Volume 60
Written By Elizabeth Boyle
ITERATIONS
Series 1: Historical Futures
Zoltán Boldizsár Simon and Marek Tamm, "Historical Futures," History and Theory 60, no. 1 (2021).
This article outlines the agenda of a collective research project that aims to explore modalities of historical futures that constitute our current historical condition. To present the collective work adequately, we have teamed up with History and Theory and initiated a long-term serial publishing experiment. In the coming years, each issue of the journal will feature contributions to this research endeavor. In our project-opening piece, we briefly introduce the experiment and the premises of the collective research agenda. We begin by recounting the many ways in which increasingly towering novel future prospects have begun to capture the scholarly world’s attention across disciplinary boundaries. We then introduce the notion of historical futures. Crediting theoretical inspirations and paying intellectual debts to conceptual relatives, we define “historical futures” as the plurality of transitional relations between apprehensions of the past and anticipated futures. At the core of the article, we formulate our call for a collective investigation of modalities of historical futures and sketch three basic sets of concerns that the explorative works in this experiment may address: kinds of transitions from past to futures, kinds of anticipatory practices, and kinds of registers as interpretive tools that position such practices on a variety of spectrums between two poles (for instance, a value register with the poles of catastrophic and redemptive futures). Finally, we close with a brief note about the necessity of collective endeavors.
ARTICLES
Zachary Riebeling, “Trauma Delegitimized: Karl Löwith and the Cosmic View of History," History and Theory 60, no. 1 (2021).
This article uncovers the work of trauma in Karl Löwith’s historical thought. Although best known for his critique of the philosophy of history and for the conception of secularization in his 1949 book, Meaning in History, Löwith deepened his positive historical vision in several essays that he wrote in the 1950s and 1960s. From these texts emerges a unique historical orientation, which I call the “cosmic view of history.” This perspective was at once a critique of modern historical consciousness and an embodied corrective to that consciousness, one in which the catastrophes of the twentieth century were relativized and made endurable. In both the origin and structure of this historical orientation and in its textual expression in Löwith’s work, trauma is a residual force that links Löwith’s language, his experiences, and the postwar context. The role of trauma in Löwith’s thought further reveals a process of delegitimization in which historical consciousness and historical events lose their power to determine historical meaning, thus enabling a response to and an escape from catastrophe. This article also explores the significance of this cosmic view of history for contemporary theoretical concerns related to the Anthropocene and its consequences for historical theory.
Alfredo Macías Vázquez, Pablo Alonso González, and Eva Parga Dans, “Class or Community? Marx, the Russian Commune, and Contemporary Critical Theory," History and Theory 60, no. 1 (2021).
This article explores the relationship between class and community through a discussion of peasant struggles and the commune during the Russian Revolution. Doing so, we show how Marx’s class-oriented reflections on community can help us to understand the role that the peasantry plays (or should play) in processes of social transformation. This enables us, first, to understand the relevance of communal forms for Marx, who believed that communitarian ways of life were crucial for overcoming a value-based society. It is, in fact, a mistake to divide Marx’s intellectual trajectory into two periods: a categorical Marx, who authored Capital and critically analyzed the classical theory of value, and a phenomenological, empirical Marx, who in the last years of his life abandoned writing Capital and focused instead on studying the Russian peasantry. Second, it enables us to discuss new externalist visions, such as postcolonial and decolonial theories, which postulate that the subordination of contemporary peasant communities is rooted in epistemology, culture, and local power relations. These theories are related to the old social-democratic canon, which conceives of social classes as preconstituted entities and of capital as a parasitic externality that is incommensurable with social dynamics. The experience of the Russian peasantry calls into question all externalist and ontological perspectives.
FORUM: Times of the Event
Theo Jung and Anna Karla, “Times of the Event: An Introduction," History and Theory 60, no. 1 (2021).
This introduction sets the stage for the following contributions by outlining the current state of research on the two fundamental categories that this forum brings together: the event and time. In a brief survey, we discuss the ways in which the temporality of events has been theorized across disciplines. We also present our core argument for understanding the event as a temporal focal point. In dialogue with existing approaches, we seek to develop a theoretically enriched and empirically fruitful conceptualization of the event, thus offering new perspectives to the academic historiography of events as well as to historical culture at large.
Fernando Esposito, “Despite Singularity: The Event and Its Manifold Structures of Repetition," History and Theory 60, no. 1 (2021).
