Cast Adrift! - Koselleck, Benjamin, and Mudimbe arrive on time

 

Between the Two my Heart is Balanced, Lubaina Himid

"Time is a difficult topic for historians. I remember an occasion when I was in the history department and I commented that—alluding to Koselleck—modern history not only is in time but also operates through it. This generated a rather snide comment from a colleague, a disgust with 'theory,' which is the only explanation for something that needlessly complicates what is so obvious and commonsensical as time." — Stefan Tanaka, History without Chronology

"Abu Huraira reported: The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said, 'How will you be when the son of Mary descends upon you while your leader is among you?'” — Sahih al-Bukahri 3449

Hello, everyone! Pretty last minute for a (belated!) birthday post…already something of a tradition. Ramadan moved up in the Gregorian calendar again so March 12th is actually inside the month this year. This shift + getting older has me thinking about time; historians are not always as interested in historicity as they should be. Wanted to talk a little bit about some stuff I find interesting in terms of writing on time. I assume most ppl who would be reading this are already familiar with ideas around clock-time as industrial technic or colonial regimes of time, so this is more on the theory side.

expectant horizons

Historian and theorist Reinhart Koselleck has been having a moment - he shows up in a lot of the best recent work on the distinctly modern experience and conception of historical time (Stefan Tanaka’s History without Chronology, Gary Wilder’s Freedom Time, and Amy Allen’s The End of Progress all come to mind.) In Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, Koselleck traced how the advent of modernity generated a rupture from traditional notions of time derived from Christian theology and Aristotelian philosophy. Central to Koselleck's analysis are his paired concepts of the "space of experience" (Erfahrungsraum) and "horizon of expectation" (Erwartungshorizont). The space of experience refers to "present past, whose events have been incorporated and can be remembered." It encompasses personal and collective memories, unconscious behaviors passed down through generations and institutions. In contrast, the horizon of expectation is the "future made present" - the projected but not-yet-experienced possibilities that direct human anticipation. For Koselleck, pre-modern, Christian conceptions of time both contained and formalized  the horizon of expectation; the future remained bound by the certainty of the Second Coming and Final Judgment, so the radical sense of open-ended possibility that we sublimate under progress rhetoric was connected to the messianic event itself. In his examination of the factors that paved the way for Neuzeit, Koselleck identifies a distinction between secular time, progress-driven and future-orientated, and Christian time, which relies more evidently on the ‘space of experience’, that is, on a set of rituals and behaviours whose features were fixed in the past and expected to be reproduced in the present and in the future. Biblical time extended from God’s creation to Judgement Day. Neuzeit, on the other hand, is infinite and presents itself as a field where progress will be free to operate; as Koselleck notes, "the objective of possible completeness previously attainable only in the Hereafter, henceforth served the idea of improvement on earth and made it possible for the doctrine of the Final Days to be superseded by the hazards of an open future." Marking this shift was a new meaning invested in the term revolution - no longer referring just to celestial cycles but now embodying a ruptural principle to actively "break up time" and establish radically new human Orders. While noting this momentous transformation, Koselleck argues it did not simply represent a clean break but also incorporated residues of the previous Christian model. The modern ideology of continuous progress toward human perfectibility represented a "temporalization" of the sacred vision of final completion, now achievable within worldly, historical time…except it wasn’t concretized in event, it was sorta smeared out over a number of technics of progress (using technics in the Stieglerian sense.) Political figures like Robespierre and the French Revolutionaries enacted an "unconscious secularization of eschatological expectation" by casting their upheavals as enacting a climactic renovation of society. Undergirding these shifts was the growing asymmetry and tension between the horizons defined by accumulated experience versus expansive expectations for the future; whereas the two were more closely bound in the pre-modern era, the newly opened vistas of indefinite progress fatefully decoupled expectations from the inertia of existing traditions and institutions. This disjuncture would profoundly shape coming experiences of worldmaking - if the older model prioritized cyclical repetition and the already-completed events of sacred history, the new modern temporality unleashed a seemingly boundless future amenable to human mastery through purposed striving. 

