scholarly journals The Transformation of Historical Time: Processual and Evental Temporalities

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 219-246

The author takes on two interrelated tasks. The first is to justify the philosophy of history as an intellectual enterprise for the modern era and one which is dedicated to finding a positive meaning in the changes that occur within humanity as it moves from the past toward the future. The viability of that enterprise has been called into question by the catastrophes of the twentieth century. The second task is to propose a new concept of historical temporality instead of the “processual” one that was discredited in the previous century. Simon maintains that we are now living in a period similar to the “saddle time” (from 1750 to 1850) described by Reinhart Koselleck. The difference between that period and the current one lies in the replacement of the “processual” temporality that was established in that earlier time by an “evental” temporality, whose structure this article is intended to explain. The future plays a key role in the structure of evental temporality. The future no longer denotes the perspective that maps out the direction of historical changes but is instead synonymous with changes as such — changes so radical that the continued existence of mankind within its former ecological, biological and physiological boundaries is at stake. The author illustrates these changes with references to bioengineering, artificial intelligence, anthropogenic climate change, etc. Expectations about these changes are utopian and dystopian at the same time and can feed one’s wildest hopes and fantasies as well as inspire the darkest fears and dreads. In any case, these changes themselves are in no way determined by the previous course of history. The future they point to undermines the continuity of human experience because it is completely independent of the past.

2013 ◽  
Vol 64 (7) ◽  
pp. 641 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Sautier ◽  
Michel Duru ◽  
Roger Martin-Clouaire

Climate change research that aims to accelerate the adaptation process of agricultural production systems first requires understanding their climatic vulnerability, which is in part characterised by their exposure. This paper’s approach moves beyond traditional metrics of climate variables and proposes specific indicators for grassland-based livestock systems. The indicators focus on the variation in seasonal boundaries and seasonal and yearly herbage productivity in response to weather conditions. The paper shows how statistical interpretations of these indicators over several sites and climatic years (past and future) enable the characterisation of classes of climatic years and seasons as well as their frequencies of occurrence and their variation from the past to the expected future. The frequency of occurrence and succession of seasonal extremes is also examined by analysing the difference between observed or predicted seasonal productivity and past mean productivity. The data analysis and corresponding statistical graphics used in our approach can help farmers, advisers, and scientists envision site-specific impacts of climate change on herbage production patterns. An illustrative analysis is performed on three sites in south-western France using a series of climatic years covering two 30-year periods in the past and the future. We found that the herbage production of several clusters of climatic years can be identified as ‘normal’ (i.e. frequent) and that the most frequent clusters in the past become less common in the future, although some clusters remain common. In addition, the year-to-year variability and the contrast between spring and summer–fall (autumn) herbage production are expected to increase.


Author(s):  
G. C. Harcourt ◽  
Peter Kriesler

This introduction discusses the main themes of post-Keynesian economics and the manner in which they are dealt with by the contributors to the Handbook. In particular, the important aspects of post-Keynesian analysis are identified, and their main critiques of mainstream theory are discussed. According to Joan Robinson, “post-Keynesian has a definite meaning; it applies to an economic theory or method of analysis which takes account of the difference between the future and the past” (1979b, 210). In other words, historical time forms the basis of post-Keynesian analysis, which also stresses the importance of history, uncertainty, society, and institutions in understanding economic phenomena.


2021 ◽  
pp. 0961463X2098772
Author(s):  
Margrit Pernau

The comparison of the present to the time of the Prophet could mean very different things at different times and for different people, in spite of the finite authoritative sources, the Quran and the traditions of the Prophet. The article argues that the time of the Prophet and the comparative standard it offered not only changed depending on the concerns of the present from which the authors wrote and the future they imagined, but also affected the present and the future of each community referring to it. In the colonial contexts of the nineteenth and twentieth century, this temporal comparison met with and integrated the model of the stages of development. Comparisons with Europe, standing in for modernity, became central for the location of the community on a scale of progress, but also for attempts to change this position by catching up, educationally, economically, and politically. They went hand in hand with a strong appeal to the emotions: The successful reform of the community or nation was what would make the difference between honor, hope, and pride on the one hand and despair, humiliation, and shame on the other, and it was the responsibility of the present generation to gain or lose the future. The article investigates two comparisons of the present with the early Islamic past, Altaf Husain Hali’s Musaddas, a long poem on the Ebb and Flow of Islam (1879), and the speeches Bahadur Yar Jang delivered in Hyderabad in the 1930s and 1940s. Both, though in a noticeably different way, show a Prophetic time, which is not only situated in the past, but also the age of the most perfect form of progress ( taraqqi). Reverting to the past thus also means advancing toward the future; comparing the present to the Prophetic times is an indication how far the community is ready to face the challenges of the future.


