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The Spectre of the Present: Time, Presentism and the Writing of Contemporary History

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JennyAndersson, The Future of the World: Futurology, Futurists, and the Struggle for the Post-Cold War Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 284 pp. (hb), £63, ISBN 978-0-198-81433-7
AleidaAssmann, Is Time out of Joint? On the Rise and Fall of the Modern Time Regime (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020, trans Sarah Clift), 264 pp. (hb), $39.95, ISBN 978-1-501-74243-9
DanEdelstein, StefanosGeroulanos, and NatashaWheatley, eds, Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2020), 464 pp. (hb), $45, ISBN 978-0-226-48162-3

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2021

Marcus Colla
Marcus Colla*
Affiliation:
Christ Church, St Aldate's, Oxford, OX1 1DP, UK
*
marcus.colla@history.ox.ac.uk
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Extract

Presentism used to be so simple. In the old vernacular it referred to a tendency to view the past from the perspective of the present (or, at its most extreme, maybe even use the past to illuminate the present). Historians disagreed furiously on the intellectual virtues of orienting their views of the past to the needs of the current day. But the content of the term itself was rarely disputed.

Type
Review Article
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , February 2021 , pp. 124 - 135
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 In a 2002 essay entitled ‘Against Presentism’, Lynn Hunt listed two forms of presentism: firstly, ‘the tendency to interpret the past in presentist terms’, and secondly ‘the shift of general historical interest toward the contemporary period and away from the more distant past’; Lynn Hunt, ‘Against Presentism’, 1 May 2002, https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/may-2002/against-presentism (last visited 14 Apr. 2020).

2 David Armitage, ‘In Defense of Presentism’ in Darrin M. McMahon, ed., History and Human Flourishing, (forthcoming, 2020), https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/armitage/files/in_defence_of_presentism.pdf (last visited 20 Apr. 2020).

3 A recent Past and Present ‘Viewpoint’ series on presentism stuck more closely to the traditional meaning; see Walsham, Alexandra, ‘Introduction: Past and . . . Presentism’, Past and Present, 234 (2017), 213–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 In this sense, there is some evident overlap between Hartog's ‘regime of presentism’ and post-modernism. Even if, as Stephen Smith points out, ‘his book contains not a single mention of this concept’; Smith, S. A., ‘China, Revolution and Presentism’, Past and Present, 234 (2017), 276–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, Our Broad Present: Time and Contemporary Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Lorenz, Chris, ‘Out of Time? Some Critical Reflections on François Hartog's Presentism’, in Tamm, Marek and Olivier, Laurent, eds., Rethinking Historical Time: New Approaches to Presentism (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 22Google Scholar.

7 Chris Lorenz, ‘Unstuck in Time: Or, the Sudden Presence of the Past’, in Karin Tilmans, Frank van Vree and Jay Winter, eds., Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 80.

8 Lorenz, ‘Out of Time?’; Charles S. Maier, ‘Transformations of Territoriality 1600–2000’, in Gunilla Budde, Sebastian Conrad and Oliver Jansz, eds., Transnationale Geschichte. Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 32–56.

9 Frederick Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

10 Marek Tamm and Laurent Olivier, ‘Introduction: Rethinking Historical Time’, in Tamm and Olivier, Rethinking Historical Time, 2.

11 As adumbrated by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Eelco Runia and Ethan Kleinberg respectively; see the discussion in Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, History in Times of Unprecedented Change: A Theory for the 21st Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 69–74.

12 Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Geschichte/Historie’, in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck, eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. 2, (Stuttgart: Klett, 1975), 647–717.

13 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, 2nd edn (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008), 8.

14 Quoted in Tamm and Olivier, ‘Introduction’, 2.

15 Victoria Fareld, ‘Coming to Terms with the Past: Exploring the Chrononormativity of Historical Time’, in Tamm and Olivier, Rethinking Historical Time, 66.

16 Ibid., 62.

17 Ibid., 64.

18 Ibid., 66.

19 Torgeir Rinke Bangstad, ‘Heritage and the Untimely’, in Tamm and Olivier, Rethinking Historical Time, 150.

20 Ibid., 160.

21 Ibid.

22 Lorenz, ‘Out of Time?’, 36.

23 Tamm and Olivier, ‘Introduction’, 35–6.

24 Simon, Unprecedented Change, 67.

25 Ibid., 62.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid., 59. See also Eelco Runia, Moved by the Past: Discontinuity and Historical Mutation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

28 Simon, Unprecedented Change, 46, 50.

29 Christopher Clark, Time and Power: Visions of History in German Politics, from the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 6.

