Temporal Vectors and the Compass of History

#Introduction

We have reached the end-time of truth. We aren’t the first to live through such times, and one could imagine parallels with early modern Europe during the Copernican and then scientific revolutions. That was a moment of radical instability, pushback, and eventually a change to the coordinates of “true” and “false” as well as the basis on which one might make such judgments. Lorenzo Valla’s famous declamatio, demonstrating that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery, comes to mind, as does the work of Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon, René Descartes, or David Hume, and of innovative Mexican thinker Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, who leveraged the new learning to argue against misogyny and in favor of educating women.

The results of this previous end-time are often retrospectively emplotted in a narrative of progress that inevitably led to our current scientific and secular standards of evidence and proof, which both naturalizes our current conception of true/false and blinds us to the frailty of the systems which hold these conceptions. The moment itself was more fraught as the debates, denials, and excommunications attest. The case of Sor Juana is especially instructive, both in how she saw her moment as an opening to advocate for women as intellectual authorities and to challenge patriarchal religious conventions, but also because of the swift retribution she faced for doing so.  In 1691, Sor Juana was reprimanded and ordered to stop writing. In 1694, she was forced to sell her collection of books. Sor Juana was erased from the historical narrative, while figures like Bacon and Descartes were retrospectively hailed as the founders of modern scientific thought and method. 

Looking back from the nineteenth century, Nietzsche decried the “good faith in science, the prejudice which dominates the modern state” that had been accomplished, and his madman famously announced the murder of God, demanding to know: “How we could drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continuously?” As we also know, Nietzsche’s madman came to realize that he had arrived with his warning too soon.  Our moment is an interesting and dangerous one, as well, because we are plunging continuously. It has yet to be determined who will be our Descartes and who will be our Sor Juana, or the grounds on which such judgments will be determined. What we do know is that the authority of the expert, the scientist, the historian, has waned such that the epistemic fabric which once held our conception of truths and facts firm in relation to the authority of science has become loose, even undone.

With this epistemic loosening, the general trust in the historian’s ability to provide direction has likewise diminished and, with it, disciplinary history’s role as an arbiter of politics or ethics. The compass of history no longer points north. In what follows, I argue for a new understanding of the ways the past makes itself available in the present, and a new compass of history to account for this understanding. I put forth a paradigm for understanding the past as a temporally dynamic site rather than a static, sedimented, or closed one. This active and unstable temporal force is what I call The Surge.

#The End Time of Truth

One place where the unraveling of truth has become apparent is the proliferation of conspiracy theories, which serve as a canary in the coal mine of weakening epistemic certainty. In an interview with Der Spiegel, Marty Baron, who was the executive editor of The Washington Post, stated that we are facing a level of conspiracy thinking unlike any we have seen before. Asked whether anything can be done to reach the conspiracy-minded, Baron confessed he had no answer to the question:

“Conspiracy thinking is deeply entrenched. Once people start to think that way, it’s very hard to persuade them that they are disconnected from reality. They see us in the mainstream media as the ones who are lying. They see themselvesastheoneswhopossessthetruth.”  Baron’s conclusion is that we have entered an era of false belief with little hope that the prior consensus on standards of truth and evidence can be reclaimed.

Samuel Moyn and Nicolas Guilhot agree that we have entered a “golden age of conspiracy theories,” but they argue that both the peddling and debunking of conspiracy theories are two sides of the same coin: the avoidance of genuine politics. In their view, the only way to combat them is to reduce the conditions of social inequality that produce them.  At the other end of the spectrum, co-authors Joseph Uscinski, Adam Enders, and Casey Klofstad are skeptical that the number of conspiracy theories have grown, relying on surveys to demonstrate little systematic evidence that belief in conspiracy theories has increased over time. 

The focus, however, should not be whether there are “more” conspiracy theories or not, or even whether there are more people who believe them, but on the way that our current epistemological climate enables these alternative views and those who hold them. Ideas or views previously relegated to the fringe are now accepted as part of a mainstream, albeit fragmented, discourse. In the United States, right-wing media and politicians are content and even eager to traffic in conspiracy theories regarding vaccinations, the influence of a “deep state,” Q-Anon, election fraud, Barack Obama’s birth certificate, or the influence of George Soros. On the left, it was the conviction that the Democratic National Committee rigged the 2016 primaries to shut down the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, and later, theories about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. To be sure, much of this can be considered misinformation, but once unleashed, it thrives because, as Marc Bloch observed in his article on false news from 1921, “it finds a favorable cultural broth in the society where it is spreading. Through it, people unconsciously express all their prejudices, hatreds, fears, all their strong emotions.”  The current epistemological climate provides such a cultural broth in which choosing the narrative or explanation that best conforms to one’s pre-existing beliefs, wishes, hatreds, or fears has been normalized. There is no longer credible refutation, only proliferation.

Another contemporary example is the rise of cyber- or cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Dogecoin (the latter being a currency that began as a joke). In Goethe’s Faust part II, Mephistopheles himself introduces the possibility of disconnecting paper money from the gold that was meant to back it when he answers the Emperor’s request to procure funding:

“I can perform as much, more than you say;
It’s easy – in a difficult way;
The stuff lies there all ready, yet to reach it –
There is a subtle art, and who can teach it?
Just think: on those calamitous occasions
When land and folk were swept by armed invasions,
How this or that man, deep in terror’s meshes,
Would rush to hide all that he held most precious.
This was in ancient Roman times the way,
And ever since, till yesterday, today.
These hoards lie buried in the ground, and it –
The soil’s the Emperor’s, his the benefit.” 