the Kingdom and the Glory

Walter Benjamin similarly saw in the modern experience a "conception of the present as now-time shot through with splinters of messianic time" - a decoupling of historical unfolding from its prior theological moorings. For Koselleck, the shift from a Christian eschatological framework bounded by the inevitability of apocalypse opened up a newly expansive "horizon of expectation" wherein the future appeared as a realm of unbounded human malleability and striving. Benjamin echoes this in his critique of the modern myth of endless "progress" being immanently realizable within the stream of historical events. However, Benjamin insisted that any true redemptive event like the arrival of the Messiah must necessarily be exterior and transcendent to historical time itself. There is an "absolute distinction between the time of messianic fulfilment and the ordinary sequence of time." This mirrors but is a little diff from Koselleck's delineation between a finite "space of experience" accrued from the past and the prospective, open-ended "horizon of expectation."  They do seem to share the idea that despite this exteriority, secular, political praxis could nonetheless exert an oblique influence facilitating messianic redemption's arrival from outside the historical flow. Gregory Marks, in an excellent series of posts on the Theses over at his blog The Wasted World, notes that "[i}f Benjamin is critical of the social-democratic faith in a progress that never arrives, it is not because it defers the moment of realisation but because it misapprehends its nature...Benjamin’s position holds to the absolute distinction between the time of messianic fulfilment and the ordinary sequence of time. One does not lead to the other; one is shattered by the other. History is [the] meeting room in which we anxiously wait for the messiah’s arrival, who arrives from outside and according to a schedule unknown to us." Again, secularizing is not immanentizing the messianic moment. The future as movement is dead or dying, even the present is on shaky ground. That's the heart of it, I think. Marks gets at this tension beautifully, describing a Benjamin caught between Rosa Luxemberg the Marxist revolutionary and Gershom Scholem the faithful apocalyptist: 

"The revolutionary needs to make the past present, to know the past so as to better act in the present. The apocalypticist desires to make the present past, to see it expire in the messianic moment of fulfilment. Somewhere between these positions, Benjamin attempts to find a relation between past and present that at once retains this messianic abruptness while still being of aid to political practice. Concurring with Scholem, the messianic is conceived as absolutely exterior to history, but in line with Luxemburg, its secularised form must be made historical. What results is Benjamin’s search for a subject-position capable of making this transcendent view of history accessible to us...As we have seen, Benjamin’s preferred route to transcendence is via the ‘archaeomodern’ classless society that stands both before and after history, and we may even posit Benjamin’s own position as a philosopher of time as one more attempt to find a structuring principle outside of history. In all cases, the secularisation of the messianic bears the kernel of transcendence deep into whatever revolutionary project Benjamin attempts to build on top of it."

