve specific types of performative ‘intervention’ as well?87 With Michel de Certeau it makes sense to ask whether and to what extend ‘historical acts’ ‘transform contemporary documents into archives, or make the countryside into a museum of memorable and/or superstitious traditions’. Within the current political and cultural context it certainly seems fruitful to scrutinise de Certeau’s thesis that the ‘circumscription’ of a ‘past,’ rather than being the product of mere contemplation, involves an active ‘cutting off ’ or an active creation of an opposition. This means taking de Certeau’s claim seriously that within a context of social stratification, historiography has often ‘defined as “past” (that is, as an ensemble of alterities and of “resistances” to be comprehended or rejected) whatever did not belong to the power of producing a present, whether the power is political, social, or scientific’.88 It should also be clear that, by opting for the focus in this book that we have just described, we do not intend to settle any ‘border conflicts’ between past, present and future, nor do we want to make dramatic claims like those of Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth who describes/declares ‘historical time as a thing of the past’.89 We do believe, however, that Ermarth’s deliberately ironic phrasing does raise long-neglected and important questions. Indeed, we think it is about time to ask about the historicity of historical time, not just in the conventional sense of scrutinising its (intellectual or cultural) genesis or genealogy, but also in the sense of its relationship to the past, future and above all to the present. These, then, are the questions that form the framework of this volume.

6. Overview of the volume We have divided the contributions to this volume into four sections: 1. Time and Modernity: Critical Approaches to Koselleck’s Legacy The first part of the volume assembles three contributions that directly build on the heritage of Reinhart Koselleck’s analyses of time and modernity. In her essay ‘Transformations of the Modern Time Regime’, Aleida Assmann elaborates on an insight that is fundamental to Koselleck’s work: that 87 Nathan Rotenstreich, Time and Meaning in History (Dordrecht, 1987), 21. 88 de Certeau, Heterologies, 216. As de Certeau claims in another of his works: ‘Une société se donne ainsi un présent grâce à une écriture historique.’ de Certeau, L’ecriture de l’histoire, 141. 89 Ermarth, Sequel to History, 25. Also see Elisabeth Deeds Ermarth, Ph(r)ase Time – Chaos Theory and Postmodern Reports on Knowledge, Time & Society IV, 1995, 1, 91–110.

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time has its own historicity. Assmann argues that a ‘continental shift’ is taking place in our experience of temporality, a shift that not only involves a future that is losing its lure, but also brings a renewed interest in the past. From the perspective of this recent change, she offers a schematic but precise overview of what she sees as five central aspects of the moribund ‘modern time regime.’ In the second chapter, ‘The Ruins of Modernity’, Peter Fritzsche offers an analysis of heterogeneous ‘shapes of time’ existing in modernity by using changing perceptions of ‘ruins’ around the early nineteenth century as his point of departure. He identifies four types of ruins that, in his view, reflect and reinforce contrasting (geo)politics of time. Fritzsche uses his analysis of ruins to reflect on the sociopolitical role of historians. History as a genre, he argues, can reanimate alternatives and raise the question of the permanence of the present, but it can equally close down other alternatives and thus ‘stabilise’ the present. In chapter 3, ‘Global Modernity and the Contemporary: Two Categories of the Philosophy of Historical Time’, Peter Osborne presents a philosophical analysis of ‘global modernity’, which he mainly criticises on a geopolitical level and for which he proposes, as an alternative, the notion of a global ‘contemporary’. He maintains that Koselleck’s analysis has always been rather restrictive on a historical and a philosophical level and is now, more than ever, restrictive due to the ‘emergence of new structures of temporalisation of history’. On a conceptual level, Osborne relates this new temporalisation to two processes: on the one hand a ‘globalisation’ of the (Western and colonial) concept of modernity, and on the other hand the ‘becoming-world-historical’ of a notion of the contemporary.

2. Ruptures in Time: Revolutions and Wars In the second part of the volume, four contributions have been assembled that analyse the effects of major ‘transformative events’, like revolutions and wars, on the ways temporal distinctions between present, past and future are constructed. In chapter 4, ‘Year One and Year 61 of the French Revolution: The Revolutionary Calendar and Auguste Comte’, Sanja Perovic focuses on the question of how time’s measure – apparently abstract, universal and invariable – relates to the lived experience of historical events. How does ‘chronological’ time, defined primarily in quantitative terms, relate to a more qualitative notion of ‘event-time’? According to Perovic, ‘failed’ calendars, such as the revolutionary calendar and Comte’s calendar, reflect alternative and more complex experiences of modernity which, though lost to us, (partly due to our current politics of measurement) can potentially grant fruitful new insights

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on modernity and more specifically on the way transformative events have been and are still being dealt with. In chapter 5, ‘Wormholes in Russian History: Events “Outside of Time”,’ Claudia Verhoeven focuses on the way in which the radical Russian intelligentsia around the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century created visions of historical time that significantly differed from more classical historicist thinking. This classical train of thought concerning historical evolution represented Russia as backward and as far removed from modernity and certainly from the modern revolution. It is known that this was also Lenin’s view. Yet Verhoeven sees Lenin’s stance as following a long tradition of intellectual efforts by the radical intelligentsia to break out of time by creating what she calls ‘temporal wormholes’. These were motivated by a wish to break with the past and to forge a new age, often by using political violence and terror as the preferred means. François Hartog in chapter 6, ‘The Modern Regime of Historicity in Face of the Two World Wars’, elaborates on the author’s influential theory about regimes of historicity. He focuses on the modern regime of historicity and raises the question of how and to what extent this regime of historicity – firmly based on the categories of future and progress – was able to survive the First and Second World Wars. What, Hartog asks, does it mean to believe in history in the period between 1918 and 1945? And what consequences do the different experiences of the victorious and the defeated nations have for conceptions of time? Hartog develops the thesis that already before 1914, the modern regime of historicity had undergone a series of changes and reformulations that made it more resistant to periods of crisis. In chapter 7, ‘Mysteries of Historical Order: Breaks, Simultaneity and the Relation of the Past, the Present and the Future’, Lucian Hölscher addresses a question similar to Hartog’s, but offers a different answer. Hölscher starts from the observation that history in the twentieth century, since the First World War, was no longer experienced as a meaningful and continuous whole, the way it had been experienced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Beginning with three autobiographical analyses of our present ‘postmodern’ historical condition, Hölscher investigates how it was possible for thinkers before 1918 to perceive of the relationship between past, present and future so differently. Hölscher argues that in the eighteenth century the notion of simultaneity made it possible for Enlightenment thinkers to conceptualise a connection – a Zusammenhang – between events that went beyond their purely temporal connection. This idea made it possible to conceive of an Ungleichzeitigkeit des Gleichzeitichen and to think of temporal order in a spatial sense. ‘Civilised’ societies in present day Europe could be represented as the future of ‘primitive’ societies elsewhere. It would take a world war and (colonial) genocides to destroy this meaning-

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ful temporal order and to render both past and future dependent on the present.

3. Thinking about Time: Analytical Approaches In the third section of the volume are two contributions that approach the problem of breaking up time from a more philosophical angle. In chapter 8, ‘The Limits of Historiographical Choice in Temporal Distinctions’, Jonathan Gorman offers a theory of historical time that transforms Quine’s (pragmatic) notion of a ‘web of beliefs’ into a ‘rolling web of beliefs’ and provides a fruitful way of thinking about our historical – that is, our diachronic – beliefs. He suggests the notions of ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ as the basic temporal distinctions within any ‘rolling web of belief ’. The only formal criterion regulating their use is the criterion of consistency. All other criteria in use are merely conventional. After having fixed the temporal notions of ‘earlier’ and ‘later’, Gorman addresses ‘the present’. He notes the durational or extended character of ‘the present’ always includes parts of the past and the future. All ‘swathes of time’ distinguished by historians – fixed centuries or more indeterminate periods, such as ‘post-revolutionary’ – have a conventional character like Wittgenstein’s ‘common sense certainties’. Only in historical hindsight do alternatives become visible. The temporal distinction between the present and the past is thus purely conventional, although it need not be consensual. In chapter 9, ‘Breaking up Time – Escaping from Time: Self-Assertion and Knowledge of the Past’, Constantin Fasolt also takes his inspiration from the later Wittgenstein. Fasolt proposes an answer to the questions what is meant by a ‘break in time’, how the latter relates to broader experiences of time and what its ethical and political implications are. Fasolt starts from a ‘grammatical’ analysis – in Wittgenstein’s sense of the term – in order to point out how transitions from present to past are made on the level of individual life. Subsequently he extends his argument to the level of ‘society’ and illustrates his theory by focusing on the ‘historical break’ between the Middle Ages and Modernity. Finally, Fasolt analyses the role of historians in the breaking-up of time. His analysis leads him to take some critical stances on the notion of breaking time, including on the issue of historical periodisation, and most explicitly on the widespread idea that the past is ‘gone’ or even ‘non-existent’. Ultimately, Fasolt argues that orthodox historical notions of the past and of breaks in time primarily serve a political project that posits the autonomy of the present vis-à-vis the past but in reality turn out to have opposite effects.

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4. Time outside Europe: Imperialism, Colonialism and Globalisation The fourth and last section contains four contributions dealing with the question of how breaking up time has been dealt with outside Europe, and with the nature of confrontations between European and non-European time-conceptions. In chapter 10, ‘Globalisation and Time’, Lynn Hunt investigates how ‘globalisation’ affects the experience of time and how it challenges the temporal concepts used by historians. First, Hunt discusses some ideas of ‘space-time compression’, ‘acceleration of time’ and ‘deterritoralisation’ which are often attributed to ‘globalisation’. She observes that although from the beginning ‘globalisation’ theorists have questioned the dominant traditional spatial unit of historiography – the nation-state – they have not as yet subjected the traditional units of western time – ancient, medieval and modern history – to similar critiques. Hunt sets out to do this by considering three challenges to the historians’ concepts of time: time-keeping, historical periodisation and the incorporation of ‘deep time’. With Koselleck, Hunt regards the idea of ‘history’ as a direct consequence of the Western project of modernity. The modern focus on itself, however, has increasingly produced a fixation on the present, thus undercutting interest in the premodern times. Hunt therefore suggests a turn to ‘deep’ or ‘big’ history as a first step towards ‘de-occidentalising’ history and uncoupling it from Western modernity. A ‘very-long-time’ and evolutionary view here replaces the idea of progress and teleology, thus shrinking Western modernity to more modest proportions. In chapter 11, ‘Unification of Time and the Fragmentation of Pasts in Meiji Japan’, Stefan Tanaka takes a closer look at how Modern History arrived in Japan at the end of the nineteenth century. Beginning with Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism, he analyses the construction of history and of historical time in Japan. The problem confronted Japanese historians when they started writing history in the Western sense during the Meiji period. This problem was, according to Tanaka, that within the Oriental scheme ‘Japan’ was part of ‘Asia’; and ‘Asia’ was conceived of as the inferior ‘Other’ to ‘Europe’. In order to conceive ‘the history of Japan’, Japan first needed to be synchronised as one geographical unit, that is as a nation-state. Next, this spatial unit had to be located in universal, Western time and also be divorced from China, both chronologically and spatially. Tanaka then zooms in on various schools of scholars who developed different ideas about Japan’s ‘history as a nation’. It was only around 1900 that historians started separating ‘the past of Japan’ rigidly from its present and subdividing its history into ancient, medieval and

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modern history, thus synchronising the periodisation of time in Japan with Western history. In chapter 12, ‘Temporal Hierarchies and Moral Leadership: China’s Engagement with Modern Views of History’, Axel Schneider looks at how the introduction of the Western notion of time was dealt with in China. He sets off by describing the reception of modern Western views of history, including issues such as linear time, concepts of progress and causality, historical periodisation, and the development of modern scientific history in China from about the 1890s to the 1940s. Schneider argues that this process was embedded in the peculiar historical situation of the early 1900s, which caused enormous temporal pressure – i.e., pressure to modernise fast in order to survive – and also raised the identity-question of how the Chinese could modernise and yet remain Chinese. He concludes that China did not have a non-Western sort of ‘secondary Orient’ against which it could position and define itself. Due to its pre-modern understanding of itself as a civilisational empire, China always aspired to move into a position of equality (at least) with other nations, if not to regain a position of centrality. Schneider then moves on to explain the background of the pre-modern Chinese understanding of history and time. This comprised the transformation of a, by and large, ethical understanding of history with cyclical views of time into a vision of history and time as ultimately focusing on struggle, power and linear progress, with Europe as its model. In the last chapter 13, ‘The War for Time in Early Colonial Algeria’, William Gallois addresses time and Algeria. He points out that one can best study implicit understandings of time by focusing on contexts in which radically different temporal cultures encounter each other. The colony of Algeria is a prime example. The French conquest of Algeria in the 1830s and 1840s was not only a battle for space but also a war between rival understandings of time. The French turned time into a battleground by justifying their conquest as a ‘civilising mission’ with the imperative to bring progress and modernity to this backward region of North Africa with its anachronistic religion. Islamic understandings of time and history were of great importance in the Algerians’ resistance to colonisation. Despite the decentred nature of the Islamic world, Gallois argues that one can properly speak of a Muslim tradition of understanding time. He elaborates on his analysis of rival politics of time by focusing on a prominent Algerian anti-imperial writing of 1833. Its non-Western style and perspective provide an excellent opportunity to think about Western historiography in an innovative and challenging way.

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1. Time and Modernity: Critical Approaches to Koselleck’s Legacy

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Aleida Assmann

Transformations of the Modern Time Regime

‘The limits of a theory are defined by the succeeding theory. We must be wary not to naturalize the ontologies of a theory.’ Jürgen Audretsch ‘The weakness of progress is marked by its loss of power to abolish the past in a sufficient degree.’ Rudolf Schlögl

Graham Swift writes in his novel Waterland: ‘Once upon a time, in the bright sixties, there was plenty of future on offer.’1 His book was published in 1983. After only two decades the future of the sixties had already lost much of its glamour. The future, as historians have instructed us in the meantime, has its own history. While it had been generally assumed that the working domain of historians is the past, they discovered in the 1970s that this past also included different futures. Reinhart Koselleck developed this idea in an influential book entitled Futures Past.2 That the future is no longer what it used to be is an insight that is accessible to anyone with a long enough memory. There was indeed plenty of future on offer in the bright sixties. Let us take as an example the speech that philosopher Ernst Bloch delivered when he received the so-called Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade) in the Frankfurt Paulskirche in 1967. In his acceptance speech, Bloch declared: ‘A map on which you cannot find the land Utopia is not even worth looking at.’3 For Bloch, ‘utopia’ was a metaphor for a vision of a future in which those who have been notoriously exploited and humiliated in the past are given a just place in a better world. His notion of utopia entailed the conviction that the way to a better future was to be paved and enforced by ‘justified revolutions’ (menschenfreundliche Revolutionen). For Bloch, they were the opposite of wars that are fought to conquer and 1 Graham Swift, Waterland (New York, 1983), 20. 2 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York, 2004 [German edition, 1979]). 3 Ernst Bloch, Widerstand und Friede: Friedenspreis des deutschen Buchhandels, Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels 1967, http://www.boersenverein.de/sixcms/ media.php/806/1967_bloch.pdf, 15.

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gain or maintain power. Humane revolutions have instead the function of midwives assisting in the birth of a better and more just world. Bloch explicitly mentioned in his speech the Russian Revolution of 1917. ‘This revolution in particular was in no way like a war propelled by the greed for power but a maieutic breakthrough bringing about a society that is no longer torn by antagonisms.’4

1. Futures Past From the point of view of our historical reality today, Bloch’s bright vision of the future has found its place in the imaginary museum of ‘futures past’. His vision collapsed in 1989 together with the Berlin Wall, which had neatly separated the different futures of the West and East during the Cold War. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, this future collapsed in Russia together with its past. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was downgraded by Putin to a coup d’état, and the central commemoration day of 7 November was wiped out of Russian memory culture. It was replaced by 4 November, a recent fabrication of Putin’s historians, who conjured up an unknown (and perhaps largely fictional) event from the seventeenth century to offer the population a new date in temporal proximity to their long-cherished national holiday.5 Much of the future that had been on offer in the bright sixties went extinct also in the country of the other Cold War superpower at the end of the bipolar tension of this period. In October 2011 an announcement was published to the effect that the United States had dismantled its last nuclear bomb, which contained hundreds of times the destructive capacity of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. According to the director of the American Department for Nuclear Security, the B53 had been developed ‘at another time for another world’. The event was acclaimed in the media as a milestone in the nuclear disarmament program of President Obama. Before he brought an end to this future and relegated it to the past, Obama prolonged another future that had also been offered during the bright sixties. In 2010, at the NASA Space Centre in Florida, he announced his determination to send a manned mission to Mars. He proclaimed that by 2035 an American astronaut was to put his foot on the red planet, adding: ‘And I expect to be around and see it!’ At the same time, he treated the venture of landing on the moon as a story of the past: ‘We have already been there. There is much more to discover!’6 4 Ibid., 11. 5 Jutta Scherrer, Russlands neue-alte Erinnerungsorte, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte. Beilage zur Wochenzeitung Das Parlament XI: Russland, 2006, 24–28. 6 Obama will Marsmission im Jahr 2035, FAZ 15. 4. 2010, www.faz.net/aktuell/ gesellschaft/weltraumprogramm-obama-will-marsmission-im-jahr-2035–1964515.html.

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These are a few examples of how futures can be either prolonged or dismissed and transferred into the past for technical or political reasons. In this essay, I am concerned, however, with a much more general problem. Experience teaches that not only specific visions of the future have crumbled, but that even the concept of the future as such has changed beyond recognition. In many areas such as politics, society and environment, the future has lost its lure. It can no longer be used indiscriminately as the vanishing point of wishes, goals and projections. Why did this happen? Why have the shares of the future fallen in the stock market of our value system? There are obvious answers that immediately come to mind: The resources of the future have been eroded by a number of new dramatic challenges such as the ongoing ecological pollution that accompanies the development of our technological civilisation, demographic problems such as overpopulation and aging societies, the scarcity of natural resources such as fuel and drinking water, and climate change. Under these premises, the future can no longer serve as the Eldorado of our hopes and wishes, rendering also the promise of progress more and more obsolete. Change is no longer automatically assumed to be a change for the better. The future, in short, has become an object of concern, prompting ever-new measures of precaution. But this is only half of the answer. Today we are witnessing a ‘continental shift’ in the structure of Western temporality: While the future has lost much of its luminosity, the past has more and more invaded our consciousness. This return of the past has obviously something to do with periods of excessive violence in the twentieth century and earlier times. This burden of the past still weighs heavily on the shoulders of the present, demanding attention and recognition, urging the taking of responsibility, together with new forms of remembering and remembrance. A decade ago, Andreas Huyssen pointed to this strange shift in the structure of our temporality when he wrote: One of the most surprising cultural and political phenomena of recent years has been the emergence of memory as a key concern in Western societies, a turning toward the past that stands in stark contrast to the privileging of the future so characteristic of earlier decades of twentieth-century modernity. From the early twentieth-century’s apocalyptic myths of radical breakthrough and the emergence of the “new man” in Europe via the murderous phantasms of racial or class purification in National Socialism and Stalinism to the postWorld War II American paradigm of modernisation, modernist culture was energised by what one might call “present futures”. Since the 1980s, it seems, the focus has shifted from present futures to present pasts, and this shift in the experience and sensibility of time needs to be explained historically and phenomenologically.7

7 Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia, Public Culture XII, 2000, 1, 21–38, 21.

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So far, cultural historians have not come up with the explanation demanded by Huyssen. I know of no study that has focused on this problem systematically or investigated this recent shift in the structure of Western temporality. In order to provide a contribution to this larger project, we have to widen the scope of the question. If it is correct that we are experiencing a new configuration in the structure of Western temporality, we must first of all investigate the previous structure that was replaced or transformed in this process. What were the seminal features of this structure that formed the unchallenged basis and background of Western thinking, feeling and acting up to the 1980s? With which values and affects was it invested? And which options for decision making and acting had been supported by it?

2. Five Aspects of the Modern Time Regime I will introduce here the term ‘cultural time regime’ to refer to a temporal ordering and orientation that is deeply entrenched in the culture and provides a basis for implicit values, patterns of thought and the logic of action.8 In the following an attempt will be made to identify central aspects of the modern time regime, which has been part of the foundations of Western culture, shaping both its epistemology and its ontology. According to its self-image and to the view from within, in modernity time had acquired the shape of an arrow that runs irreversibly from the past into the future. This shape was considered to be natural and neutral, an abstract entity and objective realm independent of cultural constructions and inaccessible to human manipulation. It was exactly this affinity to new techniques of measuring in the natural sciences that gave this time regime its emphatically modern quality. The five aspects of the modern time regime I have identified and singled out for investigation are closely interconnected and build on one another. – – – – –

Breaking up time The fiction of a new beginning Creative destruction The invention of the historical Acceleration of change

8 Hartmut Rosa uses the term ‘historisch-kulturelles Zeitregime’ in: Jedes Ding hat keine Zeit? Flexible Menschen in rasenden Verhältnissen, in: Vera King/Benigna Gerisch (eds.), Zeitgewinn und Selbstverlust. Folgen und Grenzen der Beschleunigung (Frankfurt am Main/New York, 2009), 21–39, 22.

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Breaking up Time The modern time regime deviates radically from earlier ones. Before its invention, it was the function and aim of cultural time regimes to ensure continuity and to establish connections between past, present and future. Traditions may be defined as such constructs of continuity that are designed to prevent rupture and discontinuity.9 Dangerous and fatal disruptions, such as the physical death of an individual, the change of generations or the shift from one dynasty of rulers to another were anticipated, prevented and ‘repaired’ by the binding powers of cultural traditions. The ideal of the modern time regime, on the other hand, consisted of ‘throwing overboard everything that was derived from the past and impeded the total drive towards human self-regulation and self-fulfilment’.10 In the 1970s, Reinhart Koselleck launched his magisterial project on the semantics of basic historical terms. Together with his colleague Christian Meier he wrote the article on the concept of ‘progress’ in which they abstained from the rhetoric implied in this term and focused on the anatomy of progress as a cultural practice. In this scientific light, they defined it as a process that evolves ‘in the temporal ruptures originating in continuously reproduced hiatus-experiences’.11 The temporal structure of progress, in other words, depends on the constant repetition of ruptures. The term hiatus emphasises the activity of breaking, focussing on a constant injunction to discontinue present trends. This emphasis on rupture enforces a dynamic of constant change. On this conceptual basis Koselleck created the canonical formula defining the basic structure underlying the modern time regime. In his terminology, modern time proceeds by continually producing a radical rift (or hiatus) between ‘the space of experience’ (or the past) and ‘the horizon of expectation’ (or the future). In this way, innovation was emphasised and valued as the motor of change and progress. Koselleck explained the effect of such enforced change by referring to the decline of the old topos of Historia magistra vitae (of studying history as a school for life). History could serve to teach lessons relevant to problems in the present only so long as it could be assumed that acquired experience was fit to cope with new problems. The more dramatically the problems changed in quality, the more quickly experience was devalued. ‘With the rift opening up between accumulated experience and future oriented expectation the difference between past and future grows, so that eventually time is experienced as a 9 Aleida Assmann, Zeit und Tradition. Kulturelle Strategien der Dauer (Vienna, 1999). 10 Edward A. Shils, Tradition (Chicago, 1981), 43. 11 Reinhart Koselleck/Christian Meier, Fortschritt, in: Reinhart Koselleck et al. (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. 2 (Stuttgart, 1975), 392.

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break, as a transitional period in which the new and unexpected are continuously revealed.’12 These descriptions show that the modern time regime was not the effect of and a response to historical change, but its prime cause and motor. This emphatically modern mode of breaking up time was condensed in a popular rhetorical topos that ritually announced the ongoing ‘death’ of various cultural institutions and values, which had been rendered obsolete by new turns and developments. The following proclamation of the American literary critic Leslie Fiedler from 1972 captured this spirit: ‘As certainly as God, i.e. the Old God, is dead, so the Novel, i.e. the Old Novel, is dead.’13 As the modern time regime was built not on continuity but on change and rupture, it produced at the same time a continuous crisis of orientation, that had to be compensated by the new solutions of scientific and technological experts. From the point of view of the individual, the shock implied in the abyss between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation was obscured by the fact that the unknown future was not envisioned negatively in terms of threat and danger but positively in terms of risk and chance. It is generally agreed that modern historical consciousness, the idea of irreversible progress and future-oriented action are all based on this structure of breaking up the time and cutting off the past.14

The Fiction of a New Beginning15 While pre-modern cultural time regimes create mythical origins in illo tempore (a world that transcends human senses and experience), the modern time regime posits a beginning in the here and now. In an influential book, Edward Said made the same distinction between ‘beginning’ and ‘origin’; he 12 Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main, 1984 [1979]), 336. Joachim Ritter spoke of a break between ‘Herkunft’ and ‘Zukunft’ in 1975. It is not unlikely that Koselleck’s terms Erfahrungsraum and Erwartungshorizont are translations of Ritter’s terms. Joachim Ritter, Subjektivität und industrielle Gesellschaft, in: idem, Subjektivität. Sechs Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main, 1989), 26. 13 Leslie Fiedler, Cross the Border – Close the Gap (New York, 1972), 65. In 1988 little was left of this rhetoric, which was effectively debunked by Paul Virilio in the following statement: ‘Since the 19th century people have been battering our ears with the death of God, Man, Art … it is all about nothing other than a progressive decomposition of a perceptual faith …’. Paul Virilio, La machine de vision (Paris, 1988), 45–46. 14 Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Erfahrungsraum’ und ‘Erwartungshorizont’ – zwei historische Kategorien, in: idem, Vergangene Zukunft, 349–375. 15 Inka Mülder-Bach/Eckhard Schumacher (eds.), Am Anfang war. Ursprungsfiguren und Anfangskonstruktionen der Moderne (Munich, 2008). See also: Irmgard BohunovskyBärnthaler (ed.), Die Idee vom Anfang – Mythos und Folge (Klagenfurt, 2008).

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defined the latter as ‘divine, mythical and privileged’ and the former as ‘secular, humanly produced and ceaselessly re-examined’.16 While in mythical origins the order of the world is placed outside of human time and beyond human reach, modern beginnings are rational and enabling human constructs, authorising human experience, knowledge and art. The source of inspiration is no longer to be sought in previous authorities, periods and traditions, but in the creative spirit of the human author himself. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the bold and self-assured practice of setting a new beginning was framed in many a philosophical and literary text.17 René Descartes meditated on how to radically begin anew, constructing his new ways of thinking more geometrico on a white sheet of paper. The most impressive scenario staging such a radical beginning is certainly Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1718). The eponymous protagonist of this novel proves that it is possible at any time to start the world and history over again. By experimenting on the island, Crusoe reinvents the accumulated history of human experience and organises his life with the help of a self-made time frame. ‘A beginning,’ writes Said, ‘not only creates but is its own method because it has intention.’18 In its original meaning, ‘revolution’ was what the stars did in the firmament; it referred to their cyclic movements as part of an overarching cosmic order. The idea that revolutions are not only natural processes, but also happen in history and can be man-made, is a direct result of the modern time regime. Utopias and revolutions have been intimately linked since the period of early modernity; both are philosophical and political means to break up time, to induce a temporal rupture for the forging, staging and establishing of the ‘new’.

Creative Destruction The essence of the modern time regime was summed up in the mid-nineteenth century by the professional Russian revolutionary Michail Bakunin. Like all committed innovators he was convinced of his mission as a destroyer of existing structures. At the same time he did not conceive of his goal as destructive but as creative, and he brought both terms into a relation of mutual reinforcement. His famous slogan was: ‘The pleasure in acts of destroying is 16 Edward Said, Preface to the 1985 edition, in: Beginnings. Intention and Method (London, 1997 [1st ed. New York, 1975]), xix. 17 Albrecht Koschorke et al., Der fiktive Staat. Konstruktionen des politischen Körpers in der Geschichte Europas (Frankfurt am Main, 2007). 18 Said, Beginnings, xxiii.

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a creative pleasure.’19 This statement is the most frank and radical expression of the modern time regime. This impulse of the Russian anarchist is echoed a century later in the centre of capitalism, which shows that the modern time regime spans and unites antagonistic political ideologies. The economist Joseph Alois Schumpeter, who immigrated to the US in the 1930s, introduced the concept of ‘creative destruction’ into economic theory.20 In spite of the fact that Schumpeter himself had headed a bank in the 1920s which had gone bankrupt in the time of economic crisis and inflation, he developed an optimistic theory, according to which capitalism permanently and powerfully renews itself from within by destroying previous structures and products. The concept of creative destruction is a precise description of the linear logic of replacement that propels technical evolution. In a very concrete way, this principle had already been observed and discovered by the American philosopher R. W. Emerson (who believed that it could also be applied to the dynamics of cultural progress). In an influential essay published in 1841, Emerson enthusiastically described the modern time regime as driven by an irreversible and inexorable ‘fury of disappearance’21: ‘The Greek letters last a little longer, but are passing under the same sentence, and tumbling into the inevitable pit which the creation of new thought opens for all that is old. The new continents are built out of the ruins of an old planet: the new races fed out of the decomposition of the foregoing. New arts destroy the old. See the investment of capital in aqueducts made useless by hydraulics; fortifications, by gunpowder; roads and canals, by railways; sails, by steam, by electricity.’22 In the middle of the nineteenth century, at the height of the Industrial Revolution, Emerson pledged himself to an exclusive orientation towards the future, describing himself as ‘an endless seeker with no past at my back’.23 His ideas were highly influential in fusing the modern time regime with American culture and transforming it into a vital part of the national selfimage. Beginning with the Puritan myth of a ‘Promised Land’ and the ‘American Adam’, American culture has wholeheartedly endorsed the modern time regime, affirming the break with the Old World of Europe and

19 Michail Bakunin, cited in Ernst Bloch, Literary Essays (Stanford/CA, 1998), 23. 20 Joseph Alois Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York, 1942), 81–86. 21 Konrad Paul Liessmann (ed.), Die Furie des Verschwindens. Über das Schicksal des Alten im Zeitalter des Neuen (Vienna, 2000). 22 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Circles, in: idem, Selected Writings, William H. Gilman (ed.), (New York/London, 1965), 296. 23 Ibid., 304.

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positioning itself at the forefront of modernisation and globalisation.24 Today, this easy fusion between culture and the modern time regime has become the object of controversy and deeper reflection. A radical concept of linear progress implying the creative destruction and replacement of earlier stages in the search for ever-more advanced theories and products is now accepted only in the fields of science and technology.

The Invention of the ‘Historical’ With this formula I refer to a new method of collecting, interpreting and circulating knowledge which found its palpable shape in the early nineteenth century in the new Western institutions of the archive, the museum and historical scholarship (Geisteswissenschaften). In all of these institutions, the past was placed in the custody of professional specialists and preserved, investigated, interpreted and exhibited without an obligation to satisfy immediate political demands. In the framework of the modern time regime the historical was synonymous with ‘pastness’ and ‘strangeness’ and thus discarded as a normative or creative resource for confronting new problems or questions of identity formation. The invention of the historical as an ‘objective’ dimension of research that is neatly decoupled from the demands of the present was a novelty in the nineteenth century which – to be sure – did not all of a sudden replace older time regimes. In many contexts, the past continued to be politically used and abused by the present according in both traditional and new ways of nation-building. There is a direct historical link between the invention of the historical and the French Revolution. Revolutions in general enact the modern time regime in a paradigmatic way, as they are the political medium for enforcing temporal ruptures and installing the new at the cost of the old. There are, however, different kinds of revolutions: those promoting a civil society and those that pave the way to a totalitarian regime of power. While the spokesmen of the French Revolution were eager in their zeal for the destruction of the institutions of clergy, monarchy and the Ancien Régime, they were reluctant to discard or totally destroy what they had abolished. As Ernst Schulin has shown, a special feature of the French Revolution consisted of the fact that it did not follow the imperative of creative destruction all the way. What was pushed off its pedestal and destroyed in the morning 24 Ulfried Reichardt, The ‘Times’ of the New World: Future-Orientation, American Culture, and Globalization, in: Winfried Fluck/Thomas Claviez (eds.), REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature XIX: Theories of American Culture, Theories of American Studies, 2003, 247–266.

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was collected in the afternoon and brought into the new historical institutions of the museum and archive.25 In this context, breaking up time was a performative revolutionary act that marked the end of the validity of a social and political system the revolutionaries longed to see disappear. The present was hurled into the abyss of the past, but it did not disappear without a trace ‘in the inevitable pit that the creation of new thought opens for all that is old’.26 Instead of the pit, new historical institutions for collection and preservation came into being to contain a former present that overnight had become a past. This was the hour of birth of a new cultural value: historical knowledge. In the process, a new form of ‘afterlife’ was created for materials that had lost their validity and normative value but generated now a new professional interest as historical ‘sources’. This discovery of a historical that is connected with intellectual curiosity and scholarly research is radically different from the spirit of totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century. In Germany, the National Socialists carried out book-burnings of Jewish authors; in Stalin’s Russia historical sources were censored and falsified, and archives were sealed or destroyed. In his novel 1984 George Orwell describes the role of an archivist in a totalitarian state whose task is to eliminate the past or reduce it to the function of stabilizing those in the current constellation of power.27 These, however, are radical deviations from the path of Western civilization, which, among other features, is marked by the invention of the historical. Virginia Woolf once defined the past as that which is ‘beyond the touch and control of the living’.28 For her, the first and foremost quality of the past was its having passed away. It had disappeared due to the irreversible and unchangeable character of linear time; what is over once and for all can no longer serve as a resource for the present and the future. This obvious pastness of the past is the very premise for the work of professional historians, which begins the moment the door is shut that separates the present from the past. Only what has been sealed and become inaccessible can become an object of historical research. To underline this point, Koselleck distinguished between a ‘present past’ and a ‘pure’ past. The present past is saturated with personal memories and emotions through which the living are involved in it and bound up with it. Only when these strategies of mastering the past have been dissolved can it pass over into the custody of historians, who then can start their work of reconstructing events and inter25 Ernst Schulin, Absage an und Wiederherstellung von Vergangenheit, in: Moritz Csáky/Peter Stachel (eds.), Speicher des Gedächtnisses – Bibliotheken, Museen, Archive, vol. 1: Absage an und Wiederherstellung von Vergangenheit, Kompensation von Geschichtsverlust (Vienna, 2000), 23–39. 26 Emerson, Circles, 296. 27 On archives in totalitarian states, see George Orwell, 1984 (New York, 1962 [1949]). 28 Virginia Woolf, Orlando (London, 1963 [1928]), 225.

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preting them methodically in an unbiased way.29 Thus, all that historians have to do is to wait and let ‘time’ do its work. Historical research is based on this premise ‘that a (politically, morally, emotionally) hot present will transform itself automatically into a cold past’.30 It is this temporal distance from the heat of the former present that guarantees scientific objectivity. The invention of the historical is directly related to the modern gesture of breaking up time and is a direct consequence not only of the French Revolution, but also of the Industrial Revolution. The radical transformation of life worlds under the impact of steam engines, electricity and the railway created a nostalgia for rural areas that remained untouched by the effects of acceleration and change. The German writer Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, a contemporary of Emerson, accepted the takeover of the modern time regime as an accomplished fact, though witnessing it with less enthusiasm. In her literary description of the rural areas of her native Westphalia, she is intensely time-consciousness, articulating a prescience that what she describes is bound to disappear within a timespan of forty years. Such was the physiognomy of the country up till now, and this will no longer be the case after forty years. Population and luxury are growing fast and together with them new desires and industry. … The culture of the slowly growing broadleaf forest will be neglected and replaced by the more speedy gain of fir trees, and soon spruce forests and endless fields of grain will have totally transformed the character of the landscape together with that of its inhabitants who will forget their age-old rites and customs. Let us therefore sketch and preserve what is still present before the homogenizing film that is spreading all over Europe will have reached this quiet corner of the earth.31

Droste-Hülshoff was convinced that the world as she knew it would change beyond recognition within one or two generations. Her sense of the historical was not limited to historical events and narratives but was extended to everyday objects, customs and landscapes that were in the process of vanishing. She rescued the ephemeral specificity of the Westphalian region in her ethnographic descriptions, preserving in a literary archive the characteristics that she expected were doomed soon to disappear. Her intense sense of the

29 Reinhart Koselleck, Nachwort, in: Charlotte Beradt, Das Dritte Reich des Traums (Frankfurt am Main, 1994), 117. 30 Chris Lorenz, Geschichte, Gegenwärtigkeit und Zeit, in: Dietmar Goltschnigg (ed.), Phänomen Zeit. Dimensionen und Strukturen in Kultur und Wissenschaft (Tübingen, 2011), 127–135. 31 Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Bilder aus Westfalen, in: idem, Werke in einem Band (Munich, 1984), 724. ‘Müssen wir noch hinzufügen, daß alles bisher Gesagte nur das Landvolk angeht? – Ich glaube, “nein”, Städter sind sich ja überall gleich, Kleinstädter wie Großstädter. – Oder, daß alle diese Zustände am Verlöschen sind und nach vierzig Jahren vielleicht wenig mehr davon anzutreffen sein möchte? – Auch leider “nein”, es geht ja überall so!,’ ibid., 760.

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waning of the present into the past refers us once more to the close connection between the breaking up of time and the invention of the historical.

Acceleration of Change ‘Speed is the experience of a time that is scarce and vanishing.’32 The keyword ‘acceleration’ is so prominent in the discourse on time that the modern time regime is often reduced to this particular feature. The term itself is ambivalent; it is not quite clear whether we are dealing with an objective fact or a mode of thinking which functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Again, we are dealing with another mode of breaking up time, with change and the enforced devaluation of the present. As Koselleck emphasised, acceleration of time is the hallmark of a specifically modern experience of time, ‘in which everything changes faster than one would have expected or had expected in earlier times. Together with shortened timespans, a sense of unfamiliarity enters the everyday life-world, which can no longer be derived from any previous experience. This is what constitutes the experience of acceleration.’33 Acceleration always takes place on different levels of experience: it occurs in the technical domain of traffic and the media of communication, it presents itself as a new rhythm of everyday life, and it becomes manifest in the shape of radical social and cultural change.34 Philosopher Hermann Lübbe introduced the term ‘shrinking present’ to emphasise that the period of validity of what we accept as present decreases continually and dramatically.35 The unrelenting increase of speed is accompanied by a sense of loss, producing a crisis of experience that is a notorious by-product of the modern time regime. Within this time frame, this crisis cannot be healed, though it can be compensated. This, according to Lübbe, is the specific function of musealisation (in a wider sense). Already at the beginning of the 1980s he wrote: ‘In the flight of vanishing images of the city, the practice of musealisation has the obvious function of guaranteeing elements of recognisability, 32 ‘Geschwindigkeit, das ist die Zeit, die schwindet.’ Georg Elwert, In Search of Time: Different Time-Experiences in Different Cultures, in: Zmago Smitek/Borut Brumen (eds.), Zmeljevidi casa. Maps of Time (Ljubljana, 2001), 239. Among other practices, Elwert describes different cultural time regimes by looking at the practice and value of ‘waiting’. 33 Reinhart Koselleck, Zeitschichten. Studien zur Historik (Frankfurt am Main, 2000), 164. 34 The sociologist Hartmut Rosa brought these three dimensions of acceleration together in his essay: Kein Halt auf der Ebene der Geschwindigkeit, Frankfurter Rundschau, 3. 8. 2004, 178, 16. The German word ‘Halt’ in this context has two meanings: ‘stop’ and ‘handrail’. 35 Hermann Lübbe, Im Zug der Zeit. Verkürzter Aufenthalt in der Gegenwart (Heidelberg, 1992).

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elements of identity.’36 In the affective turning to historical architecture he saw a ‘compensation’ for the inexorable impositions of the modern time regime, especially for the loss of orientation and familiarity that is a side effect of accelerated progress in urban environments. Odo Marquard, also a ‘theoretician of compensation’, seconded Lübbe. According to Marquard, ‘the modern world began when human beings separated themselves methodically from their traditions, when their future was emancipated from their background world of belonging’. But as human beings are unable to fully adapt to the modern time regime, they have to be able to combine two worlds: ‘In the modern world we must live two lives: the fast life of progress and the slow life of tradition.’37 Humans develop and cherish a culture of preservation and memory in order to compensate for the frustrations of the modern world of progress. In this logic of compensation, the homo conservator is the Doppelgänger of the homo faber: Both coevolve within the modern time regime, and it is the dialectical function of one to temper the painful and radical effects of the other. Compensation theorists are modernisation theorists and thus firmly anchored in the modern time regime as sketched above. They have, however, grown sceptical of that scheme’s negative side effects and have started thinking about possible remedies that might help humans to better adapt to the high stress that comes with the progressive transformation of the modern world. Their compensatory counter-tendencies therefore do not challenge the principles of the modern time regime, but make it somewhat easier to live with them.

3. Conclusion: Irreversible and Reversible Time We began with examples of ‘futures past’, focusing on the future at the time of the Cold War and its demise after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and proceeded to a more systematic anatomy of the modern time regime. At this point, we need to rephrase the question: What has happened to the future? During the last decades we have witnessed an erosion of the modern time regime in ecological, social and philosophical discourses, and together with the waning of the future a waning also of the so-called ‘grand narratives’. This gap, it turns out, was quickly filled with an upsurge of memories and new images of the past. This strong new emphasis on the past has indeed be36 Idem, Fortschritt als Orientierungsproblem – Aufklärung in der Gegenwart (Freiburg, 1982), 18. 37 Odo Marquard, Zukunft braucht Herkunft. Philosophische Essays (Stuttgart, 2003), 235, 239.

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come an important signature of the present time. The past that had been disposed of and largely ignored in the modern time regime is recovered now as memory and refashioned as heritage in a new cultural ordering of Western temporality. There are different reasons and motivations for this new interest in the past and the various attempts to reinsert it into the present. The first is nostalgia. We have already referred to the dialectics according to which ‘creative destruction’ produces its other in the shape of preservation and musealisation. The more the still visible past of our built environment is devalued, discarded and destroyed, the more likely the pendulum is to swing into the opposite direction: What modernists condemned to oblivion and singled out for destruction is now revalued and cherished. The past that once had been destined to silently disappear returns in many manifestations as a cultural resource now ardently preserved and protected.38 A similar theoretical background can be detected in the writings of Pierre Nora, who developed his ideas on modernism and memory in the 1970s and 1980s. His approach is clearly tinged by nostalgia as a response to historical ruptures and the acceleration of social and cultural change. Our interest in lieux de mémoire where memory crystallises and secretes itself has occurred at a particular historical moment, a turning point where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the sense that memory has been torn – but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists. There are lieux de mémoire because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory.39

According to Nora, the interest in places of memory (lieux de mémoire) is a compensation (and fake replacement) for the loss of authentic embedded memory (milieux de mémoire) and as such is a logical consequence of the irreversible and unstoppable force with which modern progress hurls the present into the abyss of the past. Both the sense of the historical and nostalgia have coevolved with the process of modernisation. Nostalgia is not so much a reaction against the modern time regime as it is a vital part of it. Progress and nostalgia stabilise each other in a dialectic that has been carefully examined by compensation theorists.40 To some extent, the modern time regime can be tempered, made more palatable or even slowed down a bit, but its fundamental structure and irreversible flow towards forgetting and annihilation remain unquestioned. 38 See also the reference to the boom of material retro-culture in Raphael Samuel, Retrochic, in: idem, Theatres of Memory (New York, 1994), 51–136. 39 Pierre Nora, Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire, Representations XXVI, 1989, 7. 40 Svetlana Boyim, Nostalgia and its Discontents, Hedgehog Review IX, 2007, 7–18.

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There is, however, another reason for the return of the past that is new and totally different from the first. This is trauma. Trauma as been defined as a psychic wound that does not heal. Its most obvious symptom is that the traumatised person remains tied to violent events in a past that does not go away and that has shattered the sense of self and trust in the world. Together with memory, trauma is a concept that has (re-)entered Western consciousness since the 1980s and deeply changed its insights, values and sensibility. The murderous conquests and destructive wars of Western empires and nations constitute a ‘hot past’ that does not automatically vanish by virtue of the sheer passing of time but stays present in the ‘bloodlands’ of Europe and in other places all over the world.41 When it comes to trauma, there is no divide between the realm of experience and the horizon of expectation; on the contrary, past, present and future are fused in various ways. For this reason, these crimes against humanity, as we call them today, have not silently disappeared but have reappeared in the 1980s and 1990s with an amazing impact. Together with the return of traumatic pasts we have witnessed a dramatic change of paradigm in the writing of history, in which the perspective of victims has challenged that of the victors. We now live in a world in which, all over the globe, the victims of colonialism, slavery, the holocaust, the world wars, genocides, dictatorships, apartheid and other crimes against humanity are raising their voices to tell the story from their point of view and thus to lay claim to a new perspective on history. Together with the new keyword ‘trauma’ and the ethics of human rights, Western nations have to a large extent adopted this perspective, whereby victims claim recognition and demand that those responsible for the injustice to which they have been exposed and the suffering that they experienced be held accountable. In this perspective of a new ‘politics of regret’, the past has not automatically vanished or been transferred into the aseptic realm of historical scholarship. On the contrary, it is recovered, reconstructed and reconnected to the present by various emotional, moral or legal ties as a response to past grievances and a form of taking responsibility. To analyse this change in the structure of temporality further, let us return to Ernst Bloch’s speech in 1967. Bloch’s impressive and passionate plea for those who had been exploited and humiliated in history was underpinned by a revolutionary spirit. He believed in the power of political revolutions such as that of 1917 to induce an irreversible change towards a better and more just world. In his Frankfurt speech, Bloch did not find it necessary to mention the enormous death toll of Stalin’s regime, which had been largely the product of this revolution. When speaking for the exploited and humiliated in history, his vision was wholly future-oriented. The concept of 41 Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York, 2010).

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trauma, on the other hand, which has changed the Western view of history over the last three decades, is past-oriented. It brought with it a new form of writing history that includes the point of view of the victims. While the future-directed time regime of modernity had the effect of leaving the victims of history behind, the past-oriented time regime of trauma reverses this structure, bringing them back into the present. While trauma itself stands for a specific pathology of time (the impossibility to separate past and present), it also generates a new awareness of the long-term persistence of the past within the present. This requires new forms of temporal reversibility in the realms of law, ethics and therapy. It had been an established juridical rule that the law must not look backward (the so-called Rückwirkungsverbot, built on the principle of null poena sine lege). This Rückwirkungsverbot, however, has been annulled in the past-oriented time-frame of trauma, because there is no statute of limitation for gross violations of human rights. Instead, there is a growing demand for a re-examination of past injustice and injuries to victims. While Bloch’s political fervour was directed towards liberating the oppressed, the new juridical, moral and therapeutic practice approach to historical trauma is retrospectively directed towards revaluation, judging crimes, acknowledging suffering and providing means of material and symbolic redress. There is, to sum up, a striking difference between the fervour of political programs directed towards the future and a retrospective attention to individual human trauma based on the human rights paradigm. It is a veto against the modern time regime in that it claims that the past has not altogether passed but contains unfinished business waiting to be addressed in the present. What is the effect of all this? Do we now – in a time of memory claims and heritage boom – have too much past and too little future? This may be a plausible reaction vis-à-vis the large and still growing number of museums, monuments, memorial sites and commemoration dates, to say nothing of popular books and films on historical themes. I will respond to this question in three steps. The future has lost its magic power to make the present vanish into a past that is only of historical interest. The concept of trauma connected with an ethical framework has challenged the modern notion of irreversible time by reintroducing cases of reversible time. ‘The assumption that the hot present will transform itself into a cold past,’ writes Chris Lorenz, ‘is a favourite temporal structure of those who prefer to let the past rest. Usually it is the temporal frame favoured by those who have to fear the sentence of law.’42 Instead of a culturally neutral time frame in which history evolves and is narrated, we prefer to speak today of a ‘politics of time’ that was directly linked to the 42 Lorenz, Geschichte, 127–135 (my translation).

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project of ‘nation building’.43 Instead of a continual irreversible breaking up of time, this new paradigm has brought with it a new world ethos with new forms of reversibility and accountability. In the juridical, moral and therapeutic time frame, the arrow of time no longer flies in only one direction. The hitherto overlooked injustices and the unaddressed suffering of human beings in the past have not automatically lost their reality and significance by having passed. On the contrary, a recognition of ongoing impact of the past on the present opens the possibility of reversing much of the harm that was done by acknowledging and responding to it. As the present was built on past injustice and injuries, it therefore can and needs to be acknowledged and addressed retrospectively. New approaches toward the past have introduced a new memory culture. During the last three decades a shift has occurred in the structure of Western temporality. After the injunction to separate the space of experience from the horizon of expectation, it has now become common to emphatically reconnect them and to bridge past and future in various ways. In the frame of memory, the future is directed by the past, but the past is also re-evaluated in the light of the future. Within this temporal framework, the past is no longer the exclusive domain of historians, nor can it be reduced to a soothing tool for compensating the negative side effects of modernisation and acceleration. The cultural uses of the past are much more vital, which does not mean, however, that they are limited to the construction and legitimisation of exclusive and aggressive religious and political identities. All cultures depend upon an ability to bring their past into the present through acts of remembering and remembrancing in order to recover not only acquired experience and valuable knowledge, exemplary models and unsurpassable achievements, but also negative events and a sense of accountability. Without the past there can be no identity, no responsibility, no orientation. In its multiple applications cultural memory greatly enlarges the stock of the creative imagination of a society. The past and the future are in a process of being reconstructed in new ways, and none of them is dispensable. The modern time regime does not need compensation but rather correction and complementation. We need the future in order to imagine and transform what is not yet. Bloch referred to ‘the vast utopian resources in the world’, meaning ‘what had not yet become part of consciousness, the yet to become, the new, the objectively possible’.44 At the same time, there are incidents in the past that still demand posttraumatic after-care. Though fraught with problems and disappointments, 43 Berber Bevernage, History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence: Time and Justice (New York, 2011), 15. 44 Bloch, Widerstand, 10.

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transforming violent pasts into possible shared futures has become the great project of states transitioning from autocratic regimes into democratic societies. The past has changed its quality but the notion of the future also has changed beyond recognition: It is no longer the Eldorado of hopes and wishes, but rather an object of constant care. The primary concern can therefore no longer only be: what do we want of the past and the future, but: what do the past and the future want from us?

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Peter Fritzsche

The Ruins of Modernity

In his Notre Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo remarked that ‘Time is a devourer; man, more so’. He traced the work of time on the great cathedral. Wrinkles scoured its facade, the stones were notched and gnawed, and the eleven-step staircase that once led up to the entrance had long since disappeared. That man devoured the stonework more violently than time was true as well of the religious and political struggles that had lurched across the history of Paris, never more dramatically than during the French Revolution in whose shadow Hugo wrote. The combat of men and women cut scars and fractures along the walls, ripped statues from their niches and smashed them. NotreDame exposed the iconoclasm of history, the political effort to undo and remake traditions of belief and patterns of devotion. But Hugo did not long linger at the sight of revolutionary upheaval. Far worse, in his view, was the modern temperament of architects who sought to update and streamline the Gothic cathedral in accord with what they considered ‘good taste’.1 Such early nineteenth-century enterprise was like an old man applying rouge to his face, thought Alexis de Tocqueville.2 Of course, the ruins themselves had not changed, even if the revolution did add to their number. They were familiar, picturesque elements in the eighteenth-century landscape. What had changed was the temporal regime in which they were viewed, so that it was possible for updating to be regarded as tasteful by the architect but horrifying to the novelist. In this chapter, I want to explore the placement of ruins in modernity and offer four ways in which the ruin reflected the shape of time as considered by contemporaries at the beginning of the nineteenth century. I will elaborate on the admonitory, confiscatory and adversarial nature of ruins before turning to the ruin of the ruin, its absence entirely.

1 Quoted in Jean Mallion, Victor Hugo et l’art architectural (Paris, 1962), 513–514. 2 See George Armstrong Kelly, The Humane Comedy: Constant, Tocqueville, and French Liberalism (Cambridge, 1992), 228.

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1. Admonitory Ruins Ruins were part and parcel of the early modern European landscape and objects of affection for eighteenth-century travellers. To a public enamoured with the picturesque, the crumbling form enhanced the extreme and unfinished or variable aspects of nature. ‘Garden-ready’ (gartenfähig) was what was ‘picture-ready’ (bildfähig), and a broken bridge span, a collapsed edifice or a crumbling wall could serve the same function as craggy rock formations and overgrown grottos to indicate irregularity and contrast. Indeed, artificial ruins were often embedded in spaces of untamed nature, up against the corrosive action of streams and waterfalls, half buried in a rocky landscape, or covered with vines and brush so that nature appeared to have over taken the works of men and women. One contemporary landscape designer referred to the ideal image of ‘slowly drowning in the floods of time’.3 The ruin in the garden suggested the impermanence of human effort and human pride, and it taught the moral lesson of humility. It also testified to the restorative and ameliorative power of nature over human sin. In either case, what the ruin evoked was the power of nature and the subordination of all worldly things to the cycle of death and birth, degeneration and regeneration. The essayist François-René de Chateaubriand even argued that God had created the forest with the scathed oak already listing in the shadows as a spur to melancholy reflection.4 Ruins thereby served a universal admonitory function. While traces of the past functioned as signs of the future, the ruin in the garden of the ancien régime had no particular provenance and told no particular story. Medieval heritage as such was almost completely neglected, and at the few historical sites, such as Tintern Abbey, which elicited general interest, visitors preferred the scene to be in disrepair, exposed to natural elements as far as possible. Indeed, eighteenth-century travellers often expressed disappointment in the face of an insufficient wildness in a ruined place.5 Otherwise, antique ensembles in Europe were more or less interchangeable. Ruins stood in natural, not historical time.

3 Quoted in Günter Hartmann, Die Ruine im Landschaftsgarten: Ihre Bedeutung für den frühen Historismus und die Landschaftsmalerei der Romantik (Worms, 1981), 129. 4 François-René de Chateaubriand, The Genius of Christianity, Charles Ignatius White (trans.) (Philadelphia, 1856), 136–137. 5 Ian Ousby, The Englishman’s England: Taste, Travel and the Rise of Tourism (Cambridge, 1990), 117–125.

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2. Confiscatory Ruins For all this timelessness, however, Chateaubriand’s observations were in fact scarred with the unprecedented force of 1789, the French Revolution that disrupted all ongoing cycles of degeneration and rejuvenation. What marked the quickened, chaotic time of the postrevolutionary era was the ongoing production and the ceaseless effacement of ruins. Revolution brought the timeliness of natural cycles to an abrupt end. Chateaubriand even narrated his personal life through the discontinuity of revolution, describing many years later his delivery as an infant to a wet nurse as ‘my first exile’.6 The fact of revolution announced the end of the ancien régime and facilitated a way of thinking that saw the ceaseless destruction of the old and the traditional in modern time. Ruins denoted the usurpation of the past by the present, the fact that things would never be as they once were. They embodied irretrievability. The distinction between, on the one hand, the work of men and women, which, Chateaubriand pointed out, demolished, and, on the other, the work of nature, which merely undermined, was elaborated throughout the revolutionary period. Already Edmund Burke placed the destructive ambition of the French Revolution ‘out of nature’, and William Wordsworth, reappraising what had become the ‘impossible individuality’ of the revolutionary self, saw in the ‘sovereignty’ of the revolution an unnatural, unsupportable ambition. ‘Pollution tainted all that was most pure.’ What Wordsworth had in mind was not ‘the oblivion that passing time inflicts’, but ‘apocalyptic catastrophe’.7 However, the catastrophe was not simply located ‘out of nature’. It had a more specific historical provenance. The destruction of the ancien régime, the commercial expansion of new Republican forces and the completely provisional nature of the political restoration that followed in 1815 became compelling arguments not simply for the movement of historical time, but for the inevitability of the beginnings and the endings of eras. Ruins could be read as signs of the inevitability of the forced integration of indigenous societies into higher orders of development. In the chronology of universal development, they were the evidence of the confiscation, whereby the succession of periods (the chain Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment; Paleolithic, Neolithic, Urban; feudalism, capitalism, socialism; or childhood, adolescence, adulthood) produced the on-going obsolescence of the past. This is 6 François-René de Chateaubriand, The Memoirs of François René Vicomte de Chateaubriand, vol. 1 (London, 1902), 17, 76. 7 Laurence Goldstein, Ruins and Empire: The Evolution of a Theme in Augustan and Romantic Literature (Pittsburgh, 1977), 153–154. See also Gerald N. Izenberg, Impossible Individuality: Romanticism, Revolution, and the Origins of Modern Selfhood, 1787–1802 (Princeton, 1992).

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how Chateaubriand understood the degradation of American Indians in his voyage to the United States in 1792, and how he understood as well his own lost status as the living ruin of a nobleman in the revolutionary era. North of Albany, along the Hudson River, the evidence of decay abounded, for there ‘in the midst of a forest appeared a sort of barn’: Chateaubriand peered inside and found ‘a score of Savages’, ‘their bodies half bare, their ears slashed’, but also a ‘little Frenchman, powdered and frizzed’, who was ‘making the Iroquois caper to the tune of Madelon Friquet’. Instead of the ‘shouts of the Savage and the braying of the fallow-deer’, Chateaubriand could make out as he walked through the Adirondack forests only ‘the habitation of a planter’ just beyond ‘the hut of an Indian’. By the time he made his way down the Ohio River, he had grown weary at the sight of new settlers pressing into Kentucky from Virginia. In ‘wilds where man [once] roved in absolute independence’, he asked, ‘will not slaves till the ground under the lash of their master … will not prisons … replace the open cabin and the lofty oak’. Chateaubriand recognised the poignant signs of destruction in the New World: the tragic figure of the Indian who ‘is no longer a Savage in his forests, but a beggar at the door of a factory’.8 And he saw in the fate of the Indian his own; they both had suffered a historical defeat and were condemned to live amidst the ruins of what once had been a noble existence. In a flash of recognition, Chateaubriand on the Ohio River approached the Indians on the far shore as fellow victims of a historical progress that had destroyed their traditional habitations. Colonialism and mercantilism stood as confirmations of the obsolescence of both the nobleman and the ‘noble savage’. In René, the fictionalised account of his homecoming to Republican France, Chateaubriand’s hero returns to the family estate which has been sold and sits now unattended, a wreck: ‘broken windows’, ‘leaves strewn over the threshold of the doors’, rooms ‘stripped’. Again and again, Chateaubriand’s domestic scenes make poignant the features of his political displacement. Even without referring to the French Revolution, René situated the ruin of the estate in (unprecedented) historical, rather than (repetitious or cyclical) natural time. ‘Never has a more astonishing or more sudden change taken place in a people,’ René reflected before arriving home. ‘From the height of genius, from respect for religion, from perfection of manners, everything suddenly degenerated to wit, godlessness, and corruption.’9 The charge of corruption, however, did not alter the irrevocable historical verdict

8 François-René de Chateaubriand, Travels in America and Italy (London, 1828), vol. 1: 98, 112, 123–134, 167; vol. 2: 101. 9 François-René de Chateaubriand, René, Walter J. Cobb (trans.) (New York, 1961), 105, 115–116.

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on Chateaubriand’s heritage. There was no going back; René would remain an exile, stranded in the present.10 On his own voyages to the United States a generation later, de Tocqueville came to the same conclusion when he stumbled upon an abandoned canoe and a tumbledown cabin in the wilderness of Michigan: ‘Are ruins, then, already here?’ he asked.11 That they were so scattered about is the sign of western land development, which was so compelling and extensive that it destroyed even the idea of a wild, indigenous landscape. The past was not preserved even in remote locations, but rendered archaeological. Any survivors became the objects of ‘salvage ethnography’, which is the enterprise of the winners.12 The degradation and finally the disappearance of the Indians in the early American republic had the effect of cleaving contemporary time into two parts, ‘“Indian times” and those that came after’.13 In his Leatherstocking Tales, James Fennimore Cooper used the figure of the disappearing Indian to trace an arc of development that has begun with the ‘almost impenetrable forest’ in The Last of the Mohicans, continued on to the ‘stumps and stubs’ and forest fires of The Pioneers in Templeton, and finally arrived at the desolate, emptied landscape of The Prairie.14 The ruin was confiscated by literature and the imagination to decree the obsolescence of the Indians and their civilisation, to mark the forcefulness of European settlement, and to signal the beginning of salvage ethnography to report on the last embers of this inevitably passing past. In similar fashion, the antiquities of Ireland and Scotland and the stories of Jacobites and ‘highlanders’ just ‘sixty years hence’, as caressed by Walter Scott and a generation of Gothic novelists, embroidered the triumph of Britain and empire. The present of Great Britain depicted the past of ancient Ireland and Scotland in order to securely confiscate the severed autonomy in lineaments of historical development.15 When viewed through the lens of periodisation, ruins entered historical time and announced the power and necessity of temporal sequences by 10 Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, 2004). 11 Quoted in George Armstrong Kelly, The Humane Comedy: Constant, Tocqueville, and French Liberalism (Cambridge, 1992), 228. 12 Jacob Gruber, Ethnographic Salvage and the Shaping of Anthropology, American Anthropologist LXXII, 1970, 1289–1298. 13 Elizabath A. Perkins, Border Life: Experience and Memory in the Revolutionary Ohio Valley (Chapel Hill/NC, 1998), 168. 14 Donald Ringe, The Pictorial Mode: Space and Time in the Art of Bryant, Irving and Cooper (Lexington/KY, 1971), 138–139. 15 Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Chicago, 1998). See also Walter Scott, Waverly, Or ‘Tis Sixty Years Hence’ (Edinburgh, 1814).

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which one time period gave way to another, or by which a self-enclosed society was overwhelmed by an allegedly more developed social order. Whereas the ruin in the garden was not held fast in a specific history, the ruin of obsolescence was inserted into a well-marked and thus authoritative historical chronology held fast by the present. The chronologically ordered collections of arrowheads or pot shapes in old museum cases made visible the systemisation of ruins in the terms of evolution. New words like revolutionary, old-fashioned and olden times underscored the logic of progressive historical development in which the past was fitted into the structures of the present. What makes this confiscation of the past all the more comprehensive is the extraordinary desire for a narrative coherence in which the plot of development realigns the past with the present and the former neatly culminates in the latter. Mental templates, which map time onto space so that a journey from the centre to the periphery becomes a walk back in time, further confiscate the autonomy of the past. The past is now yoked in a dependent relationship with the present, to which it will have to yield much as the child yields to the adult, the native to the settler, the noble to the merchant. The plot lines of national development, imperial expansion and even the advancement from childhood to adulthood reveal the struggle of the past inevitably giving way to the present. With stages and sequences, successful nineteenth-century narratives calibrated the timeliness of supersession.

3. Adversarial Ruins A telling illustration of the confiscation of the past in order to represent the logic of imperial overrule is the Musée Central des Arts in the Louvre, pointedly renamed the Musée Napoleon in 1804. It was to the Louvre that the French carted the artefacts their revolutionary armies had plundered from across Europe. The museum served as a repository of the European civilisation that had culminated and reached its apogee in the present day of Napoleon’s empire. Not only was Paris ‘the capital of the universe’, but the Louvre was the representation of how it came to be so.16 Autonomous local histories were fitted into unifying schemes of universal development. Indeed, after arriving in France from Germany in the 1830s, the journalist Ludwig Börne remarked that he had left a country which ‘only had stories’ (Geschichten) for one that had ‘history’ (Geschichte) and thus direction and

16 Klaus Behrens, Friedrich Schlegels Geschichtsphilosophie (1794–1808): Ein Beitrag zur politischen Romantik (Tübingen, 1984), 167.