To be clear, Mephistopheles convinces the Emperor to produce paper money to cover the debts of the realm based on treasure that is ostensibly buried in the ground, but yet undiscovered. This is an illusion of wealth which holds no value beyond faith or belief in the Emperor, the land the Emperor controls, and the Emperor’s ability to pay off the debts incurred today at some point in the future. Such a belief in the “full faith and credit” of the modern state has long been the basis for economic policy, but cybercurrency pushes this faith beyond even Mephistopheles’s wildest dreams. It is a currency based solely on the faith in its worth, uncoupled from anything tangible, be it government, state, or land. It is worth whatever it can be worth. Its value is surely real, but also fragile and tenuous … a currency for the end-time of truth.

Like currency backed by a national bank, cryptocurrency is beholden to a belief in the future and in this way, it remains tied to the logic of progress which Reinhard Koselleck took to be the hallmark of modernity.  To put this in Koselleck’s well-known terms, so long as the promise of gold to be found underground lies within our horizon of expectations, our experience is that the currency holds value. This can, of course, be expanded because our experience has been that currency itself holds and even gains value, so our expectation is that it will continue to do so. The state can always back up its currency in the future, and more “gold” can always be found in the “ground.” But unlike national currencies, cryptocurrency does not offer actual gold or the security of a nation state. It is solely the promise of the future, a future of ever-increasing wealth, that enables cryptocurrency to hold its worth. This future, however, is one uncoupled from and distrustful of established economic authorities, and this is where we see further cracks in the epistemological structures of modernity. 2022 was an eventful year, as cybercurrency exchanges collapsed with Terra, Three Arrows Capital, Celsius, Voyager Digital, FTX, BlockFi, and Genesis all facing bankruptcy within 12 months. The massive wealth accrued in the crypto-rally of 2021 was gone as fast as it came, and belief in an unregulated currency decoupled from traditional financial assets was undermined, though not destroyed. Tellingly, it was not the ephemeral nature of cybercurrency or NFTs that was called into question, but the modernist idea of the future as progress. The modern nexus of experience and expectation was ruptured and with it, the coordinates for what we previously took to be truth.

The force of the rupture becomes apparent when revisiting Koselleck’s “‘Space of Experience’ and ‘Horizon of Expectation’: two historical categories” with an eye toward discerning a change in the relation between the two, and thus the understanding of history itself. For Koselleck, these two categories served as the means to understand “historical time because of the way they embody past and future.”  More specifically, by discerning the relation between the categories, Koselleck is able to form a hypothesis as to the new meaning contained in the modern concept of history. “My thesis is that during Neuzeit (modernity) the difference between experience and expectation has increasingly expanded; more precisely that Neuzeit is first understood as a neue Zeit from the time that expectations have distanced themselves from all previous experience.”  The early modern age marked the space of this rupture, or end-time, of a certain form of truth in which the horizon of expectations became misaligned with the space of experience. “Above all there, where an experiential space was broken up within a generation, all expectations were shaken and new ones promoted.”  Of course, this new regime of historicity took time to coalesce into a productive tension between experience and expectation.

In what Koselleck calls the pre-modern era, “[e]xpectations that went beyond all previous experience were not related to this world. They were directed to the so-called Hereafter, enhanced apocalyptically in terms of the general End of the World… This then is a matter of expectations that no contrary experience can revise because they extend beyond this world into the next.”  In Koselleck’s reading, the horizon of expectation was tied to the space of experience in that “the horizon of expectation was endowed with a coefficient that advanced in step with time.”  The distance between the two categories was maintained as a constant. “As long as the Christian doctrine of the Final Days set an unmovable limit to the horizon of expectation (roughly speaking until the mid-seventeenth century), the future remained bound to the past.”  This is a compass of history in which the Hereafter served as the atemporal vector by which to find direction and meaning in the temporal unfolding of a finite world.

In the early modern period, the stability of this relation began to erode, and the compass no longer pointed north. Here, one could consider the arrival of ghosts in early modern culture as embodying the breakdown. The horizon of expectations previously reserved for the Hereafter now revealed a porous border between that world and the world of our experience. As in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Macbeth, unfinished business was brought back into the world of experience and not left to be rectified in the Hereafter.

These borders, and the relation between the categories of experience and expectations, eventually stabilized with “[t]he opening of a new horizon of expectation via the effects of what was later conceived as ‘progress.’”  Here, the possibility of completeness attainable in the Hereafter was supplanted by an open future characterized not by perfection in the world to come, but by improvement on Earth. In retrospect, it seems that Koselleck may have overstated the novelty of the “modern” understanding of the future, at least insofar as the relation between experience and expectation remained immune to correction by contrary experience, because the promised progress could always be deferred into the future. One could think of Francis Fukyama’s argument for the end of history and Jacques Derrida’s critique of it. Fukuyama’s case is predicated on the realization of the final stage of history as the victory of liberal democracy/capitalism and the death of Marxism. It is based on the empirical or materialist assertion that this progress has been achieved. The empirical evidence of this conquest and victory, however, contradicts Fukuyama’s narrative, forcing him to change tactics and present the victory as the future outcome of a trans-historical ideal.  There is a gap between the pronouncement of the good news of democracy as an egalitarian promise fulfilled and the reality of democratic societies as they exist where violence, inequality, racism, and sexism persist. The expectation of achievement, which is posited as having already occurred, and the experience of conditions in the present where it has not, necessitate a recalibration of those expectations to accommodate the deferral of achievement to the future.

The relation between experience and expectation has certainly changed in the “modern” era, but it did so when “progress” took on the role of a secular “Hereafter” into which any expectations that are at odds with lived experience can be deferred, no many how many times they are frustrated.  Koselleck took “[p]rogress” to be “the first genuinely historical concept which reduced the temporal difference between experience and expectation to a single concept,” but I would argue that the previous notion of a “Hereafter” seems to fulfil the same purpose as “progress,” providing a temporal delay to the achievement of what is promised.   Both mechanisms involve a deferral, or différance, that is both spatial and temporal and by which the present promise is to be delivered in the future. In retrospect, this is evident even if it wasn’t immediately available to Koselleck.