This article’s principle interest is in the “structures of repetition” that characterize supposedly singular events. The starting point for the analysis is Reinhart Koselleck’s discussion of the event in “Structures of Repetition in Language and History.” Koselleck perceived events as arising from metahistorical structures that characterize all human histories regardless of the eras in which they took place and are narrated. This article scrutinizes Koselleck’s understanding of the event as well as the underlying “structures of repetition” shaping it. In considering the question of the temporality of the event, this article distinguishes three strata of repetitive structures. First, it examines a seemingly trivial historiographical structure of repetition of the event, which is the iterative proclamation of the return of the event. It then analyzes Koselleck’s foundational, yet rarely truly appreciated, “Structures of Repetition in Language and History” and maps out the fundamental structures of repetition, which are the conditions of possibility of events. Finally, it hints at a further linguistic stratum of repetitive structures. In light of growing interest in Koselleck’s work in both German and Anglophone historiography, this article systematizes the manifold structures of repetition against the backdrop of current explorations of the event’s temporality, thus surveying a facet of Koselleck’s pioneering work that is too often forgotten.
Britta Hochkirchen, “Beyond Representation: Pictorial Temporality and the Relational Time of the Event," History and Theory 60, no. 1 (2021).
Pictures are often connected with the mediation of the event but, paradoxically, not with temporality as such. Although there are several existing approaches that focus on the interplay between the event and its literary representation, the relation between pictorial time and the temporal constitution of the event remains unexplored. The field of image theory has offered insights into the multiple dimensions of the picture’s temporality. It has shown that the picture’s temporality concerns not only the depicted event but also the picture’s immanent modes of producing different temporalities within one pictorial plane. The picture thus not only makes visible but also generates multilayered times of the event. This article brings together insights from image theory and from theories of historical times to demonstrate the relationship between the times of the event and the inner logic of the picture. In order to identify the various qualities of the picture that structure the times of the event, this article uses the case study of Reinhart Koselleck’s practical and theoretical work with pictures. This article reads Koselleck’s approaches to pictures alongside new insights concerning the relationality of time to the event and the picture. By exploring the picture’s agency with regards to the politics of time, this article lays bare the picture’s potential to structure the times of the event.
Theo Jung, “Events Getting Ahead of Themselves: Rethinking the Temporality of Expectations," History and Theory 60, no. 1 (2021).
Whereas most theoretical and historiographical accounts of the event have focused on its present and past dimensions, this article addresses the relatively underexplored phenomenon of the future event. As temporal junctures, events often already elicit effects before they come to pass, and even if they never do. Building on foundational work on the relation between experience and expectation by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Reinhart Koselleck as well as on current historiographical debates on “past futures,” I develop a threefold typology of the future event, distinguishing between the assumption of the routine event, the expectation of the relative event, and the adumbration of the radical event. Engaging with case studies like the year 2000, the ambivalent character of so-called media events, and ongoing debates about a possible climate collapse and the COVID-19 pandemic, I show how reconsidering the complex temporalities of the future event can shed new light on the ways in which past societies made their futures present.
Anna Karla, “Controversial Chronologies: The Temporal Demarcation of Historic Events," History and Theory 60, no. 1 (2021).
In everyday language and in historiography, influential events are commonly described as “historic” but are rarely defined from a theoretical standpoint. Discussing temporal demarcations of events by scholars—in particular William H. Sewell Jr.’s foundational study of the Storming of the Bastille—this article considers the contemporary urge to define the event’s temporal boundaries to better evaluate the alleged importance of certain events in history. Rather than perpetuating the constructivist idea that any event possesses a fundamentally interpretable character, it crafts a theoretical definition of the historic event that distinguishes between its flexible fringes and its rather stable core. Fixing an event as an anchor point on the timeline of history is thus presented as a process that provokes political, social, and—last but not least—financial controversies. As this article shows with examples from the history of revolutions reaching from the late eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century, such epoch-making events are essentially shaped by their flexible beginning and ending points. Although the cores of these events remain strikingly stable, their temporal fringes become objects of highly controversial discussions.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Lloyd Kramer on History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000 by Sumit Guha, History and Theory 60, no. 1 (2021).
Sandra Rudnick Luft on Giambattista Vico and the New Psychological Science edited by Luca Tateo, History and Theory 60, no. 1 (2021).
Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft on This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom by Martin Hägglund, History and Theory 60, no. 1 (2021).
ITERATIONS
Series 1: Historical Futures
Frank Ankersmit, “The Thorn of History: Unintended Consequences and Speculative Philosophy of History," History and Theory 60, no. 2 (2021).
Most, if not all, readers of this journal will be familiar with Hegel's notion of “the Cunning of Reason,” which refers to the idea that the unintended consequences of human action should bring about the self-realization of the Mind or the Spirit. What Hegel left to his reader's imagination was the question of how order could arise from the chaos of unintended consequences. Nevertheless, Hegel's notion of the unintended consequences of human action is a most fruitful one. In this article, I argue that unintended consequences are “the stuff” from which history is made and that a speculative philosophy of history can be built from them too. This argument infers a speculative philosophy of history from historical writing and not a variant of historical writing from a speculative philosophy of history, as is normally the case. Finally, I discuss how global warming and the impending climate catastrophe can be said to be the prototypical unintended consequences of human action, or to speak with Saddam Hussein, “the mother of all” unintended consequences. This article ends, therefore, with a discussion of how the notion of unintended consequences may contribute to a better understanding of what the Anthropocene must mean for our historical consciousness and for how we locate ourselves in the evolution of history since the dawn of humanity down to the present, in which dark clouds gather over our collective future.