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legibility.17 Paris, Börne declared, was the ‘telegraph of the past, the microscope of the present and the telescope of the future’.18 For his part, setting out for Paris in 1802 to study Oriental languages, Friedrich Schlegel acknowledged the central role of Napoleon’s Paris for European scholars. Along the way from Jena to Paris, across the valley of the Rhine River, he stumbled across the ruins of Germany’s medieval past. However, what is significant is that Schlegel resisted a confiscatory interpretation of the ruins such as would, in fact, have been consistent with his reason for journeying to Paris in the first place. Instead, the castles and churches and towers stood by not simply as ‘memories of what the Germans once were’, that is, before Germany was developed and uplifted by French imperialism; rather, the ruins recalled to him tokens of what the Germans ‘could be’ in the future. Here Schlegel resisted the logic of imperial supersession. By the time he reached the French border, he regarded it as an ‘unnaturally natural border’, a border in space and time that was rendered by the politics of the day as natural, but which Schlegel in fact took to be ‘unnatural’, and thus illegitimate.19 It was not long before Schlegel abandoned Paris and returned to the Rhine. And by doing so, he scrambled the logic of centre and periphery that had made Paris the ‘centre of the universe’ and the Louvre the site of learning. The journey back to the Rhine the next year in 1803 entailed a radically new understanding of history. Schlegel no longer regarded Paris as the centre of a unified European culture, and he no longer regarded the Rhineland as an outpost on the frontiers of empire and historical development. Rather, the Rhineland offered evidence of former wholes and competing centres that were different from, but comparable to, Paris. The unified geography of centre and periphery and its one-way pilgrimages to the Louvre gave way to a more fractured history of dispossession and repossession, of conquest, usurpation and contrast, and to detective journeys up and down the Rhine, forth and back to Cologne. Returning to Germany from Paris, Schlegel saw ruins as the evidence of forgotten, but not irretrievably lost itineraries of historical development that stood in contrast to the developmental supersessionary logic of the French empire. In this view, the ruins become adversaries of the French and of their historical assumptions. Schlegel took German ruins out of the medieval past 17 Ingrid Oesterle, Der Führungswechsel der Zeithorizonte in der deutschen Literatur. Korrespondenzen aus Paris, der Hauptstadt der Menschheitsgeschichte, in: Dirk Grathoff (ed.), Studien zur Ästhetik und Literaturgeschichte der Kunstperiode (Frankfurt/Main, 1985), 11–76. 18 Inge Rippmann, ‘Die Zeit läuft wie ein Reh vor uns her.’ Der Zeitschriftsteller als Geschichtsschreiber, in: Inge Rippmann/Wolfgang Labuhn (eds.), Die Kunst – eine Tochter der Zeit: Neue Studien zu Ludwig Börne (Bielefeld, 1988), 139–140. 19 Friedrich Schlegel, Reise nach Frankreich, Europa, 1803, 7–38.

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and replaced them into the conditional present. German lifeways had been crushed, but the ruins were signs of their resistance, signs of life. Suddenly, they became populated and haunted by the ghosts of those who had been dispossessed. This relocation of the ruin, however, depends on interpreting the ruined state of the ruin not as the result of necessary historical development, but as the result of conquest and usurpation, of untimely death. By this means, Schlegel invested ruins with a half-life. Even as debris, they were evidence of other, alternative lifeways. To commemorate victories over Napoleon, Rhinelanders actually lit bonfires before the walls of broken medieval ruins in the years after 1814. To be sure, the condition of half-death as well as half-life should be kept in view. By their nature, ruins were traces of dispossession, of loss, and perhaps even of the fundamentally alien nature of the past. They were reminders of the tyranny of history and of the irretrievability of what had become past. Usurpation might be permanent or genocidal. Even so, in their decrepit survival, ruins also preserved a half-life that enabled repossession if the by-gone past could be seen as the particular prehistory of a potentially different present. The ruins could thus become available for the construction of alternative historical trajectories that had been defeated but were not necessarily obsolescent. In this way, the reanimation of German cultural particularity in the face of Napoleonic conquest anticipated postcolonial critiques of empire by almost two hundred years. For the ruin to function in an adversarial rather than confiscatory way, it was necessary to make the argument that the ‘ruined’ nature of the ruin was the result of usurpation rather than under-development, that the Gothic was equal to, if different from, the French Classical tradition of the eighteenth century, rather than an inevitable step toward it. This argument for ontological autonomy depended on providing clear evidence of the historically unnecessary nature of the conquest. To define the adversary, the ruins Schlegel conjured up to represent the German entity had to be carefully dated and identified to establish their cultural particularity and historical viability. Provenance was necessary in order to provide an alternative narrative in which this sort of life flourished in this sort of place. Ruins had to be treated as relics of other lives rather than as specimens of continuous development, to use Stephen Bann’s vocabulary.20 In a schema of this kind, cultural diversity is not periodised in temporal stages leading to the present in the way that ancient Ireland must give way to contemporary Britain. Instead, diversity is nationalised into historically sovereign spatial entities so that Ireland can appear as a valid adversary of Britain and Germany of France.

20 Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio (Cambridge, 1984), 86.

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The work of provenance, which was necessary in order to establish the evidence of untimely conquest and to argue for historical distinctiveness across time, demanded the careful work of the historian and the archaeologist. Scholars arrived on the scene to extract a great many details about folkways and colloquialisms that registered particularity – the whole embroidery of historical situatedness. By contrast, imperial schemes of development did not lavish this sort of attention on the provenience of the ruin, because they focused on historical situatedness in the flux of time. What was important was to get chronology and thus supersession right. The details flourished in the present. But to make a case against empire required reestablishing the sovereignty of the past. Precisely because the ruin was viewed in terms of its half-life and was placed in an adversarial, albeit (still) subordinate relationship to the usurpations of the present, the ruin revived in the conditional tense. It indicated a possibility, a ‘might be’, an ‘other’ that the present-day of empire obscured. In this case, the details flourished in the past. To some extent, the ruin’s ‘otherness’ depended on its opacity, rather than on its transparency, like the ghost in the haunted house. The narrative of usurpation relied on the method of intuition and hermeneutics in order to tell the lost (or misplaced) tale of untimely death. Paradoxically, then, the eloquence of the half-life of the ruin, the case for the alternative to empire, is nourished by the epistemological difficulty in bringing about cultural reanimation. Empire depended on clear chronological sightlines. Resistance to empire latched on to what was hidden from view, hidden but nonetheless available to those who had been annexed by conquest and defeat. In my view, alternative histories to universal or imperial development need to be continuously replenished by the evidence of usurpation and endangerment. The autonomous national narrative of Germany or Ireland gained its strength through its thoroughly ruined nature. The ruin signals life through the facts of defeat. Rather than prove its status as a “natural” entity, the nation strives to represent itself as the beleaguered subject of its own strenuous efforts at reanimation. The national narrative is surprisingly alert to the contingency of its origins and to the prospect of untimely death in the past, the present and the future. Because it is based on untimely death, the adversarial narrative depends on contingency, whereas the confiscatory narrative is much more accommodating to ideas of necessity and inevitability. Once again, the usurper relies on clarity, resistance on muddled and underground knowledge. Hopeful, exhortative and suspicious all at once, the national idea expresses itself repeatedly in the conditional tense. Its being is first conjured up as a being under threat. And it is this state of alarm that produces the energy required to override competing local or religious or ethnic identities – often violently. Violence is inscribed in the national narrative because the nation

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imagines itself first and foremost as a collective good that is incomplete and imperilled. In many ways, the narrative must sustain itself by reproducing its own state of jeopardy. As a result, national histories tremble. The tragic or melancholic mode of history, written in the register of loss, alerts to illicit dispossession, keeps alive possibility and alternatives to the present.

4. The Ruin of the Ruin Given the adversarial potential of the ruin to provide evidence of different, alternative lifeways and to countermand arguments for the overwhelmingly self-evident nature of the present, the great jeopardy to historical innovation is the ruin of the ruin. For Chateaubriand, the French Revolution was horrific not so much for creating ruins, for killing a king or for casting émigrés such as himself onto foreign shores, as for destroying the evidence of the past, for ruining the ruin. He turned repeatedly to the tombs of the French kings at the abbey in St. Denis, which Jacobin revolutionaries had plundered in August 1793.21 This profanity became part of the larger disaster of modernity, for the demolition at St. Denis was kin also to the pillage at work in North America, where European colonists were in the process of destroying the graves of Native Americans and thereby effacing ‘the proofs of their existence and of their annihilation’. Not only did the colonists drive out the Indians, but, as Chateaubriand recognised, they annulled the connections between indigenous peoples and the historical monuments they had left behind. The revisualisation of the American landscape as empty and virginal denied indigenous people even their obsolescence, much less their alterity. The ruin of the ruin is the triumph of the permanence of the present, a present uncomplicated by other possibilities or by its own conditional nature. We might perhaps see Chateaubriand’s fear of the ruin of the ruin as related to the greatest depredation that Victor Hugo identified in the ruin of Notre Dame, where the ‘good taste’ of the present did not doubt its right to remodel the ancient. Both political usurpation in the name of empire and architectural renovation in the name of ‘good taste’ attempted to achieve an eternal, self-satisfied, perfect present. The tension between the ruin as specimen and the ruin as relic is intense. The specimen is placed in sequenced historical trajectories that unfold and culminate in the compelling self-evident nature of the present. This is the logic of the time line and the museum, where chronology orders specimens, 21 Chateaubriand, Genius, 524–525, 730–731; idem, Memoirs, vol. 2: 85, 155–156. See also Ernst Steinmann, Die Zerstörung der Königsdenkmäler in Paris, Monatshefte für Kunstwissenschaft X, 1917, 337–380.

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creating a smooth and reasoned path, whereby the present confiscates the unruly past to represent its own inevitability. By contrast, the relic jabs and pokes and resists its placement in the time line. It remains an adversary to developmental historical logic. To do so, it must conjure up the violence of the past and the evidence of untimely death. The adversarial nature of the ruin as relic not only invites, it even depends on narratives of violence which can be incited against the present; the adversarial ruin also produces violence, the evidence of untimely death. The claims of provenance work against the claims of the inevitable present by reanimating the particular adversary who has been defeated. It can thereby enable political action by creating a bounded collective subject: Germany or Ireland or Palestine. As Nietzsche argued in the Uses and Disadvantages of History, the horizon, the particular coherence of culture, is necessary for life.22 But the establishment of the particulars of a cultural horizon is difficult work. Consumed as it is with the original jeopardy of a usurped but imaginatively reanimated political subject, the adversarial narrative tends to deny ambiguous, hybrid and shifting allegiances. The adversarial ruin must tell the story of particularity and thus autonomy, and it therefore resists the assimilation of other cultures. Historical embroidery at the gravesite is about origins and purity, not cultural diversity. As a result, the archaeological method that brings the adversarial ruin to light is fundamentally destructive as well as constructive. Whereas the confiscatory ruin acknowledges alterity in the past by sealing it in the past, the adversarial ruin denies diversity to reanimate an actual autonomous subject in the present. Seen in this way, history as a genre at once reanimates alternatives through the work of provenance but rejects the evidence of yet other alternatives for the sake of its master narrative. The confiscatory and adversarial potential of ruins suggests that modernity does not unilaterally open up or close down temporal possibility. Narratives of obsolescence and supersession, in which the past is past in relation to a specific present, give directions to historical innovation. At the same time, narratives of untimely death depend on the otherness as well as the liveliness of the past to create alternatives to the present. Thus the incisive distinction that Reinhard Koselleck makes between the space of experience (or imagined experience) which stripped away by the horizon of expectation under conditions of continuous change is not so clear.23 The emergence of the idea of the past, which is not the same as the space of experience, but is also not a function of expectation, is certainly allied to the idea of the irre22 Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, Reginald John Hollingdale (trans.) (Cambridge, 1997), 63. 23 Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Space of Experience’ and ‘Horizon of Expectation’: Two Historical Categories, in: idem, Futures Past (Cambridge, 2004).

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trievability and thus the anachronistic nature of the past.24 At the same time, however, the otherness of a specific past provides evidence that allows alternatives to the present to be conjured into possibility. The violence of the present in which expectation overrides experience also creates the effect of other kinds of experience, seemingly ancient and durable things like Germanness or Irishness. The otherness of the past cuts two ways: It reaffirms the strange, far-away aspects of the past, but also makes the case for the possibility of different kinds of life. Ruins indicate different modes of being at home or being homeless, different degrees of placement and displacement, different arguments for empire and resistance. There is no compelling or single synchronicity to modern time. Placed in historical time, ruins recall what Michel Foucault has called the ‘irruptive violence of time’, which around 1800 had the effect of making life wild again, of providing evidence of abrupt extinctions and sudden transformations, of ‘breaking up time’.25 Only the ruin of the ruin, the encounter with the ‘eternal present’, or the ruins of the future, which also serve to stabilise the present, would pacify the violence of modern time.

24 Zachary Sayre Schiffman, The Birth of the Past (Baltimore, 2011), 25 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York, 1971), 132.

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Peter Osborne

Global Modernity and the Contemporary: Two Categories of the Philosophy of Historical Time

I take the syntax of my title from the well-known essay by Reinhart Koselleck – ‘“Space of Experience” and “Horizon of Expectation”: Two Historical Categories’ (1976)1 – as a mark of both acknowledgement and difference. Acknowledgement, because it is in large part as a result of Koselleck’s historical semantics of the basic temporal concepts of modernity (Neuzeit, history, progress, revolution, expectation, crisis, the new …) that the problematic of ‘the modern’ has been established in its philosophical meaning as part of a philosophy of historical time; or more precisely, as a temporalisation of ‘history’ – indeed, as the founding form of such temporalisations. Difference, because the restriction of Koselleck’s analysis of these concepts to, on the one hand, the horizon of their founding period (broadly, from late eighteenth- to late nineteenth-century Europe) and, on the other hand, the philosophical framework of phenomenological ontology, registers the narrowly or merely historical character of his work. That is to say, ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation’ cannot be treated as transcendental categories of historical analysis as such (as Koselleck presents them, from within their own absolutised historical domain), for both historical and philosophical reasons – philosophical reasons that the passage of time has itself made clearer. It was always conceptually incoherent, for example, to delegate ‘experience’ solely to the present, in counterpoint to the futural horizon of expectation; and to restrict ‘the new’ to such a horizon, suppressing both its element of externality and its ruptural quality with regard to the phenomenological subject.2 Rather, today, these categories appear relative to historical and philosophical conditions that are in the process of being fundamentally transformed. The two main conceptual registers of this process of transformation, and the 1 Reinhart Koselleck, “Space of Experience” and “Horizon of Expectation”: Two Historical Categories, in: idem, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, transl. by Keith Tribe (Cambridge/MA, 1985), 267–288. 2 For a critique of Koselleck’s essay, see Peter Osborne, Expecting the Unexpected: Beyond the ‘Horizon of Expectation’, in: Maria Hlavajova et al. (eds.), The Horizons Reader (Utrecht, 2011), 112–128.

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emergence of new structures of temporalisation of history that it involves, are (1) the ‘globalisation’ of the (historically, ‘Western’ colonial) concept of modernity and (2) the becoming-world-historical of the concept of the contemporary, as a more adequate way of grasping certain relational aspects of the spatio-temporal structure of a now-global modernity. In this article, I offer a schematic account of some of the main aspects of this dual process, through an elaboration of the concepts ‘global modernity’ and ‘the global contemporary’ as categories of the philosophy of historical time. As should already be clear, I do not understand these concepts to denote successive ‘regimes of historicity’,3 but rather integrally connected structures of historical temporalisation: objectively produced, subjective structures, subject to reflexive theorisation, which perform a heuristic but nonetheless constitutive interpretative function.4 These concepts grasp discrete aspects of the historical process, corresponding to qualitatively different subject positions, and they pose correspondingly different theoretical and practical challenges. Only when they are thought together, however, can the complex and disjunctive temporality characteristic of the current historical process be grasped in something like its unity, in outline at least.

1. ‘Modernity!’ From the Colonial to the Global I shall expound the concept of global modernity via five, brutally reductive theses on the development of modernity as a historical form: 1. As a historical concept, ‘modernity’ designates the social forms and conditions of the self-absolutising and structurally contradictory temporality of the modern: the temporality of the new. 2. This concept is further contradictory, insofar as it involves the territorialisation – or spatial delimitation – of an infinite process of temporal differentiation. (Temporal infinite, spatial finitude.) This contradiction is the dialectical motor of modernity as a distributed series of historical forms. 3. This second, spatio-temporal contradiction is epitomised by – but by no means restricted to – the historical relationship of modernity to the colonial and postcolonial (or de-colonising) imaginaries. It also applies to the historically discrete case of socialist modernities, for example, that is crucial to the comprehension of current developments in China. 3 François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité: Présentisme et expériences du temps (Paris, 2003). 4 The destabilisation of Kant’s transcendental distinction between the constitutive and regulative function of pure concepts, relative to the objects of experience, is a condition of rendering experience historical.

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4. Post-colonial relations are currently being qualitatively transformed by their immanence to now-global processes of transnational capital accumulation, as a result of which, a new kind of postcolonial temporality is emerging. This temporality is antiquating the spatial framework that the earlier form of postcoloniality inherited (through inversion) from the colonial modern: essentially, the spatial framework of anti-colonial nationalisms. 5. The transnational globalisation of processes of capital accumulation and exchange, recoding relations of colonial difference, raises the question of modernity as a global form. However, insofar as this is understood as the projection of anthropological and national senses of cultures onto a single global plane, the idea of global culture is vulgar – in Marx’s sense of offering an ‘imaginary satisfaction’, which disavows the insatiable temporal logic of the modern.5 Rather, any global modernity will be internally self-differentiating. The spatially relational aspects of this internally self-differentiating global modernity are better grasped by the idea of the global contemporary. Allow me to elaborate. Thesis 1: As a historical concept, modernity designates the social forms and conditions of the self-absolutising and structurally contradictory temporality of the modern. Indeed, ‘modernity’ is still best written (as it often was early in the twentieth century) in exclamatory form: ‘Modernity!’ This exclamation mark conveys modernity’s peculiar triple status of being, at once, a declaration, a demand and a command. There is the declaration of a state of affairs – ‘modernity’ (negation of the temporality of tradition) – and hence a description of an always-still-emergent situation. There is a demand that one recognize this state of affairs – an appeal to some other or others for its recognition, and everything that is implied, politically, by that. And there is a command, implicit in that recognition, to further actualise this state of affairs, to fulfil or complete its description. That is to say, there is a performative logic to the declaration of modernity that combines description, desire and compulsion (indeed, subjection – l’assujettissement – in the multiple senses which that term has come to acquire)6 in a way that is familiar from the retrospectively self-validating logic of claims for recognition

5 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), transl. by Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth, 1973), Notebook V, Jan/Feb. 1858, 488: ‘the modern gives no satisfaction; or, where it appears satisfied with itself, it is vulgar.’ See Peter Osborne, Marx and the Philosophy of Time, Radical Philosophy 147, 2008, 15–22; 17. 6 Étienne Balibar/Barbara Cassin/Alain de Libera, Sujet, in: Barbara Cassin (ed.), Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies (Paris, 2004), 1233–1254; translated by David Macey as Subject, Radical Philosophy 138, 2006, 15–41.

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more generally. In the case of the exclamation ‘modernity!’ however, this general performative logic of description, desire and compulsion takes on a peculiar and paradoxically absolutising form. Herein lies both its irresistibility and its specifically philosophical significance. To quote the French poet Arthur Rimbaud from 1873 – writing at the moment of the opening up of a new stage of capitalist colonialism, consequent upon the increased competition between European powers, stimulated by the emergence of Germany as an industrial force, in the final ‘Farewell’ sequence of his poem A Season in Hell: ‘il faut être absolument moderne’: ‘it is necessary to be absolutely modern’, or ‘one must be absolutely modern’. This is a strange and compulsive existential-categorial imperative, this declaration of a necessity not to act but to be in a certain way.7 Writing a decade earlier, in the wake of Baudelaire’s founding formulation of the time-consciousness of modernité as a quality of temporal experience, Rimbaud was the first to articulate the paradoxical universality of the existential demand imposed upon the historical process by the self-absolutising temporal logic of the modern, as the logic of the new. This is a demand coterminous with the increasing semantic density of ‘the new’ marked by an intensification, differentiation and growing reflexivity of temporal meanings. To grasp the significance of this absolutisation, it is necessary to recall that ‘modern’, ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’ are phenomenological-temporal concepts that, during the nineteenth century, came to be extended to the level of the concept of history (in the collective singular), at once displacing and rearticulating the category of ‘history’ itself. In this respect, the discourses of modern/modernity/modernism have no direct conceptual connection to ‘reason’ in an Enlightenment sense (although they are contingently historically associated with it) – an identification that has wrought havoc in the literature – but they are structurally tied to the philosophical concept of the subject (and its predecessors and successors). As Paul Ricoeur put it, in his belated few pages on the category of modernity in his final major work, Memory, History, Forgetting: the ‘full and precise formulation’ of the concept of modernity is achieved only ‘when one says and writes “our” modernity.’8 That is to say, as a form of historical experience – and more precisely an experience of ‘history’ in the collective singular – modernity posits Hegel’s ‘I that is We and We that is I’ as its ideal addressee. Modernity in7 Cf. Pierre Macherey, ‘Il faut être absolument moderne’: La modernité, etat de fait ou Imperatif?, http://stl.recherche.univ-lille3.fr/seminaires/philosophie/macherey/macherey 20052006/macherey28092005cadreprincipal.html [Accessed 30/1/12]. 8 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, transl. by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago, London, 2004), 305.

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volves the construction of ‘the subject’, as such, as the action of the contradictory temporal structure of ‘the new’.9 It is the phenomenological-temporal comprehensiveness of the Augustinean three-fold present (the presence within the soul – we might say, to ‘consciousness’ – of the objects of memory, attention and expectation, respectively) that is the conceptual basis of the tendency towards absolutisation inherent within the time consciousness of the modern.10 Regarding the theme of this volume – ‘Negotiating the Borders Between Present, Past and Future’ – one can thus say that there are no ‘borders’ here to be negotiated; not because time is some kind of homogeneous block, but precisely because it is not. It is the fluidity of temporal differentiation and its indifference to the chronological time in which it is retroactively measured, which constitutes historical time as the medium of historical meaning and political action alike. The tendency towards absolutisation inherent within the time-consciousness of the modern conjoins and condenses three phases in the development of its concept. First, at its root, the modern designates the valorisation of the present as new over the past, thereby splitting the present itself from within, and antiquating those aspects of the present that are not new. Second, the generalisation of this antiquating dynamic necessarily involves its application to the new itself, at any particular time, thereby instituting a self-transcending temporal structure that opposes itself not merely to what is received by any particular tradition, but to tradition as such, as a structure of temporalisation. (This the moment of the coinage of Neuzeit, on Koselleck’s account.) Finally, this affirmation of the new as such, in its transitoriness, across the totality of its manifestations (modernism) reveals the new to have become ‘ever-same’ (Walter Benjamin) – to have itself become a new kind of ‘tradition’. The new thereby contradictorily represses the very temporality it affirms, by instituting a new temporal structure of differentiated repetition.11 9 Cf. Peter Osborne, Modernism and Philosophy, in: Peter Brooker et al. (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Modernisms (Oxford, 2010), 388–409; 397. This is possible because ‘the subject’ – as philosophically invented by Kant – simply is the action of a particular structure of time-determination. ‘The modern’ codes and inflects this structure of time-determination as ‘the new’. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge, 1997), 271–277 (A137/B176–A147–B187); Jacques-Alain Miller, Action of the Structure (1968), in: Peter Hallward/Knox Peden (eds.), Concept and Form, vol. 1: Key Texts from the Cahiers pour l’Analyse (London, New York, 2012) chapter 2. 10 See Éric Alliez, The Time of Novitas: Saint Augustine, in: idem, Capital Times: Tales From the Conquest of Time (1991), trans. by Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis, 1996), 77–137. 11 Osborne, Modernism and Philosophy, 389–392. This narrative situates Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968) – taking off from the reception of Nietzsche’s eternal return – at the (current) endpoint of the philosphical history of the new.

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This is not the only contradiction that infects the concept of modernity as a result of its self-absolutizing, performative temporal logic. Thesis 2: As a historical process, this temporal absolutisation is further contradictory in so far as it necessarily involves the territorialisation (or spatial delimitation) of an infinite process of temporal differentiation. The application of the concept of modernity at the level of the concept of history, which constitutes it as a historical concept, carries with it the spatialisation or territorialisation of the phenomenological concept of ‘world’. What is now called ‘globalisation’ appears from this point of view as the planetarily expanded process of social actualisation of the phenomenological concept of world.12 And, as Marx foresaw, the medium of this social actualisation is the universalisation of relations of exchange. The idea of global modernity thus posits a (virtual) absolute ‘we’ of universal exchange. Ultimately, it is the value-form (in Marx’s specific sense) that is ‘the’ subject of modernity.13 At the level of the actual historical process, however, geopolitically, irreducible (embodied) elements of spatial finitide (place) accompany the electronic actualisation of this virtual ‘we’ in the (cyber)space of capital ‘flows’.14 The contradiction here between the temporal infinite of a self-absolutising modernity carried by the tendential universalisation of exchange relations and the spatial finitude of actual historical subjects is the dialectical motor of modernity as a distributed series of historical forms. In the first (‘anthropological’ and ‘sociological’) phases of historical modernity, these forms were primarily constituted through relations of colonial difference, transcoding socio-economic differences internal to European societies (‘feudal’ versus ‘capitalist’ relations of production, ‘religious’ versus ‘secular’ worldviews).

12 This is more clearly grasped by the French term mondialisation, which Jean-Lucy Nancy, for example, explicitly opposes to the ‘indistinct integrality’ implied by the English ‘globalisation’. This a distinction that is nonetheless negated by his English-language publishers in their translation of the title of the very book dedicated to its exposition, La Création du monde ou mondialisation (Paris, 2002): Jean-Lucy Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization (New York, 2007). See, in particular, the author’s prefatory note on the untranslatability of mondialisation, 27–29. 13 I elaborate this claim in Peter Osborne, Marx, Time and the Philosophy of the Subject, forthcoming. 14 See, for example, Saskia Sassen, Electronic Space and Power, in: idem, Globalization and its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money (New York, 1998), 177–194; idem, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton, London, 2006; 2008). I discuss these spatial issues in ‘Art Space’, chapter 5 of my Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London, New York, 2013).

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Thesis 3. This second, spatio-temporal contradiction is epitomised in the historical relationship of modernity to the colonial and postcolonial or de-colonising imaginaries. The first, still abiding historical form of modernity was the colonial modern. In its generalised historical sense, the category of modernity was constituted in the course of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenments through a dual process of the transcoding of immanently European temporal differences (‘revolution’) and colonial spatial differences (‘the colonies’), to produce a geopolitical spatialisation of temporal differences and a temporalisation of spatialised colonial differences. In this respect, as colonial difference the colonial is constituted internal to the conceptual dialectics of the modern as a historical concept, in a much more fundamental manner than its mere attribution to the modern (as one possible attribute among others) in a phrase like ‘the colonial modern’ (which suggests a variety of kinds of the modern) is able to convey. Indeed, the phrase ‘the colonial modern’ may even function to disavow the constitutive character of colonial difference; in particular, when used to refer to only one side of the colonial relation – the colonies – rather than the spatialisation of the relation itself, which includes the territorial sites of the colonial powers. On this understanding, the colonial modern is an historical a priori, in Foucault’s sense: a historically particular spatialisation of the modern that was nonetheless constitutive of the modern itself as a historical concept, in the full sense. As such, it includes an investment of state power in a distinctive temporalisation of the variety of political-territorial differences of the colonial relation constitutive of the first phase of historical modernity. This applies as much to non-European examples, such as Japanese colonialism in Northern China, for example, as it does to the paradigmatic instances of the capitalist colonialism of the European powers. More precisely, the colonial functions here as what we might call the historical modern’s first spatial reserve.15 As a geohistorical category, the modern can never be actual (as opposed to imaginary, which is also real, but in a different way) ‘without reserve’. And this reserve must necessarily be, in part, spatially conceived, since every temporal designation (‘the medieval’, for example) has spatial presuppositions, be they explicit or implicit, which resist the pure temporalisation of social differences. Categories like ‘the Middle Ages’ make no sense outside a restricted ‘Western’ topography. To use the terms of Jacques Derrida’s famous 1967 essay on Georges Bataille, the colonial modern is a particular ‘restricted

15 I draw here on my paper to the conference The Colonial Modern, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 24 October 2008: From General to Restricted Economy: The Modern’s Colonial Reserve.

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economy’ of the modern, a Hegelianism with reserve.16 Colonial spatialisation is a ‘reserve’ here in each of the contradictory senses of the term ‘reserve’: (1) the sense of a reservation, a spatial delimitation that puts something aside, but also (2) in the sense of something that is held in reserve, as an as-yet-unrealised potential, something ‘beyond’ the actual in the sense of the beyond of Bataille’s conception of an expenditure beyond meaning. At its most general, this reserve is the future. (In Blanchot’s phrase, the modern affirms a future that ‘obstinately holds itself in reserve’.)17 This is the contradictory double coding of the colonial reserve: on the one hand, it is that which is held back, delimited, segregated, enclosed; but on the other hand, it is also that which contains the future within itself: the postcolonial. It is in the postcolonial that the colonial modern actualises its futurity, that is, its temporal status as ‘reserve’. This is a dialectical reversal internal to the problematic of modernisation, in which colonies, initially figured as sites of the past, appear anew as the sites of the future, antiquating their colonial masters. However, the future that the colonial both holds back and projects, the future that the modern affirms – the postcolonial as the new – will always itself involve another (spatial) reservation, another holding back in the sense of a delimitation, another spatialisation of temporal differentiation that cannot but contain another metaphorical ‘colonialisation’ of that which is produced as ‘the antiquated/old’ by ‘the new’. This leads to the questions: What is the new today, geopolitically speaking? And what is the postcolonial today? Are postcolonial structures of difference still running on the modern’s colonial reserve? Or have they acquired new, immanently self-differentiating temporal powers? The answers to both these last two questions must be ‘yes’. Thesis 4. Postcolonial relations are currently being transformed by their immanence to now-global processes of capital accumulation, as a result of which a new kind of postcoloniality is antiquating the futures of the colonial modern. Yes, postcolonial structures of difference are still running on the modern’s colonial reserve, insofar as the relations between territorially defined nation states continues to regulate capital accumulation (including, crucially, the flows of variable capital, that is, migration). But yes also, these postcolonial structures of difference have acquired new, immanently self-differentiating temporal powers, insofar as the de-territorialising logic of capital accumulation is leading to new and genuinely transnational (rather than international) re-territorialisations or socio-spatial forms. That is to say, capital 16 Jacques Derrida, From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve, in: idem, Writing and Difference, transl. by Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978), 251–277. 17 Maurice Blanchot, The Final Work, in: idem, The Infinite Conversation (1969), transl. by Susan Hanson (Minneapolis, 1993), 289.

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markets have developed transnational dynamics that have transformed the economic, political and cultural significance of nationality beyond the purview of the problematic of postcolonial nationalisms and metropolitan multiculturalism, which nonetheless retains significant residual meaning and power. This is what Gayatri Spivak in her 2004 Wellek Lectures, Death of a Discipline – the discipline being Comparative Literature – called the ‘new post-coloniality’. On this argument, ‘demographic shifts, diasporas, labour migrations, the movements of global capital and media, and processes of cultural circulation and hybridisation’ have rendered the twin geopolitical imaginary of a culturalist postcolonial nationalism and a metropolitan multiculturalism at best problematic and at worse redundant.18 That geopolitical imaginary may now be retrospectively periodised as belonging to a ‘first stage’ of postcolonialism, insofar as the world is currently in transition from post-colonial nationalisms to transnational post-colonialities, that is, a new kind of postcoloniality. However, this is by no means capitalism or modernity ‘without reserve’, but rather the modern’s new postcolonial reserve: a dialectics of ‘old’ and ‘new’ post-colonialities that is re-spatialising social relations, geo-politically, at a global level, as an effect of the immanently temporalising modernity of capital. The globalisation of processes of capital accumulation and universal exchange thus raises anew the question of the structure of modernity as a cultural form. Thesis 5: Insofar it is understood as the projection of anthropological and national senses of cultures onto a single global plane, the idea of global culture is vulgar, in Marx’s sense of offering an ‘imaginary satisfaction’, which disavows the insatiably self-differentiating temporal logic of the modern. The spatially relational aspects of this internally self-differentiating global modernity are better grasped by the idea of the global contemporary. Global networks of communicative action are more radically de-nationalising and de- and re-culturing than the idea of global culture can sustain. ‘Cultures’ of modernity are constituted, first, at the point of intersection of received cultural practices with the logic of the value form (what Marx called ‘formal subsumption’), and second, in the enculturation of that form itself (which he called ‘real subsumption’).19 This is as much a matter of currencies as it is of ‘cultures’. (Think, for example, of the significance of the Euro as a economic-culture form.) 18 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York, 2003) 3; citing Toby Alice Volkman, Crossing Borders: Revitalizing Area Studies (New York, 1999) ix. 19 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1: The Process of Production of Capital (1867/1873), transl. by Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth, 1976), Appendix, Results of the Immediate Process of Production, 1019–1038.

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We need to distinguish here between at least three rather different senses of the global or ‘total’ application of the logic of the modern in the construction of the concept of global modernity, under the condition of transnational capital. First, it could mean something like the paradoxical spatial totalisation of modernity at the level of the planet, into a single internally temporally self-differentiating global cultural modernity – an absolute modernity, if you will. This is a powerful fantasy of capital. Yet the social unification of the global through universal exchange has not yet reached anything like this point of abstract, purely self-generating temporal differentiation. There is no actual global culture in this sense. For even on the implausibly singular interpretation, the form of unity – namely exchange – abstracts radically from the ‘meaningful wholes’ of the plural ‘cultures’ in either their anthropological or national senses, which, however imaginary, retain a social actuality. ‘Global modernity’ may have everything to do with ‘culture’, in the sense of the social processes of formation of subjectivity and meaning, but it has little to do with culture in the conventionally particularistic anthropological and national senses. Although it is precisely these senses that are kept alive through the multiple culturalisms through which various regional and state forms are currently represented within transnational cultural spaces. Second, the concept of global modernity could refer to something more empirically particularistic, namely, the empirical totality or global aggregate of the spatial multiplicity of modernities, each with their own relatively territorially contained unities (Japanese modernity, Moroccan modernity, Argentine modernity, etc.), multiple modernities; even, for some, ‘alternative’ ones, although I find that term implausible when used in a generalised manner, since socialist modernity has been, to date, the only historically genuinely ‘alternative’ modernity to those generated by the temporal logic of capital accumulation (‘expanded reproduction’) driving the capitalist system of production. The problem with this second notion is that it gives no credence to the relative unity of the world capitalist system, or its over-determining systemic effects on particular territories – and so remains within an essentially national-colonial spatial imaginary. Third, one might understand global modernity more processually as a play of forces between the abstractly unifying and temporally self-differentiating power of the universalisation of exchange relations at the level of the planet and the persisting complexly interacting multiplicity of relatively territorially discrete, immanently self-differentiating modernities. This is the most realistic and also the most messy option, which can only be adequately addressed concretely, through theoretically informed, lower-level historical analysis. The comprehension of modernity in China (which is by no means the same thing as ‘Chinese modernity’) is particularly important in this re-

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gard, given the role of the development of capitalism in China in unifying the world economy since 1989. At a theoretical level, however, the relational aspects of this third conception are in certain respects better grasped by the idea of the global contemporary, as the speculative positing of the living, disjunctive unity of a multiplicity of social times. This is the emergent temporality of a global coevalness, a massively complex set of practical articulations and mediations of different temporalities within a present constructed by these articulations themselves.20

2. The Global Contemporary In its most basic form, the concept of the contemporary is simply that of the coming together, hence the unity in disjunction, or the living disjunctive unity of multiple times.21 More specifically, it refers to the coming together of the times of human lives within the time of the living. Contemporaries are those who inhabit (or inhabited) the same time. As a historical concept, the contemporary thus involves a projection of unity onto the differential totality of the times of lives that are in principle, or potentially, present to each other in some way, at some particular time – in particular, ‘now’, since it is the living present that provides the model of contemporaneity. That is to say, the concept of the contemporary projects a single temporal matrix of a living present – a common, albeit internally disjunctive, ‘living’ historical present. Such a notion is inherently problematic but increasingly inevitable. It is theoretically problematic, first, because it is an idea, in Kant’s technical sense: Its object (the total conjunction of present times) is beyond possible experience.22 This is so not merely for narrowly Kantian reasons about finitude and totality (which are themselves problematic), but also, more fundamentally, for temporal-philosophical reasons of an early Heideggerian kind. ‘The present’, in its presentness, cannot be understood as ‘given’ with 20 For the concept of the coeval as a form of chronological coexistence that is temporally over-determined by the social dimension of spatial relations, producing complex temporalities of encounter, see Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York, 1983), 156–165. In The Politics of Time (London, 1995), 27–29, I distinguished the coeval from the temporal unity of ‘a con-temporaneous present’. Here however, in contrast, I attempt a new construction of the historical temporality of ‘the contemporary’ on the basis of the globalisation of the coeval. 21 This section sets out from material first published in Peter Osborne, The Fiction of the Contemporary: Speculative Collectivity and Transnationality in The Atlas Group, in: Armen Avanessian/Luke Skrebowski (eds.), Aesthetics and Contemporary Art (Berlin, New York, 2011), 101–123; 108–113. It is elaborated at greater length in the expanded version of that essay which appears as Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, Chapter 1. 22 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 394–408.

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experience, as a fixed temporal form with its own objects (the objects of attention), since it exists only as the differentiation or fractured togetherness of the other two temporal modes (past and future), under the priority of its futural dimension.23 From this standpoint, the concept of the contemporary projects into presence a temporal unity that is in principle futural or ‘horizonal’ and hence speculative. Furthermore, the relational totality of the currently coeval times of human existence (however theoretically comprehended in their presentness) remains, empirically, fundamentally, structurally, and socially disjunctive. There is no actual shared subject-position from the standpoint of which its relational totality could be lived as a whole, in whatever futural, temporally fragmented or dispersed a form. Nonetheless, the idea of the contemporary functions as if there is. That is, it functions as if the speculative horizon of the unity of human history had been reached, as a phenomenologically actualisable standpoint. In this respect, the contemporary is a utopian idea, with both negative and positive aspects. Negatively, it involves a disavowal; positively, it is an act of the productive imagination. It involves a disavowal – one of its own futural, speculative basis – to the extent to which it projects an actual conjunction of all present times. This is a disavowal of the futurity of the present by its very presentness; essentially, it is a disavowal of politics. It is a productive act of imagination to the extent to which it performatively projects a non-existent unity onto the disjunctive relations between coeval times. In this respect, in rendering present the absent time of a unity of times, all constructions of the contemporary are fictional. More specifically, the contemporary is an operative fiction: It regulates the division between the present and the past (the ‘non-contemporaneous’) within the present. Epistemologically, one might say, the contemporary marks that point of indifference between historical and fictional narrative which, since the critique of Hegel, has been associated with the notion of speculative experience itself.24 23 Temporality, for Heidegger, ‘has the unity of a future which makes present in the process of having been.’ Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), transl. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford, 1962), 374. 24 See Paul Ricoeur, Poetics of Narrative: History, Fiction, Time, in: idem, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, transl. by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago, 1988), 99–240. Despite the volume of his writings on time and history, Ricoeur nowhere thematises the concept of the contemporary. This is perhaps a sign of its own contemporaneity, for which, see Peter Osborne, Look Beneath the Label: Notes on the Contemporary, in: Eileeen Daly/Rebecca Heald (eds.), Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2011 (London, 2011), 4–8. The contemporary emerges as a critical concept in cultural and art theory only during the 1990s. It is important to note here the distinction between Ernst Bloch’s concept of Gleichzeitigkeit (and his dialectics of ‘Gleichzeitigkeit und Ungleichzeitigkeit’) and the concept of contemporaneity at issue here. Previously translated as ‘simultaneity’ or ‘synchronicity’ –

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It is the fictional ‘co-presentness’ of the contemporary that distinguishes it from the more structural and dynamic category of modernity, the inherently self-surpassing character of which identifies it with a permanent transitoriness, familiar in the critical literature since Baudelaire. In this respect, the contemporary involves a kind of internal retreat of the modern to the present. As one commentator put it, contemporaneousness is ‘the pregnant present of the original meaning of modern, but without its subsequent contract with the future’.25 If the primary value of the modern is ‘the new’, in its distinction from ‘the old’ (which it produces), the primary value of the contemporary is its actuality, in distinction from the fading existential hold of what is still present but ‘out-of-date’ – that is, no longer articulating living relations between a multiplicity of spatially distributed standpoints.26 If modernity projects a present of permanent transition, the contemporary fixes or enfolds such transitoriness within the actuality of spatially distributed conjunctures, or at its broadest, the envelopes of lives. This is the second aspect of the theoretical problem of the contemporary: the problem of the disjunctive unity of present times is the problem of the unity and disjunction of social space – that is, in its most extended, global form, the problem of the geo-political. In its current, global variant, the idea of the contemporary thus poses the problem of the disjunctive unity of the geo-politically historical: temporal unity/spatial disjunction – in contrast to modernity’s temporal differentiation within a unified space. The temporal dialectic of the new, which gives qualitative definition to the historical present (as the standpoint from which its unity is constructed), but which the notion of the contemporary cuts off from the future, displacing it into the actuality of a shared present, must be mediated with the comhence, ‘simultaneity and non-simultaneity’ or ‘synchronicity and non-synchronicity’ (see, for example, Ernst Bloch, Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to its Dialectics, transl, by Mark Ritter, New German Critique 11, 1977, 22–38) – Bloch’s Gleichzeitigkeit has more recently been translated as ‘contemporaneity’ (see Ernst Bloch, Non-Contemporaneity and Obligation to its Dialectic, in: idem, The Heritage of Our Times, transl. by Neveille and Stephen Plaice (Cambridge, 1991), 97–148). However, Bloch’s concept of Gleichzeitigkeit lacks the temporal differential – the multiplicity of times – that is internal to the coevalness of the contemporary itself, which Bloch grasps only via ‘non-contemporaneity’ (Ungleichzeitigkeit). In this respect, Bloch complicates, but remains restricted to, a developmental problematic. 25 Terry Smith, Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity, Critical Inquiry 32, 2006, 681–707; 703. 26 This emphasis on the value of actuality places the concept of the contemporary within the ambit of Foucault’s idea of a ‘critical ontology of the present’. For some reflections on this connection, see Giorgio Agamben, What is the Contemporary?, in: idem, What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays (Stanford, 2009), 39–54; John Rajchman, The Contemporary: A New Idea?, in: Avanessian/Skrebowski (eds.), Aesthetics and Contemporary Art, 125–144.

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plex global dialectic of spaces, if any kind of sense is to be made of the notion of the historically contemporaneous. Or to put it another way, the fiction of the contemporary is necessarily a geo-political fiction. This considerably complicates the question of periodisation: the durational extension of the contemporary ‘backwards’, into the recent chronological past. For the backwards extension of the contemporary (as a projected unity of the times of present lives) imposes a constantly shifting periodising dynamic that insists upon the question ‘When did the present begin?’ This question has very different answers depending upon where you are thinking from, geo-politically, which depends upon one’s answer to the question ‘Where is the now?’27 Despite these theoretical problems of the fictive character of unity and spatial standpoint, however, constructions of the contemporary increasingly appear as inevitable, because growing global social inter-connectedness gives meaningful content to these fictions, filling out their speculative projections with empirical material (‘facts’), thereby effecting a transition from fictional to historical narrative. This is the domain of the booming genre of global histories of the present (Hobsbawm, Arrighi, Frank).28 Such histories are as performative as they are empirical (i.e., they are constructions), but they nonetheless aspire to a hypothetical empirical unity of the present, beyond pure heteronomy or multiplicity. In this respect, the concept of the contemporary has acquired not merely the totalising scope of a Kantian ‘idea’ but its regulative necessity too. Increasingly, ‘the contemporary’ has the transcendental status of a condition of the historical intelligibility of social experience. And today, the fiction of the contemporary is primarily a global or a planetary fiction. A fiction of a global transnationality has recently displaced the 140-year hegemony of an internationalist imaginary, 1848–1989, which came in a variety of political forms. This is a fiction – a projection of the temporary unity of the present across the planet – grounded in the contradictory penetration of received social forms (‘communities’, ‘cultures’, ‘nations’, ‘societies’ – all increasingly inadequate formulations) by capital, and their 27 For a critique of the de-historicising reification inherent in the despatialisation that structures categories of historical periodisation, see Katheleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadephia, 2008). It is a virtue of the concept of the contemporary that it undoes periodisation, as conventionally conceived. See also, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Where is the Now?, Critical Inquiry 30, 2004, 2, 458–462. 28 Eric Hobsbawn, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, (London, 1994); Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London, New York, 1994; 2009) and idem, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (London, New York, 2007); Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley/CA, 1998).

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consequent enforced interconnection and dependency. In short, today, the contemporary (the fictive relational unity of the spatially distributed historical present) is transnational because our modernity is that of a tendentially global capital. Transnationality is the putative socio-spatial form of the current temporal unity of historical experience. It is at this point that a historical concept of the contemporary connects up to Spivak’s ‘new postcoloniality’, which, as we saw, marks a movement beyond the colonial modern, associated with the notion of global modernity. This ‘return of the demographic, rather than territorial, frontiers that predate and are larger than capitalism’,29 in response to large-scale migration, is made possible by the new communicational forms of virtual reality. These transversal relations of a transnational contemporaneity are overlaid upon the immanently self-differentiating temporal dynamic of the new that characterises the now tendentially global capitalist modernity. The question thus arises as to how we to think the relationship between the two forms. Might the historical time of the present (this present, now) be best thought in terms of the articulations mediating these two temporalities of global modernity and contemporaneity, as an unstable coexistence of these two distinctive forms of time? More specifically, might we not think of their mediation, primarily, as that of temporalities of crisis? As the coming together, disjunctively, of different temporalities expressing conflicting tendencies or ‘contradictions’ at the level of a tendentially systematic, self-reproducing whole, global contemporaneity is the temporality of crisis. Contemporaneity is the over-arching temporal form of global crisis – it carries the temporality of crisis immanently within itself – because crises are expressed as forms of temporal disjunction. All structural crises of capitalism are at root crises of the realisation (or over-production) of value grounded in disjunctions between moments in the circuit of moneycapital, of one sort or another: a lack of balance, or ‘unbalancing’, as they say, between the circuits of different kinds of capital, between sectors, or between regions of the system. The crisis itself is the expression of these temporal disjunctions. The primary difference of a globally extended contemporaneity from the temporality of a global modernity is that while the latter projects a collective subject of utterance (Ricoeur’s ‘our modernity’) ‘of which it is full’ (as Meschonnic put it),30 the transnationally disjunctive coding of the global contemporary projects a multiplicity of subjects, constituted by relations of temporally-coded spatial difference, within a self-consciously coeval time: the ‘con-temporary’ itself. In this respect, the phenomenology of the con29 Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 15. 30 Henri Meschonnic, Modernity, Modernity, New Literary History 23, 1992, 419.

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temporary exceeds the categorical framework of phenomenology itself, as a philosophical movement. We can see this in, for example, the contrast between the ‘heroism’ of the Baudelairean quest to ‘conquer’ modernity – what Laforgue called Baudelaire’s ‘Americanism’31 – and the constitutively ‘unconquerable’, because radically distributed, character of the contemporary. The contemporary is not to be conquered, even paradoxically via self-dissolution (Baudelaire’s solution); it is to be engaged.

31 Walter Benjamin, Central Park, in: idem, Selected Writings, vol. 4: 1938–1940, ed. by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge/MA, 2003), 161.

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2. Ruptures in Time: Revolutions and Wars

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Sanja Perovic

Year 1 and Year 61 of the French Revolution: The Revolutionary Calendar and Auguste Comte

It has been said that, of all the human science, history may be the least selfreflective about its relation to time.1 Perhaps this is because history is never just about ‘narrative’, but also essentially involves ‘measure’. When historians ask such questions as, how old something is or how long it took, they presuppose that time is a uniform continuum to be measured. When they ask such questions as why did this event occur now, or how and why was a given historical decision taken, they focus on the time of the event, the way in which an event or sequence of events is experienced, shared and understood. This raises the question: What is the relationship between time’s measure, which is invariable, and the historical event, the perception of which is subject to change? Measure, at least in the way it has been understood over the last two centuries, relies on repeatable units that exist independently of humankind and have no inherent social significance.2 More generally, all forms of chronometry, including the numerous calendars and chronologies that have been or still are in use around the world are derived from astronomical phenomena that are independent of man.3 Whereas measure presupposes the position of an external observer, someone who can see the whole of which the measure is a part, event-time presupposes the ‘internal’ or ‘subjective’ position of an actor or agent, someone who must act or make a decision. In contradistinction to chronos, the time of measure, events refer to qualitative 1 As Lynn Hunt notes, there is a much more extensive literature on time in anthropology and sociology than in historical science proper, which has only recently seen an upsurge of interest in the subject. Lynn Hunt, Measuring Time, Making History (Budapest, 2008), 16–18. See also Nancy D. Munn, The Cultural Anthropology of Time: A Critical Essay, Annual Review of Anthropology XXI, 1992, 93–123. 2 Until recently the meter was defined as 1/40,000th of the length of the earth’s meridian; the gram was originally decreed to be the weight of a cubic centimeter of water at zero centigrade. See Witold Kula, Measures and Man (Princeton, 1986), 4. 3 See Reinhart Koselleck, Time and History, in: idem, The Practice of Conceptual History (Stanford, 2002), 105–107.

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experiences of time, what the ancient Greeks called kairos, the right time, the time of opportunity, when an action or decision needs to be made.4 Understandably, historians have been much more interested in the latter than in the former. Nevertheless, the modern understanding of measure – as abstract, invariable, universal – has had an enormous impact on the kinds of historical narrative that are possible, as well as on the development of history more generally as a ‘scientific’ field. To take just one familiar example, the nineteenth-century belief in history as progress, with its emphasis on the future dimension of time, would be unthinkable without a conception of time as linear, chronological and flowing from future to past. Yet, this conception presupposes the existence of the universal chronological timeline that was slowly and unevenly instituted over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.5 Similarly, the ‘presentist’ regime, which, according to François Hartog, characterises today’s world, presupposes a synchronised global time and a universal standard measure in which simultaneity has come to trump succession.6 This suggests, at the very minimum, that rather than thinking of time measure in purely technological terms (as clock-time, railroad time, personal timetables, the rural calendar and so forth), we also need to think of it in historical or even qualitative terms: How do different systems of organising time allow us to experience the invariable within the variable in different ways? This is not just a question for history, but also, and especially, for our understanding of modernity. Does modernity primarily reflect a change in our quantitative experiences of time, as implied by such terms as acceleration, increasing synchronisation and standardisation? Or does it reflect the qualitative experience of time as the event, an experience captured by the demand for constant innovation and the iteration of the new? The former emphasises the modern experience of time as rational, uniform, abstract and global, part of an ongoing process of modernisation.7 The latter focuses on 4 For this distinction, see John E. Smith, Time, Times and the ‘Right Time’: Chronos and Kairos, The Monist LIII, 1969, 1, 1–13. 5 The invention of the modern timeline can be traced to the French Calvinist Joseph Justus Scaligar who first separated chronology from religion. See Arno Borst, The Ordering of Time (Chicago, 1994), 103–106; Daniel Rosenberg, Joseph Priestley and the Graphic Invention of Modern Time, Eighteenth Century Culture XXXVI, 2007, 55–103; Daniel Rosenberg/Anthony Grafton, The Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline (New York, 2010). 6 Hartog defines ‘presentism’ as ‘ce progressif envahissement de l’horizon par un présent de plus en plus gonflé, hypertrophié … où les innovations technologiques et la recherche de profits de plus en plus rapides frappent d’obsolescence les choses et les hommes de plus en plus vite’. François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité (Paris, 2003), 125. 7 According to Hartmunt Rosa, this is a process by which Western society has become increasingly ruled ‘by the silent normative force of temporal norms, which come in the

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the impact of transformative events, most notably the great event of the French Revolution, which, as Peter Fritzsche describes it, ‘restructured previously authoritative structures of temporality by redrawing the horizon of historical possibility’.8 The issue of what constitutes modern time becomes further complicated if we consider that our current globalised Gregorian calendar was never the only candidate for the modern time schema. As the famous example of the French Republican calendar shows, there were competing ways of representing and ‘measuring’ modern time. An equally prominent, if less well-studied, example is that of Auguste Comte, who in 1849 published a ‘Positivist Calendar of Humanity’, which was dated Year 61 of the French Revolution. The existence of these alternative calendars points to a seeming contradiction. Whenever we talk about modernity or the ‘modern time-schema’, we rely on an old-style calendar that originated almost 2000 years ago and whose timeline dates from the Middle Ages; meanwhile, every so-called ‘modern’ attempt to institute a ‘modern calendar’ has failed. The existence of these calendars thus raises the following questions: If the period of the French Revolution is, as is so often claimed, a transformative event that changed the relations between past, present and future, why did the self-consciously ‘modern’ calendars that expressed this transformation not survive the transition to ‘modernity’? Second, and more generally, how do we account for these competing frameworks in which modernity was first expressed? Third and finally, how do we measure a transformative event? Do we use measures of time that reflect current shared practices, with their longstanding religious and political assumptions – or do we analyse the event according to periodisations that derive from, and in a sense are internal to, the event itself? This paper proposes to answer these questions by focusing on how the Republican and Positivist calendars interpreted the French Revolution as a transformative event that not only caused a rupture with the past, but also broke with the very periodicity of historical time as it had been understood up to this point. Both calendars shared the conviction that time starts again with the French Revolution, and both dated their timeline from this event. And in both cases, the French Revolution is represented not just as the start of form of deadlines, schedules and temporal limits’. Hartmunt Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality (Malmö, 2010), 41. A classical description of modernity as homogenisation and synchronisation can be found in Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 2006 [1983]), 22–25. For evidence of a gradual process of change in an urbanising and commercialising society, see Paul Glennie/Nigel Thrift, Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales, 1300–1800 (Oxford, 2009). 8 Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Harvard, 2004), 18.

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a new timeline but also as belonging to the cyclical repetitions of an astronomical and natural time. Despite the different political positions represented by the two calendars, nature and history remain dual referents because the goal of both calendars was to establish the French Revolution as a yardstick or norm against which all future as well as past history could be judged. The similarities do not end here. Both calendars interpreted the French Revolution as a transformative event with the capacity to alter both quantitative and qualitative experiences of time, and both presented themselves self-consciously as an imitation, and also contradiction, of Catholicism. Finally, both calendars aimed to transform the ‘subjective’ experience of the French Revolution as a transformative event into an ‘objective’ fact. This is especially obvious in the case of the French Republican calendar, which sought to translate the emotional experience of flying high and living in a heroic new time into a change in the very measure of time. (As we recall, the Republican calendar instituted not just a new chronology starting from Year One, but also ten-day weeks and ten-hour days). But it is also evident in Auguste Comte’s calendar, which attempted to reconcile the ‘objective’ and the ‘subjective’ sides of history. Comte did so by representing two reference points for history: the empirical, contingent succession of historical developments as they actually happened and the logical progression that reordered these events synchronically according to their ‘inner’ development. As was the case with its revolutionary predecessor, this irreversible progress was not conceived of as taking place in a solely linear time. On the contrary, Comte relied on the structure of a calendar to express the idea that every stage of history recapitulated a prior stage, and that therefore no meaning was ever lost. In what follows, I propose to use these two calendars to recover some of the imagined ‘futures’ of modernity that never materialised – or at least not in the way we understand them today. I also want to use these calendars to reveal some of the unacknowledged assumptions that result when we take the ubiquity of the modern time-schema for granted. One such unacknowledged assumption concerns the link between historicism – the assumption that each historical past is to be judged according to its own values and traditions – and contemporary ‘presentism’. By relying on chronological time as its main framework of analysis, historicism typically has treated the past as an already established reality and not as a potential field of action in which each event or date is understood to have been a present at some point in the past and hence as open to other possible futures.9 In contrast to what might 9 On this difference between tensed and historical time, see Paul Ricoeur, who takes it from Emile Benveniste. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3 (Chicago, 1984–1988), 106–108.

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otherwise appear to be a growing interest in and obsession with ‘reliving the past’ on the part of the general public, most academic histories continue to perpetuate a model of history in which the past only has historical value. As I suggest, this model of ‘professional history’ may be also partly responsible for the loss of relevance of the past. For so long as chronological time remains the sole temporal framework, historical discourse provides us with little or no means for analysing structures or patterns that repeat, or for connecting the future to the past. In contrast, and despite their eventual failure, these two calendars allow us to recapture a model of history in which ‘past’ and ‘future’, ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’, ‘internal’ and ‘external’ perspectives are equally valid and necessary reference points for understanding how it came about that the event of the French Revolution was imagined to necessitate a change in time’s measure.

1. Enlightenment Measures and Calendar Time To understand the origins of the French Republican calendar, we must return to the eighteenth century, a period in which a distinctive ‘modern’ understanding of the relationship between time’s measure and historical progress first emerged. It is useful to remember in this regard the pervasive instability that characterised all levels of temporal organisation throughout the eighteenth century. On the one hand, there was no single unified civil calendar in Europe; the Julian and Gregorian calendars were in simultaneous use, with Protestant countries only slowly accepting ‘papal reform’.10 On the other hand, the everyday structures of time were represented in increasingly diverse and polemical ways, as the burgeoning almanac culture of the eighteenth century attests.11 If the revolutionary demand for a new calendar for a new time remains to this day somewhat inaccessible to us, it may well be because it originated in two, not always complementary understandings of ‘new time’. First, ‘new time’ was understood as ‘une ère nouvelle’, the fixed point from which a new chronology would commence, analogous to the originary or ‘first’ time of a new civilisation (ère chrétienne, ère musulmane).12 Second, ‘new time’ in the more colloquial sense of une nouvelle des10 See Robert Poole, Give Us Our Eleven Days! Calendar Reform in Eighteenth-Century England, Past and Present CXLIX, 1995, 95–139, especially 106–109. 11 For a general bibliography, see John Grand-Carteret, Les Almanachs Français: Bibliographie, iconographie des almanacs, calendriers, chansonniers, états, étrennes, publiés à Paris (1600–1895) (Paris, 1896). 12 The modern sense of ère as the beginning of a new chronology dates from 1678–1680. See Alain Rey (ed.), Le Robert: Dictionnaire historique de la langue française (Paris, 1998).

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ignated whatever was newest and most up to date.13 Both of these notions stemmed from an eighteenth-century understanding of calendar time. In erudite circles the calendar was hailed as the most archaic historical artefact, capable of going ‘beyond’ history to the original time of human civilisations, while for the wider reading public, the popular almanac became a privileged vehicle not just to communicate whatever was ‘new’ but also to challenge the political and cultural construction of time. At first glance, the ‘erudite’ understanding of une ère nouvelle is transparently about measure. But upon closer examination we see that it contains two different understandings of time’s measure, what we might call a heuristic aspect (that is to say, an appeal to time’s measure as a way to gain knowledge about the past) and its utopian actualisation (when knowledge gained about the past takes the form of a call to action for the future). In its heuristic sense, as Reinhart Koselleck has noted, the discovery of the new world and with it new calendars, some with timelines longer than biblical chronology would allow, had prompted a more general reflection on the origin of the timeline.14 Protestant thinkers such as Antoine Court de Gébelin hailed the calendar as a means of access to the original measures of human civilisation, which he associated with the emergence of the first states in the ancient Near East.15 By showing how religious and political authorities appropriated natural measures of time in order to create a centralised state, Court de Gébelin and his followers hoped to uncover a deeper, synchronic structure of history common to all literate and calendarbased civilisations.16 If the desire to go ‘beyond’ the historical record to uncover the ‘mythological’ origins of human civilisation encouraged a renewed appreciation of astronomical time, utopian thinkers undertook the reverse trajectory, using the abstract rationality associated with mathematical measure to project a new world order based on la juste mesure. In addition to the decimal units of the new Republican calendar, we see this affection for decimal divisions in Morelly’s Code de la Nature, in which he imagined an egalitarian society in 13 In its earliest formulation, une nouvelle designated a public rumour (1549). In the eighteenth century, it signified general information or ‘news’ communicated to the public via diverse media, including les nouvelles à la main (1751) and les journaux (1759). See Rey, Le Robert: Dictionnaire historique, vol. 2, 2402. 14 See Koselleck, Time and History, 106. 15 Antoine Court de Gébelin, Histoire du monde primitif, analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne (Paris, 1773–83), Vol. IV: Monde primitif considéré dans l’histoire du calendrier ou almanach, ij. For a comprehensive study of Court de Gébelin’s life and works, see Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre, Un supplément à ‘L’Encyclopédie’: Le ‘Monde Primitif ’ d’Antoine Court de Gébelin, (Paris, 1999). 16 Court de Gébelin, Histoire du Monde Primitif, Vol. IV, vij.

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which all people and goods would be divided by multiples of ten,17 and in Condorcet’s ‘ten stages’ of human progress. In all three examples, a decimalbased metric system did not simply connote ‘measure’; it also expressed a historical narrative of progress from feudalism to equality. As Witold Kula has shown, under feudalism, the measures used in given towns or precincts depended upon and reflected human will. Just as ‘different laws’ applied to ‘different people’, so too ‘different measures’ applied for ‘different people’.18 The metric system, in contrast, presupposed that all people were answerable to one law, an idea expressed in the popular demand in the cahiers de doléances for ‘one law, one king, one measure’.19 In this respect, the universalisation of measure, as imagined by Turgot, Condorcet or Laplace, was supposed to lead not just to increased equality, but also to increased freedom from the historical past, that is to say, freedom from the authority and will of others. As even this very brief overview makes clear, eighteenth-century narratives of progress presupposed a certain political understanding of time’s measure. Freedom and equality remained mutually reinforcing terms so long as they were understood to be the outcome of an astronomical revolution that was moral and mathematical at once.20 Implicit in these understandings of new time as both the beginning of a new history and a return to natural measures is a further distinction: between ‘modernity’, objectively understood as increased control over ever more precise determinations of natural units of time, and ‘modernity’, subjectively understood as the expression of increased freedom from determination or as ‘self-determination’. This is evident not just in the eighteenthcentury mania for diaries and their offshoot, the novel, which often took an epistolary form; it is also evident in the development of the personal agenda, which, as the Encyclopédie notes, constituted a major new change in how calendars were used and conceived.21 Finally, the wide variety and politicisation of almanacs, especially during the first few years of the Revol17 Etienne-Gabriel Morelly, Code de la nature, in: idem, Oeuvres philosophiques (Paris, 2004), 353. 18 Kula, Measures and Man, 122. 19 For Kula, both equality before the law and the ability to handle commodities as objects were essential preconditions for the eventual institution of the metric system, see ibid., 87. 20 See Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, 2008 [1990]). 21 ‘La plupart de nos almanachs d’aujourd’hui contiennent non-seulement les jours & les fêtes de l’année, mais encore un très grand nombre d’autres choses. Ce sont des espèces d’agenda, où l’on peut s’instruire de détails souvent nécessaires dans la vie civile, & qu’on auroit peine quelquefois à trouver ailleurs.’ ‘Almanach’, in: Denis Diderot/Jean le Rond D’Alembert (eds), Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, (Chicago, University of Chicago ARTFL Encyclopédie Projet, Winter 2008 Edition), Robert Morrissey (ed.), http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/.

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ution, indicates to what extent social control over time had become a political issue.22 Both these understandings of modern time – as objective, natural, equal and as freedom from history – converged to produce the first prototype of the revolutionary calendar. This was the 1788 Almanach des honnêtes gens, written by the militant atheist and future revolutionary Sylvain Maréchal and promptly burnt by the censor. Maréchal’s almanac replaced the Christian saints with secular and non-Christian figures and erased the Christian chronology in favour of starting time over again in ‘Year One of Reason’. All the elements that would characterise the subsequent Republican calendar were already present in this almanac: the ten-day week, the ‘numerical’ months, the secular festivals and the belief that rupture would release a new source of time that would regenerate all of mankind. Maréchal’s almanac was not the first to replace the saints with exemplary figures taken from secular life.23 But it was certainly the first to subject sacred and profane orders to the same measure of time in a way that destroyed the very concept of a hierarchy between sacred and profane, noble and common, Christian and infidel, saint and sinner. Equal units of time meant time was equal for everyone. In the censor’s outrage we can still sense shock at the idea that different religions and social classes could be given equal weight by belonging to the same time; that Jesus Christ could inhabit the same temporal space as you or me or Mahomet.24 A modern understanding of time as a uniform, homogeneous space for the personal classification and reclassification of values was thus used to transpose a still extant religious and social hierarchy into a purifying break between past and future. Maréchal’s almanac is notable for showing how an absolute break in the categories of past, present and future was first im22 On revolutionary almanacs, see Henri Welschinger, Les Almanachs de la Révolution (Paris, 1884); Lise Andriès, Almanacs: Revolutionizing a Traditional Genre, in: Robert Darnton/Daniel Roche (eds.), Revolution in Print: The Press in France, 1775–1800 (Berkeley, 1989), 202–222. 23 Jean-Claude Bonnet traces the cult of grands hommes to 1758, when the traditional subjects of rhetorical competitions gave way to praise of grands hommes. Jean-Claude Bonnet, Naissance du Panthéon (Paris, 1998), 10, 36. Grand-Carteret cites the 1776 almanac Heures nouvelles à l’usage des Magistrats et des bons citoyens, which replaced the saints with illustrious men and included the still living Voltaire, as the earliest precursor to Maréchal’s almanac. Grand-Carteret, Les Almanachs Français, xlv. Other precursors include Vasselier’s 1785 L’Almanach nouveau de l’an passé that replaced the saints with great military figures and celebrities and Thomas Riboud’s 1785 Les Etrennes littéraires ou Almanach offert aux amis de l’humanité, which replaced the saints with prominent gens de lettres. 24 For further discussion see my Calendar in Revolutionary France: Perceptions of Time in Literature, Culture, Politics (Cambridge, 2012), 42–52.

