Negotiating presentism: toward a renewed understanding of historical change

ABSTRACT

The article gives a critical examination considering the descriptive potential, explanatory limitations, and recent productive problematization of presentism. For several decades, notions of presentist temporality have occupied the forefront of debates about the nature of historical time, challenging the modern dynamic future-oriented temporal imaginary and theorizing the reign of an overwhelming present that assimilates the past and the future within its expanding scope. According particular attention to distinct interpretations from the work of François Hartog, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, and Hartmut Rosa, the article considers the rise of memory culture and suspension of future-oriented momentum as crucial characteristics of the presentist perspective. Referencing recent interventions by Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Helge Jordheim, however, the paper argues that momentous changes across technological and ecological domains necessitate conceptual innovation capable of exceeding presentism’s static temporal economy.

KEYWORDS:

• Presentism
• historical time
• modernity
• Hartog
• unprecedented change
• multiple times
• anthropocene

Acknowledgments

This research is funded by the European Regional Development Fund (University of Tartu ASTRA Project PER ASPERA) and is related to the Centre of Excellence in Estonian Studies (European Union, European Regional Development Fund) and research project IUT20-5 (Estonian Ministry of Education and Research). In addition, the work on this article project has been supported by RANS Professorship of Intellectual History (Department of Philosophy, University of Tartu) and Baltic Studies Program at Yale.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For a recent discussion of presentism and its significance in contemporary historical theory, see Tamm, Olivier (2019).

2. On the birth and history of the category of the future, see also Hölscher (1999).

3. Regarding the idea that it is with the French Revolution that the novel experience time became widely shared perception, Peter Fritzsche’s (2004) relevant study provides further context. He suggests that during the immense social and political upheaval of the French Revolution and its aftermath, a pan-European sense of contemporaneity developed predicated on the perception of sharing a distinct and unique historical milieu.

4. Regarding architecture: ‘Indeed, one finds hard to resist the temptation of an insight, according to which the passion with which since decades old towns are being refurbished, facades restored and monasteries turned into hotels with medium range prices, is a mere a flipside of a particular absence: Consequences of an uncertainty in relation to the question what could then be the architecture representative of the contemporary moment.’ Original: ‘Und man kann ja in der Tat der Versuchung des Gedankens kaum widerstehen, daß die Leidenschaft, mit der seit Jahrzehnten Altstädte saniert, Fassaden restauriert und Klöster in Hotels der mittleren Preislage verwandelt werden, nur die Kehrseite einer Abwesenheit sind: die Folgen einer Unsicherheit angesichts der Frage, was denn die Architektur der Gegenwart sein könnte’ (Gumbrecht 2001, 775). Regarding humanities Gumbrecht argues that our ‘our new relationship with classics, still operating diffusely, has grown out of a change in our construction of time’ (2014, 50). And: ‘In our new chronotope the relentless dynamic of historical movement has weakened and, in any case, the momentum of temporal procession has stalled in the meantime. That makes our encounters with classics more relaxed because their power to speak to us directly is no longer threatened – nor is it peculiarly theirs’ (2014, 56).

5. Original: ‘Wie Disneyland sieht jetzt die Gegenwart aus: breit, bunt, etwas unübersichtlich und sehr voll.’

6. For a broader discussion on the topic of presence and novel ways of conceptualizing present-past relationship more generally, see Ghosh and Kleinberg (2013), Kleinberg (2017), Bevernage (2011), Runia (2014), Fareld (2016).

7. ‘Nowhere is this shift in the style of historical culture more obvious than in museums. They long ago abandoned the taxonomic principle which traditionally structured their exhibits, and now tend to organize them as a reconfiguration of historical environments – ranging from prehistoric landscapes to medieval marketplaces to 1950s drugstores – in which visitors can literally become immersed.’

8. A potential criticism of this view is that even if the new broad present is conducive to the dimension presence and thus for regaining a sense of being in the world more holistic in its bodily dimensions, it should not come at the expense of turning our eyes from the gloomy-looking future. In other words, when it comes to past-present relationship, Gumbrecht does develop an alternative to the historicist interpretation, namely the framework of presence. He does not however endeavor to offer an alternative to our relationship with the future, that is simply cast aside as blocked and unnavigable. In times of increasing discourse on the impending ecological catastrophe, the arrival of Anthropocene etc, the idea of promoting presence while bracketing the future might not come across as overly convincing.

9. Original: ‘Diese breite Gegenwart ist für ihn das Gegenteil von ”Präsenz“ […].’

10. Original: ‘Als Gegenmittel verbleibt deshalb nur noch die Sehnsucht und Suche nach Momenten der Präsenz im waste land der breiten Gegenwart.’

11. Chris Lorenz also underscores that Hartog’s framework proceeds from privileging the stance of a traditional historian that necessarily keeps past and present apart. Attending to the four key words with which Hartog describes presentism – that is commemoration, memory, patrimony, and identity – Lorenz states: ‘And each of them is a threat to the autonomy and the authority of history, because each represents an unhistorical if not anti-historical way of dealing with the past. They represent four ways to erase the very distance between the past and present because they are striving after an emotional = authentic connection between an identification of the past and the present – the distance that is a precondition for the existence of history as a modernist, truthseeking practice’ (Lorenz 2019, 24).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Juhan Hellerma

Juhan Hellerma defended his doctoral dissertation in Philosophy at the University of Tartu (Estonia). His thesis presents a critical analysis of conceptual and methodological issues in current disputes on time and temporal experience. He holds an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Tartu, where he wrote his M.A. thesis on phenomenology. At various stages during his studies, he has been a visiting reseacher at different Universities in Germany as well as in the United States.