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The Longest Now:
A History of the Historical Present

When Anthony Trollope published The Way We Live Now (1875), he meant his adverb to cover a period much longer than an instant, much longer even than the extended present imagined about this time by William James. In fact, it is hard to say just how much time the now in Trollope’s title is supposed to comprehend. He uses the word to designate an indeterminate temporal extent surrounding the date of publication, stretching at the very least some months into the past and, he must have hoped, some months into the future. This is not the present of philosophy or psychology but that of common parlance, closely akin to the vulgar present recognized since Aristotle. But it also has some characteristics that are not included in most descriptions of the vulgar present from Aristotle’s to Reid’s.

Though Trollope’s now is vague and indeterminate, it must also be bounded. The implication of his title is that the present differs in some important respect from the past, and perhaps from the future. Now is commonly used in this vaguely antithetical sense to mean something like nowadays, with the implication that other days were otherwise. Though this version of the present might be quite long, perhaps even covering a period of some years, it is also unified, at least in some important respect, and identifiable as a period. As a period, this version of the present poses in an especially difficult way the basic challenge of the present in general, which is, as Norbert Elias puts it, to experience “at the same time what has not happened at the same time.”1 The longer the time span, the harder it is to accomplish this trick, which is already pretty daunting, at least to explain, at the much simpler level of the moment.

Trollope’s now also has one characteristic that fundamentally differentiates it from the other versions that exist at shorter timescales. As the title implies, it is collective in nature. This indeed seems to be a necessary characteristic of the kind of present that takes up some extended period of time, that it should also comprehend some significant extent of human space. No one has this kind of present alone. Investigations and explanations of the other, shorter presents have taken place in an artificial environment inhabited by at most one person, but any understanding of a time period covering some months must face the reality of the social. The very notion of nowadays, of the contemporary, implies a society in which conditions change in a general way. Thus it is often suggested that the literal meaning of contemporary, times together, pertains to the times of various different people, brought together in one general sense of the present as an identifiable period.2 Thus a present that means something like “the contemporary period” poses the problem of coordination in a different and even more difficult way than the one Elias identifies. It adds to the basic problem of temporal unity another, the problem of aligning the disparate temporal experiences of different people.

Given these challenges of coordination, and remembering that even the very limited unity of the private, experiential present has been quite hard to establish, it would seem that, where a now like Trollope’s is concerned, the shorter the better. But this is not the case right now, when it is common to complain that the present is not nearly long enough. A whole foundation, Stewart Brand’s The Long Now, has been set up to extend the attention span of the present into the farthest reaches of the future. Brand’s project is based on the prevalent notion that the contemporary present has withered to a mere shadow of itself, mainly because of the sort of digital devices that Brand was among the first to celebrate. Though digital devices are a popular target and this shrinkage of the present a common complaint, it is also often said that the present has come unglued from the past, and this separation is dated as far back as the French Revolution and sometimes farther.³ If this condition really has persisted since the 1780s, it would make for a very long now indeed. Sometimes, though, it is charged that the present is simultaneously too long and too short. “Such are the major traits of this manifold and multivalent present, a monstrous time,” as François Hartog puts it. “It is at once everything (there is nothing but the present) and almost nothing (reduced to the tyranny of the instant.)”⁴

Though it seems clear that the now we live in now is not the one they lived in then, whenever that was, it is not so clear exactly how our now has gone wrong. At the most general level, what these complaints have in common is the idea that the contemporary present is simply too much itself, that it has come loose from past and future and/or that it has come to dominate or even eliminate them. Whether the time period at issue is called now, the contemporary, or even the postmodern, the argument is really about modernity, for this is the basic model of the break with the past in favor of the present, the original sin with which sin itself begins. As Reinhart Koselleck puts it, in what is currently the most influential analysis of these issues, modern experience corresponds “to a state of reality which increasingly allowed the dimensions of past, present, and future to break away from one another in the progress of time.”5 Despite the metaphor of breakage, modernity for Koselleck is really a long, drawn-out process of separation that is finally stretched to the breaking point only at the French Revolution, a world-shaking event whose unpredictable course convinced everyone that the past could not be relied on nor the future predicted. The present, in a sense, is all that is left.

Concentrated as he is on this historical break, Koselleck does not actually say a lot about what preceded it, but the very notion of a break implies a past in which things were quite different. Generally, he refers to this preceding state as “the traditional experiential space, which had previously appeared to be determined by the past, but which would now break apart.”⁶ Traditionally, then, the past informs the present, and because it does so, the present can in turn form useful expectations about the future. “Experience,” Koselleck says, “is present past, whose events have been incorporated and can be remembered.” And “expectation also takes place in the today; it is the future made present.”⁷ The traditional present, then, is threefold, constantly incorporating into itself bits of the past and projecting these forward into the future. If this model seems familiar, it is because it is explicitly based on two sources: Saint Augustine and Martin Heidegger.⁸ There is no other evidence on which to establish the necessary baseline from which modern experience is supposed to have deviated.