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agined in the absence of the transformative event. Here the very postulate of absolute rupture – a Year One – is predicated on a suppression of all chronological time. Maréchal’s almanac makes explicit the extent to which all calendars are constructed against the inexorable forward march of historical time even as they essentially commemorate the memory of a specific historical group, whether early Christians in the case of the Christian calendar or, in this case, Maréchal’s ‘egalitarian society’ of honnêtes gens.25

2. Year One and the Republican Calendar By the time 1789 was rebaptised Year One of Liberty, a wholly different and unprecedented understanding of the ‘event’ had erupted. A ‘revolution’, which had first been imagined as a return to the cyclical and astronomical rotations of the planets, had now come to signify an irreversible and linear break with the past. In other words, the mathematical, homogeneous time of pure measure so dear to Enlightenment reformers now erupted with the time of kairos and along with it came a proliferation of events and dates. The fall of the Bastille, the abolition of feudal privileges on the night of 4 August 1789, the deposition of the king on 10 August 1792 – all of these dates now competed for the privilege of being ‘Year One of the Reign of Reason’. This raises the question not just of timelines, but also of the relative duration of the various revolutionary periods as they were perceived and interpreted by contemporaries. A new chronology that had been imagined as belonging to the homogeneous time of measure now revealed its phenomenological and political side. This included conflicting perceptions of the duration and meaning of revolutionary events and as well the entirely new problem of lag times. 14 July 1789 had been popularly hailed Year I of Liberty, but so too was 10 August 1792, which had been spontaneously renamed Year I of Equality by the popular press; the fête de la Fédération celebrated on 14 July 1790 signalled the final rebirth of the French nation, but so too did 22 September 1792, the day the National Convention opened, which was likened to a new dawn. Indeed, the idea of a new calendar for a new time first arose as a response to these conflicting timelines, which made orientation in time very much a challenge. However far from stabilising the meaning of revolutionary events, the protracted institution of the Republican calendar instead exacerbated the problem. As Mona Ozouf has noted, between the time when the committee on calendar reform was assembled and the time when its proposal was delivered, it was not just the king who had been executed: The Constitution had since been suspended, the revolutionary government proclaimed, 25 See Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago, 1992), 93.

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the revolutionary tribunal created and the Girondins purged.26 All these events cast doubt on the government’s claim to have instituted a new time. In an important sense, this gap between chronological and event time was there from the beginning. Year I of Equality ostensibly began with the overthrow of the king on 10 August 1792, but new time, in the form of a new calendar, did not officially begin until 22 September 1792 (the calendar itself was not officially instituted until the fall of 1793, which meant that Year I was backdated). If anything is symptomatic of the gap between the time of the event and the new political reality, it is these six weeks, which belong neither to the historical world that ended on 10 August nor to the natural world that began on 22 September when the Revolution allegedly ‘returned’ to the ‘natural’ measures of equality in time, space and justice.27 Although heralded by the revolutionaries themselves as the beginning of a new time, the events of these hot summer weeks were nonetheless condemned to remain outside the chronology established by the calendar. As Mona Ozouf noted, it was a paradoxical calendar from the outset. Was it an image of nature or a commemoration of revolutionary history? Would it serve as a truly universal standard of time, or did it represent a rupture with a specifically French past that would remain internal to French history? The purported reintegration of history with nature was further complicated by a series of shifting metaphors that were used to describe the transformative events of the Revolution: not just planetary revolutions but also the deluge or flood; not just solar regeneration but also volcanic fire; not just the uniformity and regularity of ‘metrical’ time but also the earthquake enabled time to begin anew. If we compare the rhetoric of new time that greeted the insurrection of 10 August with the rhetoric of new time that accompanied the institution of the Republican calendar, the difference is startling. As early as 4 August, militant sections such as the Mauconseil were exerting pressure on Louis XVI to capitulate through a rhetoric of temporal dilation. As the section declared to the Assembly: ‘War has been declared between Louis XVI and France. Each day, each hour is becoming centuries, becoming eternity. One instant lost and France can be lost.’28 Other sections and clubs insisted that France could only be saved on condition of a complete break between past and future.29 After the invasion of the Tuileries and 26 Mona Ozouf, Republican calendar, in: François Furet/Mona Ozouf (eds.), Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Cambridge/MA, 1989), 540. 27 For a more detailed account, see my Chapter Three in: The Calendar in Revolutionary France: Perceptions of Time in Literature, Culture, Politics (Cambridge, 2012). 28 ‘La guerre est declarée entre Louis XVI et la France; chaque jour, chaque heure, chaque minute deviennent des siècles, deviennent l’éternité; un instant perdu, la France peut être perdue.’ Archives parlementaires XLVII, 474. Henceforth abbreviated AP. 29 For example, the section de Rouen, AP XLVIII, 365–366.

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after the deputies had caved in to this public pressure, they too resorted to this same rhetoric of temporal dilation and catastrophe. The deputy Lamourette lauded the insurrection as a sign of the imminent and universal liberation of all nations, optimistically describing it as a great catastrophe, which ‘should offer us a vision of a free world and a universe without thrones’.30 The Prussian baron and atheist, Anacharsis Clootz, called it a ‘saintly insurrection’, one that would reestablish ‘the level between men as the eruptions of the ocean have reestablished the level of the seas’.31 As he put it on 11 September, in the strongest redefinition of revolution as a catastrophic rupture: ‘There is only one ocean; there will be only one nation.’32 Clootz’s utopia is revealing for the distance it assumed from the actual experience of political events as they unfolded. Everything that marked 10 August as a qualitatively distinct experience of time – the unspoken fear of the deputies before the crowds, the humiliation and overthrow of the king, the massacre in the Tuileries of the Swiss guards – was suppressed in favour of a natural image of time. There is no acknowledgement of the insurrection as a contingent historical event, that is, an event capable of unleashing forces or meanings that could not be so easily subsumed under the cyclical time of nature. Instead, Clootz treats the insurrection as if it were just the type of catastrophic rupture that would allow the earth’s surface to be reorganised along the lines of the new French départements. He prophesied: ‘A new era begins, France is free, the departmental grid will level out the earth.’33 One could conjecture that Clootz’s proclamations were tolerated by deputies and insurgents alike because they presented the events of 10 August as the end of revolutionary history; as if the overthrow of the king had somehow ensured the reintegration of the Revolution into the homogeneous, smoothed space typical of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century universal history, in which time was marked not by historical events, but by inventions and discoveries. When the Republican calendar was instituted a year later, this modern, scientific understanding of time was privileged over any reference to historical violence. In the words of Gilbert Romme, the calendar’s chief architect, the calendar marked the epoch when the history of the French Revolution converged with nature itself. The French people became free and equal the

30 … doit nous offrir le spectacle d’un monde libre et d’un univers sans trône, AP XLVIII, 689. 31 … le niveau entre les hommes comme les éruptions de l’océan ont rétabli le niveau des mers. These remarks, as well as the citations that follow, unless otherwise indicated, are all cited from Clootz’ speech of 9 September 1792, AP XLIX, 498–500. 32 Il n’y a qu’un océan: il n’y aura qu’une nation. 33 … une nouvelle ère commence, la France est libre, le damier départemental va niveler la terre.

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very moment when day and night were of equal duration. Although this image was very much a rhetorical conceit, it nonetheless reflected a deeper ambition. By stripping the Gregorian calendar of its religious symbolism, the Republican calendar would return to the astronomical layer of the Julian calendar, the first calendar to institute a secular time in the Mediterranean world.34 In turn, this secular, natural measure would give the new Republic a fresh grounding, not in the contingent time of history and violence, but in the deterministic laws of nature, which worked the same way in the past as they would in the future. Seen from the ‘internal’ perspective of the Revolution’s own actors and masterminds, the appropriate ‘duration’ for judging and evaluating the transformative character of the Revolution would not be the short-term chronology of rapidly changing events and meanings, but the longue durée of planetary revolutions, in which any deviation from the Revolution’s ultimate goal could be interpreted as an aberration. Duration, in this sense, was still understood in astronomical terms as the amount of time it takes for a planetary rotation to return to equilibrium.35 Harmony and the fundamental lack of accumulation of historical meaning remained guiding principles for understanding both history and nature. It is interesting in this respect that, although there was no popular mandate for the new calendar, Romme presented it as a logical extension of the reform of weights and measures that had already taken place.36 In Romme’s mind, what linked the two reforms was a concern with rationalising society.37 The same metric system that derived its standard from the measure of the earth would also serve as the new measure of time in which history would instantiate the progress of reason. Even history and the arts, the two spheres ‘for which time is a necessary instrument’, would henceforth proceed at an even tempo, according to these same natural measures.38 If, therefore, the Republican calendar fulfilled the promise of enlightenment, it was at the expense of history, or at the very least of the notion of progress as something requiring a perpetual and ongoing awareness of innovation, of historical difference, of every present differing from the past. 34 See Denis Feeney, Caesar’s Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History (Berkeley, 2007), 193–199. 35 Jean-François Féraud’s Dictionnaire critique de la langue française (1787–1788) notes that aberration had only recently acquired its figurative sense of an ‘error’. 36 This was the opposite of the reform of weights and measures that was vigorously demanded in the cahiers de doléance. 37 Bronislaw Baczko connects these two reforms with a third one: the universalisation and rationalisation of language that was to eliminate all linguistic differences. Bronislaw Baczko, Les lumières de l’utopie (Paris, 1978), 75. 38 Gilbert Romme, Rapport sur l’ère de la République fait à la Convention nationale dans la séance du 20 septembre de l’an II de la République, AP LV, 185–195.

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But while Romme’s proposal retained some datable events, in the final version of the calendar proposed by Fabre d’Eglantine, history dropped out completely in the name of natural time. The months were now famously named after the seasons – Brumaire, Thermidor, Germinal – and the days were dedicated to fruits, vegetables and farming utensils. Fabre d’Eglantine’s insight was to realise that a total rupture with the past required a total reorganisation of time, based on a complete forgetting of that past. The Revolution’s premise of a break or rupture in time could only be made visible if one imagined totality replaced another. What, then, can the Republican calendar tell us about the transformative event of the French Revolution that our contemporary calendar and chronological approach to history cannot? For one, it underscores a fundamental non-synchronicity in the revolutionary conception of history as a rupture with the past and the beginning of a new time. In a profound sense, a calendar, insofar as it privileges continuity, is against the event. It posits regularity, coordination and synchronicity against the irruption of the new. As Koselleck has observed, the contradiction of the revolutionary calendar lay in its attempt to mark the historical consciousness of living in a new time according to natural measures, which can only ever be cyclical.39 If, therefore, the calendar was resurrected by every single revolutionary administration for almost thirteen years, it was in order to aggressively resist that ‘other’ experience of revolutionary history – the speed, congestion and convulsion of events with their rapid accumulation of diverging interpretations. At the same time, and despite the remarkable concentration of state energy invested on its behalf, the Republican calendar eventually failed to institute the Revolution’s premise of a rupture with chronological time. It failed in part because it was compulsively modern: declaring itself to be against tradition and demanding nothing less than the fulfilment of global enlightenment and the totalisation of its own historical experience. Yet it must also be said that, although the Republican calendar failed to institute the Revolution’s premise of a rupture with the past, it nonetheless succeeded – and remarkably quickly, in establishing the French Revolution as a ‘watershed’ moment, forever separating what François Furet has called the ‘contemporary past’ from the ancien régime.40 A chronological timeline that began as an attempt to institute a new measure thus became instead an essential part of a historical narrative about modernity. It is moreover this narrative of ‘revolutionary modernity’ that enabled the Republican calendar to continue to be resurrected, whether by Auguste Comte, under the Com39 Reinhart Koselleck, Remarks on the Revolutionary Calendar and Neue Zeit, in: idem, The Practice of Conceptual History. 40 François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1997 [1981]).

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mune, in the various revolutionary and literary circles of the late nineteenth century, or even under the Soviets, who briefly considered reforming their own calendar. Let us now turn to the positivist calendar of Auguste Comte, to consider in more detail how this narrative of modernity continued to borrow from, and rely upon, the paradoxical convergence of linear and cyclical time made possible by the calendar’s structure.

3. Auguste Comte and Year 61 of the Great Revolution Sixty years later, Auguste Comte returned to the concept of a ‘revolutionary calendar’ to register the events of 1848. For Comte, the French Revolution was no longer a point in time; it had become a period of time with a beginning but no end, a fifty-nine-year-long turning point, that he called the crise moderne. The term ‘crisis’, drawn from the lexicon of medicine, referred both to the physical symptoms of an illness and to a ‘turning point’, a moment of ‘judgement’ in which the patient either gets better or worse. Through this combination of a pathological with a prognostic discourse, the French Revolution was extended both backwards and forwards in time. It was a symptom now of a much longer conflict between the forces of social order and progress that, according to Comte, first arose in the Middle Ages when the scientific worldview emerged alongside an increasingly centralised religious and theological authority. But it was also a sign of what should have happened in 1789, namely, the end of kingship and religion and the realignment of historical progress with social order and stability. Once again the transformative event of the French Revolution was represented by referencing the dual understanding of ‘modern time’ as continuity and rupture. With regards to continuity, in analysing the French Revolution as merely one element in a far longer narrative of social evolution, progress and modernisation, Comte differed little from other thinkers in the liberal tradition, such as Burke or Tocqueville. Indeed, Comte even borrowed his law of historical development from Turgot and Condorcet, positing that all societies passed through three stages of development, from the theological and military, to the metaphysical and legal and, finally, to the scientific and industrial. In interpreting the Revolution as a sign of future instability, however, Comte also revealed what was missing in a purely evolutionary understanding of modernity, namely, a solution to the problem of authority in a post-theological, industrial age.41 41 See Andrew Wernick, Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity (Cambridge, 2001).

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For Comte, the Revolution posed a twofold problem. First, if the king was alive (whether Louis XVI or Louis-Philippe), he had to be eliminated in order for progress to continue. But – and this was the second problem – in eliminating the past, the revolutionaries also eliminated tradition and history, that is to say, everything that had guaranteed order and social stability in the first place. In eliminating the past, scientific and political revolutions also eliminated meaning, which, for Comte, in the final instance, was emotional rather than purely rational. The essential dilemma, therefore, was how to combine objective criteria for understanding – such as those found in the sciences – with relativism: the realisation that every field of human endeavour and indeed every science was a historical phenomenon and the outcome of a historical process. Comte, thus, was a ‘relativist’ who embraced history but not historicism; he was also a scientist who did not believe that any one science could claim a total knowledge of the world. In contrast to the revolutionary administration, which tended to believe that mathematical ‘measure’ could serve as an umbrella theory of both science and society, Comte insisted on a ‘differential, historical theory’ of both historical progress and our understanding of reality, as refracted through the various sciences.42 The more complex the organism or organisation studied, the less general any claims made on its behalf could be.43 Thus biology, the most complex science because it dealt with the whole of the living organism, was also the ‘most dependent on the other sciences’.44 To understand the process of historical development, therefore, it was necessary to use both the diachronic and synchronic axes of time. The sciences, according to Comte, developed diachronically from the simplest sciences (mechanics and mathematics) to the most complex (chemistry and biology). But they also developed synchronically, according to their own internal timeline. In other words, the internal time through which a system or science developed was just as important as the external time that positioned the different systems relative to each other. What held for science was also true for society: All societies developed historically (this was the relativist hypothesis), but what determined the direction of their development was the speed at which social strata evolved, as well as the nature of the political forces that aided or impeded this progress.45 Since speed involves perception 42 I borrow this term ‘historical and differential theory of science’ from Johan Heilbron, Auguste Comte and Modern Epistemology, Sociological Theory VIII, 1990, 2, 153–162. 43 Ibid., 156. 44 Ibid. 45 As Wernick explains: ‘It was inconceivable that industrial society could establish order and harmony on the basis of a restored Catholicism and an idle land-owning aristocracy. However, what was modifiable in the ‘fundamental evolution of humanity’ was its

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and the apprehension of relative distances, understanding historical change requires a synchronic as well as diachronic approach. Given that this differential history of science was aimed against the Enlightenment belief in a ‘universal’ measure, how did Comte conceive the relationship between time’s measure and politics? For Comte, the problem with the French Revolution was not just historical, but also, and more importantly, structural. What mattered for Comte was less the event of the French Revolution – which he considered to be largely contingent – than the way in which the Revolution posed an epistemological problem. This is clear in his reaction to the events of 1848, which he greeted by immediately founding the society for ‘Order and Progress’, which offered free classes for the general public on his positivist system. In his advertising leaflet, Comte stressed that true revolution could only be attained by a continuous, gradual regeneration in which the public would ‘freely’ sanction what was in any case a necessary historical development.46 Beneath the slightly preposterous idea that public education alone would hasten the ‘organic end-point of the great revolution’47, Comte made an important point: If the Revolution was an epistemological problem, it required a political and social solution that could not derive from history alone. To recalibrate spiritual and mental representations of the world which were ‘out of sync’ with the vector of historical development, what was needed was a total social reorganisation that would reestablish the proper relationship between past and future. Thus, even though Comte reproduced a familiar narrative of modernity as social evolution and modernisation, he nonetheless remained committed to finding a politic and social solution to historical contradiction (unlike Hegel, for instance, for whom the dialectic of history alone provided a solution to the problems of history). This commitment to a total solution led Comte to resurrect all the attempts to ‘end’ the Revolution that had failed the first time around. He revived the idea of a religion of reason, complete with living goddesses, temples of humanity and, last but not least, a new calendar. Like the proponents of the Republican calendar, Comte believed that la véritable ère moderne could not date from something as anachronistic as the birth of Christ,

‘simple speed’ and thus, more particularly, the speed with which the final stage of positivism itself could be accomplished.’ Wernick, Auguste Comte, 94. 46 ‘La réorganisation préalable des opinions et des mœurs constitue la seule base solide d’après laquelle puisse s’accomplir la régénération graduelle des institutions sociales, à mesure que l’esprit public aura librement adopté les principes fondamentaux du régime final vers lequel tend l’ensemble du passé chez l’élite de l’humanité.’ Cited by Emile Littré in Auguste Comte et la philosophie positive (Paris, 1863), 593. 47 … terminaison organique de la grande révolution. Ibid.

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which ‘blind habit still connects to an obsolete regime’.48 Like the revolutionaries, he kept the timeline to remind people that there was no going back, that the French Revolution had changed the meaning of both the past and the future: the past because it marked the end of a religious understanding of authority, the future because it made it impossible to synchronise progress with political order and stability.49 Finally, like them, he used the calendar not so much to date events as to subordinate revolutionary history to a longer span of time. ‘These immense eruptions,’ he noted, ‘do not have monthly dates.’50 It is significant that, in both the original revolutionary calendar and in Comte’s updated version, a new calendar was constructed in order to elongate duration, thereby ensuring that historical events had time ‘to catch up’ with reason. However, in contrast to the revolutionaries, Comte’s calendar privileged history over nature as the new source of stability. The influence of counterrevolutionary thinkers such as de Maistre is evident in Comte’s insistence that tradition was the main source of social cohesion, as well as in his analysis of the problem: that the Revolution reflected a long-standing conflict between religion and science. This commitment to history over nature is made clear in Comte’s first decision: to subordinate the division of the month to the seven-day week. As Eviatar Zerbuval has noted, the week is the only man-made unit of time in the calendar; it is a function of purely social significance with no natural correlate (unlike the length of the month, which is dependent on the moon, or the length of the year, which is dependent on the earth’s rotation around the sun).51 In choosing to retain the Judeo-Christian seven-day week, Comte opted for the one temporal structure most clearly associated with regularity, iterability and repetition; it was also, as Comte noted, a vestige of a theocratic past shared by a number of cultures. Since Comte, like any good scientist, also wished to construct a perpetual calendar, he was obliged to add a thirteenth month. This month was eventually called Solus, after the sun – an elegant metaphor for a solar calendar that aimed to ‘systematically subordinate the future to the past’.52 This statement encapsulates the whole of Comte’s philosophy, which acknowledged the historical nature and indeed relativity of all knowledge, but 48 … une aveugle routine rattache encore au régime déchu. Auguste Comte, Calendrier positiviste (Paris, 1849), 9. Henceforth abbreviated CP. 49 Year I marks the ‘ouverture d’une crise decisive qui, depuis soixante ans, entraîne l’Occident vers une complete regeneration.’ Ibid., 9. 50 … ces immense ébranlements ne comportent point de dates mensuelles. Ibid. 51 Eviatar Zerubavel, The Seven Day Cycle: The History and Meaning of the Week (Chicago, 1989), 4. 52 … subordiner systématiquement l’avenir au passé. Auguste Comte, Catéchisme Positiviste (Paris, 1966), 292. He saw this as completing Condorcet’s project.

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only insofar as it expressed the invariable in the variable, the return of a system to its equilibrium point.53 This desire for the conservation of historical meaning is reflected in his decision to map the linear history of humanity onto the cyclical structures of the calendar, in imitation of the Christian calendar. As Comte put it, this was the only way to ensure that ‘all history is necessarily condensed in the history of religion’.54 The first month is dedicated to theology and named after Moses (the first stage of human thinking and social organisation, which, being most simple, is also most general). The last stage of human progress is represented by the thirteenth month, dedicated to Bichat and modern biology (at once the most complex and least general of the sciences). In between we have the second, third and fourth months, dedicated to ancient Greece and named after Homer, Aristotle and Archimedes, respectively, followed by one month dedicated to Rome and named after Caesar. After the months dedicated to theology and the GrecoRoman past, we have two dedicated to Catholicism and feudalism, named after St. Paul and Charlemagne. The six remaining months of the year represent what Comte calls the évolution moderne. This includes a month dedicated to modern epic (named Dante), to modern industry (Guttenberg), modern theatre (Shakespeare), modern philosophy (Descartes) and modern politics (Frederick the Great), before ending with the month consecrated to modern science. In a manner recalling the saints’ calendars but also the enlightenment compendiums of grands hommes, each day of the week is dedicated to a different (male) exemplar who personifies the values of the historical stage in question. For example, the month dedicated to modern drama has Shakespeare as its titular saint, and each day of the week is named after a different playwright. While it is true that, to some extent, Comte’s calendar functions as a world-historical hall of fame – albeit, as Michel Serres notes, an unnaturally peaceful one55 – this is not what is most interesting about it. Rather, what is interesting is how Comte’s calendar privileges not chronological time or even causality, but the relative duration of the various stages of history: the nine centuries of the Middle Ages are given just two months while ‘modern’ history needs half the year to include all the relevant developments and therefore is as long as all the previous stages of history put together. The problem is evident: The multiplication of reference points – modern technology, modern drama, modern philosophy, modern science – and the fact 53 See Michel Serres, Paris 1800, in: idem (ed.), Eléments d’histoire des sciences (Paris, 1989), 347. 54 … toute l’histoire de l’humanité se condense nécessairement dans celle de la religion. Ibid., 264. 55 Serres, Paris 1800, 358.

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that they cannot be arranged in a meaningful hierarchical order means that modern history is experienced as a period of acceleration. In a revealing comment, Comte admits that the dispersal of modern history makes recapitulation almost impossible: ‘Above all, due to the profoundly dispersive effects of such a progression, it is not possible to include all the essential elements in the general outcome.’56 Linear progress is thus constructed out of increasing self-consciousness, the abstract awareness that the future will never resemble the past. However, reason also needs to be supplemented by an organic, ‘internalist’ emotional experience of the present as a cyclical continuity with the past. Cyclical time ensures that early stages of history are not lost or cast off in a remote past, but are recapitulated every year and in every subsequent stage. Fetishism is thus the first stage of humanity and also an essential part of modern life so long as history is considered from the standpoint of both cyclical and linear time. Indeed, it is only by reviving the tendances spontanées associated with fetishism that the accélération systématique away from the disorder introduced by the monotheistic religions and towards stability can finally be achieved.57 This is precisely Comte’s insight: that any politics of measure must also be a politics of religion. Otherwise, there is little or no way of ensuring that the baser human instincts – vanity, greed, ambition – are reoriented towards altruistic principles (‘altruism’, of course, being another term coined by Comte).58 Comte’s calendar thus aims to integrate an objective understanding of historical development into a subjective appreciation of time in which the calendar will serve as an immense poëme of evolution.59 Which raises the question: What kind of poem is it? Is it an epic account of human progress spearheaded by its titular heroes? Or is it meant as a lyrical appreciation of the living past as a past present, still open to other futures than the one that comes to pass? In an obvious way, the content of Comte’s calendar is clearly intended as an epic account of human history. But in choosing to depict this epic in the form of a tableau, a list, and not a narrative, Comte’s calendar also evokes a lyrical conception of time. It is in the character of lyric form to transcend the limits of the present moment. Of course every poem has narrative sequence, but lyric poetry sets up unity, repetition, structure against linear time. If we consider Comte’s calendar as a lyrical poem, we can see how it jettisons a certain idea of narrative history. The content of Comte’s calendar 56 Surtout due à la nature profondément dispersive d’une telle progression, où on ne peut point embrasser tous les éléments essentiels du résultat général. Comte, CP, 20. 57 Comte, CP, 277 58 See Wernick, Auguste Comte, 108–110. 59 Comte, CP, 12

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may be an epic account of human history, but it is also lyrical insofar as it inverts the original task of the Republican calendar, which attempted to construct an objective, universal time out of the lyrical experience of flying high and creating time anew. It is interesting in this regard that Comte imagined the last stage of human history as one in which all narrative is reduced to its lyrical form and communication is perfected by ‘the replacement of prose by verse’.60 In an important, if somewhat obscure sense, both the Republican and Positivist calendars can be considered lyrical expressions of history, especially given that lyric poetry, like natural law, presents itself as symmetrical to the axis of time, working the same way in the past as it will in the future. Auguste Comte’s solution to the problem of revolutionary rupture may be ridiculous, but his analysis made an important point. Modernity is neither exclusively a story about scientific progress nor is it just about political order or disorder. Rather it is the expression of a series of temporal disjunctions between past and future, regress and progress, on every level: cognitive, emotive, social and industrial. This means that, under the conditions of modernity, history can at best function as a bipolar system that needs the perspective of both progress and disorder to go forward. Michel Serres has likened Comte’s bipolar system to the nineteenth-century concept of a motor.61 To convert one type of energy into another, a system oscillates between two poles. Each of these poles may be a stable equilibrium point in its own right, but movement happens when energy moves between these two points. That is to say, when there is a perturbation or movement towards stasis again. By constructing history out of a series of binary oppositions (order/progress, religion/science, reaction/revolution), Comte acknowledged history to be a dynamic process moving towards a stable system. As Serres notes, Comte layered circles upon circles of history.62 History is intelligible as a helix rather than a simple line, because it moves forward in circles that oscillate between progress and order and back again.

4. Conclusion What, then, is the relationship between time’s measure and the historical event? And what can these two calendars tell us about this relationship that our own Gregorian calendar cannot? As the comparison of these two calendars has shown, the categories from which historical narration is constructed 60 … le remplacement de la prose par les vers. Comte, CP, 38. 61 See Michel Serres, Introduction, in: Auguste Comte, Philosophie première, vol. 1 (Paris, 1975), 1–19. 62 Ibid., 18.

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both are and are not historical. They are of course historical insofar as they refer to events and dates and ahistorical insofar as they also refer to measures that can be applied extrinsically to any particular series of events. In the case of the Republican calendar, the primary understanding of the relationship between nature and society was mathematical and mechanical, as reflected in the joint choice of a new timeline signalling a break with the past and the metric system. In the case of the Positivist calendar, the primary understanding of nature and society was bipolar and dynamic, as reflected in a theory of history that operated on the same principle as the nineteenth-century motor. In the former, a politics of history was expressed using a circle and a line; in the latter, a politics of history took the form of a helix. This suggests that historical narration is derivative of structural patterns that cannot be historicised even if they themselves have a historical life (the helix reflected nineteenth-century theories of science; the line and circle were paradigms of the eighteenth-century obsession with mathematisation). Historical narration cannot be decoupled from these principles of invariance, and yet, as Comte put it, history is the only reality we have for understanding both history and nature.63 Yet it is also the case that neither of these calendars was able to implement the ‘politics’ of measure that was their goal. When faced with the transformative event of the French Revolution, these same invariable structures proved unable to coordinate and organise the meaning of events. On the contrary, the very proliferation and accumulation of historical meaning destroyed the promise of synchronicity – that revolutionary events, and the experience of rupture with the historical past, could somehow be aligned with rational, scientific progress – held out by these two calendars. This suggests, at a very minimum, that the understanding of modernity as the logic of increasing rationalisation cannot be reduced or folded into the understanding of modernity as an ongoing rupture and break with the past. Despite the best attempts of historians to map a narrative of ruptures and breaks – whether political or epistemological – onto the chronological sequence of events, the time of chronos and the time of kairos cannot be aligned, because they do not operate in the same temporal frame. Or rather, if they appear to belong to the same temporal framework it is partly because the ubiquity of the modern time schema generates the sense of living in a continuous, homogeneous time in which any number of events and dates can vie for the status of ‘beginnings’. This paper began by suggesting that by superimposing our contemporary timeframe onto events of the past we risk remaining blind to some very different ways of framing modern history. I wish to conclude with the further 63 See Pierre Macherey, Comte: La philosophie et les sciences (Paris, 1989), 18.

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suggestion that the globalised Gregorian calendar raises a further problem: historical relativism. Once events and dates are placed side by side on a timeframe, we can pick any date and any event to construct a historical narrative.64 This gives rise to the dilemma that, whenever we talk about progress in science, technology or (increasingly) economics, we assume that history functions as a natural law. But whenever we talk about human agents and events, especially those of the past, we remain not just relativist but also revisionist. The former perspective, by insisting that natural law is symmetrical to the axis of time, has little or no room for human agency. The latter perspective, by insisting that all meaning is diachronic and historical, acknowledges human agency only to the extent that it also divests it of any responsibility for, and understanding of, the natural world. It is precisely because a ‘politics of measure’ is no longer obvious or even possible that history has been reduced to just a series of narratives – whether a self-aggrandising ‘mythic’ narrative or an ironic one. In this sense, the price to pay for historical self-observation may perhaps be unbearably high. For it reveals that, although history can still teach us about the past, the sheer accumulation – and dispersion – of historical meaning renders the past no longer capable of teaching us. This in the end is what makes these calendars so modern. They may have failed as real calendars, but they succeeded in showing how the familiar narrative of modernity as consisting of both rupture and progress presupposes a paradoxical convergence of linear and cyclical time. If in the end we cannot accept the solutions proposed by these two calendars, it is perhaps because modernity has come to signal for us the inability to coordinate natural and historical time. This is our legacy: We cannot recuperate a belief in a unity of meaning, but we still face some of the problems diagnosed by these two calendars.

64 For the modern time-schema and historical revisionism, see Hunt, Measuring Time, Making History, 24–30; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, 2000), 73–74.

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Claudia Verhoeven

Wormholes in Russian History: Events ‘Outside of Time’ (Featuring Malevich, Morozov, and Mayakovsky)

If modernity is an ethos, and anti-modernity too, then much of imperial Russian history might fairly be framed as a somewhat unfair tug of war between these two attitudes.1 Tracing this history’s trajectory would produce an ellipse, its long sides the empire’s frozen political winters, the short turns its vital thaws – the more violent for their very quickness, though at no point quick enough to escape the orbit. The pull of the past is strong in Russia. This gravity held Russia in its grip until the events of 1917, or the ‘event’ that was 1917. The year outran the old world with such force that it smashed not only Russia’s horizons of expectations, but also – because it produced the world’s first socialist revolution in the very last of likely places – all the prognostications of global revolutionary culture. This essay argues that a capacity for ‘wormhole thinking’ – simply put, thinking in such ways as to transcend or bypass ‘normal’ historical time – among the radical intelligentsia contributed to the creation of a temporal climate that made it possible for Russia to break out of its orbit and reconfigure the history of the world.

1. Russia: From the Last to the First Russia’s past was strong, but its history was long thought to be weak. More than a century after Peter the Great resolved to drag his land out of the ‘dark ages’ in order to ‘catch up’ with the West, Petr Chaadaev’s Philosophical Letters (1829) could still proclaim that Russia existed ‘outside of time’: The

1 On modernity as an ethos, see Michel Foucault, What Is Enlightenment?, in: Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York, 1984), esp. 39–49.

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empire had been left unaffected by the ‘history of the human spirit’.2 To Chaadaev, Russia’s backwardness was lamentable, producing a sort of unbearable lightness of being: ‘[Everything] flows, everything passes, leaving no trace outside or within us.’3 To the father of Russian socialism, Alexander Herzen, however, who in his despair over the catastrophe that was the failure of 1848 resurrected Chaadaev’s thesis but inverted its values, Russia’s light history was positively charged. It meant that, in a revolutionary situation, nothing would hold its people down: [Europeans] have grown pale with terror; nor is this surprising, for they have something to lose, something to be afraid of. But [Russians] are not in that position at all … Europe is sinking because it cannot rid itself of its cargo – that infinity of treasures accumulated in distant and perilous expeditions. In our case, all this is artificial ballast; out with it and overboard, and then full sail into the open sea!4

So, circa mid-nineteenth century, Russia’s developmental time lag vis-à-vis the West was recast as a distinct advantage: Less (traditional) baggage meant more (historical) speed. With nothing to lose, thus the radical intelligentsia henceforth held, Russia was simply going to skip modern nations’ standard developmental stages (above all: capitalism) and leap straight into the future (i.e., socialism). The last would be first, the laws of history be damned. This type of thinking also undergirded the birth of terrorism, a new form of ‘impatient’ political violence that, historians tend to agree, first emerged in Russia during the 1860s and 1870s.5 Essentially, when the political present started to seem unbearable but the time that remained until the revolution still too far off, the radical intelligentsia rejected the ‘laws of history’ and opted for terrorism as a way of breaking out of time and bringing near the dawn of a new age. They tried, in other words, to create temporal wormholes through violence. In conceiving such schemes, the intelligentsia could build on Herzen, who insisted that in history ‘everything is ex tempore’, and that wherever ‘sacred unrest’ finds its path blocked, ‘genius will pave a new one’.6 2 Petr Chaadaev, Filosoficheskie pis’ma (1829–1830): Pis’mo pervoe, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1991), 320–339, 321. 3 Ibid., 322. 4 Alexander Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, vol. 5 (Moscow, 1955), 13–14. This translation of the passage adopts the one found in Isaiah Berlin’s Russia and 1848, in Henry Hardy/Aileen Kelly (eds.), Russian Thinkers (New York, 1978), 3–4. 5 On the temporality of terrorism, see Claudia Verhoeven, Time of Terror, Terror of Time: On the Impatience of Russian Revolutionary Terrorism, Jahrbücher für die Geschichte Osteuropas, Special Issue: Terrorism in Imperial Russia: New Perspectives LVIII, 2010, 2, 254–273. 6 Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 6: http://az.lib.ru/g/gercen_a_i/text_0430.shtml [Accessed 13 Oct. 2011].

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2. Lenin: From Catastrophe to Event This is the tradition of thought on which Lenin could lean when he convinced his fellow Bolsheviks in 1917 that Russia’s peculiar historical circumstances would permit them to proceed directly from the bourgeois to the proletarian revolution. Slavoj Ëiˇzek, however, in his very interesting introduction to Revolution at the Gates, a collection of Lenin’s writings from 1917, does not mention this tradition when he stages the Bolsheviks’ unlikely victory as the result of Lenin’s solitary living in the time of an ‘event’ that to all eyes looked like lunacy: his vision of the two-in-one revolution as spelled out in State and Revolution (1917) and publicly promoted since the ‘April Theses’. Ëiˇzek provides a narrative for Lenin’s intervention in which resound the echoes of what was related above about Herzen: In the midst of despair about the catastrophe that was ‘the shock of 1914’ (that is, Europe’s succumbing to the ‘nationalist temptation’), Lenin’s Verzweiflung (despair) ‘cleared the ground for the Leninist event, for breaking the evolutionary historicism of the Second International’.7 A quick quote should reveal the affinity between the logic of this ‘event’ and the temporal order of the tradition described above. Ëiˇzek writes: Here we have two models, two incompatible logics, of the revolution: those who wait for the ripe teleological moment of the final crisis when revolution will explode ‘at its proper time’ according to the necessity of the historical evolution; and those who are aware that revolution has no ‘proper time’, those who perceive the revolutionary chance as something that emerges and has to be seized in the very detours of ‘normal’ historical development.8

But while it is true that Lenin’s vision of historical time looked like lunacy to most of his contemporaries (the historical record has preserved their reactions), spiritually Lenin was a lot less alone than Ëiˇzek supposes: His logic kept company with a century of intense intelligentsia efforts – theoretical and practical – to break out of ‘normal’ time. As three different examples chosen from the fields of art, science/fiction and poetry/love will indicate, these efforts could come in the most variegated forms, but all were born of despair over the present, and all were determined to break out beyond its horizon of expectations. These fields were chosen in accordance with Alain Badiou’s argument that ‘events’ can be ‘political, loving, artistic or scientific’, i.e., may occur in politics (Lenin), art (Malevich), science (Morozov) and love (Mayakovsky).9 The point of pre7 Slavoj Ëiˇzek, Introduction: Between the Two Revolutions, Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to October 1917 (London, New York, 2002), 6. 8 Ibid., 10. 9 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, Peter Hallward (trans.) (London, New York, 2001), 42.

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senting these examples is not to argue that they influenced Lenin, but rather to suggest that they are part and parcel of the hyperconscious historical thinking that characterised Lenin’s general environment and made the members of the radical intelligentsia – or, more broadly, Russia’s political and artistic avant-garde – among the most temporally sensitive creatures of the modern age. Ideally, moreover, the three examples – which should be read with the Leninist event and Herzen’s too – should also help us begin to answer the question, ‘What kind of an event makes for a new time?’ In other words, what has to happen for an event to register as endowed with the power to reconfigure the relations between past, present and future on a large scale?

3. Malevich’s ‘Black Square’: From Zero to Creation In 1916, not so very long after the birth of the ‘royal infant’ that was his abstract painting ‘Black Square’ (1913), the artist Kazimir Malevich (1879– 1935) narrated this birth in a statement that still stands as one of the cleanest, most complete breaks with the past ever achieved: I transformed myself in the zero of form and emerged from nothing to creation, that is, to Suprematism, to the new realism in painting – to non-objective creation. … Our world of art has become new, non-objective, pure. Everything has vanished. There remains a mass of material from which the new forms will be built.10

This ‘event’ was the crowning achievement of an anti-passéism that had in its thrall the whole of Russia’s political and artistic avant-garde at the turn of the twentieth century and reached an especially feverish pitch during the inter-revolutionary decade from 1907 to 1917. By this time, in other words, Russians consciously despaired as much as other Europeans over what Nietzsche had diagnosed as the age’s ‘debilitating historical fever’.11 The best-known expression of this general culture of anti-passéism – aside from the waves of terrorism that relentlessly targeted the old order – is probably the Russian Futurists’ 1912 ‘Slap in the Face of Public Taste’ (Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu), a pamphlet no less contemptuous of the past than its Italian predecessor, Filippo Marinetti’s 1909 ‘Futurist 10 Kazimir Malevich, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting, in: Patricia Railing (ed.), Malevich on Suprematism: Six Essays, 1915–1926, (Iowa City, IA, 1999), 39–40. Or see Malevich, Ot kubizma i futurizma k suprematizmu, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, vol. 1: Stat’i, manifesty, teoreticheskie sochineniia i drugie raboty, 1913–1929 (Moscow, 1995), 53. 11 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Utility and Liability of History for Life, in: Unfashionable Observations (Stanford, CA, 1995), 86.

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Manifesto’. ‘The past is too tight’, yelp the authors of ‘Slap in the Face’: ‘Throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc., overboard from the Ship of Modernity.’12 To properly depict modernity, these artists needed ‘totally new words and a new way of combining them’.13 Famously, this ultimately meant creating a whole new, transrational and transtemporal language known as zaum or ‘beyonsense’ (za, meaning ‘beyond’, and um, meaning ‘mind’) – though not before destroying the old: ‘We ceased to regard … grammatical rules. … We loosened up syntax. … [We rejected] normal orthography. … We abolished punctuation marks. … We shattered rhythms.’14 Initially, Malevich supported Futurism: ‘I accepted the dawn of Futurist art’s revolt. I opened myself and, smashing my skull, threw my reason of the past into its swift-moving fire.’15 Soon, though, he moved on, claiming Futurism had not gone far enough, or worse, had ‘sailed [back] to the shore’, i.e., back to representational art, however defamiliarised.16 Malevich insisted that everything – that is, content and form – should be abandoned; so long as the past would not be made to pass, it would not only burden the present, but also actively prevent the future from taking off: ‘[We Suprematists] welcome revolution, but by this demand that everything and all foundations of the old be destroyed, lest things and states may rise from the ashes.’17 We might say that what Malevich feared most was Baudelaire’s vision of modernity as a ‘disgusting phoenix’, the world caught up in an eternal recurrence of past forms.18 Better to blow it all up and get out for good: to guarantee the death of the past, Malevich wrote, the Suprematists buried the ashes of the old in the depths of the earth, ‘for we had rejected the earth in ourselves’, and emerged as ‘a new planet on the blue dome of the sunken sun … and declare all things to be groundless’.19 Now as light as Russian history once was, Suprematism sails off into open space, where – if they succeed 12 David Burliuk/Aleksei Kruchenykh/Vladimir Mayakovsky/Victor Khlebnikov, Slap in the Face of Public Taste, in: Anna Lawton/Herbert Eagle (trans. and eds.), Words in Revolution: Russian Futurist Manifestos 1912–1928, (Cornell, 1988), 51. Or see Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu, in: I. Vorob’ev (ed.), Russkii Avangard. Manifesty, deklaratsii, programmnyi stat’i, 1908–1917 (Saint Petersburg, 2008), 99. 13 Aleksei Kruchenykh, New Ways of the Word, in: Words in Revolution, 72. 14 Various authors, untitled, in: Words in Revolution, 53–54. Or see Manifest iz al’manakha ‘Sadok Sudei II’, Russkii Avangard, 101–102. 15 Kasemir Malevich, Reply, in: idem, Essays on Art, 1915–1928, vol. 1, Xenia Glowacki-Prus/Arnold McMillin (eds.), Troels Andersen (trans.) (Copenhagen, 1968), 52. Or see Malevich, Otvet, Sobranie sochinenii, 64. 16 idem, Reply, 52; Otvet, 64. 17 idem, Reply, 53–54; Otvet, 65. 18 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Seven Old Men’, The Flowers of Evil, Keith Waldrop (trans.) (Middletown/CT, 2006), 118. 19 Malevich, Reply, 53–54; Otvet, 65.

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in filling the future with a perfect image – ‘there will be no temporal difference’.20 Had he not preferred Beethoven’s Appassionata, or rather had he understood the new art, Lenin would have loved it. Does not his repetition of the revolution en route to communism find an echo in Suprematism’s double strike against traditional art and its subsequent leap beyond time?21

4. Morozov’s ‘Half-Fantasy’: From Death to Eternal Life Nikolai Morozov (1854–1946) was a socialist revolutionary, a member of the world’s first official terrorist organisation, the People’s Will (Narodnaia Volia), and that group’s principle theorist of violence. Most famously – though in fact Morozov is not very famous at all – he wrote ‘The Terrorist Struggle’ (Terroristicheskaia bor’ba, 1880), history’s first explicit argument for the development of a theory and praxis of terrorism. At the time of writing, Morozov held, ‘the terroristic revolution’ should target the tyranny of the Russian autocracy. But more generally it was a form of struggle that should stand the test of time, so that ‘every new appearance of tyranny in the future will be met by new groups of people [who] will destroy oppression by consecutive political assassination’.22 For readers given to despair, Morozov included in his pamphlet a hopeful note to the effect that even in Russia the terroristic struggle could succeed, because the necessary ingredients for rebellion ‘did not disappear from humanity during its darkest periods of history, when it seems that oppression would crush the last gleam of life and of the consciousness of the people. The gleam sparkled secretly in the heart … and broke free …’.23 For Morozov, writing around 1880, life naturally rebels against death and ultimately always survives. This was a conviction that would serve him well over the next twenty years, which Morozov spent, bu20 idem, The World as Non-Objectivity, in: The World as Non-Objectivity: Unpublished Writings, 1922–25, vol. 3, Troels Andersen (ed.), Xenia Glowacki-Prus/Edmund T. Little (trans.) (Copenhagen, 1976), 270; Or see Mir kak bespredmetnost’ (ideologiia arkhitektury), in: Kazimir Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, vol 4: Traktaty i lektiii pervoi poloviny 1920 – kh godov (Moscow, 2003), 200. 21 For Lenin’s famous words about Beethoven’s Appassionata, see V. I. Lenin, Lenin on Literature and Art (Rockville/MD, 2008), 226. For Lenin on his incomprehension of ‘expressionism, futurism, cubism, and other -isms’, see Clara Zetkin, Errinnerungen an Lenin (Berlin, 1957), 16–17. 22 Nikolai Morozov, The Terrorist Struggle, in: Walter Laqueur (ed.), Voices of Terror: Manifestos, Writings, and Manuals of Al Qaeda, Hamas and Other Terrorists from Around the World and Throughout the Ages (New York, 2004), 79. 23 Ibid., 80.

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ried alive essentially, in St. Petersburg’s dreaded Peter-Paul Fortress, ‘that secret grave, where the victims of political persecution and absolutism disappear without a trace’.24 Morozov was arrested in February 1881, shortly before the People’s Will assassinated Tsar Alexander II, and then held in various tsarist prisons until 1905, when he was amnestied. Probably not least because of the many years he spent in solitary confinement, Morozov was an absolute graphomaniac, producing endless writings on topics as varied as time travel, Pyrrhonism, poetry, St. John’s Apocalypse, chemistry, astronomy, physics and mathematics. One of these many writings is entitled On the Border of the Unknown (Na granitse nevedomogo), a book containing six ‘scientific semi-fantasies’, of which the first, ‘The Eras of Life (Semi-Fantasy)’ (Ery zhizni (polufantasiia)), narrates an event – a vision, a thought, or what the author calls ‘wonderful and strange knowledge’ that transformed Morozov from a dead man to an eternal being and, so he thought, could do the same for others. The story begins in the dead of winter with a prisoner dragging his aching body back and forth across a cell in the snow-covered Peter-Paul Fortress. He can barely move, but there is no life without movement, he says, and he must live because, as of last night, he knows something that should be made known to all. It is, as mentioned, ‘wonderful and strange knowledge’, possibly proximate to either ‘revelation’ or ‘madness’, he admits, and received in the middle of the night, when his mood was ‘agitated and exalted’.25 Those are his words, but if we examine the episode more closely, we might conclude that his was a knowledge born of despair, a creation from nothing – indeed, born of an ‘event’. The night he received his new knowledge, the narrator had contemplated the ‘mysteries of eternity and earthly life’. In the distant future, he imagined, humanity would reach its full development and attain total truth, but then, ultimately, once the sun burned out and the planet cooled down, humanity would disappear, killed off by below zero. He sees nothing save snow and ice, limitless white atop ‘an endless graveyard of millions of generations’.26 This vision undermines the prisoner’s original historical optimism, and he pivots on a question: Will that be the end of life on earth, or even in the universe? Sadness grips his body. What saves him is the return of the past: Suddenly there flashes across his mind a memory of his pre-terrorist time, of his scientific studies, and, specifically, an experiment he performed. This is what he remembered: Carbon 24 Nikolai Morozov, Na granitse nevedomogo: Nauchnyia polufantasii (Moscow, 1910), 8. 25 Ibid., 11. 26 Ibid., 12.

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dioxide, when contained in a closed environment and exposed to pressure and cold, turns into a liquid. This memory is enough to convince him that the global ice age will inevitably produce new, carbon-based oceans, whence will rise up particles towards the sky, then down again in the form of rain, or across it in the shape of lightning or a rainbow. Soon enough, ‘mysterious chemical processes’ will go to work in the new world, just as they do in ours, and ultimately the narrator tells us about his vision where ‘everything in the new world was the same as it was in ours’.27 Conclusion: whereas the death of the future seems irreversible from the point of view of the present, in fact ‘[the] empire of ice and death will not be continuous’.28 As in ‘The Terroristic Struggle’, life naturally trumps death, and it is not difficult to see how we might map onto the seemingly endless expanse of white death envisioned by Morozov in ‘The Eras of Life’ both Russia’s actual winters and its political ones. In each case, Spring always comes. And it is not so very hard to wait for life: The death of a whole world or an entire era is analogous, so Morozov, to one night’s sleep for a single soul. The ‘echoes of nature’s eternal life’ resounding in his ears, the narrator’s imagination then flies into the past, then farther past, then back to the future again – and in each case the world is ‘just like ours’, its materials made from the recycled life forms of ages past. Today’s life forms will be the materials for tomorrow’s world, just as the life forms of yesterday are our materials today. The story climaxes when he realises that these materials include the metal bars of his cell, approaches them with the words, ‘Greetings, remnants of a past life!’ and then kisses and bows to them.29 With this act, no doubt, the past is redeemed, and he will be, too. Having grasped the chemical unity – indeed kinship – of all the universe’s forms of life throughout all of its ages, Morozov masters time: All time is now, and he everywhere at all times. It should come as no surprise that in some of the other stories in On the Border of the Unknown, Morozov happily flies throughout the ‘fourth dimension’. Nor that he survived his imprisonment – and soared: he took his first real airplane flight shortly after he was amnestied (which caused the authorities to worry that the old terrorist might want to bomb one of the imperial palaces of St. Petersburg from the air) and went on to produce many more ‘scientific’ tracts, eventually as a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

27 Ibid., 13. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 26.

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5. Mayakovsky’s Permanent Poetry: From Byt to Bytie30 A poet, a revolutionary and a man in love: Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893– 1930) was three things at once and all the time. ‘How long will this go on?’ an annoyed audience member at an early Futurist event yelled at him once. ‘[My] whole life!’ Mayakovsky shot back.31 And so it was. Anna Akhmatova did not like Mayakovsky all that much, but even so she wrote a poem, ‘Mayakovsky in 1913’, that captures why Osip Brik said about his best friend that he was ‘an event’ rather than a human being: Everything you touched, it seemed was never more, what it was before.32

How did Mayakovsky become what he was? And – though this is a question for down below – how did he stop being all that on 14 April 1930, when he shot himself in the heart? Or did he not stop? Mayakovsky became what he was by being born no less than at least four times: as a human animal (1893), as a revolutionary (1905), as a poet (1909) and as a man in love (1915). Dates connected to these births left their mark in his 1929 autobiography, I Myself (Ia sam), where there are at least three moments that are ‘the most’. First, because Mayakovsky began reading literature and writing poetry when he, age sixteen, was locked up in Moscow’s Butyrka prison for his revolutionary activities. The months he spent there were a ‘most important time for me’.33 Second, because his encounter with fellow art student David Burliuk produced the birth of Russian Futurism, the setting for this encounter is described as a ‘most memorable night’.34 And

30 Byt means ‘the everyday’, ‘daily life’, or even ‘the daily grind’. Bytie means ‘being’ or ‘existence’ and carries the sense of ‘spiritually meaningful existence’. For an informative discussion of the terms and their changing meaning in Russian and Soviet history, see Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge/MA, 2005), 53–66. 31 Vasily V. Kamenskii, Zhizn’ s Maiakovskim (Munich, 1934), 39. ‘Crю gihnь!’ could also be translated as ‘A lifetime!’, but ‘My whole life!’ (with the possessive ‘my’) reads and captures the atmosphere better. 32 Anna Akhmatova, Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh, vol. 1: Stikhotvoreniia 1904–1941 (Moscow, 1998), 465. The original reads: Crf, xfdo karalrя sы, kahaлorь Nf sakim, kak bыlo eo sfх poq. Lilya Brik writes that Osip told her this; in: Pristrastnye rasskazy (Nizhni Novgorod, 2003), 168. 33 Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v dvenadtsati tomakh, vol. 12 (Moscow, 1949), 18. 34 Ibid., 20.

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finally, July 1915 is a ‘most joyful date’, for it marked the moment he met Osip Brik and his wife Lilya, who would become the love of his life.35 Actually, when she finally ‘got’ him, Lilya had already met Mayakovsky three times. She had even heard his poetry – and told him she did not like it much. In fact, when her sister Elsa brought Mayakovsky to the Briks’ apartment that fateful day in July, Lilya asked her to not ask the poet to recite his work. But Elsa asked him anyway. And then, when Mayakovsky opened his mouth, ‘a miracle’ happened: ‘A Cloud in Pants’ (Oblako v shtanakh, 1915).36

Lilya ‘lost the gift of speech’ and Osip ‘fell in love’.37 ‘This,’ Lilya retrospectively wrote for both of them, ‘was what we had been waiting for for so long.’38 Mayakovksy, apparently, had been waiting for something, too. He dedicated ‘Cloud’ to Lilya that very evening, then moved his things into a room at the Palais Royal, close by the Briks. Eventually, they all three moved in together. It was not a ménage-à-trois, Lilya later insisted; physically, only Vladimir and Lilya were involved – Osip having lost sexual interest in Lilya even before they met Mayakovsky – but they lived like a family, or rather like ‘new people’, i.e. according to the rationalist principles spelled out by Nikolai Chernyshevsky in his 1863 hit novel, What Is to Be Done? Tales from the Lives of New People (Chto delat’? Iz rasskazakh o novykh liudei).39 From July 1915 onward, they loved each other ‘forever and ever’.40 And the years passed. When February came, Mayakovsky was seen running around Petrograd, chasing revolutionary gunfire.41 When October came, the question of whether or not Bolshevik power should be accepted did not even present 35 Ibid., 25. 36 Brik, Pristrastnye rasskazy, 24. For the rest of the details, see ibid., 21–24. 37 Ibid., p. 25. 38 Ibid., p. 24. Compare Viktor Shklovsky’s narration of this event, which is much more prosaic, though he does note that Mayakovsky fell in love with Lilya ‘at first sight, and, actually, forever’. Viktor Shklovsky, Mayakovsky and His Circle, Lily Feiler (ed. and trans.) (New York, 1972), 75 and 79. 39 For Brik’s insistence that their household was no ménage-à-trois, see Pristrastnye rasskazy, 168. For Brik’s description of Mayakovsky’s relationship to the novel, see ibid., 120. For Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? as a model for their private life, see Ann Charters/Samuel Charters, I Love: The Story of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik (New York, 1979), 283–285. The Charters’ account – though based on Brik’s (at that time unpublished) memoirs and interviews with her – differs from Brik’s own. 40 Brik, Pristrastnye rasskazy, 167. The Russian reads: nacrfгea, nacfki, ossodo xso hso orsanfsrя c cfkav. 41 See Charters/Charters, I Love, 100–101.

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itself to him: ‘My revolution’, Mayakovsky said, and so it was.42 So in tune with things revolutionary was Mayakovsky that the year 1917 was hardly an event at all. ‘Mayakovsky entered the Revolution as he would his own home’, wrote the literary critic Viktor Shklovsky.43 In fact, for Mayakovsky, the real break – and this one was a catastrophe – only came after the Revolution. On 28 November 1922 to be exact. Professionally, things had been going well. Professionally, things had been going too well. Privately, this did him in; it cost him his heroism. Listen to Lilya: We both cried. It seemed like we were perishing. We got used to everything – to love, to art, to revolution. We got used to each other, to being dressed well, to living comfortably, to having our cup of tea. We’re drowning in everyday life (byt). We’ve hit rock bottom. Never again will Mayakovsky write anything real … We often had conversations like that at that time, and they never led to anything. But now, that night, I decided – that we’d at least take a break for two months. To think about how we should live now.44

Mayakovsky spent the next two months in self-imposed isolation, but in his despair managed to turn the catastrophe into stanzas. Shklovsky said it was the hardest work Mayakovsky ever did, but ‘About That’ (Pro eto) – ‘that’ being love – made a meditation on byt into a miraculous expression of bytie.45 The poem ends with a request for resurrection in the ‘thirtieth century’, a time when love will no more be ‘a sorry servant of matrimony, lust, and daily bread’.46 On the other hand, so what? He was a poet, after all, and fellow Futurist Vasily Kamensky relates that Mayakovsky got over a certain Maria (or even several Marias, including some Sofia) in just the same way, by sublimating his pain into the poetry of ‘A Cloud in Pants’: Maria – You don’t want me? You don’t! Ha!47 42 See Mayakovsky, Polnoe Sobranie, 27. 43 Shklovsky, Mayakovsky, 97. 44 Brik, Pristrastnye rasskazy, 76–77. 45 See Shklovsky, Mayakovsky, 149. 46 The Russian reads: Xsob nf bыlo lюbci–rltganki hamtgfrsc, povosi, vlfboc. Mayakovsky, Polnoe sobranie, vol. 6, 132. 47 Idem, Polnoe sobranie, vol. 1, 203. For Kamensky’s comments on the circumstances of Mayakovsky’s composition of ‘Cloud’, see Kamenskii, Zhizn, 97–100.

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And Lilya relates that, late in 1929, when Tatiana Yakovleva rejected Mayakovsky in favour of ‘some French viscount’, Mayakovsky likewise publicly purged himself of his private hurt: His post-rejection performances were crammed with snide asides about his romantic rival.48 The question is why Mayakovsky could not manage the same thing in 1930, when he shot himself just moments after Veronika Polonskaya walked out the door. When did Mayakovsky stop being able to turn the troubles of his byt into the eternal truths of bytie? It’s difficult to know exactly when the change set it – – 1921? 1923? – – but Mayakovsky’s last years, judging by his autobiography, begin to feel heavy, professional. In the 1920s, there are no more dates that are ‘the most’, just lists of years, and within these years, the titles of jobs and names of cities he toured. Mayakovsky had been on tour before, in 1913, with his fellow Futurists, and he described this time in I Myself as ‘a fun year’, but his entry for the year 1926 ends like this: Novocherkassk, Vinnitsia, Kharkov, Paris, Rostov, Tiflis, Berlin, Kazan, Sverdlovsk, Tula, Prague, Leningrad, Moscow, Voronezh, Yalta, Yevpatoria, Vyatka, Ufa, etc., etc., etc.49

If only ‘etc., etc., etc.’ read like the ‘and so on’ with which the weird and otherworldly Velimir Khlebnikov would trail off while reciting his own poetry; but Mayakovsky’s ‘etc.’ contains precisely too much of this world.50 Around the time that he was writing entries such as those for 1926, that is, in 1929, Mayakovsky’s old friend, the painter Yuri Annenkov, ran into him in France. Annenkov had been living abroad for a few years already, and Mayakovsky asked him when he’d return to the USSR. ‘I answered’, thus Annenkov, ‘that I had stopped thinking about it because I wanted to remain a painter,’ to which Mayakovsky, his voice hoarse, replied, ‘But I … am going back … because I’ve already stopped being a poet.’ ‘And then’, writes Annenkov, ‘there was a truly dramatic scene: Mayakovsky began sobbing and, barely audibly, whispered, “Now I’m … a bureaucrat … ”’51

48 Brik, Pristrastnye rasskazy, 135. 49 Mayakovsky, Polnoe sobranie, vol. 12, 23, 30. 50 Both Lilya Brik and Kamensky mention that Khlebnikov would often start to recite one of his poems – only to trail off after a few lines and conclude with a quiet ‘and so on’. See Kamenskii, Zhizn, 60; Brik, Pristrasnye rasskazy, 46. 51 Iurii Annenkov, Dnevnik moikh vstrech. Tsikl tragedii, Rene Gerra (ed.) (Moscow, 2005), 213. Annenkov seems to have taken this to confirm his own opinion that politics had strangled Mayakovsky’s poetry. He shared this view with Pasternak and Akhmatova, who only liked Mayakovsky’s prerevolutionary poetry. Annenkov actually liked Mayakovsky for longer – he thought Mayakovsky was at least honest until 1925 – but not his post-revolutionary work, such as his advertising copy, e.g. ‘Nowhere but in Mosselprom!’ (The Russian rhymes: Nidef кqomf, kak c Morrflьpqomf!), about which Mayakovsky

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So not a poet anymore. Not a revolutionary, either. And then love seemed lost as well. His famous suicide note reads (in part): As they say, ‘The incident is closed.’ Love’s boat has smashed against the everyday (byt) Life and I are quits, so why bother balancing mutual hurts, harms, and slights.52

Interpretations of Mayakovsky’s suicide are legion. Lilya argued that he was a ‘Poet. He wanted to exaggerate everything’, and that, anyway, the idea of suicide was his ‘chronic illness’.53 Dr. Zhivago author Boris Pasternak thought he had done it ‘out of pride, that he judged something in or around himself, and that his love of self could not come to terms with this thing’.54 Shklovsky seemed to suggest that things had simply added up – ‘an infantry must not march in step over a steel bridge; the shocks add up, and the rhythm causes the bridge to collapse’ – and that Mayakovsky was ‘unhappy’ and ‘ill’, though he also noted that Mayakovsky ‘died, having explained how the love boat crashes, how man perishes, not of unrequited love, but because he has ceased loving’.55 And then there’s Trotsky’s explanation: ‘“The ship was smashed up on everyday life”, says Mayakovsky in his pre-suicide poems about his intihimself said it was ‘poetry of the highest quality’. For Annenkov’s disapproval, see Dnevnik, 197. For Mayakovsky’s own praise for the slogan, see Polnoe Sobranie, vol. 1, 28. 52 The original reads: Kak docoqяs‘inwiefns irpfqxfn.’ Lюbocnaя loeka qahbilarь o bыs. Я r gihnью c qarxfsf i nf k xfmt pfqfxfnь chaimnыv bolfj, bfe i obie. Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky, Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 65 (Moscow, 1958), 199. 53 Brik, Pristrastnye rasskazy, 136 and 134. 54 Boris Pasternak, Proza 1915–1958: Povesti, rasskazy, ovtobiograficheskie proizvedeniia, Gleb P. Struve/Boris A. Filippov (eds.) (Ann Arbor/MI, 1961), 136. 55 Shklovsky, Mayakovsky, 199, 201 and 203.

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mate personal life. This means that “public and literary activity” ceased to carry him high enough over the shoals of everyday life – and was not enough to save him from unendurable personal shocks.’56 But probably it was Mayakovksy himself who got the reason right, fifteen years before the fact, when he wrote in the prologue to his 1915 poem ‘Backbone Flute’ (Fleita-pozvonochnik): It might be far better for me to punctuate my end with a bullet.57

On this reading, in 1930, Mayakovsky, an event that indeed had gone on his ‘whole life’, was brought to an end, decisively, so that he did not die of doxa, but, in fact, just in time.

6. Concluding Thoughts: From Event to History Now let us ask again, apropos of the above examples, ‘What kind of an event makes for a new time?’ Arguably, what happened to Morozov when he received his vision was no less transformative than Malevich’s experience as the ‘zero of form’, Lenin’s ‘breaking of evolutionary historicism’, and Mayakovsky’s move (really multiple moves) from byt to bytie. Only the latter three, though, registered as real events in the history of our world. In other words, on a personal scale, no doubt all four were occasions for the transformation of the subject’s historico-temporal self-understanding, but for an event to publicly register as endowed with the power to reconfigure the relations between past, present and future, it seems something more is required. For example, what allowed the Leninist event to register on a large scale was, according to Zˇiˇzek, that it ‘found an echo in … revolutionary micropolitics: the incredible explosion of grass-roots democracy, of local committees sprouting up all around Russia’s big cities and, ignoring the authority of

56 Lev Trotsky, Mayakovsky’s Suicide (May 1930), in: Leon Trotsky on Literature and Art, Paul Siegel (ed.) (Atlanta/GA, 1972), 176. 57 The original reads: Crf xazf etmaю – nf porsacisь li ltxyf soxkt ptli c rcofm konwf. Mayakovsky, Polnoe sobranie, vol. 1, 207. The translation taken from idem et al., Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and About Mayakovsky, Michael Almereyda (ed.) (New York, 2008), 246. For a translation of the entire poem, see Vladimir Mayakovsky, Backbone Flute: Selected Poems 1913–1930, Andrey Keller (trans.) (Boston, 2008), 85.

