A Compass that Promises Overcoming Uncertainty and Facing the Future
Can history play a role in the search for a compass that gives us certainty in a world that locates itself at “the end-time of truth,” a world in which knowledge no longer has authority, a world in which a profound rupture exists between the “space of experience” and the “horizon of expectation” (two categories that are among the most familiar concepts of Reinhart Koselleck’s writings)?
Ethan Kleinberg suggests that the role of history as a compass in navigating this unstable world is broken. Until now, Kleinberg states that the compass has been used with ahistorical directional markings, “dominated by the presence of the present which reaches back to tell the past what to be.” Rather than a directional indicator that no longer functions, Kleinberg proposes a compass that, while not radically outside of time, nevertheless opens up to a “logic of anachrony.” In today’s socio-political climate, history could still play a guiding role in times of uncertainty. The historian should finally abandon the traditional understanding of the past as hermetic and static – an understanding that seems to have regained strength in modern historiography, because thinking about world history is often based on shared spaces of events and thus on a generalized temporality. The compass is supposed to point to altered paths of history, but also to altered truths. In order to do this, the compass must be taken out of the atemporal position in which historiography often still believes itself to be. To accept the temporality of history is to become part of temporality.
With the concept of “the Surge,” Kleinberg introduces a mode of history that makes it possible to look at the prolific possibilities of the present and to underline that not every present option follows a linear deduction from the past. This approach is antithetical to traditional Western historiography and accepts that there are multiple and competing logics of time and ways of organizing the past. Therefore, Kleinberg challenges the historian to construct a new compass of history that does not seek to locate directions, but instead “detects the Surge” and guides us at the end-time of truth through a multipolar understanding of the world, its past and future.
Kleinberg describes the Surge as a mode of history characterized by a “Total Other without logic, order, or time”. The Surge is void of spatial and temporal ordering of the past, and therefore, the Surge detector is tasked with identifying the junctions where past themes recur and connect with the present. Locating historical moments at these points is important because the “multiple and conflicting logics of how we encounter, account for, and recount the past” are revealed. Even if the Surge detector is consequently built as an atemporal mechanism for understanding the past, it is undoubtedly a measuring instrument that is held up to the events, that is, it touches the events. For it is the historian’s hand that guides this new compass and thus predetermines what it measures as “the past.” Should the compass be associated with the idea of reaffirming or regaining an “objectivity” of histotical research because the Western historian does not want to give up locating himself in an “objectivity” outside the event?
Subsequently, a crucial question is whether the Surge detector is a new invention. With its intended ability to indicate a direction from the stream of events, the detector follows a more traditional view of historiography and the tasks ascribed to it. It is also worth noting that Kleinberg’s detector does not measure time, but identifies places: It “points to sites where the past surges into the present unexpectedly, touching us and connecting with our concerns not only for the present but also the future.”
Toward the end of his reflections, Kleinberg refers to a study by Aleida Assmann, who discussed how up to modernity, historiography had guaranteed the promise of the future. Steeped in the modernist belief in progress, history traditionally provided an opportunity to hope for something better and greater. With the waning of the belief in history’s ability to guide people to a greater future, so has the confidence in history as a discipline. The invalidation of a universal narrative of history for future humanity, especially the particularization of event narratives, would have resulted in the intensification or multiplication of social and political conflicts.
Do we really have to assume a close connection between loss of the future, conflict, and violence? Kleinberg contradicts this somewhat cautiously by arguing that the promise of the future is only valid for those who believe in it. Nevertheless, he does not discuss in detail whether the “Surge detector” can also detect places of discourse between the present and the future.
On further reflection on the role of the narrative of the future, it is essential to highlight three contradictions. First, the interest of modern Western historiography in the “future” has never been universal but national. Second: the argument of the “loss of future” or the risk of the “future becoming uncertain” is a discursive figure that has helped legitimize political radicalism and violence in modernity. Readiness for violence arises not from uncertainty, but from the narrative that this uncertainty must be overcome. We can formulate a third contradictory consideration: In the current figure of speech of the “rupture of time” or “end of time,” in the contemporary public discourse about the crisis of the present, hardly any of the world’s real crises receive attention. Whether Mali, Burkina, Niger, Haiti, Kenya, Congo, Yemen, Karabakh, or Sudan, when describing the consequences of the crises, the actual political conflicts are considered. Remarkably, while contemporary discourses refer to recent social and political conflicts, they become detached from social and political events regarding their consequences. The public is currently led to believe that the individual’s options are limited. Institutions no longer suffice, the argument goes, politics is incapable of action, and social divisions between generations, genders, political parties, rich and poor are unbridgeable. The idea of political and historical crisis is currently firmly linked to arguments about the limitation of the self.
