Charting the History of Time
NB: This is my first of what I hope to be multiple (and certainly more than one) posts about history and my love for it. Undoubtedly fewer people will read these than usual, and if you hate history then please feel free to ignore this, but I hope to at least be able to share my thoughts on a few things and in an accessible way that makes it clear how much I enjoy thinking and writing about the past, and how much I think others should also.
When I arrived at university, I wasn't absolutely set on what sort of historian I was going to be. It has quickly emerged that I am a pretentious one. No hard-grain economic history for me. A bit of intellectual history, sure; a lot of social history, why not; and a good old chunk of political history, certainly. But when it all boiled down to things, it turned out that at heart I was a cultural historian.
Aside from the fact that 'cultural historian' means next-to-nothing (aren't we all 'cultural historians' these days?), it has also emerged that I lie towards the pretentious side of pretension, for although I am interested in such things as religion, cultures of entertainment and so on my main interests seem to have set up in the position of being able to claim the flashiest area of interest in scholarship today - the history of time and space! Actually, I'm strictly interested in how people have thought about, and organised their lives around concepts of, time and space, particular times and particular spaces. I'd also probably add the word 'people' to that list of interests, but I'm sure I'll end up talking about that somewhere else.
What does it mean to write a history of 'time'? How can time itself have a history? Is time not, as one of my recent exam papers put it, a 'colourless medium in which the events of history take place' rather than a potential object of historical study per se?
Not so, in fact, especially if you want to write cool-sounding history. As mentioned above, historians have in recent years become fascinated by the idea of charting how people's experiences of time and of the temporal dimensions - past, present and future - have varied by period, place, culture and individual. Much of this literature focuses especially on how people's senses of history have changed; equally, however, it has also come to embody study into people's attitudes towards future time, towards the organization of time and its relationship to structures of power, towards people's experience of the 'acceleration' of modernity and so on.
Much of my own interest centres around the question of whether or not there exists a distinctive 'modern' sense of time standing in contrast to earlier attitudes towards the past, present, and future, and to illustrate this idea let me tell a slightly over-simplified narrative of European ideas about history from the medieval period onwards.
The German historian Reinhart Koselleck argued that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed the emergence of a new, ‘modern’ sense of time and history defined by its conviction that the past and present were fundamentally ‘different’ and separate from one another.[1] Under his interpretation, pre-modern peoples were seen as having possessed ‘no conception… of radical separations between past and present’,[2] instead being inclined to perceive the ‘sameness’ common to the two. Past, present and future were not so different to such peoples, Koselleck argued. The key evidence for this was the distinctly limited 'sense of anachronism' that medieval peoples seemed to display in much of their creative output: like Mr Bean in the Specsavers adverts set in Samurai-era Japan, certain details in medieval writing and art seemed to stand out for their lack of historical awareness, except that these details seem not to have been especially deliberate in their mixing up of periods and eras. The classic example of this is the frequency with which stained-glass church windows from Medieval Europe depicted figures from the nativity in contemporary peasant dress rather than in first-century attire; Koselleck illustrated the same point using the Alexanderschlact, a sixteenth-century painting which supposedly depicts an ancient battle but in which all the participants appear in suspiciously sixteenth-century battle clothing.[3] My supervisor Peter Mandler has recently drawn my attention to an even more striking example of how when English artists in the 18th century attempted to reproduce the Bayeux Tapestry through drawings they rendered it in the artistic style of their own day despite the fact that they HAD THE DAMN THING IN FRONT OF THEM.