There are two significant problems with this reliance on authority rather than demonstration or example. First of all, the models of the present offered by Koselleck’s authorities are normative rather than descriptive. Heidegger does not believe that most people experience the present as a three-part compact. He views the present in its already broken state, at a time when most people live in a degraded version of time without proper reference to past or future. Thus he argues from the absence of such a concord that it should exist. In fact, it seems safe to say that the very notion of the threefold present, in this case at least, is a back formation, constructed as the opposite of the unhappy state that actually exists and projected back into the past as an ideal. Augustine’s testimony might be taken as evidence for the actual existence of that ideal, except that his account is, in its own way, as haunted by distention as Heidegger’s. The role of attention is to overcome the ordinary distention of time and thus bring a human consciousness somewhat closer to the eternity of God. Secondly, it is not at all clear how either of these accounts of individual experience might be expanded to cover the situation of experience in general. As Koselleck concedes, “it remains an open question whether the intersubjective temporal structures of history can be adequately adduced from existential analysis.”9 But this is, in fact, exactly what he does.

Despite its argumentative thinness, Koselleck’s example has been influential in discussions of what is sometimes called the “historical present.”¹⁰ Basically, the term historical present is an awkward synonym for what Trollope simply calls now: the collective sense of a longish contemporary period as distinct in some way. But the term also includes a three-part argument. It implies that a particular understanding of this longer present has prevailed generally in history. In this sense, a better synonym might be traditional present. It also implies that this traditional present is historical in a second sense, in that it has ceased to prevail and has now passed into history. The title of Harry Harootunian’s essay on this subject is, therefore, “Remembering the Historical Present.” Finally, this traditional present is historical in that it always includes history. In other words, the traditional present was not cut off from the past but incorporated it, so that the present was a fluid part of the transmission of the past into the future.

This understanding of the historical present as a traditionally normative form seamlessly incorporating past and future into itself is now quite widespread. For example, Peter Osborne identifies the “phenomenological present” as a basic structure that the “historical present generalizes and complicates.”¹¹ For Osborne, this phenomenological present is “always threefold.”¹² Here he relies on Augustine and Husserl for support, as Koselleck had relied on Augustine and Heidegger. In a slightly more normative tone, Helga Nowotny calls on the example of James to argue that “the ‘specious present’ is not just interpreted as a phenomenon of individual psychology, but becomes socially and politically interpretable.”¹³ Here Nowotny ignores the doubts that James had built into his own term for the extended experiential present, as Osborne takes for granted the tortured speculations of Husserl as if they were matters of settled fact. As Paul Ricoeur points out, though, the difficulties that Husserl had in explaining how the three parts of time could converge on a single point are only amplified if his model is expanded to the more general level of intersubjective time.14 Thus the historical present turns out to depend on a prototype, the experiential present, that is itself in need of much better explanation and support.

It seems odd, in any case, to rely primarily on modern authorities like James, Husserl, and Heidegger for models of what the present used to look like. On one hand, this would seem to involve reading back into history observations made about the present in modern times. On the other hand, the detectable existence of the threefold experience of the present in the researches of James and the investigations of Husserl would seem to contradict the idea that the present had freed itself of past and future as far back as the French Revolution. If the present had already dwindled to a pinprick, then why were these authorities so convinced that it must take up some measurable time? In fact, what James hesitantly called the “specious present” is itself a modern idea, developed slowly in the course of the 19^th century against the traditional notion, passed on from Aristotle, that the true present is but a single point. The real problem for James and Husserl is that they cannot quite free themselves of the traditional authority of the strict present, the infinitesimal point, so that they can formulate a more modern notion of the present as a differentiated space.

In the absence of any real support for the authority of the historical present in these arguments, the basic question still remains: what was the present? Is it really the case that for much of history, human temporal experience was a successful amalgamation of the three parts of time that James and Husserl struggled so mightily to compose? Of course, it is easy to see why this question is not usually asked, much less answered, since it is hard to imagine what kind of evidence would settle the issue. We cannot exactly poll the dead about a present that is long past. However, even some speculative evidence might tell in an argument that has heretofore relied mostly on authority and a priori reasoning.

What, then, was the present? Hartog, like Koselleck before him, takes Augustine as a norm of measurement, if not exactly a constant in human history. As he puts it, “Augustine’s phenomenological description of the three times still remains essential for apprehending and expressing these experiences.”¹⁵ But Hartog is also aware that the anthropological evidence does not always support the notion that Augustine’s threefold structure is the essential substrate of temporal experience before the modern break. His example is the Maori of contact times, for whom the future was behind and not in front.16 What actually lies behind in this case is a vast fund of possible actions, all of which exist more or less out of time and from which actions in the present are chosen. Time thus runs from potentiality to actuality, toward what European tradition calls the future, and not from that future through the present into a settled and no longer existent past. Thus it seems, from this one example at least, that the most fundamental aspect of the “historical present,” the order within it of past, present, and future, is not an experiential given.