Apolline Taillandier, “'Staring into the Singularity' and Other Posthuman Tales: Transhumanist Stories of Future Change," History and Theory 60, no. 2 (2021).
In this article, I conduct a contextual analysis of transhumanist conceptions of posthuman futures. Focusing on cryonics, nanotechnology, and artificial superintelligence technological projects through a study of primarily American sources from the 1960s onward, I identify three distinct conceptualizations of the posthuman future: Promethean, spontaneous, and scalar. I argue that transhumanists envision posthumanity as resulting from a transition that involves both continuity and radical change. Although these three posthuman futures appear to share an interest in predicting a superior “cosmic” realization of human destiny, they involve distinct “liberal” conceptions of historical agency. These include the unlimited individual liberty of the technologized self, the knowledge-ordering properties of the market, and the rational aggregation of individual interests over the long term. I locate these heterogeneous and partly conflicting conceptions of historical agency in the context of the postwar crisis and remaking of liberalism's future. I argue that transhumanist ideas about the transition toward a more-than-human or beyond-human future are best understood as manifesting a wide range of attempts at thinking about horizons of unprecedented change within the terms of postwar liberal projects. Ultimately, transhumanist futures shed light on the multiplicity of political temporalities that are required for thinking and writing stories about unprecedented futures.
ARTICLES
Sina Steglich, “The Archive as Chronotopos in the Nineteenth Century: Toward a History of Archival Times," History and Theory 60, no. 2 (2021).
The archive produces patterns of time consciousness and makes it possible to order time through its materiality and visibility. Thus, as an institution and as an idea, the archive offers a historical concept of time that is based on specific evidence and perceived authenticity. This hypothesis forms the main focus of my article. Scholars have recently argued that time cannot be perceived when it is in motion; fixing it would therefore enable the handling of time and the construction of specific—that is, historically contextualized and socioculturally and politically relevant—chronotypes. Hence, the archive's status as a complex of repository buildings, archival documents, institutional structures, and scientific practices means that it can be understood as a paradigmatic institution in which projects involving the formation of a concrete chronotype are carried out. This special quality of the archive enables us to discuss its relevance not only at times of crisis and temporal acceleration but also in the experiences of contingency that can be observed in almost all nineteenth-century European societies. With this historical context in mind, my article raises the question of whether the archive can be read as an authority that helped people to regain orientation in time by constructing and communicating a specific pattern of time. To be more precise, it understands the archive as a physical and conceptual space of time—a chronotopos—in which a historically, nationally bound concept of time is rooted. This interpretation of the archive as a time-ordering institution helps to shed light on the assemblage of temporal orders in modernity. I thus propose that the historical conceptualization of time qua archive—and the archive's materiality and organic nature—helped to foster a nationalized understanding of time that was not abstract and arbitrary but rather evident and authentic.
Mariana Imaz-Sheinbaum, “Principles of Narrative Reason," History and Theory 60, no. 2 (2021).
Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen has theorized that narrative does not involve rational content. Rather, he suggested, narrative is only a descriptive practice consisting of singular statements. Kuukkanen thus divorced the rational and narrative frameworks, arguing that historiography belongs to the former and not the latter. This article establishes a new conceptual framework that provides a revised understanding of narrative as a rational practice. I argue that the principles of organization brought to light by the Gestalt school of experimental psychology illuminate the underlying organizational logic that historians engage with when constructing narratives. To illustrate how these principles operate in historical narratives and how they are rational, I examine classic historical works such as Karl Marx's introduction of the concept of surplus value; Giambattista Vico's Autobiography and Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance; Reinhart Koselleck's Futures Past; and E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class and Johan Huizinga's Waning of the Middle Ages. My analysis shows that narrative entails its own kind of explanatory structure. It is a way of thinking that provides meaning and structure to that which is otherwise unstructured and undetermined. Finally, my new framework offers a foundation for the rational evaluation of narratives by showing how the context of discovery and the context of justification cannot be separated in the case of narrative histories.
Mohammed S. Ali, “Marking Time and Writing Histories," History and Theory 60, no. 2 (2021).