Past and present seemed not to be far away from each other to Europeans prior to the late eighteenth century. In addition to being evident from their lacking 'sense of anachronism', it was also clear from their widespread adherence to the principle ‘historia magistra vitae’, or 'history is the teacher of life' - that is, examples from the past can help us understand the present and the future. For this idea to work, the past has to be considered sufficiently similar to the present as to provide a useful guide to action; hence the belief of Isidore of Seville among others that history writing was about providing 'instruction for the living'.[4]
The Renaissance and the Reformation(s) of the early modern period undoubtedly represented a move away from this medieval sense of time, what with their emphases on the present’s ‘differentness’ and inferiority in comparison to the ‘golden age’ of classical antiquity and the uncorrupted ‘ancient Church’ respectively. Yet the shared tendency of these movements towards imitation and veneration of an earlier - if not immediately preceding past - indicates that they too perceived a form of underlying ‘sameness’ between history and the present, one which made it possible to imagine that the earlier pasts of antiquity and the primitive Church could be reconnected with, and to continue abiding by the maxim ‘historia magistra vitae’.[5]
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, however, there emerged a far stronger sense that the past was irrevocably separated from the present. The causes of this shift are too many, too contentious and too tangential to be systematically outlined here, but four emerge as particularly significant. The first was the eighteenth-century Enlightenment which, through its experimentation with ideas about progress, frequently undercut on an intellectual level the cultural authority wielded by ‘the ancients’.[6] Second and third were Europe's long-term movements towards industrialisation and urbanisation, processes which both effected major historical change - and thus, perhaps, a greater awareness of that change - and which encouraged a greater sense of the present as temporary, fleeting and as accelerating away from the past. Time itself gained value under industrial capitalism - 'Time is money' - and this drew attention to time's value, the urgency of the need to use time productively, and the consequent gnawing sense of the present as deeply temporary. [7] Fourthly, the French Revolution and the wars which followed also acted to encourage new attitudes towards the past: as Peter Fritzche has noted, the deep, invasive and widespread impact of these disruptive events in conjunction with the fact that they were ‘narrat[ed by contemporaries]… as change or progress’ and therefore ‘seen to extinguish tradition’ led individuals across Europe to feel a profound and novel sense of disconnect from the past in reaction.[8]
This was as true in Britain as it was elsewhere: the country’s experiences were, for instance, perceived by William Wordsworth to be ‘unknown to former times’, an observation which embodies this novel conception of the modern moment’s distinctiveness from the past.[9] The sense of anachronism became pervasive - hence the Grimm brothers' hopes of preserving German folk tales 'as they were', or Chateaubriand's desire to keep Pompeii 'as it was' in Roman times, or Ranke's desire to write history 'as it really was' rather than just as a way of teaching lessons to future generations, a goal that Ranke rejected.
The sense of detachment from history that all of these developments generated opened up new opportunities for imagining the future which, freed from expectations of ‘sameness’, could now be invested with expectations of genuine change. Koselleck saw this as the really crucial moment when history became something that humans believed they themselves could 'make'. It was no longer necessary to look to past customs and structures for political legitimation - they were somewhat defunct if the past was too different to be useful - and so the years which followed saw the rise of all sorts of extra-historical, future-oriented ideologies, liberalism, socialism, every 'ism' under the sun. For Koselleck, certainly, this was the start of modern politics as we knew it. [10]
There is much more that could be said about this modern sense of time - this sense of the past as irrecoverably lost, of the future as open-ended and makeable, of the present as temporary, fleeting and in constant acceleration. But hopefully, if this post wasn't too unreadable, I've done enough - and copy and pasted enough of my university essay work! - to give a sense of the sorts of pretentious history in which I am interested. I am not ashamed to say that the history of time and of history itself is a subject which is in the words of Ranke 'sexy as hell'.
When I arrived at university, I wasn't absolutely set on what sort of historian I was going to be. It has quickly emerged that I am a pretentious one. No hard-grain economic history for me. A bit of intellectual history, sure; a lot of social history, why not; and a good old chunk of political history, certainly. But when it all boiled down to things, it turned out that at heart I was a cultural historian.
