Rethinking Historical Time, New Approaches to Presentism

Abstract

Marek Tamm and Laurent Olivier have put together a truly inspiring collection of writings that, for a history dilettante like me, provided a lot of food for thought. Firstly, it is necessary to note that history, and perhaps more importantly historical research, is understood in the book as extremely multivalent. This lends the collection a transdisciplinary tone that is most evident in how welcoming the book was to an archaeologist. More importantly, I read the book as a philosopher of archaeology who was repeatedly reminded of the importance of the different combinations of archaeology, history, and philosophy to historical understanding. History today, as we are told, is not interested in any defining conceptualization of time, but in how to think time and history as consisting of multiple temporalities. Not only are there many pasts, presents, and futures, but also many ways to research them. This simple realization forms the backdrop and aim of the book: ‘to enter into a transdisciplinary dialogue with the contemporary conceptualisations of time’ (editors’ introduction, p. 3). This formulation is, however, somewhat misleading because the book takes issue with one particular contemporary and, dare I say, Eurocentric conceptualization of time: presentism. Presentism, in Chris Lorenz’s (Ch. 1) reading of François Hartog, one of the originators of the term, can mean two things. It is either 1) a term for our present, contemporary period, a block in time, or 2) a particular heuristic tool in the analysis of the relationship between the past, present, and future where the present nevertheless dominates. Whereas the former view is simply a reaffirmation of the modern conceptualization of history as causal, directional, and unilinear, and as such part of the problem rather than the solution, the second meaning is much more interesting and, as I see it, also the motivation behind many, if not all, of the chapters. The problem of presentism (and I say problem because, as also noted by Aleida Assmann in her conclusion to the book, there is an evident irritation with the anti-historicism of presentism running through the chapters) is operationalized in three movements. Part 1 is deeply rooted in the philosophy of history and as such charts some of the philosophical foundations of presentism. On the one hand, the roots of presentism stretch back to the time between the world wars, the Holocaust, and post-colonialism. These events form the impetus to the distrust in the future which, entwined with the disappointment with a history that we cannot leave behind, leads to presentism (Ch. 4, p. 73). While the causes for presentism can be understood via an analysis of postmodernism, it is also evident that the roots of presentism as an analytical concept extend to the Enlightenment. Special reference is made to Kant. If in biblical chronologies history was adapted to chronology, in Kant’s analysis, after the Enlightenment, chronology has had to adapt to history. This, Helge Jordheim (Ch. 2) laments, created a break with chronology. The concept of chronology is particularly important in the context of posthumanism and Anthropocene thinking, both topics central to presentism. While the end-time strand of Anthropocene thinking is predicated on the view of history consisting of little more than a succession of traumatic events, and therefore is a continuation of postmodern catastrophism, it is hard to label it as presentist because it imagines a future that is radically different from the past and the present (Ch. 4, p. 79). In this sense, while treating history as a processual continuation (albeit as a negation of how Hegel envisaged it as progress), in posthumanist Anthropocene thinking the future dominates. In the geochemist and climatologist camp of the Anthropocene on the other hand the past dominates. In order to