The following sections elaborate on the “contradictions” mentioned above, critiquing the argument that the modern universal promise of history is broken. The remarks ultimately support Kleinberg’s observation that discourses contain topographical logics deployed through temporal figures, but they show, by introducing the aspect of positionality of historical thought, that the question of the promise of history is not a scientific, but rather a political question. The considerations outlined here also venture to suggest that it should not be the historian’s task to give directions, but to accept different pasts.
The historian who searches for the multiple nodal points of the past and present to determine the future must not overlook the fact that they do not encounter the flow of events, but instead the narratives about the events. It is the discourses about the events that flow to the historian. Accepting the flow of narratives means that the historian must understand the existence of diverse experiences at these nodal points of history. Seeking directions means trying to impose authoritative readings or perpetuating the validity of particular readings.
Historical, social, and human sciences do not focus on finding causes, but on the connections discovered in processes, i.e. on interrelations and the effects of interrelated social, political, and human factors. Cultural and social scientists, for example, do not ask why the sun sets, but try to understand the traditions and translations, the cultural emotions and intergenerational narratives of sunsets, their social significance and political echoes. Historical research has only recently – perhaps since the challenges posed by the writings of Hayden White – moved away from the assumption that they clarify the actual, “true” causes of events. Historical “truth” is not the truth about the causes and developments of events, but a prefiguration and refiguration of narratives about events based on mediated knowledge, disciplinary concepts, social positions, agreements, and assumptions about the driving forces of occurrences. Kleinberg reminds us that historical sciences have yet to accept that the flow of events is a social figuration and that historical research is a strategy of knowledge communities.
This also relates to the discovery that time has a specific temporality. The assumption that past and present have speed was closely connected with the idea that by influencing the temporality, the times themselves could also be changed: By intervening in the present and thereby altering the past, the future should be saved. These figures of discourse are firmly anchored in 19th-century German historiography.
#Decoupled Temporality
Strategies of temporalization can be understood as strategies for changing the relationship between the places and times in which we live and our cultural practices, experiences, and identities. The narrative which accompanied this figure was that time had become uncertain because the present crisis was so comprehensive, so general, that the crisis also affected all concepts of meaning and, ultimately time itself. The time that had become uncertain was discovered in German historical philosophy at the beginning of the 19th century. It was rediscovered in the philosophy of the 1920s, particularly in the writings of Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (1876 –1925) and Oswald Spengler (1880 –1936). However, it would be far too short-sighted to single out only the representatives of a young conservative school of thought. Philosophical, historical, and political writings printed in Germany after World War I contended that a rupture had occurred between time and space, and that time itself had become alienated precisely because of the loss of connection to space.
In the face of crisis, the argument that time is being detached from space goes back to the nationalist imagination that links identities to a connection to place, language, heritage, culture, and not least, “time.” Its formation can be directly traced to the writings of Humboldt, Herder, Fichte, or Ernst Moritz Arndt, which addressed the unity of history and the fulfilment of national identity framed in a historical time. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the argument emerged that time and space needed to be reunited to overcome political crises.
In a speech about the “Views of Germany’s Future in the Present,” theologist, university teacher, and later President of the University of Marburg and Breslau Ludwig Wachler (1767–1838) refers to a decisive hour – this hour, however, is not temporal, it is an extra-temporal threshold, “against time.” The hour is a “place;” it has (as a threshold) a certain spatial extension. Wachler explains that the future can be seen directly – by those who want to see it. His concern is not to miss the hour to strengthen its effect and recognize the need to act. The political goal should not be to merely assume the pace of time in order to return to time itself. Rather, the goal should be to change the temporality and dynamics of time to increase its effectiveness: “[I]t seems to be a duty against the time in which we live, and a duty against ourselves [...].”
Wachler closely relates the reflections on “people” and “time.” Thus, the new time must be shaped as a “rebirth.” The threshold of a “new time” has to do with seed and grain. It is about the greatness of Germany, about a strong “self-awareness” and last but not least, about a new generation. The historical threshold that Wachler calls for must be realized by those who act in the new era: It is the people who must become the movers and shakers of the times. “Self-awareness” is another new political key: a cognition that integrates the feeling of the times with the sense of national identity.
In the year of his doctorate exam under Hegel at the University of Heidelberg, philosopher and later politician Joseph (1788–1871) speaks of the potential promise of the future in his text “On the Unity of Time.” “German bravery and moral strength” had succeeded in freeing itself from “enslavement,” Hillebrand wrote in his reflections. Only now, man stands there, “in the middle of time,” and must recognize his duty to change its course. Only once man understands that “the past is the birth of reality, which in turn carries the seeds of a future, that the bond of time wraps itself around everything and unites all events and phenomena into a picture of the infinite” will it be possible to build a future.