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the “legitimate” government, taking matters into their own hands’.58 Zˇiˇzek opposes this reading to the ‘myth of the tiny group of ruthless dedicated revolutionaries which accomplished a coup d’état’, but it is difficult not to detect a new cynicism in this reading. Essentially, it suggests that it is the sheer force of numbers that determines the truth (read: success) of one vision over another. Mayakovsky and Malevich’s cases are worrisome, too: what would have become of the first without Stalin’s verdict that Mayakovsky was ‘the best and the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch’ and of the latter without the market success of American Conceptual Art and Minimalism?59 There is really no ready alternative to this rather brutal relativism, other than to be sensitive to all of history’s false/failed visions and try to redeem these by including them in our narratives. Thus certainly we should keep open the possibility of counting even the likes of Morozov (who stands in here for all those who tried but failed to escape from their time and into History) among the legitimate authors of real events. At the very least, Morozov’s vision should be seen as an example of the capacity for ‘wormhole thinking’ that was characteristic of Russia’s radical intelligentsia, and as such as belonging to the temporal climate that eventually produced the ‘event’ 1917. But really we should go further and insist on using events like Morozov’s as the jumping off points for the writing of alternative histories, which is to say, ultimately, for unsettling the relations between past, present, and future. For example, why not maintain Morozov’s utopia of eternal recycling as the potential kernel of a future environmentalism that would be truly universal? One could jump right from Morozov’s vision of cosmic care to Trotsky’s ecstatic prognosis that the reconstruction of nature under communism would be done so well that, ‘the tiger will not even notice the machine, or feel the change, but will live as he lived in primeval times’, and then, lo!, an unfamiliar naturalist path in Russian revolutionary history already begins to open up, and this history, in today’s world, may actually have a future.60 In other words, the madness of Morozov could stand for events whose time has not yet come – but someday may.

58 Ibid., 7. 59 On Stalin’s rescue of Mayakovsky, see Edward J. Brown, Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution (Princeton/NJ, 1973), 367–370. A 2011 exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, ‘Malevich and the American Legacy,’ celebrated the connection between Malevich and artists like Donald Judd, Richard Serra, Sol LeWit, and others. 60 Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, William Keach (ed.), Rose Strunsky (trans.) (Chicago, 2005), 205. Or see idem, Literatura i revoliutsiia (Moscow, 1991), 194–195.

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François Hartog

The Modern Régime of Historicity in the Face of Two World Wars

As soon as time is at issue, we discover that we have access only to experiences of time. When we begin to scrutinize any given culture from this angle, everything – from the most elaborate intellectual production with a thousand reflective subtleties to the most ordinary everyday object – can offer signs that testify to these experiences. From experiences, we move to forms and modes of temporality, which are elaborations, produced by contemporaries themselves for the sake of orientation in time, their own time – expressions of their need to articulate and reflect it. (This is done with the help of words, notions and concepts. It is accomplished through stories, objects and images. In short, it calls upon all the resources of culture, past and present.) The process of reflecting, articulating and making use of time unfolds according to the goals people fix and the beliefs they have. The primary (but not the only) reference points are the categories of past, present and future. What has varied according to time and place is the content and the manner of their articulation: their frontiers. So far, we have no regime of historicity. That notion, as I have outlined it, intervenes, in effect, after the fact; it is an artifact and operates in ideal-typical mode.1 What, then, is the fundamental characteristic of the modern régime of historicity? It is, I believe, the predominance of the category of the future; an expanding distance (to adopt the meta-categories of Reinhart Koselleck) between the field of experience and the horizon of expectation. The future is the telos. It is the source of the light illuminating the past. Time is no longer a simple classificatory principle, but rather an agent, the operator of a historical process – the other name, or rather the true name, for progress. This history, which human beings make, is perceived as accelerating. There is thus a belief in history – a belief that is diffuse or reflected, but nonetheless shared. There is also a conviction that mankind makes history. Tocqueville 1 Christian Delacroix/François Doss/Patrick Garcia, Sur la notion de régime de régime d’historicité. Entretien avec François Hartog, in: eidem (eds.), Historicités (Paris, 2009), 133–149.

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gave the clearest expression to this belief when in 1840 he wrote: ‘When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.’ With these words, he signalled the end of the old regime of historicity, while at the same time offering a quasi-formulation of the modern regime – that is, a key to comprehending the post-1789 world, in which the future would henceforth illuminate the past. The spirit thus does not walk, or no longer walks, in darkness. History becomes a notice addressed by the future to the contemporary and to the past. Has this modern régime survived the 1914–1945 period, which Raymond Aron has termed ‘the thirty years’ war,’ and others ‘the suicide of Europe’? Can we reconcile the idea of progress with the vision of ruins, devastation, the millions of dead, the vanished, the broken generations? To be sure, reconstruction followed on destruction; there was economic progress, gains in productivity and improvements in the standard of living. Modernisation made its demands, and modernity as such was valorized. And this is to say nothing of the setting in of the Cold War and East-West competition after 1945, of the race for arms and progress. But between 1918 and 1945, what does it mean to believe in History? Clearly we need to distinguish between how the victors and the vanquished experience time, between time as experienced in the new totalitarian regimes and the time experienced in democracies, between the time of the new actors (the United States and the Soviet Union) and that of the old guard. Clearly, the positions, the expectations and the regrets of these players were not identical, any more than the relations formed between past, present and future could be. Universal time exists, there is no doubt about that; but even aside from our literal experience of jet lag the time we read is not the same time, not even in Berlin, Moscow, Rome and Paris. From all of this, the modern regime cannot escape unharmed. This suggests an initial question: Does the notion of regime of historicity retain any scrap of relevance when it is asked to embrace experiences of time that are so different, histories so shattered, situations so diverse? Or is it simply an empty term, subsuming only vague abstractions? That is the question we have set out to answer.

1. Time as Progress As an initial approach, let us look upon time as if it were the ship that serves as the emblem of the city of Paris, with its motto, Fluctuat nec mergitur! [It pitches, but it does not sink.] Before World War I, the notion of time underwent reformulations that rendered it more capable of surviving through the years to come. For alongside progress, another figure came to the fore,

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emerging from time but gaining autonomy, namely revolution, itself conceived as either the spearhead of progress or as beyond progress. At the same time, there came an awareness of the economic dimension of phenomena, the open-eyed recognition of a history profoundly marked by modes of production and class struggles, by reflections upon economic crises. On the heels of this awareness, an economic and social history appeared and gave rise to a new interest in studying the inner, subsurface rhythms of societies. If progress exists, it comes from afar, it is not continuous, and is not to be confused with what is immediately visible. In brief, the modern regime has now acquired density, profundity; it become more complex, for the sense of time that defines it no longer has a single coherent flow. Human beings make history. This proposition is the culmination of a long path that had its beginnings in the Renaissance, with its vision of the human being as agent, as the one who makes and is made. In order to believe in history, it was necessary for time to become, in its turn, an agent – and this development took place at the end of the eighteenth century. It is from the meeting and interaction of these two agents – the first of them trying always to master the second, to put it to use – that actual effective history results. A single example suffices to give an idea of what might be termed the energetic, optimistic view of the modern regime. Around 1910, Jean Jaurès eloquently expressed his philosophy of time, which addresses both the way in which history is made and the engine that drives political action. In the face of his conservative opponents, he claimed true ‘faithfulness’ to the past. ‘It’s by moving towards the sea,’ he wrote, ‘that the river is faithful to its source.’ As for history: ‘It is remarkable to see how the great historical force [the French Revolution] that gave rise to a new world at the same time opened up the way to understanding the old worlds.’ And as for the present: ‘It is only one moment in the march of humanity,’ hence let there be ‘no blind admiration’ for it, since France ‘is moving towards a full clarity it has not yet attained, but which it feels already in thought.’2 Hence the future, seen as the deepening and fulfilment of the Revolution, is still what animates and gives meaning to both the past and the present. Progress and revolution march together. As the spearhead of progress, the Revolution in France is simultaneously behind us, because it has taken place, and in front of us: to be resumed. For some, its defeat means that it awaits completion; it has yet to reach its conclusion. For others that defeat has the contrary meaning: It is necessary to start the struggle over again in order to move it to a new level, beyond its bourgeois phase. In large measure, the Revolution is seen as an occasion for reactivating in a new guise the ancient and 2 Jean Jaurès, Discours et Conférences (Paris, 2010), 210, 240, 250.

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powerful Christian temporal schema that straddles the already and the notyet: It has taken place, just as the Redeemer has already come, but all has not yet been accomplished, far from it. Variants will graft themselves onto this schema, differing from it to greater or lesser degrees. Conceived as a logical development, the Revolution is sustained and delivered by the future, in accordance with Lassalle’s idea that ‘revolutions make themselves, they are not made,’ or with Kautsky’s that ‘we are marching toward an era of revolution whose moment of coming we cannot determine’. And there is in it the messianism of Bebel as well, announcing to his audience in 1891 that ‘few people present in this hall will fail to experience those days.’3 The Leninist interpretation, however, introduces an altogether new relationship with time. Revolution now arrives through a leap that comes from a place outside the present, enabled by the action of a revolutionary avant-garde. Another time, a new future, now opens up – and with it the promises of a complete mastery over destiny.

2. French Historians before the Great War How do French historians position themselves in relation to the futurism of history? Are they its zealous propagators? Less so, it seems, than we might expect – or at least they are zealous in a way that is more implicit than explicit. Soon designated ‘positivists’ by their younger detractors, the experiences they look back to are the defeat of 1870 and the Commune, the founding of the Republic and the Dreyfus Affair. The more they lay claim to pursue a scientific history, the more they emphasise the past and to insist on the necessity of splitting the past from the present. The only scientific history, they declare, is the history of the past; the historian must, in a certain sense, separate himself from himself, i.e., abstract himself from the present. Lucien Febvre does not fail to underscore that in fact this history ‘was nothing but a deification of the present with the help of the past,’ but that ‘it refused to see or express this fact.’4 In sum, the past here tends to prevail over the future. If intelligibility still comes from the future, one simply doesn’t make too big a deal out of it, or rather one proceeds as if the past were speaking all by itself, the Republic being conceived of as the definitive regime. But then the crisis of the Dreyfus Affair comes along and, by deeply dividing historians, reminds them that even if the critical method does not offer a solution to everything, it can still lead them to leave their offices to confront the challenges posed by the present. 3 Marcel Gauchet, A l’épreuve des totalitarismes (Paris 2010), 99, 86. 4 Lucien Febvre, Combats pour l’histoire (Paris, 1992), 9.

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The Affair in effect plays a role in the emergence of a contemporary history. But the Great War catalyzes one of those periods of pause that Hannah Arendt termed ‘time-gaps,’ bringing with it many profound questionings of the relation of man to time. Most important, what becomes of the common belief in history? Starting in 1919, Paul Valéry responds with his prosopopoeia on Europe’s decadence, which soon becomes famous: ‘We, the civilised, we now know we are mortal. … We now see that the abyss of history is large enough for the whole world.’ As a result of this collapse, it is as difficult to ‘reconstitute’ the past as to ‘construct’ the future: ‘The prophet is in the same bag as the historian. Let’s leave them there.’5 History has gone bankrupt; gone is the diplomatic history à la Bismarck – the only history he knew, one that claims foresight but is founded on precedent and prides itself on lessons taught – a history that formulates ‘a tomorrow, but not at all a tomorrow that has never presented itself.’ A little later, in 1931, to a history filled with political events Valéry opposes another, non-existing history inhabited by ‘significant phenomena … rendered imperceptible by the slowness of production.’6

3. Critique of Modern Time after the War Alongside what Valéry analysed as a ‘crisis of the spirit,’ we have what in Germany was termed a ‘crisis of historicism’: a complex cultural phenomenon that preceded the war but was also precipitated by it, and which had multiple expressions. In regard to temporalities, its best-known expression has become Walter Benjamin’s critique of a homogeneous, linear and empty time, and his evocation of a messianic time. The appeal to another historical time, that of a dazzling conjunction between present and past moments, also represents a new faith in another form of history, inviting us to tie the present and the past together in a different way, while at the same time not renouncing the idea of revolution. In this constellation the future, albeit a transfigured future, remains the guiding category. The strength of the idea of revolution is also attested to, albeit in a reversed sense, by the oxymoron of the ‘conservative revolution,’ forged in those years – a singularity of the Weimar epoch involving nothing less than a mobilisation of the then-current power of that idea to freely recreate a past that never existed. Against the tyranny of the future (and its misdeeds), we turn to the past (and its blessings) by means of ‘a double radicalisation that is both backward and forward looking.’7 5 Paul Valéry, Œuvres I: La crise de l’esprit (Paris, 1957), 991. 6 Idem, Œuvres II: Regards sur le monde actuel (Paris, 1960), 918, 919. 7 Gauchet, A l’épreuve des totalitarismes, 425.

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Another critique, or at least form of dissatisfaction with modern time is expressed by a new place being recognised for memory, as being either outside history or as having a critical relationship with it. Alongside Proust, Bergson and again Benjamin (and his concept of Eingedenken), there is the sociology of memory developed by Maurice Halbwachs between 1920 and his death in 1944, as a consequence of the Great War but without ever referring to it. For Halbwachs, all collective memory has ‘a group limited in space and time as its support.’ Since every group has ‘its own duration,’ there is no single, universal time. Seen from the point of view of memory, history can only be in a position of exteriority. Indeed, its practitioners have established that history began where memory ended. Halbwachs says no more than that, but he insists on the hiatus that separates the two. Collective memory concerns itself with resemblances; history, proceeding by shortcuts that evade continuity, underscore differences. It ‘extracts the changes from within duration.’ Memory, on the contrary, is located in the continuous. After crises, it works at ‘restoring the thread of continuity,’ and, even if ‘the illusion’ doesn’t last, for some time at least ‘we figure that nothing has changed.’8 From the University of Strasbourg, once again French after the Great War, we have, finally, the historians’ professional response – that of the founders of Les Annales. Their key aim is to break with the instrumentalisation to which history had been subjected in the two camps, for the sake of aiming at ‘a truly disinterested analytic effort.’ That is Febvre’s first answer, ethical and methodological at once, asking himself aloud in 1919 whether he has the right to ‘do history’ [faire de l’histoire] in a world ‘in ruins.’ At the same time, stimulated by the young discipline of sociology, an economic and social history has begun to claim its place – a history attentive to other ways of measuring temporality. Already in 1903, François Simiand invited historians to turn their attention from the accidental and individual to focus on the regular, repetitive and collective. Some of them take up the history of prices, Ernest Labrousse completing his Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au XVIIIe siècle in 1932. But the study of emerging regularities leads again to the question of change. Did the Revolution result from a broader historical movement in which the surrounding socioeconomic conditions coalesced, or was it rather the product of an abnormal time? In 1929, in their Adresse aux lecteurs, Bloch and Febvre announce their desire to fight against the ‘divorce’ between historians, who ‘apply their good old methods to documents from the past,’ and other researchers who ‘engage in the study of contemporary societies and economies.’ Hence, without denying the importance of specialisation, we need to favour a movement 8 Maurice Halbwachs, La mémoire collective (Paris, 1997), 166, 134.

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back and forth between past and present (‘the future of economic history is at that cost, and also a proper understanding of the facts that will be history tomorrow’), while recognising that what is closest is not necessarily what offers the best explanation. The main combat is always against the past/present division, that credo of methodical history – but there is no longer any pretence as there was with the founder of the Revue historique in 1876, that the historian was to contribute ‘to the greatness of the homeland and progress of the human race.’ In short, the future seems to have declined as a force, at least in the realm of historical scholarship. It may remain a value for the citizen, but the historian does not base his reflection on it, or make of it the principle for understanding history. Work is now centered on rendering the border between past and present permeable, while recognising the presence of the historian in history. Raymond Aron’s attitude is also revealing. In 1938, he publishes his Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire, which contains a ferocious critique of positivist history, questioning if not the reality, then at least ‘the regularity of progress.’9 Importantly, thanks to his experience in Germany, he is familiar with historicism and the crisis it is undergoing. For Aron, ‘historicism is the philosophy of relativism.’ It corresponds to ‘a period unsure of itself,’ to ‘a society with no future,’ and it expresses itself as a ‘substitution of the myth of becoming for the myth of progress.’ ‘In place of the optimistic certainty that the future will be better than the present, a sort of pessimism or agnosticism spreads itself out,’ and against such fatalism Aron defends the idea that ‘the past depends on knowledge,’ and ‘the future on will’: the latter ‘is not to be observed but to be created.’ He leaves for London in June 1940. For him too, the historian is present in history, and there can be no doubt that there is a history – often tragic – and choices to be made. The human being has a history or, better, ‘is an unfinished history.’10 Fatalism is merely the symmetrical inverse of the optimism-of-the-future characteristic of the modern regime: The sign inverts itself, but the structure remains.

4. After the Second World War How is one to regard the incompletion of this history after 1945? In face of the breadth – and continuing vitality – of this question, I will limit myself to a few remarks. What becomes of the belief in History and in time as progress? There is, to begin with, a strong awareness that a gap has opened up in time. In The World of Yesterday, written before his suicide in Brazil in 1942, Stefan 9 Raymond Aron, Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire (Paris, 1986), 182, 377, 432. 10 Idem, Mémoires (Paris, 2010), 179.

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Zweig bears witness to the disruption: ‘between our today, our yesterday, our day before yesterday, all the bridges have been broken.’ Or as the poet René Char puts it, trying in 1946 to express his experience of the Resistance: ‘Our heritage was left to us by no testament.’ Hannah Arendt would take up these words, since for her the aphorism grasps, through its abrupt side, the moment where a gap opens up between the past and the future: a strange intervening space where agents ‘become aware of an interval in time altogether determined by things that are no more and by things that are not yet.’11 Indicating to the heir what will legitimately be his, the testament is, in effect, an operation on time: it ‘assigns a past to the future’; it names, tells where the ‘treasure’ is and what it contains.12 The simple flux of becoming becomes continuous time, measured between past and future. In the literal sense, it makes itself tradition. Here Tocqueville’s formula about the past no longer illuminating the future readily comes to mind. Could light still come from the future? Could it do so for historians – for those who, as we have seen, had already long before taken their distance from the optimistic version of historicity? Interesting in this respect are the positions of two historians who will become very close during the postwar period: Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel. In 1946, Febvre launches the Manifeste des Annales nouvelles, with a very clear title, ‘Facing the Wind,’ and the subtitle Economies, sociétés, civilisations. He here underscores that we have henceforth entered a new world, one ‘in a state of definitive instability,’ where the ruins are immense, but where there is also ‘something quite different than ruins, and more serious: that prodigious acceleration of speed which, telescoping the continents, abolishing the oceans, suppressing the deserts, places human groups charged with opposing electricity in abrupt contact. The urgency, at the risk of no longer understanding the globalised world of tomorrow – of today, already – is thus not to look back at what has just taken place, but forward, in front of oneself. (…) Finished is the world of yesterday. Finished forever. If we, the French, have a chance to pull through – it will be in understanding, more quickly and better than others, this manifest truth. In leaving the shipwreck. Into the water, I tell you, and swim steadily.’ To explain ‘the world to the world,’ to answer the questions posed by mankind today – such is the historian’s task when facing the wind. As for the past, the only task is to ‘understand well how it differs from the present.’13 11 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York, 1978), 3, 9. 12 Ibid., 5. 13 Febvre, Face au Vent, Manifeste des Annales Nouvelles, in: idem, Combats pour l’histoire, 35, 40, 41.

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Three years later, in an article significantly titled ‘Towards another History,’ which constitutes a sort of passing of the baton between him and Braudel, Febvre reiterates the necessity for an opening up toward the world and the future, pleading for a history that does not allow the past to crush us, but rather organises it ‘to prevent it from weighing too much on the shoulders’ of the living. ‘Forgetting is a necessity for groups, for societies that want to live.’14 The future is here, it is knocking at the window; facing it requires a survival operation, which is also the only way to (re)endow the practice of history with meaning. In the same year, Braudel publishes La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II. Prepared over a long period before the war, then taken up again during his years as a war prisoner, this manifesto for a ‘structural history’ finally appears in 1949. Braudel does not comment directly on either the recent period or the future’s power to sweep things along. But it is well known that the author has ‘little interest in events,’ and that among the three forms of temporality, the main role is given to the longue durée – to those ‘layers of slow history’ located where there is ‘barely any movement [à la limite du mouvement].’ To ‘Treitschke’s prideful, unilateral declaration: human beings make history’ he thus counters that ‘history also makes human beings and shapes their destiny’ – and, by the same token, limits their responsibility.15 They have little control over history’s course. If Febvre and Braudel start from different views of what constitutes the time of history, they agree in avoiding the recent past and share the idea that a ‘new world’ needs a ‘new history’: the history of civilisations for Febvre, that of the longue durée for Braudel … whence the natural emergence of another idea: the longue durée of civilisations. For his part, in Race et histoire, published in 1952, Claude Lévi-Strauss likewise starts with civilisations, which for him need to be seen as spread out not so much in time as in space. Challenging evolutionism, he asks us to shift from seeing progress as a ‘universal category’ to seeing it merely as the category of a ‘particular mode of existence proper to our society.’ With each new publication, Lévi-Strauss then strongly calls into question the modern régime of historicity.16 Similar is his distinction – the thrust of which, he always emphasizes, is theoretical – between hot and cold societies. If the former have been shaped by a (futurist) temporalisation of history and have even made it into a principle of development, such is not the case with the latter, or not yet, or only to a certain extent – the one certain thing being that all of these societies are both located in history and producers of history, with, 14 Ibid., 436, 437. 15 Fernand Braudel, Ecrits sur l’histoire (Paris, 1969), 21. 16 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale (Paris, 1958), 368.

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however, different modalities of being in time.17 This is a way of revisiting or nuancing relativism. Nevertheless, in those years progress and history run their course, even a hellish one. In the press, Hiroshima is initially presented as a technical achievement. The revolution is there, as a threat or a promise, but in any event victorious. The war’s victors make history and divide up the world. Reconstruction, modernisation, the planned economy are so many watchwords giving the main role to the future. Various slogans indicate that the nations have begun their forward march again: the radiant future (in the Soviet world), the German miracle, the thirty glorious years (in France, referring to the postwar economic boom, with, already, a retrospective undertone). All of this is orchestrated by the Cold War, the nuclear threat, and the forward rush it renders imperative for both camps. This is one of the faces of progress – another will soon be the birth of the consumer society. There is thus a divergence between the form of temporality envisaged by the social sciences and the time of society (even if that word is too generic). The gap, which is not new, will even continue to expand until the end of the 1960s. The structuralist fever here comes to mind. 1968, in this respect, can be viewed as a signal. The futurist basis in any event remains: implicitly in the social sciences, explicitly for social time. But when the Revolution vanishes from the horizon in the 1970s, futurism recedes and the present (in the space that has been left free) gradually imposes itself as the dominant category. Translated by Joel Golb

17 Idem, Anthropologie structurale deux (Paris, 1973), 40–41.

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Lucian Hölscher

Mysteries of Historical Order: Ruptures, Simultaneity and the Relationship of the Past, the Present and the Future

We live in a time when history has lost its utopian horizon of a promised land, the realm of God, the state of peace and harmony of mankind, some liberal or Communist society – or whatever the image may be. For most of us history no longer moves in a coherent way, as it did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from some very distant past to some remote future. Gradually the nations of Europe have lost their faith in the continuous progress of culture and civilisation, including their belief that political, social and moral developments in different parts of the world will ultimately converge. The concept of history, in former times conceptualised as a living organism, has shattered. The question remains how this could happen. Looking closer, it seems as if we today can no longer view history as unfolding in one coherent, evolutionary stream. Instead, old and new concepts exist side by side – a vision of continuous technological, economic and socio-political progress; of a post-modern coexistence of regions and social groups with different outlooks on the past and future; and even the championing of a radical concentration on the past. All these we see chronicled from the 1960s onwards in a vast theoretical literature. Historical times have multiplied, each establishing a presence in a historical cosmos of its own. Post-modern theories have torn to pieces the continuity of historical change.1 Regional studies have elaborated the dependency of historical concepts on regional cultures.2 In short, the path of history has become complicated. How the past, present and future fit together is today one of the principle concerns of historical theory. The earliest signs of the confusion date to the First World War, when basic assumptions about the forces compelling history ever forward were destroyed and faith in history as progress became no longer tenable. Thor1 Lutz Niethammer, Posthistoire: Ist die Geschichte zu Ende? (Reinbek, 1989). 2 Sebastian Conrad/Randeria Shalini (eds.), Jenseits des Eurozentrismus: Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main, 2002).

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oughly disillusioned intellectuals throughout Europe came to distrust the very foundations of the concept of history. To illustrate this, let me begin with three biographical sketches dating to this period.

1. Ruptures of History My first example is the painter George Grosz who as an ardent opponent of the war joined the communist party in 1919 and whose works count as some of the fiercest attacks on the leading classes produced during the war and after.3 Grosz was drafted into the army in late 1914, and his experiences on the battlefield drove him almost mad. He was hospitalised for mental illness and survived – but only barely – thanks to the protection of some influential friends, who recommended him for release. In order to function, soldiers must believe in something that gives order to the chaos of their lives, and so the general breakdown of values posed a great danger. To the brutality of warfare they reacted first with heightened attention, then with feelings of revolt and, finally, by falling silent or going mad. Madness was in fact widespread among soldiers of all nations during the war, and psychiatric institutions were overcrowded despite the cruel treatments then current, such as electro-shock therapy.4 For many, the war was characterised principally by its absurdity. There was no making sense of it all. Even those who did not initially oppose it took one lesson home from the battlefield: this war should never have happened, and it must never happen again.5 As for George Grosz, he recovered after leaving the military hospital by joining the Berlin group of Dadaists, who became famous for exposing the absurdity of modern bourgeois culture. But even after having escaped the Nazi regime – he emigrated to the United States in 1933 – Grosz was never able to make his peace with moral values, for he discovered that his art was accepted by the very bourgeois classes he had so violently opposed during and after the war. Towards the end of his life in 1957, he despaired of a coherent interpretation of history.6 3 An excellent and comprehensive introduction to Grosz’ life and work is Uwe M. Schneede’s George Grosz: Der Künstler in seiner Gesellschaft (Cologne, 1975). 4 Ben Shepard, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists 1914–1994 (London, 2000). 5 Ulrich Linse, Das wahre Zeugnis: Eine psychohistorische Deutung des Ersten Weltkriegs, in: idem (ed.), Kriegserlebnis: Der Erste Weltkrieg in der literarischen Gestaltung und symbolischen Deutung der Nationen (Göttingen, 1980), 90–114. 6 Cf. his autobiography: George Grosz, A Small Yes and a Big No (New York,1946; new edition 1998), translated into German as Ein kleines Ja und ein großes Nein. Sein Leben von ihm selbst erzählt (Hamburg, 1955).

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My second example: When in late July 1914 the war broke out, Stefan Zweig, the famous liberal poet, had just spent some weeks relaxing with his Belgian friend Emil Verhaeren.7 Zweig was a man of cosmopolitan sophistication, but he nonetheless accepted the war with enthusiasm, as did most German and Austrian intellectuals at the beginning. Not until early 1915 did his ideas began to change, but by 1916 his opposition to the war was ardent. The change was documented in a remarkable way in his journals. For Zweig chronicling his own life was a way of realigning in time and history. As we know from his early masterpiece Sternstunden der Menschheit, he believed in the existence of historical moments, which, hidden though they were to most contemporaries, turned the path of history. His journals served him as seismographs, showing him where these poignant moments lay. Thus, immediately after the outbreak of war, he began to record the secret signs of history that revealed themselves in daily life. But only half a year later he became tired, because there were no results that he could see. So he stopped writing, then started and stopped, again and again. Obviously Zweig, too, had lost his orientation. But than something happened. Having started writing again in September of 1918, he gave it up just at the peak of the revolution in mid-November. This moment was different from all the other moments when he had stopped because nothing noteworthy had happened. The last entry of November 13 reveals why: Der Waffenstillstand abgeschlossen. Viktor Adler gestorben, der Kaiser Karl demissioniert – früher wäre man Kopf gestanden. Jetzt ist man nur müde. Es war schon so viel vorher und es kommt noch so viel nach. Man kann einfach nicht mehr. Und wenigstens ich verbrauche die Hälfte meiner geistigen Kraft in den grauenhaften Visionen dieser kommenden Umstürze, wo der Hass der Klassen, der Stände, riesengroß diese Welt erfüllen wird.

Visions of hate and terror were approaching, coming ever nearer, and they would take the place of all calculations that looked to the future for progress. For Stefan Zweig the events of the winter of 1918/1919 foreshadowed the breakdown of history, from which it would take years to recover. So far my examples are drawn from the liberal and left wings of opinion. My third and last example, however, comes from the right side of the political spectrum. It does not seem at first an example of historical time breaking apart, as it did for Grosz and Zweig, but rather of its integrity and continuity. But it brings us to a rupture in history of another kind: a disruption between our own understanding of moral terms and the understanding of the past. It 7 For the following observations, see Zweig’s diaries: Stefan Zweig, Tagebücher, Knut Beck (ed.) (Frankfurt am Main, 1984), 81ff., as well as his later autobiography: Die Welt von gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers (1942), written during his exile in South America.

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causes us to doubt whether we share the moral world of past generations and, therefore, whether there is any way for us to really understand the past. Among the mountains of literature produced by the outbreak of war, Max Scheler’s Der Genius des Krieges und der deutsche Krieg was one of the most popular. Published in December 1914 and written in an excellent style, it almost immediately sold out and was reprinted. The outcome of the war, however, rendered its message obsolete. The essential theme of the book was that great wars could never be justified or condemned according to formal criteria: by asking questions like who started with hostilities, who crossed first into his enemy’s territory, who acted in self-defence and who was the aggressor. For Scheler only one thing was important: Was there a ‘great, historically approved cultural mission’ (‘eine große, historisch bewährte Kulturidee’8) behind the war? If there was – and Scheler did not doubt that Germany had embarked on just such a mission – then the war was justified. Nothing would prevent a nation bent on such a cause from fighting. War was unavoidable. And if the great national ideas of nations like Russia and Germany should clash with one another, then it was God’s judgement alone that would determine the outcome. God would judge who was right and who was wrong. Of course, at the time he was writing, Scheler was convinced that Germany would win the war. We now know better. Unlike others whose way of thinking was changed by the war, Scheler never renounced the ideas embedded in his bestseller.9 And what is even more remarkable: almost none of his biographers and critics, even after the Second World War, took him to task for his desperately inaccurate prophecy.10 What does this mean? Was he not wrong? Or, if wrong, was he wrong only because his visions did not become reality or because his thinking was wrong from the very beginning? To go yet a step further: Do philosophical truths depend on historical experiences for support? Do historians have to change their moral standards to stay in tune with the experiences of the past? There is no definitive answer to these questions. On the one hand, it seems to be impossible that value should depend on historical circumstances; on the other hand, it is undeniable that values change over time. 8 Max Scheler, Der Genius des Krieges und der deutsche Krieg (Leipzig, 1915), 166. 9 Max Scheler, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4 (Munich, 1982), 691–692. 10 The usual way in which Scheler’s fierce 1914 ideas about the war were justified was to refer to the spirit and circumstances of the time or to point to the systemic aspects of his philosophy of value. See John Raphael Staude, Max Scheler 1874–1928: An Intellectual Portrait (Toronto, 1967); Wilhelm Mader, Max Scheler in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Hamburg, 1980); Jan H. Nota, Max Scheler: Der Mensch und seine Philosophie (Fridingen, 1995). The only explicit critique of Scheler’s war rhetoric was articulated by Kurt Flasch, Die geistige Mobilmachung: Die deutschen Intellektuellen und der Erste Weltkrieg (Berlin, 2000), 103ff.

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Here is not the place to reanimate the discussion about the ‘crisis’ or the ‘poverty’ of historicism that became such a critical issue after the war, raised by philosophers like Ernst Troeltsch and Karl Heussi – and by Max Scheler himself.11 Rather the problem of the historical relativity of moral judgements has to be placed within the broader framework of historical continuity and discontinuity. For a statement that is true is true forever and yet can be dismissed in the course of time, then the concept of historical continuity breaks down. In fact, the experience of war challenged almost all basic assumptions about the nature of historical time, including the assumption that man respective religion could be taken as the continuous reference object of historical experience – and that there was a strict continuity in human history. Acceptance of the idea that historical time is discontinuous was a necessary consequence of the historical experiences that changed the European understanding of history during and after the First World War. Even today, a century after the war, this change cannot be revised without doing harm to those who have suffered and learnt from it. To defend the continuity of historical time would mean denying the experiences of those who went through the atrocities of the war; who were deceived by their belief in divine justice and in the progress of culture and civilisation and human nature. For most contemporaries the world after the war had nothing to do any more with any pre-war notions of the future. The future of that past was plainly not this present, and as much as the future had changed, so had the past. Both were valid at their time, but today each contradict the other, and loudly. The war did more than mark the end of one epoch and the beginning of another: It ended a way of thinking about history, a way of conceptualising time. Ruptures in history12 have far-reaching consequences for the ways in which we perceive the concepts of past, present and future: For a very long period of time, the past, the present and the future seemed to follow one another and beheld together like pearls on a string. Future events became present and then past, the past was seen as the precondition of the present, just as

11 Ernst Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Probleme (Tübingen, 1922); idem, Der Historismus und seine Überwindung (Berlin, 1924); Karl Heussi, Die Krise des Historismus (Tübingen, 1932); Max Scheler, Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft (1926), in: idem, Werke, vol. 8 (Bern, 1960), 150; Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London, 1957). 12 Why this threshold of modern history is linked to the First World War is discussed in my article ‘Hermeneutik des Nichtverstehens: Skizze zu einer Analyse europäischer Gesellschaften im 20. Jahrhundert’ (Internationales Jahrbuch der Hermeneutik VII, 2008, 65–77, reprinted in: Lucian Hölscher, Semantik der Leere: Grenzfragen der Geschichtswissenschaft [Göttingen, 2009], 226–239).

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much as the present was a precondition for the future.13 But over the course of the twentieth century, it became more and more obvious that such concepts no longer fit modern experiences, and hence do not relate to a coherent state of the world anymore. The implications of this new disjunctive model of historical times for the understanding of history are tremendous. To call only some to mind: What former generations expected would come to pass differs from what the present generation is actually experiencing. The future is no longer seen as the implication of the past and present, for unforeseen futures emerge all of a sudden and replace the older ones. And the same is true for the past: The past is no longer seen as something stable, but rather as a changing projection of the present and future. Finally, the present, instead of being a transitory moment has become the centre of historical times: Many present moments follow one another not in a coherent sequence of past, present and future, but rather as moments independent from one another, each with its own past and future. Put all this together and we begin to see how radical the meaning is for us: We can no longer have trust in the traditional hope that we are the people whom our fathers expected. Rather, each generation builds its own house of history, with little respect for the rooms that the previous generation reserved for its children. Under such circumstances, does it make any sense to look to the past in order to understand what will come? Does it make sense to trust in our capacity to care for future generations? When we look back at the past, we may even ask how was it possible that people once trusted in the course of time as something meaningful? Was it ever unnatural to think that each generation would design history according to its own plan? How was it possible to believe that history was an absolute space in which the human race would develop, travelling through time from change to change, step by step, to man’s final destination? In an attempt to find answers to such questions, the following second and third parts of this paper deal with the construction of historical time as established in the early eighteenth-century philosophy of history. After that excursus, I come back to modern constructions of historical times in the twentieth century.

13 The famous sentence was first articulated by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, Monadology (1714), § 22: ‘And as every present state of a simple substance is naturally a consequence of its preceding state, in such a way that its present is big with its future.’

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2. The Claim of the ‘Spirit’ in History The classical concept of history assumed that time was endless, continuous and followed a meaningful course. Over the two hundred years of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, writers on the philosophy of history repeated again and again their understanding that everything is linked to everything else, that all history is one ‘great chain of being’.14 The inner coherency of historical time, however, is more than experience can prove, for empirically only single events may depend on one another. The concept of a homogeneous space of history turns out to be a basically theological assumption, an extension of the concept of an almighty and unique God, and a hope, that we know today, is not everlasting. Sometimes this is obscured by the fact that the concept of a coherent history in modern secular societies is not bound to such a religious belief. Instead, it serves as a hypothesis leading historians to look for links between events in time, which at first do not seem to communicate. But the idea of historical reality implies the assumption that all real events are part of one coherent historical universe, today as in the past. It was Johann Christoph Gatterer (1727–99), a historian at the university of Göttingen, who in the late 1760s established the axiom: ‘Alles hängt aneinander, wird veranlasst, wird gezeugt, und veranlasst und zeugt wieder. Die Begebenheiten der Vornehmen und der Geringen, der einzelnen Menschen und aller zusammen, des Privatlebens und der großen Welt, ja selbst der unvernünftigen und leblosen Geschöpfe und der Menschen, alle sind ineinander verschlungen und verbunden.’ August Ludwig Schlözer (1735–1809), his colleague in Göttingen, built on this idea when, in the early 1770s, he distinguished between the ‘real connexion’ (Realzusammenhang) of things that are connected obviously by cause and effect, and a ‘pure temporal connection’ (bloßer Zeitzusammenhang) of things that were not grounded in one another, but only happen to exist at one and the same time: This latter kind of connection, based on the simultaneity of events was not as obvious, but, Schlözer hoped, was nevertheless most real: ‘Ein höherer Geist, der die Verkettung aller Dinge unsers Erdbodens durchschaut, würde auch unter ihnen eine entweder spätere oder frühere Realverbindung finden.’15 Discovering this kind of historical connection was the job of the historian’s spirit (Geist). The notion of spirit was one of the most prominent concepts in enlightenment philosophy, highly 14 For the history of this topos, see Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge/MA, 1957 [1936]). 15 Ludwig August Schlözer, Versuch einer Universal-Historie (Göttingen/Gotha, 1772), 49.

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theological and indispensable for the new concept of history that was to prevail up to our time. To appreciate the all-encompassing nature of this concept, it is necessary to go back to its origin in Leibniz’s Monadology. Leibniz reasoned as follows: ‘ … in the plenum every motion has an effect on distant bodies in proportion to their distance, so that each body not only is affected by those which are in contact with it and in some way feels the effect of everything that happens to them, but also is mediately affected by bodies adjoining those with which it itself is in immediate contact. Wherefore it follows that this inter-communication of things extends to any distance, however great’ (§ 61). Seeing connections far beyond the immediate links of cause to effect, Leibniz argued that for bodies to act upon one another, nothing more was required than their neighbourhood in space and time. This assumption was necessary for the construction of a coherent space in which all ‘bodies’ (events, things) in the world were joined in a meaningful interdependence. This was the essential character of Leibniz’s ‘monad’, which by its entelechy would rule the plenum. But inherent to this ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ of the world Leibniz also assumed the existence of minor monads with their own soul or spirit. Being part of the ‘City of God’, each spirit was itself a mirror or image of the universe of created things and therefore in its own right: ‘a small divinity in its own sphere’ (§ 83). The construction of such a hierarchical model of monads was helpful for coming to terms with the conflicting claims or requirements placed on a theory of history, which called simultaneously for an infinite network of semantic and material links among all things in space and time and for independent material and semantic entities, each existing for its self. The concept of spirit made this possible, for it enabled the understanding of each historical entity as both having its own being and a being in relation to some bigger entity. Adopted by philosophers such as Montesquieu (De l’esprit des lois, 1748) and Voltaire (Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations, 1756) the concept of spirit served various functions: It could demonstrate the correspondence between the microcosm that is one historical person, for example, and the macrocosm of history or of mankind as a whole. So Voltaire in his introduction to The Age of Louis XIV: ‘It is not only the life of Louis XIV. that we propose to write; we have a greater object in view. We mean to set before posterity not only the portrait of one man’s action but that of the spirit of mankind in general, in the most enlightened of ages.’16 But more frequently the concept of spirit was used for subsuming many different events under one leading aspect. This could be an age, such as the Renaissance or the Reformation, 16 Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV (Berlin, 1751). English: The Age of Louis XIV, William Fleming (trans.), in: The Works of Voltaire, vol. 12 (New York, 1901), 5.

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a nation, or some other kind of historical organism. In this line Montesquieu argued that a nation is bound together by its esprit, the nature of which is determined by factors like climate, food and language.17 And Voltaire, too, in his Age of Louis XIV argued that people living in a particular age are ruled in common by one spirit of time.18 Consequent to this major shift in the architecture of the historical universe, the German terms Zeitgeist (spirit of the time) and Nationalgeist (national spirit) emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century, giving evidence to the historiographical importance of the concept of Geist at that time.19

3. The Implications of Simultaneity The concept of spirit was ruled by the logic of simultaneity. Things, events did not belong together because they had an immediate effect on one another – a process that did not go without the passing of time. Rather, they acted upon one another because they happened to coexist at the same point in time or at the same point in space. One might ask: How exactly did it come about that the idea of pure simultaneity, of the coincidence of events in time, could establish such an evidence for the coherence of history? Looking back to ancient and medieval historiography, we find quite a number of examples of historians citing simultaneous events, for instance the temporal equation noted by the Roman historian Livy of the assassination of the Athenian tyrant Hipparchus by Harmodius and Aristogeiton and the expulsion of the Roman king Tarquinius Superbus, both of which occurred in 510 BC20; or the synchronic lists produced by Eusebius of Caesarea (260–339), Hieronymus (347–420) and others, which demonstrated that kings in different regions lived in similar ways at the same time. But these synchronicities were mere observations of the similarity and simultaneity of certain events, and did not imply that those events were bound together by a spirit common to their time. The construction of ages, bound together by one spirit, one state of culture and civilisation, made it possible to anchor events, actions and human characters much deeper in the 17 Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois (Paris, 1748). 18 Voltaire, The Age of Louis XIV: ‘The enlightened spirit which has reigned in France for this past century, and which has communicated itself to people of all ranks …’ (23); ‘We have already said enough to give an idea of the manners and spirit of the age which preceded that of Louis XIV’ (52). 19 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch VII, 1889, 425 (first record: Schiller); 15, 1956, 558 (‘Die zu einer Zeit geltenden Meinungen, Geschmack, Wille’; first record: L. Meister 1789). 20 Livy, Ab urbe condita, book 2.

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cultural environment, in historical circumstances, mentalities, etc. However, these ages had to be seen as parts of a common universe if their coexistence was to be more than pure coincidence. The idea of a common spirit served that end, but the spirit had to be a temporal spirit if it was to carry with it connotations of sequential logic and simultaneity. In order to understand the benefits of a coherent historical universe, it may help to remember the analogical construction of a coherent geographical universe. Analogies in eighteenth-century thinking about space and time are striking. In chronology, the definition of a point Zero between the years 1 BC and AD 121 served as a pivot for an infinite calendar, going back in time far beyond the assumed date of the world’s creation (c. 4000 BC) and forward into some very distant future. The definition of a Zero meridian running through Greenwich near London likewise enabled the construction of an infinite geographical space. Both conventions made it possible to extend the boundaries of space and time, bringing the whole empirical world together under one order. What is more, these temporal and geographic constructs allowed distances of time and space to be measured in meaningful ways, and indeed such measurements became important tools for describing the world. In geography, blank spots (weiße Flecken) on maps, such as the famous map of Africa published by Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville in 1749, encouraged the exploration of unknown territories. In history, critical dates situated at different points in time prompted historians to ask what had happened in the time between these events that made them possible and more comprehensible. These impulses gave rise to the ideas of evolution und progress, which became established as historical concepts with a universal claim to validity. Historiography followed the path of geographical representation as well, by establishing a link of temporal coherency in one and the same age. As in geographical space, so in historical time the pure neighbourhood of things was accepted as an expression of their meaning in history. Now the fact that events existed side by side in space or time was enough to establish a semantic link between them. And even if the geographical distance between two simultaneous events was considerable, historians began to assume that there was some hidden link between them. As Schlözer put it in 1772, this tacit nexus rerum in history, though difficult to prove, was most useful: 21 Christian chronology began with the year 1. Hence, from the eighteenth century onwards earlier years were counted as years before Christ’s birth, with the year AD 1 following immediately on the year 1 BC. Cf. Charles Seife, Zero. The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (London, 2000); Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, Historische Chronologie des Abendlandes: Kalenderreformen und Jahrtausendrechnungen: Eine Einführung (Stuttgart, 2000).

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Begebenheiten, die von Natur in einander verflochten sind, lassen sich eben dadurch leicht als gleichzeitig denken: aber Begebenheiten ohne allen merklichen Realzusammenhang, die Siege des Timurs und die Jntriguen der Margaretha, wie lassen sich diese als coexistent behalten? Sie haben keine Verbindungspuncte, sie verhalten sich eben so willkührlich wie Wörter und Ideen zusammen, und die systematische Weltgeschichte scheint dadurch eine eben so lästige Memoriensache wie das Sprachenlernen zu werden.22

The axiom of simultaneity established in the eighteenth century was fruitful in post-enlightenment historiography in many respects. One immediate effect was the construction of the synchrony of a-synchronic events: of people, for instance, who while living at the same time belonged to subsequent stages in the development of mankind, as did Native Americans and their European contemporaries, for instance. Johann Gottfried Herder, Condorcet, Adam Smith and many others argued that ‘primitive’ people would in time follow the same course of development as had Europeans in earlier times: Our present was their future, their present our past. In later times the reach of this model would be extended further still. For instance, in his famous book Erbschaft dieser Zeit (1935), Ernst Bloch suggested that the Ungleichzeitigkeit des Gleichzeitigen explained the success of National Socialism in Germany. The classes, he argued, that lost out in the process of modernisation, tended to orient themselves to the past, not to the future. In the 1960s the formula Ungleichzeitigkeit des Gleichzeitigen was taken up by other historians, such as Reinhart Koselleck23 and Hans-Ulrich Wehler. In the 1970s and 1980s debate over the German Sonderweg, Wehler insisted: If ‘belated’ nations like the Germans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries failed to follow the direction of development taken by advanced nations, such as the English or French, they would face severe difficulties.24 The concept of a-synchronic developments had highly normative potential when used as an instrument for prognosticating future developments. Nevertheless, in the end it proved a poor guide to the future, not only for historical analysis but also for predicting political and other developments, because in many cases what happened in one country and society did not in fact duplicate the course taken by its supposed ‘forerunners’. What was helpful for one society and one nation was of no benefit to others.

22 Schlözer, Versuch einer Universal-Historie, 49. 23 Reinhart Koselleck, Zeitschichten: Studien zur Historik (Frankfurt am Main, 2000). 24 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte III (Munich, 1995), 4. The controversial debate on this hypothesis is documented in Wikipedia, ‘Deutscher Sonderweg’.

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4. The Construction and Deconstruction of the Past, Present and Future Returning to the construction of historical times, i.e. to the historical concepts past, present and future, it is significant to note how closely they were modelled in eighteenth-century semantics. Until the eighteenth century, the German language lacked the terms Vergangenheit, Gegenwart and Zukunft. Events of the past, present and future were designated by Vergangenes, Gegenwärtiges and Zukünftiges. Events were supposed to pass through time one behind the other. Even simultaneous events were not conceived of as belonging to a common temporal space or universe (a Zeitraum) called past, present or future, for the terms Vergangnenes and Zukünftiges did not point to the idea of a past or future world (as did the new eighteenth-century terms Vorwelt and Nachwelt), by which all events happening at the same time would be bound meaningfully together. Such an idea was only established by the conceptual terms Vergangenheit, Gegenwart and Zukunft. The semantic implications of the terms past, present and future unfold in a sequence of three steps: – On a first level, we can observe how they were derived from special expressions: Originally the German Gegenwart (present) had the meaning of Anwesenheit (presence);25 Zukunft was used to designate what is today referred to as Ankunft (arrival),26 and the term Vergangenheit did not yet exist at all.27 It was not until the mid-eighteenth century that they were transformed into temporal expressions. The idea of simultaneity was inherent in this special origin. – On a second level, the concepts of past, present and future were conceptualised along the lines of historical ages. All events that could be categorised as belonging either to the past, the present or the future, could be considered together, even if they followed one another in time. – On a third level, past, present and future were conceptualised as historical agents, making demands on the people of the present or judging their actions. This was possible because, like Leibniz’s monads, they were seen as having a historical life by their own.

25 Johann Christoph Adelung, Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der Hochdeutschen Mundart, vol. 2, 1796, 488; Grimm, Wörterbuch, 5, 1984, 2284. 26 Adelung, Wörterbuch 4, 1801, 1757; Grimm, Wörterbuch, 32, 1984, 476; Lucian Hölscher, Die Entdeckung der Zukunft (Frankfurt am Main, 1999), 34. 27 Adelung, Wörterbuch 4, 1801, 1035 (no entry); Grimm, Wörterbuch, 25, 1984, 374 (‘scheint ein verhältnismäßig junges Wort zu sein, erst in den Wörterbüchern dieses Jahrhunderts nachzuweisen’; first record: Gottsched 1857).

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This concept of history, embedded in eighteenth-century philosophy, is today no longer tenable.28 Over the course of the twentieth century, the idea of history as the record of a meaningful universe has disintegrated.29 With the emancipation of its colonies, Europe lost its position as the centre of the civilised world.30 The experiences of modern warfare made it impossible to believe any longer in the continuous progress of culture and civilisation.31 Genocide threatened entire ethnic groups with the possibility of being extinguished and thus excluded from world history altogether.32 And perhaps most significant of all: The children and grandchildren of these victims of the past have demonstrated a determination to see justice done to the memory of their ancestors. By the 1920s, the breaking up of the continuity of historical time had progressed far in both the humanities and sciences – as witnessed by the discovery of the relativity of time and of inherent time structures in organisms and social institutions.33 In historiography it was Lucien Febvre who, in his book on the river Rhine, deconstructed the myth of historical continuity.34 He demonstrated convincingly that the ideological exploitation of the Rhine as the ‘natural borderline’ between France and Germany was one of the major factors perpetuating hate and rivalry between these countries throughout the nineteenth century. Fernand Braudel took up the challenge of his teacher, elaborating a theory of three layers of historical time. His central message was that each object moves through history according to its own

28 As an introduction, see Lucian Hölscher, Neue Annalistik. Umrisse einer Theorie der Geschichte (Göttingen, 2003). 29 Jörn Rüsen, Zeit und Sinn: Strategien historischen Denkens (Frankfurt am Main, 1990); Hölscher, Neue Annalistik. 30 Cf. the articles of Klaus E. Müller, Zeitkonzepte in traditionellen Kulturen; Achim Mittag, Zeitkonzepte in China; and Heidrun Friese, Bilder der Geschichte, in: Klaus E. Müller/Jörn Rüsen (eds.), Historische Sinnbildung: Problemstellungen, Zeitkonzepte, Wahrnehmungshorizonte, Darstellungsstrategien (Reinbek, 1997). See also Jörn Rüsen (ed.), Westliches Geschichtsdenken: Eine interkulturelle Debatte (Göttingen, 1999). 31 Cf. Nikolas Buschmann/Horst Carl (eds.), Die Erfahrung des Krieges: Erfahrungsgeschichtliche Perspektiven von der Französischen Revolution bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg (Paderborn, 2001); Kurt Flasch, Die geistige Mobilmachung: Die deutschen Intellektuellen und der Erste Weltkrieg (Berlin, 2000), 384ff.; Lucian Hölscher, Die Einheit der historischen Wirklichkeit und die Vielfalt der geschichtlichen Erfahrung, in: idem, Semantik der Leere. Grenzfragen der Geschichtswissenschaft (Göttingen, 2009), 68–80. 32 Lucian Hölscher, Geschichte als ‘Erinnerungskultur’, in: Mihran Dabag/Kirsten Platt (eds.), Generation und Gedächtnis: Erinnerung und kollektive Identitäten (Opladen, 1995), 146–168. 33 Cf. Günther Dux, Die Zeit in der Geschichte: Ihre Entwicklungslogik vom Mythos zur Weltzeit (Frankfurt am Main, 1992). 34 Lucien Febvre, Le Rhin: Problèmes d’histoire et d’économie (Paris, 1935).

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time schedule.35 It is true that this idea was not new – Johann Gottfried Herder, for instance, had argued along similar lines already in the late eighteenth century36 – but at that time it was still embedded in the concept of a universal history, which in the twentieth century began to be questioned. In philosophy, too, Franz Rosenzweig reacted to the collapse of the nineteenth century’s idea of a coherent mental universe. When after the war in 1919 he published his dissertation Hegel und der Staat, which had actually been completed before the war, he confessed that the book ‘would never have been started today’: ‘Ich weiß nicht, wo man heute noch den Mut hernehmen soll, deutsche Geschichte zu schreiben. Damals, als das Buch entstand, war Hoffnung, dass die innere wie äußere atemversetzende Engigkeit des Bismarckschen Staats sich ausweiten werde zu einem freie Weltluft atmenden Reich. Dies Buch sollte, so weit ein Buch das kann, an seinem kleinen Teil darauf vorbereiten … Es ist anders gekommen. Ein Trümmerfeld bezeichnet den Ort, wo vormals das Reich stand.’37 Historicism had fallen victim of its own theory and methodology. Historical reconstructions of past developments had failed to forecast the future. In the end, not only had hopes for a powerful German Weltreich and a progressive unfolding of German and European culture proven false, but so had the entire method of historical analysis that Rosenzweig inherited from his teacher Friedrich Meinecke. In Die Idee der Staatsräson, published in 1924, Meinecke himself conceded that his idealistic approach was massively deficient.38 The same could be said, however, of the materialist approach to history of the pre-war period. Walter Benjamin’s critique on the German Social Democratic Party in the 1920s and 1930s made exactly this point: The Social Democrats, he argued, had trusted too much in the necessary fulfilment of the ‘laws of history’, which, so their materialistic analysis suggested, would lead social development inevitably to socialism. In the end events and changes unforeseen robbed them of their expectations. As a consequence of this failure, Benjamin promoted the idea of a discontinuous history, in which the past was glimpsed and recollected only in moments of danger.39 35 Fernand Braudel, Geschichte und Sozialwissenschaft: Die lange Dauer (1959), in: idem, Schriften zur Geschichte, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main, 1992), 49–87. 36 Johann Gottfried Herder, Verstand und Erfahrung: Eine Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in: idem, Werke, vol. 8: Schriften zur Literatur und Philosophie 1792–1800, Dietrich Irmscher (ed.) (Frankfurt am Main, 1998), 303–640. 37 Franz Rosenzweig, Hegel und der Staat (Munich, 1920), xii. 38 Friedrich Meinecke, ‘Introduction’ to Die Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte (Munich, 1924). 39 Walter Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte, in: idem, Gesammelte Schriften I.2, Rolf Tiedemann/Hermann Schweppenhäuser (eds.) (Frankfurt am Main, 1980), 691–704.

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But changes in the concept of history were more than academic responses to faulty ideological constructions. For the generation of World War One, the war was an existential thunderstorm that turned the experience of time upside down. As Kurt Flasch demonstrated in his study Die geistige Mobilmachung. Die Deutschen und der Erste Weltkrieg (2000), almost all vital categories of historical interpretation – including Geist and Kultur – had lost their credibility by the end of the war.40 But only a very few scholars in the humanities were able to draw from this loss correct conclusions, among them Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann41 in Protestant theology; Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger42 in philosophy. Their most notable contribution to the concept of history was to notice that the centre of history had shifted from the past to the present. Each generation would now have to tell history in its own way. Truth could no longer be found in the origins of history or in its final destination, but only in the existential moment of present experience. This was the basic assumption underlying the concept of historicity, promoted by scholars like Collingwood and Bultmann after the Second World War.43

5. Outlook: History of the Future and History of Memory By the 1960s, history began to splinter into layers of historical perspectives – in space as much as in time. Post-colonialism, post-modernism, post-histoire and post-secularism are each and all symptoms of this crisis of historical time. In 1971, Reinhart Koselleck, following the line of argument of Fernand Braudel in 1957,44 even declared the ‘theory of historical times’ to be the core of historical analysis at all.45 In numerous essays he reconstructed the ‘spaces of experiences’ inherent to historical concepts and past fields of social activities.46 One of his basic assumptions was that past and future can40 Flasch, Mobilmachung, 269. 41 Rudolph Bultmann, Eschatologie und Geschichte (Tübingen, 1958). 42 Martin Heidegger, Die Idee der Philosophie und das Weltanschauungsproblem: Kriegsnotsemester 1919, in: idem, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 56/57 (Frankfurt am Main, 1987), 180ff. 43 Cf. Robin George Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford 1946); Bultmann, Eschatologie. 44 Cf. n. 35. 45 Reinhart Koselleck: Wozu noch Historie? in: idem, Vom Sinn und Unsinn der Geschichte: Aufsätze und Vorträge aus vier Jahrzehnten (Frankfurt am Main, 2010). 46 Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main, 1979); idem, Zeitschichten; idem, Begriffsgeschichten: Studien zur Semantik und Pragmatik der politischen und sozialen Sprache (Frankfurt am Main, 2008); idem, Vom Sinn und Unsinn der Geschichte.

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not be reduced to dimensions to be viewed from the perspective of the present, but should be acknowledged as historical subjects in their own right. Ever since, the art of composing past, present and future has been a major challenge for all historiography. Two major efforts to address the new situation need to be mentioned here, namely, attempts to produce a history of the future and a history of memory: Already by the early 1960s, the future (conceptionalised as a subject in itself) was beginning to attract the attention of many scholars and of the public in general. This was a time when in many countries there was a new optimism about the possibility of improving the society of the future. Political as well as economic thinktanks were established, and a new branch of the social sciences emerged: called futurology,47 which was embraced with enthusiasm.48 In those years historians also developed a new interest in the future, not only of their own time, but also of past societies.49 In 1964, Reinhart Wittram and Reinhart Koselleck invented the concept of a past future, by which was meant a future that was not the future of the present but the future as it was conceived of at some time in the past.50 Reinhart Wittram at Göttingen University began in fact to take the future as a starting point for understanding the past and the present. He suggested that if the future would not fulfil the expectations of the past, then historians would have to turn the direction of historical explanation upside down: the past would no longer tell us what the future would bring, but instead

47 Ossip K. Flechtheim, Futurologie – Möglichkeiten und Grenzen (Frankfurt am Main, 1968). 48 Cf. Hölscher, Entdeckung der Zukunft, 219ff.; Alexander Schmidt-Gernig, Das Jahrzehnt der Zukunft: Leitbilder und Visionen der Zukunftsforschung in den 60er Jahren in Westeuropa und den USA, in: Uta Gerhardt (ed.), Zeitperspektiven: Studien zu Kultur und Gesellschaft (Stuttgart, 2003), 305–345; idem, Die gesellschaftliche Konstruktion der Zukunft. Westeuropäische Zukunftsforschung und Gesellschaftsplanung zwischen 1950 und 1980, Welt-Trends 1998, 63–84. 49 Reinhart Wittram/Hans-Georg Gadamer/Jürgen Moltmann (eds.), Geschichte – Element der Zukunft (Tübingen, 1965); Reinhard Wittram, Zukunft in der Geschichte: Zu Grenzfragen zwischen Geschichtswissenschaft und Theologie (Göttingen, 1966); Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft; Niklas Luhmann, Die Zukunft kann nicht beginnen: Temporalstrukturen der modernen Gesellschaft, in: idem (ed.), Vor der Jahrtausendwende. Bericht zur Lage der Zukunft, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main, 1990), 119–150; Ernst Schulin, Die Zukunft im historisch-politischen Denken des 20. Jahrhunderts, in: Heinz Löwe (ed.), Geschichte und Zukunft: Fünf Vorträge (Berlin, 1978), 91–110; Ulrich Raulff, Der unsichtbare Augenblick: Zeitkonzepte in der Geschichte (Göttingen, 1999); Jörn Rüsen, Zerbrechende Zeit: Über den Sinn der Geschichte (Köln, 2001); idem: Kann gestern besser werden? Essays zum Bedenken der Geschichte (Berlin, 2002); Hölscher, Neue Annalistik. 50 Cf. the proceedings of the 26th German Historikertag in Berlin, 1964.

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present expectations of the future would clarify our understanding of the past.51 In 1969. Reinhart Koselleck read his inaugural lecture at Heidelberg University on the ‘past future of early modern times’.52 Because they expected that the end of the world was imminent, he argued, men of the Reformation, such as Martin Luther, had one idea of the course of history, while contemporaries of the French Revolution two centuries later had quite another idea. If modern historians were to understand their actions, they would have to take greater cognisance of these different horizons of expectation. The past future was not to be identified with what had actually happened afterwards, but had instead to be acknowledged as a historical factor in its own right. A similar concern can be observed in French historiography at about this same time. A new generation of historians built on Bloch’s and Febvre’s concept of mentalité – notable among them was Jacques LeGoff, who in his famous book La naissance du purgatoire (1981) began to explore medieval and early modern constructions of time and history. And, following on Nietzsche, Michel Foucault elaborated on the difference between ‘origin’ and ‘descent’ in historical narratives.53 In the 1980s and 1990s, these new conceptions of the past and the future (as historical spheres independent of the present) gave rise to two new branches of historical investigation: the history of expectations and the history of memories. Both have in common that they do not take the present time of the historian as their starting point for historical narratives, but rather the past resp. the future. For the history of memories54 Jan Assmann’s Die Zauberflöte may serve as an example:55 It presents the culture of ancient Egypt not as a modern historical work would, but from the perspective of late eighteenth-century freemasonry. For the history of expectations,56 we 51 Reinhard Wittram, Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Geschichtswissenschaft in der Gegenwart, in: idem, Zukunft in der Geschichte, 30ff. 52 Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft der frühen Neuzeit, in: idem, Vergangene Zukunft, 17–37. 53 Jacques LeGoff, La naissance du purgatoire (Paris, 1981); Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, die Genealogie, die Historie, in: idem, Von der Subversion des Wissens (Munich, 1974), 83–109. 54 Pierre Nora, Zwischen Geschichte und Gedächtnis: Die Gedächtnisorte, in: idem, Zwischen Geschichte und Gedächtnis (Berlin, 1990), 11–33; Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in den frühen Hochkulturen (Munich, 1999); Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (Munich, 1999). 55 Jan Assmann, Die Zauberflöte: Oper und Mysterium (Munich, 2005). 56 George Minois, Histoire de l’avenir (Paris, 1996); Hölscher, Die Entdeckung der Zukunft; idem, Zukunft und Historische Zukunftsforschung, in: Friedrich Jaeger et al. (eds.), Handbuch der Kulturwissenschaften, vol. 1 (Stuttgart, 2004), 401–416; Enno Bünz/Reiner

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look to Rüdiger Graf ’s Die Zukunft der Weimarer Republik. There Graf shows how an awareness of the past future can alter historical judgements. Instead of reading the Weimar Republic as a pre-history of the Third Reich, we learn that it was a time of optimism and far-reaching reform programs.57 The history of historical expectations as much as the history of historical memories counterbalances the tradition of present-centered historiography. These approaches have in common, however, that both challenge the idea of a homogeneous universe and question the truth of historical narratives in general. The future will no doubt bring solutions to this dilemma which we cannot foresee; but whatever happens it seems unlikely that historiography will ever again present us with a homogeneous universe of the classical philosophy of history.58

Gries/Frank Möller (eds.), Der Tag X in der Geschichte: Erwartungen und Enttäuschungen seit 1000 Jahren (Stuttgart, 1997). 57 Rüdiger Graf, Die Zukunft der Weimarer Republik: Krisen und Zukunftsaneignungen in Deutschland 1918–1933 (Munich, 2008). 58 An effort to draw theoretical conclusions from this situation is made in Hölscher, Neue Annalistik. A shorter English version is published under the title The New Annalistic: A Sketch of a Theory of History (History and Theory XXXVI, 1997, 317–335).

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3. Thinking about Time: Analytical Approaches

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Jonathan Gorman

The Limits of Historiographical Choice in Temporal Distinctions1

Chris Lorenz and Berber Bevernage ask two distinctively philosophical questions: ‘Is distinguishing between past, present and future simply a matter of passively “recognising” or “observing” what is “natural” and “undeniable”, or does it involve a more active stance in which social actors create and recreate these divisions? Can we claim to know precisely how “present” social and cultural phenomena turn into (or come to be perceived/recognised as) past phenomena?’2 They also wish to connect philosophical debates about these matters with historical debates of a related kind, but it is difficult to know how ‘related’ to one another philosophical and historical approaches can be. For, with respect to the first question, it may well seem that discussions of claims about the ‘undeniability’ of the distinctions between past, present and future or the ultimate limits of social creativity with respect to these distinctions involve general theoretical arguments regarding necessity and possibility. Such arguments are characteristically at home in philosophy, or in such other universalising disciplines as are concerned with what is ‘natural’. Recovering various unique details of contingently changing facts, as historians might typically do, seems inappropriate. Continuing the point with respect to the second question, we may seek to know when present phenomena turn into past phenomena and whether such things are matters of ‘fact’ or of ‘perception’, but to ask whether we can claim to know these matters precisely – reading this as ‘can we ever claim to know them precisely’ – involves general epistemological and metaphysical issues which are again primarily at home in philosophy. It is not merely that philosophy is the appropriate discipline to provide an answer, but that it is here a philosophical doubt about the possibility of a precise claim to knowledge that raises the epistemological issue. What is at issue is not the historian’s practical doubt about whether we can achieve precise understanding of 1 I am most grateful to Chris Lorenz and Berber Bevernage for their comments on an earlier draft. 2 Call for papers, e-mail, 2 June 2010.