The more salient point, and the one with which we are concerned, is that in what Koselleck calls modernity, “history could be regarded as a long-term process of growing fulfilment which, despite setbacks and deviations, was ultimately planned and carried out by men themselves.”  This is an understanding of progress as the active transformation of this world where the benefits would be reaped in a future to come. But these benefits would come at an unexpected cost: “From the late eighteenth century, another finding joins the ones we have just discussed: that of techno-industrial progress, which has an impact, albeit a varying impact, upon everyone. It became a general empirical principal of scientific invention and its industrial application that they gave rise to an expectation of progress that could not be calculated in advance.”  As it turns out, what Koselleck saw as a varying impact was also an environmental and thus planetary one. Conditioned by an attitude of confidence, Koselleck could argue that this “future not inferable from experience released all the same the certainty of an expectation that scientific inventions and discoveries would bring about a new world. Science and technology have stabilized progress as a temporally progressive difference between experience and expectation.”  Of course, such a belief was only possible against the background of an unchanging nature supplying resources to be endlessly extracted, like the gold Mephistopheles promised would be found underground.

This was a future of possibilities unlimited by what had previously been experienced and thus beyond expectation. Fortschritt (progress) was itself the expectation. “It became a rule that all previous experience might not count against all possible otherness of the future. The future would be different from the past, and better, to boot.” What was not expected was that the very mechanisms of progress (technology, industrialization, globalization) would have catastrophic effects on the biosphere, and these effects would not be varied. The modern understanding of progress was conditioned by an understanding of nature as unchanging, thus the realization that nature itself is historically contingent upon human actions and ultimately finite undermined the coordinates upon which expectation and experience were held. Under the concept of the Anthropocene, what once appeared as progress now appears as destruction.

The terrain has shifted as we face a future of possibilities that cannot meet our expectation (progress). It is true that all previous experience cannot count against all possible otherness in the future, but this is because it is a future of frustrated expectations. Our experience tells us we cannot obtain what was expected and thus the future as the realm of endless progress has collapsed, and with it, our faith in the shepherds of progress. We once again face a porous and unstable border between the world we experience and the horizon of our expectations.

#The End Time of History

In the discipline of history too, the stability of our previous moment has been supplanted and fragmented by a proliferation of histories offered by historians and non-historians alike. This has yielded both positive and negative results. On the negative side, and as with conspiracy theories, historical narratives and arguments previously relegated to the fringe are increasingly accepted as part of a mainstream, albeit fragmented, discourse. To be sure, these are for the most part bad-faith actors conducting poor scholarship according to the rules of the guild, but nevertheless their work has found purchase in the “favorable cultural broth in the society where it is spreading.” 

On the positive side, the discipline of history has become increasingly diverse and heterogeneous over the last fifty years, and there is no doubt that this expansion is for the better. This very positive expansion of subjects and areas deemed worthy of historical investigation is undercut by the way these challenges to prior historical narratives continue to rely on the established and accepted methods of historical discourse. In this way, these new histories replicate the historical conceits of the narratives and fields they purport to engage with or replace. As the types of historical topics and narratives have increased, the collective fantasy of a “definite account” has been fractured by a proliferation of histories, each running on the now outdated assumption that their account of the past correlates to that past one-to-one.

This is to say, the new and positive possibilities offered by plural, multiple, or global histories is misaligned with the dominant theory of history that is used to tell them. Each relies on the view that their account is a correction that presents the event as it happened. This unleashes a perspectivalism which derails the correlationist understanding of history. To use Nelson Goodman’s assessment, “[…] no one of these different descriptions is exclusively true, since the others are also true.” In Goodman’s constructivist analysis, this leads to the conclusion that “[n]one of them tells us the way the world is, but each of them tells us a way the world is.”  In our current moment, the ontological realist commitment coupled with multiple correlationist understandings of the past leads to the conclusion that if all of them can be true, then none of them actually are true. Conventional historians argue that their understanding and use of perspectivalism can account for the many, and oftentimes conflicting, historical narratives, but such nuance has been crowded out by the pick-your-own-truth variant of history. This virulent strain caters to an audience increasingly inclined to believe the historical narrative that aligns with their preconceived notion of what they want the past to be. This is the shift from truth to post-truth.

The irony, or perhaps tragedy, is that perspectivalism actually enables the scholarship presented by bad-faith actors in the service of their ideological agenda. While the increasingly plural scholarly foci appear as “simply alternative viewpoints among so many others … Historians working in women’s history and microhistory, for example, have very diverse and quite particular social and political goals, but the wholesale embracing of all different viewpoints as equally valid relegates most of them to a powerless minority.”  This leaves the good-faith scholars vulnerable to more opportunistic populist accounts of the past, which enter the terrain as an “equally valid viewpoint.” Their historical account is simply one of many. What’s more, proponents of “pick-your-own-truth” history present themselves as realist historians offering an equally rigorous alternative. When talking about scientific issues, post-truthers mimic the language of empirical verification by citing insufficient proof or the need for more study. Holocaust deniers also used this language, claiming insufficient proof that the gas chambers existed because there were no eyewitness survivors to corroborate the assertion that they did exist. They want to be considered “realists.” It is on these grounds that they make their claims, and it is in this regard that their methodology and underlying theoretical assumptions are aligned with the conventional historians who otherwise oppose them. As noted, “pick-your-own-truthers” are not benign actors, and their scholarship is not credible by disciplinary standards, but the one-to-one correlation they assert between the evidence they present and the facts or truths they claim is the same as that of many conventional scholars and pundits: alternative but equivalent. The Confederate statue is presented as the past, not a representation, and to tear it down is to destroy the past itself.

