Encountering the Past within the Present

Modern Experiences of Time

Siobhan Kattago

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429656125
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Encountering the Past within the Present: Modern Experiences of Time examines different encounters with the past from within the present – whether as commemoration, nostalgia, silence, ghostly haunting or combinations thereof. Taking its cue from Hannah Arendt's definition of the present as a time span lying between past and future, the author reflects on the old philosophical question of how to live the good life – not only with others who are physically with us but also with those whose presence is ghostly and liminal. While tradition may no longer command the same authority as it did in antiquity or the middle ages, individuals are by no means severed from the past. Rather, nostalgic longing for bygone times and traumatic preoccupation with painful historical events demonstrate the vitality of the past within the present. Divided into three parts, chapters examine ways in which the legacies of World War II, the Holocaust and communism have been remembered after 1945 and 1989. Maintaining a sustained reflection on the nexus of memory, modernity and time in tandem with ancient questions of responsibility for one another and the world, the volume contributes to the growing field of memory studies from a philosophical perspective. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, social theory and philosophy with interests in collective memory and heritage.

Part I
Gaps, glitches and ghosts

1
Wandering in obscurity

Modern experiences of time

Hannah Arendt, Reinhart Koselleck and François Hartog perceived dislocation and rupture as characteristics or even symptoms of the modern experience of time. All three reflected on historical events that occurred during their lifetimes with their corresponding shifts in temporality. Koselleck, like Arendt, lived through the age of extremes in the twentieth century. Both argued that the past no longer illuminates the present in the same way as it did in previous centuries. Instead, it is the future that structures the modern understanding of time. Hartog, in contrast, argues that neither the past nor the future illuminate the present in the same way as before. Instead, the present has become an extended tract of time disengaged from both the past and the future.

In 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville concluded Democracy in America by reflecting on the dramatic changes that he had experienced in France and the United States. In examining how a democratic form of government was shaping the manners and habits of Americans, Tocqueville foresaw the future of Europe and the old world. After the French Revolution, the past no longer illuminated a way out of the present towards the future. ‘Since the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity’ (Tocqueville quoted in Arendt 19 77: 7).¹ Tocqueville’s disorientation in the present and disenchantment with the authority of the past resonate with Arendt, Koselleck and Hartog. And yet, if the past is no longer a source of authoritative tradition, how might one account for its traces that linger, influence, burden, and even haunt the present? Particularly with mass-mediated images, moments from the past seem to have a ghostly presence and extended afterlife. Moreover, the compression of time and space in the twenty-first century blurs traditional boundaries of past, present and future. For some, the ‘time is out of joint,’ while others may sense glitches or that they are ‘stuck in time’ and ‘stranded in the present.’² In response to this impasse, I suggest Derrida’s hauntology as a way in which to acknowledge the spectral and episodic presence of the past within a changing present. His attention to ruptures in linearity and the disjointed sense of time responds to the lacunae in Arendt, Koselleck and Hartog’s writings. Moreover, ghosts demonstrate that temporal boundaries may be more porous than the past as ‘no longer’ and the future as ‘not yet.’

Looking back after 1945: the gap between past and future

In trying to make sense of the magnitude of historical change in the first half of the twentieth century, Arendt described the present as a gap between past and future. In simplest terms, the present is a temporal space in between two different understandings of time. If the past is ‘no longer’ and the future is ‘not yet,’ the present lies somewhere in between the two. However, Arendt emphasised how the meaning of the ‘present’ as a contemporary period of time transformed after the war to denote a break in continuity that had occurred during her lifetime. Totalitarian regimes, statelessness, genocide and the mass murder of Jews constituted a fundamental break in the continuity of tradition. The post-war ‘present,’ for her, was without precedent. Indeed, she characterised the experience of trying to understand the first half of the twentieth century as akin to ‘thinking without a banister. ‘In German, “Denken ohne Geländer.” That is, as you go up and down the stairs you can always hold on to the banister so that you won’t fall down. But we have lost this banister’ (Arendt 2018: 473). The past as a rich repository of tradition and heritage, filled with ideas and cultural ways of life handed down from one generation to the next, had been irrevocably broken. In her preface to Between Past and Future, Arendt reflected on what René Char, a French poet and member of the resistance, wrote: ‘Notre heritage n’est précédé d’aucun testament – our inheritance was left to us by no testament’ (Char, quoted in Arendt 1977: 3). The lack of a written will or testament left Char and his generation at a loss for how to live in the present and how to make sense of the past in order to go forward into a shared future.

