Response to the Comments

My proposal to expand the concept of history, traditionally limited to authenticated facts, to the idea of virtual history has met with a variety of reactions in the contributions collected here. I would like to thank my colleagues Rūta Kazlauskaitė, Chris Lorenz, and Britta Hochkirchen for their efforts to examine the conceptual foundations of such an extension for their coherence on the one hand, and to discuss the possibility of its practical implementation in historiography on the other. However skeptical they may be about such an expanded concept of history, their comments certainly help explore possible directions in which the work of historians might develop in the future.

At the heart of my proposal is the category of the historically possible, which has received increasing attention in twentieth-century historical theory, for example in the work of Ernst Bloch and Reinhart Koselleck, for assessing past and future human action.  Its further development will be of strategic importance for the future work of historians. I start from the observation that future-oriented possibilities of human action and expectations usually undergo a process of separation into illusions on the one hand and real phenomena on the other. In both cases, this led to a gradual neglect of such expectations and visions of the future in nineteenth-century historiography, which confined itself to representing the past and only indirectly considered the future: either by continuing to pursue such prospects only in terms of their successful realization, or by ignoring them altogether as failed projects. With this neglect, however, a large part of historical reality has been lost to historiography, namely that which is possible, imaginary, still open. All that continues to inspire and stimulate the future, even if it has not (yet) been realized. The main purpose of my reflections is to preserve all this for historiography and for the future.

Several of the critical considerations and suggestions expressed in the commentaries focus on the question of the temporal nature of such possibilities: The world of past events is historically ordered primarily in terms of time. Therefore, when considering a historical event, one of the retrospective historian’s first tasks is to determine when it took place. It is the historian’s reality check, so to speak. Intellectual ideas, however, are fundamentally beyond the scope of this task. How, then, can we recognize them as historical objects? As Chris Lorenz has pointed out, they can be dated according to their historical origin, but not according to their validity, which can extend far beyond the time of their origin. This raises the question of their external and internal temporality, i.e. their temporal position in history on the one hand, and the time they create or manifest themselves on the other.

Dating: To date intellectual concepts and ideas, historians try to relate them to the historical contexts and points of view in which they acquired their validity. But this is not easy. For even if they can thus identify the reasons for their later loss of validity, we must also consider that the contexts and places to which historians assign an idea can vary greatly, depending on the particular temporal, spatial, and social contexts in which this assignment took place: An idea born in classical Greece, for example, such as that of democratic rule or of human beauty, could regain its persuasive power in very different times and contexts. This shows that the validity of such an idea is not limited to the time and context in which it was first formulated.

Chris Lorenz refers to Gadamer’s concept of “horizons of meaning” (Bedeutungshorizonte) to come to terms with the fact that historical objectivity is not timeless, but changes over time. But this concept does not take into account the fact that ideas unfold differently at very different times. Like Foucault’s discourse analysis, Gadamer’s hermeneutic approach is unable to resolve the contradiction between the universalist, trans-temporal claim and the epistemological relativism of such horizons of meaning, which Reinhart Koselleck pointed out in his letter to Carl Schmitt of 23 January, 1953.  As much as it provides a hermeneutic framework that spans the ages, it contributes little to the historical dating of the various readings that an idea or conception expressed in the past has later generated. What we need, then, is a historical analysis of the different readings or forms of reception that such ideas have generated in different contexts. Then we no longer need to attribute the trans-historical “classicism” of some historical works to their intrinsic “aura,” as Chris Lorenz did, but can instead attribute it to their historical reception.

Finally, to clear up a misunderstanding, virtual historiography does notpresume to judge what real or unreal possibilities existed in the past, asChris Lorenz implies. Rather, it aims to restrict discussions of alternativepossibilities to those that contemporaries already considered.This does notdeny that things turned out quite differently than any contemporary could have imagined. Of course, every virtual historiography must also report on the unintended consequences of past actions and contingent events.

However, its portrayal benefits from the fact that virtual historiography explores the horizon of what could once be said and imagined.

Latency and temporalization: The question of the internal temporality of ideas points in a different direction. This is the subject of Rūta Kazlauskaitė’s comment. Referring to findings from the theory of predictive processing, she agrees with the view that the brain’s activity of anticipating the future is itself inscribed with a temporal orientation. The constant correction of anticipations by new experiences and the associated rejection of presumed knowledge of the future therefore does not present itself to her as a “problem” of the inconsistency of historical representations, whose transience must appear to the historian as detrimental to their scientific character, but as a normal activity of the brain, in her words as an “inherent aspect of human experience and making sense of history.”