Presumably, such examples could be multiplied, since it stands to reason that the wide variety of human societies would have had a similarly wide variety of time schemes and timescales. But, according to some sociologists, it is not necessarily given that human beings need a time scheme at all. According to Elias, experiential time in the absence of clocks and calendars is discontinuous and episodic.¹⁷ Time is told in terms of significant events, which succeed one another without establishing any particular relations of succession or priority. Early timing, as Elias puts it, is “point-like and discontinuous.”¹⁸ Where there are external time schemes, these are not meant to distinguish and order particular times but simply to establish the “right time,” as in the right time to plant or worship. Thus the important distinction is not between past, present, and future, but between right and wrong, as in the ancient Greek distinction between kairos, the appropriate, and akairos, the ill-timed.¹⁹

Something similar is suggested by Georges Gurvitch, who has established an especially complex typology of social times. In his schema, archaic societies superimpose a cyclical mythological time onto the more or less steady state of nature, which is itself inflected by the unpredictable tempi of rudimentary social organizations. Since even ecological time is full of its own surprises, as in the case of storms and droughts, and since mythological time has a tendency to leap forward from cycle to cycle, the result is an especially complex mixture of stasis and uncertainty. As Gurvitch puts it, “this is a deceptive time, where time leaping forward and sudden crises are hidden behind delay and where erratic time seems to play a more influential role than would be expected.”²⁰ In other words, time in such a situation is an unpredictable mixture of stasis and crisis, with purely episodic transitions from event to event, even as most things seem to exist in a steady state.

Gurvitch’s model is so complex that it is a little hard to imagine what it would have been like to live in such a society on a daily basis. But the basic point he makes is the one also made by Elias, that societies without clocks or calendars need not necessarily have a single time scheme at all. Without this prior establishment of a single time-line, the distinctive ordering of past, present, and future makes little sense. Perhaps this is why Jack Goody claims to have found so little narrative in the oral societies he has studied, why he believes that the “intercalation of the past and the present” is raised as a problem in an acute form only with the advent of writing.21 At the very least, then, there is some reason to believe that the ordered trinity of past, present, and future is not a primordial aspect of human experience.

The evidence of recorded history suggests that locating the present in any very precise way would have been very difficult for most early societies. Ancient Greek timekeeping, for example, was variable and inexact, as the day was broken up into unequal periods and the nighttime was not divided at all. Until about 159 BCE, daytime hour divisions were not observed in Rome.²² The very concept of abstract punctuality was difficult to enforce when the shortest measurable unit of time, the punctum, was twelve to fifteen minutes long.²³ The minute, as the sixtieth part of an hour, was not generally recognized as necessary or useful until the end of the 16^th century.²⁴ But, in fact, precise time-reckoning was not generally recognized as necessary or useful until quite late in recorded history. On the very threshold of the 20^th century, Field General von Moltke observed complacently to the Reichstag that “practical life rarely demands a punctuality reckoned in minutes.”²⁵ What was recognized, especially in highly organized units like monastic communities, was the rule of sequence and order. Where timing methods were developed and applied in such communities, it was not to tie observances to particular times but to make sure that they did not run too long or too short and thus interfere with one another.²⁶ As David Landes points out in his history of timekeeping, human beings got along for many centuries without having to know the time, which is to say, without having to locate the present moment in a larger or wider context.²⁷

In fact, it makes more sense to think of the present as the imposition of a particular kind of society, as a forcible simplification of the almost chaotic time scheme outlined by Gurvitch. Having to do so is the effect of a larger, more organized society. Thus Elias maintains that the present is not a natural aspect of human consciousness in the raw but rather the result of a certain kind of social conditioning: “The concept of the present . . . represents the timing of a living human group sufficiently developed to relate a continuous series of events, whether natural, social or personal, to the change to which it is itself subjected.”²⁸ Only in this social sense are individuals able to “distinguish as the present what they are doing here and now . . . both from what is over and subsists only in memory, and from what they may possibly once do, experience or suffer, that is, from the past and future.”29 The present, by this account, is not given but developed, and its first effect is to interpose itself and thus divide time into three parts.

The present may very well be a latecomer to a temporal system founded on the more basic distinction between earlier and later, before and after. These work quite well, in theory and in practice, without an absolute division between them. They provide all that is needed for a reliable sense of consequence. In fact, as McTaggart pointed out, before and after are much more reliable than their threefold counterpart, since the relations of before and after do not change, while the same event can be and is future, present, and past in turn. That which is before some later X is always before that X, but that which is before now will sooner or later be behind it.³⁰ The present is therefore a relatively specialized time tool, added as a division between before and after. Since its purpose is to transform these by division into past and future, it makes little sense to complain that the present has come to divorce us from the past. The present is a division. Logic dictates that it can only reintegrate past and future into itself if it has already divided them, so it makes little sense to think of the integrated, threefold present as primordial and the merely divisive one as a later degeneration.

