Theme Issue 61

Chronopolitics: Time of Politics, Politics of Time, Politicized Time

Edited by
Fernando Esposito and Tobias Becker

Image by Jr Korpa.

Articles

+ FERNANDO ESPOSITO AND TOBIAS BECKER, The Time of Politics, the Politics of Time, and Politicized Time: An Introduction to Chronopolitics, History and Theory, Theme Issue 61 (December 2023).

Time is so deeply interwoven with all aspects of politics that its centrality to the political is frequently overlooked. For one, politics has its own times and rhythms. Secondly, time can be an object and an instrument of politics. Thirdly, temporal attributes are used not only to differentiate basic political principles but also to legitimize or delegitimize politics. Finally, politics aims at realizing futures in the present or preventing them from materializing. Consequently, the relationship between politics and time encompasses a broad spectrum of phenomena and processes that cry out for historicization. In our introduction to this History and Theory theme issue on chronopolitics, we argue that the concept of chronopolitics makes it possible to do this and, in the process, to move the operation of rethinking historical temporalities from the periphery toward the center of historiographical attention as well as to engage in a dialogue with scholars from a wide range of disciplines. To this end, we propose a broad concept of chronopolitics by discussing existing definitions, by distinguishing between three central dimensions of chronopolitics (the time of politics, the politics of time, and politicized time), and by systematizing possible approaches to studying chronopolitics.

+ FERNANDO ESPOSITO, Peasants, Brigands, and the Chronopolitics of the New Leviathan in the Mezzogiorno, History and Theory, Theme Issue 61 (December 2023).

The image of a backward, archaic South whose barbarian population had remained at a low tier of civilization was a child of Italian unification. Not unlike the Orientalist East, the South that meridionalist discourse brought forth was a “chronotopos”—that is, a time-space that had supposedly remained in the past. The war against brigandage in the Mezzogiorno demonstrates the workings of the “politics of historicism.” This article first sheds some light on the grande brigantaggio and on the descriptions of the South that it generated among both contemporaries and later historians, such as Eric Hobsbawm. With the help of Pierre Clastres's and James C. Scott's political anthropology, it then attempts to uncover the structure beneath the “denial of coevalness.” It argues that the dichotomy between the “backward” and the “modern” was based on the political distinction between friend and enemy, which, in the age of historicism, was temporalized; that is, the temporal dichotomy of the savage and the civilized can be understood as the historicist variant of those “asymmetric counterconcepts” that have always served the state and its representatives to demarcate the corpus politicum from other political entities, to justify the state, and to praise the advantages of being governed. In conclusion, the article addresses the close interweaving of state and history, progress and civilization, in the historicist worldview and argues that it was this nexus of state and history that drove the mechanics of time-power.

+ MARCUS COLLA & ADÉLA GJURIČOVÁ, 1989: The Chronopolitics of Revolution, History and Theory, Theme Issue 61 (December 2023).

A failed effort at “reform from above” or a dramatic reassertion of “people power”? Almost thirty-five years on, studies of the Revolutions of 1989 continue to be framed by these two polarities. However, this historiographical focus has meant that scholars have often overlooked the actual content and character of protest itself. This article argues that one way of reinjecting agency and ideas back into our historical understanding of 1989 is through examining the chronopolitics of revolution: that is to say, by addressing how the control and interpretation of time became a political battlefield, a site of contention and negotiation, between Communist regimes, on the one hand, and political activists and society, on the other. Investigating events in the German Democratic Republic and Czechoslovakia, the article contains two central claims: first, that an interrogation of the concept of “chronopolitics” can provide a new angle by which to grasp the revolutionary character of “1989” and the democratic transformations that resulted and, second, by way of inversion, that a study of the temporal experiences across 1989 and the early 1990s can in turn shed light on the analytical value of “chronopolitics” more generally.

+ BENJAMIN MÖCKEL, “What Has Posterity Ever Done for Me?”: Future Generations, Intergenerational Justice, and the Chronopolitics of Distant Futures, History and Theory, Theme Issue 61 (December 2023).

“Future generations” play a key role in current political debates. In the context of the climate crisis especially, political controversies are often framed as moral problems of “intergenerational justice.” This article aims to historicize the use of the concept of “future generations” in modern political discourse and to uncover its long—and often ambivalent—history. Its main argument is that talking about “future generations” was part of an attempt to integrate (distant) futures into the political discourse of the time. The first part of the article outlines a theoretical perspective on the relationship between generations and temporalities. The second part focuses on how anticipating “future generations” became an important part of the history of utopian thinking and political planning in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in the realm of demographic and economic discussions. The third part analyzes the emergence of “future ethics” and “intergenerational justice” as important political discourses in the 1970s. This part refers both to the academic debates about “future generations” and to the way political decision-makers used the concept to legitimize their policies. The article argues that the concept of “future generations” should not be taken as an ethical principle that transcended the political debates of the present. Rather, it was itself the result of intense political controversies.

+ HELGE JORDHEIM, The Manifesto, the Timeline, and the Memory Site: The 22 July 2011 Attacks in Norway and the Chronopolitics of Genre, History and Theory, Theme Issue 61 (December 2023).

In addition to being heinous crimes, acts of terrorism are complex chronopolitical events. Perpetrators, victims, survivors, families, and authorities manage their relationship to the events by engaging with and giving shape to time, or, rather, to a plurality of times. To perform this time work, they avail themselves of different genres, which serve as chronopolitical tools. This article discusses three such genres: the manifesto, the timeline, and the memorial site. These genres belong not only to different phases of the terror attacks but also to different actors. They are used to shape temporal progression in ways that enable specific forms of action, survival, and memory. The article takes the 22 July 2011 attacks in Norway as an example to map and analyze the role of these chronopolitical genres in managing the multiple times of terror.