Scholars, and those engaging with the past in particular, should realize that the epoch of scientific authority is a historically contingent one, and they should not be surprised by the possibility that the results of scientific investigation or a preponderance of empirical evidence can no longer be taken asarticles of faith. This is not new. One of Hayden White’s central claims in his 1966“The Burden of History” was that disciplinary history itself was a historical accident, “a product of a specific historical situation, and that, with the passing of the misunderstandings that produced that situation, history itself may lose its status as an autonomous and self-authenticating mode ofthought. It may well be that the most difficult task which the current generation of historians will be called upon to perform is to expose the historically conditioned character of the historical discipline.” At that time, White was hopeful he might “preside over the dissolution of history’s claim to autonomy among the disciplines, and… aid in the assimilation of history to a higher kind of intellectual inquiry.”   As we have seen, the unravelling of our epistemological tapestry has led to quite different results.

This makes our current epistemological and political moment a perilous and important one, but as Donna Haraway remarked in the New York Times, “it’s also an important moment not to go back to very conventional and very bad epistemologies about how scientific knowledge is put together and why and how it holds.”  This is to ask, do we really want to return to the era of blind obedience to white men in white lab coats? Have we forgotten that the epistemic regime that rested on such total faith in science also featured appropriately garbed doctors selling cigarettes, advocating better living thanks to chemicals, or proselytizing eugenics? Modern-day pundits and intellectuals do us all a disservice by harkening back to the good old days before science, truth, and Enlightenment values were destroyed, all the while pointing at “facts” and “truths” and then becoming apoplectic when they aren’t believed.

While historians and other scholars engaging with the past have long understood the historical contingency of the epoch of scientific authority, because their work addresses the ways that regimes of knowledge shift and change over time, this very epoch of scientific authority coincided with the formation and rise of disciplinary history. As a result, the historian’s tools of analysis and argument have been blunted. In essence, the historian is entangled because their mode of analysis is itself now an object of historical analysis. In 1969, Koselleck emphasized the irony that “history pure and simple” (Geschichte schlechtin) or “history itself” (Geschichte selber) did not originally refer to objectivity and the notion of realistic representation which underpinned historical methodology, but instead signaled the need for theory in history precisely to address the historicized entanglement of the historian with their object of study.  Koselleck’s solution to the problem or crisis of historicism was to introduce metahistorical categories outside of the time and place in which they were to be used, much in the same way the purpose of a compass is to orient the traveler. But any theory of history to which we now turn cannot be one imperiled by the end-time of truth.

The proliferation of historical perspectives at the end time of truth exposes the ways in which history is built and deployed in the present. The ways in which histories are made and not found. This is not to say that the past never happened or certain events did not exist, but instead to point out that ultimately it is more important to convince others that events happened in a certain way than to portray them as they really happened, or even that they happened at all. It is in this sense that Koselleck states on issues of memory and experience: “The false testimony of a contemporary will always remain a more immediate source even it if is later unmasked” and also that “it is clear that there can be no pure Zeitgeschichte in the sense of a mere history of the present, and at the very least, it must refer to a past present and its past: first comes the history, then its narration (which does not rule out the existence of histories that consist only of their narration).”  The narration includes histories of events that happened, that did NOT happen, or for which we only have the narration but no corroborating evidence. This is the game of history, and if we are successful, then such a past does exist for us and appropriates all the ontological properties we commonly afford to any commensurate happening in the present.

In Nothing Happened: A History, Susan A. Crane provides the striking example of a photograph taken by John Darwell depicting the empty landscape of the Kirkstone Pass looking toward Ullswater in the Lake District of North West England. The countryside is rugged and beautiful but, Crane tells us, this is not the significance of the photograph. It is only in the context of a “devastating epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease” which “broke out in Cumbria, England, in 2001” that we realize what we are looking at is a shocking absence.  Where there used to be sheep as far as the eye could see, one now only sees empty fields and mountains.

“Darwell’s color photograph documents the site of the disaster, the now empty landscape, but it depends on the viewer’s knowledge of the epidemic. A random viewer, not from that place, might see only a quiet landscape, misty clouds shrouding steep inclines, rocky walls, and a road wending its way through a pass.” 

Crane uses this photograph for her intriguing and insightful analysis of the role and place of Nothing in history and memory. I would like to emphasize a different aspect of Crane’s use and narration, the way she builds something out of that nothing. Crane presents us with a photograph of mountains, fields, stone walls, and the sky. There is nothing in the photograph itself that would suggest sheep or tourists or anything except an uninhabited landscape. But as Crane provides historical context, evidence that there used to be sheep at this site, accounts of the terrible epidemic, and testimony about “the death of the flocks and the ruin of the economy,”  the missing sheep appear before our eyes, if only in their absence. Crane ontologizes the absent or missing sheep in much the same way historians ontologize the absent past. Crane is a virtuous and careful historian, but a more devious or malevolent one could use the same tactics to construct a past that never was.

Still, to my mind, places such as Kirkstone Pass carry a weight that is resistant, though not impervious, to such malice because I believe historical constructions are ultimately “moved by the past,” to use Eelco Runia’s term, or haunted, to employ my own.  It is my conviction that the past is a site of spectrality, of ghosts and hauntings, such that in Haunting History, I argue that the past is both a presence and an absence, a specter or ghost that haunts our present. To quote that work, “the past is and is not, or better yet it i̶s̶. The past comes and goes, and the pieces we do have are shot through with the nonsynchronicity of prior historical tellings.”  This argument about the past doubles as an ontological questioning of the present. If the past i̶s̶, what kind of present can now be reconceived? The present does not exist as a direct extension of the past, just as historical inquiry cannot treat the past as ontologically given. In returning to the present, inquiry must approach the present (and the intervention it seeks to make in the present), first of all as a performative interpretation, an interpretation that transforms and even hijacks the past for which it provides an account. To follow the analysis of Stefanos Geroulanos, the problem is that what present-day historians imagine is itself anachronistic. “In the name of a certain subjectivism, problems visible in the present are projected and sources for them derived in the past. For it, the present becomes a simulacrum of the past’s future, just as this past is essentialized as the past of the historian’s present.”  The fiction of a stable past is the fiction of a stable present. Previously solid rules of evidence and argument have melted into air. As a result, the coordinates by which we understand politics and ethics have been obscured, especially the historical ones.

