Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley, eds. Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 464 PP. $48.00 Cloth. ISBN 9780226481623.
In a 1987 book where he dipped into the history of early modern science, the biologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) introduced the terms “time’s arrow” and “time’s cycle.” Time’s arrow he described as sequential time, in which events accumulate one to the next in a linear causal relationship. Time’s cycle, by contrast, was a temporality that never advanced into a genuinely novel future, instead completing its circuit in a return to the origin point. Gould distinguished one of the signatures of the modern period as the move from the theologically overlaid notion of cyclical time to one of linear time, moving into a blank slate future.
The dichotomy of arrow and cycle is also one that underpins most of the modern disciplines of the social sciences. Sociology, anthropology, and history too are arguably built on the distinction between identifying those narratives (and the cultures that sustain them) which were constructed on what was broadly called tradition on the one hand and modernity on the other. Even in the face of all of the strenuous criticism of modernization theory in the last few decades (Time and the Other appeared in 1983), it would be hard to say that we in the humanities and social sciences have fundamentally broken from the claim, codified in mid-twentieth century US social science—that time’s cycle is then and time’s arrow is now.
For those trained in modern European history, the passage from one modality to another is invariably referred to as a revolution. Much of what one studies in political or cultural history is how to identify the specific modes of thought or action that embody or bring about the reformatting of individual and collective experience such that one could persuasively claim transit from one temporality to another. There are debates on the sidelines about the extent to which supposedly secular beliefs in revolution are, in fact, premised on chiliasm or eschatology. Sometimes political actors court these comparisons themselves. The German student revolutionary Rudi Dutschke (1940-1979) appealed to Kairos, the propitious moment of both classical philosophy and Christian theology, and there are many other instances worldwide where customary ideas of spirituality have been infused into moments of collective mobilization, from the Taiping Rebellion to Liberation Theology, from Japanese fascism to Vanuatu’s John Frum movement, from the Ghost Dance to Waco.
Despite its sheen, the study of time can sometimes feel like fool’s gold. It seems to hold something ineffable—and therefore intellectually alluring—but often reverts to an overly familiar ping-ponging analytic of circularity or linearity, reaction or revolution, rupture or continuity. Enter the recent volume Power and Time, edited by Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley, which, from its deliriously fractal cover featuring a drawing by the German artist Jorinde Voigt onward seeks to explode any sense of predictability or narrowness in the subfield and to restore some of the antic diversity and unpredictable versions of the possible that the field always promises but infrequently delivers.
The volume is arguably at its best when it strays furthest from the dramaturgy of modernity bookended by the French Revolution at one end and the Berlin Wall’s fall at the other, and ranges further into the temporalities of the very small and the very large, the very narrow and the very wide. Because a summary of all of the volume’s sixteen chapters is impossible, I will engage with a few of the contributions that stood out most for me and seemed best poised to launch future productive inquiries by other historians and historically-minded scholars.
My encounter with the volume was colored by my growing sense that one of the clearest biases in the discipline of European history over the last thirty years or so has been the excessive privileging of not just humans over the rest of the world in which they are embedded, but also a particularly narrow focus on the fecundity and generative power of human speech and discourse. One learns—and learns to teach—for the most part about the power of words and categories as if, in a strong constructivist mode, humans are able to refashion the world around them through the act of redescription alone. Of course, there has always been a strong minority view in economic history, environmental history, and energy history, as well as the affiliated fields of science studies and the history of science, but these remained fairly well cordoned off from mainstream historical scholarship until recently.
One of the ways that we, as professional academics and as citizens of the world, have responded to the heightened urgency of attention to the effects of human actions on the planet has been to confront much more seriously the material constraints and prerequisites of the worlds and social formations which we as a species have set about building. Andrea Westermann’s chapter on plastics is a wonderful example of how history can be and must be adapted to be more in concert with the human transformation of Earth. As she describes it, plastic is a kind of clock that we are building into the ecosystems of our planet, producing what she calls a “technofossil.” Projecting forward to the idiomatic “future historian,” whoever they might be, she helps us realize that plastic will be able to be used as an index of levels of consumption and less as evidence of adaptation of the physical world. In conversation with one of the most fecund debates of the last couple of decades around the so-called Anthropocene, historians and geologists ask similarly whether traces of radiation, ash, or carbon in other forms can be used as a material marker of the move from one era to another. Again, as someone trained in what retrospectively feels like a very linguistically dominated period, this idea of a material clock that allows us to “slide up and down temporal scales,” as Westermann puts it, offers some of the exhilarating sense of intellectual and political imagination that studies of time promise.
Natasha Wheatley’s chapter offers a different kind of revisionism. In her case, she proposes that we think about states less as spatial entities than as temporal ones. This is the kind of brilliant proposition that, once thought, is impossible to unthink. Her investigation of legal theory in the Austro-Hungarian Empire explores the high stakes of eternity and longevity in the political realm. Her work suggests that “indigenous” itself should be thought of as a temporal category, a question of a duration of tenure as much as, or in fact more than, a biological or physiological category, in the way it is thought through in medical or racial typologies. The chapter by Emma Kowal and Joanna Radin literalizes this understanding in its focus on blood and the conflict over who owns the vials of human tissue taken from indigenous peoples in the great encyclopedic harvesting of data at midcentury that the historian of science, Rebecca Lemov, describes so well in Database of Dreams (2015).