There is at least some evidence to suggest, then, that anthropology and sociology may reinforce the findings of contemporary neurobiology, which have tended to undermine the notion that the present is an experiential given. At the very least, it seems safe to say that it is not necessary to organize human temporality on the trinitarian model of the present, or perhaps on any model of the present at all. Reconsidering the present in this way, making it optional, as it were, would at least have the salutary effect of explaining why it has always been so hard to understand. But this would, in its turn, raise another set of questions. If the present is not an eternal fact of human consciousness, if it is something more like a social category, then when, how, and why did it come about? Thus the question “What was the present?” might be rephrased as the even more puzzling “When was the present?”

III

Hartog is not the only one to note that some societies existing in historical time have not seemed to need a concept of the present much like the one taken for granted by European philosophy and science. He says that for the Maori “the divide between [past and future] which inaugurates modern Western history does not exist. It would be better to say that past and present coexist, and that the ‘past’ is ‘reabsorbed’ into the ‘present.’”31 The picture thus painted resembles quite closely that usually offered in accounts of the heroic age of the ancient Greeks. Hartog develops such an account at length, relying at points on the famous chapter in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis. For Auerbach, the Iliad takes place in “a pure present, without temporal perspective, in which there is ‘no development.’”³² Hartog insists that Achilles does act and in so doing creates effects not already comprehended by the past, but, he says, these effects are always folded back into the old present, which is so absorptive that it can include these without changing. The result of this circular process is “the perpetual present of epic time.”³³

This version of epic time is a kind of constant in European histories, so old as to seem almost perpetual itself, about which more will be said in a later chapter. But it is worth asking, despite the great authority of this account, whether the time scheme so described is all present or no present at all. Gurvitch maintains against the consensus that the epic tradition always projects “the present into the past.”³⁴ In its attempt to ensure the stability of things, these heroic societies “make the past endure by dissolving the present and future in it.”³⁵ In the end, though, it doesn’t seem to matter much whether this singular time zone is called the past or the present, since any one of these terms in isolation is meaningless. The present, in particular, has its meaning and purpose only insofar as it keeps the past and the future apart. Without them—in isolation, as it were—it is not the present but just time, albeit time that does not pass. To see this static time as a perpetual present, as natural as it may be for a modern European, is, in fact, to read a past society by means of the very concept it is not supposed to have had. “Perpetual present,” then, is not just a semantic contradiction in terms but also a historical one, in that it forces a modern name onto a past society that, by all accounts, had no use for it. It is a bit like taking an ancient celebration of the winter solstice and calling it Christmas.

If societies like that of the ancient Greeks of the heroic period, on the very edge of recorded history, did not observe the present as a social fact, then when did it develop? It might seem that any useful concept of the present must require a single, unified social subject, the we in The Way We Live Now. If this now is not shared, then it loses most of its usefulness and its significance. The construction of the present, though, cannot be the result of the self-consciousness of a unified social subject but must rather be an essential part of the creation of that consciousness. The present, in this respect, would not be a part of time or a kind of time but an approach to time, what Gurvitch calls mastery, an approach that involves representing, symbolizing, measuring, and quantifying time. As Gurvitch says, “mastery means to unify time in a definite manner.”36 What Gurvitch generally means by this term is the mastery of time, the unification and regulation of an otherwise inchoate process. But it must also involve the mastery of times, that is to say the elimination of the sort of temporal multiplicity that, for Gurvitch at least, is the ordinary state of human experience. Thus it must also mean the mastery of individual subjects, the unification of their individual time zones into one. This unification is also necessarily a synchronization, one that is more or less synonymous with the present as a social fact.

It probably goes without saying that another indispensable feature of such an organized time scheme is some abstract accounting system, independent of events in the particular and external to all individuals. When Locke complained that it is not possible to compare two different times, he meant that it is not possible to compare them directly. He had probably not forgotten about clocks, which make it possible to compare the experiential times of different individuals by reference to a measurement independent of them. Without some such standard against which to compare, it is hard to see what meaning could attach to the present. Perhaps this is why Elias finds it hard to locate any sure sense of the present apart from clocks and calendars, and why Goody finds it absent apart from writing. Even with these devices in hand, though, at least according to Gurvitch, the unification and simplification of time is always relative and perhaps even intermittent.³⁷ The underlying multiplicity of times is not erased but merely dominated.