Aside from the fact that 'cultural historian' means next-to-nothing (aren't we all 'cultural historians' these days?), it has also emerged that I lie towards the pretentious side of pretension, for although I am interested in such things as religion, cultures of entertainment and so on my main interests seem to have set up in the position of being able to claim the flashiest area of interest in scholarship today - the history of time and space! Actually, I'm strictly interested in how people have thought about, and organised their lives around concepts of, time and space, particular times and particular spaces. I'd also probably add the word 'people' to that list of interests, but I'm sure I'll end up talking about that somewhere else.
 |
| This is what pretentious and radical young historians wear. |
What does it mean to write a history of 'time'? How can time itself have a history? Is time not, as one of my recent exam papers put it, a 'colourless medium in which the events of history take place' rather than a potential object of historical study per se?
Not so, in fact, especially if you want to write cool-sounding history. As mentioned above, historians have in recent years become fascinated by the idea of charting how people's experiences of time and of the temporal dimensions - past, present and future - have varied by period, place, culture and individual. Much of this literature focuses especially on how people's senses of history have changed; equally, however, it has also come to embody study into people's attitudes towards future time, towards the organization of time and its relationship to structures of power, towards people's experience of the 'acceleration' of modernity and so on.
Much of my own interest centres around the question of whether or not there exists a distinctive 'modern' sense of time standing in contrast to earlier attitudes towards the past, present, and future, and to illustrate this idea let me tell a slightly over-simplified narrative of European ideas about history from the medieval period onwards.
The German historian Reinhart Koselleck argued that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed the emergence of a new, ‘modern’ sense of time and history defined by its conviction that the past and present were fundamentally ‘different’ and separate from one another.[1] Under his interpretation, pre-modern peoples were seen as having possessed ‘no conception… of radical separations between past and present’,[2] instead being inclined to perceive the ‘sameness’ common to the two. Past, present and future were not so different to such peoples, Koselleck argued. The key evidence for this was the distinctly limited 'sense of anachronism' that medieval peoples seemed to display in much of their creative output: like Mr Bean in the Specsavers adverts set in Samurai-era Japan, certain details in medieval writing and art seemed to stand out for their lack of historical awareness, except that these details seem not to have been especially deliberate in their mixing up of periods and eras. The classic example of this is the frequency with which stained-glass church windows from Medieval Europe depicted figures from the nativity in contemporary peasant dress rather than in first-century attire; Koselleck illustrated the same point using the Alexanderschlact, a sixteenth-century painting which supposedly depicts an ancient battle but in which all the participants appear in suspiciously sixteenth-century battle clothing.[3] My supervisor Peter Mandler has recently drawn my attention to an even more striking example of how when English artists in the 18th century attempted to reproduce the Bayeux Tapestry through drawings they rendered it in the artistic style of their own day despite the fact that they HAD THE DAMN THING IN FRONT OF THEM.
 |
| The Alexanderschlact - a great piece of historical evidence, and also a beautiful painting! |
Past and present seemed not to be far away from each other to Europeans prior to the late eighteenth century. In addition to being evident from their lacking 'sense of anachronism', it was also clear from their widespread adherence to the principle ‘historia magistra vitae’, or 'history is the teacher of life' - that is, examples from the past can help us understand the present and the future. For this idea to work, the past has to be considered sufficiently similar to the present as to provide a useful guide to action; hence the belief of Isidore of Seville among others that history writing was about providing 'instruction for the living'.[4]
The Renaissance and the Reformation(s) of the early modern period undoubtedly represented a move away from this medieval sense of time, what with their emphases on the present’s ‘differentness’ and inferiority in comparison to the ‘golden age’ of classical antiquity and the uncorrupted ‘ancient Church’ respectively. Yet the shared tendency of these movements towards imitation and veneration of an earlier - if not immediately preceding past - indicates that they too perceived a form of underlying ‘sameness’ between history and the present, one which made it possible to imagine that the earlier pasts of antiquity and the primitive Church could be reconnected with, and to continue abiding by the maxim ‘historia magistra vitae’.[5]