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temporal transition in some particular historical case, a doubt which characteristically presupposes that precise historical knowledge is in principle available. Rather it is a philosophical distinction, between the reality of time as ‘objective fact’ and the reality of time as ‘subjective perception’, which raises the metaphysical issue, an issue sometimes characterised as ‘realism’ versus ‘idealism’. It is usual for historians qua historians to let the merits of such metaphysical assumptions go unrecognised and unexamined. Our first two paragraphs here make points which express some familiar and traditional views about history and philosophy, yet it is also a philosophical and indeed historical question whether we are right to distinguish philosophy from history in such definite ways. While examples of each discipline and the characteristic questions of each discipline can very often be clearly distinguished, below we will adopt a pragmatic philosophy which blurs the borderline between philosophy and history.3 It is worth noting that debates about the nature of historical time barely exist in either philosophy or history, however they are conceived. Just as it is fair to say that the concept of ‘the past’, and the associated distinctions between the categories of ‘the past’, ‘the present’ and ‘the future’, in the way historians use those notions, have seldom been reflected upon by historians, so also they have not been much reflected upon within the traditionally understood boundaries of the discipline of philosophy.4 While the word ‘time’ sometimes appears in the titles of writings by phenomenological or hermeneutic philosophers with an interest in history,5 it usually does no more work than the word ‘history’ or ‘narrative’ does, and, even where the nature of time is given central attention,6 the issue has rarely been how historians actually use temporal notions. Analytical philosophers of narrative have sometimes attended with exactness to temporal language,7 but again the nature of historical time has not been central. 3 Details and the general approach used in this paper are developed in Jonathan Gorman, Historical Judgement: The Limits of Historiographical Choice (Stocksfield, 2007 and Montreal, 2008). That the history/philosophy borderline is blurred here is stressed by Herman Paul, Performing History: How Historical Scholarship is Shaped by Epistemic Virtues, History and Theory L, 2011, 1–19, 12. Related arguments may be followed up in Jonathan Gorman, The Transmission of our Understanding of Historical Time, Historia Social y de la Educación – Social and Education History I, 2012, 2, 129–152 (Open Journal System http://www.hipatiapress.info/hpjournals/index.php/hse/article/view/216/215). 4 As Frank Ankersmit noted: De navel van de geschiedenis: over interpretatie, representatie en historische realiteit (Gröningen, 1990), 110; a reference I owe to Maria Grever. 5 For example Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Chicago, 1984), vol. I, Kathleen McLaughlin/David Pellauer (trans.). 6 For example Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time (Bloomington/IN, 1985), Theodore Kisiel (trans.). 7 For example Arthur Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge, 1965), chap. VIII and passim.

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Most of the relatively few philosophers who have shown a central interest in time have not done so with a view to understanding historians’ use of temporal notions. Rather, they have sought to address the problematic of time directly, commonly looking at its place in science or in the metaphysics of the mind. There is no sustained and detailed work or tradition of discussion which compares or contrasts perceptions or conceptions of time in historiography and science. In the next section I will set out the relevant metaphysical and epistemological issues in Kantian terms, then examine the philosopher of history R. G. Collingwood’s idealist approach to time, and finally present a diachronic form of it which draws on American pragmatism. This diachronic form privileges historical perspective, so blurring the philosophy/history borderline. In succeeding sections I will argue for some general freedoms and constraints on our organisation of time, concluding with Collingwood’s theory of ‘absolute presuppositions’, in order to answer Chris Lorenz’s and Berber Bevernage’s philosophical questions.

1. Organising Time There are obvious senses in which historians are the same as everyone else: they have beliefs, emotions and desires; they share languages with others; they live in space and time; they remember, they hope, they expect; they have the same commonsense everyday understanding of time in general as we all do. Of course, just as one person’s desires can differ from another’s, so one historian’s detailed grasp of some temporal issue within the shared overall frame of time may differ from that of another historian or differ, even in major ways, from the conceptions of those people about whom she or he is writing. Yet those people are in our past and we are in their future; their past is our more distant past. However variant our account or measure of the past may be, the overall frame is still shared, and our philosophical difficulties here lie first in making sense of that general temporal understanding rather than any particular historical issue, embodying as that general understanding does what have long been thought to be fundamental distinctions between past, present and future. Immanuel Kant thought that Isaac Newton was right in expressing and explaining the following belief: time and space, sorted into past, present and future, provide an absolute background which frames all possible experience.8 This accords with the commonsense view that we all share the same overall frame of time. In addition, if Kant and Newton are correct, it justifies that view. 8 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (London, 1933), Norman Kemp Smith (trans.), 25, 74–78.

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For Kant, the experienced world is a complex requiring both what human senses deliver from ‘outside’ the self and also what human minds contribute by way of categorisation, classification and conceptualisation. In this respect the experience of time, like other experiences,9 requires both what is provided by the unstructured perception of the world and what is provided by the application of mental conceptualisation. The relevant mental conceptualisation is our a priori subjective grasp of time, a necessary condition for all possible experience. Our individual subjective understanding of time is also the objective time of the universe itself, since for Kant our subjective grasp of time is fixed a priori and essentially grounded in an absolute and unchanging conception of reason within human nature, the very same unchanging reason as provides the foundation of the objective universe which Newton describes. Kant applied this assumption of the universality and absoluteness of reason to experienced history, speculatively stretching reason over historical time to justify the idea that history is, necessarily, progress: the predictable and inevitable advance of reason.10 Given that reason, for Kant, was also the foundation of morality, this amounted to claiming inevitable progress towards a final perfect moral state. Apart from the intellectual difficulties inherent in Kant’s dubious and arbitrary assumption that universal reason can deliver substantive results about the structure of the experienced world, the horrors of world wars and revolutions in the twentieth century have made the operation of reason in history an unacceptable idea, and have contributed to the twentieth-century view that belief in absolutes of any kind is not so much a grasp of genuine truth as submission to totalitarian dogma. The twentieth-century view of science as a form of historical advance built on the fundamental revision of received ideas, as offering experimentally revisable theories rather than ultimate truth, has contributed to giving empiricism, which supports that view, the central place it has in much philosophy today. That we should use evidence, rather than a priori reasoning, to make sense of the world as we experience it, is a central tenet of empiricism. Yet while the absolute Newtonian view of time, which Kant used, changed in the twentieth century with the advance of empiricism and with Einstein’s theories of the relativity of time and space,11 our latest physics does not give us clarity: ‘one

9 For Kant time and space differ markedly in other respects from other experiences, each being a condition for the possibility of the latter and not merely yet another experience. They alone he calls ‘a priori intuitions’. 10 Immanuel Kant, Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, in: Patrick Gardiner (ed.), Theories of History (New York, 1959), 22–34. 11 Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time (London, 1988), 33–34.

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gets results which make no sense’, say Newton’s successors at Cambridge.12 Our concepts and our reasonings about time have yielded paradoxes from ancient times until the present. Like Saint Augustine, we know what time is, so long as we are not asked. To understand historical time we need to start the debate again, although not from scratch: we will here accept Kant’s point about the necessary input of some subjective conceptualisation of our experience of time, since the general importance of conceptualisation in experience is widely accepted by philosophers, particularly pragmatists. We will not thereby merely assume time to be absolute, however, nor assume that our conceptualisation of our experience of it is rigid and not subject to revision. Chris Lorenz and Berber Bevernage ask in effect whether we ‘observe’ or ‘create’ time. If we allow some subjective conceptual input, should we then understand historical time to be ‘real’ or ‘ideal’? R. G. Collingwood, that renowned idealist theorist of history, followed the usual practice of philosophers, even philosophers of history, in not addressing directly and at any length issues about historical time in particular.13 He said, ‘My central difficulty is this: All statements ordinarily made about time seem to imply that time is something which we know it is not, and make assumptions about it which we know to be untrue’.14 ‘We imagine time’, he proceeded, ‘as a straight line along which something travels. Without inquiring too closely what it is that does the travelling, we may ask whether time is at all like a line; and, obviously, it is not. … “Thought of as a line, it would only possess one real point – namely, the present. From it would issue two endless but imaginary arms, Past and Future” (Lotze, Metaphysic, Section 138). It is difficult’, Collingwood continued, ‘to uproot from one’s mind the illusion that somehow the past and the future exist, or that the past somehow exists, even if the future does not.’15 But he was firm that it is an illusion none the less. ‘No doubt, the present would not be what it is if the past had not been and if the future were not to be; but it is a childish confusion of thought to argue that therefore the past and the future are now real.’16 Yet Collingwood did not express his idealism in the clearest way. ‘Ideal’ and ‘real’ were not for him opposites: ‘The ideal and the real are not mu12 Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, http://www.damtp. cam.ac.uk/research/gr/public/qg_ss.html [Accessed 7 Mar 2011]. 13 Although see his Lectures on Philosophy of History in the van der Düssen edition of Robin George Collingwood’s The Idea of History (Oxford, 1994), a reference I owe to Robert Burns. 14 Idem, Some Perplexities about Time: with an Attempted Solution, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society XXVI, 1925–1926, 135–150, 138. 15 Ibid., 143. 16 Ibid., 143–144.

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tually exclusive. A thing may be ideal and also real.’17 This may sound contradictory: the conflict between ‘realism’ and ‘idealism’ is often understood by modern philosophers as involving not the medieval issue about the nature of universals, but rather the conflict between the realist’s assertion and the idealist’s denial of the view that there is an unknown, even unknowable, reality which exists completely independent of us and of our conceptions. The idealist suggests that realism, so understood, may well be unintelligible, and there are other versions of the issues. Yet, while such ‘realism’ may indeed be indefensible, the word ‘real’ is an everyday word that is correctly used on some occasions, and the idealist holds that we must not allow it to be hijacked by dubious philosophical approaches. A properly expressed idealism will seek to account for all our concerns about reality without loss of meaning.18 ‘Real’ must be a word which the idealist is able to use successfully without commitment to unnecessary metaphysical baggage, and Collingwood’s position accords with this requirement. As an idealist, Collingwood holds that privileging some thought by calling its intended reference ‘real’ is itself an act of thought. The ‘real’/‘unreal’ distinction lies within the ‘ideal’; ‘real’ is therefore not opposed to ‘ideal’. Here Collingwood’s position may be understood as trying to use the notions of ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ to make sense of such commonsense views as the following: the way in which, as we ordinarily understand it, the present is real while the past is dead and gone, and the past is unreal by contrast with the present; while at the same time the past is real in so far as history can be true to it, for it must contrast with fiction, which is false and purports to refer to an unreal world. Similarly, the future, not having happened, is not real like the present; yet when we speculate about our own future we are speculating about something which is real by contrast with speculation about what may come next in the fictional story we are reading. In the present context Collingwood is best read as stipulating for philosophers how he is using the words ‘real’ and ‘ideal’, since he is not following one of the traditional philosophical usages. In this he is recognisably closer to our everyday usage. While past and future are, for Collingwood, not real, rather, ‘The real is the present, conceived not as a mathematical point between the present and the past, but as the union of present and past in a duration or permanence that is at the same time change. Thus the past as past and the future as future 17 Ibid., 150. 18 In recent decades, with developments in the philosophy of language and of mind, the opposite of ‘realism’ has been taken to be ‘anti-realism’. Simon Blackburn introduces the term ‘quasi-realism’: a quasi-realist is ‘a person who, starting from a recognizably anti-realist position, finds himself progressively able to mimic the intellectual practices supposedly definitive of realism’. Simon Blackburn, Essays in Quasi-Realism (Oxford, 1993), 15.

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do not exist at all, but are purely ideal; the past as living in the present and the future as germinating in the present are wholly real and indeed are just the present itself. It is because of the presence of these two elements in the present … that the present is a concrete and changing reality and not an empty mathematical point’.19 Recalling the second of our original questions, ‘Can we claim to know precisely how “present” social and cultural phenomena turn into (or come to be perceived/recognised as) past phenomena?,’ we find an outline answer in Collingwood: ‘In actual history, events overlap; … and it is only when our knowledge of events is superficial and our account of them arbitrary that we feel able to point out the exact junction between them, or rather, feel that there is an exact junction if only we knew it.’20 It is an old realist error to think that there might be a fixed independent objective truth in answer to questions of this kind. The present, for Collingwood, is then both ideal and real. Ideal because it exists in thought; real because the present is the only reality for us. ‘Time, as succession of past, present and future, really has its being totum simul for the thought of a spectator, and this justifies its ‘spatialized’ presentation as a line of which we can see the whole at once; it also justifies, so far as they go, subjectivist views of time like that of Kant.21 Is Kant’s position ‘subjectivist’, as Collingwood, perhaps misleadingly, suggests here? ‘The whole distinction between a subjective and an objective factor in experience loses most of its significance with the abolition … of the vicious Kantian distinction between the “given” in perception and the “work of the mind”,’ says idealist A. E. Taylor.22 Idealism denies the ‘given’ as an unstructured reality independent of us.23 As George Berkeley saw, in some way that he was not himself able to explain satisfactorily, to be is to be perceived as such; it is all ‘ideas’.24 All is in ‘thought’. All is the ‘work of the mind’. It should be noted that the idealist is not here giving up the idea of the possibility of history being objective, but merely denying that objective knowledge can consist in the matching of what historians say with some independently real external reality essentially deprived of human conceptualisation. Historical reality and historical time are not ‘out there’ in some mysterious realm. Historical truth lies rather in the rational use of evidence. 19 Collingwood, Some Perplexities about Time, 149. 20 Ibid., 141. 21 Ibid., 150. 22 Alfred Edward Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics (London, 1903), 242. 23 For ‘the myth of the given’ see Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, in: Herbert Feigl/Michael Scriven (eds.), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. I (Minneapolis/MN, 1956), 253–329. 24 Best explained by him in George Berkeley, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (London, 1713).

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Experience characteristically involves the active focussing of attention, presupposing choice in the matter. Against Kant, for whom any choices we may have in the active focussing of attention are framed by the limits imposed by fixed categories of the mind, things might have been different. It may seem as unimaginable for us as it was for Kant that we might not need to think of temporal experience as organised into past, present and future, but it is precisely that idea which needs to be examined. Crucially, current pragmatism recognises that it is not merely that the experienced world is a matter of contingency, but also, continuing with the idealist view that reality is what we structure it to be, that what we count or organise in thought and language as the experienced world varies with the contingency of historically variable general conceptions of the world.25 Counting or organising reality through the classifications of our language happens not in terms of fixed categories but is something human beings can consciously do by choice. There are, as history and anthropology demonstrate about humanity at large, many different ways of doing it. In virtue of these considerations, we may agree with many pragmatist philosophers today that our knowledge arises in the context of a view that our claims to knowledge, our beliefs, in fact form a ‘web’ that expresses reality as a whole. This holistic ‘web’ metaphor derives from W. V. O. Quine’s work. For Quine, ‘Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system’ … ‘No statement is immune to revision’.26 Changing some of our beliefs, or counting or sorting the world differently, has costs in terms of the requirement for sufficient adjustment elsewhere in our system of beliefs. That requirement typically arises, contingently, in situations of choice, where we desire to change our beliefs for various practical reasons and, to avoid inconsistencies with other beliefs in the web, are obliged to revise some of those other beliefs. While in principle any belief is at risk in this way, as a matter of contingent fact it is often true that it is in practice impossible to find an alternative belief system which does as well in terms of consistency and practicality as the belief system we already have, so that many of our beliefs can then be seen as ‘established’. That ‘practicality’ is a consideration here marks out this approach as part of the tradition of philosophical pragmatism. The reference to consistency as a constraint on the web permits many philosophers – at least those with little interest in understanding history – to 25 Isaiah Berlin, The Purpose of Philosophy, in: idem, Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays (Oxford, 1980), 1–11, 8. 26 W. V. O. Quine, Two Dogmas of Empiricism, in his From a Logical Point of View, 2nd edn. (New York, 1961), 20–46, 43.

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treat it as if one could see it synchronically, at least in one’s mind’s eye. For them the web of beliefs may seem to be an abstract matter, and some see the web as if it were a timeless and ideal equilibrium of resolved inconsistencies between beliefs. By contrast the web should be understood diachronically rather than synchronically, as modelling the actual world of beliefs. History is inherently diachronic, and history is also that which we conceptually count or organise as ongoing historical reality. As such, this pragmatic model is appropriate for framing our understanding of history. Being diachronic, our expression of the web at any one time may have inconsistencies, some ignored and others heading for resolution. The so-called ‘web of beliefs’ is then properly to be seen as an ongoing and changing holistic process, involving only contingently the resolution of conflict by an evolving search for consistency in the face of difficulties. The image we should then have is of a rolling web of beliefs and other expressions, which organise and sort historical reality. Our language, a successfully shared social institution, embodies our decisions about how to sort the world. How we do this is not a timeless question for philosophers but a factual question appropriate for historical recovery, so making the history of historiography important for the philosophy of history. We may imagine that the point here refers primarily to simple concepts and so to beliefs expressed in comparatively short sentences, but historians express historical reality in larger units of meaning than this, commonly in terms of lengthy narratives or indeed in temporal structures or periodisations that are much greater still. Narratives offer far more than merely a list of discontinuous facts. They unify those facts into temporal structures that sort, classify and express the historical world. More accurately, the web is to be seen as a rolling web of reality-sorting expressions, of whatever temporal size. Hence reality, including historical reality, is what we count it to be, and in principle we can choose, and have chosen, to count it as we do and have. We live with the outcome of our inherited choices, most of which we are not able to revisit simply because we no longer see them as the outcome of choices, while many more choices, even if we wished to revisit them, are not in practice revisable because an alternative belief system consistently permitting change is not available to us. It is appropriate here to repeat Collingwood’s point: time is a succession of past, present and future, existing all at once in thought. We may now interpret that, in terms of history, as the rolling web of reality-counting expressions: the structure of time in past, present and future, existing all at once in Collingwoodian thought, is the diachronic Quinean web. We share time. What matters for us here are the limits on the range of choices we have in understanding it.

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2. The Limits of Temporal Revision Despite the variation, in principle, of the ways in which we might conceptualise time, at least one clear limit becomes apparent since the alternative seems unimaginable. It is plausible to hold, as a matter of fact about our everyday conception of time, the following: foundational and pragmatically irrevisable in our actual personal experience of time is our personal experience as that is conceptualised by us in terms of the words ‘earlier’ and ‘later’. In everyday contexts we share an inherited and unrevisable understanding of these words. That does not mean that we always agree on what is earlier and what is later, that is, agree when these words are to be applied. For I may think (for example) that successful public education in the United Kingdom in the 1950s was earlier than economic advance in the period, and you may think it was later. We may both be wrong: they may be neither earlier nor later than each other, but be concurrent or overlap; indeed, neither may have occurred. Yet we do agree that if one particular occurrence is earlier than another, the very same occurrence cannot also be later. Difficulties are apparent even here, for one period of history may be both earlier and later than another in so far as it includes the latter and does not merely overlap with it: it began first and finished later. Here the problem lies in exactly when we have a single occurrence and when a lengthy period, or in how long or short an ‘event’ may be by comparison with an ‘occurrence’ or a ‘state of affairs’. Yet, essentially, our shared understanding enables us to judge when the words ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ are being used in inconsistent ways, and it is inconsistency which marks this first limit of the revisability of temporal concepts. You and I cannot believe inconsistent things. Philosophically, the question arises of what drives our standards of consistency. What kind of ‘cannot’ is involved when we claim ‘you and I cannot believe inconsistent things’?27 Here, given the pragmatism now outlined and adopted, we are to understand the requirement of consistency as a personally perceived and localised psychological constraint. The words ‘local’, ‘psychological’ and ‘personal’ here are important. The word ‘local’ varies widely in its possible range of application. I may think Europe local, by contrast with the rest of the world. Or, by using the word, I may intend instead to localise to a much more limited area of the public space around me. It depends on the context, on my audience. I might also wish to localise to my own immediate person. Centrally, the use of the word implies a contrast with a world beyond that which is referred to. While of standard use in spatial contexts, it is also regularly used in a metaphorical way. Next we need to under27 The grounds of consistency are examined in Jonathan Gorman, The Normativity of Logic in the History of Ideas, Intellectual History Review XXII, 2011, 3–13.

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stand ‘local’ as referring to that which is local or immediate within my own thought. Here the contrast is with those contents of my thought that are not immediately a matter of conscious deliberation. Within my immediate thought I might, for example, believe something that, unbeknown to me in that immediate thought, had distant implications which conflict with other beliefs I also hold. These other beliefs, while mine, lie beyond the ones I am currently using. Hence not being immediately aware either of them or of the distant implications of my immediate thought, I am also unaware of the consequence that my overall beliefs are inconsistent with each other. Not being aware of the inconsistency, the demand for consistency involves no constraint upon my immediate thinking. Yet when any one of us localises our personal thought in a practical way to what is immediate to each of us, the psychological constraint becomes apparent and effective. Knowing as I immediately do what ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ count for me as meaning, I am psychologically unable to believe at the same time28 that, for example, the 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act in Britain came earlier than major changes in attitudes towards Catholics on the British mainland and also that it came later than those changes.29 Try as I might, I just can’t do it. It is a personal psychological inability. That there is a happy coincidence here with the requirements of the laws of classical logic suggests that there is further work for a philosopher to do, but, whatever the philosophical issues, the personal psychological constraint remains. Moreover you are in the same situation as me: you too, given that you share with me as you do the meanings of the terms involved, cannot believe at the same time that the 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act in Britain came earlier than major changes in attitudes towards Catholics on the British mainland and also that it came later. The upshot of this illustration is that neither one of us is able to conceive his or her actual and immediate experience in ways which are inconsistent with what is captured by what we accept that we ordinarily mean by ‘earlier’ and ‘later’. Hence my temporal conceptualisation of my immediate experience in terms of ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ cannot be re-conceptualised by me to reach what I judge at the time to be inconsistent beliefs. Nor can you successfully decide to do such a thing. It follows that ‘we’, that is you and I, conceived as referring here to just us two single individuals, cannot organise time in such contradictory ways. Nor can any particular person in any larger group, whatever its size. And yet importantly, you and I might in principle contradict each other. For example, at the same time, you may believe that the 1829 Catholic 28 ‘At the same time’ means in my immediate present. I can, of course, ‘entertain’ inconsistent thoughts; I just cannot believe them, that is, judge them both to be true. 29 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London, 1992), 343–344.

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Emancipation Act in Britain came earlier than major changes in attitudes towards Catholics on the British mainland, and I may believe that it came later. There is no inconsistency within either of us here, but there is an inconsistency between the two of us. Here, clearly, ‘we’ can choose in contradictory ways, and many have thought that the discipline of history is distinctive for such disagreements, and indeed that their existence is what prevents history from being a science. There is certainly no personal psychological constraint blocking such contradictions. What ‘we’ can or cannot do here is hence ambiguous.30 On the first meaning, we cannot organise time in contradictory ways, since neither one of us can. On the second meaning, ‘we’ (conceived in this context as referring to our small group of two as a whole rather than to two single individuals) can, in principle, choose what to believe in contradictory ways. It is contingent whether we contradict each other in this way or agree on the fact of the matter. Even if the two of us agree, others may differ from us. It is contingent how big our group may be considered to be, whether by us or by a future historian looking back at us. It is contingent how widely agreement is shared, whether at the personal, the local, or even the worldwide level. It is also contingent how far we may wish to resolve the disagreement. Scientifically minded historians may be more disposed to resolve historical disagreements than those who see historical writing as more of an art. Crucially, if you are far enough away from me, we might not notice any contradiction between us, a situation analogous to that in which some of my own beliefs are inconsistent with and distant from those beliefs that are part of my immediate thought. It is not to be merely assumed that all contradictions in the ideas held within a society are apparent within a particular group, whatever its size, any more than that all the contradictions within my own thought are apparent to me in my immediate thought. Also crucially, when some contradiction surfaces within a particular group, there is no personal psychological constraint preventing it; but there may be some social constraint either preventing its adoption or requiring its resolution. In this way a social constraint – law, force, public opinion – may be analogous to the personal psychological constraint of a law of logic, and may similarly limit the room for re-conceptualising our ideas about time. In practice all those who share the same language have agreed on the fundamental meanings of ‘earlier’ and ‘later’. We have noticed that we may not agree exactly when it is correct to apply these words. Yet we, in our language community, may be understood, as a matter of contingent fact, to have 30 The ambiguity can also lead to paradoxes of democracy. See Jonathan Gorman, A Problem in the Justification of Democracy, Analysis XXXVIII, 1978, 46–50.

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agreed to share the same world with each other and to have organised time in the same shared simple conceptual ways, so that we can get on with each other.31 Such ‘agreement’ is often – perhaps almost always – tacit. It is analogous to the familiar understanding of social contract theory in political science: we are with hindsight deemed to have agreed with each other in virtue of our compliance with ongoing relevant norms. We may be deemed to have done more: working within the absolute limits imposed by consistency, which is a matter of personal psychological constraints, we can see ourselves as having in the past decided to choose and establish other limits for ourselves about temporal order. That is, we can understand that there are social limits which those of us in the present have largely inherited. In fact, in our modern societies, we share a wide understanding of large temporal structures, structures which go beyond the merely personal or the limitations of our local or sectional concerns. For example, we may imagine sharing with others in British society the following historical view: that any disagreement about whether the 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act in Britain came earlier or later than major changes in attitudes towards Catholics on the British mainland has long since been resolved in favour of the view that it came later, rather than, say, that it was ‘only because of the threat of insurrection in Ireland’.32 Telling the story with this temporal order reinforces the British conception of themselves as essentially a tolerant people. The fact of the matter, whatever it is, may now be imagined to be a long-established historical fact, and a practical limit will then have been set in that we will not, we would predict, revisit that history in order to re-sort its temporal ordering. It is historians who would judge these things. Thus, in so far as we have inherited a conceptual scheme in which we share the same world with other people, we have to have overcome any important differences in our conceptualisation of shared time. It is a contingent question whether there were in the past any such differences, not one determined by some a priori argument. Our having overcome any such differences will, contingently, have ‘fixed’ our conceptualisations of our shared time. Since this ‘fixing’ is a contingency, it follows that we might have done it differently. It is again a practical question how far we can make sense of counterfactual alternatives to our present conceptions, a practical question how far we would even bother to try, and a practical question how far alternative schemes can be found in the past. What we count as our shared world is nevertheless a diachronic 31 Jonathan Gorman, The Grammar of Historiography, Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Journal of the History of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Science III, 2010, 44–53. 32 Colley, Britons, 344, referring to G. I. T. Machin, The Catholic Question in English Politics 1820 to 1830 (Oxford, 1964).

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matter, with revision sometimes preserving traditional shared understandings, sometimes not.33 We have examined a situation in which you and I choose what to believe in contradictory ways. Perhaps my conceptualisation of the time through which we are living is that it is a period of progress, beginning with the end of bloody twentieth century revolutions and wars and marked by the continuing if slow advance of human rights and individual wealth. You, by contrast, might see things over a rather longer period and consider that all has been and will continue to be an inevitable decline in the moral fibre and comparative affluence of diminishing Western empires. A future historian may mark our disagreement, and may choose to judge which of us is right; but that future viewpoint may instead ignore our views entirely and periodise the time in which we live in terms of quite different structures. Those structures might be presently known to us as possible ideas, which we think inappropriate to our time; or they may involve an understanding that is beyond our present limits. Historians can periodise time in different and contradictory ways. Some historians think that ‘objectivity’ requires that they see the past in terms shared with those about whom they are writing. They are wrong: they cannot achieve ‘objectivity’ by this route since, in the present hypothetical example, future historians will have to decide between you and me, and, apart from anachronistic partisanship, they can only make that decision in the light of matters future to us and outside the terms you and I recognise. Historians characteristically do not, and should not, decide a priori that they will, or will not, write about the past in ways that they share with those about whom they write. Historians characteristically do and should deal with the issue in terms of the evidential detail. It is plausible that Kant knew he was living through an Enlightenment much as later historians have conceptualised it (indeed, later historians did so partly as an outcome of the self-understanding of people in Kant’s position); by contrast, it is considerably less plausible to think that people living during the English ‘long eighteenth century’ knew that this was what they were doing; they did not conceptualise their own present in that way. Yet in order to share their world with others of their own time, they did have to share, to an extent, some other diachronic process of conceptualisation, changing and conflictual though it was. Historians can, but do not have to, engage with that.

33 Jonathan Gorman, The Commonplaces of ‘Revision’ and their Implications for Historiographical Understanding, History and Theory, Theme Issue XLVI on Revision in History, 2007, 20–44.

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3. The Present We have fixed ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ in our shared experience, and our historically established social practices have established much more. But have we fixed the ‘present’? Certainly not as a ‘mathematical point’, as Collingwood affirmed.34 I am now writing this essay, and it is still ‘now’ as I come to the end of this sentence. That the phenomenology of the experience of time shows it to be continuous and extended beyond a ‘point present’ is widely accepted. Hearing a piece of music is another example of experiencing continuity as both present and over time. Our shared practical understanding of ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ is such that it is impossible for us to conceive of this in such a way that, when we listen together to a symphony, for you, the first movement takes place earlier than the second, while, for me, the first movement takes place later than the second. But we may nevertheless count or periodise the ‘present’ here in different ways, and often do. You and I may be watching a film accompanied by music. You, hearing the music, may ‘periodise’ it into musical passages, for example, concentrating on those; while I am periodising the music according to the action on screen. Neither of us is wrong, and neither right, in periodising as we do. There is much freedom here. Yet, while we do not share a mode of periodising, we both hear the music during an extended present, even if we each differ from the other in our judgement of the duration of that present. Such differences show that there is, in general, much freedom about how to sort the present (and the past), and there is no fixed duration for ‘the present’ in our experience. Nevertheless Collingwood, while right in his view that the present is extended, suggests an inappropriate limitation: he sees it as a union of past and present, whereas it also includes the future. The sentence ‘Now I am writing a sentence’, which on this occasion I think before coming to the end of the sentence I am now writing, covers more than a point-present, and includes in the ‘now’ of its delivery the anticipated end of the sentence I am now writing; it is also true. The sentence just written is plainly of long enough duration to make not just the past and present but also the future very apparent within the extended present of the thought. Developing Arthur Danto’s notion of ‘narrative sentences’,35 which Danto thought commonly take the past tense, Mark Day defines ‘an open narrative sentence’, which ‘is about a past event, but which refers to it in terms of later events, including events that have not taken place by the time of the speaker. Such sentences are open to the utterer’s future.’36 Day, thinking of sentences 34 Collingwood, Some Perplexities about Time, 149. 35 Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History, 143, 156, chap. VIII and passim. 36 Mark Day, The Philosophy of History (London, 2008), 227; Day’s emphasis.

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as in part properly capable of being future-referring, rightly stresses that ‘what is required is an act of will: the will to make that sentence true by your future action’.37 The third sentence in the present paragraph clearly indicated my intention to complete the action of writing in the remaining time required and illustrated the substantial duration of that ‘present’ or ‘now’ of immediate thought in which it was written. Also, I made the sentence true as I completed it. Similarly, ‘I am writing an essay’ is explicitly in the present tense, but none would interpret that as implying that an essay is being written instantaneously in a point-present. Plainly, it can take months, and future achievement is part of the thought expressed. Our inherited language is well organised to express the present as having continuity of duration. Our references to ‘the present’ as having duration can mean much more than these brief examples. The present is not merely that of our immediate personal experience, but also that which we share with other people. Our tensed language reflects the fact that we frequently count the present as being of much longer duration than that of immediate personal experience. The continuous present in writing a sentence takes us mere seconds into the future; as just observed, ‘I am writing an essay’ can imply a duration of months for the continuous present; ‘we are fighting a war’ can involve a continuous present which implies a duration of years; ‘we live in the modern period’ implies so much more. Following Day’s suggestion and in so far as we are periodising our own shared present, it is appropriate for us to use future-referring narrative sentences if we have the intention, confidence and power to complete bringing their truth about.38 Narrative sentences are characteristically embedded in accounts covering conceptualised swathes of time which can include our personally experienced presents, and narrative sentences (past, present and future-referring as appropriate) are an important part of the grammar and rhetoric of expression of such temporal structures. We should see such conceptualised swathes of time as part of the rolling web of reality-counting expressions, a web which has not just past and present but (given our intentions, confidence and power) a future too.39 On the pragmatist approach adopted here, reality is what we count it to be. We should understand the power and confidence to include the future as part of our current extended present, as the power and confidence to control what we will accept as true descriptions of the future. Indeed, it should be noted that our confidence may be such that we give no thought to the possibility 37 Ibid. 38 Illustrated in Jonathan Gorman, The Grammar of Historiography. 39 Jonathan Gorman, The Presuppositions of Writing the History of Historiography, Storia della storiografia LIX-LX, 2011, 198–208.

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that our future will not turn out to be what we anticipate. The future can then be understood as ‘fixed’ if we develop a grasp of the powers, and their limitations, which govern the choices we have and will have over what to believe is the case. A successful theory of the future might in principle be selfaffirming if humanity thought it true and had the power to act accordingly; indeed, the future-referring model of Christian belief may be seen to have operated in just such a way in pre-modern times. It is a historically variable contingent matter recoverable by historians, not a matter for a priori philosophical theorising, what the constraints are on how far we may think of the historical future as predictable. The Victorians had great confidence that they could bind the future, some of it well founded. That the time in Bristol is the same as the time in London is a result of nineteenth-century decisions in the development of railways, decisions beyond our current imagining to revisit. How peoples with different degrees of confidence frame their own positions in time, and how they understand their own pasts, extended presents and futures, give them (and offer for later historians’ views of them) periods of calm or periods of uncertainty and fracture. Real confidence in organising the shared present shows itself in a lack of consciousness of alternatives to the ongoing certainties that people feel. It might, for example, be unthinkable at some period that the sun would set on the British Empire, or that the Third Reich would not last for a thousand years. Such attitudes are foundational for those societies, and a society’s shared present is regarded by its members as fixed and incapable of revision in those matters which are foundational for it. How pervasive such certainties are can vary, and any fracturing accordingly piecemeal and gentle on the one hand, or catastrophic and revolutionary on the other. Historians writing about large-scale structures such as the Renaissance or the Enlightenment clearly think of them as wideranging, and Ludwig Wittgenstein thinks of them in that way too. Following Wittgenstein, we may characterise the swathes of time in which such commonsense certainties arise as ‘forms of life’. Martin Kusch quotes from Wittgenstein other similes: ‘a world-picture’; ‘the rock bottom of my convictions’.40 Thomas Kuhn used the now familiar word ‘paradigm’.41

40 Martin Kusch, Kripke’s Wittgenstein: On Certainty, and Epistemic Relativism, forthcoming, 15–16, http://univie.academia.edu/MartinKusch/Papers/102778/Kripkes_ Wittgenstein_On_Certainty_and_Epistemic_Relativism [accessed 22 Feb 2011]. 41 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962).

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4. Absolute Presuppositions Recall the first of our original questions: ‘Is distinguishing between past, present and future simply a matter of passively “recognising” or “observing”, what is “natural” and “undeniable”, or does it involve a more active stance in which social actors create and recreate these divisions?’ Within our current pragmatic framework there is no general answer. Some matters appear as undeniable certainties, whereas others are regarded as available for revision. Collingwood recognised such pervasive and long-lasting certainties as involved in Wittgenstein’s ‘forms of life’, and he asserted that they are historically contingent. He called an ‘absolute presupposition’ a belief or assumption underlying the beliefs and attitudes involved in our ordinary ways of life, an assumption which is a historical absolute for a time, in that it is contingently uncriticisable at that time.42 A belief or attitude is uncriticisable at a time because it is not even entertained at that time as a conscious thought, let alone doubted and actively contrasted with serious alternatives. It is unthinkingly presupposed by past agents. An absolute presupposition is uncriticisable because the question to which it might be an answer is simply not raised, and the issue whether there might be a better answer similarly never arises. Truth and falsity do not apply to absolute presuppositions because the question of their truth is unconsidered, and so the idea has no meaning for those for whom a presupposition is absolute. Kusch points out that Wittgenstein’s view of commonsense certainties suggests that they have a peculiar character: ‘He writes that certainties are both true and neither true nor false (83, 205); … Although we cannot be in error about common-sense certainties, we are not infallible regarding them either (425, 384, 385).’43 Just as commonsense certainties are seen by Wittgenstein as both true and neither true nor false, so for Collingwood absolute presuppositions are not properly capable of being true or false; indeed, there is a striking similarity here between Wittgenstein and Collingwood. The ‘uncriticisability’ of an absolute presupposition involves in our terms a pragmatic impossibility. While in a priori principle people can reorganise their world creatively, they may not in fact be aware of practicable alternatives, and the choices they have are contingently limited by their situation. ‘Absolute presuppositions’ may then be taken to mark the contingent limits of choice in the judgements made by people in a given form of life, for they are not recognised by them as choices at all. Since the confirmation of Britain 42 William Henry Walsh, Metaphysics (London, 1963), 160; R. G. Collingwood, Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford, 1940); idem, Autobiography (Oxford, 1939), chap. 8. 43 Kusch’s references are to Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Oxford, 1969). Martin Kusch, Kripke’s Wittgenstein.

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as a Protestant state, for centuries it was unconsciously assumed in government that Catholic emancipation was simply not an option. Reconceptualising their own situation, with its particular social characteristics and temporal structuring, was in practice impossible where their own absolute presuppositions were concerned. Historians of those forms of life need to recover the absolute presuppositions and observe – on the further assumption that they do not themselves share those presuppositions (for we too have them) – the way in which the presuppositions ceased to be absolute and where and when alternatives were considered, so marking how the form of life came to an end. Historical hindsight alone gives alternatives to absolute presuppositions, and the required hindsight for our own present will be future to us. The task of metaphysics, thought Collingwood, could only be the recovery of absolute presuppositions, which was an undertaking essentially involving historiographical method. We draw from Collingwood here not merely a view of how metaphysics should be undertaken but also a view (not his) of how history should be undertaken. Unfortunately, by ‘historiographical method’ Collingwood meant empathetic understanding, that is, the re-enactment of past thought. That won’t do, because the re-enactment of past thought is impossible as a means of recovering absolute presuppositions, since absolute presuppositions are not consciously thought. We cannot put ourselves in the position of the past agent and directly recover a thought which was never consciously there. Herbert Butterfield notices the point: There are ‘things that the men of 1600 shall we say – but the men of 1900 similarly – do not have to explain to one another, and the result is that they do not always get into the historian’s evidence’.44 Again: ‘It took a lot of work, a lot of insight, on the part of Namier and others, to discover those dim unavowed things that the men of 1760 had not even needed to talk to one another about.’45 To recover absolute presuppositions without empathetic understanding, without evidence, we may then have to engage in the philosophical analysis of past writings. Once again the borderline between philosophy and history is blurred. Again, we may have to ascribe presuppositions and choices to past agents, using a model which is inevitably anachronistic and only applicable with hindsight.46 Only hindsight allows the practical ascription of truth or falsity to absolute presuppositions, and the recovery of them is inherently anachronistic just because we, recovering them, can see alternatives to them as the past society could not. To put the same point differently, even if the actual 44 Herbert Butterfield, The Discontinuities between the Generations in History: Their Effect on the Transmission of Political Experience (Cambridge, 1971), 6. 45 Ibid., 7. 46 Economic models are familiarly used. See Jonathan Gorman, Understanding History (Ottawa, 1991), chap. 5.

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thoughts expressing an absolute presupposition were there and per impossibile recoverable by re-enactment, alternative thoughts plainly were not, and we could not – in an attempt to avoid anachronism – uninvent our own understanding of the thought, which typically comes complete with the alternatives. The meaning of the thought would inevitably be ours, and not the past agent’s, on this approach, since for them the thought was absolute while for us it is not. Where, now, shall we draw the difference between the ‘present’ and the ‘past’? For, while sometimes it may be passive and undeniable, it may sometimes be our choice. Indeed, in some circumstances we can vote for it. One of the unsuccessful candidates in the October 2011 election for the presidency of the Republic of Ireland was Martin McGuinness. While on the one hand Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland and a central figure in the peace process, he has also been a commander in the Provisional Irish Republican Army. During the election he was confronted by relatives of victims of IRA killings who blamed him for his role, and he sought to persuade electors that Ireland had moved on: that with the peace process there had been a clean break with the past, and that his past was therefore not relevant. Looking back, the ‘historic’ peace in Ireland marks for many the difference between past and present, and is widely seen that way in the North. Yet for the relatives of victims the past lives on. Had McGuinness won the election, the electorate might be taken to have voted for the view that the violence should be seen as a thing of the past, not the present. McGuinness proposes to reoffer himself for election in 2018, when the new president’s first term of office ends. The then electorate may yet vote to separate McGuinness’s perceived past from the then present. In a different world, the distinction between ‘past’ and ‘present’ can be marked by less democratic political decisions: in a jokey but perceptive remark, W. B. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman suggest that a favourite of Elizabeth I of England, Sir Walter Raleigh, was executed by James I ‘for being left over from the previous reign’.47 Everyone in the England of 1618 knew exactly how to periodise the time in which they lived, namely in terms of reigns. It would be treason not to. The ‘present’ is that period during which we all share with each other the same broad conceptualisations of shared temporal structures, the same sense of sharing in the same diachronic process, and in particular, from a historian’s point of view, the same absolute presuppositions. But, as Collingwood said, ‘in actual history, events overlap’.48 In accordance with our pragmatic understanding of the rolling diachronic web of reality-counting expressions, at any given period there will be a range of presuppositions, 47 Walter Carruthers Sellar/Robert Julian Yeatman, 1066 and All That (London 1930), 62. 48 Collingwood, Some Perplexities about Time, 141.

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some with ‘absolute’ status not in practice available for reconsideration and hence wholly unexamined, some consciously known and fixed because alternatives are not available, some doubted with an active search ongoing for alternatives which may yet become available. A wide swathe of time, over large communities, will certainly disclose the variability here, and historical recovery of the thought of a single individual may well disclose it too. Looking back, the past comes into idealistically understood existence as contrasting with the present when we see ourselves as no longer sharing the ongoing world with the past individuals in question. The change comes when people in the present become conscious of ideas which people in the past unconsciously assumed. The change comes when, because of changes in the status of what were once absolute presuppositions, we no longer feel that we do, or that we have to, conceptualise our own time in the same way as past individuals did. The change comes when we feel that we can periodise our past, present and future in ways which permit temporal choices and conceptual re-arrangements which those past individuals never had available to them. We may again illustrate with Butterfield, who remarks: ‘At one period it is felt to be the natural thing, as well as the proper thing, for the clergy to be amenable only to ecclesiastical law; but in another period things are inverted, and, without any consciousness of running to paradox, ordinary people will refuse to believe that the clergy should not be amenable to the law of the land, like everybody else.’49 Just what count for historians as the central differences in absolute presuppositions is a matter for historical judgement. Such judgements may sometimes draw on philosophical analysis. The differences between present and past lie importantly, but not solely, in the contingent differences between our absolute presuppositions and those of past groupings, whether about time itself or about anything else. The same kinds of differences mark our distinguishing the people who we are from those in other communities today. In so far as communities are tied to territories, distinguishing our areas of space from other areas lies again in the differences between our assumptions and expectations and theirs, between our absolute presuppositions and theirs. Where exactly the differences lie is a matter for judgement, just as it is a matter of judgement what we choose to share, with whom we choose to share it, and for how long we choose to do so. With respect to sharing with different peoples in the present, such judgements mark the limits of toleration. With respect to the past, these judgements are all contingent matters which include our senses of how far we ought to share past selfunderstandings, how appropriate it is to revise them, and how soon we may allow ourselves to forget what our forebears thought and experienced. 49 Butterfield, Discontinuities, 5–6.

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Constantin Fasolt

Breaking up Time – Escaping from Time: Self-Assertion and Knowledge of the Past1

Perhaps the idea of a new historical period is an idea of a generation whose natural reactions – not merely whose ideas or mores – diverge from the old; it is an idea of a new (human) nature. And different historical periods may exist side by side, over long stretches, and within one human breast. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

Different human beings at different times in different places have different attitudes to time. Some focus on the present, some on the past, some on the future. Some view time as a devourer, others as a healer of all wounds. Some believe that time can be divided into segments, while others treat it as a seamless web. Time can be perceived as moving fast or slow or standing still. Time can be likened to an arrow, a river, a circle, a wheel. For some human beings time is the most elementary reality; for others it is nothing but illusion.2 These differences raise many questions for historians and philosophers of history. Some of those questions concern the notion of a break in time. That is the subject of this paper, which is divided into seven parts. First, I describe 1 I would like to thank Chris Lorenz and Berber Bevernage for challenging me to extend the case I made in The Limits of History (Chicago, 2004). I would also like to thank the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, the contributors to the conference, the members of the Early Modern Workshop at the University of Chicago, Jean K. Carney, Bob Rosen, David Terman, John Riker, Marcia Dobson and David Nirenberg for helping me to clarify my thoughts and their expression. 2 For rough guidance to a vast and variegated literature, consider Stephen E. Toulmin/ June Goodfield, The Discovery of Time (New York, 1965); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton/NJ, 2000); Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York, 2002); William H. Sewell, Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005); Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia, 2008); Zachary S. Schiffman, The Birth of the Past (Baltimore, 2011); and Arnaldo Momigliano’s characteristically incisive Time in Ancient Historiography, History and Theory VI, 1966, 1–23.

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Moore’s paradox. Second, I use Moore’s paradox to explicate the grammar – the essence – of change over time.3 Third, I examine what it means to make a break in time. Fourth, I address the question whether a whole society can make a break in time. Fifth, I treat Sophocles’ Oedipus as a poetic example of a break in time made by an individual. Sixth, I treat Europe as a historical example of a break in time made by an entire society. Seventh, I turn to the role historians have played in that break. Finally, in conclusion, I propose an explanation for the tenacity of the conventional division of European history into ancient, medieval and modern periods.

1. Moore’s Paradox The most effective way I know to clarify just what is meant by a break in time is to focus first on Moore’s paradox, named after Ludwig Wittgenstein’s friend and predecessor as Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, G. E. Moore.4 Moore’s paradox appears in sentences like this: ‘It is raining, and I do not believe that it is raining.’ This sentence consists of a conjunction of two propositions. One states that it is raining. The other states that I do not believe that it is raining. The paradox is that the sentence has no intelligible meaning and yet may very well be true. It may be true that it is raining. It may also be true that I do not believe that it is raining. Logically speaking these truths are unrelated. They do not contradict each other. Each is a matter of contingent fact. And yet their combination has no intelligible meaning. If I say, ‘It is raining and I do not believe that it is raining,’ I make no sense. I give the impression of a human being who does not understand what he is saying. The best response would be to ask, ‘What do you mean?’ Moore’s paradox is limited to sentences combining an assertion of a fact with an expression of disbelief in the truth of that fact in the first person present indicative.5 It vanishes as soon as you change the person or the tense. If, for example, you change the first person into the third person and say, ‘It 3 The relationship between grammar and essence is considered below. 4 Mitchell S. Green/John Williams (eds.), Moore’s Paradox: New Essays on Belief, Rationality, and the First Person (Oxford, 2007). 5 As Wittgenstein put it, ‘One can mistrust one’s own senses, but not one’s own belief. If there were a verb meaning “to believe falsely”, it would not have a meaningful first person present indicative.’ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen = Philosophical Investigations, G. E. M. Anscombe/Peter M. S. Hacker/Joachim Schulte (trans.) (Chichester, 2009), Part II x.91–92. What used to be called Part II of the Philosophical Investigations in older editions is called Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment in the muchimproved edition of 2009, where the title Philosophical Investigations is reserved for Part I. I henceforth cite Part I as PI and Part II as PPF, followed by section number.

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is raining and he does not believe that it is raining,’ you make perfectly good sense. You assert that someone mistakenly believes something to be the case that is not so. That is a commonplace occurrence. Again, if you change the tense from the present to the past, there is no problem. If I say, ‘It was raining and I did not believe that it was raining,’ I assert that I once mistakenly believed something to be the case that was not so. That, too, is a perfectly commonplace occurrence. Why then does it create a paradox to say in the first person present indicative that ‘It is raining and I do not believe it is raining’? The answer to that question may seem to be a matter of purely grammatical or logical significance. But it is neither ‘purely grammatical’ nor ‘purely logical’. It rather is grammatical in the full sense that Wittgenstein gave to grammar. There is no space here to explain that sense. What does need to be said, however, is that it is not ‘purely linguistic’, though it is often said to be. To treat grammar as a ‘purely linguistic’ matter is, roughly speaking, to deny that grammar has anything to do with the reality of things, or to assert that language stands between us and the reality of things, or that reality is a mere construct of our minds. That is an idea at least as ancient as Protagoras. Today it forms the pivot of what is often called the ‘linguistic turn’.6 Once the linguistic turn is made, reality seems to move out of sight, the very concept of an ‘essence’ seems to become untenable, and facts seem to be barely, if at all, discernible from fiction. But that is not what Wittgenstein maintained. Quite the opposite, on Wittgenstein’s understanding it is precisely grammar that gives us access to the reality of things. He certainly acknowledged how strongly we are ‘tempted to say that our way of speaking does not describe the facts as they really are. As if, for example, the proposition “he has pains” could be false in some other way than by that man’s not having pains. As if the form of expression were saying something false, even when the proposition faute de mieux asserted something true.’7 But that temptation was precisely what he attacked. He thought the talk opposing language to reality is fundamentally confused because it does not heed the difference between the world and things existing in the world. He gave that difference pride of place at the beginning of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: ‘The world is the totality of 6 Cf. Roland Barthes, The Discourse of History, Stephen Bann (trans.), Comparative Criticism III, 1981, 7–20 (first published 1967); John E. Toews, Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience, American Historical Review XCII, 1987, 879–907; Joyce O. Appleby/Lynn A. Hunt/Margaret C. Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New York, 1994); and Gabrielle M. Spiegel (ed.), Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn (New York, 2005). 7 PI 402.

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facts, not of things.’8 He kept insisting that, ‘when we say, mean, that suchand-such is the case, then, with what we mean, we do not stop anywhere short of the fact.’9 He declared that ‘essence is expressed in grammar.’10 He held that ‘grammar tells what kind of object anything is.’11 And he brusquely rebutted the sceptic who deems that we construct the truth on terms we are at liberty to choose by drawing an elementary distinction between agreement in language and telling the truth: ‘“So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?” – What is true or false is what human beings say; and it is in their language that human beings agree. This is agreement not in opinions, but rather in form of life.’12

2. Change over Time In this sense of grammar Moore’s paradox is anything but ‘purely grammatical’. It rather tells us that the difference between ‘I believe’ in the first person present indicative and ‘I believed’ in the first person past indicative amounts to something more substantial than a mere change in the time to which these sentences refer. For one thing, the change from ‘I believe’ to ‘I believed’ changes the meaning of the word ‘believe’.13 What I believe in the present is something I cannot regard as false. But I can very well regard as false what I believed in the past. For another, the change from ‘I believe’ to ‘I believed’ changes my relationship to other people. My present belief puts me in disagreement with anyone who says that I am wrong. I can acknowledge the possibility that my belief is false as a hypothesis, but my belief excludes the possibility of my agreeing that the hypothesis is true. My past belief does nothing of the kind. I can very well agree with other people that my past belief was false. Above all else, the change from ‘I believe’ to ‘I believed’ changes 8 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Charles Kay Ogden (trans.) (London, 1922), 1.1. 9 PI 95. 10 PI 371. 11 PI 373. 12 PI 241. The chief authorities from whom I have drawn my understanding of Wittgenstein are Gordon P. Baker/P. M. S. Hacker, An Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations (Oxford, 1980–96); Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge/MA, 1991); Alice Marguerite Crary/Rupert J. Read (eds.), The New Wittgenstein (London, 2000); and the writings of Rush Rhees, Norman Malcolm, Georg Henrik von Wright, G. E. M. Anscombe, Peter Winch, Stanley Cavell, D. Z. Phillips, Ernst Tugendhat and Joachim Schulte. 13 ‘Don’t regard it as a matter of course, but as a most remarkable thing, that the verbs “believe”, “wish”, “want” display all the grammatical forms possessed by “cut”, “chew”, “run”.’ PPF x.93.

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my relation to myself. It changes me from someone who cannot differentiate between the truth and his belief into someone who can. My relation to the person that I am is different from my relation to the person that I was. I still am one and the same human being. But I have changed, and I acknowledge that I have changed by speaking in different tenses. This change in my relation to myself needs closer scrutiny. It begins with something I maintain is true, for example that ‘it is raining.’ In maintaining this as true, I commit myself to an agreement with the statement that I make: I agree that it is true. But I also commit myself to an agreement with myself: I agree that it is I who makes the statement. That is what makes it nonsense for me to express my disbelief in what I say. My agreement with myself, so to speak, eliminates the only space where I could state my disbelief: the space between myself and the person making the statement not to be believed. My agreement with myself establishes that I am one and the same human being as the person who is speaking. It makes me the speaker of my words and thus secures my integrity as a human being. Changing my mind about the truth therefore demands something besides the recognition that what I say is false. It also demands that I dissolve my agreement with myself. That may seem a simple thing to do. But there are some of us who find it difficult to dissolve our agreements with ourselves even when it concerns a matter as seemingly inconsequential as the rain. And most of us find it difficult when the truth in question is so closely intertwined with other truths that it cannot be doubted without doubting those other truths as well, especially if those truths have been confirmed by long-standing habit or profound conviction. Doubting such truths can make us feel as though we were being broken into pieces and hurled into a great abyss from which there is no hope of return. It poses a danger to our integrity as human beings. The danger is sometimes called ‘an inner tension’. But that is a misnomer. Tension is a physical condition, for example, of a bow when it is flexed. It does not involve commitments to the truth or to oneself. ‘Cognitive dissonance’ may seem more appropriate because that does involve the truth. But ‘cognitive dissonance’ is also misleading: The dissonance does not merely concern cognition. It concerns the whole human being whose cognition is in doubt. It threatens to divide me into two persons one of whom maintains as true what the other person doubts. Such a division is emphatically not a matter of ‘purely logical’ inconsistency. We are well known for the frequency and ease – and sometimes even the pleasure – with which we contradict ourselves without the slightest danger to our humanity.14 Nor should it be confused with any purely mental or psychological condition, at least not in the 14 ‘It is raining and it is not raining’ is a contradiction. It can have all sorts of meaning: silly, funny, poetic, unintended and so on. But it poses no threats to anyone.

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familiar sense of ‘psychological’. The danger rather is grammatical in nature. It tests the essence of what it means to be a human being. This test determines if we can change our minds about the truth without doing damage to our humanity. Because we cannot tell the truth without committing ourselves to an agreement with ourselves, we cannot change our minds about the truth without dissolving that agreement. Dissolving that agreement means entering into a disagreement with ourselves. If I am caught in disagreement with myself, I have to reckon with the possibility that two different beings are speaking through my mouth.15 As long as I must reckon with that possibility, I cannot give real meaning to my words. When we cannot give real meaning to our words, we cannot tell what we are saying. Because we cannot tell what we are saying, we can form no intentions. Because we can form no intentions, we cannot act. We enter the land where Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for Godot. Perhaps the best that we can do is to acknowledge the absurdity of our condition. We face the risk of speechlessness, impotence and even madness, both in the sense of rage and of insanity. We are threatened with a specifically human danger: not the loss of our lives, but the undoing of our humanity. Undoing our humanity here means losing the ability to heed the grammar joining truth to commitment. That loss takes many different forms. It can be fast or slow, brief or long lasting, muted or violent, minimal or colossal. It does not have to take the form of a dramatic crisis. It can manifest itself as idle chatter and humdrum fecklessness … and be all the more insidious for that. But when we make a firm commitment to the person we take ourselves to be and then are forced to change our mind about the truth of statements crucial to that commitment, the crisis can be profound. Take statements like the following: ‘You are not your father’s child.’ ‘Your spouse is leaving you.’ ‘Your fortune lies in ruins.’ ‘Your good name has been destroyed.’ ‘Your enemies have won.’ ‘Your country exists no more.’ ‘You have brought death upon yourself.’ ‘There is no God.’ The effort needed to embrace statements like these can shatter us and turn us into ghosts or beasts. That is the danger posed by change over time.

3. Making a Break in Time In principle the danger can be averted in what would seem to be two ways. One is to submit to the experience of time. I can say, ‘It was not raining, but I believed it was.’ In so doing I dissolve the two agreements to which I was 15 ‘One would have to imagine a kind of behaviour suggesting that two beings were speaking through my mouth.’ PPF x.105.

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committed when I said, ‘It is raining’: my agreement that the statement is true and my agreement that I am the person making it. In dissolving those two agreements I make a sacrifice. I sacrifice not merely my commitment to the truth I used to hold. I also sacrifice myself.16 My sacrifice divides myself into a past person committed to the truth I used to hold and a present person holding the opposite. I make the sacrifice by means of the grammatical distinction between the present and the past. In yielding to that distinction, I gain the freedom to let the old person go and take on a new person committed to two new agreements: one with the statement that what I once maintained as true was false; the other with myself, that I am the person making the statement. I have changed and can go on. In saying, ‘It was not raining, but I believed it was,’ I thus do more than merely indicate that I have changed my mind, and more than merely tell the truth about the past. I also answer to the past and claim the past as mine. I meet a responsibility that I have to myself, both as the human being that I am and that I used to be. I acknowledge that the person who said, ‘It is raining,’ and the person who now says, ‘It was not raining, but I believed it was’ – the person sacrificed and the person born from the sacrifice – belong to one and the same human being. In that way I make the experience of time without undoing my humanity. The other way of dealing with the danger that change over time poses to my humanity is not to sacrifice myself, but to assert myself instead.17 I can defy the threat to my humanity. I do so by making a break in time. A break in time is made by replacing the grammatical distinction between the present and the past with an imaginary line. In drawing such a line I turn the past from a matter of fact given to me by grammar into an object of my imagination.18 I imagine that the past leads an existence of its own, quite independently of what I know, or say, or do. When I imagine it like that, it seems to have the unique characteristic that it is gone. It seems to make up a timeless, immutable reality that lies beyond the limits of all possible experience. That is extremely reassuring. I can of course imagine that it has had effects that last into the present. But those effects can enter my experience only because they are present to me now. They constitute remainders from the past. I call them evidence of things that happened. I can subject such 16 It would be of considerable interest to trace the connections between this sacrifice and sacrifice as a religious ritual. That is not possible here, but cf. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, Patrick Gregory (trans.) (Baltimore, 1977), and John Bossy, The Mass as a Social Institution, 1200–1700, Past and Present C, 1983, 29–61. 17 This paragraph and the following state, in a nutshell, the case I made at length in Limits of History. 18 Put differently, I engage in the kind of ‘private exhibition’ that Wittgenstein showed to be an illusion by analysing what it means to feel pain; see PI 311.

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evidence to critical analysis and claim to possess objective knowledge of the past with the authority of a historian. But in so doing I do not claim the past as mine. I rather strengthen my attachment to the object of my imagination. At the same time I claim a new kind of freedom. For I do not merely turn the past into an object of the imagination. I turn my self into an object of the imagination, too. Just as the past appears to be an object that is completely gone, my self appears to be a subject that is completely present. That subject is absolutely one and indivisible. It does not manifest itself in different persons or speak a human language. It rather has ideas and thinks. It is a thinking thing, a res cogitans. It has no commerce with the past and no disagreements with itself. It is completely free. Whatever remainders from the past have happened to survive into the present can have no claim on that subject now unless I approve the claim. At one stroke I have disowned the past and asserted my autonomy. I seem to have escaped from the experience of time by making myself the master of my experience. But I can go still further. I can imagine that the past does not exist at all, not even as an object that is gone. I can imagine that I merely imagine the existence of the past. I can imagine that the remainders supposedly surviving from the past are nothing but raw material for representations of a past that never was. I can subject such representations to critical analysis and claim to possess objective knowledge of literary fictions with the authority of a critic. In so doing I also claim yet another new kind of freedom. I can imagine that I merely imagine my self to be a thinking thing, a res cogitans. I can imagine that there exists no subject, but only fragments of subjectivity, all of which conflict with one another and none of which can fall into a disagreement with itself. Thus both my past and my self turn out to be entirely fictitious. I seem to have escaped from the experience of time because there seems to be no time and no one to make the experience. But none of this is true. A thing, an object or a human being can cease to exist.19 Caesar is dead. His bodily remains must still exist somewhere somehow in some advanced condition of dispersion and decay. But Caesar himself exists no more. That is precisely what it means to say that Caesar died two thousand years ago. But Caesar is different from the past. The past is not a thing. It is a matter of fact. It cannot cease to exist. It is something we have, just as we have a body, feelings and a mind: right now. There is of course a lot we do not know about the past. But so is there about our body, our feelings and our mind. That does nothing to diminish their presence or their reality. We have our body, our feelings, our mind and 19 But even an object cannot simply vanish. See Peter Winch, Ceasing to Exist, in: idem, Trying to Make Sense (Oxford, 1987), 81–106.

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our past regardless of anything we do or do not know. They are inalienably ours. Like our body, our feelings and our mind, the past is something of which we cannot possibly be rid, though we do sometimes wish we could. We do of course have the ability to put an end to our life. But if we do, we do not actually get rid of our body, feelings, mind or past. We just make sure that there is no one left who could be rid of anything at all. If there is any part of time of which it might make sense to say that it is gone, it is the present, not the past. The present is not something that we have. The present slips away from us in every present moment. The past is what we call the present when it is gone. Saying ‘the past is gone,’ is like saying, ‘the present that is gone is gone.’ It is to say the same thing twice about the present and nothing at all about the past. It is a piece of nonsense, not in the sense of babbling, but in the sense that Wittgenstein made the target of philosophy.20 If it is frequently repeated in the erroneous belief that the past must be gone because it is obviously not present, that nonsense can grow to the dimensions of temporal metaphysics with seemingly profound significance. But it is nonsense all the same. It amounts to an illusion. It conveys no information. It merely thwarts our experience of time. And that, of course, is just what makes it so alluring. A break in time may therefore seem to offer us a way out of our disagreements with ourselves that does not require us to sacrifice ourselves to the experience of time. But in fact a break in time does nothing of the kind. So far from solving our disagreements, it makes them more difficult to solve. We make a break in time from a desire to assert ourselves. But we unwittingly achieve the opposite effect. Without knowing what we are doing, we commit an act of violence against our humanity that makes us victims of ourselves. The violence is not physical or psychological or logical – though it has physical, psychological and logical effects for others and for ourselves. It is grammatical. It damages our essence. It is violence done to the human form of life. It splits our past in two: on the one hand, an imaginary object from which we believe ourselves to be entirely detached (because we imagine that it is really gone or totally fictitious); on the other hand, the past we actually have as a matter of known or unknown fact, but whose existence is concealed from us by its imaginary double. A break in time splits our selves in two as well: on the one hand, an imaginary self that seems to have escaped from the experience of time (because we imagine that it has made itself master of the experience or that it does not exist at all); on the other hand, a human self 20 ‘The results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and of bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limits of language. These bumps make us see the value of the discovery.’ PI 119. ‘What I want to teach is: to pass from unobvious nonsense to obvious nonsense.’ PI 464.

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that manifests itself in different persons but is concealed from us by its imaginary double, too. In one sense a break in time is therefore real and in another it is not. It is not real in that it consists of an imaginary line. It does not really break up time – whatever that might be supposed to mean. It merely gives us the illusion that we can make the experience of time without having to sacrifice. But in another sense a break in time is very real indeed. It leads us down a path that we would otherwise not take and gives us an experience that we would otherwise not make. It changes the course of history. At first it gives us the illusion that we have left the past behind and won our autonomy. But then it divides us into factions. Those factions are the conscious manifestation of the damage we have unconsciously done to our humanity by devoting ourselves to its imaginary doubles. Those doubles make up the substance of the argument. One faction claims that the object we have imagined for ourselves objectively exists. The other claims that it exists only in our imagination. Both run the risk of absurdity, tautology and violence. Neither can tell the difference between reality and imagination, much less imagination and imagining imagination. Neither can recognise the ties that bind them to the past or the illusion that unites them with each other. Because we engage in battle over objects of the imagination, we cannot stop the battle. Because we cannot stop the battle, our illusion turns out to be a curse. The curse compels us to re-enact the past we thought we left behind with growing violence, until we meet our doom. Then the illusion is destroyed. A break in time thus marks the beginning of a historical development that ends by forcing us to make, against what seems to be our will, the very sacrifice we had intended to avoid. It puts us on a different, longer, more exciting, more violent and more exhausting road to the experience of time.