Without testament or, to resolve the metaphor, without tradition – which selects and names, which hands down and preserves, which indicates where the treasures are and what their worth is – there seems to be no willed continuity in time and hence, humanly speaking, neither past nor future, only semipaternal change of the world and the biological cycle of living creatures in it.

(Arendt 1977: 5)

The present, understood for Arendt and many of her generation as the years after World War II, was overshadowed by learning how to find new ways to think about a broken past. She wrote that Char’s sense of loss ‘sounds like a variation’ on Tocqueville’s diagnosis that the past had lost its ability to illuminate the future (Ibid: 7). For her, 1945 meant zero hour or Stunde Null – the end of catastrophic world wars demanding renewal and change.³ If continuity had previously been taken for granted, after the Second World War, links to a traditional past were fragmented. Given what Arendt calls ‘the modern break in tradition,’ the present, as a tract of time between past and future, became increasingly uncertain and fragile (Ibid: 15). On the one hand, as she writes, the present, as a gap in between two temporalities, is nothing new. ‘The gap, I suspect, is not a modern phenomenon, it is perhaps not even a historical datum but is coeval with the existence of man on earth’ (Ibid: 13). Once tradition loses its authority and solidity, the past no longer serves as a guidepost to the present and the future.

In her essay on Walter Benjamin, Arendt reflected on the role of tradition and authority.

Insofar as the past has been transmitted as tradition, it possesses authority; insofar as authority presents itself historically, it becomes tradition. Walter Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and the loss of authority which occurred in his lifetime were irreparable, and he concluded that he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past.

(1968: 38)

As tradition and authority fragment, the links between generations weaken. Both Benjamin and Arendt tried to find new points of continuity with a broken past, as well as ways of dealing with its traces in the present. In Life of the Mind, Arendt again reflected on the relationship between religion, authority and tradition.

What has been lost is the continuity of the past as it seemed to be handed down from generation to generation, developing in the process its own consistency. The dismantling process has its own technique. … What you then are left with is still the past, but a fragmented past, which has lost its certainty of evaluation.

(1978: 212)

The authority of tradition was challenged by two world wars, genocide and state-sponsored terror.

We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition.

(1973: ix)

Like Benjamin, Arendt looked for new ways to retrieve fragments from the past in order to understand how they relate to the present. The loss of tradition in the twentieth century did not mean that all links with the past were severed. Nor did it mean that traditional concepts such as freedom, politics or authority were meaningless – rather, that they had undergone a ‘sea-change.’ In the late twentieth century, Hobsbawm echoed Benjamin and Arendt’s argument for the loss of tradition by suggesting that fading links between generations are indicative of twentieth-century social life. ‘The destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one’s contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late twentieth century’ (Hobsbawm 1994: 3).

Benjamin’s ‘Theses for a Philosophy of History’ outlined historical change as one propelled from one catastrophe to the next. The Angelus Novus is haunted by catastrophes that are continually piled at his feet. While the angel is propelled forward, his gaze looks back to the past. ‘But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward’ (Benjamin 1968: 257–258). Living in the present includes dealing with remains of the past, as ruins and unpredictable aftermaths of upheaval. ‘Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet’ (Ibid: 258). Time is viewed less as a linear line of progress and more as a destructive storm. The past understood as ‘no longer’ and the future as ‘not yet’ do not capture the fragility of historical time that Benjamin wished to convey. ‘To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was” (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashed up at a moment of danger’ (Ibid: 255). The present as nunc stans or ‘standing still’ invokes a moment of danger within the passage of time.

Futures past and accelerated time

Arendt and Koselleck were both influenced by the work of Martin Heidegger, for whom time is the horizon of human understanding. There is neither an objective view from nowhere nor a point of eternity; rather, we approach the world from a particular temporal and historical standpoint. ‘Time must be brought to light and genuinely grasped as the horizon of every understanding and interpretation of Being’ (Heidegger 1978: 60). As human beings, we are aware of our finitude and that we exist ‘in time.’ Moreover, we live in a world full of artefacts from the past. ‘Remains, monuments, and records that are still present-at-hand, are possible “material” for the concrete disclosure of the Dasein which has-been-there’ (Heidegger 1962: 446). Key to Heidegger’s understanding of time is that although events may have occurred in the past, their effects continue in the present. ‘Here, by “history,” we have in view that which is past, but which nevertheless is still having effects’ (Ibid: 430). Our temporality is rooted in the future of our own impending death. We are not confined to the present but rather pulled towards the future with projects, plans and concerns. ‘Understanding is grounded primarily in the future; one’s state-of-mind, however, temporalizes itself primarily in having been’ (Ibid: 390).