Even in historical times, the Greeks found this basic task of synchronization inordinately difficult to accomplish. In the ancient world, according to Denis Feeney, “each city had its own way of calibrating past time, usually through lists of local magistrates, just as they had their own currencies, their own weights and measures, and their own religions.”³⁸ Basic communication thus required a certain amount of agile synchronization. But this did not involve translating between calendars, because the ancients did not, for the most part, use dates. What they used for correlation instead were events. Decisive battles or notable reigns were not located within some neutral grid of dates, because such a thing did not exist. Instead, battles and reigns were used as markers to build up a common sense of historical time.³⁹ A classical author as late as Cornelius Nepos gauged historical time by counting back and forth between certain fixed points: the first Olympiad, the foundation of Rome, the birth of Alexander the Great.40

Building up a sense of historical synchronicity in this way was a very difficult matter, but it was also an important project, first in order to give the various Greek states some way of conceiving their common history and then of integrating Rome into that commonality. Ancient history is thus replete with synchromatic tables, parallel columns of important events, counted down according to the Greeks, the Romans, and sometimes the Asian or North African worlds beyond. In this context, according to Feeney, each synchronism is a simile, a comparison of apparently distant things.⁴¹ Like a simile, though, a synchronism inevitably raises a question about the basis of the comparison. Aristotle was probably the first to object that mere coincidence in time does not imply any causal connection or common purpose.⁴² But the whole point of these synchronisms in the first place was to envelop the various Greek states and the republic of Rome in a common history with a common meaning. The fact that two distant battles seemed to happen at more or less the same time implied that the armies involved were part of a single struggle.

As this account already implies, the unification under Roman rule of the world it knew made a large-scale synchronization at least theoretically possible. The historian who most grandly proclaims this possibility is Polybius: “How, when and why all the known parts of the world were brought under the domination of Rome is to be seen as a single action and a single spectacle, which has an identifiable beginning, a fixed duration and an acknowledged end.”⁴³ Polybius makes it clear how a single subject makes possible the narration of a single action, which can then be divided into the Aristotelian categories of beginning, middle, and end. These do not, of course, correspond in any exact way to past, present, and future. An Aristotelian action has a rather large middle, while the threefold time scheme has a very narrow one. For Aristotle himself, as Paul Ricoeur has argued at length, the three parts of the tragic plot are logical and not temporal categories.⁴⁴ Still, it is possible to see in Polybius the beginning of the adaptation of the tragic plot so that it can serve in temporal and even historical situations. To live in Rome between its beginning and its coming end was to live in a social present, albeit a vague and distended one, quite different from anything available before.

Polybius also attempted to convert the old synchromatic tables into a dated calendar.⁴⁵ Marking time in this way was especially important to Rome, which tended to identify itself with recorded history and measurable time. Still, the Republican calendar was a hash of asymmetric months in which dates were not counted forward from one, but backward and forward from the three ceremonial markers: kalends, nones, and ides. For a number of reasons, one of them that the calendrical year did not correspond very closely to the solar year, it was essentially impossible to use numerical dates to mark particular events in time. Thus these still tended to be associated with festival days.46 Because they were not anchored to particular dates or days of the week, these festival days could seem to exist outside of time, setting up a different system of accounting that could run in circles as the rest of the calendar marched forward from the founding of Rome. In fact, the pre-Julian calendar was so far out of sync with the solar year that seasonal festivals did not coincide with the parts of the year they were supposed to celebrate.⁴⁷ In other words, the establishment of Rome as a dominating world subject did not necessarily lead to a uniform mastery of time. In addition to the presence within Rome of various different time-lines along which counting might proceed, there was the consciousness, even for Polybius, that the sway of Rome was not, in fact, universal, that there were empires beyond it, perhaps with histories of their own.

The Julian calendar, of course, was supposed to change all this, and it did certainly establish a consistent accounting of time that corresponded more exactly than any system before to the patterns of the sun and moon. This is perhaps the most obvious example in European history of the mastery of time as the mastery of a people, and vice versa.⁴⁸ But there were other, ancillary calendars in use even after the Julian reform, so that it was still possible to live in several todays at once. The advent of the Julian calendar coincides, more or less, with the Advent itself, and this pivotal event became the center from which past and future are now calculated. This, in itself, would seem to give time a meaningful synchronization it had not had before. It is also sometimes asserted that monastic discipline, with its rigorous observation of regular times for prayers and other observations synchronized daily time in a similarly meaningful way.⁴⁹ Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum shows in great detail, though, that monastic time organization was not meant to respect either time or punctuality in the abstract, but rather to make it possible to handle all the religious duties of the day without scanting any.⁵⁰ As to time itself, according to Thomas Aquinas, “the Church does not strive for restriction through the clever study of time. One does not need to use an astrolabe to know when it is time to eat.”⁵¹

