INTH-Review-Martin L. Davies
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Chris Lorenz & Berber Bevernage (Eds.), Breaking up Time. Negotiating the Borders between
Present, Past and Future. Schriftenreihe der FRIAS School of History, vol. 7 (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 274pp. [ISBN 978-3-525-31046-5]. 44,99 Euros.
The title alone is intriguing: ‘breaking up time’? But doesn’t time break things up? As
Aristotle remarks: ‘we regard time in itself as destroying rather than producing, for what is counted in
time is movement, and movement dislodges whatever it affects from its present state’; or in
Shakespeare when Time itself insists ‘it is in my power / To o’erthrow law, and in one self-born hour
/ To plant and o’erwhelm custom.’1 Time transcends purely anthropic world-arrangements. – And
then the notion that time has ‘borders’, as if it were material. For Bergson conceiving of time in
spatial terms is a mental illusion (as though the past persisted in a spectral dimension).2 Time as it
passes annuls all precedent states. That these could be retrievable comes (as Whitehead observes)
from the mind being in time and space in a different way to nature with its constant passing of events.
Cogredient with successive states of consciousness, it can construct ‘serial time’ as an abstraction
from the ever-elapsing ‘passage of nature’. Otherwise, ‘the attempt to set up time as an independent
terminus for knowledge is like the effort to find substance in a shadow’. The conviction of the
uniqueness of the temporal series (as in materialist theories of nature and, by implication, history as a
“process” of material change) is, therefore, particularly illusory: ‘it has a trimness about it, with its
instantaneous present, its vanished past, its non-existent future, and its inert matter, [that] ill accords
with brute fact.’3
Conceptual and terminological precision is important. History is heterogeneous, as this book
shows. It contains, besides the editors’ introduction, thirteen chapters on a social-anthropologically
diverse range of time-cultures organized into these classes: ‘Time and Modernity: Critical Approaches
to Koselleck’s Legacy’; ‘Ruptures in Time: Revolutions and Wars’; ‘Thinking about Time: Analytical
Approaches’; and ‘Time outside Europe: Imperialism, Colonialism and Globalization’. Precision,
though, is forfeited from the start. Within a paragraph the argument slips from ‘time being essential to
historiography’, to the identity of history and time, to ‘historical time’ with its ‘temporal scales and
rhythms’ and its ‘distinctions between past, present and future’, and then, ultimately, to the realization
that ‘time has its own historicity’ (pp.7-8; 31). It completes a (vicious) circle.
The central, often reiterated thesis of the book is that historical “constructions” of time have
‘not received the attention they deserve’, ‘are badly in need of [...] conceptual [...] analysis’, and ‘have
hardly been studied in a comparative perspective (pp.9, 11, 27). The precision professed to be
theoretically desirable, goes begging. In Peter Fritsche’s essay on ‘The Ruins of Modernity’ what
distinguishes ‘natural time’ from ‘historical time’ (pp.58, 60)? In Peter Osborne’s essay on ‘Global
Modernity and the Contemporary’, is the ‘historical time as the medium of historical meaning’ that is
indifferent to ‘chronological time’, conterminous with Fritsche’s usage (p.73)? And how do these
definitions fit with ‘the disjunctive model of historical times’ defined by Lucian Hölscher’s essay
‘Mysteries of Historical Order: Ruptures, Simultaneity and the Relationship of the Past, the Present
and the Future’ (p.139), or with Jonathan Gorman’s discussion of the ideality or reality of historical
time, hence of the ‘rolling web of beliefs and other expressions which organize and sort historical
reality’ in his essay on ‘The Limits of Historiographical Choice in Temporal Distinctions’
(pp.159,163)? Is there any connection between ‘universal time’ in François Hartog’s essay on ‘The
Modern Régime of History’ (p.125) and ‘the universal, homogeneous, totalising category of time
developed from the eighteenth century onward’ affirmed by Lynn Hunt in her essay ‘Globalisation
and Time’ (p.214)? And where does Osborne’s ‘historical present’ occur (pp.81, 83)? (Does the
epithet imply a non-historical present? If so, how would that relate to history? And if not, the
qualification is redundant.) That ‘different human beings [...] have different attitudes to time’, as
Constantin Fasolt remarks in his essay ‘Breaking up Time – Escaping from Time. Self-Assertion and
Knowledge of the Past’, or that time can seem both ‘invisible and ethereal’ and ‘strikingly real and
clear’ according to William Gallois’s essay on ‘The War for Time in Early Colonial Algeria,’is selfevident and self-contradictory (p.176). It just means that any theoretical description of historical time
is valid. Hence, it is possible – as in this book – to range indiscriminately across these time-schemes
by means of a ‘shared overall frame of time’, of ‘swathes of time’, as in Gorman’s essay
(pp.157,170,171, 175), of ‘frames of knowledge’, and ‘diverse ecologies of time’ as in Gallois’s
essay cited above (pp.254,255).