Given that historical subjects experience a multiplicity of temporalities, how should scholars themselves keep time? What should they consider when selecting one temporality over another? In this article, I examine scholarship that attempts to reconcile marking time with the analysis of change over time. Before beginning this analysis, I recount how the anno Domini era became the standard for marking time. I then discuss scholarship by Fernand Braudel and David Harvey in order to establish the general sociohistorical recognition that time is a multiplicity experienced differently by its subjects. In doing so, I tease out the irony of scholars accepting temporality as a multiplicity yet nonetheless using the anno Domini calendar system to mark time in their scholarship. I then take up work by Randall Collins, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Hayden White, laying bare the ways in which they present a series of divergent possibilities for marking time in history that in turn call attention to its irreducible multiplicity. I read these scholars as invested in determining how to create and write with a language that is suitable for studying historical change over time but that does not rely on the assumption that time itself is something monolithic and prioritized above the Weltanschauungen of historical subjects. After presenting their models, I discuss the relative strengths and weaknesses of each approach. Finally, I close this article with a meditation on the dynamics of knowledge production in the historical guild vis-à-vis the possibilities and prospects of marking time differently in scholarship.
FORUM: Historiography, Ideology, and Law
Justin Desautels-Stein and Samuel Moyn, “Historiography, Ideology, and Law: An Introduction," History and Theory 60, no. 2 (2021).
This is an introduction to a forum on historiography, ideology, and law. The basic question weaving this forum together concerns the meaning of the term “critical” in the domain of critical legal history, a question that is deeply familiar to historians of all stripes. Ultimately, whether you are a lawyer doing historical work, a historian interested in law, or a historian of a different sort altogether, there is no hiding from the question of context and, critically, the ideological stakes in choosing an answer to that question.
Justin Desautels-Stein and Samuel Moyn, “On the Domestication of Critical Legal History," History and Theory 60, no. 2 (2021).
Among many of today's legal historians, there is a relatively new and generally unreflective understanding of the relationship between history and method. The landscape is everywhere marked by a tendency to eschew big thinking, grand theory, and programmatic approaches to historical explanation and social transformation. In the place of the grand theory approach to law and history, there is a preference for the minimalist, the pragmatic, the particularistic, and the quotidian. What this normal science of today's legal historiography makes obvious is a kind of attachment to particular kinds of problems with particular sorts of built-in solutions. The result for today is intellectual stagnation, a routinized and thoroughly domesticated mode of revealing contingency. Oddly, the fascination with contingency, and its deadening affair with a minimalist pragmatism, is itself a result of the triumph of what continues to be called “critical legal history.” Ostensibly due to an interface between critical legal studies and the historical discipline, the rise and triumph of critical legal history hides a secret: the whole idea of a reigning critical appreciation for contingency seems to be a misnomer. Sure, some may say that “things might have been otherwise.” But what this intellectual settlement demands is obedience to its qualification: “things might have been otherwise, but they weren't, and so let's get on with doing what works.” Although so-called critical legal history seduces adherents with promises of edgy progressivism, the actual malaise of our minimalism seems in fact to suggest just the opposite. It is a quiescent and even quietistic method in practice, counseling in its conservatism against higher-order proposals that might ever make good on the discovery that nothing is natural. In the end, either we must accept that critical legal history in the United States is a lot less politically explosive than we once thought—given its deradicalization and domestication today—or that people have been mistaken about what critical legal history was, is, and ought to be.
Natasha Wheatley, “Law and the Time of Angels: International Law's Method Wars and the Affective Life of Disciplines," History and Theory 60, no. 2 (2021).
Recent method wars in international legal scholarship turn on the problem of law in time. Rejecting historians' focus on context and their “policing of anachronism,” prominent legal scholars like Anne Orford and Martti Koskenniemi have argued that the workings of modern law are not governed by the narrow strictures of sequential chronology and that legal scholars require alternate methods that reflect law's transfer of meaning through time. Contextualism, in this reckoning, represents a misguided methodological straightjacket that stifles critique by quarantining meaning and power in discrete historical silos; the embrace of anachronism, conversely, would foster a revitalized history of international law intimately connected with the political imperatives of the present. This essay uses the debate as an opening into a fuller exploration of law in history and in time. In considering the idiosyncratic way law frames time, sequence, and duration, it explores the connection between law's transtemporal transfers and its very mode of reproduction. To speak of law's capacity to escape context and travel through time is another way of describing its normativity: the laws of the past that survive to exert a normative force in the present are not, in their law-ness, past—they are simply present law. The essay suggests some ways to make that temporality itself the object of analysis (rather than naturalizing and affirming it, as Orford has, or, conversely, dismissing it as bad history, as some historians have). It draws on the history of science to generate an account of law's temporal habitus as a disciplinary knowledge tool, a kind of epistemic virtue that is intimately involved in law's internal criteria for truth and falsity.
Maeve Glass, “Theorizing Constitutional History," History and Theory 60, no. 2 (2021).