#Temporal Vectors and the Compass of History

I want to engage with our current historical moment (both where we are in history and how we think about history) by means of two terms loosely borrowed from Distributional Semantics in the field of artificial intelligence: temporal vectors and the compass. Temporal vectors are a means to understand semantic change over time, but they are unstable, because while time is moving through them, we are also moving through time. We can think of this as akin to the vortex of historicism about which Koselleck warned us when he posited the need for meta-historical categories directed toward the temporality of history.  Like Koselleck’s meta-historical categories, the compass serves as a heuristic device providing an atemporal vector (outside of time, as it were), stable coordinates by which we can orient ourselves. We can think of our relationship to the past as akin to temporal vectors: While the historian produces history, history also produces the historian. Each is moving through the other. Throughout the late 19th, and into the 20th and 21st centuries, the discipline of history has purported to provide a compass, an atemporal vector outside of time, to navigate our relationship to the past and provide coordinates for political and ethical pronouncements.

If we look to Koselleck’s brief observation, translated into English as “Constancy and Change of All Contemporary Histories: Conceptual-Historical Notes,” we might conclude that this has always been the case: “There are diachronic and synchronic dimensions at work at various temporal depths, about which historians from distant epochs can still help us gain insight for today, because history repeats itself structurally, something that is often forgotten when ‘singularity’ is stressed.”  To be clear, here Koselleck is speaking of “social-psychological processes that” he considers to be “constants throughout the history of events,” whether past or future.  This account of This account of history and human nature actually differs little from that of Thucydides in The History of the Peloponnesian War where he concludes that those readers “who want to look into the truth of what was done in the past – which, given the human condition, will recur in the future, either in the same fashion or nearly so – will find this History valuable enough, as this was composed to be a lasting possession and not to be heard for a prize at the moment of a contest.”  The emphasis on the structural repetition of social-psychological processes or a permanent human condition provides a compass, an ahistorical vector outside of time, which allows for all aspects of the past to be explained from the vantage point of the present and even a future present.

In Matter and Memory, Henri Bergson provides an account of the phenomenon known as dèja-vu, or the sense of having previously experienced what is currently happening as if it had already taken place. On Bergson’s account, what one actually experiences is not a previous occurrence, but the contemporaneous realization that one will remember it. It is a recognition to come, which Bergson sees as the formation of a memory of the present in real time.  Historians encounter something similar when they posit a permanent interpretative structure, a compass outside of time, by which to decipher, interpret, and emplot the past. The sensation appears to them as a re-encounter with something that already occurred, just like a déja-vu. By following this atemporal compass of history they purport “that this is the way it really happened.” What they actually experience is not the past as it really happened, however, but the contemporaneous realization that they are making history. Just as the experience of a dèja-vu reveals the dissonance of a colliding past and present, there is a similar dissonance between the permanent structure proffered and the history presented to justify its stability. This is the place where, as in a déja-vu, time is out of joint, but here it is, because the historian fails to take into consideration the historical conditions, the temporal vectors, of these so-called permanent structures. These are the historically determined conditions of possibility which restrict what we can imagine as possible pasts. In Haunting History, I argue that our knowledge of the past is conditioned by what presents itself to us both in terms of its vestiges and in terms of our reception. The limits of what we are willing to accept as “past possibles” conditions what we are willing to accept as possible pasts. That which lies beyond this realm appears to us as simply impossible. Thus, the historian transports their sense of what “should be” back into the past, all the while ascribing a sense of permanence to these normative values.  The order we want the past to have is taken to be the order it actually had, at the expense of other possible ways of ordering or accounting for the past.

The limited or restricted sense of past possibles dovetails with the perspectivalism discussed above, but strictly speaking, the multiplying histories should be seen as parallel accounts rather than perspectives on a singular event. This is because the belief that there are multiple perspectives of a singular event has fractured. Now we have a series of parallel histories, each telling its own story to its own audience. Such an occurrence was not inevitable, but neither should it come as a surprise if one traces the role and place of perspectivalism in the discipline of history. Chladenius (1710-1759), whom Koselleck credits as the harbinger of modernity because of his theory of perspective or standpoint, held that “histories are accounts of things that have happened. If one intends – as is presumed – to speak the truth about an event, one cannot recount it in a way that differs from one’s perception of it.”  For Chladenius, while any past event is itself one, conceptions of it are many because “different people perceive that which happens in the world differently, so that if many people describe an event, each would attend to something in particular – if all were to perceive the situation properly.”  Koselleck acknowledges that “to state that every historical statement is bound to a particular standpoint would today meet with hardly any objection. Who would wish to deny that history is viewed from different perspectives, and that change in history is accompanied by alterations in historical statements about our history?”  What is less apparent is the way that Chladenius’s historical science is predicated on his religious beliefs. “For Chladenius, who gave the first independent lecture on Historik in Erlangen in the winter semester of 1749– 50, an explicit belief in divine providence is basic.”  Chladenius makes this evident in the preface to the Allgemeine Geschichtswissenschaft, where he declares that his purpose is “to defend and extoll these high truths, the truths of the New Testament,” and his work is punctuated by this claim throughout.  What’s more, writing in the first half of the 18th century, Chladenius must be considered as a pre-critical thinker in the Kantian sense of the term because despite his innovative way to determine the role and place of the observer in relation to what is observed, this relative relation is uncritical, in the Kantian sense.  Chladenius never questions the conditions under which cognition is possible or the knowability of things in themselves because to do so would have contradicted his orthodox Lutheran belief that the faith was governed solely by Scripture. For Chladenius, the historical record of Scripture could never be in doubt, for if it were, faith itself would rest on an unstable foundation.  Thus Chladenius’ project of creating a historical science employing a theory of perspectivalism was predicated on the theological foundations of his faith. The truth of the event under investigation is ultimately vouchsafed by God.