+ ETHAN KLEINBERG, Deconstructing Historicist Time, or Time's Scribe, History and Theory, Theme Issue 61 (December 2023).

This article investigates the enduring chronopolitics of Historicism. To do so, I work through two dominant understandings of Historicism: the view that “historicism” is a means to account for the historian's own standpoint or historical situation as the place from which they take up and interpret the past, which I call Historicism A, and the separate (though now more popular) understanding of “historicism” that is derived from Karl Popper's The Poverty of Historicism, which I call Historicism B. I am less interested in what draws these varying definitions of Historicism apart and instead investigate a point of intersection in their understanding of time and temporality. Both strains serve politics via a concept of time as a neutral, uniform, and apolitical scale upon which any political or ideological agenda is enacted. Time here serves as the basis for historical explanation, but its neutrality, homogeneity, and extra-historicality are a trick. I employ Gérard Genette's analytic of the palimpsest, with the help of Nancy Partner, to expose the ways that Historicism allows the past to be rewritten and overwritten to political and ideological ends that the temporal construct conceals. This then enables me to work through the politics of Historicism and ultimately deconstruct Historicist time, demonstrating how the universal or eternal claims of Enlightenment or pre-Historicist thought are actually maintained in Historicism as the mechanism to advance political and ideological positions under the cloak of neutrality. In what follows, I make the temporal mechanism of Historicism explicit in order to expose the ethical failings that this mechanism conceals.

Review Essays

+ MARGRIT PERNAU, review of Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History, edited by Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley, History and Theory, Theme Issue 61 (December 2023).

The twentieth century witnessed the historicization of the categories of time and space. Instead of functioning as a universal category, moving from the past to the present and from the present to the future, time has multiplied into temporalities, and historians have looked for adequate metaphors to describe this multiplicity, its many ways of moving forward and backward, its acceleration and decelerations, its entanglements, and its conflicts and struggles for hegemony. The editors of Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History offer a thought-provoking concept by translating biocenosis, the coexistence of different species in the same environment, to time studies and thus using the term “chronocenosis” to refer to different temporalities sharing the same embattled space. The volume covers a large variety of case studies—ranging from early modern Chinese historical novels to attempts to bring together social and biological time in the discussion of the Anthropocene—and draws together disciplines that are not usually discussed in studies of temporalities, disciplines ranging from law to the history of science.

+ APARNA VAIDIK, review of Time's Monster: How History Makes History, by Priya Satia, History and Theory, Theme Issue 61 (December 2023).

Historians are generally coy and diffident when it comes to engaging with the moral question despite it being a critical aspect of doing history. However, historians of empire cannot evade the moral question given the ethical dilemmas that imperialism posed for the men at its helm. To portray the colonists as hypocrites is too facile and cynical an explanation. So, what allowed the British colonists to manage the conscience that they indeed possessed? As Priya Satia boldly argues in Time's Monster: How History Makes History, the answer to this question resides in historicism, which became the new ethical idiom from the nineteenth century onward. It enabled the British colonists to assuage their conscience and made the empire an ethically thinkable reality. It helped whitewash colonial violence and generate public acceptance for colonization. The historians’ power lay in anointing history as providence and in using it to paper over the cracks in the British conscience. Being able to narrate was itself a manifestation of power. It was only after the Second World War that history renounced its pact with power and a reimagination of the historical idiom emerged. Various shades of South Asian and Caribbean anti-colonial leaders and postcolonial writers began to think beyond the historicist category of the empire. These efforts to dismantle the empire's historical narratives were paralleled by the writings of British historian E. P. Thompson, although he remained tied to the idea of history as progress. The moral question, however, remains unsettled. It endures for present-day historians because the teleserials, nostalgic period dramas, and “great men” histories continue to hold sway over the public mind, generate debates about the “benefits” of the empire, and feed Britain's anti-immigrant sentiments. Satia's book lies at the intersection of three sets of historiographies—histories of British political thought, postcolonial writings that highlight alternate conceptions of the past and the significance of orality, memory, and community history, and, lastly, histories of violence—all of which engage the moral question in some form or another.

+ HANNAH SKODA, review of Politics of Temporalization: Medievalism and Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century South America, by Nadia R. Altschul, History and Theory, Theme Issue 61 (December 2023).

This review essay examines Nadia R. Altschul's discussion of medievalism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South America in Politics of Temporalization: Medievalism and Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century South America. She explores a chronopolitics whereby the notion that late medieval Iberia lagged developmentally behind the rest of Europe sustained the claim that parts of South America were still medieval, even while capitalist modernity was established elsewhere. Her exploration of the instrumentalization of this trope for neocolonial and neoliberal purposes provokes my own exploration here of medieval ideas about time. Medieval people actually had very sophisticated ideas about time, and this complexity troubles the idea of a simplistic and dully repetitive medieval temporality on which the linear hierarchies of time analyzed and critiqued by Altschul rely. More than this, though, I suggest that medieval ideas of time provide us with alternative chronotopes in the sense of thinking through the relationships between time and space in very different ways; in turn, this might permit a different kind of chronopolitics. First, I explore the ways in which medieval people experienced and articulated multiple interwoven layers of time, de-essentializing hierarchies of temporalities and puncturing the illusion that certain spaces should be associated with certain times. Second, I look at the ways in which time was not straightforwardly conceived of as linear in the Middle Ages and consider the ways in which this troubles ideas of periodization; a short discussion of nostalgia in different periods sustains this point. Third, I explore the ways in which ideas about time could be contested in the Middle Ages, challenging the idea that chronopolitics need just be a study of hegemonic attitudes.