However, this raises the question of whether the brain constantly anticipates future possibilities, or whether it also considers possibilities that have no temporal coefficient, or possibilities that are not derived from personal experiences, such as C.G. Jung’s archetypes. In such cases, they cannot be refuted by new experiences and therefore do not trigger learning processes. This raises the question of how the historical latency of such concepts relates to their temporalization.

Timeframes are not necessarily part of the production of concepts and ideas that push for their realization. Rather, their immanent temporality sometimes remains latent at first. In other words, people do not necessarily create temporal horizons, even when they put them into action, however compelling this may seem to the historian’s retrospective view in recapitulating past projects. The builders of medieval cathedrals, for example, or the Venetian merchants who sent their trading ships far across the ocean in the sixteenth century, usually had no concrete notion of the timeframe their projects would take to complete. In any case, there is little mention of this in the historical sources.

Historians are often quick to assume that contemporaries calculated timeframes, even if they proved to be factually incorrect, since they can reconstruct in retrospect how long such projects took to complete. They struggle to realize that there is no need to estimate the duration of a project, neither for its design nor for its execution. A well-known example for this is Luther’s project of planting an apple tree in his garden, not even wanting to know whether it would to bear fruit before the end of the world.

The situation is different when the promoters of such projects or their contemporaries anticipate temporal horizons for them, as has become increasingly common since the early modern period. Such anticipations lose their former timeless latency and acquire a temporal dimension – a process that can be called the temporalization of ideas in the sense of a historical process. “Temporalization”, however, usually means something more and something different: namely, the temporal extension of the realization of an idea in anticipation of future points in time. Step by step, the idea is realized through the successive transition from a present to a future state, with time passing from one step to the next. In this way, otherness is transformed into the future and thus drawn into the concept of a temporally extended reality. This is the process that Britta Hochkirchen addresses in her program of image analysis. According to her, images, whether painted or drawn, modeled like sculptures or technically produced like photographs, always contain in their material appearance a discrepancy with what they represent in reality, and this difference can be interpreted, again from the point of view of the (contemporary or retrospective) observer, as an anticipation of a reality that is only latently contained in the image. But it can also be subjected to a process of temporalization that is realized when it is released as a draft for the future. This innovative approach, however, raises questions that need to be further discussed: How can such visions of the future be derived from the images in a methodologically viable way? Does this require additional linguistic evidence? Or could the images also be read as materializations of a pictorial “language” of the future, which in its “changed form” opens up a view of a possible future?

In the early twentieth century, aesthetic “languages” of the future, such as abstract painting, atonal music, and architectural and industrial design often broke with tradition and created alternative forms of expression to create a socio-political and market-oriented tension between the present and the future. Automobiles, for example, were often designed in a streamlined look that suggested futurism to potential buyers. Questioning artworks regarding the possibility of realization has also often been a concern of art interpreters, especially in recent times: For example, Stefan Willer’s literary texts, whose depiction of possible worlds, despite their fictional character, does not necessarily have to be fictitious, i.e. not realistic. Rather, the future offers them a space in which that which is not yet can be in the future.  For a virtual historiography, such aesthetic “languages” of the future offer a broad field of investigation. It will also be a matter of coming to terms with the disappointments that the realization of such futuristic projects has repeatedly provoked: Precious Bauhaus-style residential and industrial complexes turned out to be social hotspots and ruins of concrete; scandal-ridden beacons of hope for ‘new music’ turned out to be shrill sound structures that appealed only to a small fan base; streamlined road cruisers became oversized gas guzzlers, and so on.

With her reference to the analysis of historical temporality in novels and films such as “Here,” “The Changing Same Ep. 1, The Dilemma,” and “The Book of Distance,” Rūta Kazlauskaitė draws attention to another valuable aspect of virtual historiography that is closely related to the last. The experimental interweaving of different temporal levels of past, present, and future in these works of art makes them an excellent training ground for sharpening the perception of historical time. I think she is right in assuming that staging them would afford virtual historiography great benefits.

Taken together, the comments do not only point to problems that need to be clarified, but also to additional dimensions along which the concept of a virtual history should be further developed.