As for the calendar, the BC/AD system was not proposed as a universal system until 1627, and the century did not become a common means of reckoning until about a century after that.52 The general sense of Christ’s birth as the comprehensive midpoint in time, in other words, did not very immediately translate into a necessary system of organizing dates. Hannah Arendt maintains, in fact, that early Christianity was indifferent to these in general.⁵³ She points to Augustine’s Civitas Dei, with its principled disinterest in secular history. For Augustine, the uniqueness of the Incarnation was absolute, and thus it made all other dates more or less identical in their insignificance. Since earthly events matter only against the background of eternity, they need not be organized or understood backward and forward in relation to other earthly events but only in relation to the constancy of God’s plan. It makes little sense, in other words, to look to Christianity for a general observation of the social present. The messianic now, as Giorgio Agamben defines it, is neither in nor out of chronological time but is the time that time takes to conclude, like the time it takes us to realize what has just happened, only raised to a higher power.⁵⁴ This is not a present marked in time but one lifted out of it. As Paul puts it, the Christian lives “forgetting what lies behind, but straining forward to what lies ahead.”⁵⁵ The present, according to this diagram, is not a point or a dividing line but a vector leading always in one direction. In any case, the time of the Church was not the only time, even in the Middle Ages, when the Church itself recognized the claims of ordinary chronological time alongside Paul’s time of constant expectation.⁵⁶

When it came to accounting for historical time, the early Christians used the same sort of synchromatic tables that had served the ancient Greeks. The most influential of these was the Chronicle of Eusebius, who set out in the 3^rd century CE to coordinate the Jewish and Christian scriptures with the histories of the secular nations. Eusebius arranged his historical matrix in nineteen parallel columns, one for each tradition, a system that narrowed as early empires passed into dust and the Romans came to dominate the world.⁵⁷ The result was so influential it established a tradition of tabular parallel histories in which the Roman Empire gradually came to be the dominant column.⁵⁸ Unfortunately, this tradition lasted longer than the Roman Empire itself, so that the tables gradually acquired more columns again, and the problem of coordinating different world histories emerged in the very attempts to graphically solve it. One problem that became more stringent over time was that of reconciling the apparent history given in the Bible with that provided by other sources. Even the Hebrew and Greek versions of the Bible itself gave different accounts of the amount of time between the Creation and the Flood. Then, when Europe acquired more complete knowledge of the past histories of civilizations like the Egyptian and the Chinese, the account of past time became even more complicated.59

Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton have shown that such tabular, parallel histories were by far the dominant graphical form in which history was visualized well into the modern period. Though the ostensible purpose of such tables was to provide a sort of Rosetta stone for the translation of one time-line into another, what they tended to expose was the incoherence of the time-line as a metaphor. Even the apparent mastery of Rome over other chronologies was temporary and to a large extent illusory. What the tables showed, then, was that for the greater part of human history, there were multiple times running simultaneously and thus multiple historical presents. Or, to put it more accurately, the very notion of a historical present as a single synchronizing point to which all could refer made no sense.

In fact, it seems quite possible that a universal synchronization in terms of a single present was not really available until Newton offered it to the world in a purely abstract form. As Locke formulated it at the end of the 17^th century, “this present moment is common to all things that are now in being, and equally comprehends that part of their Existence, as much as if they were all but one single Being; and we may truly say, they all exist in the same moment of Time.”⁶⁰ This particular definition of the common present is not just different from but actually diametrically opposed to all previous versions of that category. From the time of the Greeks, at least, events had conferred dignity on dates, such as they were. The subjects of history—Greeks, Romans, or Christians—had given history its meaning. In fact, without such significance, dated time had no particular purpose, and there was no reason to observe it. In Locke’s formula, though, time itself precedes those who might observe it, and dates exist whether anything happens on them or not. Time itself is the universal subject, and it enlists “all things,” conscious or not, and makes of them “one single Being” in a way that no actual civilization could even imagine.

Something like this must have been a prerequisite before Kant could even propose his project for a universal history: “A philosophical attempt to work out a universal history of the world in accordance with a plan of nature aimed at a perfect civil union of mankind.”⁶¹ This history would transform “an otherwise planless aggregate of human actions” into a system, recognized as a whole.⁶² Locke’s abstract sense of all beings as one in the light of time makes it possible for Kant to propose a universal human subject, which is itself quite abstract since it exists only as a promise, as the end of the historical system of accounting. Redeemed from its past state as a planless and episodic aggregate, the human story ceases to be episodic and assumes the shape of a plot. This plot is then called history, in that purely modern sense of the term that uses it to designate not the story of events alone but rather the invisible course of time that subtends it. This is what Koselleck refers to as “history as a collective singular without reference to any associated subject,” and which he dates as a general project to about 1780.63

Without some such conception of history, the very notion of the present as a point of universal synchronization makes no sense. But it is also worth noting the priority that Locke gives to the present itself. For Locke, it is not the common past that makes all existence into one being, or the expectation of a common future, but rather the reality of the common present. That all things share the same now is our best evidence for their commonality and thus for our belief that they share a common past and future, neither of which we can actually witness. In much the same way that the coordination of the different senses just is the present for Aristotle, the unity of all beings just is the present for Locke. It seems possible to say, therefore, that the present as a social fact, apart from its scientific or experiential versions, did not emerge until sometime in the early modern period, somewhere between Locke and Kant, and that it did not arrive by separating itself from the past and the future. Rather, it seems safer to say that locating the present is the primary step in the coordination of social time and that the establishing of the past and future as linear history, in Kant’s terms, follows from that.