2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 31-64

The article offers a thoroughgoing critique of the concept of presentism, through which the famous French intellectual historian François Hartog conceptualized the modern sense of history. Introducing the concept of “the regime of historicity,” Har- tog pointed to the socio-cultural conditionality of the relationship between the pre- sent, past and future. He redefined Koselleck’s description of the genesis of modern history during the “saddle time” in terms of a transformation in the regimes of his- toricity. The author of the article points out the duality of Hartog’s presentism, which is both an “ideal type” and a description of a chronologically defined span of time. Although Hartog explicitly speaks of presentism as a heuristic tool designed to deal with the temporal experiences of people, he does not investigate them anthro- pologically or sociologically. Hartog describes the specific tendencies inherent in twentieth-century historiography — its memorialization and juridification, and the concepts that have become key in dealing with the past — memory, commemoration, heritage and identity. These arguments of Hartog’s contain normative judgments and indicate a negative attitude toward the change that he witnessed in the social status of historiography. Careful study shows that Hartog’s use of presentism as a diagnosis of the modern era is incompatible with presentism as an analytical category. The former assumes a progressive linear course of time and is the inverse of modernism. The latter is a way of pluralizing time. The half-heartedness of such a status can be seen by contrasting it with Achim Landwehr’s concept of chronoference, which explains the sociocultural nature of historical time. If the distinctions between past, present and future are not ontological (as the historians of modernity imagined them) but instead situational, then the dominance of any one order of time is impossible. But unlike Landwehr, Hartog is not ready to completely abandon the modernist concept of history.


Author(s):  
VICTOR BURLACHUK

At the end of the twentieth century, questions of a secondary nature suddenly became topical: what do we remember and who owns the memory? Memory as one of the mental characteristics of an individual’s activity is complemented by the concept of collective memory, which requires a different method of analysis than the activity of a separate individual. In the 1970s, a situation arose that gave rise to the so-called "historical politics" or "memory politics." If philosophical studies of memory problems of the 30’s and 40’s of the twentieth century were focused mainly on the peculiarities of perception of the past in the individual and collective consciousness and did not go beyond scientific discussions, then half a century later the situation has changed dramatically. The problem of memory has found its political sound: historians and sociologists, politicians and representatives of the media have entered the discourse on memory. Modern society, including all social, ethnic and family groups, has undergone a profound change in the traditional attitude towards the past, which has been associated with changes in the structure of government. In connection with the discrediting of the Soviet Union, the rapid decline of the Communist Party and its ideology, there was a collapse of Marxism, which provided for a certain model of time and history. The end of the revolutionary idea, a powerful vector that indicated the direction of historical time into the future, inevitably led to a rapid change in perception of the past. Three models of the future, which, according to Pierre Nora, defined the face of the past (the future as a restoration of the past, the future as progress and the future as a revolution) that existed until recently, have now lost their relevance. Today, absolute uncertainty hangs over the future. The inability to predict the future poses certain challenges to the present. The end of any teleology of history imposes on the present a debt of memory. Features of the life of memory, the specifics of its state and functioning directly affect the state of identity, both personal and collective. Distortion of memory, its incorrect work, and its ideological manipulation can give rise to an identity crisis. The memorial phenomenon is a certain political resource in a situation of severe socio-political breaks and changes. In the conditions of the economic crisis and in the absence of a real and clear program for future development, the state often seeks to turn memory into the main element of national consolidation.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sigit Haryadi

We cannot be sure exactly what will happen, we can only estimate by using a particular method, where each method must have the formula to create a regression equation and a formula to calculate the confidence level of the estimated value. This paper conveys a method of estimating the future values, in which the formula for creating a regression equation is based on the assumption that the future value will depend on the difference of the past values divided by a weight factor which corresponding to the time span to the present, and the formula for calculating the level of confidence is to use "the Haryadi Index". The advantage of this method is to remain accurate regardless of the sample size and may ignore the past value that is considered irrelevant.


Author(s):  
James Tweedie

This chapter introduces the concept of the “archaeomodern” and its connection to the aging of the quintessential modern medium of film. It sketches the historical and cultural background of the archaeomodern turn in the late twentieth century, including the development of an obsession with the past in the heritage industry and the rise of postmodernism. It then discusses two phenomena from the 1980s and 1990s—a mannerist or baroque revival, and the development of media archaeology—that complicate the habitual association between tradition and the past or modernity and the future. The introduction suggests that archaeomodern cinema was characterized by the return to failed or abandoned modern experiments and other relics from the modern past.