Thinking about indigeneity as a regime of time reminds us of the centrality of law in rendering concrete particular claims on history. Pursued to its logical end, it also presents us with the vertiginous paradox that if one goes back far enough, the species itself vanishes. Human claims on eternity are always bounded in advance by our own shared heritage as a prehuman species. One of the editors of the volume has explored the many ramifications of the primate-human boundary in a recent wonderful book: The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence and our Obsession with Human Origins by Geroulanos. This work offers us a vision of the modern human relentlessly stalked by its immediate progenitor (as in Rudolph Zallinger’s, 1919-1995, March of Progress known to every schoolchild, which the book itself analyzes so well). Similar ideas are explored in the contribution from Maria Stavrinaki. Her chapter uses the French poet and philosopher Georges Bataille (1897-1962) and especially his encounter with the cave paintings of Lascaux (discovered in 1940) to define what she calls “regressive acceleration,” the plunging into an ever more distant past that has accompanied modernity (201). Her chapter is a mesmerizing example of how one can ride the waves of insight produced by a radical thinker beyond the frontiers of where conventional understandings usually take us. Through Bataille, she places the humanity-ending potentialities of nuclear war alongside the humanity-producing potentialities of art and expression. As she puts it, “Lascaux marks the beginning of a universal history, of which Hiroshima may well be the end” (214).
The drama of this observation suggests the way that tracing time’s arrow to its target can produce a synapse back to the point of origin. This becomes a recurring theme in some of the best contributions to the volume which blur the distinction between a modernity characterized by immediacy, disorientation, and individual subjectivity, with a Before Time of stolidity, hierarchy, and group stasis. Claudia Verhoeven’s chilling explanation of what one could describe as the political theory exemplified by Charles Manson (1934-2017) is another example. In her telling, Manson’s vision of “Helter Skelter” or an apocalyptic revelatory race war in which all existing hierarchies would be overturned was the expression of an inability to come to terms with his own capture in the transhistorical space of solitary confinement. The carceral black hole where Manson was trapped in LA Men’s Central Jail’s section 2904 became a kind of temporal black hole into which he was able to pull young followers to the point of committing horrifying murders, which they believed would precipitate a leap into the next human epoch. Although the hardening of the revolutionary’s heart to the necessity of mass murder in pursuit of the Promised Land to Come would appear familiar, the combination of pop references, and the Manson Family’s public image, most recently from Quentin Tarantino’s film Once Upon a Time (time!) …in Hollywood (2019), makes Verhoeven’s account of the transmutation of victimhood at the hands of state violence into murderous volunteerism especially affecting.
At the other end of the propriety scale—but somehow related—Henning Schmidgen’s chapter on the brain also helped to stretch my understanding of time into a new dimension. The near-instantaneous moment of the flicker, which became important to early brain sciences, especially in the move from an electrical understanding of the mind to a chemical one, has close relationships with the psychedelic practices of the 1960s, as described in Andreas Killen’s brilliant recent book, Nervous Systems (2023). The transforming understandings of the mind and how it processes and makes sense of the sequence of sensory perceptions is something that should be more foundational to our training as historians. More than ever, it seems to me that a basic background in the capacity and constraints of the human body should be a routine part of almost any course of study in history. Attending to the way that the mind perceives time is a starting point for what the editors describe more grandly as “chronocenosis” or “the conflict of temporal regimes operating in any given moment” (4), what Jenny Odell describes poetically, for example, in Saving Time as the way that one’s days are “marbled by childhood memory.”
Observed closely enough, the history of the social sciences also reveals that we have never made that conclusive leap, from time’s cycle to time’s arrow. Perhaps the clearest evidence of this in the volume comes in Jamie Martin’s chapter, where he explains how the most self-consciously modern and up-to-date understanding of collective human life—and arguably the one that has the most immediate day-to-day influence on all of our lives—has not expelled the idea of time’s cycle, but has integrated it into an idea of sequence and progression. The history of the business cycle as something that occurs with regularity and is amenable to only a limited degree of technocratic control is one of the most profound ways that we remain within multiple temporal regimes simultaneously. Even if one chooses to bracket and ignore the obvious ways our lives are currently affected by the symptoms of overshoot and climate crisis, it remains clear that these issues have significant consequences. The business cycle continues to manifest in our daily experiences, in paychecks and interest rates from month to month and quarter to quarter, as the temporal regime from which even the most advanced capitalist economies have found it impossible to liberate themselves. In some ways it was the mundane image of boom and bust captured in the hillocks and valleys of the price chart that stuck with me most from the volume as an enduring reminder of our inability to escape the constraints of power and time.
Quinn Slobodian is professor of international history at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. He is the author or editor of seven books including, most recently, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy, which has been translated into six languages. Forthcoming is Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right. A previous book, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2018), won the American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize. He is co-director of the History and Political Economy Project and writes frequently for New Statesman, New York Review of Books, New York Times, and elsewhere.