Lost in time: periodization and temporality in abnormal times (original) (raw)
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This is an exceptionally sophisticated and wide-ranging book on historical time, the construction of the past, present, and future, and the problem of periodization. Its major thesis is that temporal divisions of history are produced by social actors, including historians, who break up time from their distinct temporal positions. The book inquires about the theoretical underpinning and historical constitution of temporal breaks: the premises sustaining notions of pastness, presentness, and futurity; the relations constructed by these notions between historiography and other fields of knowledge; the specific articulation of shifting and mutually competing temporalities both within and beyond European history; and the political implications of temporal divisions. Throughout the book the breaking up of time is studied as a fundamental political operation. To engage with temporal breaks, the authors contend, is to engage with the historian's contemporary, to negotiate borders that act upon the present, including the border that safeguards the presumed autonomy of the time of history-writing.
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN PSYCHOANALYTIC ASSOCIATION, 2020
The novel coronavirus, followed by en masse antiracist uprisings, has interpellated the global public into something of a social psychoanalysis, characterized both by dismantling and psychic conditioning. Signage of the “weird” and the “strange,” and the uncanny call of marginalized subjects and unconscious archaic pasts and elemental futures have jolted us (white and privileged especially) from the repetitive orbit of self-same certainties into precarity and tumult. Widespread calls for anticapitalist, antiracist collective renewal, issuing, via apres coup, from an encounter with previously repressed, even “unthinkable” ancestral racialized legacies, implicate psychoanalysis. This essay challenges psychoanalysis to reckon with its validity as a so-called emancipatory, healing praxis and to inscribe in its theory a new “position”, a radical democratic imaginary that affirms individual-collective inseparability. This new conceptual space opens onto novel paradoxes and strange temporalities as the insistence of the Real disorients both patient and analyst. Operating between splitting and mourning/reparation, this new imaginary is marked by a vivid contestation between life and death drives. It is constituted by the catalyzing action of revolt, the disruption of the plague of the incestuous familiar, by a democratizing, deconstructive praxis, and by the vitalizing, unruly motions of desire and its truthful, erotic telos.
The Present Shock and Time Re-appropriation in the Pandemic Era
Science & Education
The crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic led most people all over the world to deal with a change in their perception and organization of time. This happened also, and mainly, within the educational institutions, where students and teachers had to rearrange their teaching/learning dynamics because of the forced education at a distance. In this paper, we present an exploratory qualitative study with secondary school students aimed to investigate how they were experiencing their learning during lockdown and how, in particular, learning of science contributed to rearranging their daily lifetime rituals. In order to design and carry out our investigation, we borrowed constructs coming from a research field rather unusual for science education: the field ofsociology of time. The main result concerns the discovery of the potential of the dichotomy betweenalienation from timeandtime re-appropriation.The former is a construct elaborated by the sociologist Hartmut Rosa to describe the society...
Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science
This paper investigates one aspect of meaning making that occurs in the wake of systemic change. It addresses the question of how time is re-configured by socio-material changes resultant from the COVID-19 pandemic. Employing a semiotic perspective, we aim to describe a process of disruption and distress, which leads to a recognition of the oddness of ‘covid-time.’ This is characterised by distressing ‘suspended waiting’, a despairing frozen temporality. After this, this odd covid-time is semiotically assimilated into the old and familiar. Distressing ‘suspended time’ is transformed into ‘productive time’, ‘normal time’, and ‘transformational time’ as an attempt to regulate affect. By highlighting this semiotic shift, the theory of the Cultural Psychology of Semiotic Dynamics (Valsiner, 2014) is used to highlight how meaning is constructed using cultural resources.
Introduction: Rethinking Historical Time
Rethinking Historical Time: New Approaches to Presentism. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019
In his "Archaeology of the Human Sciences" (1969), Michel Foucault compared the history of knowledge with a powerful geological process: it happens sometimes that deeply buried plates of commonly acknowledged ideas and concepts, covered since ages by a continuous accumulation of sediments – made of successive interpretations – suddenly break down under the huge pressure of events and come to the surface, making the world shaking. Is that what is happening now? Like seismographs, most of the various fields of human and social sciences – and specially those dealing with the past – are recording the lift of new objects of enquiry, that are appearing under the thrust of a new force, previously hidden and unnoticed, that of the present. The French historian François Hartog has first given a name to this conceptual earthquake: presentism (2003, and, for an English translation, 2014). But where are we now? It has become obvious that the Hartogian notion of presentism is actually insufficient to grasp this new reality dominated by the present – since it is not anymore a specific question addressed to history and the historians. It is urgent to draw the state of the fields that have been actually contaminated, or affected, by the spread of the present, but more importantly, it is urgent to assess what is at stake under this compelling transformation. The conventional frontiers which used to separate the disciplines from the others are gradually falling down. But this is not just some sort of new academic debate: presentism – whatever the name we stamp this phenomenon with – is a symptom revealing the ideology of our present time, in other words, its new ontological situation.