The historical study of American constitutional law has long rested on a conceptual framework that divides the past into linear units of analysis. Constitutional time unfolds according to discrete eras defined by changes in political leadership and governance, whereas constitutional space typically appears divided into bordered jurisdictions and regional sections. Despite the prominence of this conceptual framework, scholars have yet to ask how, why, and to what effect it became the paradigmatic mode of study. In the absence of close study, the framework instead appears as a neutral embodiment of the constitutional order. This essay offers a preliminary sketch of how theories of knowledge production, and particularly Louis Althusser's theory of law as an ideological apparatus, can help to move beyond this facile assumption. By returning to a selection of landmark judicial opinions and legal treatises from the long nineteenth century and analyzing their discursive practices in relation to the dominant modes of production, this exploratory essay suggests a striking possibility: that the paradigm that we have assumed to be a primordial part of the constitutional order only emerged in its current iteration in the late nineteenth-century shift from a plantation mode of production rooted in enslaved labor to an industrial mode of production rooted in wage labor. As these sources indicate, leading jurists in America's age of conquest and enslavement regularly analyzed questions of state power and rights by organizing time according to chains of title rooted in dispossession based on race and space according to the geographic circuits of capital. Effective in naturalizing the strict racialized hierarchy integral to the production and circulation of export commodities, this discourse of tethering institutions to the history of property acquisition and the movement of commodities began to shift with the formal abolition of slavery and rise of intensive industrialization, as a new generation of legal academics created a paradigm of institutional time and space that, by erasing material histories of structural inequality, made it possible to reconstitute an old social order predicated on racial classifications of whiteness.
Judith Surkis, “Family Law Matters," History and Theory 60, no. 2 (2021).
This essay analyzes how new histories of family law help to dismantle developmentalist accounts of legal, economic, and political modernity. Far from being backwaters, they have recently emerged as sites of theoretical and practical innovation. Recombining methodologies from genealogy to social reproduction theory and psychoanalysis, they do more than denaturalize categories, destabilize familiar narratives, and demonstrate ideological contradictions (although they do that too). Motivated by a sense of what is lost theoretically and politically by the family's historical and juridical marginalization, they reinvigorate legal history by locating the problem of the family at the center of broader critical projects.
Simon Stern, “Proximate Causation in Legal Historiography," History and Theory 60, no. 2 (2021).
The variety of legal history published in general-interest law journals tends to differ from the variety published in history journals. This study compares the two varieties by examining footnote references in five general-interest law journals and footnote references in two journals of legal history. In the law journals, cases and statutes accounted for the single largest group of footnotes (approximately 35%), followed by references to other law journal articles (nearly 25%). In the legal history journals, these two categories accounted for less than 20% of all references; primary and secondary historical materials predominated in the footnotes. To be sure, legal decisions and law journal articles can also be historical sources: rather than being used as evidence of what the law is, they might be studied for what they reveal about legal reasoning or rhetoric in an earlier age. However, in most legal historical research that attends primarily to cases and statutes, these materials figure as evidence of the state of the law at that time. When the analysis relies on legal sources to trace the development of a certain doctrine and treats them as sufficient to account for that development, the result is the distinctive style of research that I seek to contrast against approaches that cast the net of historical inquiry more widely. To account for these different approaches, I suggest that law professors rely on a notion of proximate causation as a historiographic method. According to this approach, legal developments are proximately caused by other developments in the legal sphere, and other social and cultural developments play more attenuated roles, such that their influence is less significant. By proposing this explanation, I hope to draw more attention to assumptions about causation in legal historiography and to question their persuasive force.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Jonathan Gorman on The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation by Paul A. Roth, History and Theory 60, no. 2 (2021).
Zachary Riebeling on History in Times of Unprecedented Change: A Theory for the 21st Century by Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, History and Theory 60, no. 2 (2021).
John H. Zammito on Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories by Reinhart Koselleck, edited and translated by Sean Franzel and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, History and Theory 60, no. 2 (2021).
ITERATIONS
Series 1: Historical Futures
Nitzan Lebovic, “Homo complexus: The “Historical Future” of Complicity," History and Theory 60, no. 3 (2021).
The moment in which we live proposes a staggering new challenge to past, present, and future understanding of our existence: climate change in general, and the Anthropocene in particular, requires a recalibration of all temporal relationships. In this article, I propose to identify the agent of change with current forms of complicity, or, as I call it in the title to this piece, the Homo complexus. A focus on complicity, I will argue, suggests that any future analysis of our society will recognize a short-term investment in a threat hovering above different forms of existence, or a new “sense of an ending.”
The Eighth History and Theory Lecture
François Hartog, “CHRONOS, KAIROS, KRISIS: THE GENESIS OF WESTERN TIME," History and Theory 60, no. 3 (2021).
Responses by: Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Dana Sajdi, Nitzan Lebovic, Ethan Kleinberg, Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, and Dipesh Chakrabarty.
Articles
Daniel Woolf, “Getting Back to Normal: On Normativity in History and Historiography," History and Theory 60, no. 3 (2021).