30 Though one might indeed view the ‘temporal turn’ as a further stage in the post-modernist project. As Ernst Breisach observed in 2003, ‘considering the importance of the postmodernist revision of the temporal dimension of human life – be it the change and continuity dichotomy or the progressive linear concept of time – the discussion of that topic has been surprisingly sketchy’. Despite the fact that some post-modernists explicitly rejected historical time as ‘an invention of modern Western civilization . . . no direct discussion of the role of time in postmodernism generally and the metanarrative specifically ensued’; Ernst Breisach, On the Future of History: The Postmodernist Challenge and its Aftermath (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 139–40.

31 Achim Landwehr, Die anwesende Abwesenheit der Vergangenheit. Essay zur Geschichtstheorie (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2016).

32 Indeed, in Assmann's historicising take on the waning of the ‘modern time regime’ one can detect an echo of Geoffrey Barraclough's classic 1966 defence of the practice of contemporary history. Attacking those who condemned contemporary history as a ‘newfangled notion’ developed in response to the profound political questions posed by the early twentieth century, Barraclough retorted: ‘it is not unfair to answer that what was newfangled was not a concept firmly anchored to the present but, on the contrary, the nineteenth-century notion of history as something dedicated entirely to the past’; Geoffrey Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History (London: Penguin, 1967), 7.

33 Aleida Assmann, Is Time out of Joint? On the Rise and Fall of the Modern Time Regime (trans. Sarah Clift Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020), 199.

34 Ibid., 197.

35 Ibid., 195.

36 Ibid., 199.

37 Ibid.

38 Lorenz, ‘Out of Time?’, 35. In describing the modern ‘invention of the historical’, Assmann cites Bruno Latour's claim that ‘moderns’ are ‘cut off from a past that is maintained in a state of artificial survival due only to historicism’; Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (trans. Catherine Porter, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 133.

39 Assmann, Is Time out of Joint?, 199.

40 Ibid., 169.

41 Ibid., 8.

42 Ibid., 175.

43 Fernando Esposito, ‘Zeitenwandel. Transformationen geschichtlicher Zeitlichkeit nach dem Boom – eine Einführung’, in Fernando Esposito, ed., Zeitenwandel: Transformationen geschichtlicher Zeitlichkeit nach dem Boom (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017), 7.

44 Achim Landwehr, ‘Die vielen, die anwesenden und die abwesenden Zeiten. Zum Problem der Zeit-Geschichte und der Geschichtszeiten’, in Esposito, Zeitenwandel, 230–1.

45 Esposito, ‘Zeitenwandel’, 54.

46 Lukas J. Hezel ‘“Was gibt es zu verlieren, wo es kein Morgen gibt?” Chronopolitik und Radikalisierung in der Jugdendrevolte 1980/81 and bei den Autonomen’, in Esposito, Zeitenwandel, 122.

47 Ibid., 122, 149.

48 Silke Mende, ‘Das “Momo”-Syndrom’. Zeitvorstellungen im alternativen Milieu und in den “neuen” Protestbewegungen’, in Esposito, Zeitenwandel, 180.

49 Elke Seefried, ‘Partei der Zukunft? Der Wandel des sozialdemokratischen Fortschrittsverständnisses 1960–2000’, in Esposito, Zeitenwandel, 195.

50 Ibid., 194.

51 Andersson, Jenny, The Future of the World: Futurology, Futurists, and the Struggle for the Post-Cold War Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 215CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 Ibid., 22.

53 Ibid.

54 Edelstein, Dan, Geroulanos, Stefanos and Wheatley, Natasha, ‘Chronocenosis: An Introduction to Power and Time’, in Edelstein, Dan, Geroulanos, Stefanos and Wheatley, Natasha, eds., Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2020), 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 Ibid., 20.

56 Ibid., 23.

57 Natasha Wheatley, ‘Legal Pluralism as Temporal Pluralism: Historical Rights, Legal Vitalism, and Non-Synchronous Sovereignty’, in Edelstein, Geroulanos and Wheatley, Power and Time, 53.

58 Ibid., 54.

59 Palmowski, Jan and Readman, Kristina Spohr, ‘Speaking Truth to Power: Contemporary History in the Twenty-first Century’, Journal of Contemporary History, 46, 3 (2011), 502CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 Assmann, Is Time out of Joint?, 130.