THE CONTRADICTIONS OF POST-MODERN TEMPORALITY IN THE LIGHT OF THE NEW CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC
This article reflects on how much we live in a time of increasing complexity, which seemed to have already overcome all problems, given the security that confidence in scientific and technological processes seemed to have returned to us. But when these processes, as now happens in the Coronavirus pandemic, show their weakness, they reveal, as never before, their weaknesses. These are the weaknesses that result from depositing all the objective value in these processes, believing that in them was the capacity to redeem us from all our ills. Running after innovation and success at all costs, without ethics, without respect for nature and for others, without regard for the past and without anchoring the future in it, reduces the stability and structural security of the societies and individuals that compose them.
Time. Temporality in Global History
Rethinking Global History, ed. Stefanie Gänger / Jürgen Osterhammel, CUP, 2024
The chapter discusses how questions of time and temporality shape and challenge global history, as well as historical studies in general. I take my cue from the specific temporality of global history itself and its role in defining the identity of the field. I move on to show, firstly, why time can be understood as history’s ‘last fetish’, as Chris Lorenz has phrased it, and how this makes itself known among global historians. In a second step, politics of periodisation are analysed as a particular challenge for de-centring history. Here, the recent debate about the ‘Global Middle Ages’ and the longer history of the global proliferation of the ‘medieval’ serve as an example. Finally, I turn to the question of synchronisation and contemporaneity, which presents both a promise and a problem for global historians.
Periodizing Time: The Concept of Time in History
Research Discourse, 2018
Time is the most important factor of history because it gives identity to it by differentiating it from present and future. So far nobody could have defined 'time' but each one from living to non-living has felt it directly from their beginning to end. It is surprising to note that, time which is the core of any historical work, historians have shown very little attention towards it. It is the literary scholars who have seized upon the subject of time before the historians. One reason for this may be because both modernism and postmodernism had more impact on literature than on history. But historians tend to assume the existence of "modernity", indeed posit it as a fundamental dividing line in historical studies and in most occasions, they describe it in their work rather than investigating it as a temporal category. What historians failed to attest is that, it is the western notion of the time imposed on the non-western world with an idea of the dichotomy of the backward and progressive world. Every culture was having (perhaps still having) a notion of time which can be evidenced by their historical accounts. So it is necessary to reinvestigate into the notion of time to understand 'the history' in its temporality rather than comparing it with the western time frame.
(ed. with Chris Lorenz) Breaking up Time: Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past and Future
Claudia Verhoeven, Stefan Tanaka, Chris F G Lorenz, William Gallois, peter osborne, François HARTOG, Constantin Fasolt, Berber Bevernage, Lynn Hunt, Lucian Hölscher, Jonathan L Gorman
2013
Thirteen expert historians and philosophers address basic questions on historical time and on the distinctions between past, present and future. Their contributions are organised around four themes: the relation between time and modernity; the issue of ruptures in time and the influence of catastrophic events such as revolutions and wars on temporal distinctions; the philosophical analysis of historical time and temporal distinctions; and the construction of time outside Europe through processes of colonialism, imperialism, and globalisation. Table of Contents Introduction Berber Bevernage and Chris Lorenz: Breaking up Time – Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past and Future 1. Time and Modernity: Critical Approaches to Koselleck’s Legacy Aleida Assmann: Transformations of the Modern Time Regime Peter Fritzsche: The Ruins of Modernity Peter Osborne: Global Modernity and the Contemporary: Two Categories of the Philosophy of Historical Time 2. Ruptures in Time: Revolutions and Wars Sanja Perovic: Year 1 and Year 61 of the French Revolution: The Revolutionary Calendar and Auguste Comte Claudia Verhoeven: Wormholes in Russian History: Events ‘Outside of Time’ François Hartog: The Modern Régime of Historicity in the Face of Two World Wars Lucian Hölscher: Mysteries of Historical Order: Ruptures, Simultaneity and the Relationship of the Past, the Present and the Future 3. Thinking about Time: Analytical Approaches Jonathan Gorman: The Limits of Historiographical Choice in Temporal Distinctions Constantin Fasolt: Breaking up Time – Escaping from Time: Self-Assertion and Knowledge of the Past 4. Time outside Europe: Imperialism, Colonialism and Globalisation Lynn Hunt: Globalisation and Time Stefan Tanaka: Unification of Time and the Fragmentation of Pasts in Meiji Japan Axel Schneider: Temporal Hierarchies and Moral Leadership: China’s Engagement with Modern Views of History William Gallois: The War for Time in Early Colonial Algeria"