Normativity has long been a central concept in ethics, medicine, and the social sciences. It has not been fully explored as an element in historiography or historical thought. This article contends that normativity, when taken as a metaconcept that underpins notions of the “normal,” “norms,” and “normality,” can help us understand changing attitudes to the possibility, actuality, and moral exemplarity of historical phenomena, but only if we disaggregate three different modes or registers of normativity: moral, metaphysical, and phenomenal. After exploring the place of moral normativity in historical thought and writing from antiquity to the early modern era, I discuss metaphysical and phenomenal normativity as filters that, from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century, were applied to reported or recorded experience prior to any decision to derive from it any moral conclusions. I then argue that Baconian empiricism, Humean skepticism, classical probability theory, and mathematical statistics collectively gave rise to a modern sense of what constituted “normality” for past and present events. Finally, I conclude that the late Enlightenment bequeathed to modernity and postmodernity a normalized sense of fundamental rupture (exemplified by the French Revolution and characterized as the “historical sublime”) that we still experience and struggle through as we routinely reconstruct history as both a linear tradition and a discontinuous series of “new normals.” We also contend with this sense of fundamental rupture as we “renormalize” catastrophes that could reasonably be regarded as beyond normalization while simultaneously fetishizing the experience of disruption, which we have defined as a clinamenic swerve from one normality into another. This paradoxical process is accompanied by a deadened capacity to judge that which is, and is not, normal.
Georg Gangl, “The Essential Tension: Historical Knowledge between Past and Present," History and Theory 60, no. 3 (2021).
In this article, I scrutinize knowledge as it operates in historiography. Historians find themselves in a peculiar position: they need to employ the tools available to them in their present in order to say true things about a past that might have been very different. I argue that our knowledge of the past is best understood through an informational account of knowledge and a coherentist account of justification. In this framework, knowledge claims about the past and anachronisms introduce no special epistemic problems for historiography, and once the logic of historical (re)description and evaluation is understood, historiography stands firm among the historical sciences in terms of the feasibility of its goal of speaking truthfully about the past.
FORUM: What Is a Postcolonized History? Seeing India through Mexico
Taymiya R. Zaman, “Chasing India in Mexico City," History and Theory 60, no. 3 (2021).
A paradox informs the writing of Mexican and Indian history. In Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico (2006), Camilla Townsend writes that Mexico was conquered and could never be conquered because indigenous ways of being in the world survived, adapted, and continued. Similarly, in A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia (2016), Manan Ahmed Asif writes that Sindh was conquered by British armies but cities such as Uch, in which shrines and trees remain imbued with the sacred, point to that which is impossible to conquer. If change itself has unchanging essence embedded within it (we must know what Sindh or Mexico are in order to recognize that they have changed), then what would it mean for postcolonized historians to think more deeply about what historical narrative cannot conquer, tame, or control? How might we think about ways of doing history that we have internalized despite these being products of European conquest themselves? To reflect on these questions, I draw on my forays into Mexican history as a Mughal historian and discuss how examining premodern and modern encounters between the Muslim world and the Americas might open windows into unexplored ways of inhabiting the past and present.
Manan Ahmed Asif, “Reading across Firishta and Chimalpahin," History and Theory 60, no. 3 (2021).
In this essay, I reflect on the position of a postcolonized historian traversing space and time, thinking and linking to histories of European arrivals to Mexico and India. The essay is concerned with early seventeenth-century histories by Chimalpahin and Firishta, who documented their worlds before and after the arrival of Europeans. I argue for a transregional decolonial approach to thinking about historical violence and the formation of disciplinary histories.
Camilla Townsend, “Responses from Latin America: Thoughts of a Contemporary Scholar and of the Seventeenth-Century Indigenous Historian Chimalpahin," History and Theory 60, no. 3 (2021).
This essay is a response to this forum’s other two essays, which are by Taymiya R. Zaman and Manan Ahmed Asif. In it, I share in the excitement presently generated in the field of history by the effort to make South-South connections and yet also warn of the inherent limitations of such efforts. Subaltern studies famously failed to take hold among Latin Americanists, largely because the colonial context there was so profoundly different than in South Asia that it failed to illuminate history in the same ways. I assert that what Zaman and Asif attempt to do in their essays differs significantly from what subaltern studies scholars have done because they visit Latin America, literally and figuratively, in order to foster new lines of thinking in their writings about Asia. In response, I begin by considering what forays into Asia would likely do for the study of Mexico. Then, to test the forum contributors’ modern assumptions about the usefulness of such efforts, I consider what Chimalpahin, the greatest of the colonial Nahua historians, revealed about his own interest in using the notion of Asia to think with.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Timo Pankakoski on Der Briefwechsel: 1953–1983 by Reinhart Koselleck and Carl Schmitt, edited by Jan Eike Dunkhase, and Der Begriff der Politik: Die Moderne als Krisenzeit im Werk von Reinhart Koselleck by Gennaro Imbriano, History and Theory 60, no. 3 (2021).
Jonathon Catlin on The Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age by Eva Horn, translated by Valentine Pakis, History and Theory 60, no. 3 (2021).
THE POSSIBILITY OF AN OUTSIDE
Ulrich Timme Kragh, "The Possibility of an Outside: Theoretical Preamble," History and Theory 60, no. 4 (2021).