4. The Individual and Society Society may seem to be exempt from these considerations. Society might be thought to consist of individual human beings. Without individuals there would then be no society. If Europe, for example, may be considered a society, and Europe made a break in time, that break would have to be explained in terms of many breaks made by the members of European society. And then one would have to ask: which members of European society? The rich? The powerful? The intellectuals? Common men? Common women? The question, ‘Did Europe make a break in time?’ would seem to be misguided. If that is how it seems, it is because the question is confused. Society consists of our agreement in a shared form of life. Such an agreement must be

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distinguished from the human beings whose agreement it is. Society is neither a large group of human beings nor a collective subject. It can neither act nor think. Only human beings can act and think, exercise reason, distinguish true from false, disagree, criticise the structure and the foundations of society, make and break contracts and agreements, and, not the least, prevent us from exercising our rational faculties or subject us to force. But there is no such thing as purely individual human beings. To act or to think is to engage in social activity. Anything that we can do, regardless of how isolated we may be or feel, regardless of how firmly we may assert our independence or our originality, is social by definition – or else it is not human. Like the change from ‘I believe’ to ‘I believed’, whatever change we make changes our relationship both to ourselves and to other human beings. It signifies that the essence of our humanity consists of individuality and membership in society at one and the same time. Society as such, therefore, can make no break in time. But not every break in time that one, or some, or many of us make – and perhaps not even every change that all of us combined can make – amounts to changing our agreement in a shared form of life. A break in the time of individuals or groups of individuals can therefore be distinguished from a break in the time of society. A break in the time of society is made whenever we change our agreement in a shared form of life by drawing an imaginary line between the present and the past in order to avoid confronting disagreements we have with ourselves about our agreement in a shared form of life. In so doing we transform the past we have as members of society into an object of society’s imagination, and we found our agreement in society on the illusion that our society has managed to escape from the experience of time. We commit an act of violence both against our past as members of society and against our agreement in society. Like acts of violence against the past and the self of individuals, the violence splits the humanity of society in two and gives it imaginary doubles. Those doubles are called ‘history’ and ‘sovereignty’. History and sovereignty conceal the disagreements we have with ourselves as members of society about ourselves as members of society. In return for our loyalty they give us the illusion that the history we have is gone, and that an agreement we must accept as given can be replaced with an agreement we can make. Under the spell of that illusion we place our society on the same longer, more exciting, more violent and more exhausting road to the experience of time I have described above.

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5. Oedipus for Example Oedipus tells the story of a man who pays the price for having made a break in time.21 When he was young, a drunkard told him that he was not the son of Polybus, the king of Corinth (852–860). He knew the drunkard’s charge was ‘hardly worth the anxiety I gave it’ (857). But Oedipus did not know then or later how to tolerate anxiety. He asked his parents for the truth. They said he was their son (862–867). Not satisfied with their response, he asked Apollo for confirmation. Apollo did not answer, but told him instead that he would kill his father and marry his mother (867–875). That posed a threat to his humanity too great for Oedipus to bear. So he defied the threat. ‘I heard all that and ran. I abandoned Corinth’ (876). He made a break in time. The action of the play takes place after a lapse of many years. It opens when ‘Thebes is dying’ from blight, sick cattle, stillbirths and the plague (31–38). The people beg Oedipus to rescue them (39–69). Oedipus is at the pinnacle of power and self-confidence. He has killed his father Laius not knowing whom he killed, vanquished the Sphinx, become the king of Thebes and married his mother Jocasta not knowing whom he married. He says, ‘Here I am myself – you all know me, the world knows my fame: I am Oedipus’ (7–9). He seems to have mastered time. Then he learns from the oracle at Delphi that Thebes will not be saved unless the murderer of Laius is found and punished (97–159). He vows, ‘I’ll bring it all to light myself!’ (150). He calls the prophet Tiresias (326–526). Tiresias, forced to reveal the truth over his strenuous objections, tells Oedipus, ‘You are the curse, the corruption of the land’ (401). Now Oedipus faces a disagreement with himself similar to the one he faced when he was told that he was not his father’s son. But this time he cannot run. He is the king. So he refuses to believe Tiresias and turns to violence instead. He rages against the prophet (402–492). He charges Jocasta’s brother Creon with conspiracy (594–651). He wants Creon dead (698). He is even prepared to cross the line to tyranny and to divide his people (703–735). His marriage to Jocasta is the sole bond that can withstand the rage and paranoia provoked by his refusal to face the truth Tiresias pronounced (751–771). Jocasta brings Oedipus to his senses (767–778). She tries to make light of Tiresias (778–800). She is convinced that the oracle foretelling that Laius would be killed by his son has proven false (936–949). But her desire to give courage to Oedipus leads her to mention details that have the opposite effect: they shake Oedipus’ self-confidence. ‘Ai – now I can see it all, clear as 21 I rely on Sophocles, Oedipus the King, in: The Three Theban Plays, Robert Fagles (trans.) (Harmondsworth, 1984), 155–251, for all quotations and line references.

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day’ (830). He has to reckon with the possibility that he might be the murderer of Laius after all (899–923) – but he does not believe it yet. At this point chance intervenes. A messenger brings news from Corinth that Polybus has died of natural causes (1012–1053). Jocasta and Oedipus are momentarily triumphant (1036–1040, 1053–1064). But then things turn. The messenger reveals that Oedipus is not the son of Polybus. The shepherd who had been ordered to expose Oedipus to die had taken pity on him instead and given him to the messenger, and the messenger had turned him over to Polybus (1096–1144). Jocasta realises that Oedipus is Laius’ murderer and her son. But Oedipus does not. He wants to ask the shepherd what he knows (926–951, 1145–1175). Jocasta tries to stop him (1155–1171). But Oedipus will not be stopped (1160–1173). He still believes he has defeated fate (1183–1194). With threats of torture he forces the shepherd to tell him everything (1228–1305). There is no longer any room for doubt: ‘O god – all come true, all burst to light! O light – now let me look my last on you! I stand revealed at last – cursed in my birth, cursed in marriage, cursed in the lives I cut down with these hands!’ (1305–1310). The chorus stands witness: ‘For all your power Time, all-seeing Time has dragged you to the light’ (1340–1341). Jocasta hangs herself (1364–1397). Oedipus blinds himself (1383–1414). Now he must make the sacrifice he has so long delayed: ‘Oh, Ohh – the agony! I am in agony – where am I going? where on earth? where does all this agony hurl me? where’s my voice? – winging, swept away on a dark tide – My destiny, my dark power, what a leap you made’ (1442–1447). But he is not destroyed. Now that he has owned his past he can go on. ‘I have been saved for something great and terrible, something strange. Well, let my destiny come and take me on its way!’ (1596–1598). This is not only the story of an individual, but also of Thebes.22 The story is the reason for the city’s plague. It is what threatens Thebes with civil war and shakes the foundations of society. Thebes prays to the gods (168–244, 216–244). But its faith is sapped by doubt (550–560). Thebes vows never to abandon Oedipus (572). But it is horrified when Oedipus rounds on Creon (739–741). Thebes affirms the rule of the gods (954–963). But it also fears that ‘they are dying, the old oracles sent to Laius, now our masters strike them off the rolls. Nowhere Apollo’s golden glory now – the gods, the gods go down’ (994–997). It is Creon who saves Thebes. He restores decency and order by separating Oedipus from his daughters/sisters and by removing him from power (1662–1677). Only then can the people regain their balance and make their peace with the experience of time, as they do in the famous 22 Cf. Bernard Knox, Introduction, in: Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays, 131–153, on the degree to which Oedipus reflects conditions in contemporary Athens.

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concluding lines: ‘Now as we keep our watch and wait the final day, count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last’ (1683–1684). Oedipus reveals the grammar of change over time with striking clarity. The elements of that grammar include oracles announcing the time to be experienced (to Laius, Oedipus and Thebes); actions taken by individuals to escape from that experience (Laius’ decision to have his son killed; Oedipus’ decision to leave Corinth); false beliefs about the past resulting from such actions (Jocasta’s belief that Laius’ son is dead; Oedipus’ belief that he is the son of Polybus); a crucial piece of ignorance (the identity of Laius’ murderer); disagreements with oneself provoked by the experience of time (the anxieties of Oedipus, Jocasta and the people of Thebes); disagreements with others provoked by the refusal to enter into disagreement with oneself (the violence threatened by Oedipus; the scorn cast on prophecy by Oedipus and Jocasta); the ‘dark power’ of time (to haunt the present with the past); and the sacrifice demanded by that power (the substance of the entire play, from the plague on Thebes to the suicide of Jocasta, the disgrace of Oedipus’ children, and the blinding and exile of Oedipus himself).

6. Europe for Example To the extent that medieval Europe ever formed a single society, it was united by the certainty with which its members were in agreement on the truth of certain basic propositions. In the interest of simplicity, I will reduce those propositions to just one, namely, ‘a good human being ought to be a faithful member of the Christian church’, otherwise known as Christendom, Christianitas, respublica Christiana or populus Christianus. The members of medieval European society never agreed exactly what it meant to be a faithful member of the Christian church. But they were certain that it was something a good human being ought to be. Their certainty was reinforced by three convictions that deserve to be spelled out. First, they were convinced they knew the means with which to find the meaning of ‘a faithful member of the Christian church’. That means consisted of the word of God written in sacred letters. Second, they were convinced that theologians had the skills to ascertain the meaning of those letters with the precision and clarity of science. The most important skills were the ability to read the sacred letters and to subject them to logical analysis. Third, they were certain that the Christian church deserved to be defended against its enemies. Responsibility for that defence lay with the clergy under the leadership of the papacy with the assistance of the laity. The understanding that medieval Europeans had of themselves therefore depended on the confidence with which they could distinguish Christians

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from non-Christians, the clergy from the laity, and scientific knowledge of the word of God from error, heresy and ignorance. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries their confidence was great. That changed during the later Middle Ages. Theologians disagreed over the merits of Thomas Aquinas’ via antiqua and William of Ockham’s via moderna. The clergy were divided between secular clerics, monks and friars. And the foundations of the Christian church were shaken by the Great Schism. Meanwhile the laity began to rival the clergy in its understanding of the word of God and its determination to imitate the life of Christ. Late medieval movements of reform, Humanism, Renaissance and Reformation challenged convention and gave new meanings to Christianity. Those changes made disputes about the meaning of Christianity impossible to settle with the required certainty. And uncertainty about the meaning of Christianity led Europe into the kind of disagreement I have described above: a disagreement with itself about its agreement in a shared form of life. Attempts to solve that disagreement slipped out of reach when matters of fact became so thoroughly confused with forms of expression that they could not be told apart from matters of belief. Confronted with a threat that brought on fears of the apocalypse, and failing to recognise a past on which it could agree, Europe defied the threat instead. To the extent that modern Europe ever formed a single society, its unity depended on the conviction with which its members were in agreement on the truth of certain basic propositions that stood in an emphatic contrast to their medieval equivalents. I will reduce those propositions also to one, namely, ‘a good human being ought to be a rational member of civilised society’, otherwise known as the Occident, the West or Europe. The members of modern European society agreed no more on what it meant exactly to be a rational member of civilised society than medieval Europeans had agreed on what it meant to be a faithful member of the Christian church. But they were equally convinced that it was something a good human being ought to be, and they maintained their conviction in similar ways. First, they were convinced they knew the means with which to find the meaning of ‘a rational member of civilised society’. The means consisted not of letters, but of facts. Knowledge of facts was what was needed in order to distinguish reason from mere belief and nature from civilisation. Second, they were certain that it took special skills to know the facts. The most important skills were the ability to gather accurate observations and to subject them to mathematical analysis. In the view of modern Europeans, people who possessed these skills could ascertain the meaning of facts with the same scientific clarity with which medieval theologians had formerly been thought to ascertain the meaning of sacred letters. Third, they were certain that civilised society deserved to be defended against its enemies. Responsi-

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bility for that defence was given to sovereign states with the assistance of their citizens. The understanding that modern Europeans had of themselves therefore depended on the confidence with which they were able to distinguish fact from fiction, reason from belief – especially belief in words that claimed to be words of God – and nature from civilisation. Human beings who could make these distinctions were to be counted rational members of civilised society. Human beings who could not were to be counted ignorant, insane or criminal, and needed to be educated, cured or kept under lock and key. Medieval Europe stood convicted of barbarism, ignorance and superstition. Antiquity was welcomed as an ally on the far side of the Middle Ages. And the rest of the world was going to be instructed in European science and civilisation. The past had been transformed into an object of the imagination. The present had been subjected to sovereignty. In order to escape from the apocalypse, Europe had made a break in time.23 It took the entire span of early modern history, from modest and inconspicuous beginnings in the fourteenth century all the way to the end of the eighteenth century, for that break to be completed. It was not made in any single moment. It was made over and over by many different people in many different ways at many different times in many different places in one of the greatest bursts of freedom in European history. It was not until the French Revolution abolished the feudal regime, changed the calendar and established the cult of reason that Europe managed to give the imaginary line between the present and the past the clearest definition that it was ever going to receive. For the same reason, the French Revolution marked a decisive end to the long rising tide of a new temporal regime and the beginning of its ebb. Precisely because it made Europe’s break with its medieval past incontrovertible, it gave Europe a modern past that was as incontrovertibly of its own making. Thereafter, the break Europe had made no longer hid its disagreements with itself from sight. The past came back to haunt the present with the same violence to which Europe had tried to put a stop by making a break in time. The effort to perfect civilisation turned the illusion that Europe had won autonomy from the experience of time into a curse. Europe spent the better part of the nineteenth century defending itself against that curse. It placed a temporary bet on Hegel’s attempt to achieve a harmony of mind and matter with a philosophy of history. It hedged that bet 23 In my opinion this was the second break in time that Europe made. The first was made around 1000 C. E. in ‘the first European revolution’. See R. I. Moore, The First European Revolution, c. 970–1215 (Oxford, 2000). That is a crucial point because it helps to explain the virulence of European history. But I cannot pursue it here.

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by giving scientists a chance to prove that Europe could be saved from having to face its past by restricting historical and scientific work to the accumulation of positive facts, all the way to the extreme of banishing the very use of the first person present indicative from scientific work in the logical, but mad, belief that silencing one of the persons in which a human being disagrees with itself might solve the disagreement. It tried to square the circle with social sciences like economics, sociology, psychology, anthropology and linguistics which were explicitly designed to gain a grasp on the external world and the internal mind at once – as if science could transcend the distinction between fact and belief without losing its meaning. It tried to keep playing the concert of Europe. It mastered technologies for dominating nature. And it went all the way in trying to dominate the world while claiming to civilise barbarians. In hindsight it may seem self-evident that such devices could delay but not prevent the unravelling of the terms on which Europe had based its selfconfidence. Once Hume had failed to find a self inside his mind and Kant had demonstrated that the mind could not conceivably gain knowledge of reality as it existed in itself, facts could no longer be distinguished from beliefs with the required certainty. The boundaries Europe had drawn to make up for its rejection of the respublica Christiana lost their solidity. First Marx showed the reality of conflict beneath the surface of liberal legality. Then Nietzsche recognised the will to power behind the pursuit of truth. Then Freud discovered an unconscious and barbaric id below the conscious surface of reason and civilisation. And then the game was up. Europe had lost the plot. The disagreements it had considered dead and gone returned with a vengeance that threatened humanity with annihilation. The Republic of Virtue, the Terror and the reign of Napoleon are object lessons still admirable for the clarity with which they exemplify that vengeance. It spread from its point of origin until it had demolished every line Europe had drawn in order to define itself. It took the form of madness, terror and addiction. It blinded John Stuart Mill to the absurdity of justifying despotism with barbarians while claiming to endow the principle of individual liberty with absolute authority. It cast nations, empires and races into war with each other – and Europe into war with itself. It turned civilisation into the enemy of nature and nature into the enemy of civilisation. Its victims were not only Europe’s subjects in the colonies, but also Europe’s own citizens on the continent and in its settlements abroad, fighting each other and the world with unplanned ferocity and giving vent to nameless rage in massacres that did not reach their peak until the twentieth century. The vengeance was not exhausted until the distinctions between past and present, fact and fiction, nature and culture, barbarism and civilisation, humanity and inhumanity had been reduced to the absurdity that Kafka, Joyce and

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Beckett tried to put into words. In the concluding words of Beckett’s What Where: V: Good. I am alone. In the present as were I still. It is winter. Without journey. Time passes. That is all. Make sense who may. I switch off. [Light off P. Pause. Light off V.]24

Today the past is staring us straight in the face and we do not know what to say. The Holocaust has made a mockery of our attempt to treat the past as though it were an object of the imagination, and yet we do not know how else it should be treated. If not so long ago it may have seemed as though the forces of irrational belief had once and for all been brought to heel by reason and civilisation, now reason and civilisation seem to be losing their authority to a resurgence of religious violence. We are left speechless by the apocalypse we have brought on ourselves in order to avoid the apocalypse that had been prophesied. Our speechlessness is often masked by information, garrulity and passion. But it is the condition of our time.25

7. The Role of Historians The role historians played in the history I have just sketched was never merely that of students of the past. From the beginning they were protagonists and principals in the campaign for the autonomy of Europe. They ridiculed as legend, myth and superstition what had formerly been counted as the foundations of society. They cut whatever ties of memory, understanding and tradition united medieval and modern Europeans in one form life. Like scientists, they were convinced that knowledge had to be based on facts. Like scientists, they distinguished facts of the internal mind from facts of the external world. By severing the history of the mind (philosophical history, intellectual history, history of ideas) from the history of the external world (political history, economic history, social history) they drove a metaphysical illusion into their understanding of the past itself. They cast a spell on 24 Samuel Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays (New York, 1984), 316. 25 Cf. Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton/NJ, 2005).

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their readers and themselves by fascinating them with spectacles to be admired or reviled, whatever the case might be, but always reinforcing the imaginary line dividing the spectator from the spectacle. They fed the illusion that the past was gone and Europe had reached the pinnacle of reason and civilisation. Like the history of Europe, the history of Europe’s historians can therefore be divided into two phases: one leading up to the French Revolution, the other thereafter. Before the French Revolution historians were united in a respublica litterarum defined by its distinction from nations, politics and the respublica Christiana. They studied the remainders of antiquity – Greek and Roman, Christian and Jewish, European and ‘oriental’ – with a devotion that brought them as close to breathing life into an object of the imagination as anyone ever came. They were certain that they were serving the cause of humanity and judged the past as they saw fit. Their judgement found magnificent expression in histories like those written by Hume, Voltaire and Gibbon. After the French Revolution, historians began to struggle with growing doubts about the truth of their beliefs. In an attempt to make up for the criticism they had formerly aimed at the past, they turned their attention from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages, from judgment to understanding, from scorn to sympathy, and from enlightenment to historicism. They unleashed their criticism, not on the past itself, but on the evidence. They published primary sources in editions conforming to standards of unprecedented scholarly precision. They created monuments to the distinction between the history that ‘really happened’ and the history that was ‘merely told’ in works like those written by Ranke, Carlyle and Michelet. They equipped each of the European nations with an imaginary past on which to stake an imaginary identity. They tried to turn the study of history into a veritable science. They multiplied the subjects under historical investigation. They did their best to persevere in their devotion to the illusion that the past is gone. But in the very act of doing the best they could, they made the best more difficult to do. They turned themselves into professionals and built an academic system dividing them from their audience. They formed national historical organisations and published the results of their research in journals that spelled the death of the respublica litterarum. They wrestled with the difference between the cause of their profession and the cause of humanity. They were alarmed to find that facts appeared to be contaminated with an unnerving dose of theory. They tried to sterilise their tools and immunise themselves by separating facts from values. But that seemed only to deprive the facts of meaning and turn the values into a matter of arbitrary choice. They entered into a crisis.

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8. Conclusion The character of that crisis is strikingly evident in debates about the conventional division of history into an ancient, a medieval and a modern period. Historians have long since recognised that this periodisation amounts to a profound misrepresentation of the past. But no one has managed to establish a genuine alternative.26 True, Renaissance and Reformation no longer make for an obvious beginning of modern history. Many regard the French Revolution as a more fitting point for that beginning. Some say that modern history began in the eleventh century with ‘the first European revolution’. The growth of early medieval history, early modern history and contemporary history has posed an explicit challenge to the conventional periodisation. Historians, in other words, have managed to move the imaginary line between the Middle Ages and modernity from its original location to other points in time, or widened it into a whole new period with boundaries of its own. But the old line in the new locations and the new boundaries of the new periods still lead to the same kind of misrepresentation as the misrepresentation they were intended to dethrone. The grammatical distinction between classicists, medievalists and modernists remains constitutive of the profession. From the perspective adopted in this paper the reason seems obvious: The tripartite periodisation of history is more than a conventional way of structuring the past. It is an enduring symbol of the victory historians won for metaphysics when they convinced the world that Europe had really managed to make a break in time. It does double duty as part of the imaginary object historians attempt to grasp and as a form of expression they use to speak about that object. It leads them to divide into two equally misguided parties. One party claims that periods are matters of fact (as if the past were an object really existing in and of itself); the other counters that periods are products of the imagination (as if, in Wittgenstein’s formulation, history could be false in some other way than by its not having happened as historians say it did).27 But neither party can detach itself from the imaginary object historians invented when they first made a break in time. The periodisation of European history into three periods springs from that break. It constitutes the simplest, toughest and seemingly most innocuous precipitate of the illusion that the past is gone. 26 Cf. Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia, 2008). 27 Cf. PI 402, where Wittgenstein gives a compelling explanation of the conflict between these parties: ‘For this is what disputes between idealists, solipsists and realists look like. The one party attacks the normal form of expression as if they were attacking an assertion; the others defend it, as if they were stating facts recognized by every reasonable human being.’

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So long as historians keep doing more research in the belief that more research must be the proper means with which to disarm misrepresentations of the past that are as obviously contradicted by the evidence as the division of that past into three periods, such misrepresentations will keep rising from the grave in which historians have tried to bury them. They will keep rising from that grave because historians themselves condemn them to the life of the living dead. They confront historians with their own version of Moore’s paradox, as if to say, ‘the past is real and I do not believe it is’. They pose a riddle historians cannot solve unless they sacrifice their profession and say, ‘we studied the evidence because we thought the past is gone – but we were wrong’.

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4. Time outside Europe: Imperialism, Colonialism and Globalisation

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Lynn Hunt

Globalisation and Time

Most historians have only lately discovered globalisation. Yet the phenomenon is hardly new. If we are all descendants of people who lived in Africa 200,000 years ago and colonists from Africa replaced all other early humans throughout the world starting about 60–100,000 years ago, then some form of globalisation has accompanied human history from its very beginning. Since ‘globalisation’ is an elastic term that covers many different kinds of developments, commentators have offered different points for its beginning. In addition to the move out of Africa, these include, among others, the diffusion of Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam as ‘world religions’; the development of European colonisation and imperialism; and the invention of the ‘homeless’ technologies of the railroad, telegraph, telephone and steamship.1 Have we entered a distinctive and especially global era in recent years, or is this moment just the latest stage in an ongoing development? The chronology of globalisation is just one of the ways in which globalisation and time are intertwined.

1. The Perception of Globalisation Whatever one’s position on the distinctiveness of contemporary globalisation, it is clear that scholarly interest in globalisation is relatively recent and not just among historians. The graph is based upon the number of books in English listed in WorldCat with globalisation in the title for each year beginning in 1970.2 WorldCat lists virtually no such books before the late 1980s and then shows a sharp increase during the 1990s continuing into the 2000s. Globalisation may not be a new phenomenon, but the use of that specific term most definitely is. The question of how globalisation is perceived, and when and why it becomes an 1 On homeless technologies, see Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge/MA, 2003). 2 Since WorldCat is constantly being updated, it is important to note that this study was undertaken in February 2011.

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issue, might well be more important, therefore, than any attempt to measure its development quantitatively and thus pin down a precise moment or epoch for its unfolding. It hardly seems accidental that globalisation gained common currency as a term just when the Soviet Union and with it the lingering credibility of Communism in the West collapsed. Talk of globalisation rushed in to fill the resulting ideological vacuum. There were few adherents of Communism left to carry on the debate between free-market capitalism and statedirected Communism, but rather than withering away, the debate shifted terrain. Marxists immediately turned to the critique of globalisation as a component of capitalism, and even supporters of globalisation reaffirmed Marx’s continuing relevance. As John Micklethwaite and Adrian Wooldridge insisted, Marx ‘may be kaput’ as a prophet of socialism, but he lives on as a prophet of globalisation. Among the many memorable lines of the Communist Manifesto were these: ‘The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe … In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations.’3 As early as 1848, Marx and Engels had thus clearly identified the process of globalisation and begun to theorise it. It is nevertheless undeniable that Communism rather than capitalism collapsed first under the 3 John Micklethwait/ Adrian Wooldrige, The Hidden Promise: Liberty Renewed, in: Frank J. Lechner/John Boli (eds.), The Globalization Reader (Malden/MA, 2004), 9–15, 9.

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weight of its own contradictions, but that does not mean that the inner contradictions of capitalism have disappeared, or that they have lost any of their salience for social analysis.

2. Experience and Concepts of Time Rather than rehearse the ever-expanding debates about globalisation as a process, this essay focuses on the impact of globalisation on notions of historical time. It undertakes to answer two very broad questions: 1) Has globalisation as a process had an effect on the experience itself of time? 2) In what ways do the current debates about globalisation raise new issues about historians’ notions or concepts of time? Since time itself is surprisingly hard to pin down as a category of experience or an element in the writing of history, my answers to these questions can only be provisional and partial. They are raised here to start a conversation rather than to establish a position in a debate whose very terms are still in the process of formulation. Although it may seem that these questions presuppose the existence of globalisation as a discrete and relatively recent phenomenon, answers to them will contribute just as much to scepticism about the novelty or recentness of globalisation.4 Globalisation is usually defined in terms that are primarily spatial and not temporal. Jan Scholte, for example, simply equates globalisation with ‘the rise of supraterritoriality’.5 In perhaps the most influential formulation, Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye maintain that globalisation is the development of increasingly dense ‘networks of interdependence at multi-continental distances’.6 ‘Globalisation shrinks distance’, they argue, largely through the declining cost of communications, rather than their increasing speed. The greatest increase in ‘message velocity’, according to Keohane and Nye, occurred with the laying of the transatlantic cable in 1866; it reduced transmission time by a week, that is, by a factor of 1000, whereas the telephone reduced it only by a few minutes and the internet, in comparison with the telephone, hardly at all. What the Internet did was dramatically lower the cost of

4 For an incisive discussion of the issues involved in discussing globalisation, see Geoff Eley, Historicizing the Global, Politicizing Capital: Giving the Present a Name, History Workshop Journal LXIII, 2007, 1, 154–188; and Michael Lang, Globalization and Its History, The Journal of Modern History LXXVIII, 2006, 4, 899–931. 5 Jan Aart Scholte, Globalization: A Critical Introduction (New York, 2000). 6 Robert O. Keohane/Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Globalisation: What’s New, What’s Not (and So What)? in: David Held/Anthony G. McGrew (eds.), The Global Transformations Reader (Cambridge, 2003). The essay first appeared in 2000.

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communicating in real time, and it therefore increased the intensity or thickness of global interconnection rather than its speed. Despite this insistence on space as primordial in globalisation, most commentators cannot resist a space-time linkage. David Harvey influentially equated ‘the time-space compression’ of postmodernity with the development of global forms of capitalism: ‘There is some kind of necessary relation between the rise of postmodernist cultural forms, the emergence of more flexible forms of capital accumulation, and a new round of “time-space compression” in the organisation of capitalism.’7 Harvey followed Marx in claiming that a basic law of capital accumulation is the annihilation of space through time. Moreover, Harvey argues, social theory (he cites Marx, Weber and Smith) typically privileges time over space because it focuses on processes of social change. The spatial boundaries remain constant (and therefore in some sense cease to matter), while the social processes within those spaces (e.g., proletarianisation, urbanisation) undergo change over time. That is what matters, not the spatial unit. ‘[The notion of] Progress entails the conquest of space,’ Harvey concludes, ‘the tearing down of all spatial barriers, and the “ultimate annihilation of space through time”.’8 Ironically, or perhaps intentionally in Harvey’s case, the rise of globalisation theory seems to have reversed this process; writers about globalisation tend to privilege space over time. It is impossible to determine with any certainty whether globalisation has had more impact on the experience of space or that of time. When speaking of globalisation, ‘deterritorialisation’ is a frequently used term with evident spatial connotations, whereas no one speaks of ‘detemporalisation’. True, ‘compression of time’ often appears, but it is almost invariably rendered as space-time compression, that is, as a common process affecting both. Pronouncements seem to take the place of empirical investigation, though it is less than obvious how empirical investigation outside a laboratory setting might be undertaken.9 Neuroscientists and psychologists have developed ingenious methods to study the chemical and biological basis of the perception of duration, for example, but these are difficult if not impossible to generalise to the effects of temporal compression experienced (if they are indeed experi-

7 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Malden/MA, 2004), vii. 8 Ibid., 205. 9 In their introduction to an important collection on the anthropology of globalisation, Jonathan Xavier and Renato Rosaldo explicitly accept Harvey’s position (along with that of Giddens), and none of the essays offer empirical evidence one way or another on time-space compression. Jonathan Xavier Inda/Renato Rosaldo, The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader (Malden/MA, 2008).

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enced) by communities and cultures over months and years.10 The acceleration of time associated with modernity is a hypothesis with a seemingly solid intuitive basis (we all feel rushed), but it remains difficult to pin down.

3. Space and Time in History Since it is so hard to identify specific changes in the social or cultural perception of time, it is perhaps not surprising that interest in globalisation has had its most immediate impact on historians’ spatial units of analysis. History as an academic discipline arose in the nineteenth century in tandem with the nation state. Most history taught in universities in the last fifty years (even the last 100 or 150 years) has been the history of nation-states, starting with one’s own and moving out from there. Studies of globalisation, in contrast, almost always give higher priority to the transnational. Globalisation studies can easily accommodate local, transnational and global or world history, but they tend to push nation-states to the side. Even studies of nationstates themselves are changing, as historians such as Jörn Leonhard write about them in comparative perspective and in explicit relationship to their supposed predecessors, the multi-ethnic empire. As he says in his recent book co-authored with Ulrike von Hirschhausen, ‘Europäische Geschichte ist mehr als die Summe europäischer Nationalgeschichten.’11 A truly European history challenges the conventional division of history by nation-state. The same is even truer of global history. Conventional temporal categories have yet to come under the same intense pressure as the spatial unit of the nation-state, but their time is coming. Different kinds of temporal categories are potentially at issue, ranging from the ways clocks are synchronized to the manner in which historians divide up their time periods. Globalisation from the late nineteenth century onward depended in no small measure on the spread of Western forms of timekeeping, which is one reason why globalisation is often equated with Westernisation. Can measures of time become truly international? History writing has long been dominated by the Western-derived time schema of ancient, medieval and modern (antiquité, moyen âge, époque moderne, histoire contemporaine; Frühzeit, Mittelalter, Neuzeit), but is this schema adequate to an internationalised study of history? 10 See, for example, the much-cited article by Warren H. Meck, Neuropharmacology of Timing and Time Perception, Cognitive Brain Research III, 1996, 3–4, 227–242. I discuss the notion of the acceleration of time in modernity in Lynn Hunt, Measuring Time, Making History (Budapest, 2008). 11 Jörn Leonhard/Ulrike von Hirschhausen, Empires und Nationalstaaten im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2009), 9.

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Finally, why are historians still writing within what Daniel Smail calls ‘the grip of sacred history’? Smail has drawn attention to the historical discipline’s unwillingness to come to terms with ‘deep history’. The general public came gradually to accept that the origins of the universe and of human beings went much further back than ca. 4000 BC, the accepted time frame for the moment of creation for Christian Europeans until the nineteenth century. Faced with the new knowledge of deep time, Western historians simply changed their reference point to the origins of civilisation in the Near East, which happened to correlate quite nicely with the previous Bible-based chronology. Year-round agriculture, metallurgy and writing all emerged between 5500 and 3000 BC. What counted as historical time did not change even after most educated people came to accept that the earth and the presence of humans on it went back much further in time than previously believed. Is there a way of incorporating the deep past into historical writing?12 The remainder of this essay considers these three challenges to historians’ concepts of time: time-keeping, historical periodisation and the incorporation of deep history.

4. History of Time-Keeping Although global time-keeping has a complex and still evolving history, most discussion takes the 1884 Prime Meridian Conference in Washington, D. C. as a convenient point of departure. The conference established Greenwich as the prime or first meridian for longitude and established a universal day of 24 hours that began at midnight at Greenwich (making possible the adoption of time zones across the world). The disputes in Washington pitted the major European powers against each other, but the very intensity of the British-French disputes showed that Westerners felt little compunction about dictating time to the rest of the world. Peter Galison explains: ‘Competing for colonies, for news, for shipping, for prestige, inevitably the major powers clashed over telegraphic networks. For through copper circuits flowed time, and through time the partition of the worldmap in an age of empires.’13 Europe and the Americas were well represented among the twenty-five nations at the Washington conference, but there was only one delegate from Asia (Japan) and one supposedly from Africa. William Coppinger, Secretary of the American Colonization Society in Washington, D. C., represented 12 Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley/CA, 2008). 13 Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time (New York, 2004), 144.

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Liberia. The Society’s goal was to persuade African Americans to return ‘home’ to Africa.14 In 1889, Coppinger wrote a pamphlet vaunting recent ‘Progress in Africa’ (the title of his pamphlet): ‘The eagerness with which the great Powers reach forth to possess themselves of her territory continues: exploration and commercial enterprise were never more active; the building of railroads and the development of her natural resources go on steadily, and Christianity and civilisation are pressing forward.’15 So much for African representation at the meetings! Nevertheless, the Europeans could not immediately impose their will on the rest of the world, because they could not agree among themselves or get their respective governments to act upon the conference’s decisions. Ironically, the first country to adopt the joint resolutions was Japan in 1886.16 The Japanese government’s decision provided yet another example of how Japan served, in the words of Sebastian Conrad and Dominic Sachsenmaier, as ‘a metaphor for Asian modernity for the Ottomans, Egyptians and Indians’.17 In the United States, Congress failed to act on the conference resolutions, leaving decisions about time up to localities for decades. Germany adopted the new standard in 1895, France only in 1911 and the Netherlands in 1940. The adoption of the Gregorian calendar after 1582 took even longer, though for religious as much as for political reasons. It was adopted first in Catholic countries and only in the eighteenth century in Protestant ones: Great Britain adopted it in 1752 and Sweden in 1753, for instance. It was embraced by Japan in 1873, Egypt in 1875, China in 1912, Russia after the revolution in 1918, Greece in 1923 and Turkey in 1926. It was only bit by bit and after countless internal and international conflicts that most of the world found itself on the same clock and calendar.18 In every debate about global time, Western countries have predominated. Yet even as they assumed that they would set the terms for discussion, they fought among themselves over those terms. At the very end of the nineteenth century, European topographic maps still used eleven different sites for the prime meridian (the question supposedly was decided in 1884).19 Only Great Britain and the United States were using Greenwich, 14 http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/info/conference-delegates.htm 15 William Coppinger, Progress in Africa (Washington/DC, 1889), 1. 16 Ian R. Bartky, One Time Fits All: The Campaigns for Global Uniformity (Stanford/CA, 2007). 17 Sebastian Conrad/Dominic Sachsenmaier, Competing Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements, 1880s-1930s (New York, 2007), 224. 18 George V. Coyne/Michael A. Hoskin/Olaf Pedersen (eds.), Gregorian Reform of the Calendar: Proceedings of the Vatican Conference to Commemorate its 400th Anniversary, 1582–1982 (Rome, 1983). 19 Bartky, One Time, 98.

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and the United States also used Washington’s Old Naval Observatory. As soon as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) began to win universal acceptance, moreover, agitation began to replace it with universal time or what eventually came to be known as UTC (Universal Time, Coordinated). UTC became official in the 1970s with the rise of international atomic time, calculated from signals around the world. In fact, however, the difference from GMT is not great (and GMT is still used in the United Kingdom); Greenwich is still the prime meridian, and only the means of calculating the exact time at it has changed. Not surprisingly, the French and British/ Americans fought as intensely over the name of universal time as they had once fought over the prime meridian. Anglophones wanted CUT (Coordinated Universal Time) and Francophones wanted TUC (temps universel coordonné). UTC (Universal Time, Coordinated; universel temps coordonné) was the compromise solution.20 Although the determination of the second, minute, hour and day is now supposedly universal, what passes for a universal system of years is the Western Christian Gregorian calendar, whose zero point is the birth of Jesus (and in fact that is not even a proper zero point as the Gregorian calendar has 1 BC and 1 AD but no zero). Calendar reform has been proposed but has repeatedly failed. In 1954, the United States vetoed efforts by the United Nations to set up a commission to propose a world calendar.21 But even if it had succeeded, it is not evident what kind of calendar everyone in the world might possibly have agreed upon. The French republican calendar of 1793 famously took as its starting date the declaration of the French Republic on September 22, 1792. The gesture was meant to be universalising because it broke so decisively with the Christian past (there were new names for days and months, a ten-day week, etc.), but it was clearly Francocentric and in the end failed even to win over the French.22 Most recent projects have been designed to avoid Jesus’ birth as the hinge on which a calendar turns. But neither the Holocene calendar nor the Before Present time scale used in archaeology and geology offer entirely satisfactory solutions. The geologist Cesare Emiliani laid out the rationale for a new calendar based on the Holocene or Human Era. It would reset the beginning of the calendar to 00.00 hours GMT (his term) on 1 January 10000 BC. More recent dates need only add a one in front; Columbus discovered America 20 Dennis D. McCarthy/P. Kenneth Seidelmann, Time: From Earth Rotation to Atomic Physics (Weinheim, Germany, 2009). 21 Duncan Steel, Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar (New York, 2000), 312. 22 Sanja Perovic, The French Republican Calendar: Time, History and the Revolutionary Event, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies XXXV, 2011, 1, consulted at http:// onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1754–0208.2011.00408.x/pdf

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in 11492 and the French Revolution took place in 11789.23 Emiliani’s calendar has the advantage of being based on a starting point devoid of any particular religious connotation, but it has disadvantages as well: The dates most people use are longer and harder to say in speech; 10000 BC is itself derived from the Christian calendar; and the date creates a new and equally arbitrary rift in time. Moreover, it gives a false sense of precision to dating the Holocene (which scientific research may well modify over time); and in any case, human history predates the Holocene, going back perhaps as much as 200,000 years or more. The ‘Before Present’ or BP time scale attempts to remedy some of these defects by offering a system for rendering dates very long ago in the past. It is widely used by archaeologists and geologists and derives from radiocarbon dating, a technique developed in the 1950s. It depends, however, on picking a date for the present, which is customarily taken to be 1950, another date derived from the Christian dating system. Many scholars writing world history now use a combination of BP and Christian time scales, but with BCE (Before the Common Era) and CE (Common Era) replacing BC and AD.24 These efforts to reform the calendar show how difficult it is to develop a single-line time scale, precisely because it requires either a fixed beginning (10000 BC) or a fixed endpoint (‘the present,’ in BP defined as 1950). The surprising advantage of the Christian system in distinguishing between BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini or ‘in the year of our Lord’) is that it has neither a fixed beginning nor a fixed endpoint. Unlike its proposed replacements, it can accommodate an ever-deeper history of humans and the earth and a constantly moving present. The combination of BC/AD only came into systematic use in the West in the eighteenth century. AD was common usage long before BC or AC (Ante Christum or ‘Before Christ’). Until the end of the 1700s, English authors often still gave Julian Period dates (invented by Joseph Scaliger in 1583) alongside AC in their chronological tables. But in their narratives AC eventually overwhelmed the increasingly scant references to the Julian Period.25 Joseph Priestley rang its death knell in his 1788 Lectures on History: ‘I cannot help observing, that this boasted [Julian] period seems to have been unnecessary for the chief purpose for which it was invented, viz. to serve as a common language for chronologers, and that now little use is made of it, notwithstanding all writers still speak of it in the same magnifi23 Cesare Emiliani, Calendar Reform for the Year 2000, Eos. Transactions. American Geophysical Union LXXV, 1994, 19, 218. 24 Patrick Manning, Migration in World History (New York, 2005). 25 Donald J. Wilcox, The Measure of Times Past: Pre-Newtonian Chronologies and the Rhetoric of Relative Time (Chicago, 1987).

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cent terms. The vulgar Christian aera answers the same purpose as effectually.’26 Like Priestley, most other Western eighteenth-century writers of history embraced ‘the vulgar Christian aera’ without understanding its consequences. The BC (or AC) that appeared originally as a by-product of early modern disputes over reconciling Biblical and secular chronologies opened the way to deep time and even the secularisation of time. It also led to the disappearance of the very chronological studies that had given birth to the new dating system in the first place.27 Chronologists pursued a universalism defined by the ambition to combine natural and supernatural histories. Yet, since it opened the way to infinite regress into the deep past, the establishment of BC made it possible to sever the study of time from its religious origins and pursue secular aims and explanations instead. Bishop Bossuet’s form of universal history gave way to one defined by geographical and temporal inclusiveness along a secular continuum. Historians might disagree about the meaning of events in the fifth century BC, for instance, but they agree on the time frame that constitutes the fifth century BC.28 The power of a universal, homogeneous and ever-deepening notion of time is incontestable. It undergirds Western science, Western imperialism, globalisation and the current vogue of world history, which some might consider facets of the same phenomenon. It is hardly coincidental that universal, homogeneous and deep time took hold concomitantly with the development of Western science (even though deep time emerged only with the geological breakthroughs of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries). The Western calendar eventually prevailed worldwide and has become associated with Western values. It does not follow, however, that universal, homogeneous or deep time is somehow Western in essence, any more than that the idea of universal, homogeneous time is somehow Christian because dating Easter provided a prime motive for calendar revision or because BC and AD refer to the life of Jesus. Having begun as a Christian exercise in dating Easter and reconciling sacred and profane histories, the BC/AD dating system ended up submerging Christian chronology in an even more universal, homogeneous and deep sense of time.29

26 Daniel Rosenberg, Joseph Priestley and the Graphic Invention of Modern Time, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture XXXVI, 2007, 1, 55–103, quote 72. 27 Anthony T. Grafton, Joseph Scaliger and Historical Chronology: The Rise and Fall of a Discipline, History and Theory XIV, 1975, 2, 156–185. 28 Hunt, Measuring Time. 29 The secularization of time is a big subject, that requires much more space than is allotted to it here. See, for example, Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge/MA, 2007), and Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge/MA, 1985).

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5. The Problem of Teleology The real problem posed by the globalisation of time is not the system of dating or keeping time. It is, rather, the teleology implicit in historians’ proclivity to divide history into the periods ancient, medieval and modern, and in particular to use the modern as the benchmark for historical development. There are two facets to this problem: the nefarious consequences of this periodisation on the writing about history in the rest of the world, and the equally challenging dilemmas created by this periodisation for Western history itself. Sebastian Conrad has shown how postwar Japanese historians ‘drew on the European model of periodisation. The concepts and terminology of historical understanding – development, progress, modernity – owed their explanatory substance to the European experience.’30 Without drawing as much specific attention to time as Conrad, Dipesh Chakrabarty argued: ‘There is a peculiar way in which all these other histories tend to become variations on a master narrative that could be called “the history of Europe”.’31 To state in shorthand a development that has drawn much attention of late: The Western concept of modernity has come to define the discipline of history for everyone in the world.32 Problems with the modern time schema are not limited to its imperialist past or present. Reinhart Koselleck and François Hartog have shown that it has its own inherent defects.33 At the end of the eighteenth century, in no small measure as a result of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, it became possible and then increasingly common to view modernity (the modern period) as a rupture from the past. The past then no longer illuminated the present by providing exemplars for present behaviour. The present took its meaning instead from the future toward which it was ineluctably headed.34 Ironically, however, as Peter Fritzsche argues, this shift gave history 30 Sebastian Conrad, What Time is Japan? Problems of Comparative (Intercultural) Historiography, History and Theory XXXVIII, 1999, 1, 67–83, quote 82. 31 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts? Representations XXXVII, Special Issue: Imperial Fantasies and Postcolonial Histories, 1992, 1–26, quote 1. 32 See, for example, Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley/CA, 2005), esp. chapter 4 on globalisation and chapter 5 on modernity. 33 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. by Keith Tribe (New York, 1985); François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps (Paris, 2003). On the differences between the two, see Gérard Lenclud, Traversées dans le temps, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales LXI, 2006, 5, 1053–1084. 34 Here I collapse Hartog’s distinction between ‘presentist’ and ‘futurist’ regimes and therefore take a line closer to Koselleck’s. For a position that is much closer to Hartog’s, see Chris Lorenz, Unstuck in Time. Or: The Sudden Presence of the Past, in Karin Tilmans/ Frank van Vree/Jay Winter (eds.), Performing the Past: Memory, History and Identity in

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writing a much larger role than ever before. Because the past turned opaque, it therefore required more serious scholarship. It also appealed to more and more people. The French Revolution had brought the people onto the stage of politics, and historians therefore had to pay attention to them in their writing. Genres of historical writing proliferated, the historical novel being one of the striking examples. Modernity and history writing developed together. By reconfiguring the past, the very positing of modernity opened up a new role for history. 35 The tandem development of modernity and history writing eventually ran into a cul de sac, however. The idea of modernity as rupture, which once energized history writing (around 1800 and for a few decades thereafter), proved enervating over the long run. The past lost its opaqueness and became increasingly subservient to the obsessive search for new understandings, new interpretations and ever-new histories. Over time, this translated into diminishing attention to ‘pre-modern’ history as increasing emphasis was laid on the direct and even immediate sources of the present. In the nineteenth and even much of the twentieth century, most history students studied ancient and medieval history. Now most undergraduates and even many graduate students – at least in the United States – prefer to study the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The same holds true for the writing of history. Students – and scholars – are likely to know the most recent historical writings but are apt to be almost entirely ignorant of the work of historians before 1950, and especially before 1900. With an increasing focus on the present and a growing disregard for previous historical writing, the historical discipline has become, it seems, less and less oriented toward the past. How then are we to escape from the ‘chronological Orientalism’ that Constantin Fasolt decries in The Limits of History? In his view, this Orientalism takes two forms: either medieval thinkers (he could just as well have used the example of the ancients) are viewed as having already said everything of importance, or they are viewed as having failed to take the crucial steps toward modernity that would come later. We ‘oscillate between dismissing medieval people as barbarians and revering them as the creators of our civilisation’. We fail to respect their differences.36 Historians of the medieval and ancient periods are most likely to revere their subjects as the true creators, but as history faculties become increasingly dominated by modern or contemporary Modern Europe (Amsterdam, 2010), 67–102. Lorenz shares Hartog’s concern with memory studies as shaping a new form of historical consciousness. 35 Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge/MA, 2004). 36 Constantin Fasolt, The Limits of History (Chicago, 2004).

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historians, a much greater danger is the tendency to view people in the more distant past as failing or lacking just because they were different. The problems inherent in a fixation on modernity as the inevitable telos of world history have been clearly identified. The challenge now is to figure out solutions. Is it possible (or even desirable) to de-Occidentalise history writing? Should we ‘generate new identities for history’, as William Gallois urges us to do, by turning to Buddhist ideas of time and history instead?37 Might other models for history writing be found in the earlier history of the West itself? Should we, as Lucian Hölscher suggests, develop a ‘new annalistic’, which he describes as maintaining ‘the advantages of history as progress, while discarding its problematic theological implications’.38 Can we jettison the ancient-medieval-modern chronological divides? Can we give up the problematic concept of modernity itself? Nothing could be less evident. Many years ago, Peter Osborne concluded that ‘as our primary secular category of historical totalisation, it is hard to see how we could do without it [modernity] in one form or another.’39 At the conclusion of a more recent critique of the concept of modernity, Frederick Cooper comes to a sensible, if somewhat frustrating, conclusion: ‘My purpose has not been to purge the word modernity and certainly not to cast aside the issues that concern those who use the word. It is to advocate a historical practice sensitive to the different ways people frame the relationship of past, present and future, an understanding of the situations and conjunctures that enable and disable particular representations, and a focus on process and causation in the past and on choice, political organisation, responsibility, and accountability in the future.’40 Yet Cooper’s references to the past (‘focus on process and causation in the past’) and future (‘choice, political organisation, responsibility and accountability in the future’) derive from the modern time schema itself. We study the past in order to be able to control the future. This critique of the concept of modernity rests, therefore, on assumptions implicit in the concept itself. The same might be said of virtually all the other critiques of modernity. The turn toward ‘deep history’ challenges the ancient-medieval-modern categorisation in a different way. In deep history what is often called ‘prehistory’ swells to truly enormous size and overwhelms the conventional his37 William Gallois, Zen history, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice XIV, 2010, 3, 421–440. 38 Lucian Hölscher, The New Annalistic: A Sketch of a Theory of History, History and Theory XXXVI, 1997, 3, 317–335, 318. 39 Peter Osborne, Modernity Is a Qualitative, Not a Chronological, Category: Notes on the Dialectic of Differential Historical Time, in: Francis Barker/Peter Hulme (eds.), Postmodernism and the Re-reading of Modernity (Manchester, 1992), 23–45, 40. 40 Cooper, Colonialism, 149.

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torical categories. Yet even here references to modernity have not disappeared, whether out of convenience or conviction. David Christian, author of the ambitious universal history Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, begins his account with the origin of the universe and ends it with a section on the ‘modern era’. He does not employ the terms ‘ancient’ or ‘medieval,’ which is telling, yet his ‘Early Human History’ and ‘The Holocene’ – the titles of part III and part IV of his book – still march toward ‘The Modern Era’ (part V) with its familiar chapter titles: ‘Approaching Modernity’; ‘Globalisation, Commercialisation, and Innovation’; ‘Birth of the Modern World’ and even, finally, ‘The Great Acceleration of the Twentieth Century’. ‘Ancient’ and ‘medieval’ might be disposable if history is viewed in the perspective of deep time, but ‘modern’ turns out to be extremely tenacious.41 Recent work by Andrew Shryock, Daniel Smail and their colleagues on deep history offers a way of putting the modern and with it globalisation in a very long-term perspective without entirely dismissing it. They argue that all of human history ‘is punctuated by momentous leaps in population, energy flow, efficiency, levels of political organisation and degrees of connectivity.’42 The leap from communities numbering in the tens of people to thousands of people may be just as significant, for example, as one from millions to hundreds of millions and might well require even more complex and meaningful modifications in human interactions. Therefore, they argue, we need more appropriate metaphors than those implied by modernity (‘take-off ’, for example, or the one they discuss in detail, the ‘J curve’, where all before is flat and largely immobile compared to what comes after the breakthrough). They advocate replacing the current historical metaphors, e.g. ‘the birth of the modern,’ with those of webs, trees, spirals, scalar integration and fractals. In fractals (think of a snowflake or an intricate Oriental carpet with a repeating pattern on smaller and smaller scales) the same regular or even irregular pattern is repeated at every level of magnification.43 The point of using such metaphors is to insist that the smaller scales (that is, events, structures and patterns of human interaction developed in the far distant past) are not erased by the emergence of larger ones. As scales – for example of political organisation – increase, they add new levels of behaviour with new social ac41 David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley/CA, 2004). 42 Andrew Shryock/Daniel Lord Smail (eds.), Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (Berkeley/CA, 2011), 247. 43 To get a good sense of a fractal, it is necessary to go online to see, for example, a Koch snowflake. Fractal geometry is now used more and more in environmental and urban studies and is not just of interest to mathematicians. See, for example, Marie-Laurence de Keersmaecker/Pierre Frankhauser/Isabelle Thomas, Using Fractal Dimensions for Characterizing Intra-urban Diversity: The Example of Brussels, Geographical Analysis XXXV, 2003, 4, 310–328.

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tors and larger contexts but they do not efface the smaller ones of families, clans, cities or, for that matter, nation-states, as some have feared might happen with the extension of globalisation. Modernity is not the benchmark of human development; it is only one step along a road whose destination is far from certain. Historians are not going to turn themselves en masse into archaeologists or physical anthropologists and devote themselves from now on to studying the far distant past. The results obtained by those who do study those far distant pasts can nonetheless help the rest of us develop a less teleological view of history. A divide has developed between the evolutionary view of history that is associated with the concept of modernity and the natural scientific understanding of evolution. It is perhaps now time to rethink the former by paying closer attention to the latter. The evolutionary, developmental or progressive view of history took shape before Darwin (between the Scottish philosophers and Hegel), and it never did become Darwinian, though in the later nineteenth century historians did sometimes veer into the vulgarisation known as Social Darwinism. The evolutionary view of history (or what Johannes Fabian calls ‘evolutionary time’) could not be Darwinian because it remained caught up in the telos of the modern. According to Fabian ‘civilization, evolution, development, acculturation, modernization (and their cousins, industrialization, urbanization) are all terms whose conceptual content derives, in ways that can be specified, from evolutionary Time.’44 Those who are primitive, savage, backward or traditional in the present belong to an earlier time. In the evolutionary view of history, history is advancing toward a goal, and that goal is modernity, whether in keeping with the theories of Hegel, Marx, Comte or any other of the many social theories of modernisation (Weber, Durkheim, Parsons, etc.). Each defines modernity differently, of course, but modernity still operates as a kind of final purpose animating the progression. In contrast, Darwinism is nothing if it is not non-teleological. Natural selection favours ‘adaptive structures’, but these are incredibly various and virtually unpredictable, if not imperceptible, except over very long periods of time. A non-teleological version of history would be Darwinian in the way that the current modern time schema is not.45 I am not advocating applying Darwinism to history to establish a kind of Darwinian naturalism in histori44 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983), 17. 45 On Darwin’s view, see the account in Derek Freeman, The Evolutionary Theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, Current Anthropology XV, 1974, 3, 211–237. Especially useful is Ernst Mayr, The Idea of Teleology, Journal of the History of Ideas LIII, 1992, 1, 117–135.

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cal studies as some would do in political theory.46 Instead, I am suggesting that closer attention to the Darwinian revolution might help shake up historians’ unquestioned assumptions about modernity and its role in historical writing. ‘Ancient’, ‘medieval’ and even ‘modern’ and ‘modernity’ would be less troublesome terms if they were used non-teleologically as handy temporal pointers. Modernity would cease to be the goal of history and would instead function as a provisional location for some, but perhaps not all, societies. It would signal where some societies are, rather than making claims about where everyone else in the world is necessarily headed. In a non-teleological view, there is no need to argue that history lacks all sense of direction, any more than one need claim that evolution is directionless. Both have been characterised by the development of greater complexity, whether in social organisation or in the biological progression from bacteria to the human brain. Greater complexity in evolution may have established the conditions for the emergence of human reason, but greater complexity in social and political organisation does not guarantee that human reason will construct a more just or harmonious society and politics. If the parallel with evolution is valid (and it can only be a metaphor given that historical writing has developed over a relatively small slice of time compared to evolutionary processes), then historians must grant that our current sense of where we are is not a sign of the telos, much less the end, of history – and that major changes in direction are entirely possible in the future. Natural selection favours adaptation, but it also leads on occasion into dead ends. Even more important, what is adaptive is not predictable; it can only be understood as such ex post facto. Although some attention to the Darwinian sense of evolution and time might be a helpful corrective to habits developed in the last generations of historical writing, science is not going to solve history’s problems. Solutions will emerge from the ever-mutating practices of historians and history makers. I believe that it is desirable to continue using the universal, homogeneous, totalising category of time developed from the eighteenth century onward, because it enables us to imagine ourselves as living in one shared world with one shared past, albeit a past with many diverging traces. Globalisation – both the experiential changes so labelled and the concept developed to analyse those changes – depends on that concept of universal, homogeneous time. That one past (‘one’ only in the sense that it is shared and not implying that every part of it points in the same direction) need not lead to a pre-given teleologically determined present or future. A certain 46 Larry Arnhart, The New Darwinian Naturalism in Political Theory, The American Political Science Review LXXXIX, 1995, 2, 389–400.

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amount of teleology no doubt creeps into any historical narrative or historical interpretation, because the narrator or the interpreter knows how the story ends, and that knowledge inevitably shapes the story. Insofar as teleology is related to meaning itself, teleology slips in. As history repeatedly shows, however, the ending is always provisional; it is simply a convention, albeit a necessary and powerful one, of storytelling. Teleology has to be resisted, even when it cannot be vanquished.47 Globalisation, whether one believes it is happening in a new way or not, has at the very least the merit of producing greater interest in non-Western histories and historians. We may well be entering a period of experimentation, as Gallois and Hölscher suggested, in which Western historians not only question their own ways of writing history, but also look more closely at how other cultures conceive and express historical time. It may well be that we have a greater sense of distance from our own ways of writing history because those ways are becoming a thing of the past. History remains fascinating precisely because it is always changing.

47 Here I simplify a complex debate about narrative. David Carr, Place and Time: On the Interplay of Historical Points of View, History and Theory XL, 2001, 4, 153–167.

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Unification of Time and the Fragmentation of Pasts in Meiji Japan

An enquiry into ‘time’, as one may have noticed, is a useful point of departure for the great spring-cleaning that is long overdue. There is always a need for it when an intellectual tradition providing the basic means of orientation within its societies has run its course for several centuries, as ours has from the (so-called) Renaissance to the present time. Norbert Elias1 In a nutshell, [the logic of] inversion turns the pathways along which life is lived into boundaries within which it is enclosed. Life, according to this logic, is reduced to an internal property of things that occupy the world but do not, strictly speaking, inhabit it. A world that is occupied but not inhabited, that is filled with existing things rather than woven from the strands of their coming-into-being, is a world of space. Tim Ingold2

The archipelago in the Western Pacific that we now call Japan was one of the first non-Western places to write its history following modern European conceptions. For non-Western places this was (and is) an especially difficult process. These societies not only had to deal with new time-reckoning systems – the solar (Gregorian) calendar and the twenty-four hour clock – they also needed to adapt to new temporalities: mechanical time and the notion of progress. Many years ago Edward Said demonstrated one implication of developmental time for our understanding of the world, namely, the way that a particular discursive construction of the Orient is part of a temporal structure that locates it as being at an early stage or as backward.3 The power of this knowledge system, the difficulty it presented to many Japanese intellectuals as they tried to adapt to this new liberal-internationalist world and its connection to history, is evident in a pithy statement by a Japanese re1 Norbert Elias, Time: A Brief Essay (Oxford, 1992), 93–94. 2 Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (London, 2011), 145. 3 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978).

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counted by Erwin Baelz in 1876: ‘We have no history. Our history begins today.’4 This statement suggests that in this encounter history is playing a performative role. The possibility that a place with over a millennium of recorded heritage has no history is a fascinating admission. In his Outline of a Theory of Civilization (1875), Fukuzawa Yukichi, one of the most famous of enlightenment proponents, echoed Hegel when he stated that Japan’s government has repeated the same thing for twenty-five centuries.5 We can find similar statements from other cultures, such as India and China.6 At the most basic level, this absence of history suggests that the mode of representing the past differed in these societies. But more important, the idea that history begins after more than a millennium of recorded past demonstrates the specificity of history in a society adapting to the modern world. Because of these different understandings of what came before, history has powerful implications in political relations and is more than a descriptor of events and relations. For the first time, Japan needed to discover its past to locate its horizon into some future. Since Said’s classic work, we have interrogated, extended and criticised the idea of Orientalism; we have traversed much ground, from the early critiques of deconstruction and post-everything, beginning with post-structuralism. Yet it strikes me that we always seem to reiterate what has been stated earlier. We, that is Japanese studies (and area studies more broadly), still operate within the discursive structure described by Said. To a rather remarkable extent, forgetting is a part of our knowledge industry. The persistence of this idea, despite empirical work to the contrary, renders meaningful Alfred North Whitehead’s notion of a ‘Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness’. In his 1925 Lowell lectures, Whitehead delves into the mechanistic nature of thought, an epistemology that has existed since the seventeenth century and, in his words, we can ‘neither live with nor live without’.7 The misplaced concreteness is the confusion of the material and the abstract, a simplification of a high degree of abstraction. This interplay between material and abstract can occur on several levels. At the root of this confusion, here, is the conflation between the content of pasts and time. In other words, to slip outside 4 Quoted in George Macklin Wilson, Time and History in Japan, American Historical Review LXXXV, 1980, 3, 570. 5 Fukuzawa Yukichi, Outline of a Theory of Civilization, David A. Dilworth/G. Cameron Hurst (trans.) (Sophia, 1973). 6 See for example Romila Thapar, Historical Traditions in Early India: c. 1000 BC to c. AD 600, in: Andrew Feldherr/Grant Hardy (eds.), The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Beginnings to AD 600, vol. 1 (Oxford, 2011), 533–576. 7 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York, 1967[1925]), 51–55.

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of this circularity of critique that ultimately falls back into the structure of Orientalism, we need to be mindful of Elias’ call for a spring cleaning, an enquiry into time and history. In this paper, I would like to explore the extent to which history itself has been a technology that facilitates this fallacy of misplaced concreteness. I follow recent work that has pointed out that, beginning in the early nineteenth century, history changed, adapting a unilinear temporal framework rooted in a notion of time as ‘empty’ or ‘homogeneous’.8 Numerous studies point to the rise of a specific form of historical thinking around the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Scholars began to write about the past using a linear, that is, chronological, structure, part of the mechanical nature that Whitehead analyses. The nature of the subject matter also changed, moving from a focus on exemplary deeds and figures to concentrate on the nation and its institutions. Tim Ingold’s notion of a logic of inversion cited in the epigraph offers a way to further unpack the implications of this historicity of history. He defines this inversion in the following way, ‘Through this logic, the field of involvement in the world, of a thing or person, is converted into an interior schema of which its manifest appearance and behaviour are but outward expressions’.9 In the transformation of Meiji Japan, linear time becomes the interior schema; history gives it outward form. That history was both the world or universalistic history that Western nations brought to Asia, a concept that located Japan as some backward place and the technique that intellectuals used to formulate a narrative of Japan’s national becoming. Within the field of Japanese history, a major problem has been that efforts to unravel this structure often occur within the same historical framework. When we have described the history of history writing in Japan, we have described the transformation from early modes of history writing to more advanced forms, that is, the jettisoning of inherited practises and knowledge and the adaption of ‘modern’ ideas and techniques. In evaluations, ‘traditional’ becomes ‘conservative’ and ‘modern’ becomes ‘progressive’, even ‘liberal’, largely because of the locus in what is backward or what is new.10 But because the past is necessary to the modern, and because Japan was the past 8 See for example Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York, 1983); John Toews, Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early NineteenthCentury Berlin (Cambridge, 2004); Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, Keith Tribe (trans.) (Cambridge/MA, 1985); Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, Tom Conley (trans.) (New York, 1988); and Zachary Schiffman, The Birth of the Past (Baltimore/MD, 2011). 9 Ingold, Being Alive, 68. 10 Two very different scholars have pointed to the power and misuse of the ‘new’ in social discourse: Michel Serres, The Birth of Time, in: idem, Genesis, Genevieve James/James Nielson (trans.) (Ann Arbor/MI, 1995), and David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old (Oxford, 2007).

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but needed a past to extract itself from that locus, we must formulate a different way of understanding this process. By reorienting the subject of my analysis to history apart from linear time, we can see how history has been a tool that is employed in different and in often contradictory ways. Most important, it becomes possible to recognise that the difficulty of writing history in Japan (and other non-Western places) is often located within history itself, that is within this logic of inversion, rather than in a failure of the Japanese to fully understand. That dilemma within history, which Japanese intellectuals confronted, was that, as part of Asia, their inherited knowledge and practises locate them as Oriental, that is, without history. To extract themselves from this static category, they needed to separate themselves from their inherited knowledge and practises; but to become a nation, they needed their own past in order to write that history and gain a horizon of expectations. The transformation of history in Meiji Japan was not a movement from one form of writing to another, but rather an inversion, a reformulation of meaning, where words, ideas and data could continue as if they had not changed because of their resemblances to what they had been, though in fact they had been placed within a different conceptual structure so as to alter, considerably, their significance, purpose and meaning.