Still, it is hard to say with any certainty that Locke’s version of the universal present has ever been much more than a convention. For one thing, history continued to be represented primarily in tabular form well into the modern period. Joseph Priestley, for example, produced a widely influential New Chart of History in the late 18^th century that was supposed to allow viewers to locate historical events in “universal time.”⁶⁴ But he did not himself believe that this concept was anything more than a useful convenience.⁶⁵ For him, “universal time” was really nothing more than the empty space containing the various histories. It did not itself have any substance, any power, or even any meaning. In fact, as Priestley’s example inspired more and more such tables in the following centuries, the space of universal time became more and more crowded and thus more and more chaotic. Bringing the histories of different cultures, religions, and places together did not, in other words, have the effect of unifying them but rather of dramatizing their differences. The great project of “synchronology,” to adapt the title of Stephen Hawes’s 1869 chart, ultimately showed how asynchronous historical times had always been.⁶⁶

Perhaps this brief history of the present as a social fact can help clarify the terms and stakes of contemporary complaints about our present. First of all, charges that the present has changed in some way presume that it is a given, a constant and primordial fact of human sociality. But this does not seem to be the case. Negotiating the world in terms of before and after does not necessarily require a fine line between them, and organizing a social polity on a local basis does not necessarily require calendrical time with a moving present at the center of it. Philosophical concerns about the now are, of course, very old, but these tend to concentrate on it as a logical or experiential puzzle and not as a feature of social organization. People with any historical sense at all will have some notion of the difference of their time from other times, but this does not imply the existence of a unified social present. In this form, it seems that the present is fairly young, as human institutions go, and that it did not change in modern times but arrived with them. The imposition of the present, in and as modernity, might seem to divide a previously unified temporal continuum. But it seems that such a continuum had not been part of the human understanding of historical time, at least not until Kant proposed it as a project. Perhaps this project makes no sense without the present to anchor it, as the past and the future, unlike before and after, really make no sense unless the present intervenes between them.

Perhaps, then, the problem is with the present as such. General unhappiness with it may not have to do with its being too long or too short, too disconnected from past or future, or with any other quality, but precisely with its lack of qualities. Locke’s sense of all being as one being unified in the moment was not just abstract but also ideal, in the sense that it did not actually exist in reality. Nowadays, at least if philosophers like Peter Sloterdijk are to be believed, that unity exists inescapably. As Sloterdijk puts it, “the globalized world is the synchronized world; its form is produced simultaneity, and it finds convergence in things that are current.”67 One of the reasons this is a deleterious situation for so many is the source of the synchronization. As Walter Benjamin says in The Arcades Project, expanding on Marx, “simultaneity, the basis of the new style of living, likewise comes from mechanical production.”⁶⁸ Kant’s grand project of universal human history is realized by industrial capitalism, by and for its technologies, and thus its character is purely mechanical.

If the old synchromatic tables used by the Greeks produced a global simultaneity that was essentially metaphorical, contemporary technologies produce one that is definitely metonymic. Where the Greeks did not actually need a date unless some significant event sanctioned it, dates and times now come constantly and unbidden, prior to their significance.69 Simultaneity seems to require explanation, to demand meaning, and so people get restive if the year or the decade does not readily offer its own interpretation. Constant attempts to define the spirit of our age simply expose the fact that the age precedes its spirit, as the calendar precedes events. The present, above all, precedes any explanation of itself. We have been given this sort of social present without having any particular need or use for it, and now we labor under the necessity of finding a place for it. This may be why the present is now such a topic of anxious discussion.

One thing these discussions tend to ignore, however, is their own constant presence in the modern period. Romantic opposition to the abstraction of time coincides with Kant’s plan to achieve it, and the tradition of critique that Berlin calls the opposition of quality to quantity is a steady component of modern philosophy from the early German Romantics through Kierkegaard and beyond. In other words, there have been many time-lines and other versions of the present within and against the apparent global synchronicity. Koselleck himself was fond of the notion of “the contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous, or perhaps, rather, of the nonsimultaneous occurring simultaneously.”⁷⁰ For Koselleck, this is a fact of history, each portion of which will contain different, noncurrent time-lines. It seems, however, that the advent of modernity, with its single time-line of progress, tends to exacerbate the traditional tendency to arrange these different time-line hierarchically, as the Greeks did when they banished the barbarians to a time behind.⁷¹ The unsynchronized still exists, somehow, within the synchronous and beneath its domination.