The political writings of German intellectuals of the so-called “pre-March era” (“Vormärz”), the period leading up to the revolutions of March 1848, is often referred to as the period of “romantic nationalism” (1814–48). Remarkably, no other political generation is cited so frequently in the political writings of the 1920s. The studies of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Ernst-Moritz Arndt, in particular, saw a stream of new editions after World War I and became influential references. Indeed, central concepts emerge during this pre-March period: a conception of “people” (“Volk”), which becomes the new seminal category by being tied to a historical realization. The setting of this new political force was not only dependent on linking the political idea of the people with characteristics of life, cultural greatness, and historical endurance but, above all, to the requirement of still having to be formed.
Historian Ernst Moritz Arndt already assumed a mutually dependent relationship between man, time, space, and history, which would lead to a catastrophe if man did not recognize his power to shape history and to change the course of history: “Time passes through man, without him it would stand still.”
For Arndt, the “crisis” manifests itself not only by being processual but also by accelerating:
“The era is on the run, passing its major images by us in rapid succession, but the contemporaries marvel and gawk, standing motionless in wonder, unable to comprehend anything. But this rapid succession gives them, as it were, a feeling of an endlessness of time that unravels before them, and all the more, since they, the frozen ones, do not keep pace with it and thus no longer have a measure of time. Time is on the run, the wiser among us have long known it. Monstrous things have happened, the world has silently and loudly suffered great transformations, in the silent pace of days and in the hurricanes and volcanoes of the revolutions; monstrous things will happen, greater things will be transformed.”
The crisis is not only a political and social experience, but also a formation that became fundamental for modern knowledge. The argument that a crisis reveals the distance between actual time and the time of the present can be understood as an indication of a particular political grammar. The concepts of time and temporality can be related to worldviews and social beliefs as cultural constructs. There are four interconnected levels: the argument of a disoriented time is convincing on the semantic level, it carries meaning on the discursive-communicative level, but also on a cognitive-cultural level, and last but not least, it brings together the discourses of different political generations on an argumentative level. The figure of time is used here as an interpretative pattern for political contexts. It is also used as an allegory for a superordinate destiny. It can point to movements and dynamics, but it can also symbolize the continuity of cultural distinctiveness. This peculiarity, that the figure of time can also be symbol and allegory, that on the level of political discourse, it can point to the continuity of one’s own as well as to the loss of one’s own, is a design that goes back precisely to the writings of the pre-March generation. “Time” thus becomes a topological figure of political discourse because it does not itself raise the question of meaning, but rather “anchors” (or precisely locates) political ideas. Thus, in the 1920s, the arguments of the time (“Zeit”) that must be recovered, as well as the time from which the contemporary (“Zeitgenosse”) had fallen out, became relevant again.
In his work The Logical Problem of the Philosophy of History (“Das logische Problem der Geschichtsphilosophie”), German cultural philosopher Ernst Troeltsch argued that a distinction should be made between two concepts of time: a concept that describes the causality of historical becoming, which is linked to space, and a concept that is linked to meaning and memory and allows for the attribution of “sense.” Troeltsch fundamentally distinguishes between natural scientific and historical scientific rationality. The respective causalities are not only determined by principles of rationality, but also by the units of meaning (“Sinneinheiten”) that affect them. Historical continuity does not result from stringing together events or from interrelations of events. Troeltsch speaks of a “unit of emergence” to clarify that the continuity of the historical does not lie in the causality of events:
“[T]he continuous genesis of historical things, as far as it is truly continuous, cannot be represented in a purely causal relation to a series of distinguishable individual processes, but [...] the individual processes are fused in an unit of emergence which pervades them, makes them dissolve into each other, and thus continuous, which is very difficult to describe logically, but it is the essence of the historical sense to see and to feel them.”
Historical development and historical progress result only from the mutual relatedness of the objects and matters acting in society and from the fusion of units of meaning. The continuity of meaning is guaranteed by collective memory, which can connect past and present and must be understood as a space of meaning (“Sinnraum”). For Troeltsch, the rhythm of time is a “flow;” the temporality of historical continuity is the temporality of movement and change. The investigation of the scientific “contexts of emergence” can therefore only be based on the acceptance that the continuity of meaning (“Sinnkontinuierlichkeit”) lies in the processes themselves and is shaped in the spatio-temporal relations. In the historical-philosophical writings of the 1920s, questioning the constitution of modern history cannot be detached from the meaning of the world’s overall events and the fate of Germany’s future. That “space” moves into these fields of reference follows as well from the importance of space in nationalist discourse, but also from new theories of space that had prevailed since the 1890s, and not least from an idea of the modernity of spatial knowledge. The temporality of spatialized time directly reflects the notion of existence and is drawn from the contexts of crisis.