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The book’s central topic is the Modern (Euro-centric) conception of history as linear,
homogeneous, progressive time with its trim symmetry of past, present, and future and whether or not
it can be sustained as a cognitive structure in a self-historicizing world, a world that through historical
events, through revolution, war, imperialism, globalization, hence through the proliferation of ‘pasts’
and (often ‘lost’) ‘futures’, has severely compromised the existing technology for its own selfunderstanding. Outlined by the editors in their historiographical introduction, this predicament is
neatly summarized by Aleida Assmann in her essay on ‘Transformations of the Modern Time regime’
when she concludes: ‘The past and future are in a process of being reconstructed in new ways and
none of them is indispensable’ (p.55). But this theoretical preoccupation is offset by its scholastic
practice. The essays that examine the non-viability of revolutionary calendars or the relinquishing of a
pre-historical past in non-European cultures for the historical world of colonialism and capitalism –
Sanja Perovic’s essay on ‘Year 1 and Year 61 of the French Revolution: The Revolutionary Calendar
and Auguste Comte’, Claudia Verhoeven’s on ‘Wormholes in Russian History: Events “Outside of
Time”’, Stefan Tanaka’s on ‘Unification of Time and the Fragmentation of Pasts in Meiji Japan’,
Axel Schneider’s on ‘Temporal Hierarchies and Moral Leadership: China’s Engagement with Modern
Views of History’, besides those by Gallois and Hunt already mentioned – exhibit complete
confidence in an essentially linear (Modernist) conception of history. Their essays represent very well
the standard academic, generally efficient discourse of linear historical analysis and explanation.
This disjunction in the book between theory and practice raises a further question: does the
basic modernist discourse affirm itself through cognitive efficiency or through scholarly habit? As
Peirce argued, habit itself lends explanation regularity.4 The professed theoretical ‘need’ for a new
conceptualization of temporal structures is neutralized by the inertial force of comprehension as a
cognitively depleted, but automatic scholastic procedure. The book inadvertently suggests that the
Modernist conception of history – despite the interventions of Koselleck, Assmann, or Hartog – lacks
the terminology or the grammar to articulate the historicization of history in a dynamic, globalized
world devoid of any single, privileged observer-standpoint. To define what in theory might happen to
history’s temporal regimes, it still defaults habitually to the usual categorical coordinators
indispensable for making history make sense: to ‘historical trajectories’ (p.64), to ‘traditions’ (pp.237,
239), but particularly to ‘processes’. Concern with them, particularly with ‘historical processes’,
occurs in several essays without any discussion coordinating their definition, – as when Hartog
asserts: ‘time [...] is the operator of a historical process – [...] the true name for progress’ (p.124),
while Gorman argues: ‘the so-called “web of beliefs” is [...] to be seen as an ongoing [...] holistic
process’, as though any “process” could not be ‘ongoing’ (p.163). The problem is: this conception of
history in itself implies “process”, so ‘historical process’ would mean merely the “process of a
process”. The habitual recourse to “process” as a heuristic tool that evidently connects anything with
anything else culminates in cognitive redundancy. In fact, on crucial issues where ‘processes’ imply
academic gravitas they are superfluous, – as in Assmann’s ‘process of being reconstructed’ (where
reconstruction is already in itself the process) (p.55); or in Osborne’s ‘the process of being
fundamentally transformed’ (where transformation itself already signifies process) (p.69); or when
Hunt affirms a ‘debate whose very terms are still in the process of formulation’ (where formulation is
already the process) (p.201); or in Tanaka’s ‘Turning these myriad pasts into a history though, was
not an easy process’ (where ‘turning into’ is also the process) (p.223). The discursive-cognitive habit
that overcodes ‘process’ by the rhetorical means of amplificatio only reveals what it would conceal:
apprehension that the historical description might inadequately grasp the history it is describing, that
its reason might not be sufficient to unravel its chaotic complexity.
Certainly the informative essays this book contains reflect the technical expertise that
produced them: they exemplify the prevailing norms of Wissenschaftlichkeit. But the book is more
significant as a testimony to a scholastic syndrome. The conception of time that sustains history
derives from a static (Newtonian) system. Here everything can be ‘pinned down’ in its “proper”
historical place (cf. Hunt, pp.201, 203). Unfortunately reality is the product of a dynamic system that
is relativistic, entropic, and chaotic. Life unfolds amidst multifarious, different, conflicting, atomized
spheres of facts and values, as evinced here by the allusions to Bloch’s concept of ‘asynchronous
synchronicity’ (pp.32, 80, 144). The historian-observer already projected into this chaotic profusion is
left to his or her own devices to attempt to conceptualize it historically. But, as Prigogine and Stengers
observe, in a chaotic system time so transforms a situation that its initial (now long past) states can
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never be retrieved from or discerned in its subsequent transformations.5 A chaotic system and the
cognitive habits of historical comprehension are, therefore, antithetical: the one would negate the
other. But precisely here the specific history syndrome kicks in. On the one hand, historians can
contemplate their historicized predicament, their eventual obsolescence, – in theory: theoria means
‘contemplation’. On the other, they discover that their practice can still assert their comprehension
habit. As Hunt remarks: ‘History remains fascinating precisely because it is always changing’ (p.215).
This identitary logic – (history [change] = change [history]) – confirms that no matter how much
history changes, however chaotic or atomized it becomes, it is still history: it is – reassuringly –
always the same, the same old thing. The theory, however conceptually refined, need never impede
habitual practice.
Notes:
1. Aristotle, Physics. Books I-IV. Trans. P.H. Wicksteed & F.M. Cornford, Loeb Classical Library
(Cambridge, Mass. & London: Harvard U.P., 1996), pp.402-5 (IV, xii, 221 b); W. Shakespeare, The
Winter’s Tale, Act.IV,1. ll,7-9.
2. H. Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, Coll. Quadrige (Paris: P.U.F.,
1982), pp.74ff.
3. A.N.Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (Cambridge: C.U.P., 1920), pp.65ff., 73.
4. C.S. Peirce, The Essential Peirce. Selected Philosophical Writings, Vol. 1 (1867-1893), ed. N.
Houser & C Kloesel (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indianapolis. U. P., 1992), pp.327ff.
5. I. Prigogine & I. Stengers, Entre le temps et l’Éternité (Paris: Flammarion, 2001), pp.77, 193-4.
Martin L. Davies
Leicester