1. Synchronisation: The Unification of Universal Time In the mid-nineteenth century people in the region we now call Asia did not identify themselves as Asian. They were of a particular community, region or empire; today they are from particular nations. On the continent the word Asia (yaxiya) was introduced by the Jesuits in the seventeenth century, but it was not until the late nineteenth century that it gained the meaning of an autonomous geographical place.11 In Tokugawa society, appellations such as shinkoku (the characters for Qing and country) and t¯ojin (the characters for Tang and person) were commonly used for what we today call China or Chinese. Some scholars used ch¯uka (middle kingdom) as a condition opposite to iteki (barbarian). Each of these terms suggests the relationality of place. In Meiji Japan, Fukuzawa was one of the first to refer to Asia as an area in decline.12 This is an example of how the logic of inversion has guided our understanding of the change that occurred. ‘Asia’ is a word for some geographical area that began in the imagination of Europe. For Herodotus (we trace the word back to ancient Greece) Asia was the land to the east (today 11 Rebecca Karl, Creating Asia: China in the World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century, American Historical Review, CIII, 1998, 4, 1100–1101. 12 Hashikawa Buns¯o, Jungyaku no shis¯o (Keis¯o shob¯o, 1973), 15–16.

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we would call this region Anatolia or the Middle East), but Asians did not inhabit that land – Scythians, Persians, etc. did. In contrast, Donald Lach locates Asia as the lands east of the Indus River, but he writes about China, India, Japan and the countries of Southeast Asia as metonyms of Asia.13 Around the eighteenth century this ‘other’ gained a temporality. Montesquieu discusses Asia as the static antithesis to a dynamic Europe, Voltaire recognises it as the beginning of civilisation, but one that had never advanced, and Hegel locates Asia in the first stage in the development of history. The very meaning of ‘Asia’ is thus intertwined with the synchronisation of the places of the Western Pacific into the international world. We call this progress, development, imperialism and colonialism; it is the population of Newtonian time with a linear notion of change; it is the rise of a historical thinking in these regions; it is the division of various territories into nation-states, and it is the emergence of the historical discipline that naturalises the progress and development of the world. Asia has become the starting point of a world of progress. But for the places of Asia, it is also the arresting of that process. Although they have experienced much upheaval and change, they have become concrete manifestations of an abstract idea – the static origin. One problem with this linear temporality can be illustrated through a metaphor borrowed from Michel Serres, a fascinating philosopher of science. He reacts to the linear, progressive time of modern society: ‘That’s not time, only a simple line. It’s not even a line, but a trajectory of the race for first place – in school, in the Olympic Games, for the Nobel Prize. This isn’t time, but a simple competition – once again, war. … The first to arrive, the winner of the battle obtains as his prize the right to reinvent history to his own advantage.’14 This metaphor of a race strikes me as particularly apposite for the temporality of the modern, especially as it has imbricated our understanding of the non-West. It is competition, the hallmark of capitalism, that places all on treadmills. The acceleration of change in our lives and in our societies aim at that elusive goal of progress, development and modernity. This race to be modern, this conceptual mapping of the world, gives order. Various places are synchronised according to the same system, a temporal metric that assigns position within the absolute space of the globe. Others then are not alter, but other – ‘foreign’ – participants in a race who can never be first. Even though this is a hegemonic system, it is often willfully accepted. The seduction of the race is the possibility of participation in a system that seems to offer all the same conditions, absolute time. In Meiji Japan this notion of time was accepted as a basic requirement for attaining the goal of fukoku ky¯o13 Donald Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe (Chicago, 1965). 14 Michel Serres/Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, Roxanne Lapidus (trans.) (Ann Arbor/MI, 1995), 49.

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hei (rich country, strong military), the horizon of wealth and power. It was the desire of nineteenth-century intellectuals to write their own history of Japan that fit this structure and served their ambitions. This is part of the genius of Hegel’s history as well as the genius of modernity – to establish a goal that brings units into one universalistic order and then uses difference marked temporally to explain why others do not measure up. My invocation of Hegel is because of his centrality in the making of history or, more accurately, in the dissemination of this form of developmental or historical thinking. He placed Asia at the beginning of history, a stage characterised by despotism, childishness and a ‘repetition of the same majestic ruin’.15 He is certainly not the leading or only intellectual to render the world according to the absolute time and space of Newton. The brilliance of this formulation is that it takes a relational idea and fixes it along a mechanical continuum. Through history, Asia became the outward form – the past that is still living – that naturalised that inner schema. Hegel exhibits this naturalisation: ‘Time is real and objective not only because it constitutes the framework within which the subject organises possible experience; it is real because it is the process which exhibits the reality of the subject itself.’16 The noun ‘time’ can be replaced by ‘Asia’. Asia is the concrete manifestation of an abstract idea. In this early moment when the Japanese began to discover a past, they found that they were the past, the living past of the West lumped together with India and China.

2. Discovery of Pasts This synchronisation of the places of this archipelago provides the potential for reconceiving society and also illustrates the power of history to restrict. Within Japan, what had hitherto been the present, which included over a millennium of accumulated experience, was no longer apposite to this world. In other words, the unity of time and society had been broken. Time was uneven, but its variability was synchronised with social life and the specificity of place, so that its unity was ‘natural’. The lunisolar calendar was more closely tied to the agrarian, non-capitalist economy. It marked auspicious and inauspicious days, days of rest were connected to the movement of the moon, ‘holidays’ were tied to especially powerful days. The day was broken up into six equal units of daylight and six equal units of dark; and obviously 15 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York, 1956[1837]), 106. 16 Donald J. Wilcox, The Measure of Times Past: Pre-Newtonian Chronologies and the Rhetoric of Relative Time (Chicago, 1987), 36.

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these twelve units were neither equal nor constant. In 1872 the Meiji state changed time, it adopted the Gregorian calendar and the twenty-four hour clock. The change sparked the following lament for the lunisolar system of time keeping: Why did the government suddenly decide to abolish it? The whole thing is disagreeable. The old system fitted in with the seasons, the weather and the movement of the tides. One could plan one’s work or one’s clothing or virtually anything else by it. Since the revision … Nothing is the way it should be.17

In the case of Japan, it is a mistake to connect the discovery of the past with the coming of the West and the Meiji ishin.18 The separation of the past from the present was not a result of Western encroachment. It began earlier amidst the intellectual world of the Tokugawa era and accelerated after the ishin. In the eighteenth century a group of intellectuals known as the kokugaku (nativist studies) school argued that the ancient ideal is not that of the sages and texts of ancient China, but can be found in the extant writings from ancient Japan. Motoori Norinaga turned to the Kojiki, a chronicle completed in 712, eight years before the Nihon shoki, the hitherto authoritative account of Japan’s ancient past. Although only separated by eight years, the Kojiki was written in ancient Japanese using Chinese characters. The Nihon shoki was written in Chinese, in Chinese characters and using the Chinese style of dynastic chronologies. This elevation of the Kojiki begins a separation of the archipelago from the intellectual order centred around ancient (and contemporary) China and facilitates an ‘idea’ of Japan. Moreover, the followers of this school would become important figures in an early attempt to formulate a history of Japan in the mid-Meiji period. The idea that a past needs to be discovered is difficult to grasp in our modern age.19 Nevertheless, in Meiji Japan that idea took hold, and it did so in sporadic and varied ways.20 An early indication that present practises might no longer be apposite for the contemporary world appeared in 1868 when the new government issued the Charter Oath, a broad statement of principles. The fourth item stated, ‘Evil customs of the past shall be abandoned, and actions shall be based on international usage’.21 Verification that evil 17 Quoted in Stefan Tanaka, New Times in Modern Japan (Princeton/NJ, 2004), 8. 18 Ishin is commonly translated as restoration. I use ishin to emphasise the revolutionary, not the restorative nature of this event. See Tetsuo Najita, Japan’s Industrial Revolution in Historical Perspective, in: Masao Miyoshi/H. D. Harootunian (eds.), Japan in the World (Durham/NC, 1993), 13–20. 19 For a provocative, new study that demonstrates the historicity of the past, see Schiffman, The Birth of the Past. 20 I have described the gradual discovery of pasts in Tanaka, New Times, esp. 27–53. 21 Robert M. Spaulding, The Intent of the Charter Oath, in: Richard K. Beardsley (ed.), Studies in Japanese History and Politics (Ann Arbor/MI, 1967), 11.

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customs were indeed past came in April 1868 when the government issued the first of several laws separating gods and spirits (kami) from boddhisattva. Shrines (Shinto) and temples (Buddhist) had been administered by the Buddhist priests, and temples in addition to their religious function often performed administrative duties for the local lord. The destruction of many temples, and of their many books, statues and buildings that this law provoked, indicates that these objects were not viewed as relics, artifacts or antiques, but as material of the [hated] present. Shortly thereafter their meaning began to change as statues and other discarded objects appeared in treaty port shops that catered to Westerners who view them as antiques. In 1872 the government conducted the jinshin survey to catalogue the objects in temples and shrines, primarily in the Kansai area, and in 1884 a law was passed regulating ‘antique’ stores. Another event that indicates the severing of a part of the present into a past occurred in 1877, when Edward Morse found evidence of cannibalism in shell middens exposed during the laying of railroad track between Tokyo and Yokohama. The ensuing debate could lead to only two conclusions: these ancient people were not Japanese, which would break the unity between place (the archipelago) and people, or the Japanese had been/are cannibals. By the end of the 1870s, as time was being unified, the archipelago increasingly possessed myriad pasts. Turning these myriad pasts into a history, though, was not an easy process.

3. An Attempt to Write History Linkage to an antecedent can be a powerful tool in legitimating a new government. From the very beginning of the new regime, its leaders recognised the need for a written account that would connect the new government with the distant past and give the impression that they were ‘restoring’ an earlier form of government. As early as 1869 an imperial edict was issued that begins, ‘Historiography is a for ever immortal state ritual and a wonderful act of our ancestors’.22 More important, the government established an Office of Historiography, charged with compiling a history along the lines of the Six Histories, which had been written during the Nara (710–794) and Heian (794–1183) periods. This new chronicle would, it was hoped, establish a connection between the new government and an ancient aristocracy. Since its founding, the Office underwent numerous reorganisations as well as leadership changes. In part, its instability can be attributed to the impossibility of its task: to continue a twelfth- or fourteenth-century chronology written in 22 Quoted in Margaret Mehl, History and the State in Nineteenth-Century Japan (New York, 1998), 1.

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Chinese so as to legitimate a new (modern) government that now sought to distance itself from China, and to do so while using or at least acknowledging a temporal structure borrowed from the West.23 Underlying this complicated problem was a more fundamental issue: the uncertainty of history given the instability of the past. A connection to an earlier moment is not the same as a narrative of national becoming. Moreover, the popular movements and protests of the first half of the 1880s, which culminated in the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement, spurred many in government to view history as a tool to foster the unity of the nation and loyalty to the state. The scholars who filled the positions at the Office of Historiography generally belonged to one of two intellectual traditions. Many had trained in the knowledge system that drew heavily on neo-Confucian forms of learning. The histories they had learned were based on the dynastic compilations of the different Chinese empires. These historians, called kangaku scholars, were skilled in careful exegetical readings of texts. Shigeno Yasutsugu and Kume Kunitake are two of the most active and best known of these scholars. The other principal group was trained in nativist studies. This group traces its lineage back to great philologists like Motoori and his influential reinterpretation of the Kojiki. The followers of this group saw the possibility of ‘restoring’ ancient texts, which they hoped to unearth the ‘pure’ Japanese sensibility that had obtained before the assimilation of Chinese ideas and culture. My purpose in this essay is not to recount the unfolding of history writing,24 but rather to explore how the past changed making it possible for a history to be written. These scholars brought different intellectual traditions to the task, had different notions of what a suitable past is, and, while sharing an interest in the nation, they defined it differently. An important group I will not cover are those who have been called ‘enlightenment proponents’, Fukuzawa and Taguchi Ukichi among them. These intellectuals argued for a linear, progressive history, invoking Western historians such as Henry Tho23 This office eventually became the Historiographical Institute in 1895, still at the Imperial University of Tokyo. The many name and organisational changes reflect the controversies surrounding the past, as well as the difficulty in coming to grips with it. For example, in 1881 the antecedent changed when the Institute was directed to compile a chronology beginning in the fourteenth century. For an account of these different offices, see Mehl, History and the State; and Tanaka, New Times. 24 There are many other accounts that have covered this ground. Two recent essays are Axel Schneider/Stefan Tanaka, The Transformation of History in China and Japan, in: Stuart MacIntyre/Juan Maiguascha/Attila Pok (eds.), Oxford History of History Writing, 1800–1945, vol. 4 (Oxford, 2011), 491–519; and Margaret Mehl: The mid-meiji ‘history boom’: The Professionalisation of Historical Scholarship and the Growing Pains of an Emerging Academic Discipline, Japan Forum X, 1998, 1, 67–83.

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mas Buckle and Francois Guizot. In the end, though they were important advocates, they did not write that history.25 The 1880s exhibit a considerable rise, a ‘boom’, of interest in a history of Japan.26 A number of historians have attributed this interest to a renewed conservatism, an emphasis on the nation in reaction to Westernisation.27 Yet the controversy that surrounded the writing of history should be seen as a part of the process of becoming a modern nation-state. The scholars were engaged in debate aimed at determining what Ingold calls the ‘internal property of things’. In 1883 the Shigaku ky¯okai became the first history association of modern Japan; it began publishing its journal, the Shigaku ky¯okai zasshi in July of that year. Prior to this moment history had been taught as Western History, while Japan’s past was taught in the Department of Japanese and Chinese Literature (wakan bungaku). The founding of this history association was one result of a concerted effort to institutionalise the discipline of history within the main university, Tokyo University. One year earlier, Inoue Yorikuni and Konakamura Kiyonori, professors in the Department of Japanese and Chinese Literature, established the Center for Investigation of Ancient Texts (K¯oten k¯oky¯ujo) with the support of Kat¯o Hiroyuki, president of university. The first course on Japanese history, it should be noted, was not taught at Tokyo University, but at its preparatory school. Kat¯o also supported the founding of the Shigaku ky¯okai, of which Konakamura and Inoue were founding members. The Shigaku ky¯okai has generally been overlooked in standard surveys of historiography. It is indeed easy to miss them if one follows a linear progression of historigraphical developments within the adapt/react model of change. But it is at this point that linearity – our practice of retrospectively recounting how things have become what they are – has determined that historiography. The kangaku scholars, such as Shigeno and Kume, are usually described as traditional and rather bland, largely because their textual criticism resulted in very detailed and rigorous analysis of texts.28 Moreover, the history and compendiums they were preparing were written 25 Indeed, historians who have tried to celebrate these intellectuals as ‘enlightened’, that is proponents of Western ideas, have had a difficult time sustaining their praise as the more these men learned about the West and its ideas the more they became more nuanced and nationalistic. For a recent attempt to sustain such a positive interpretation by avoiding the last thirty years of Fukuzawa’s career, see Albert M. Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment: The Early Thought of Fukuzawa Yukichi (Cambridge/MA, 2009). 26 Mehl has described this rise in interest in history in her The mid-meiji ‘history boom’. 27 See for example Okubo ¯ Toshiaki, Nihon kindai shigaku no seiritsu (Tokyo, 1988), esp. 51–58. 28 Peter Duus, Whig History, Japanese Style: The Min’y¯usha Historians and the Meiji Restoration, Journal of Asian Studies XXXIII, 1974, 3, 415–436.

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in Chinese (by practice and decree), a fact that certainly supports a charge of traditionalism. Nativist studies scholars, on the other hand, have been depicted as conservative because of their focus on ancient texts and their emphasis on the imperial system. Though these categorisations oversimplify, they are not without some validity, and they were used in the rhetoric of the vying sides. But for my purpose, to categorise the two schools in these ways for using their learned conceptual systems as they sought to elevate Japan’s past into a history diminishes their contribution and downplay the often radical nature of their critiques of canonical texts. Indeed, I will suggest later that it is devious; for it glorifies the West, exonerates history and obscures the inversion that occurs in the formulation of history. The significance of this concerted effort to give form to the past, in conjunction with the increasing separation of the past from the present, is that it first called into question the standard interpretation that the Japanese had adapted from the West, and then a conservative reaction set in. At the very least, it suggests that a simultaneity existed in which changes toward a greater incorporation of Western ideas and objects existed side by side with an increasing concern for ordering Japan’s own past. For example, the iconic event of Westernisation was the November 1883 opening of the Rokumeikan, the hall designed by Josiah Conder in French Renaissance style to host and entertain Western dignitaries. The simultaneity of these two events – the foundation of the Shigaku ky¯okai and the opening of the Rokumeikan – suggests that both were constituent parts of the process of joining the ‘race’ by becoming a modern nation-state. Japanese intellectuals were demonstrating comparability between Japanese and Western forms, while at the same time turning to a particular part of their past, an essential part of nation-making and not some kind of conservative reaction. But even more, such an interpretation ignores the contradictory positions of pasts in the making of a modern nation. It accepts the end point, the academic history of Japan that established the boundaries, the ‘internal property of things’. The lead essay of the inaugural issue of Shigaku ky¯okai zasshi was written by Maruyama Sakura, a codirector of the association.29 Maruyama’s essay exhibits the transition that many of the members of this school were under-

29 Maruyama Sakura, Shigaku ky¯okai s¯oritsu no shushi, Shigaku ky¯okai zasshi, no. 1 (July 1883), 2–8. Maruyama, a professed disciple of Hirata Atsutane, served the government in various capacities since the ishin. In 1882 he helped organise the Rikken Teiseito, the Imperial Constitutional Party, a government party organised to counter the political parties supporting the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement, and in 1886 he became assistant head librarian of the Imperial Household Ministry.

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going.30 It shares ideas with enlightenment scholars, such as Fukuzawa and Miyake Yonekichi, as well as with kangaku historians, such as Shigeno and Kume. He, too, laments the poor state of historical writing and understanding about Japan. History, he asserts, is more than events and records, rise and fall, order and decay, and customs and habits. It should include abstractions: rights, obligations, and the the idea of the nation and its structure. He complains that most accounts of the past are not about Japan, but are written for or by a particular group and to represent a particular perspective. They therefore lack narrative form – a swipe at the annalistic style taken over from China, as well as at the stories of great deeds. In short, he suggests that many of the hitherto authoritative texts are not history. He does not go so far as to question their overall veracity or their historical utility, as did Shigeno and Kume, but he does specifically criticise two canonical works: the Dai nihon shi, which he found to be written simplistically, ‘in childish language’; and the Kojiki, which he complained was written with Chinese ideographs.31 Maruyama and his colleagues played an important role in transforming the subject of history from a compendium of ethical stories fragmented by locale to a geographical abstraction, the space of the nation. Maruyama’s lineage traces back to Motoori and Hirata, but his advocacy for the ancient past is less a championing of the emperor and the imperial lineage than a use of imperial continuity as a means for describing the nation. He implores attendees to work for a history that restores the ‘great imperial Japan’ (dai nihon teikoku), but he ends his essay by acknowledging that it is unclear what will be the shape of a history of Japan. Parallel to this effort to write a history of Japan emerged a movement by intellectuals to unify the language and nation. Such a unification also affected the historical debates. Records of the past had been written in Chinese, and initial efforts to compile a history of Japan had persisted in using that language. But nativist studies scholars complained that a Japanese history should be written in Japanese; this was, on the one hand, a continuation of the nativist emphasis on the ancient texts that separated Japan from ancient China. In 1889 Konakamura pointed out the difficulty of fostering a history of Japan when much of the existing accounts were written in Chinese. But more germane, during the 1880s an international issue – the problem of Asia – was very much on the minds of Japanese intellectuals. This was most strongly articulated in 1891, when Inoue Tetsujir¯o, a professor of philosophy at the Imperial University of Tokyo, 30 For an account of nativist studies scholars during the Meiji period, see Susan L. Burns, Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan (Durham/NC, 2003). 31 One of the earliest versions of the Kojiki available in a vernacular Japanese was Iida Nagao’s 1888 Japanese translation of Basil Hall Chamberlain’s English translation of that text.

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wrote an essay arguing for a Japanese Oriental history program.32 Inoue complained that, while studying in Europe, he was often identified as Chinese. A Japanese Oriental history would be a corrective to the ignorance and misunderstandings of Westerners. But the most troubling misunderstanding for Inoue was not about Asia as such, but rather the identification of Japan as belonging within Asia, that is, being like China. Inoue believed that empirical research would correct the identification of the Japanese as Orientals, and therefore backward. This shift of the unit of analysis to the space of Japan, however, ultimately helped to undermine the goals of the Shigaku ky¯okai. The conversion of history into the history of a nation was coterminous with the rise of modern history and nation-states.33 It was, therefore, a necessary step in Japan’s synchronisation with the international system. In the second to last issue of the Shigaku ky¯okai zasshi, Iida Nagao writes, ‘national history (kokushi) describes the actual experience of the populous/people (jinmin) since the founding of the country. More specifically, national history brings together nationals (kokumin), considers them as one person and records the deeds of that [collective] person; it is the biography of that person, the unification of the nationals, their features, nature, work and intercourse as well as their religion, laws and government.’34 Konakamura, too, argued in the Shigakkai zasshi, the inaugural issue of the Japanese Historical Association, that a national history is important first of all to develop a sense of patriotism and national unity, and second because an understanding of the customs and habits of the past facilitates good government.35 Maruyama’s acceptance of principles and rights, Iida’s framing of history as the space of the nation that bounds and contains, and Konakamura’s pedagogical and utilitarian reasons further the separation of the past from the present. But even though these scholars increasingly recognised the events prior to their present as a past, that past seemingly included everything. The problem became populating that past in some orderly fashion. In two essays published within two years’ time, we can see the limitations of the Shigaku ky¯okai’s effort to organise the past so as to write history. In its opening editorial, 32 Inoue Tetsujir¯o, T¯oy¯oshigaku no kachi, Shigakkai zasshi, no. 2 (1891), 709–717; no. 2 (1891), 788–798, and no. 3 (1892), 1–14. For a fine account of Inoue that covers his engagement with Western scholarship and his gradual move toward a more Japan-centered idea, see Richard Reitan, Making a Moral Society: Ethics and the State in Meiji Japan (Honululu/HI, 2008). 33 For a fine study on the simultaneity of nation formation in Japan, the United States and France, see Christopher Hill, National History and the World of Nations: Capital, State, and the Rhetoric of History in Japan, France, and the United States (Durham/NC, 2008). 34 Iida Nagao, Shiron, Shigaku ky¯okai zasshi, no. 26 (1885), 819. 35 Konakamura Kiyonori, Rekishi no hanashi, Shigakkai zasshi, no. 1(1889), 5–10.

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the board listed twenty-four historical categories: creation (of heaven and earth), the heavenly deities, imperial lineage, the bureaucracy (court), ritual and ceremony, imperial travel regalia, music, literature, military system, weapons, law, food distribution, agriculture, commerce, engineering, art, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, feudalism, geography, customs, foreign relations and Buddhism. Here, the past is flat, a plane of recorded happenings with more or less equal weight. Time, too, is not an important metric or marker. The timeless past is lined up with the distant (dead) past and the living past. In this listing, the imperial genealogy and accounts of its emergence and deeds came first. Maruyama cited Kitabatake Chikafusa’s Jinn¯o sh¯ot¯oki (ca. 1339) as a suitable example of a national history.36 His praise for this text rested on the presence within it of a unifying ideal for the nation, taigi meibun (the ethical relations between emperor and subjects). Most categories were closer to a living past, being concerned with those aspects of life that continue, such as customs, geography, mathematics, astronomy and food distribution. These appear mixed in with items from the now-distant past, such as weapons, feudalism and Buddhism.37 Two years later Iida offered a shorter list of ten categories in his essay on history: geography, government and law, customs, literature, art, religion, farming, crafts, merchants and foreign relations.38 The creation, heavenly deities, the imperial lineage, ceremony and the court either disappeared or were folded into categories such as politics and religion. Iida’s proposal for ordering the past amounted to an act of categorisation that increased the remove and compartmentalisation of the past. It is hard to imagine where Chikafusa’s glorification of the imperial line, which begins with the creation of the islands (Õyashima), would fit in Iida’s structure. Perhaps in government and law, geography, customs or religion? But to do so would break up the unity of the narrative, which consists in a continuous succession of emperors and empresses reaching back to creation, and it would substitute for that unified story a collection of parts, of data that fit the different categories. The timeless elements that were of concern to nativist-school historians would of necessity be severed in the making of a modern history of Japan. The impossibility of any endeavour to maintain the unity of the hitherto authoritative texts while conforming them to abstract historical categories 36 According to H. Paul Varley, the first draft was completed in 1339, but the extant version was revised in 1343. A Chronicle of Gods and Sovereigns: Jinn¯o Sh¯ot¯oki of Kitabatake Chikafusa, H. Paul Varley (trans.) (New York, 1980). 37 It would be several years before the temple complexes and various sects that had lost their influence would reconfigure themselves into a Buddhist religion. See James Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution (Princeton/NJ, 1990). 38 Iida, Shiron, 819.

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led toward a fissure that further divided the past into what we now know as the disciplines of history and national literature. Nativist scholars relinquished history, while history relinquished the people and their sensibilities. The Shigaku ky¯okai disbanded in 1885 and was replaced by the Õyashima gakkai (Association of the Great Myriad Islands [Japan]) in 1886. The ¯ yashima’ is an ancient appellation for what we change is telling. The name ‘O now call ‘Japan’. Literally, it means ‘the eight great islands’, the islands that were created by the gods Izanami and Izanagi. The Õyashima gakkai focused on the ancient texts and earlier histories, what we now call the classics, which include the Kojiki and Dai nihon shi. In other words, the disbanding of the Shigaku ky¯okai was a recognition of the limitations of that vision of history, while the founding of the Õyashima gakkai shifted emphasis to the centrality of the ethical ideals embedded in the now old accounts (that is, to Japanese literature) as the foundational knowledge of the nation.

4. History or Mythistory The transformation of the Shigaku ky¯okai parallels an institutional reform at the Imperial University of Tokyo that would reign over the distant and increasingly categorised past. In 1885 the Department of Japanese and Chinese Literature was split into departments of Japanese Literature (wabun gakka) and of Chinese Studies (kangaku); in 1889 the former became the Department of National Literature (kokubungaku). In 1887 a Department of History was founded and Rudolph Riess, a young German historian with distant ties to Leopold von Ranke, was hired. In 1889 a Department of Japanese History (kokushi) followed and took its place alongside the Department of History and the Department of Japanese Literature. And finally in that year the Japanese Historical Association was established. Shigeno and Kume became professors of Japanese History; Konakamura and Nait¯o Chisso remained in the Department of National Literature. Moreover, the Center for Investigation of Ancient Texts became an educational institution in its own right (Kokugakuin), specialising in the teaching of Japan’s past through the lens of Shinto. This suggests yet another division of the past: The discipline of national literature would honour the unity of the texts that had been the authoritative accounts of the past in such as way as to extract the general trends, ethics, sensibilities and spirit of the nation; Kokugakuin would play an important role in merging the myriad spirits that existed on the archipelago with the nation; this sacred past became the archive for State Shinto.39 39 For accounts of the history of national literature, see Haruo Shirane/Tomi Suzuki (eds.), Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature (Stan-

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This fragmentation of Japan’s past into the living, the sacred and the distant enabled the discipline of history to enter Serres’ race at last, synchronising itself with Western histories. The first consequence of this new history was its usefulness to the state. In his inaugural address as the first President of the Japanese Historical Association, Shigeno concluded: It is my hope that, when we have subjected to the processes of Western historical scholarship the materials which the Office of Historiography and its successors have collected and when we have in that light examined the evidence of our country’s past and compiled a history therefrom, the formation of this Historical Association will have proved to have done the state some service.40

Second, the new departments of History and Japanese History reigned over the contracted, distant past. Shigeno signals the centrality of data collection for the production of history. The understanding of what constituted “data” now went well beyond the previously accepted authoritative sources. The creation of an archive of material collected throughout the archipelago was, in fact, one of the lasting accomplishments of this office. Two examples are the Koji ruien (Encyclopedia of Ancient Matters), a massive compendium of material on life, objects and events in premodern Japan. It was first published between 1896 and 1913 in 350 volumes and is still in print. Konakamura was a principal figure in this undertaking. After the Historiographical Institute was reorganised (for a final time) in 1895, it began publishing the materials collected by Shigeno, Kume and colleagues as the Dai nihon shiry¯o (Chronological Source Books of Japanese History) and Dai nihon komonjo (Old Documents of Japan), documents about political figures and institutions from throughout the archipelago. When Shigeno mentions ‘processes of Western historical scholarship’, he is alluding to the study of the past as a science. The methods of this science were outlined in a memo by the president of the Imperial University advocating for the new Japanese History Department. Watanabe K¯oki wrote, ‘Today in order to understand social phenomena of a particular time and space, we will collect books, handicrafts and other artifacts of those times; dissect and analyse them; discern their qualities and research these things at a library just as science uses laboratories’.41 These compilations, however, were far from neutral or innocent projects; documents that bore meaning in a particular timespace were now shorn of their context and placed into an abstract spatial entity called ‘Japan’. The application of time altered the truth of this distant, soon to be historical past. ford/CA, 2000). For a history of the transformation of the kami into State Shinto, see Helen Hardacre, Shinto and the State, 1868–1945 (Princeton/NJ, 1989). 40 Quoted in Thomas Keirstead, Inventing Medieval Japan: The History and Politics of National Identity, The Medieval History Journal I (1998), 1, 61. 41 Tokyo teikoku daigaku goj¯unenshi, vol. 1 (Tokyo, 1932), 1297.

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Dates served as a framework for separating the data from the present and as a ‘neutral’ unit for comparison and verification (as if time at that era was unified). For example, when Shigeno found that documents disagreed on the dating of Kusunoki Masashige’s battle at Tenn¯oji, he suggested that the record of Kusunoki’s deeds was unreliable, perhaps even legendary in nature. He also claimed that Kojima Takanori, the reputedly loyal retainer of Emperor Go-Daigo, was fictive.42 The events surrounding Go-Daigo were politically significant because of the desire to connect the new government, as a restoration, to the Kenmu ishin of the fourteenth century. Time also facilitated evaluation. Kume Kunitake, Shigeno’s colleague, highlighted the remove in time of these now old texts by declaring that the narrative of the Heike monogatari was childlike.43 Frequent use was made of the metaphor of the child because it conveniently placed texts at an earlier moment of comparative ignorance and simplicity – and sometimes removed them from the purview of history altogether. This work operationalises Watanabe’s memo and speaks to the inversion that turns former reality – stories about exemplary experience – into fiction and establishes a new historical reality based on abstract criteria, the space of Japan and a linear (or universal) time. Neither criteria had existed when the documents were produced. The now finite past, the distant past of verifiable data, could then be further fragmented and ordered anew – dissected, analysed and classified. From the standpoint of Konakamura or the nativist sense of the past, this might have looked like an act of vivisection. To paraphrase Ingold, these tools establish that internal property of things that occupy but do not inhabit the past. Such a classificatory system is a part of the logic of inversion, where abstractions and the methodologies that support those abstractions became as important, if not more important than the content. Rather than explaining this development as a turn toward a more conservative (i.e., nationalistic) rhetoric, I prefer to see it as a moment when the category of ‘meaning’ took precedence over ‘content’. Michel de Certeau has this to say about the relationship between the different pasts: Our technical practices are often as silent, as circumscribed and as essential as were the initiation rites of the past, but henceforth they are of a scientific nature. It is in relation to these technical practices that historical discourse is elaborated, assuring them as a symbolic legitimacy and at the same time, ‘respecting’ them. – … historical discourse becomes the one possible myth of a scientific society that rejects myth …44 42 Shigeno Yasutsugu, Shi no hanashi, in: Tanaka Akira/Miyachi Masato (eds.), Rekishi ninshiki (Tokyo, 1991), 339–355. 43 Kume Kunitake, Rekishigaku no susumi, in: Tanaka Akira/Miyachi Masato (eds.), Rekishi ninshiki (Tokyo, 1991), 223. 44 Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, Brian Massumi (trans) (Minneapolis/MN, 1986), 220.

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A key technical practice, in the words of Ingold ‘the interior schema,’ is time, both as a metric employed to turn a living past into distant data and as a naturalised developmental structure (chronological time) to map that data. During the 1890s history also gained chronology, and it is in the context of this conflation between linear time and historical chronology that the ‘new’ practises become silent and descend into a ‘respected’ historical discourse. One of the more interesting studies was Naka Michiy¯o’s recalibration of the chronology in the Kojiki; he declared that the first three thousand years of the accounts of Emperors (and Empresses), prior to Ingy¯o (412–453), are inaccurate and even fictive.45 Beyond the question of real or not, ancient Japan gained temporality; it was not so much important as source of some essence, as much as it was necessary to determine the beginning of the narrative of the continuous development of the nation-state. The desire to subject the ancient texts to evaluation, to ‘dissect and analyse them, discern their qualities and research these things’, was to determine their place (if at all) on a historical timeline. This is a process of distillation of materials, of removing them from what had been their immediate context and meaning system and placing them into a putatively larger system, the space of Japan.46 Importantly, even though the meaning has changed, it was still the ancient period. Another key moment occurred during the first decade of the twentieth century as a medieval history was articulated, filling out the historical periodisation.47 The inversion was accomplished. By the first decade of the twentieth century, a chronological historical structure – ancient, medieval, modern – became standard, and linear time and historical chronology merged. This naturalisation of time and nation enabled history to claim that it narrates the historical reality of the nation, the ‘myth of a scientific society that rejects myth’.

45 Naka Michiy¯o, Joseinenki k¯o, Shigaku zasshi VIII (1897), 747–778, 884–910, 997–1021, 1206–1231. An early version of this study appeared in 1888. 46 Paul Nadasdy describes this process of distillation in the contact between environmental scientists and the Kluane First Nation. The similarity between the confrontation between the scientists with their abstracted knowledge and the Kluane beliefs and understanding and this process of writing history in Meiji Japan is remarkable. Paul Nadasdy, The Politics of TEK: Power and the ‘Integration’ of Knowledge, Arctic Anthropology XXXVI, 1999, 1/2, 1–18. It reminds me of Georg Simmel’s sage comment: ‘The things that determine and surround our lives, such as tools, means of transport, the products of science, technology and art, are extremely refined. Yet individual culture, at least in the higher strata, has not progressed at all to the same extent; indeed, it has even frequently declined.’ Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, David Frisby (ed.), Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (trans.) (London, 1990), 448. 47 See Keirstead, Inventing Medieval Japan.

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5. The Possibility of Histories To close, I would like to bring out an alternative vision of a national past, one that would neither require fragmenting the past nor function as a documentary archives of data that could be used to construct a chronological narrative. Instead it would be based more on the experience of the collective inhabitants. During the 1890s Miyake Setsurei, a public intellectual who founded the Seikyosha and edited its journal Nihonjin, wrote widely on the past and its relationship to the present nation. Based on his writings on Japanese characteristics, he has commonly been juxtaposed with Tokutomi Soh¯o as the more conservative and nationalistic intellectual. Yet, the following statement from his famous text Shinzenbi nihonjin (Japanese: ‘truth’, ‘goodness’, ‘beauty’) written in 1890, suggests a quite different notion of the past and how it accumulates into the history of a nation. How could the natural country of Japan be a place that organised itself? From the legends of the Kojiki – chronicles that are probably not accurate – which depict much turmoil many thousands of years ago, there is procreation, reproduction, cooperation and expansion. In this way, there are as many as 40 million loving descendants who exist over a long period and have a great variety of stations in life, this is smelted (porcelain), brewed (sake) and gradually forms the nation of Japan. The nation-state is not organised from desire and constructed like a company – planning, leisurely discussion and the distribution of pamphlets (opinion papers). Each person in the nation of Japan with this history is called Japanese.48

Miyake’s sense of history is as an accumulation of the activities and experiences of the people, what Ingold calls the many ‘strands of their cominginto-being’. Miyake’s past was not a distant, dead past of documents separated from the evidence of living or sacred pasts. It was not a story that could be neatly ordered (chronologically) into a narrative of political becoming. It is closer to a place that Ingold sees as inhabited. This idea has the potential to engender a different kind of political system. It can deemphasise the mediating structures (such as the former samurai who steered the government away from the common people) in such a way as to allow for greater participation and a more direct relationship (more democratic) between the ruler and ruled. Antecedents for this ethical past were evident in the writings of some of the nativist historians, like Konakamura, Maruyama and Iida discussed above. This idea was also actively debated during the early twentieth century in the legal interpretation of Minobe Tatsukichi and the political theory of Yoshino Sakuz¯o. Both scholars 48 Miyake Setsurei, Shinzenbi nihonjin, in: Miyake Setsurei sh¯u, Gendai nihon bungaku zensh¯u, vol 5. (Kaiz¯osha, 1931), 217. For more detail on this interpretation of Miyake, see Tanaka, New Times, esp. 85–110.

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sought to interpret the constitution to enable greater participation of the populace and to decrease the power of the bureaucracy and of governmental institutions. To label such historians as ‘conservative’ because of their fidelity to a particular past of the nation overlooks an alternative that would certainly have been less statist than the one that emerged. At last, I turn to Norbert Elias’ statement, one of the the epigraphs of this paper. It is essential to historicise the particular ways that time has naturalised categories that bind as much as they enable. This enquiry brings out the fact that ‘Japan’, like the idea of Asia that envelops it, is myth, in the sense that Joseph Mali gives that word: ‘a story that has passed into and become history’.49 Myths are built upon a logic of inversion between the material and the abstract. History, through a notion of universal time, has dissected, analysed and classified the past into stable, predictable forms that meet the political needs of the liberal-international system or of the state. It is maintained by the historical thinking that has been institutionalised in our global system, as well as by our disciplines of history and area studies as they are today constituted. History is a practice that often restricts understanding to a category that is occupied, not lived; this is certainly true of the idea of Asia and of the national history in Japan.50 We must further be mindful that to extract ourselves from these categories, we must unpack the conflation of linear time with chronological history and broaden our understanding of pasts.

49 Joseph Mali, Mythistory: The Making of a Modern Historiography (Chicago, 2003), 6. 50 For a brilliant example of this power, see Masao Miyoshi, Japan is not Interesting, in: idem, Trespasses: Selected Writings (Durham/NC, 2010), 189–204.

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Axel Schneider

Temporal Hierarchies and Moral Leadership: China’s Engagement with Modern Views of History

Modern China often is referred to as ‘young China’, or ‘new China’, and its history over the past one hundred and twenty years is portrayed as a history of ruptures and revolutions. This emphasis on youth, renewal and the revolutionary overcoming of tradition is the common thread in much of modern Chinese academic and political discourse. It not only betrays the influence of modern Western concepts of history as ‘progress’, but is also an indication of the enormous pressure felt by Chinese elites to join modern history, to modernise and to catch up with the West in order to survive the imperialist threat. Chinese elites no longer sought meaning and orientation in the past, in the Confucian Golden Age of the Three Dynasties. They turned instead to the future, sometimes even to utopian schemes for a future ideal society, be it the Age of Great Harmony of a Kang Youwei or a future Communist society. At the heart of this new vision of time and history lay notions of linear and causal progress, of universal patterns of history and concepts of evolution applied to society. This approach has been dominant until recently. Voices criticizing the paradigm have become louder since the early 1990s1 and have given rise to a considerable variety of interpretations of the history of modern China. This article analyzes the process of receiving, adopting and at times also rejecting ideas of progress and evolution from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s against the foil of the traditional Chinese understanding of history. In the mid to late nineteenth century, modern notions of history began to exert an influence on China, initially due not so much to the direct reception of Western ideas as to the concrete historical experience of progress as a continuous acceleration of technological advances and historical changes, both imposed on China by Western imperialism.2 Starting in the 1880s, modern 1 Famous examples are Li Zehou/Liu Zaifu, Gaobie geming [Farewell to Revolution] (Hong Kong, 2004) and Ying-shih Yu, The Radicalization of China in the 20th Century, Daedalus CXXII, no. 2, 1993, 125–150. 2 Luke S. K. Kwong, The Rise of the Linear Perspective on History and Time in Late Qing China, c. 1860–1911, Past & Present CLXXIII, 2001, 157–190.

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notions of history were received and adopted at first predominantly via Japan,3 but later directly from France, Germany, the UK and the US.4 This process occurred in three major steps,5 beginning with Kang Youwei’s theory of three historical stages in the 1890s, followed by the reception of evolutionary thought and progressivist history by Yan Fu, Liang Qichao and others around the turn of the twentieth century, and then continued as socialist and Marxist views of history grew in influence and eventually became dominant with the Communist Revolution of 1949.

1. The Tradition of Chinese Historiography The growing influence of Western historiographical ideas fundamentally changed what was the longest continuous tradition of historical thinking and writing.6 In premodern China, the recording of history occupied a central position in Chinese understanding of the cosmic and sociopolitical order.7 This order centred on the ruling clan and the worship of its ancestors, the ritual enactment of which served as its paradigmatic expression. The legitimacy of the ruling clan, rationalised as the Mandate of Heaven, consisted of religious and political elements that were closely intertwined. 3 Stefan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley, 1993) and Margaret Mehl, History and the State in Nineteenth-Century Japan (New York, 1998); Edward Q. Wang, Narrating the Nation: Meiji Historiography, New History Textbooks, and the Disciplinarization of History in China, in: Brian Moloughney/Peter Zarrow (eds.), Transforming History: The Making of a Modern Academic Discipline in Twentieth-Century China (Hong Kong, 2011), 103–133. 4 On the reception of Western historiography in China, see Xiaoqian Li, Xifang shixue zai Zhongguo de chuanbo, 1882–1949 [The dissemination of Western historiography in China, 1882–1949] (Shanghai, 2007) and Axel Schneider, Wahrheit und Geschichte. Zwei chinesische Historiker auf der Suche nach einer modernen Identität für China (Wiesbaden, 1997). 5 See Wang Fansen, Jindai Zhongguo de xianxing lishiguan – yi shehui jinhualun wei zhongxin de taolun [The linear view of history in modern China: A discussion focussing on social evolutionism], Xin shixue XIX, no. 2, 2008, 1–46 and idem, The Impact of the Linear Model of History on Modern Chinese Historiography, in Moloughney/Zarrow (eds.), Transforming History, 135–168. 6 For a succinct analysis of traditional Chinese historiography, see Yves Chevrier, La servante-maîtresse: condition de la référence à l’histoire dans l’espace intellectuel chinois, Extrême-Orient, extrême-occident IX: La référence à l’histoire, 1987, 117–144. 7 See Benjamin I. Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge/MA, 1985) and idem, History in Chinese Culture: Some Comparative Reflections, History and Theory. Theme Issue XXXV: Chinese Historiography in Comparative Perspective, 1996, 23–33. See also On Cho Ng/ Q. Edward Wang, Mirroring the Past: The Writing and Use of History in Imperial China (Honolulu, 2005), especially chapter 4.

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The predecessor of the later historiographer, whose early function might best be characterised as that of a scribe or archivist, recorded the words and deeds of the rulers and thus gave witness to the ritual enactment and re-presentation of the cosmic order. This order was not conceptualised as preordained, but had to be actualised via moral example and through the performance of sacred rituals. The Mandate of Heaven thus provided legitimacy for the ruling clan, but also the rationale for a change of dynasty in cases where these requirements were not met. It stood for the conviction that men can and do deviate from the moral principles of the cosmic order, and that the gap between what is and what ought to be is part of the human condition. To bridge this gap by establishing and maintaining a polity as close as possible to the normative order is the mission of the ruling clan and the political elite, while it is the task of the historiographer to record these attempts for posterity.8 It is from this function that he derives his eminently powerful ethicopolitical position, a position further reinforced by the fact that in Chinese culture the normative order was not perceived as accessible to humans through an act of divine revelation. It was rather posited as actual history, an order realised during the Golden Age of the Three Dynasties. History thus acquired a quasi-absolute status as a field of human activity providing privileged if not exclusive access to heavenly truth.9 This ‘heavenly’ sanctioned centrality of the recording of history in Chinese culture translated into the institutionalization of historiography within the imperial bureaucracy, a process that culminated during the Tang Dynasty in the establishment of the History Office.10 Ultimately the historiographer thus fulfilled two complementary functions, closely linked but not without internal tension. He recorded history in a historiographical mode, leaving behind a record of the past as truthful as possible, but at the same time he manifested the cosmic order by expressing praise and blame and thus fulfilled a pivotal role in the aforementioned mission of bridging the gap between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’. Having the power both to laud or to condemn, the historiographer found himself in an exposed position, sometimes risking his life in fulfilling this – what Yves Chevrier calls – ‘historiological duty’.11 8 Schwartz, World of Thought, especially chapters 1 and 2. 9 Masayuki Sato, The Archetype of History in the Confucian Ecumene, History & Theory XLVI, 2007, 218–232; Chun-chieh Huang, The defining character of Chinese historical thinking, ibid., 180–188. 10 For the History Office, see Denis C. Twitchett, The Writing of Official History under the T’ang (Cambridge, 1992). 11 Chevrier, La servante-maîtresse. Given this centrality of history in China, it comes as no surprise that quite in contrast to their Western counterparts many modern Chinese intellectuals have a very strong interest in history or even do research on history; see Jon-

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In line with this view of history is an understanding of time and change that is rooted in the cosmology of the Book of Changes.12 Although it is contested whether the traditional Chinese understanding of time allowed for linear perspectives, the dominant view clearly was of a cyclical, structured continuum of constant change in combination with the aforementioned notion of an ideal society once realised in the past Golden Age. The goal was to approximate as nearly as possible the ideals encapsulated in the histopia of the Golden Age by synchronizing the polity with cosmic patterns through sacred rituals conducted at the right moments in time. Rather than confiding in divine providence or anticipating the future based on assumptions of linear and causal progress, the ideal of the Book of Changes was to grasp the opportune moment for change. Change was not understood here as interference with the course of events, but rather as coming into harmony with what was about to happen ‘naturally’.13

2. The Western Challenge As we have noted, this tradition of thinking about history and writing history was challenged in the nineteenth century by an influx of Western historiographical notions. The view of history that had initially the most profound impact was that of linear progress, along with the concomitant concept of abstract time.14 This notion of time was either combined with deathan Unger, Using the Past To Serve the Present: Historiography and Politics in Contemporary China (Armonk/NY, 1993). 12 François Jullien, Du ‘temps’. Eléments d’une philosophie du vivre (Paris, 2001); Shuhsien Liu, On the Formation of a Philosophy of Time and History through the Yijing, in Chun-chieh Huang/John Henderson (eds.), Notions of Time in Chinese Historical Thinking (Hong Kong, 2006), 75–94. 13 Jullien, Du ‘temps’. See also Chun-chieh Huang, ‘Time’ and ‘supertime’ in Chinese historical thinking, in Huang/Henderson (eds.), Notions of Time, 19–41; Chun-chieh Huang/Erik Zürcher, Cultural notions of time and space in China, in Chun-chieh Huang and Erik Zürcher (eds.), Time and Space in Chinese Culture (Leiden, 1995); Q. Edward Wang, Time Perception in Ancient Chinese Historiography, Storia della Storiografia XXVIII, 1995, 69–86; Shu-hsien Liu, Time and Temporality: The Chinese Perspective, Philosophy East and West XXIV, no. 2, 1974, 45–53. 14 On the reception of linear time in China, see Wang, Jindai Zhongguo de xianxing lishiguan – yi shehui jinhualun wei zhongxin de taolun [The linear view of history in modern China]; Kwong, The Rise of the Linear Perspective; Nan Yu, Shilun ‘Wusi’ qianhou xueshujie dui ‘jinhua shiguan’ de fanxing: Yi Zhang Taiyan, Liang Qichao, Liu Yizheng de shixue sixiang wei li [Tentative discussion of the reflections of academe on the evolutionary view of history around the time of the May Fourth movement: The historiographical thought of Zhang Taiyan, Liang Qichao and Liu Yizheng], Shoudu shifan daxue xuebao, shehui kexueban, 2006, 2, 65–71.

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mands to modernise the discipline of history along the lines of the natural sciences15 or went hand in hand with the methodology of history as pronounced by Ranke16 in the rather positivistic understanding of Bernheim or Langlois and Seignobos.17 The Chinese reception of these ideas occurred against the foil of the aforementioned traditional Chinese views of history and under specific historical circumstances. Threatened by imperialism, Chinese intellectuals not only had to receive, understand and adapt a new concept of history, they also had to concretise this new vision by reinterpreting the Chinese past in ways that would allow China to ‘join’ world history on par with the Western powers, thereby transforming the previous empire into one nation among others. However, by adopting a new concept of history and applying it to the Chinese past, historians faced a complicated conundrum. Reinterpreting the past always poses the threat of alienation from one’s inherited history and can lead to a loss of identity. Joseph R. Levenson referred to this as the challenge of how to modernise and yet stay Chinese.18 Moreover, integrating a comparatively backward China into a progressive and law-like process of global dimensions forced Chinese historians to accept a temporal hierarchy in which China appeared at the lower end. This entailed accepting the risk that China might never be able to catch up with the advanced West and thus might face annihilation. This meant that whenever Chinese intellectuals re15 Especially influential for this view was the translation of Henry T. Buckle, History of Civilization in England (London, 1857). On the influence of this book in China, see Xiaoqian Li, Bakeer ji qi Yingguo wenmingshi zai Zhongguo de chuanbo he yingxiang [The dissemination and influence in China of Buckle’s History of English Civilization], Shixue yuekan, 2004, 8; Li, Xifang shixue zai Zhongguo de chuanbo, 1882–1949 [The dissemination of Western historiography], chapters 2 and 3. 16 On this influential image of Ranke and the extent to which it misrepresent his historiography, see Georg G. Iggers, The Image of Ranke in American and German Historical Thought, History and Theory II, 1962, 17–40. On the reception of Ranke in Japan, see Tanaka, Japan’s Orient; and Mehl, History and the State; on Ranke in China, see Axel Schneider, Reconciling history with the nation? Historicity, national particularity, and the question of universals, in Roy Starrs (ed.), Asian Nationalism in an Age of Globalization (London, 2001), 223–233, and Lan Yi, Lanke shixue yanjiu [Research on Ranke’s historiography] (Shanghai, 2006). 17 See Ernst Bernheim, Lehrbuch der historischen Methode und der Geschichtsphilosophie. Mit Nachweis der wichtigsten Quellen und Hilfsmittel zum Studium der Geschichte (Leipzig, 1908); Charles Langlois/Charles Seignobos, Introduction aux études historiques (Paris, 1898). On the reception of German historiography in China, see Li, Xifang shixue zai Zhongguo de chuanbo, 1882–1949 [The dissemination of Western historiography], chapter 7. 18 Joseph R. Levenson, ‘History’ and ‘Value’: The Tensions of Intellectual Choice in Modern China, in Arthur F. Wright (ed.), Studies in Chinese Thought (Chicago, 1953), 146–194.

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interpreted the past they had to so this in ways that would preserve links with the inherited vision of the past in order to provide some foundation for a Chinese identity. In addition, they had to come up with a new Chinese history that substantiated the hope that China would eventually be able to catch up to a position of at least equivalence with the West, if not at some point in time regain superiority. In systematic terms, this transformation entailed three fundamental innovations: a new attitude towards the past; a new, evolutionary view of history; and new universal patterns of history.

3. A New Attitude towards the Past First, the new view of history fundamentally altered the attitude towards the past. The histopia of the Golden Age was transformed into an early, primitive stage of history, thereby losing its classical-normative status. The future now became the locus of the realization of ideals, and Chinese history had to be rewritten accordingly. The first step towards this inversion of time was Kang Youwei’s theory of history.19 He had inherited some traditional views of history; but he substantially reinterpreted them under Buddhist and Western influence. Postulating a linear and teleological view of history based on the New Text theory of the Three Ages of Great Chaos, Rising Peace and Great Harmony, Kang ultimately envisioned an ethically defined telos of history (the Datong, or the Great Harmony). In other words, Kang’s vision of history still centered on an ethical core, but now transposed into the future. His position indicated a major departure from the orthodox view insofar as he postulated a quasi-necessary, linear development towards a goal that, once humankind had reached it, would constitute the end of history. In addition to this structural change in the nature and direction of history, Kang advocated a concrete goal that was fundamentally at odds with the ethics of orthodox Confucianism. He promoted an ideal society characterised by social and gender equality rather than the hierarchical and patriarchic Confucian family system, and by ideals of self-rule and direct democracy in place of the paternalistic and autocratic political system of the Chinese imperial past.20 19 Kung-chuan Hsiao, A Modern China and a New World: K’ang Yu-wei, Reformer and Utopian, 1858–1927 (Seattle, 1975). 20 Laurence G. Thompson, Ta T’ung Shu: The One-World Philosophy of K’ang Yu-wei (London, 1958), 37–57. The differentiation of an Old-Text and a New-Text School of Confucianism goes back to the Han Dynasty when a version of the Confucian five classics written in the old script dating back to the 3 century B. C. allegedly was found in the walls of Confucius’ old residence and used to legitimize the New Dynasty (221–206). During

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4. A New, Evolutionary View of History In the succeeding step, Yan Fu introduced evolutionary and progressivist views of society and history. When Liang Qichao applied them to the theory and writing of history, the full impact of these new views became manifest.21 History was transformed into a law-like process governed by causality, and time became an abstract and empty category underlying linear progress. This emphasis on laws and causality left little space for the influence of human agency on history and thereby further undermined the traditional ethical function of Chinese historiography. The concrete ethics of the Confucian family system, notions like filial piety, were displaced now by a history devoid of any ethical norms except the citizen’s loyalty to the nation.22 Liang belonged to the first group of Chinese intellectuals who, inspired by Western examples of modern nation-states that transformed subjects into modern national citizens, re-conceptualised the purpose of the writing of history so as to focus completely on the writing of national history and on the instigation of a national consciousness and loyalty towards the new nation-state. In short: the adoption of concepts such as evolution and progressive history posed the problem of how to ground ethics, which in the Confucian universe had been anchored in the histopia of the Golden Age. The new views accentuated as well the problem of freedom, raising the question of how much influence the human actor might yet have on history.23 The adoption of concepts of linear and law-like history also posed the threat of eternal backwardness. If laws govern history and human agency is hence severely limited, how then could the Chinese, finding themselves at a seemingly very backward historical stage, ever hope to catch up with the the early Qing dynasty the Old Text and New Text controversy resurfaced in the context of Qing evidential scholarship and became part of late Qing political discussions on the nature and status of Confucianism in China’s history and China’s future course of development. See Anne Cheng, Nationalism, Citizenship, and the Old Text/New Text Controversy in Late Nineteenth Century China, in Joshua A. Fogel and Peter Gue Zarrow (eds.), Imagining the People: Chinese Intellectuals and the Concept of Citizenship, 1890–1920 (New York, 1997), 61–81. 21 Joseph R. Levenson, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and the Mind of Modern China (Cambridge/MA, 1953); Q. Edward Wang, Inventing China through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography (Albany/NY, 2001). 22 Xiaobing Tang, Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao (Stanford/CA, 1996). 23 Axel Schneider, Shijie lishi yu lishi xiangdui zhuyi de wenti: 1919 nian yihou Liang Qichao de shixue [World history and the problem of historical relativism: The historiography of Liang Qichao after 1919], in idem (ed.), Zhenli yu lishi: liang wei Zhonguo shijia dui Zhongguo xiandai rentong de qiusuo [Truth and History: Two Chinese Historians in Search of a Modern Identity for China] (Beijing, 2008), 238–259 (an unpublished English version of this article is available from the author upon request).

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West, let alone at some later point in time surpassing the West to reconquer a position of supremacy and global leadership? Chinese historians became aware of this conundrum early in the process of adopting Western views of history and Western methods of historical research, and they reacted in various ways. As early as in 1910, Liang Qichao, for example, was already voicing doubts. Then, after Europe’s loss of ideological and moral leadership in the wake of World War I, he developed new and increasingly sophisticated concepts in an attempt to resolve the problem. He narrowed the definition of progress to certain aspects of history (technology, state organisation), proclaiming that other aspects of human life, such as morality, are not susceptible to progress. In other words, by fragmenting progress and linear time he created space for Chinese self-esteem, equivalence with the West and even moral leadership. Modern Chinese politicians too reacted in different ways. Without abandoning notions of progress, they conceived ways to reclaim space for human action and Chinese leadership. Sun Yat-sen’s concept of democracy included elements from China’s premodern political tradition, such as the Control Court and the Examination Court, which promised to improve on Western notions of democracy, avoid Western mistakes and, in the long term, to reclaim for China a leading role. Premodern elements can be detected as well in Mao Zedong’s Sinicisation of Marxism-Leninism, culminating in the 1960s with a concept of revolution that highlighted the decisive role of human agency and ideological struggle in even a classless, Communist society.24 These issues of the nature of history as a law-like process and the scope of human agency translated into questions of how to research the past and thus impacted historical methodology. If laws determine the course of history, what then is the influence of the historians, of their thought and their subjectivity on research? Should they just record what ‘actually happened’ – and, if so, how to do that? Or would it not be more honest to acknowledge the historian’s subjectivity as a corollary of this increasing awareness of human agency and hence adopt methods of historical research more akin to hermeneutics? In 1903, Liang Qichao25 was one of the leading figures in the reception of notions of linear, law-like historical progress and of the concomitant Western concepts of periodisation. Around 1910,26 however, he became more and more aware of the drawbacks outlined above and embarked on a search for a 24 Frederic E. Wakeman, History and Will. Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-tung’s Thought (Berkeley, 1973). 25 Schneider, Shijie lishi yu lishi xiangdui zhuyi de wenti: 1919 nian yihou Liang Qichao de shixue [World history and the problem of historical relativism]. 26 See Liang Qichao, Shuo kuo-feng [On national customs], Kuo-feng-pao I, 20. 2. 1910, reprinted in Yinbingshi wenji IX, 1983, 2, 3–11.

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theory of history better suited to the needs of late-developing China. After 1919 this search resulted in a thorough and continuous revamping of his theory of history, culminating in a rejection of evolutionary progress. In a first, deconstructive step,27 Liang distanced himself from concepts such as ‘causality’ and ‘general principles’. Instead, he emphasised the particularity of history, paid more attention to the role of human agency (ethics) and adjusted the methodology of historical research by highlighting the intuitive understanding of human intentions as an important adjunct to the analysis of facts. However, his new methodology of historical research was still marred by inconsistencies, because he was not yet prepared to question progress and to adjust his understanding of the nature of history and historical research accordingly. In a series of articles28 published between 1922 and 1927, he drew on a variety of sources, including Neo-Kantian philosophy and Buddhism, to solve his problem of how to create space for human agency so as to allow for historical particularity as a basis for national identity and yet maintain a nationalist and at least partly progressivist view of history. Referring to Wilhelm Wundt and Heinrich Rickert, he introduced the notions of particular, historically grown culture and human ‘free will’ to take the place of ‘general principles’ and ‘causality’ as central categories. Borrowing from Buddhism, he proposed the concept of ‘interdependence’ as a foil to strict mechanical causality, though without abandoning completely the idea of the interconnectedness of historical events. He further elaborated on these themes by highlighting the subjective viewpoint of the researcher in discovering meaning in history. However, Liang still maintained that the historical development of a family of free and equal nations is a progressive process. Even this last version of his theory of history was inconsistent, however, as it failed to reconcile Liang’s wish to find a ground for Chinese particularity and the relevance of the human free will in history with his goal to maintain some degree of a universal historical progress towards a world of free and equal nations.29 His failure was symptomatic of the difficulties Chinese his27 Idem, Zhongguo lishi yanjiufa [Methods for the study of Chinese history], Gaizao IV, 1921, reprinted in Yinbingshi quanji I, 1978, 1, 1–128. 28 Idem, Shenme shi wenhua? [What is culture?], Chenbao fukan, 19. 1. 1922, reprinted in Yinbingshi wenji XIV, 1983, 39, 97–104; idem, Yanjiu wenhuashi de ji ge zhongyao wenti [Several important questions of research on cultural history], 1922, reprinted in Yinbingshi wenji XIV, 1983, 40, 1–7; idem, Zhongguo lishi yanjiufa bubian [Additions to the methods for the study of Chinese history], 1926/27, reprinted in Yinbingshi quanji I, 1978, 1, 1–176. 29 Schneider, Shijie lishi yu lishi xiangdui zhuyi de wenti: 1919 nian yihou Liang Qichao de shixue [World history and the problem of historical relativism], 238–259.

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torians faced in their attempts to accept modern views of time and history, while they at the same time sought ways out of China’s backwardness and tried to find space for human agency in history.

5. New Universal Patterns of History Third, the new view of history as a linear, progressive process was based on the assumption that general principles (gongli) and causality (yinguo guanxi) underlie history, so that the historian can detect universal patterns of historical development. The Western tripartite periodisation of history into ancient history, the middle ages and the modern period hence was accepted and applied to restructure Chinese history, which hitherto had been divided according to dynasties.30 The reception of this notion of general principles and causality however led to two problems: First, assuming universal patterns of historical development that derived de facto from Western historical experience posed a threat to Chinese cultural and historical particularity and hence undermined Chinese national identity. Second, on a more concrete level, the adoption of Western schemes of periodisation as well as other historical categories very soon proved inadequate as many did not neatly fit Chinese history.31 This led to attempts to make them appear usable and to the creation of subcategories or composite concepts such as ‘semi-feudal’ or ‘semi-colonial’. As tools for the analysis of late imperial history these were dubious at best, for they ignored the fact that, with the exception of a phase during the Zhou Dynasty (twelfth to thirteenth centuries BC),32 China never experienced a period of feudalism. The aim of much of modern Chinese historical research was to apply these new Western schemes and categories of analysis to reinterpret the Chinese past in updated, scientific terms, and simultaneously to Sinicise these Western concepts so as to make them fit China’s particular history and safeguard some sort of Chinese identity. Much of the historiography of the post May Fourth period was committed to this double undertaking, albeit with a different emphasis and pursuing divergent academic and political goals.33 30 Schneider, Wahrheit und Geschichte, 68–73. Wang, The Impact of the Linear Model, 142–146; for Xia Zengyou as an early example, see page 144. 31 In this respect, the situation in Japan was quite similar, as can be seen from Japanese historians and their writings on the civilizational history of the late nineteenth century; see Wang, The Impact of the Linear Model, 136–139. 32 And even that is contested. 33 For prominent examples of these movements, see the following. For the movement to doubt antiquity led by Gu Jiegang, Lawrence A. Schneider, Ku Chieh-kang and China’s New History: Nationalism and the Quest for Alternative Traditions (Berkeley, 1971) and Ur-

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Sebastian Conrad34 has argued that Japanese historians related to China as an inferior country and thereby were able to mitigate the humiliation Japan had experienced at the hands of Western imperialism. Japanese backwardness vis-à-vis the West was thus less painful, and Japan could assign to itself the task of leading East Asia in the fight against imperialism. In contrast to Japan, historians in China did not have a non-Western, ‘secondary’ Orient against which they could position China as a superior country. China, which had always viewed itself as the leading civilization, now found itself in a position of double inferiority, humiliated by the West and much less successful than Japan in facing the imperialist challenge. Eventually China even found itself on the losing side in a war with Japan. The challenge of a new view of history characterised by universal principles and causality was thus much harder for China to address due to specific historical circumstance that Chinese elites had previously perceived of China as the leading civilization whereas its position now was inferior not only vis-à-vis the West, but also Japan. The majority of Chinese historians coped with the three structural changes discussed above through a variety of countermeasures such as Sinicising Western concepts and historical schemes. To this end they harnessed universal, law-like progress by limiting it to certain aspects of human existence, thereby providing a new ground for Chinese particularity and creating space for China to catch up. All these modifications remained, however, within the larger framework of modern notions of time and history. Linear progress as such was seldom fundamentally doubted; Western historical constructs such as the tripartite periodisation and such concepts as feudalism, capitalism, etc., were adopted; and traditional Chinese historiography with its ethical and political orientation was reconceptualised along the lines of Western historical science. And all these changes served the modern nation-state. sula Richter, Zweifel am Altertum. Gu Jiegang und die Diskussion über Chinas alte Geschichte als Konsequenz der ‘neuen Kulturbewegung’, ca. 1915–1923 (Stuttgart, 1992). For the movement to reorganise the national past led by Hu Shi, Wang, Inventing China through History, 63–65. For Fu Sinian’s school of historical material, Fansen Wang, Fu Ssunien: A Life in Chinese History and Politics (Cambridge/UK, NY, 2000) and Schneider, Wahrheit und Geschichte). For Marxist historiography of that period, see Arif Dirlik, Revolution and History: The Origins of Marxist Historiography in China, 1919–1937 (Berkeley, 1978); Mechthild Leutner, Geschichtsschreibung zwischen Politik und Wissenschaft. Zur Herausbildung der chinesischen marxistischen Geschichtswissenschaft in den dreißiger und vierziger Jahren (Wiesbaden, 1982), Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, On ‘shi’ and ‘lun’: Toward a Typology of Historiography in the PRC, History and Theory.: Chinese Historiography in Comparative Perspective XXXV, 1996, 74–95. 34 Sebastian Conrad, What Time Is Japan? Problems of Comparative (Intercultural) Historiography, History and Theory XXXVIII, 1999, 1, 67–83.