The modern appropriation of perspectivalism avoids this theological motivation and requirement by focusing solely on the rules of interpretation in relation to the text. But for this to hold in the absence of God, Chladenius’s certainty about the fixed status of past events must now be based entirely on rules of textual investigation. In our current secular usage, historical methodology is our only access to the past. In this view, the correct meaning is available and accessible, but the theological side of this theological-historical hold is effaced without actually being replaced, creating the illusion that the past event or object simply holds itself. When the zone of agreement no longer needs to account for a past event per se, but only the conceptions of the past, about which there are many, perspectivalism slips into parallelism. Here, it is not the past event that is shared or agreed upon, but the method or logic of history. So long as the account adheres to this aspect of uniformity, the histories need not agree at all. As it turns out, both right-wing and left-wing tribalism, which characterizes “identity politics,” are the result of a historical logic and method which came of age in the nineteenth century, designed to serve identitarian nationalism. The difference now is that the identity no longer coincides with the nation, and the proliferation of viewpoints or perspectives has allowed this mode of historical inquiry to serve conflicting parallel causes and accounts. While perspectivalism and parallelism both run on the same logic of history, in the case of parallelism, there is no longer agreement on the past event itself. This leads to multiple competing narratives with no point of intersection or interaction. Each seeks a different audience who accepts distinct accounts that compete, yet do not touch.

In the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue to his Habilitation, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Walter Benjamin sets up a provocative opposition between “truth” and “knowledge.” “Truth,” Benjamin tells us “bodied forth in the dance of represented idea, resists being projected, by whatever means, into the realm of knowledge. Knowledge is possession. Its very object is determined by the fact that it must be taken possession of – even in a transcendental sense – in the consciousness. The quality of possession remains.”  By contrast “the opposite holds good for truth. For knowledge, method is a way of acquiring its object – even by creating it in the consciousness; for truth it is self-representation, and is therefore immanent in it as a form.”  Without committing to Benjamin’s positions, I think it productive to consider this distinction between truth and knowledge in regard to the current climate of history. Following Benjamin, perhaps we can say that while history is the realm of knowledge, it is not the realm of truth. As we have seen, history in its modern sense requires method to acquire its object. It lacks self-representation. Even so, in our current understanding, we have burdened history with truth instead of allowing it to stand as a labor of knowledge. This burden creates the mismatch of temporally dependent historical methodology and ostensibly permanent and definitive truth claims (about identity or heritage, for instance), which leads to parallelism. This misalignment restricts dialogue further because as Benjamin suggests, “Knowledge is open to question but truth is not.” 

The matter is further complicated by the way these histories profess to guide us into the future. Aleida Assman argues convincingly that for the time regime of modernity, “[t]he future was for the temporal compass what the North Pole is for the spatial compass: a steady and reliable source of orientation-in-movement. The future was a continuous promise harboring utopian energy and serving as the ‘telos’ of a narrative of progress and liberation,” but that particular understanding of the future has collapsed, and with it, the modern compass of history.  To my mind, and as argued above, such faith in the future only existed as long as we believed it to exist, and is akin to the promise of treasure buried in the ground, yet currently undiscovered. As our epistemic fabric has loosened, the general belief in history’s ability to provide such a compass or such a future has waned and, with it, the authority of disciplinary history.

It is worth noting that for many left-leaning academics, the means to rectify the situation and regain authority, ethical and political, is via a return to the older notions of progress and liberation that were part and parcel of the modernity project. An article by Susan Neiman published in UnHerd is indicative of this trend:

“What concerns me most here are the ways in which contemporary voices considered to be progressive have abandoned the philosophical ideas that are central to any liberal or Left-wing standpoint: a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress. All these ideas are connected. The Right may be more dangerous, but today’s Left has deprived itself of ideas we need if we hope to resist the lurch to the Right.” 

Indeed, the true means of combating conspiracy theories and right-wing populism might be by reducing conditions of social inequality, but the political agenda put forth for this purpose relies on modernist models of progress that have become undone. The left wishes to return to a universalism that fosters solidarity, but as this relies on the notion of progress (technology, industrialization, globalization, and the ecological catastrophe this model wrought), it is no longer credible and thus fails to persuade. The crisis of the Anthropocene makes clear how the very means of achieving the ideal (infrastructure and increased means of production) are the cause of climate change and impending disaster. The earlier architects of progress have been recast as the architects of doom.

The very notion of an atemporal compass of history, a mechanism to tell us where we’ve been and where to go, is indicative of the emancipatory desire at work in the modernist project of history. This desire, however, remains forestalled as an emancipatory promise, in part because it is locked up by the transhistorical, and thus changeless, mechanisms intended to serve as history’s compass. History has burdened itself with a commitment to truth, as timeless as the compass, on which it cannot deliver. Our belief in such a compass of history outside of time has lost its hold.

What’s more, this prior mechanism was always as much a closing of possible pasts as an opening to their truth. It was always based on what we imagined to be the only pasts possible. The compass of history as an ahistorical vector is dominated by a present that reaches back to tell the past what to be. I want to reverse this movement and this temporal flow to put emphasis on the absent past that meets us, though I want to do so without reifying the reversal. I propose that we rethink the compass of history at the end-time of truth as one shorn of its atemporal dimension, embracing instead a logic of anachrony. This would mean letting go of the “metahistorical definitions directed toward the temporality of history,” which Koselleck saw as a guardrail to prevent us from getting “caught up in the vortex (Strudel) of its historicization.”  This new compass of history does not stand outside of time and instead 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. This might be something one sees … or hears … or feels. It is the past lifting us up, pushing us forward, or perhaps even pushing us under. We should not fight it, and we cannot control it, though we can ride it.