Elías J. Palti, "Deleuze’s Foucault: On the Possibility of an Outside of Knowledge/Power," History and Theory 60, no. 4 (2021).
During 1985 and 1986, Gilles Deleuze directed a seminar on Michel Foucault’s work at the University of Paris 8 at Vincennes/St. Denis. The course was divided into three parts, one dedicated to each of the three levels on which, according to Deleuze, Foucault’s concept of thinking unfolds: knowledge, power, and subjectivation. As I will show, Deleuze’s attempt to reconstruct Foucault’s perspective on the history of thought is highly enlightening, although, at some crucial points, it raises doubts regarding the plausibility of the hypotheses that Deleuze attributed to Foucault. In particular, in the third part, which focuses on subjectivation, it is not clear whether Deleuze was attempting to relate Foucault’s concept or to expose his own ideas on the topic. The displacements, which Deleuze introduced into Foucault’s perspective, are particularly interesting, since they are symptomatic of broader epistemological problems that philosophical thought currently faces in attempting to articulate a consistent perspective of the possibility of an “outside” of power or, in Foucault’s formulation, knowledge/power.
Frank R. Ankersmit, "Koselleck on ‘Histories’ versus ‘History’; or, Historical Ontology versus Historical Epistemology," History and Theory 60, no. 4 (2021).
The theme of this journal issue deals with the opposition between what can be said to be the “inside” and the “outside” of a culture or a civilization, a question that can be approached in different ways. To begin with, one may ask whether certain anthropological constants can be discerned in all of humanity or, to take the opposite approach, whether civilizations possess certain cultural features that are unique to them. An approach focusing on certain anthropological constants gives us access to an “inside” shared by all of humanity, whereas the latter approach is part of how a civilization demarcates itself from its “outside.” How “inside” and “outside” relate to each other had best be investigated historically, since cultural and social differentiation grow historically out of the common soil of anthropological constants. This article focuses on Reinhart Koselleck’s oeuvre to illustrate this claim. Why Koselleck? To begin with, one may find in his work an “inside” defined in terms of a philosophical anthropology and a culturally defined “outside,” both of which he contrasts in an original and thought-provoking way. As I will argue, the contrast runs parallel to the one between historical ontology and historical epistemology that can be discerned in Koselleck’s writings. I will show how the dichotomy between ontology and epistemology reappears in his notion of the saddle time (Sattelzeit)—that is, the period in which Western modern historical writing was born. Prior to the saddle time, history was seen as the product of the anthropological constants of human nature, but afterward, these constants had to give way to the belief in a historical development requiring a historical epistemology to achieve historical truth. This is how the “inside” (ontology) and the “outside” (epistemology) are interwoven in Koselleck’s notion of the Sattelzeit. In sum, ontology provides an interculturally shared “inside,” whereas epistemology divides it into as many “insides” as there are different civilizations.
Meera Ashar, "Thriving on the Margins of History: Engaging with the Past in the Vernacular," History and Theory 60, no. 4 (2021).
A diversity of discursive formations in the vernacular flourish on the margins of history, and even outside it. To better understand these formations, particularly in postcolonial societies such as India, I argue that it is important to eschew the sole use of the lens of veracity. I explore alternative lenses through which to more fruitfully examine historical narratives in the vernacular: the contrast between the “historical past” and the “practical past,” the complexities involved in cultural translation, and the lyrical and fictionalized nature of prior accounts of the past. I employ these alternative lenses to make sense of Gujarati author Nandśaṅkar Tuḷjāśaṅkar Mehtā’s use of the historical novel form in his pioneering historical work, Karaṇ Ghelo, Gujarātno chello Rajpūt rājā: ek vārtā (Karaṇ the Crazy, Gujarat’s Last Rajput King: A Story), the first novel written in Gujarati. Writing at a time when the demand for histories and history textbooks was burgeoning, Mehtā made the curious choice to write a vārtā, or “story”—a choice that becomes more comprehensible when seen from the alternative perspectives I propose.
Jörn Rüsen, "The Horizon of History Moved by Modernity: After and Beyond Koselleck," History and Theory 60, no. 4 (2021).
This article first describes Reinhart Koselleck’s interpretation of the modernity of historical thought and then discusses the specific meaning-orientation of this thought. This description is done in a perspective that follows the question of whether modernity is only an epoch in Western history or covers general, universal history. Then, it discusses three problem areas of this conception of modernity: (1) whether there is an alternative to Koselleck’s model, (2) whether this model applies only to Western historical thought, and (3) what problems it raises. Afterward, it offers suggestions for how Koselleck’s list of “counter-concepts” can be expanded to include further provisions. Finally, it identifies and discusses the criteria of meaning that are decisive for the expanded conception of basic historical-anthropological concepts.