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, however, there emerged a far stronger sense that the past was irrevocably separated from the present. The causes of this shift are too many, too contentious and too tangential to be systematically outlined here, but four emerge as particularly significant. The first was the eighteenth-century Enlightenment which, through its experimentation with ideas about progress, frequently undercut on an intellectual level the cultural authority wielded by ‘the ancients’.[6] Second and third were Europe's long-term movements towards industrialisation and urbanisation, processes which both effected major historical change - and thus, perhaps, a greater awareness of that change - and which encouraged a greater sense of the present as temporary, fleeting and as accelerating away from the past. Time itself gained value under industrial capitalism - 'Time is money' - and this drew attention to time's value, the urgency of the need to use time productively, and the consequent gnawing sense of the present as deeply temporary. [7] Fourthly, the French Revolution and the wars which followed also acted to encourage new attitudes towards the past: as Peter Fritzche has noted, the deep, invasive and widespread impact of these disruptive events in conjunction with the fact that they were ‘narrat[ed by contemporaries]… as change or progress’ and therefore ‘seen to extinguish tradition’ led individuals across Europe to feel a profound and novel sense of disconnect from the past in reaction.[8]
This was as true in Britain as it was elsewhere: the country’s experiences were, for instance, perceived by William Wordsworth to be ‘unknown to former times’, an observation which embodies this novel conception of the modern moment’s distinctiveness from the past.[9] The sense of anachronism became pervasive - hence the Grimm brothers' hopes of preserving German folk tales 'as they were', or Chateaubriand's desire to keep Pompeii 'as it was' in Roman times, or Ranke's desire to write history 'as it really was' rather than just as a way of teaching lessons to future generations, a goal that Ranke rejected.
The sense of detachment from history that all of these developments generated opened up new opportunities for imagining the future which, freed from expectations of ‘sameness’, could now be invested with expectations of genuine change. Koselleck saw this as the really crucial moment when history became something that humans believed they themselves could 'make'. It was no longer necessary to look to past customs and structures for political legitimation - they were somewhat defunct if the past was too different to be useful - and so the years which followed saw the rise of all sorts of extra-historical, future-oriented ideologies, liberalism, socialism, every 'ism' under the sun. For Koselleck, certainly, this was the start of modern politics as we knew it. [10]
There is much more that could be said about this modern sense of time - this sense of the past as irrecoverably lost, of the future as open-ended and makeable, of the present as temporary, fleeting and in constant acceleration. But hopefully, if this post wasn't too unreadable, I've done enough - and copy and pasted enough of my university essay work! - to give a sense of the sorts of pretentious history in which I am interested. I am not ashamed to say that the history of time and of history itself is a subject which is in the words of Ranke 'sexy as hell'.
[1] Reinhart Koselleck, Futures
Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2004).
[2] Benedict Anderson, Imagined
Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London:
Verso, 2006), p. 22-3.
[3] Ibid; Peter Burke, The
Renaissance Sense of the Past (London: Edward Arnold, 1969).
[4] Burke, Renaissance Sense,
p. 4; Isidore
of Seville, Etymologies, I:XLIII,
trans. Stephen A. Barney et. al (Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 67.
[5] Burke, Renaissance Sense and
‘The Sense of Anachronism from Petrarch to Poussin’ In: Chris Humphrey and W.
M. Ormrod (Eds.), Time in the Medieval
World (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2001), p. 158; for Renaissance
imitation see David Lowenthal, The Past
is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); for the
Reformation see Anthony Kemp, The
Estrangement of the Past: A Study in the Origins of Modern Historical
Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 75-81;
Koselleck, Futures Past, pp. 29-30.
[6] See David Spadafora, The
Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1990).
[7] See John Burrow, Evolution
and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1966), pp. 99-100; E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline,
and Industrial Capitalism’, Past & Present No. 38 (Oxford University Press,
1967), pp. 56-97.
[8] Peter Fritzche, Stranded in
the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Harvard University
Press, 2004), p. 17.
[9] William Wordsworth quoted in Ibid, p. 27.
[10] Ulfried Reichardt, ‘Time and the African-American Experience: The
Problem of Chronocentrism’, Amerikastudien/American
Studies Vol. 45:4 (2000), pp. 468-9.
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