Like Arendt, Koselleck argued for a shift in the how we understand ourselves in historical time. What she described as a ‘break in tradition,’ was, for him, more the fading of history as the source of an exemplary past. From Cicero onwards, historia magistra vitae meant that the orator and historian granted immortality to glorious examples from the past. The study of the past meant that history was a teacher for life. Koselleck examined how the modern experience of time changes how we think about historical events and their narration. The past and future started to become unmoored and detached from one another during the Sattelzeit or threshold of modernity in the 1800s. The Enlightenment heralded a different consciousness of time from the medieval religious world. Rather than moving towards the certainty of the Last Judgment, modern progress is open-ended and accelerates towards an unknown future. ‘The future of this progress is characterized by two main features: first, the increasing speed with which it approaches us, and second, its unknown quality’ (Koselleck 1985: 17).

The French Revolution changed how time was understood. If, previously, revolution marked the cyclical direction of the planets, afterwards, it meant irreversible change. The future became an unknown horizon of political upheaval and expectation of something better. If the medieval sense of temporality posited a Final Judgment and end of the world, this changed after 1789, as the future was slowly detached from a religious, eschatological sense of time. Progress gradually replaced prognosis or the certainty that the world will end one day with the Final Judgment. ‘Progress opened up a future that transcended the hitherto predictable, natural space of time and experience, and thence – propelled by its own dynamic – provoked new, transnatural, and long-term prognoses’ (Ibid).

‘Futures past’ refers to different ways that people in the past imagined and fore-saw the future. Once the future was perceived as uncertain, it was not only open to progress and change but also to the unknown. For Koselleck, like Arendt, Tocqueville captured the disorientation accompanying the loosening of traditional ties between past and future. In reflecting on Tocqueville’s quotation that ‘the past has ceased to throw light upon the future,’ he found his writing to be ‘heavy with the suspense of the modern breaking free of the continuity of an earlier mode of time’ (Ibid: 31).

Different rates of acceleration and deceleration co-exist simultaneously. There is not one universal historical time but rather many ‘histories in the plural’ which are multi-layered, comprised of different durations and speeds. Possible histories are comprised of the sediments of time, which, like the geological metaphor, may be open to cracks and erosion. Although Koselleck refers to modernity in the singular, he stressed histories in the plural and the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous.

Koselleck’s histories in the plural share much in common with Eisenstadt, Chakrabarty and Fabian. Similar to Koselleck, S. N. Eisenstadt suggests not one but ‘multiple modernities,’ each with different experiences of modernisation and technical progress. Multiple modernities underscore that ‘modernity and Westernization are not identical’ (Eisenstadt 2000: 2–3). The European experience is not the only path for modernisation. Rather, each encounter with modern forms of government, technological innovation and cultural ways of life is unique. For Eisenstadt, modernity is a complex process of adaptation, appropriation, innovation and redefinition. Of central importance to his argument for multiple modernities is the ongoing and unresolved tension between the universal and particular claims of the Enlightenment. Modernity indicates a new time distinguished from the previous one, structured by myth and religion.

Similar to Eisenstadt, Dipesh Chakrabarty suggests that the many different experiences of modernity point towards what he calls ‘the provincialization of Europe.’ ‘The Europe I seek to provincialize or decenter is an imaginary figure that remains deeply embedded in clichéd and shorthand forms in some everyday habits of thought’ (Chakrabarty 2000: 3–4). Likewise, for Johannes Fabian, the emphasis on European and even Western modernity denies not only different modernities but the coevalness of time in different cultures. If Europe is understood as the centre for the counting and measuring of time, other cultures are deemed to be slower, backwards or even to exist in a different temporal realm (Fabian 2002). What unites Koselleck with Eisenstadt, Chakrabarty and Fabian is an understanding of modernity that avoids positing a universal conception of historical time. Instead, the modern experience of time is plural, coeval and overlapping.

While natural time is based on the cycles of birth and death and the changing of the seasons, linear time is structured by clocks and calendars. Kosellec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Gaps, glitches and ghosts
• PART II Looking back after 1945
• PART III Looking back after 1989
• Epilogue
• Index