walking through Mpala

Criminally underread Congolese philosopher V. Y. Mudimbe provides a rich elaboration of these dynamics in the context of Belgian colonialism in Central Africa in The Idea of Africa. For Mudimbe, the practical implementation of colonialism required systematic "normalizing projects" and "panoptic organizations" to remake Congolese (who exist through and thus before the Congo!) conceptions of space, time, ritual and memory in order to fit European spatial-temporal templates. He documents how Christian missionaries relentlessly restructured village life by subordinating it to Western calendars, liturgical rituals, and a new "economy of days, weeks, months, years." This forced transition represented a violent rupture severing local traditions from their organic periodicities and cosmological moorings. Drawing on Michel de Certeau's concepts of spatial "rhetorics of walking," Mudimbe analyzes the colonial reordering of the town of Mpala through the opposing lenses of synecdoche and asyndeton. The synecdoche unified the missionary station under a coherent narrative of linear progress - the past, present and future aligned toward the telos of religious conversion and cultural assimilation. Contrarily, the asyndeton emphasized discontinuity and fragmentation, erasing the existential and historical bonds binding the colonized to their land and heritage. Yet as Mudimbe shows, both these temporal operations were complementary aspects of the same colonial project of transcribing African societies into alien Western codes of historicity. The synecdochic rendering of a future-oriented civilizing mission was predicated on the asyndetic denial and evacuation of indigenous pasts as mere detritus lacking true historical dynamism. In this light, Mudimbe locates two key processes at the heart of the colonial temporalization of Africa. First, the imposition of the inexorable, ameliorative logic of secular progress underwritten by European Christianity as the sole conceivable "horizon of expectation." And second, the framing of African pasts as ahistorical and thereby rightfully abandoned relics to be musealized and managed through Western archival tutelage (notable that Koselleck, Benjamin, and Mudimbe were/are all very interested in ruination and its possibilities.) Mudimbe's intervention highlights how the colonial subjugation of Africa drew ideological fuel from the distinctly modern phenomenon diagnosed by Koselleck - the increasingly unmoored and expansive European conceptions of futurity severed from the "spaces of experience" encapsulated in traditional reserves of meaning. By denying Africans contemporaneous present-tense historicity, colonialism could position itself as the revolutionary force capable of finally arighting the African temporal order and realizing its long-obstructed potential for directional change, the Messiah in khaki. But it's a false Messiah, yeah? A DAJJAL!! Because it's actually foreclosing new futures in its attempt to blast open a "static" past - the angel must look backward.  

even Jesus prays behind the Mahdi

Don't really have a concluding thought - the brilliant and patient friends who suffered through my yapping (and honestly went bar for bar on the psychosis) during the most recent period of occultation have given me a lot to work with on the subject of messianic time, but I haven't sat with all of it long enough yet. Hoping to look at some Levinas, Derrida, and Agamben together sometime soon, since I've been spending way too much brainspace on their own relationships to the Coming/Waiting, but for now I just want to shout out Zedeck Siew's recent post on representing revolution. Revolutionary moments in games are generally chronologized, in stages, unfolding through patterns of progress - a process of domestication. I'm not innocent of this by any means. Tanaka describes encountering this trap in his book on histories:

"Perhaps the most unsettling question that a decentering of chronology and a framework that emphasizes heterogeneity raises is the ability of history, in contrast to claims, to discuss change. The modern discipline of history sees itself as study of change. Yet I am more and more convinced, after writing two books that sought (unsuccessfully) to move beyond a teleological history, that I also have been confined to the mythical structure. I discussed, through a lens that challenged some common understandings, how things came to be, not how change happens. History’s concept of change is to describe (or critique) how units— nations, societies, and communities—became what we know them to be. Within a homogeneous time, we begin history from the end (usually the present) and move backward to some origin to discuss the unfolding toward that endpoint…I now believe that history is a field of knowledge that maintains states and conditions through a language of movement."

(Neither here nor there but I wonder if we could say Benjamin and Mudimbe, the archaeomoderns, maintain movement through a language of states and conditions.)

There's none of that in Zedeck's solution - he gives us the lightning flash of revolution, the Messiah arrived and world remade. The post's exhortation to "Toss out your rule book and sheets" evokes Benjamin's criticism of historicism's attempt to neatly order events into a homogeneous sequential flow akin to "telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary." For him, authentic historical understanding required shattering these constraining chronologies to unleash the "splinters of messianic time" encoded in religious survivals. Both Benjamin and Mudimbe highlighted the revolutionary potential of embracing the outmoded and the anachronistic as a way to catalyze new futures no longer tethered to Western modernity's progressivist teleologies; there's something about Zedeck's suggestion that we "shoe-horn a tarot deck into a map-making game" that resonates with this lineage of power contained within recombinations of received cultural materials. The revolution lies not in substituting one totalizing temporal regime for another, but in an ongoing practice of creative reassemblage enacted as a group, together - Fanon's spirituality of the New Man.