The question of how temporality is explicitly thematized in figurations of history, which has only been touched on very briefly in this excursus, led to the discovery that nineteenth-century German works on the philosophy of history developed an idea of “time” that was alienated from nation and history. The theme of this alienated time in nationalist works was intended, not least, to underline a political call to action. In any case, working with figures of time and making a case for certain temporalities is firmly integrated into the works on the emergence of modern historiography. Where are we today, what concepts of time are used to describe the present, which Kleinberg calls for to achieve time-figures that allow for desynchronized, multi-layered temporalities?
#Time and Crisis
There is a close connection between the discourse figures of time and crisis and time and violence. At present, the connection between time and crisis is being challenged, in particular by historians of Eastern European Studies. Thus, there is an intense debate about whether today’s war is a reason to rethink the foundations and direction of historical research on Eastern Europe. On the one hand, some researchers firmly say “no,” that there is no need to rethink, that the “extent of a war” is “no scientific criterion for a revision,” that one should not make oneself “slaves of the event” by exploring the foundations of a subject based on current events. On the other hand, historians call for critically examining the discipline’s past involvement in shaping political opinion. The cooperation between academia and politics is still not sufficiently addressed in many fields, especially in Oriental and Eastern European Studies.
This excursus is significant for the relevance of the “Surge detector” because the detector proposed here does not work if it is not understood as a knowledge-theoretical or knowledge-critical instrument.
This can also be discussed with Kleinberg’s point about attracting conspiracy theories. Undoubtedly, to understand their appeal or effectiveness, we could consider information bubbles or the loss of a moral compass. However, the power of conspiracy theories cannot be understood by focusing on the relationship between truth and reality. At its core, conspiracy theories are not about knowledge or direction in a time of disorientation; they are about asserting one’s own identity and voice in a time of diversity of identity, history and cultures. Conspiracy theories enable those who present them to portray themselves as the only ones who know the truth. Conspiracy theories are, in their essence, theories of identity. They do not emerge in the stream of events, but at the nodes where one’s concepts, images, and figures are to be asserted against the Other. Conspiracy theories emerge in times of change. They offer unambiguous explanations to the interrelationality of interactions, accompanied by speakers who position themselves in a discourse space that they imagine as disordered or surging.
Thus, I suggest calibrating the Surge detector somewhat differently, namely also with regard to the junctures, the nodal points, that is to the arguments used to claim that the present is becoming too narrow, externally determined, or crisis-laden under the current of an urgent temporality.
Thus, the “end-time” with which Kleinberg begins his contribution is a figure expressed amid an event. In retrospect, the end of time is rarely diagnosed, because this would mean that the speaker, who is now in the future, no longer has any relevance. Temporal categories like “end-time” or a “turning point of time” mark a decisive spatio-temporal moment; they define a speaker’s position and create pressure to act.
To call out a critical failure of the historical offers of meaning is another figure of knowledge that was formed in the 19th and in the early 20th century. From today’s perspective, such a consideration points not only to a failure to reappraise the history of knowledge in one’s own disciplines, but above all to the fact that a knowledge-critical approach is not easy, especially in Germany. Those who assert that historians are not slaves to events overlook the fact that they are part of the events.
Given the enormous political and social crises of the present, it is a critical task to make visible the new involvement of research in social and political knowledge processes, to consider the production of knowledge about societies, identities, law, and life, and also, against this background, to understand postcolonial transformations, new authoritarianism, and geopolitical power politics.
Those who want to rewrite history as direction to find meaning enter a problematic continuity. Wanting to write history as direction, one consciously/ unconsciously puts oneself at risk of placing one’s (own) account as binding and one’s own proposition of meaning above the history (of others), denying the others’ narratives their rightful place. Those who ask for “meaning” do not feel that there is too little “meaning” out there, but that the meaning they propose does not find enough resonance. This also makes conspiracy theories powerful because they provide such resonance from the outset, or instead, they assure that there will be resonance, no matter which way the narrative is told.
It is therefore quite remarkable that Kleinberg ascribes two levels to the consideration of recalibrating time figures and the concept of temporality: On the one hand, as a question we ask as we examine interpretations of the present, and on the other hand, as a question asked in ongoing debates with traditional models of history, such as the modernist model of progress or the nationalist narratives of time and history described above.