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Archiv für Januar 2017

China, Revolution and Presentism

Januar 29, 2017, 10:00 am, Smith SA., Allgemein.

When the idea of a round table on presentism was mooted at a board meeting of Past and Present, my thoughts turned to Herbert Butterfield’s Whig Interpretation of History, a text I hadn’t read since I was an undergraduate. Going back to Butterfield, however, I discovered that he never actually used the term.11 His target was the tendency he perceived in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British historiography to write British history as a story of the onward march of liberty and, more generally, to judge the past by the standards of the present, which is what I had remembered as a critique of presentism. His book now looks dated. He subscribed to an epistemology that assumed historians could recover the reality of the past through empirical research, that they could get inside the heads of historical actors and so forth. Yet it was refreshing to re-read the text as it still has many wise things to say, especially about the relationship between past and present in the writing of history. He writes, for example, that ‘the chief aim of the historian is the elucidation of the unlikenesses between past and present and his chief function is to act … as the mediator between other generations and our own’.22 Two propositions here: one that stresses the alterity of the past, the other that points to the responsibility of the historian to communicate understanding of the past across generations. Moreover, Butterfield does not assume naively that the historian (inevitably assumed to be male) can escape the present: By imaginative sympathy he makes the past intelligible to the present. He translates its conditioning circumstances into terms which we today can understand. It is in this sense that history must always be written from the point of view of the present. It is in this sense that every age will have to write its history over again.33 There have been many who have questioned the confident assumption that present and past can be brought into the kind of dialogue envisaged by Butterfield. Writing eight years after him, the philosopher John Dewey argued that it is a matter of elementary logic that the historian always studies the ‘past-of-the-present’ rather than the past in its own terms.44 Others have pointed out that the selection of topics for investigation, lines of interpretation, value judgements will always reflect the situatedness of the historian in the present. Some see this as cause for celebration since it allows us to ask new questions of the past and to exploit the accumulated knowledge of the past. More recently, under the influence of postmodernism, with its denial of any ontological status to the past, some suggest that respect for the alterity of the past is neither here nor there.55 David Harlan argues: All we need to do is find some moral exemplars from the past — people whose lives embody the values we think important. Instead of striving for detachment and objectivity, for ‘the most complete, least idiosyncratic, view that humans are capable of’, we should be trying to convince other people (our students, for example) that their take on the world would be richer, more interesting, and more ethically pertinent if they added some of our heroes to their own list of heroes.66 This long-standing debate about the relationship of past and present in historical writing lies at the core of what I understand as presentism. But current interest in the term derives from a different source and is coming to be used in a very different sense. This new currency stems from the work of the French historian François Hartog, whose book Régimes d’historicité: présentisme et expériences du temps was published in 2003 and has lately appeared in English translation.77 Hartog has developed a concept of ‘regimes of historicity’ which he defines as the particular historical form in which a society articulates the relationship between the temporal categories of past, present and future, and the ways in which it ascribes value to that relationship. He uses the idea in both a restricted sense — how a given society approaches its past and reflects upon it — and a broader sense (following Reinhart Koselleck) as the ‘modalities of self-consciousness that each and every society adopts in its construction of time and its perceptions’.88 He defines a ‘regime of historicity’ as an ideal type, a tool, rather than a factual given.99 In an interview that pre-dates the appearance of the English translation of his book, however, Hartog was more concrete in specifying three ideal-type regimes of historicity: that of the ancient world, which ascribed almost the entirety of value to the past; that of modernity, which, from the eighteenth century to the late twentieth, looked to the future and was underwritten by an idea of progress; and today’s regime of historicity, which he dubs ‘presentism’, in which the present prevails over the past and future.1010 Hartog defines presentism as the ‘sense that only the present exists, a present characterized at once by the tyranny of the instant and by the treadmill of an unending now’.1111 In his interview, he elaborated on this: presentism ‘sees the present as self-sufficient, as the sole horizon of possibility, as that which constantly fades into immediacy’.1212 Whereas in the first iteration of the concept, he appeared to suggest that we are already living in a presentist regime, in the English edition he is more circumspect, preferring to describe presentism as a hypothesis to be explored. Indeed, he now seems to have distanced himself from a strong defence of presentism: ‘Are we dealing with a past which has been forgotten or which is too insistently recalled?’, he asks: ‘a future which has almost disappeared from our horizon or which hangs over us as an imminent threat?’1313