#The Surge

This is what I call the Surge. In Haunting History, I describe how, at any given moment, a sudden surge can bring evidence of past vestiges to the surface. In that work, I use the metaphor of the ocean as the site of the surge, but one might also imagine a surge of wind, of power, or of sound. Recent films involving the supernatural, ghosts, or haunting spirits (malevolent or misunderstood) often signal the arrival of this present absence with a surge of electricity overtaxing the lights, or by a surge of sound – sometimes even blowing up the lights and leaving us in darkness, or reaching a deafening crescendo, leaving us in silence. We are, by and large, afraid of surges, and I would suggest that we are equally afraid of the past. This is, at least, part of my argument in Haunting History. The instability of such open possibilities is disturbing, and conventional history often serves as an anesthetic that desensitizes us to such jarring effects. The Surge is the unfettered intermingling of past, present, and future. It is free and generous and dangerous.

In this regard, the Surge is a Total Other without logic, order, or time. Nertheless, it impresses itself upon us and it is in this moment of engagement that the past or future becomes available to us. It is a moment of mediation between our position in an unstable present and the arrival of otherness, the arrival of something different, even unprecedented. Once one notices it, one can conceptualize it. Benjamin’s discussion of “origins” provides a useful, though imperfect, analogy to this process of arrival and conceptualization. For Benjamin, “[o]rigin [Ursprung], although an entirely historical category, has, nevertheless, nothing to do with genesis [Entstehung]. The term origin is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance.” The Surge does not describe the process by which the past or future event comes into being, but is the site of becoming and disappearance. “That which is original is never revealed in the naked and manifest existence of the factual; its rhythm is apparent only to a dual insight. On the one hand it needs to be recognized as a process of restoration and reestablishment, but, on the other hand, and precisely because of this, as something imperfect and incomplete.” What appears to us is not the manifest existence of the factual, but a revenant or arrivant. In the case of the past, it is not the reclamation of the event itself, but an imperfect and incomplete reappearance. 

Benjamin tells us that “[o]rigin is an eddy/whirlpool/vortex [der Strudel] in the stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the material involved in the process of genesis.”  I want to turn this around to consider how Benjamin’s “origin” comes from the eddy/whirlpool/vortex. It comes from the Surge that swallows the material involved in the process of genesis. Here, time is not a river that flows downstream from past to present to future. Instead, it is a vortex in which past, present, and future events swirl. They are pulled down and pushed up. Sucked under in one place to reappear in another or thrown in any possible direction. This casts a different light on Benjamin’s analysis that “[t]here takes place in every original phenomenon a determination of the form in which an idea will constantly confront the historical world, until it is revealed fulfilled, in the totality of its history.”  The determination of the form in the present is projected into the past, thus imposing an origin point retrospectively. This de facto origin then becomes the basis for an explanatory narrative of cause and effect, which effaces the role of the Surge in bringing this “origin” to the present.

The modes of history we have discussed, Benjamin’s included, are about controlling the past and limiting the Surge, as is the ahistorical compass limiting the temporal vectors of history and historian, even if the goal of such protections can be laudable. But as in Haunting History, where I demonstrate the ways that the noble goal of forging a path to the past, a poros, simultaneously creates an aporia, the purportedly ahistorical compass of history, as the arbiter of meaning deployed by conventional history, restricts our gaze and our attunement to the possible pasts and past possibles surging forth to meet us. It is to these surges of the past, these ghosts brought forth by the Surge, that we should be attuned. The ghost would become our metahistorical guide, taking the place of coordinates such as Koselleck’s “space of experience” and “horizon of expectations,” or, more precisely, haunting that space and horizon. When we experience the ghost, we experience the impossible, and the horizon that opens before it is that of the unexpected. It is not an imposition from without, but neither is it internal to our moment. It is somehow inside and outside, thus forcing us to question the very coordinates by which we create stable meaning, semantic, temporal, or otherwise. These are the histories that need to be heard, not as parallel histories which are interpretatively distinct and methodologically homogenous, but as histories that create an intersection of multiple and conflicting logics of how we encounter, account for, and recount the past.

What’s more, by accepting our encounter with the Surge as an encounter with that which is totally other, we are forced to reckon with the moment of mediation when we seek to bring what is beyond order into order. This is the moment when we gather and organize time according to a logic upon which our account of the past can then be brought into the present with relation toward the future. The key point here is that there is no singular or definitive way to do this. By looking at this moment of ordering and organization, we realize there is not a singular logic of time or history, but multiple possible ways of organizing them in response to the Surge. This is the moment of mediation, when we look to make sense of the past that surges forth and moves us, but also a chance to interrogate that moment. This is not perspectivalism where the same event is seen from multiple viewpoints, nor the parallelism that results from multiple competing narratives that do not intersect. Instead, starting from the Surge, this approach accepts that there are multiple competing logics of time and ways of organizing the past. These differing approaches may not agree or use the same system, but by taking each logic of history seriously, we are forced to interrogate the axiomatic claims upon which any given logic of history is founded. This is especially important for unsettling conventional or disciplinary history now that this mode of history has come undone.