Author(s):  
Mahesh K. Joshi ◽  
J.R. Klein

The world of work has been impacted by technology. Work is different than it was in the past due to digital innovation. Labor market opportunities are becoming polarized between high-end and low-end skilled jobs. Migration and its effects on employment have become a sensitive political issue. From Buffalo to Beijing public debates are raging about the future of work. Developments like artificial intelligence and machine intelligence are contributing to productivity, efficiency, safety, and convenience but are also having an impact on jobs, skills, wages, and the nature of work. The “undiscovered country” of the workplace today is the combination of the changing landscape of work itself and the availability of ill-fitting tools, platforms, and knowledge to train for the requirements, skills, and structure of this new age.


Author(s):  
Tanjana S. Zlotnikova ◽  

The article raises the question of foreseeing moral and intellectual, aesthetic and political collisions that could occur after the expected changes at the turn of the XIX–XX centuries. The philosophical and anthropological paradigm of the pre-revolutionary era is defined through metaphors and concepts that attracted the attention of Russian philosophers, representatives of the sphere of artistic creativity: «expectation» (of changes, new people and phenomena) and «fear» (of changes, the unknown). For the analysis, we selected the judgments of prominent philosophers who discovered existential issues and related existential problems of the transition era for their contemporaries: V. Solovyov, V. Rozanov and N. Berdyaev. In V. Solovyov, the problem of waiting is related to the loneliness of a person in the face of global discord. Attention is drawn to the concept of «symptom of the end», to the concepts of crisis and disaster. Loneliness is experienced by the intellectual in anticipation of changes, possibly destructive, so the expectation as a context of loneliness turns into horror. V. Rozanov emphasized the tendency to distance himself from the world, Europe, contemporaries and classics in Russia. In Rozanov's philosophical and journalistic works, the future is not discussed at all because it is impossible to construct it; the past, which might have been the refuge of ideas about the harmony and dignity of life, causes the philosopher's attitude is sometimes even more negative than the present. On the example of the great creators – A. Chekhov, V. Meyerhold, V. Komissarzhevskaya and other contemporaries of N. Berdyaev, the psychoemotional tension from the coming crisis, the horror in anticipation of the coming future is shown. Berdyaev organically raises the question of the border between longing and other conditions (boredom, horror, a sense of emptiness), and the border is existential.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Eleanor Toland

<p>A surprisingly high number of the novels, short stories and plays produced in Britain during the Edwardian era (defined in the terms of this thesis as the period of time between 1900 and the beginning of World War One) use the Grecian deity Pan, god of shepherds, as a literary motif. Writers as diverse as Somerset Maugham, E.M. Forster, Frances Hodgson Burnett and G.K. Chesterton made Pan a fictional character or alluded to the god of shepherds in more subtle ways. The mystery of why the Edwardians used an ancient Greek god as a symbol requires a profound interrogation of the early twentieth century British soul. The Edwardian era was a narrow corridor of time between the Victorian age and the birth of modernism with the First World War, a period characterised by vast social and political transition, as a generation began to comprehend change they equally feared and desired. Pan was an equivocal figure: easily portrayed as satanic due to his horns and goatish nature, but as the kindly god of shepherds, also a Christ-like figure. Such ambiguity made Pan an ideal symbol for an age unsure of itself and its future. Writers like Maugham and Machen, afraid of social and sexual revolution, portrayed Pan as diabolical, a tempter and a rapist. E.M. Forster, a homosexual man hopeful about the possibility of change, made Pan a terrifying but ultimately liberating figure for those ready to accept the freedom he represented. Kenneth Grahame, desiring the return of a Luddite, Arcadian past that had never truly existed, wrote of Pan as Jesus on the riverbank, sheltering the lost and giving mystic visions to the worthy. Pan represented a simultaneous craving in the Edwardians to flee to the past and to embrace the future, an idealism of the primitive coupled with hope for the future. What he also symbolized was anxiety about the future and the desire to not return to the horrors of the past, fears of the primitive suggested in the nightmarish atavism of Saki’s “The Music on the Hill” and the fears of what society might become expressed in Forster’s “The Machine Stops”. The Edwardian Pan eventually reached its culmination in J.M. Barrie’s twentieth-century fairy tale Peter Pan, in which the eponymous character, seeming at first so different from the ancient Greek mythological figure, became an embodiment of everything the Edwardian Pan phenomenon represented. With the nightmarish yet fascinating figure of Peter Pan, the Edwardians had created a new Pan, reborn for their age. With the beginning of World War One, the Pan figure would begin to fade into insignificance, with only one major work later published which could justifiably be called part of the phenomenon; Lord Dunsany’s The Blessing of Pan, a fitting elegy for the Edwardian Age.</p>


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