VIRTUAL HISTORIOGRAPHY: OPENING HISTORY TOWARD THE FUTURE

LUCIAN HÖLSCHER

This article deals with the conceptual tools of a virtual historiography. This is what I call a historiography that goes beyond factual events to consider the possible alternative interpretations of the course of history without entering the field of counterfactual history. In contrast to counterfactual history, which asks what else could have happened, virtual historiography asks how the past would be seen if it had led to another future. For such a historiographical project, the article offers a set of conceptual tools that allow possible alternative courses of events in the past and present to be brought to the attention of contemporary historians: the concept of time figures for presenting a typology of the temporal directions of historical change (part 1); the concept of the future as a generator of time figures (part 2); the concepts of past futures for developments alternative to the factual course of history and of future pasts for visions of the present state of affairs seen from a future point of view (part 3). In part 4, I outline the significance of these concepts for a virtual historiography, and in part 5, I draw conclusions for the political use and the scale of time implicit in such a design of history.

Image by Mo (9 October 2021)