The Total Other that is the Surge can be the conduit to the proximate others who surround us (spatially and temporally). Once we accept the possibility of a Total Other, the proximate other becomes available as other, not as something to be made the same. What’s more, this recognition extends to ourselves in the realization that we are all other to someone/-thing. We are all same and other. The impersonal, if not anonymous, nature of the Surge deprives the historian of a possessive stance in response to the past or the future. Strictly speaking, it is not “ours,” and here we see the possibility of an opening to the other, whose past and future we are asked to embrace, not because such a past belongs to us, but because we recognize that others have an equal right to such a past, present, and future. The “we” with which I began this paper is now challenged and contested. Who is this we of which I speak, and on what grounds can such a collective claim be made? Rather than fight to retain “my” or even “our” past, the Surge pushes us toward the concept of “their” past and “their” future as temporalities to which we do and don’t belong. This pulls the understanding of the past away from the nationalist or ethnic suppositions on which the discipline of history was founded. The past of “them” as an identity that does not coincide with the self, and the Surge as a Total Other which necessarily displaces the primacy or priority of the self. The goal is to imagine what happens when we let ourselves think about the past and the future according to a totally different logic. This means letting go of all the coordinates by which we find ourselves privileged owners of history, to imagine and enact an ethical relation to the past and future. As such, it requires a different way of looking at the logics of time and history, a new compass of history.

#A New Compass of History

The compass I propose is a Surge detector that identifies the sites of political and ethical intervention when issues from the past return in ways that connect to immediate concerns. This understanding of history and mode of argument is predicated on the moment before the orderly organization of time and the categories of past, present, future. The anachrony of the Surge – the unrestrained mingling of past, present, and future – is disorienting compared to the atemporal neutrality of a magnetic compass pointing north. But just as the magnetic poles of our planet have shifted, leaving the compass misaligned, the old modes of history cannot guide us at the end-time of truth. The new compass of history is not restrained by what has been, but attracted to what can be pointing us toward critical political and ethical action.

A key question is: How can one pursue criticism and ethics without a normative definition of the two or having to resort to the concept of regulative ideas? I am sufficiently constructivist and Nietzschean to operate with an unbound and historically contingent understanding of ethics and ethical action. Then again, I do try to consider the ways the Surge either brings the past to us or helps us rise up to meet it, making for ethical and political commitments. Given this understanding, there is no one normative definition or regulative guideline, resulting in the very real potential that the prevailing “ethical” or “political” intervention may not be the one you or I would hope for. This is the danger. But is that not the case now? And would it not be better to confront this instability head on?

By attuning ourselves to the Surge and to these ghosts, to the ways they tear at conventional understandings of time and temporality, historians can take up their cause, which is our also own. I take this to be an attunement to the past that allows such an historian or thinker to hear the call of the absent, missing, or hidden dead. In this way, the dead are not taken as persons or commodities who are no longer present and whose properties and scope have been previously determined. Instead, the historian listens to the dead that haunt us as the presence of an absence from time which is, as of yet, unknown and undetermined. This allows or opens space for multiple and conflicting logics of how we encounter, account for, and recount the past. The tension and conflict between multiple pasts enable an alienation effect by exposing or creating cracks and fissures in the smooth surface of what had previously appeared to be the singular logic of history. The actors and vocabularies may be unorthodox and the accounts may be unfamiliar, but these myriad approaches and definitions of history force us to question the dominance, politics, and ideologies behind any one variant. To return to the ocean metaphor, we must learn to surf the Surge. To ride with a history of differing logics and approaches to the past rather than battle against them by imposing methodological uniformity on an ever-increasing field of areas and subjects. The new compass of history is an attunement to the Total Other of the Surge, which is likewise an attunement to the proximate other in the present. As such, the past provides the call for a moral imperative in the present and for the future.

This new compass of history has the potential to transform our present, but only if the particular event surging from the past, now as history, is not left in the past as though the danger were over and done with, or entirely appropriated by the present telling of what we want it to be. Vladimir Jankelevitch warned of the ever-persistent march of time that inevitably leads to forgetting and with that oblivion, a washing away of past wrongs. The historian’s calling has long been to battle against this river of Lethee. But perhaps more pernicious is the way that the historical focus on evils and wrongs of the past allows us to ignore or demote the evils and wrongs of our present. This is what Berber Bevernage has called “Temporal Manichaeism.”  The new compass of history is attracted to the Surge via an attunement to the past in the present so that like temporal vectors, each travel through the other. The evils of the past cannot be left in the past, but neither can they be co-opted by “my” present in the form of a select group or individual. The work of history should not be the work of listening to ourselves and our own laments but attunement to what arises from the Surge. Listening for and to the ghost – hearing the ghost, hearing the past – results in attunement to the other coming from a different temporal direction. A tool to puncture time. We need to learn how to let the ghosts speak and how to let the past speak rather than leaving them behind or speaking for them.

Related to this temporal shift is an emphasis on a different vision of solidarity and universality. History is a story for a future humanity and a future beyond humanity which eclipses the particularity of any past event. This cannot be a return to the universal collective of Enlightenment thought or traditional left-wing politics encumbered with the baggage of a foregone vision of “progress.” The emancipatory promises of homogenous universal ideals were so often never intended to be fulfilled. Postmodern theory in its various formations sought to unsettle the hegemonic claims of master narratives and normative values that were heralded as universally available, but never offered to large segments of humanity because of class, gender, or racial status. Calling out and rectifying the discrepancy between the aspirational nature of Western Enlightenment, or “true left” values, and the flaws inherent in their initial articulations, industrial implementation, as well as the unquestioned assumptions that led to such discriminatory application across the globe, was and is a noble cause. Nor can this be an understanding of the past in a possessive form, a restrictive “my” or “ours.” Instead, it is a universal “they” of which we are and are not a part. This is to say, the past event can only serve us if we look beyond its particularity as past and toward its guidance toward their future. The new compass of history points us to what can be rather than what has already passed. It points us to the Surge, the site of dynamic temporal entanglement where the past arrives as if it were new, calling for intervention and engagement. The past as future, if you will, rather than futures past.