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6. Critical Voices There were, however, quite a few interesting cases of scholars who took issue with these modern notions of time and history. Their opposition was by no means a simple reiteration of traditional positions. They reacted against the substance of these new Western concepts, that many of them had themselves adopted earlier in their careers. Representatives of this opposition grasped the nature of these modern notions with their implications of linear and progressive history and resented them for a variety of reasons. They developed a critique based either on Buddhist philosophy or on the cosmology of the Book of Changes. Although most of them emphasised Chinese particularity, some did so less out of a concern for safeguarding Chinese identity than in an attempt to relate particularity to universality in ways that would not measure Chinese particularity by Western universal standards. Zhang Taiyan (1868–1936),35 originally a radical theoretician of national and racial revolution, was deeply influenced by Yog¯ac¯ara Buddhism (the Consciousness-Only school of Buddhism)36 during his time in jail (1903– 1906). Based on Yog¯ac¯ara concepts of consciousness, he first explained history, the emergence of time, the self and the state, and then, in a second step, he unmasked time and history as illusions. In his initial work, Zhang emphasised the spatial and temporal particularity of history and proposed that, on account of that particularity, the study of history is fundamentally different from political science or sociology, which deal with universal phenomena. He developed a karmic interpretation of history, i.e., an understanding of history at the objective level as a process shaped by the activity of karmic seeds (b¯ıja). These seeds are brought to fruition through action, producing karmic fruits (vip¯aka), which then in turn become the seeds of another round of future fruits in keeping with the Buddhist concept of samsara. The flow of history at the phenomenal level can thereby be explained in Buddhist terms. However, although he accepted the phenomenon of evolution at a descriptive level, Zhang rejected the use of evolution as a criterion for establishing temporal and civilisational hierarchies, an argument that is quite in line with his view of history as particular. He went even further by pointing out that with progress in political 35 For the best analysis of Zhang’s complicated thought to date, see Viren Murthy, The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness (Leiden, 2011), especially chapter 4. See also Young-tsu Wong, Beyond Confucian China. The Rival Discourses of Kang Youwei and Zhang Binglin (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, New York, 2010), and Schneider, Wahrheit und Geschichte, 73–82. 36 For the most comprehensive introduction to Yog¯ac¯ara thought, see Dan Lusthaus, Buddhist Phenomenology. A Philosophical Investigation of Yog¯ac¯ara Buddhism and the Ch’eng Wei-shih lun (London, New York, 2003).

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organization (the state) and technology (firearms), the potential of human beings for harm had greatly surpassed previous levels. Zhang then further developed the Yog¯ac¯arin concept of karmic seeds to explain the emergence of notions of self,37 the experience of time, and the development of the state as a temporary means to achieve revolution and liberation from imperialist oppression. Karmic seeds, which emerge out of past actions, are stored in the storehouse consciousness (¯alaya vijñ¯ana). This level of storehouse consciousness is then, upon contact with sense-centre consciousness (mano vijñ¯ana, cognition), misrecognised by obscuration consciousness (manas vijñ¯ana) as the self, which leads to the rise of self-consciousness, which in turn is the basis for the experience of time. Once the self arises, subject and object are separated and alienation sets in, causing suffering and continuous rebirth. The political state is itself an expression of this process of the misrecognition of self, of alienation and suffering.38 According to Buddhist philosophy, this process of misrecognition has to be overcome. Once overcome, the mind is quiet and the self dissolves. A state of ‘thusness’ (tath¯ata) is reached, characterised not by self-realization, but by self-negation. ‘Thusness’ indicates the absolute reality, which transcends the multitude of forms of the phenomenal world. All phenomena are viewed as empty and thus as being without movement or evolution. The karmic process comes to a halt and history, seen as the process of suffering caused by deluded impulses and by afflictions, finally comes to an end. Thus, Zhang ultimately negates the world, time and history.39 Zhang Taiyan represents a critique of linear time and progressive history which does not look back to traditional orthodox views of history. He was in fact as radical in his review of modern historiographical theory as he was in his demand for the violent overthrow of the Qing dynasty in a national, racial revolution. His negation of time and history left him in a vulnerable position, however, as he was no longer able to address issues of the reinterpretation of history and matters of contemporary importance.

37 The Buddhist understanding of ‘self ’ emphasises the non-substantiality, the emptiness of the self. None of the phenomena of the five aggregates (form, sensation, perception, mental formations and consciousness) qualifies as the self, nor does the combination of these five aggregates constitute the self, which is nothing but an illusion. 38 See Murthy, The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan, 150–155 and Young-Tsu Wong, Zhang Binglin’s critique of Western modernity: A Chinese View of Cultural Pluralism, in: Peter Zarrow (ed.), Creating Chinese Modernity: Knowledge and Everyday Life, 1900–1940 (New York, 2007), 23–50. 39 This Buddhist end of time and history of course bears no resemblance to Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’, a state of liberal bliss achieved after the decline of Communism. See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, Toronto, 1992).

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Liu Yizheng (1880–1956)40 started out, like Zhang Taiyan, as an advocate of modern views of history and historiography; however, his case is fundamentally different, for the modern view he attempted to construct was deeply influenced by traditional Confucian concepts. In his early years, he propagated an evolutionary theory and engaged in translating Japanese modern history books into Chinese.41 The historian, in Liu’s thinking, has to analyze history objectively in order to uncover general laws and the causality underlying historical evolution. History is conceptualised as being a universal, lawlike process, in which cultures differ only insofar as they are positioned at different points along the temporal continuum of universal progress.42 However, as early as the late 1910s, Liu began to doubt these positions and to develop a new vision of history.43 This phase of his work culminated in his 1948 Essentials of the Country’s History,44 in which he now rejected notions of causality and progress. History was not progressive; on the contrary, the past is full of examples of moral decline. He relied now on notions of change, permanence and cyclicality derived from the Book of Changes to posit a new view of history that embedded human beings in cosmic change. He thereby opened up a space for human action that is anticipatory and accommodative rather than manipulative, as is the case with the modern, detached Cartesian subject that creates and controls its world by technical means. At the heart of Liu’s Confucian-inspired theory was the notion of a comprehensive Heavenly Order as the foundation for human nature, which in turn manifests itself in concrete, historical rules of conduct. He linked concrete culture back to the Heavenly Order, that is, he saw the particular character of any nation as inextricably dependent on a general conditio humana 40 For an analysis of Liu Yizheng’s theory and practice of historiography, see Axel Schneider, Nation, History and Ethics: The Choices of Post-Imperial Chinese Historiography, in Moloughney/Zarrow (eds.), Transforming History, 271–302; Brian Moloughney, Nation, Narrative and China’s New History, in Starrs (ed.), Asian Nationalism, 205–222. 41 See Liu Yizheng, Lidai shilüe [A Brief Historical Account of Different Periods] (Nanjing, 1902). 42 These views are expressed in idem, Zhongguo wenhuashi [History of Chinese Culture], Xueheng zazhi 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 58, 61, 63, 64, 67, 70, 72, 75, 1926–1931, especially in the introduction. 43 Milestones of this process are idem, Ping Lu Moude Zhou-Qin zhexueshi [A critical appraisal of Lu Moude’s history of Zhou and Qin philosophy], Xueheng zazhi XXIX, 1924, reprinted in Liu Zengfu/Liu Dingsheng (eds.), Liu Yizheng shixue lunwen xuji, (Shanghai, 1991), 231–242; idem, Shixue gailun [Outline of historiography], 1926, reprinted in Liu Zengfu/Liu Dingsheng (eds.), Liu Yizheng shixue lunwenji, 97–117; idem, Lishi zhi zhishi [Historical knowledge], Shidi xuebao III, 1925, 7, reprinted in Liu Zengfu/Liu Dingsheng (eds.), Liu Yizheng shixue lunwenji, 80–84. 44 Idem, Guoshi yaoyi [Main Principles of National History] (Shanghai, 1948). The following summary is based on Schneider, Nation, History and Ethics.

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rooted in a moral cosmic order. In Liu’s understanding, morality is thus not undermined by history, as was the case in European late historicism45; rather it is grounded in history and provides a ground for history. It is understood that, in this reconfiguration, history loses much of its modern progressive and directional nature. This understanding had far-reaching consequences for the historian and his work. Via a posited shared human nature, the historian would be able to access different cultural manifestations in time and space. Liu proposed a research methodology rooted in human self-intelligibility and derived from it a demand for mutual respect across time and space. But history is more than an academic discipline. For Liu it acquired nearly absolute status, because it is via research on history that human beings are able to glimpse the heavenly order, which is not revealed by divine power but manifests itself in history. Therefore, the historian must be a morally cultivated human being. In Liu’s understanding, the idea of the Virtue of the Historian (shide) did not mean that researchers had to be truthful to the facts. They were, however, required to be morally cultivated Confucian gentlemen before they could even approach the records of the past. Here Liu went beyond his traditional sources of inspiration and at the same time effectively negating the Cartesian dualism that is at the heart of the modern project. And yet, in addition to these anti-modern positions, Liu also adopted modern elements. He insisted on building a modern historical profession. He opposed the centralising modern nation-state, but nevertheless adopted core notions of modern politics, such as the division of powers and popular sovereignty; and he clung to a modern national view of China and its culture centered around the nation. How these seemingly incongruous elements of a Confucian-inspired, partly traditional history would fit together with the modern aspects he accepted is a question he did not address.

7. Conclusion Chinese scholars met the triple innovation and challenge triggered by the historical experience of modernisation and by Western concepts in various ways. Modern notions of time and history created temporal hierarchies, which ranked nations on an evolutionary scale and caused enormous time pressure. They were both a source of hope for a better future and at the same time lead to normative crisis and cultural alienation. On a deeper level, they brought with them an altered understanding of humankind’s position in the 45 Charles R. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca/NY, 1995).

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cosmos, as the world now became an object to gaze at, to interpret and eventually to bring under technological control.46 The mainstream of modern Chinese historical thinking and writing initially adopted these new views of time and history wholeheartedly. Before long, however adjustments were made, as analyzed above, in order to cope with the crises and threats caused by these changes, but without fundamentally revising the new modern framework. In contrast, Zhang Taiyan and Liu Yizheng, introduced here as examples of critical voices, questioned the modern view of time and history in a much more radical manner. Deeply aware of the connection between progressive views of history and the ethical and cultural crises brought about by modernity,47 they relied on premodern traditions to supply alternative approaches to history. Zhang and Liu chose fundamentally different philosophical frameworks. The former, inspired by Yog¯ac¯ara Buddhism, negated history altogether and thus was compelled to remain silent on pressing questions of his times. Inspired by a Confucian reading of the Book of Changes, Liu was less radical, but he too offered a view of history that provided no viable sociopolitical program. Their silence on contemporary affairs can be interpreted as an indication of how views of time and history that are in themselves deeply abstract are nonetheless linked to concrete issues of sociopolitical organisation and change48 in such a way as to potentially limit the influence of critical voices in times of existential crisis.

46 Martin Heidegger, Die Zeit des Weltbildes, in idem, Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main, 1980), 73–110. 47 For an analysis of the connection between modern historical thought and the crisis of modernity, see Bambach, Heidegger. 48 See Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination. A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge, New York, 1993).

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William Gallois

The War for Time in Early Colonial Algeria

There are moments when we imagine time to be invisible and ethereal, while on other occasions it can seem strikingly real and clear. This is nowhere more apparent than in encounters between people who come from radically different temporal cultures. Such meetings are often characterised by a profound sense of estrangement as each interlocutor perceives the others’ sense of time as being distinctly unreal or as a mistaken picture of the world. Accounts of such engagements are, however, of great interest to outsiders, for when the parties describe the temporal difference of the others’ culture, they also tend to reveal a great deal of the contours of their own understanding of time, which more usually lie undescribed. Colonial settings offer exemplary forms of such encounters. While this is most obviously the case in places where Europeans met communities that had led otherwise isolated lives – such as Australian Aborigines1 – it was surprisingly common in settings such as India and North Africa, where interchange between peoples had existed for many centuries. Here the essential difference between nineteenth-century imperial encounters and earlier trading engagements was the element of power; more specifically, the determination of Europeans to seize power in the form of political and cultural control of places that had previously enjoyed their own ecologies of space and time. In such situations, time often became a key battleground between the two cultures, for it was as obvious a locus of resistance as it was a focus of imperial pressure. The conquest of time, and the others’ experience of time, was well understood to be synonymous with absolute domination.2 One such setting was the French colony of Algeria. The battle for space, as land was conquered by the invading army in the 1830s and 1840s, was 1 In the case of nineteenth-century European literatures on Australia, we find the commonplace that Aboriginals needed to join history after having subsisted for millennia in a prehistoric ‘living stone age’. Such claims were as evident in the classic works of the nascent social sciences – both Freud and Durkheim believed they had located ‘primitive man’ in Australia – as they were in the racially driven texts of British colonial society. 2 See Giordano Nanni, The Colonisation of Time: Ritual, Routine and Resistance in the British Empire (Manchester, 2012).

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accompanied, and arguably underpinned, by a contest between rival understandings of time. The French asserted that their invasion was morally justified because its motive was a redemptive ‘civilising mission’ that sought to reorient North Africans back onto the path of historical progress – back into history. As the originary and archetypal moderns, the French had earned the right to look at the world from the vantage point of futurity and to point out ways in which other cultures might also be induced towards modernity. The Maghreb was especially fertile ground for such notions, for it was well understood that there was a time when places such as Algeria had themselves been in the vanguard of world civilisation. Had the region not been the granary of Rome in ancient times (the ruins of such glories were all too apparent along the southern shores of the Mediterranean)? Had Augustine, and his fine-tuning of the Christian motor that would eventually drive European culture, not come from Algeria? The man of whom Jerome remarked that he ‘established anew the ancient faith’ had been Bishop of Hippo, now known as Annaba, but soon to become Bône under French rule. Algeria therefore became the site of a temporal renaissance, akin to that engineered in fifteenth-century Florence and Rome, where once again the edifice of the modern was strengthened through the revival of its ancient foundations. Yet the French conquerors would have done well to remember that Augustine had also discoursed on time, and he had come to no quick or easy conclusions. He mused: ‘What is time? When nobody is asking me, I know what it is, but when I try to explain it to somebody who asks me, then I don’t know?’3 This classic disquisition on the paradox that time seems both natural and yet lies beyond description, leads easily towards relativistic understandings of time, for if we are forced to acknowledge that we are uncertain as to the nature of time, we can well imagine that others may experience and define time in ways other than our own. Such was the case with the Arabs, Berbers and Jews of Algeria, who experienced the profound rupturing of their traditional lifeways in the nineteenth century. The threat posed by Europeans lay in their determination to eliminate cultural difference and the basis of resistance was understandably grounded in the wish to preserve that dissimilarity.4 Where Europeans identified Islam as a point of weakness in local culture, and the root cause of temporal decadence, Muslims understood their faith as providing a picture, a framing, of the world and of time, which would provide for them and offer grounds for repelling this alien empire. 3 Wolfhart Pannenberg, Basic Questions in Theology (London, 1970–1971), 62. 4 Though care needs to be taken in analysing jihadi literatures, which tended to deploy less subtle accounts of cultural difference than texts that were not outwardly designed for propagandistic purposes.

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The text through which this article views such a confrontation is Hamdan Khodja’s Le Miroir, a classic Algerian anti-imperial polemic of 1833, which denounced European colonialism on temporal grounds. Just as French writers were describing the retarded character of North African society and the oddity of Muslims’ understanding of time, Khodja argued that this temporal difference provided the perfect basis for resisting European invaders, in both the immediate struggle with the French army and in a more premonitory sense as the eventual fall of the French empire was predicted. Le Miroir deserves to be recognised as a classic, and rather rare, example of an explicit colonial reaction against the validity and the authority of Europeans’ picture of time and modernity, but it can also induce more general historiographical reflection on time in three connected areas. The first lies in its potential to be inserted into those debates on periodisation and the modern that have underpinned much recent historical discussion of time. The sense that the idea of modernity is an artifice that merits interrogation is bolstered by the consideration of texts such as Khodja’s. Secondly, since Khodja’s contemporary history of the French invasion of Algeria is written in a distinctly Islamic mode, it offers a rare and early example of a history of the modern West written from outside. To those who ask how the history of modernity and its offshoots, such as empire, might appear if that history could somehow be written outside the genres, language and tropes of the historical modes that emerged concurrently in the European nineteenth century, Khodja’s text provides an answer. And it demonstrates, more generally, the potential of such other histories. Thirdly, therefore, a consideration of Khodja and the Islamic temporal modes on which his text is founded, offers a practical gift to contemporary historians, for the careful study and acquisition of such ways of thinking about time might form other bases for the making of histories today. The unmaking of the frames through which the history of modern empire is made is evidently a complex business. While subaltern scholarship has successfully altered the presumptions of subjectivity and objectivity in writing on the non-West, temporal studies aspire to unpick what are perhaps more elusive frames of knowledge and to induce new modes of practice grounded in other understandings of time.5 Two examples of such an approach are David Loy’s Buddhist History of the West, which re-imagines the history of modern Europe as told through a Buddhist lens, and recent Australian art, which adopts Aboriginal forms as a means of redescribing the re-

5 See Mark Cladis, The Discovery and Recovery of Time in History and Religion, History and Theory XLVIII, 2009, 3, 283–294.

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cent history of the continent.6 This formal difference suggests that it may only be through the adoption of other grammars that the deep-lying assumptions of the earliest colonial histories may be excised. It is evident that there are risks involved in the making of such exploratory history, yet it seems equally important that the study of time become a field with the potential to impact historical practice. To fully recognise temporal differences it is necessary to go beyond the acknowledgement of the existence of other calendars to assert that the study of diverse ecologies of time might lead to experiments in history-making.7 One of the hazards inherent in such work is that the discovery and deployment of other modes of history might constitute a further over-extension of the reach of the West.8 It also runs the risk of becoming Ersatz, Kitsch, pastiche – a kind of temporal tourism. Hard philosophical questions clearly underpin these epistemological variations – for example, can we be in other times? Yet there also exist connections to other historiographical work on time, which has sought to describe the particularities of lived time in specific cultures, such as in the worlds of early modern provincial English merchants or Russian and French revolutionaries, and to works such as Hartog’s on the experience of time as compared with history.9 This chapter moves on to explain the particularities of classical Islamic understandings of time, before examining the ways in which such ideas underpinned the work of Hamdan Khodja and that project of Algerian resistance, which saw itself as being based upon temporal difference. It considers the origins of Muslim accounts of time, their extension into the production of culturally distinct modes of history-making and the manner in which conceptual understandings of time were lived by Muslim societies.

1. Islamic Time In the third decade of the seventh century, Prophet Mohammed and his followers began the Hijra, or flight, from Mecca to Medina. He bore with him the message of a new faith for the peoples of the Arabian peninsula, which, 6 David Loy, A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in Lack (Albany/NY, 2002); Wayne Tunnicliffe/Julie Ewington (eds.), Tim Johnson: Painting Ideas (Melbourne, 2009). 7 See recent volumes of the journal Rethinking History. 8 I’m grateful to Lynn Hunt for outlining these dangers. 9 See chapters by Verhoeven and Perovic in this volume, as well as: Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago, 1980); Paul Glennie/Nigel Thrift, Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales 1300–1800 (Oxford, 2009); François. Hartog, Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps (Paris, 2002).

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in less than two generations. would move thousands of miles eastwards and westwards. In doing so it absorbed and synthesised aspects of existing Mediterranean and Asian religions and mythologies, but enshrined for Muslims a new Islamic time in a calendar whose first year began in the Gregorian year 622 C. E. This organisation of time united what became ‘a polyfocal Islamic world’ or an ‘Islamic commonwealth of states’, rather than the Islamic world, for Islam was and has always been remarkable for its decentered character.10 While it does possess a sacred geography (and history), with Mecca at its heart, there is no overriding power structure in Islam, no hierarchical prelature, no central bodies of learning and doctrine (al Azhar in Cairo comes closest), and no central co-ordination of the expression of ideals and dicta. This situation reflects and sustains the historic division of Islam along geographical and ideological lines, though many would interpret this localism as strengthening the underlying unity of the umma or Islamic community. Early Islamic ideas of time drew on Christianity and, especially, on Judaism in an avowedly self-conscious manner, as Prophet Mohammed sought to present Islam as a synthetic faith that followed and completed the work of the earlier Abrahamic religions. Unsurprisingly, the first centuries of the faith were characterised by the exploration of a broad diet of temporal ideas – as had been the case for early Jews and Christians – with different varieties of eschatological traditions coexisting with cyclical descriptions of time and the institutionalisation of linear recordings, chronologies and calendars that contrasted with the natural understandings of time that prevailed in Islam’s polytheistic rivals in Arabia, Africa and Persia. Early Muslims were therefore deeply conscious of their faith’s continuation of Judaeo-Christian history, and the Qur’an11 (2:61) stresses Islam’s recognition of fellow ‘peoples of the Book’: ‘Believers, Jews, Christians and Sabians – whoever believes in God and the Last Day and does what is right – shall be rewarded by their Lord; they have nothing to fear or regret.’ In addressing early Muslims, the Qur’an announces: ‘Children of Israel, remember the favour I have bestowed upon you. Keep your covenant, and I will be true to mine’ (2:38). This is accompanied by great stress on duty, ritual and punishment, couched in terms that implicitly appear to build on and continue the Jewish culture of the Torah rather than later Jewish or early Christian traditions. Admonitions were framed in temporal terms familiar from the Jewish law, such as the caution (2:234) that widows should stay away from other men for four months and ten days. The concept of a sacred month was added to that of a Sabbath day, and there was stern condemnation of Jews who broke away from their own rituals in order to worship in 10 Chase F. Robinson, Islamic Historiography (Cambridge, 2002), xviii, xxi. 11 The Koran, Nessim Joseph Dawood (ed.), (London, 1990).

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other fashions. Particular emphasis was placed upon the idea that ‘Those that worshipped the calf incurred the anger of the Lord and disgrace in this life’ (7:151), reinforcing the Jewish fear of the (temporal) power of nature cults. Believers of other, non-Abrahamic, religions were not accorded this respect, and one of the chief tasks of early Muslims was the recruitment of those who had been lost to polytheistic and ‘pagan’ faiths, though it has been noted that the eschatologies that Islam borrowed from Christianity and Judaism were themselves adapted from myth-based cultures.12 As Islam’s monotheism expanded westwards from Arabia, it was intellectually strengthened through its encounter with Neoplatonic philosophy in cities such as Alexandria, the former home of Plotinus and the location of a vibrant Greek philosophical culture. Its eschatology – with an end of days described as ‘the Day of Resurrection’ (4:87) – was arguably much clearer than that essayed in Judaism or early Christianity. Tiwari describes it as ‘the most straightforward’ of eschatologies, and it is apparent that this was another theological area where Muslims had learned a great deal from existing faiths (though this would not prevent the later fragmentation of Islamic eschatological traditions).13 In part this connection to Jewish and Christian eschatology emerged from the fact that early Muslims faced many of the same battles with nonbelievers as those found in the Bible.14 In this sense, Islam maintained the Abrahamic legacy of challenging the popular stress on nature as the overarching temporal order. Islamic time was also in some sense a reaction to the ideas of temporality that prevailed among the tribes of the Arabian peninsula at the time of Prophet Mohammed. Goodman notes: ‘To the Arabic poets of the preIslamic age, time was fate or destiny, often complained against as the source of human misfortunes, personified it apostrophed as a malign or corrosive influence, emblematic of change, loss and death.’15 12 Suliman Bashaear, Arabs and Others in Early Islam (Princeton, 1997), 94–111. 13 Kedar Nath Tiwari, Comparative Religion (Delhi, 1997), 208; Abdulaziz Abdulhussein Sachedina, Islamic Messianism: The Idea of Mehdi in Twelver Shi’ism (Albany/NY, 1981). 14 As Haddad and Smith, The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection (Albany 1981), 1, remark, ‘Disbelief, rejection and ridicule – thus the Qur’an portrays the response of the Meccan community to the message delivered by Prophet Mohammed concerning the day of resurrection and the universal judgement’, noting the importance of the Qur’an’s remarks that ‘They swear by God to the very limit of their oaths that God will not raise him who dies’ (16:38), and ‘They say, Are we to be returned to our former state when we have become decayed bones? They say, that would be a detrimental return!’ (79:10–12). 15 Lenn Goodman, Islamic Humanism (Oxford, 2003), 138.

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In a broader geographical region dominated by monotheistic faiths, the temporal offer of Islam needed to be less fatalistic, more optimistic and of an order of conceptual complexity that could effectively compete with the time cultures of Judaism and Christianity. This was achieved in a remarkable fashion between the eighth and thirteenth centuries, though as Goodman observes, the questing, scientific, logical bent of Islamic thought sometimes took it to places not originally envisaged, as became apparent in the schools of kalam (‘knowledge’, of a theological kind) and falasifa (‘philosophy’): In the schools of dialectical theology, kalam, that grew up in the garrison cities of Basra and Kufa in Iraq and elsewhere in the Islamic empire, time now became problematic in ways that would have seemed abstract and alien to the original audience of the Prophet. One concern of the mutakallimun, or practitioners of kalam, was to demonstrate God’s creation of the world. But the effort was rendered difficult, as Maimonides […] explains: Endeavours to prove that God created the world often proved too much because they rely on the idea that God’s creation is necessary: in the case of the falasifa, Muslim philosophers in the tradition of Neoplatonic Aristotelianism, the tendency is towards the notion of a necessary and therefore eternal universe. Necessary creation yields the idea of eternal creation, an unwelcome outcome for those who held that God created the universe in the beginning, that is, that the cosmos has a temporal origin.16

The underlying problem with debates between clerics and philosophers was that one position was predicated on certainty and the other on doubt. Whereas philosophers relentlessly sought out the chinks in the logic and epistemology of Islam (as a means of perfecting the religion), the clerics wished to draw a line in the sand, alleging that speculation could become an indulgence that diverted men from their chief task of obedient belief. This debate was won decisively by the theologians in the twelfth and thirteen centuries, and, as Goodman observes, a simpler and more manageable account of Islamic time began to prevail: ‘Time lost its bite, its teeth were drawn, when it was moralised – domesticated, as it were – subjected to God’s purpose. That purpose was judgement, and it was for the sake of judgement that time had first been created.’17 We ought not to think that this clash between logic and faith in the realm of time was a novel development that came into being with Islam, for similar tensions had earlier existed in Christianity. Toulmin and Goodfield note that ‘the more the Christian message came to depend on prophecies, portents and revelations, the more difficult it was for Christianity to coexist with the rationalistic elements in Greek science and philosophy’.18 Moreover, the picture of time presented in the Qur’an is not necessarily so unambiguous as Goodman’s account of a ‘moralised’ time, subject to God’s mastery might 16 Ibid., 139–140. 17 Ibid., 161–162. 18 Stephen Toulmin/June Goodfield, The Discovery of Time (London, 1965), 68.

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suggest. After all, God’s lordship of time is at one point expressed in a manner reminiscent of Peter’s relativisation of time in which ‘with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day’ (2 Peter:3.8); or, as the Qur’an expresses this idea, that God is a master of times rather than a master of time (2:259): Or of him, who, when passing by a ruined and desolate city, remarked ‘How can God give life to this city, now that it is dead? Thereupon God caused him to die, and after a hundred years brought him back to life. ‘How long have you lingered?’ asked God. ‘A day,’ he replied, ‘or part of a day.’

Islam quickly developed a deeply historical culture, but it cannot be overemphasised how both productive and disorienting Islamic syntheses of religion, science, politics and culture can appear to those working outside the Islamic tradition. The synthetic mode, which developed as Islam spread and absorbed foreign ideas, required the formulation of styles of enquiry that were linguistic and epistemological, for if bodies of knowledge were to be combined and re-thought, then they would have to be reconsidered in their most basic forms: in language. This philological approach infused all aspects of Islamic learning, which shared a common interest in linguistic classification, the study of genre, and a self-consciousness as to the linguistic production of knowledge. Such an approach is evident in the interrogation of the linguistic idea of time in Al K¯afiyaj¯ı’s Short Work on Historiography and many other classical Islamic texts: Now, linguistically, (the words) ‘time-section’ (zam¯an) and ‘time’ (waqt) are identical. Time is a generally known (concept). (The word) m¯ıq¯at (derived from waqt, ‘time’) has a wider range than ‘time’. The time appointed for a certain activity, such as the time of the pilgrimage, or of prayer, and so on, is called m¯ıq¯at. In addition, m¯ıq¯at is used for the place designated for something. The m¯ıq¯at of the Syrians is the point where they have to enter into the ¯ıhram, that is al-Juhfah; the m¯ıq¯at of the Yemenites is Yalamlan; that of the ‘Ir¯aqians D¯at al-‘irq, and so on.19

Interestingly, time here is understood not only through language, but also through practice and the different regional understandings of temporal ideas. Classical Islam developed both an extensive range of historical modes and a raft of philosophies of history and historiographical tools. In some ways, these developments were more remarkable than other fields of Islamic learning, for Islamic history drew only sparsely on traditions of Greek or Persian history, and there had been relatively little pre-Islamic Arabian his19 Franz Rosenthal, A History of Islamic Historiography (Leiden, 1968), 250.

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tory.20 Most earlier history took the form of genealogical oral traditions, whose ‘content [could] be adapted to the changing requirements of tribal societies, where one’s identity [was] determined principally by perceived bonds of kinship. In very schematic terms, a tribesman rationalise[d] his social and economic ties to contemporaries by creating or severing ties between supposed forefathers’.21 Colossal numbers of historical manuscripts survive from the classical Islamic period, many of them still unpublished, and we are fortunate to possess a modern historiographical movement that has undertaken a detailed study of this field, carefully delineating the changing character of historical production from the seventh to the fifteenth centuries. Much of this scholarship has been written with a knowledge of both the classical Islamic and modern Western traditions, which allows its authors to approach both of these forms of temporalising with a sense of distance. One such area is the question of the professional purpose of history, for it is evident that much classical Islamic history served religious and legal purposes. Robinson contends that: ‘Historiography and historians stood on the margins of an academic establishment designed by and for lawyers. Rather than generate truths, it [history] could only reflect or exemplify truths already made manifest by God … Its function was accordingly restricted to instructing, moralizing, entertaining and archiving.’22 Such a picture is given credence by texts such as that of Al K¯afiyaj¯ı, which argue that ‘the knowledge of history is a community duty, because it presents the best available method of establishing the chronology of the whole course of human affairs, including the other life.’23 Yet even such claims possess the potential to unnerve the historian from another tradition, for how, we might ask, can chronological history offer us understanding of ‘the other life’ to come? In fact, one might argue that the independence, syntheses and language of classical Islamic history constitute a form of temporal investigation that lies not only outside the Western tradition but, in some ways, also beyond functionalist interpretations that seek to see history only as a branch of theology. One area in which we see this is in the colossal number of distinct historical genres generated during this period (when analogous developments also took place in literature). A short list of the most important would include khabar (which chronicles the historical as opposed to the legal past), isn¯ad (which deals with proofs of transmission), had¯ıth (a ‘report of the words or deeds of a religious authority’, in Khalidi’s words, who explains further: ‘In 20 21 22 23

David Samuel Margoliouth, Lectures on Arab Historians (Delhi, 1930), 22. Robinson, Islamic Historiography, 10. Ibid., 187–188. Rosenthal, History, 252.

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the Qur’an hadith has two basic meanings. In Meccan verses, especially the had¯ıth of Moses or of Pharaoh, for example, it means “story” or, better still, “parable”. In Medinese versions, had¯ıth tends to mean “speech” or “report”’),24 ta’r¯ıkh (concerned with dates or dating), al-khulaf¯a (‘history organised by caliphal reigns’),25 s¯ıra (‘the way of proceeding’),26 tabaq¯at (‘compilations of biographical material organised chronologically’), and tafsir (Qur’anic exegesis), genealogies, biographies, prosopographies and chronographies. Khalidi has identified what he believes to be a path of development through these genres, in which a series of ‘epistemic canopies’27 succeeded one another from the seventh to the fifteenth centuries: History was looked upon from four major points of view. History as Hadith meant the preservation of the sacred and secular past of the community with the emphasis falling upon the modes of transmission of historical reports rather than on their intrinsic probability. History as Adab meant history as a narrative record of human civilisation where patterns may be detected as guides to political and ethical conduct. History as Hikma meant a more rigorous attention to the workings of nature and rationality in the acceptance of historical reports, largely perhaps in order to prune religion of legend. History as Siy¯asa meant history as an imperial bureaucratic chronicle, authoritative, comprehensive, and primarily designed for administrative use.28

Robinson, meanwhile, claimed to identify a consolidation of historical genres in the mid-ninth century as the Abbasid caliphate instituted imperial control over the production of historical knowledge, so as to erase ‘unpleasant and controversial history’ from the records, most notably the Abbasid’s own slaughter of the Umayyad house, whose caliphate the Abbasids had usurped.29 Humphreys builds on this point to make the more general claim that ‘splits in early Islam promoted the collection of historical material and the creation of factional histories’.30 El-Hibri’s recent work takes a very different approach, contending that even the most partisan histories often found subtle ways of critiquing their political present through the contextualisation of that present within a universal history, which afforded a covert means of questioning the moral character of contemporary rule.31 If time was the vehicle for God’s judgement of man, it followed that in the writing of

24 Tarif Khalidi, Arab Historical Thought in the Classical Period (Cambridge, 1994), 17–18. 25 Robinson, Islamic Historiography, xii-xiii. 26 Ibid., 29. 27 Khalidi, Arab Historical Thought, xii. 28 Ibid., 232–233. 29 Robinson, Islamic Historiography, 61. 30 R. Stephen Humphreys, Islamic History: A Framework for Enquiry (Princeton, 2002), 92. 31 Robinson, Islamic Historiography, 42.

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history time should serve a moral purpose in which a consideration of the justness of men’s behaviour, and its evaluation by the Divine, ought to be writ large. The epistemological character of Islamic history, and its location of temporality at the heart of historiographical debate, is also seen in the work of al-Tabar¯ı, the first of the great Islamic historians.32 It seemed obvious to alTabar¯ı that his epic history of Islam should begin with a conceptual discussion of time: First, however, I shall begin with what for us comes properly and logically first, namely the explanation of What is time? How long is its total extent? Its first beginning and final end. Whether before God’s creation of (time) there was anything else.33

Such questions were of critical importance to al-Tabar¯ı, because they served not only to provide a reliable method for historical work, but also a form of justification or motivation that located historical study within God’s universe (al-Tabar¯ı was well aware of the manner in which such questions had been answered in other religions). As the very first lines of his study begin ‘Praise be God, first before any first and last after any last, enduring without cease and persevering in everything without moving away. … He remains after everyone infinitely without term.’34 Understandings of history, God and oneself flowed together in a consideration of the nature of time, for ‘In this fleeting world … He is the Creator of all eternal and temporal time.’35 God, then, is the provider of a variety of times, through which he orders things, and time functions as a form of religious semiotics, ‘distinguishing the signs for people who know’.36 This variety of times through which God orders the world is made plain by al-Tabar¯ı in the following description: And We have made the night and the day two signs. We have blotted out the sign of the night, and We have made the sign of the day something to see by, so that you may seek bounty from your Lord and so that you may know the number of years and the reckoning. For everything, We have made clear distinctions. [Qur’an17:12] And so that they may achieve knowledge of the times – the hours of night and day, the months and the years – when the religious duties God has imposed upon them are to be fulfilled, such as prayer, charity, pilgrimage, fasting and their other religious duties, as well as the time for settling their debts and their claims …37 32 33 34 35 36 37

Humphreys, Islamic History, 73. M. ibn Jar¯ır Al-Tabar¯ı, The History, vol. 1 (Albany/NY, 1989), 169. Ibid., 165. Ibid., 166. Ibid., 167. Ibid., 167.

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God, therefore, used time as a means of offering men a life of ‘clear distinctions’, and righteous men then adopted time as the grammar of their secular and religious lives. It became a means of embedding a knowledge of, and faith in, God across all aspects of their existence. A critical feature of this Islamic picture of time was the role that ideas of justice played in connecting the actions of men with the world of God. The life of ‘clear distinctions’ and righteousness was evidently a life lived justly, for the judgment which God would eventually impose on all men was clearly dependent on their having lived a life full of moments of being just rather than unjust. This centrality of ideas of justice within Islam became pivotal to the theology, philosophy, ethics and, of course, the lived reality of the faith. As Lawrence Rosen notes, ‘It has been argued that if the Christian worldview is predominantly cast in terms of love, then the Islamic one is suffused by a discourse on justice.’38 Classical thinkers of the late medieval Islamic Renaissance were deeply concerned with the immediate social manifestation of the notion of justice. The Just City of Ibn Sina (980–1037), for instance, ‘was constituted by a social contract amongst administrators, artisans and guardians, the welfare of all being secured by a common fund of resources’, whilst the related concept of maslahah (or public interest) of al-Ghazali (1058–1111) and al-Tufi (d. 1316) ‘received legal force by calculating social consequences against individual interests’.39Muslims therefore believed that a strong relational bond existed between the just qualities of the societies that individuals came together to make in the world and God’s eventual judgement on individuals and the world. While God’s mercy is also stressed a great deal in the Qur’an, there can be little doubt that the idea of justice was established as the ruling concept, one that should inform the behaviour of individuals and collectives in the world. Majid Khadduri wrote: ‘The principles and maxims of justice derived from the Revelation and Divine Wisdom were considered infallible and inviolable, designed for all time and potentially capable of application to all men.’40 In other words, a great stock of examples of just behaviour and lived justice could be found in the Qur’an and the had¯ıth, which might serve in the creation of Muslim societies and polities. ‘For an individual to be ‘adl (just)’, Rosen writes, ‘is as the term implies, to be balanced, to engage in acts that are framed by an awareness both of the pursuit of reason over passions, of the harm that may be done to the ties that bind individuals to another and all believers in a single commu38 Lawrence Rosen, Concepts of Justice, in: John L. Esposito (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World (Oxford, 2009), 278–282. 39 Ibid., 279. 40 Majid Khadduri, The Islamic Conception of Justice (Baltimore, 1984), 3.

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nity.’41 The most specific injunction imposed upon individuals and nations would therefore seem to be the avoidance of causing harm, with a special emphasis on those acts that might impact the lived cultures of justice associated with, for instance, charity or hospitals. As we shall see, it was precisely this stress on the need to be aware of how seemingly good acts might have unjust consequences that lay at the heart of Hamdan Khodja’s critique of French imperialism and his allegation that the grandeur of its ideas served to dismantle the just fabric of Algerian societies. This contrast was more generally apparent in the colonial encounter between Europeans and Muslims, for where the key Hippocratic ethic for the coloniser was the idea of beneficence, which, it was claimed, underpinned the virtuous project of imperialism, Muslim ethics had traditionally stressed the primacy of nonmaleficence, of ensuring above all else that the causing of harm was avoided. Intriguingly, the one major exception to this distinction came in developments in nineteenth-century European law, which were largely forgotten until they were unearthed by historians of empire and genocide, such as Dirk Moses. Moses observed that in the nineteenth century English law moved from the concept of mens rea, in which guilt was predicated on an individual’s premeditated intent, towards the idea that ‘a person was inferred to have intended the “natural consequences” of his or her actions: if the result proscribed was reasonably foreseeable as a likely consequence of his or her actions, the presumption was that the accused had intended the result.’42 This was also true of other empires, for ‘the concept of dolus eventualis, found in the criminal law of civil law countries’ predominated, ‘which judges the consequences which one might reasonably expect to emanate from policy, rather than strict intention itself ’.43 Here there is evidence of an idea of justice shared by both European and Islamic cultures, but, as we shall see, this notion had very little play in the special jurisdictional realm of empire.

2. Le Miroir While there were multiple Muslim understandings of time, all were characterised by ideas of God’s lordship of and in time. History was accordingly viewed as a branch of human culture that could serve both secular and theo41 Rosen, Concepts of Justice, 278. 42 Dirk A. Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York, 2008), 28. 43 Ibid., 18–19.

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logical purposes; there was an indelible connection between time, history and justice as well as a temporal fluidity that went beyond narrow linear understandings of time to include a range of uses of ideas of the future and its potentially being embedded outside of its immanence in our own present. All these ideas figure in Hamdan Khodja’s critique of his own historical moment and of the temporal rupture that the French were, in his view, attempting to perpetrate in the Maghreb. More specifically, Khodja wrote in the tradition of history known as adab, ‘a narrative record of human civilisation where patterns may be detected as guides to political and ethical conduct’, for the Historical Glimpse which Khodja’s Le Miroir offered of the French was relentlessly critical of the morality of France’s civilisational offer and, most specifically, of the ‘political and ethical conduct’ of its representatives. Whereas the French saw the European return to Africa as a kind of renaissance, the birth of a new day, Khodja saw the closing in of night upon the lives of the people of Algeria. This ‘blotting out’ of indigenous culture needed to be opposed by those, who, like Khodja, sought to bring back the light of a day in which, in the terms of al-Tabari, the bounties of God might once again be revealed. Khodja was a rich indigène, a major landowner, farmer and trader, who had formerly served as an official for the Ottoman Empire. He at first assumed a similar role for Algiers’ new colonial masters, but became profoundly disillusioned with the behaviour of the French as compared with that of their Turkish predecessors. He travelled to Paris where he wrote Le Miroir, whose ironic title sought to contrast the brute realities of the French conquest with the civilising mission that the occupiers believed themselves to be carrying out in the Maghreb. The book especially addressed ambassadors, those French politicians who were instinctively sceptical of the Algerian adventure, and metropolitan public opinion.44 Le Miroir has therefore tended to be read as a form of local parroting of enlightened values, in which Khodja acted as a mouthpiece for French liberals and anticolonialists who wished to bring a quick end to the Algerian experiment.45 This view was advanced by St. John, then British consul in Algiers, and by later generations of historians such as Charles-André Julien, who noted that Khodja’s argument appeared to depend more on references to Constant, Grotius and Tacitus than it did to ‘Islamic thought’. This tendentious claim ignored the fact that the well-educated Khodja was wholly at home in both the European and Islamic cultural milieux, and the fact that it 44 Hamdan Khodja, Le Miroir. Aperçu historique et statistique sur la Régence d’Alger (Paris, 1985 [1834]). 45 Abdeljelil Temimi, Recherches et Documents d’Histoire Maghrébine. L’Algérie, la Tunisie et la Tripolitaine, 1816–1871 (Tunis, 1980), 23, 26.

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evidently made rhetorical sense for him to impugn French motives on the basis of their claim to be founding a liberal empire.46 Yet, even in a text designed to inspire anticolonial sentiment in European society, Khodja could not but rely on a set of tropes and deep-lying structures that drew on Islamic genres of making sense of time. Although the book is not overtly religious, it is aptly viewed as within the traditions of the adab, the s¯ıra and the Islamic tradition of justice-centered histories. When treated in this context it becomes a much more precious resource for those who seek to rethink the history of the early colony, for rather than seeing Le Miroir as an Ersatz form of European argumentation, they may now read it an historical account of the coming into being of a new form of society, one that drew heavily on Islamic traditions of history and modes of time. As we will see, Khodja himself would use such a description of living in new times as a means of identifying the most revolutionary and brutal features of the colony. When viewed as an Islamic history, or as a text in the Islamic historical tradition, the importance Khodja placed on the French rupturing of timebeing in North Africa cannot be understated, for what he described as emerging in Algeria was a new J¯ahiliyya or ‘time of ignorance’. The idea that the advent of Prophet Mohammed marked a break between a time of ignorance and a time of knowledge had always been central to Muslim notions of world history. ‘Muhammed’s emigration’ was seen as ‘the divide between truth and falsehood’. ‘Islam cancels all that was before it’, went the popular maxim.47 So, while it was true that Islam had suffered some reverses since its inception – in the expulsion of Muslims from Iberia for instance – a governing temporal assumption of most Muslim cultures was that they had decisively moved out of J¯ahiliyya, never to return. Although left unstated for his French audience, this temporal notion structured Le Miroir’s argument. For Khodja, two historical cultures found themselves in opposition in Algiers: those who lived in God’s time versus those who brought with them a secularised understanding of time and of a universe in which men created their own cultures of justice. While the explicit assertion of the book was the idea that the colonists ought to be judged according to their own self-serving understandings of an idea of justice, its implicit suggestion was that they ought also to expect that they would have eventually to account for their actions before God. Khodja saw himself neither as a lone nor an elite voice, but as ‘an echo of the facts and of my compatriots’, and the chief point that he sought to make to the French was that they needed to ‘listen to the pleas and the words of the 46 Ibid., 26. 47 Margoliouth, Lectures, 41.

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inhabitants of Algeria, so that justice could be done to them’.48 This plea was a vain one, for it demanded that his French interlocutors think of the Algerians as they would think of themselves, but at the same time try to imagine an idea of justice that might not be their own. Ultimately, Khodja was forced to conclude that the French would never understand such things. Le Miroir therefore stands as a form of religiously-inspired testimony that describes how a history of injustice – which would unfold over the coming decades – was constructed, and how it would ultimately be judged by a higher force, for ‘God would scorn those who sponsored the suffering of others’.49 The final lines of Khodja’s text read as follows: ‘This work is but a simple form of report. It is my profound hope that the French government will reconsider the question of the Regency of Algiers and that, at the very least, it will ask the Commission which will be sent to this country to listen to the pleas and opinions of its inhabitants such that justice will be done to them.’50 This stress on justice makes apparent Khodja’s anger at the ‘bad faith’ of the French who had reneged on their treaty agreements with the Algerians, agreements that Khodja had helped to negotiate and for which he now felt responsible as he saw his countrymen being denied the rights and dignity that the pacts enshrined.51 While it was true that Khodja lost much of his own wealth to the French in a very short space of time, his resentment was general rather than personal and centered on his claim that the liberal idea of French empire masked the reality of its despotic, brutal and thieving practices: ‘All these horrors which are committed in the name of France and her representatives in Algiers lie contrary to the principles of liberalism and, indeed, true civilisation.’52 The arbiter of ‘true civilisation’ here was evidently the Islamic culture from which Khodja came, and of which the country’s invaders seemed to know almost nothing. Khodja’s list of proofs in support of his central assertion was a long one, in which questions of law and welfare played leading roles. He alleged ‘that France reneged on her promises of a fair treaty-process … that the goods and property of locals have been pilfered by the French … that the French army has behaved barbarously and despoiled the land … that it was the victors who were savages and the defeated people the exemplars of civilisation … and that charitable donations and legacies held by religious foundations had been seized, with a consequent collapse in the welfare base of the

48 49 50 51 52

Khodja, Le Miroir, 264. Temimi, Recherches, 22–23. Khodja, Le Miroir, 264. Temimi, Recherches, 22–23. Ibid., 22–23.

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city and a massive increase in misery and poverty’.53 This last assertion was of especial importance, for it described the dismantling of a lived culture of justice that had served as an expression of the good life Islam promoted. The venal manner in which the waqf and other charitable funds had been confiscated by the invaders exposed the true savagery of the French as compared to the Muslim ‘examplars of civilisation’ whom they confronted.54 Khodja’s Le Miroir thus gave the lie to French claims that their actions were ‘based on principles of morality and civilisation’. At the very moment that Algerian charitable funds were being confiscated, Khodja observed, the French were ‘giving millions to the Greeks and the Poles! … aiding these peoples with Algerian gold!’55 He was evidently alive to the fact that in making these calculations the French were describing the relative value of different kinds of humans. With their highly racialised view of the world, they were unable to perceive the worth of peoples such as those they found in Algeria. Islam’s justice-driven arguments for egalitarianism and mutual respect regardless of colour or creed found their antithesis in the French creation of an apartheid colonial state. The confiscation of alms for the purpose of funding the occupation of the country undermined one of the four pillars of Islamic practice, whilst the simultaneous theft of one hundred and twenty thousand francs from the Regency’s fund for pilgrimages to Mecca and Medina dismantled a second prop of the faith.56 In citing these violations, Khodja’s argument was not that of a zealot or even of an avowedly religious person. His clear aim was rather to point to the ways in which the very foundations of a culture were being destroyed. The waqf had its origins and its outward purpose in the Islamic injunction to tithe one tenth of one’s income in zak¯at to aid the poor, but such systems of welfare had profound political utility in addition to their religious significance. They enhanced the harmony and stability of society, and thus were enshrined in legal statutes that underpinned the daily business of existence. When Khodja talked of the ‘principles of morality and civilisation’, he was referring to this rich fabric of ethical obligations that tied men to one another, obligations that though based on religious teachings were put into practice in quite worldly contexts.57 The idea that the threads of such a culture might be loosened by an avaricious trespasser evidently gave Khodja reason to fear the eventual unravelling of the whole.

53 Réfutation de l’ouvrage de Sidy Hamdan ben Othman Khoja intitulé Aperçu historique et statistique sur la régence d’Alger (Paris, 1834), 26. 54 Khodja, Le Miroir, 230–231. 55 Ibid., 236. 56 Ibid., 223. 57 Ibid., 231.

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The complement to this destructive component of French rule was the construction of new forms of life, which Khodja saw as wholly malign replacements for the Islamic culture of justice. Chief among these were new forms of violence, most especially the French re-invention of the razzia or ‘extermination raid’, which purported to mimic indigenous forms of aggression, but in fact represented something wholly new in North Africa. Razzias, a form of rustling in which one tribe confiscated the cattle of another, were now re-imagined as moments of terrible brutality in which no distinctions were made between civilians and combatants, and arbitrary violence was inflicted on against men, women and children alike. Such allegedly mimetic forms of cruelty had their origins in the European belief that viciousness was endemic to the Barbary Coast and that by mirroring such behaviour the French might more effectively communicate with the locals: speaking a language they could understand. Khodja stood witness to the duplicity behind such an ideology of terror, describing ‘the theatre of horrors’ that the French staged in Algiers; the ‘shameful massacre’ of men, women and children by Clauzel at Blida, where breast-feeding children had been sliced apart; and the more general ‘yoke of extermination and war crimes’ which had been placed on the Algerian population.58 He commented: This invasion dishonoured France because it inevitably resulted in the extermination of a considerable number of beings who form a part of the human race. [Cette invasion est un déshonneur pour la France, puisque ses résultats doivent être l’extermination d’une grande partie des êtres qui composent la race humaine.] If the Algerian people had shared the same religion as the French, would the invaders have acted in the manner in which they did?59

As Abdelkader Djeghloul wrote, for Khodja the symbolic value of the razzia and of such retributive violence lay less in ‘its immediate effectiveness or its relation to the Algerian past’ than in the manner in which it represented ‘the dawn of a renaissance, the eruption of the future’ into the Algerian present, for he understood very well that the restructuring of human relations that had taken place in the early days of the colony would create a long, dark ‘colonial night’.60 It was the return of the J¯ahiliyya. For Khodja, according to Djeghloul, there were but two ‘solutions’ to France’s Algerian problem: ‘to fight to the point of either exterminating, subjugating or exiling Algerians, or the abandonment of the colony’.61 French civilisation was thereby revealed to be grounded in a suspension of ideas of earthly justice, for its people’s actions in the present were wholly determined and to be assessed against a means-end yardstick that assigned its 58 59 60 61

Ibid., 38, 155, 211. Ibid., 213. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 27.

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highest marks to conquest and domination. These were the goals of the French invaders (along with the promise of benefits that might eventually explain and justify all that had led to this moment in time). While this theoretical or conceptual understanding of what we might call anticipatory time, in which the contours of the present are given meaning only from the standpoint of the future, was secular, it was nonetheless more abstract than the lived ideas of justice that infused Islamic culture, for Khodja’s critique of France’s actions was relentless in documenting the panoply of ways in which new forms of misery were inflicted on the Algerians. He was acutely aware also of the temporal and spatial distance that separated the French from the daily sufferings of their colonial subjects, writing of ‘les horreurs dont Alger est devenu le théâtre’, as if describing a privileged audience watching a predestined drama playing out on a stage.62 Khodja correctly judged that what he was seeing in the early colony was the creation of a permanent moral world in which Algerians could be brutally subjugated and not a brief moment of militarised violence that would usher in a more humane future for France’s new subjects. Khodja’s perceptiveness stemmed in part from the fact that he had known Ottoman rule well and so was able to make clear comparisons between the behaviour of old and new imperial rulers and to assess the broader ethical import of specific policies. Khodja acknowledged that the Ottomans had been ‘despots’, but he remembered that their ‘iniquity’ had extended only as far as the imposition of harsh taxes. It did not occasion the ‘forced exile, pillage and massacres’ that accompanied French ‘progress’.63 We should also note that Khodja identified religion as the critical factor that permitted the French to exclude Algerians from the human community as they conceived of it (that group towards whom one should act as if towards one’s own people). This related to Khodja’s broader thesis that the injustice of the developing state of affairs in Algeria was founded upon a fundamentally erroneous and imbalanced model of knowledge. France, he observed, mistook its power for understanding. French newspapers, for example, purported to know more and more about Algeria, while insisting that Algerians did not have access to an understanding of their conquerors. The reverse, Khodja notes, was true, for ‘the Bedouins knew of all that happened in Europe, while Europeans had no idea what went on with the Bedouins in Africa’.64 This attitude informed the creation of a state in which ethics were imposed in ignorance (by those who assumed knowledge), while the consequences of such a creation was suffering (by those assumed ignorant). 62 Ibid., 155. 63 Ibid., 214–215. 64 Ibid., 215.

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Khodja’s ‘history’ of the early colony looks quite unlike other accounts of the 1830s precisely because his work was grounded in utterly different conceptions of time and of the purpose of history. This also explains why Western historians have tended to view his text as polemical and rife with local resentments (albeit expressed in a voice presumably intended for French ears), rather than as a history in and of itself. Viewed as history, and as a distinctly Islamic history of the period, Khodja’s work gains weight as a mirror onto the world of the early colony, and also as the basis for a new way of making histories of this moment. Khodja’s history in its dependence upon the idea that time should be understood from the perspective of divine justice differs profoundly from Western histories of the early years of the Algerian colony. Western texts have tended to operate from within the frames and tropes of military and political history, often unconsciously stressing the importance of the progressive unfolding of the life of the colony that is found in both primary and early secondary sources from the period. Following Khodja, any attempt to try to write new histories of these years will have to go beyond merely trying to see this moment through the eyes of Algerians rather than from a European perspective. In addition, our very objects of study will have to change as we consider the new and unique forms of destruction rather than construction that emerged in Algeria, and to see them not from the forwardlooking perspective of hopeful colonists, but from a later theological judgement that juxtaposes the behaviour of the European invaders with the existing culture of the Maghreb (which tends to be ignored in Western narratives).

3. Conclusion With its central concern, with the notion of ‘breaking up time’, this volume recognises that nowhere is there a greater need for challenging and (potentially) dismantling our existing temporal frames than at the inception of European modernity. Anxieties as to the character, and indeed the existence, of the modern and modernity run through contemporary historiographical work on time. Yet there seems little awareness that Western ideas of time might be contested from outside the West or, more surprisingly, that other modes of understanding time and history might be deployed as a means of more directly addressing the causes of the temporal malady of which anxieties as to the periodisation of the modern are but symptoms. This paper has therefore sought to offer an introduction to Islamic time modes, along with a case study of a text from that tradition composed at precisely the moment when

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Europeans were most convinced of the veracity and lived reality of their picture of modernity. Hamdan Khodja’s work begins to reveal the depth and extent of Islamic forms of time-being in 1830s Algeria and the degree to which the language, tropes and ethics of this understanding of time were critical to Algerians’ experiences of the rupturing of their world. Europeans were resisted not simply because they were rapacious or brutal, but because they were rightly understood to be bringing with them an alien and rival conception of time and history that was to be superimposed on the lives of the people of the Maghreb. It is therefore far from an exaggeration to say that a war for time took place in North Africa in the middle third of the nineteenth century. As Khodja indicated, the significance of the French invasion of Algiers and of the arrival of a conquering European modernity was well understood, even by the Bedouin of the deserts who were presumed to exist in a state of historic ignorance. The wistful and nostalgic tone of much of Le Miroir makes clear that Khodja did not expect that the Algerians would win this temporal battle, so important to her vanquishers, in the present. He nonetheless understood how crucial it was that the actions of the French be both subjected to judgement in that present according to the morals that were proclaimed to underpin the invasion and summoned to an ultimate divine judgement that lay in and over all time. The time of Western modernity could be resisted precisely because of the ‘civilisational’ value of Algeria’s Islamic culture. More specifically, Khodja understood that his ‘civilisation’ had already undergone many of the social and intellectual shifts that characterised Europeans’ understandings of the ‘renaissance’ and the ‘modern’ that they sought to bring to North Africa. Many Muslims had, after all, lived in large and complex urban economies distinguished by extensive division of labour since the medieval period. Twelfth-century scholars such as Ibn Rushd had questioned the existence of God with a frankness that mirrored what Europeans imagined to be the utter novelty of the Enlightenment six centuries later and even in the desert world of the Sahara, travelling scientific universities would criss-cross between the camps of the Bedouin. For these reasons, the supposedly innovative features of the new forms of being that were exported to Algeria were instead viewed as anachronisms. The number of nineteenth-century Algerian voices that remain to us is relatively small, but there is some evidence of disillusionment with the project of modernity and the so-called civilising mission of the French. We find it, for example, in the resignation note of Abdelkader Ben Zahra, an Algerianborn health officer in the French medical service. Writing in 1884, Ben Zahra ironically critiques the supposedly beneficent ‘road of civilisation and progress’ that he and his countrymen had been encouraged along, noting:

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The War for Time in Early Colonial Algeria

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I write, Monsieur Governor, as a man who holds only the position of health officer, but I hope you will realise the great effort it has taken me to reach even that rank. Out of a population of three million Algerian Arabs there are just four colonial doctors, two health officers and two other medical officials. Those appointed as doctors have qualifications no different from my own – simply a secondary education without a bachelor’s degree – but they had the great fortune to work under Governor Chanzy, who felt moved to alter their ranks from health officers to doctors. In those days, the authorities never missed the opportunity to encourage young Algerians who wished to study and to assimilate themselves with their French masters; to enter into the new life that France offered them. I would like to believe that such policies continue to this day and that your office will support the development of more Algerian doctors so as to encourage our country down the road of civilisation and progress. … Today, however, with my health officer’s diploma I find myself without resources or a route of advancement. I feel like a sea-going traveller who, when his ship reaches the middle of the ocean, is told that he must disembark for he will be taken no further. Because of this, Monsieur Governor, I feel that I would have preferred not to have travelled on that journey and to have remained instead on my own shore, where I would have been content with my savage existence and not troubled by these brick walls and obstructions that now face me.65

The ‘new life’ proposed by the French was revealed as a sham, such that Ben Zahra would have preferred the ‘savage existence’ he already enjoyed; an expression he, like Khodja, evidently used to denote what he believed to be the deeper civilisational virtues of his own culture as opposed to that of his country’s invaders. The chief failing of this new European project was the fact that it promised a vision of the future it had never been capable of creating, or even of being willing to create. The promise was clearly an exercise in injustice. Ben Zahra, after all, well understood that his life had been chosen to stand as a symbol of the European project in Africa, and it was therefore profoundly emblematic that his life had been so filled with empty promises and unjust humiliations. This paper has suggested that temporal difference has value not just as an object of study, but as the basis of a practical means of approaching the past afresh. While the French in the 1830s may have conceived of their imperial task as having been founded upon a project of temporal dismantlement and reconstruction, they were unaware of the fact that the Algerians understood the threat that European temporalities posed to Islamic understandings of time. Even today the presence, and importance, of alternate understandings of time seems ethereal to those who cannot countenance the idea that we might live in different times.

65 Letter of 30 May 1884, Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer, box ALG 113 bis, file 1u/1.

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The Authors

Notes on Authors

Aleida Assmann is Professor of English Literature and Literary Studies at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Berber Bevernage is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Theory of History at the Department of History, Ghent University, Belgium. Constantin Fasolt is Professor of History at the University of Chicago, USA. Peter Fritzsche is Professor of History and Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Illinois, USA. William Gallois is Senior Lecturer in the History of the Modern Middle East at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, UK. Jonathan Gorman is Professor Emeritus of Moral Philosophy at Queen’s University Belfast, UK. François Hartog is Professor of Ancient and Modern Historiography at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France. Lucian Hölscher is Professor of Modern History and Theory of History at the Ruhr-University of Bochum, Germany. Lynn Hunt is Professor of Modern European History at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA. Chris Lorenz is Professor of German Historical Culture at the VU University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. Peter Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University London, UK. Sanja Perovic is Senior Lecturer in French at King’s College London, UK. Axel Schneider is Professor of Modern China Studies and Director of the Center for Modern East Asian Studies at the University of Göttingen, Germany. Stefan Tanaka is Professor of Communication and Director of the Center for the Humanities at the University of California, San Diego, USA. Claudia Verhoeven is Associate Professor at the Department of History, Cornell University, USA.

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Schriftenreihe der FRIAS School of History

Band 1: Jörn Leonhard / Ulrike von Hirschhausen (Hg.)

Comparing Empires Encounters and Transfers in the Long Nineteenth Century 2. Auflage 2012. 556 Seiten mit 19 Abb., geb. ISBN 978-3-525-31040-3 E-Book ISBN 978-3-647-31040-4

Europas Großreiche waren geprägt von ethnischer Differenz und räumlicher Vielfalt. Gerade der Umgang mit Pluralität, die lange als Ursache für Scheitern und Zerfall galt, interessiert heute als typisches Signum Europas. Die Beiträge dieses Bandes vergleichen systematisch vier europäische Empires im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert – das Britische Empire, die Habsburgermonarchie, Russland und das Osmanische Reich – und erklären, was die Beziehungen zwischen Zentrum und Peripherie sowie zwischen Herrschern und Beherrschten so spannungsreich und vielfältig machte.

Band 4: John Krige/ Helke Rausch (Hg.)

American Foundations and the Coproduction of World Order in the Twentieth Century 2012. 301 Seiten, gebunden ISBN 978-3-525-31043-4 E-Book ISBN 978-3-647-31043-5

Wenn das 20. Jahrhundert in vielerlei Hinsicht als »American Century« gelten darf, dann haben die großen US-amerikanischen Stiftungen wie Carnegie, Rockefeller und Ford einen erheblichen Anteil daran. Allerdings nicht so, dass sie sich schlicht als einschlägige Handlanger US-amerikanischer Machtpolitik betätigten. Die Bedingungen vor Ort stellten ungleich höhere Ansprüche an das philanthropische Geschäft. Dieser zweisprachige Band zeigt, wie die US-Philanthropie im Zwischen- und Nachkriegseuropa zu einem politischen Schauplatz ständig ausgehandelter Wissens- und Ordnungsvorstellungen wurde.

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Schriftenreihe der FRIAS School of History

Band 5: Jan Eckel / Samuel Moyn (Hg.)

Moral für die Welt?

Band 6: Maurus Reinkowski / Gregor Thum (Hg.)

Menschenrechtspolitik in den 1970er Jahren

Helpless Imperialists

2012. 396 Seiten mit einem Diagr., gebunden ISBN 978-3-525-31045-8 E-Book ISBN 978-3-647-31045-9

Imperial Failure, Fear and Radicalization

Die Proteste gegen die Apartheid und gegen südamerikanische Militärdiktaturen, die Außenpolitik Jimmy Carters und die Dissidentenbewegung in Osteuropa – bereits diese wenigen Beispiele zeigen, dass der Menschenrechtsgedanke in den 1970er Jahren weltweit an Bedeutung gewann. Der Band untersucht die Voraussetzungen, Formen und Auswirkungen dieser Entwicklung. Alle Beiträge setzen sich dabei mit der Leitfrage auseinander, inwiefern sich die 1970er Jahre als eine qualitativ neuartige Phase in der Geschichte der Menschenrechte begreifen lassen.

2013. 211 Seiten mit 5 Abb., gebunden ISBN 978-3-525-31044-1 E-Book ISBN 978-3-647-31044-2

Das Zeitalter des Hochimperialismus wurde bisher als Zeitraum unangefochtener ökonomischer, technologischer und militärischer Überlegenheit der europäischen Kolonialmächte gesehen. »Helpless Imperialists« beleuchtet den bisher in der Forschung kaum beachteten Aspekt imperialer Frustration und geht dem Zusammenhang zwischen dem Scheitern imperialer Projekte und dem Verlust imperialer Routine und Gewalt nach. Die englischsprachigen Beiträge des Bandes untersuchen das Phänomen des Scheiterns in den deutschen Kolonialgebieten ebenso wie im späten Osmanischen Reich und den Kolonien Südostasiens.

© 2013, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ISBN Print: 9783525310465 — ISBN E-Book: 9783647310466