For Gurvitch, on the other hand, the mastery of any one time frame over the others is always illusory. He quotes from Maurice Halbwachs the principle that “there are as many origins of different times as there are different groups. No one time is imposed on all groups.”⁷² What passes in the modern period for the universal time of technology and science is the attempt of the bourgeois class to impose “its own scale of time as universal.”⁷³ But its pretensions are only partly successful, and modern time has more parts to it, more layers, more tension and competition than that of any earlier period.⁷⁴ Gurvitch might warn us, then, that what is sometimes advertised as “a world-wide condition of simultaneity” is not by any means what it is cracked up to be.⁷⁵ For anyone who has to make a phone call from Sydney to Los Angeles, the abstract ideal of a universal synchronization is not of much relevance. Surely one of the effects of standardized world time zones is to dramatize how far apart Sydney and Los Angeles actually are.

From this point of view, the apparent simultaneity of all contemporary time-lines may look like the empty abstraction it was for Priestley, not a fact of experience at all but a convention. One reason we tend to feel otherwise may be the continuing influence of the concept of modernism, which has always served to convert modernity’s empty simultaneity into a meaningful synchronism. In the beginning, of course, modern was a deictic, a synonym for now, designating the present.76 Even in its celebrated quarrel with the ancient, the modern was still a relative term, and thus it was capable of moving in time to keep up with the present. Sometime around 1927, though, with the publication of A Survey of Modernist Poetry by Robert Graves and Laura Riding, the term modern lost its deictic quality, its relativity, and its freedom and became attached to a particular stretch of years. Once it was provided with a beginning, whether it was identified with Baudelaire, Wilde, or Eliot, the modern also necessarily needed an end, and once it was defined by these it could no longer function as a synonym for the contemporary. Thus the rather odd situation in which the modern is no longer present and the present is apparently no longer modern.

In its young and innocent days as a simple deictic, the modern did not have any particular character. Arbitrary and relative, it simply designated whatever was happening right now, a random and therefore meaningless collection of events. Losing its connection to the present and becoming fixed in historical time, losing its essentially arbitrary quality and acquiring a particular significance, the “spirit” that is usually associated with an “age,” all happen as functions of one another. However, these changes do not just happen to the modern, now converted to a period concept, but to the more general concept of the present, with which it had been synonymous. Though the modern has been severed from the present, ideas about the present are still strongly conditioned by the modern. All the terms for now, including contemporary, seem to have lost their deictic function, their purely relative significance, and are expected to have a particular quality, on the model of the modern. The technological synchronicity that allowed the modern to think of itself as a distinct period of time was purely metonymic in nature, and thus it lacked almost by definition any particular significance. In a sense, it was no more meaningful than the deictic it had replaced. Modernism is the concept that converts this empty set of relations into a significant simultaneity.

One impediment to this effect is the empty circularity of the term itself. Since modernism intrinsically means nothing more than commitment to the modern, it can hardly lend to modernity the significance it lacks. Another problem is modernism’s own lack of meaningful simultaneity. It is worth noting at this point that Rosenberg and Grafton end their history of the historical time chart with an extensive examination of some exemplary graphs of modernism, including the famous flowchart of modern movements that Alfred Barr printed as the cover of the catalog for the MOMA exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art in 1936.77 Though Barr’s chart is often denounced as an attempt to impose a single interpretation of the modern movement, it actually shows how disparate the modern movements were, at least in time. In any one year, say 1910, cubism, futurism, expressionism, orphism, and suprematism all jostle for the same space in the historical continuum. The historical present thus pictured is just as various and asynchronous as the world histories of Eusebius or Priestley. And Barr’s is only one of several rival charts, all attempting to coordinate the histories of various tendencies and movements into a single entity that might be called modernism.

This attempt has never been successful. In fact, it is now quite common to insist that there are different national and regional versions of modernism across the globe. For example, Fredric Jameson notes the presence within modernism of “various national traditions” with “a certain order and logic specific to each one.”⁷⁸ Modernism does not arrive at the same time or move with the same tempo in Latin America as it does in France. In fact, the wider the geographical net is cast the more various are the time schemes, so that modernism in Japan may coincide only very briefly with what passes by the same name in much of Europe. Of course, the natural end of this exercise is to decide that the very concept of modernism, as the work of a particular time, is faulty, and that its uniform imposition on the globe is a historical injustice. Pluralizing modernism is one way of saving appearances, but this also pulls it away from the temporal simultaneity that was the basis of modernity in the first place. There is hardly any need for a concept like modernism if the historical singularity of the modern has disappeared.

It might be said, then, that modernism has left us the expectation of a meaningfully synchronized present without providing a very good example of how to realize it.⁷⁹ If nothing else, though, the common assumption that modernism should be followed by a successor movement, like it in form but different in content, shows how the notion of a common, social present persists in the absence of any particular evidence for it. Presumably, if the contemporary were such a present, then there wouldn’t be so much anxiety about how to characterize it, what to call it. Current debates about this issue assume that one of the more important offices of art and literature is to declare the meaning of the present. A closer look, taken in the next three chapters, at painting, narrative fiction, and film, will show instead how these arts have tended to question the assumptions on which the traditional notion of the present has been based.