Ulrich Timme Kragh, "The Refraction of White: The Primary Colors of Hayden White’s Tropological Theory of Discourse," History and Theory 60, no. 4 (2021).
There has been sustained discussion of the narrativist approach in the Western tradition of theory of history, and it has focused especially on the work of Hayden White. While the reception of White’s work in the non-West has resulted in multiple translations of his oeuvre into Chinese and other languages, there has, as of yet, been no attempt to apply his tropological theory of discourse in a detailed study of non-Western historiography. Any such future endeavor would require assessing the extent to which White’s theory is culturally specific to the inside of the Western cultural tradition and determining which elements may be applicable to the outside of non-Western discourse. In this vein, the article pries open a possibility for an outside in the narrativist study of history. It establishes a European family tree of White’s tropological theory of discourse by first tracing its acknowledged intellectual ancestry to Peter Ramus’s rhetorical reductionism and Giambattista Vico’s poetic logic. It then extends the genealogy of White’s tetragrammatical analysis further back into a European ancestry by identifying its roots in the patristic and medieval exegetical traditions of the four senses of scripture and the four words of Saint Paul. The analysis reveals that White’s narrativist method of tropology belongs to a particular refraction of mythic consciousness having an identifiable beginning, middle, and end in the Western cultural tradition. Any methodological step beyond this consciousness would require reading the tropological spectrum of another cultural lineage of myth.
Fiona Jenkins, "Whoever Are Histories For? Pluralization, Border Thinking, and Potential Histories," History and Theory 60, no. 4 (2021).
How are contemporary philosophies of history articulated in resistance to the long legacies of colonial rule and practice that continue to shape presuppositions of knowledge? By foregrounding the performative dimension of modes of historical narration, this article considers how practices of engagement with alterity can be conceptualized as constituting new spaces of encounter. The “whoever” invoked in this article’s title is presented as a site of indeterminate identity, the futural antidote to an epistemic regime, and the addressee of a question that is as much about what we might become as what we have been. Exploring versions of this figure in the work of Walter Mignolo, Ariella Azoulay, and Judith Butler, the article demonstrates how these theorists all problematize the presumptive universality of the West, and the historically established status quo that underpins it, without adopting in its stead a naive or merely fragmented account of difference. Each approach to the politics of knowledge considered here suggests a way of capturing the significance of the performative and mediated space of separation and relatedness between “same” and “other” as potential sites for decolonizing history, and each seeks to activate the interference and disturbance of the “exteriorities” at once produced and repressed as aspects of the institution of a “center” or “origin.” The theorists I discuss variably describe such exteriorities via the resources of “border thinking” (Mignolo), “potential history” (Azoulay), and the “exilic” (Butler) and provide means not only to acknowledge histories of oppression but to imagine a transformative politics premised on these vital interventions.
Charles Lock, "Thinking on Location: An Essay in the Vulnerability of the Subject," History and Theory 60, no. 4 (2021).
This essay addresses problems of how and what we know in an attempt to distinguish what’s inside from what’s outside and to figure out whether acts of knowing can be plotted on either side of any boundary that might claim to separate inside from outside. Moving beyond the familiar dialectics derived from Hegel’s theory of history, the essay reflects on the author’s experience as a teacher of English literature “abroad” who has tried to disclaim any privileged access to the interpretation of texts written in English. It was possible to maintain a status as outsider when teaching texts written across the postcolonial world, but such a position was not sustainable when teaching literature by authors from the First Nations of North America. Throughout, various theoretical alternatives are posited, from Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s “outsidedness” to Alain Badiou’s pursuit (following Saint Paul) of “universal singularity.” None of these theories seems adequate, and the essay’s argument finds itself circling around the intractable. That figure of “circling around” would suggest that the outside had been attained, but one can always think of a theme, a context, or a relation in which the subject would find itself again inhabiting the inside. Structuring the argument is the notion of place and location and the Viconian yearning for the strictly geometrical representation of history, and thence of entities in fixed places, and of constant spatial relations between entities—and of metonymy as the figure by whose suppression, alone, space and time have been enabled to persist in their Kantian sovereignty as the a priori categories that ground all our knowing.
Ewa Domańska, "Prefigurative Humanities," History and Theory 60, no. 4 (2021).
In this article, I propose that a future-oriented project of prefigurative humanities will provide a much-needed framework for fostering alternative ways of approaching the past beyond history. I consider whether such future-oriented humanities, which are guided by the idea of critical hope and epistemic justice (understood as the inclusion of knowledges created in “epistemic peripheries”), might provide critical tools for imagining different scenarios of the future, as manifested in realistic and responsible utopias. The prototypes of such utopias might be found in art, film, literature, and history as well as in real, everyday life. Following Ruth Levitas’s approach to utopia and Ariella Azoulay’s project of potential history, I also consider how utopia might function not only as a goal but as a method to revive more positive thinking about the future.
Cover image: untitled, by Daniele Levis Pelusi (3 January 2019)
