Regimes of Historicity: presentism and experiences of time

OUR RELATIONS TO TIME MAY BE DISSECTED BUT NOT DECREED. For how could we ever pronounce upon our own present? Perched on what stilts or standing on the shoulders of what giants? We have seen that the present’s immediate self-historicization is a defining trend of our time. And we credit ourselves with the power to extend and intensify this trend? To push presentism to its very limits?

If there was a time when Chateaubriand’s stance could be ours, it is certainly long gone. I shall mention it one last time, as a way of bidding farewell to the self-styled swimmer between the banks of time, between the old and the new regime of historicity. Having described the July Days of the 1830 Revolution as they unfolded, Chateaubriand notes that “a certain contemporary colouring” sheds a cast over his portrayal, which is “true at the moment when it occurs” but “false when the moment has gone.” In order to “judge the reality that remains impartially, one must adopt the point of view from which posterity will consider the completed event.” Chateaubriand does not for an instant doubt his success in this: he entitles this chapter of his Memoirs “How the July Revolution will be viewed,” or, a variant, “The July Revolution in the Future.”1 We may well be as eager as Chateaubriand, or even more so, to historicize the present, but we cannot be even half as certain that we will succeed. What of 1989 in the future? What of 11 September 2001?

Ten years later, as Chateaubriand was preparing to lay down his pen and step into his grave, he observed, “The world now, the world without consecrated authority, seems lodged between two impossibilities: the impossible past [because “the old society is breaking up”] and an impossible future.”² Yet he can almost immediately move on from this aporia, from what we have called a pause or a gap in time. First, he still has the example of Rome to refer to, even if in the same breath he declares historia magistra to be officially dead. Although the excesses of freedom may well lead to despotism, he states, excessive tyranny has never led to anything but greater tyranny: “Tiberius did not return Rome to a Republic; he simply left Caligula as his successor.”³ Second, as regards the future, he appeals to the virtue of Christian hope as “more permanent than time.” It alone can help the future come into being, through a combination of eschatological belief and faith in progress. Hence the last sentence of the Memoirs, “I behold the light of a dawn whose sunrise I shall never see.”⁴ But leaving aside the particular (and well-tried) remedies Chateaubriand proposes, could such an analysis, namely the assertion of this twofold impossibility, still shed even a modicum of light on our own contemporary situation? Can our present conjuncture be addressed in these terms? Is the image of the swimmer between the banks, or equally of the gap, still adequate today?

“Tell me how you interpret the present and I will tell you what philosophy you are,” said Péguy.⁵ What, then, are the salient features of our present? How do we conceive it? What order of time does it point to, and—a related question, which has accompanied us from the very start—are we to believe that a new regime of historicity has emerged? Or is emerging? A regime which might be visible only in sector-based, local, or even disciplinary areas, but which would as yet have no general or unified expression. Then again, it might be useless to look for unity, if a certain dispersion or simply a multiplicity of different regimes of temporality happened to characterize (and distinguish) our present. And it might also be simply premature, given how long it takes to bring to light and delineate a regime of historicity, as we have seen, and given also that a regime of historicity never exists in pure form.

Let us nevertheless add some finishing touches to the depiction of our present, which this book has, explicitly or implicitly, never lost from view. In moving back and forth between presents and pasts, while consistently focusing on the category of the present in its relations to the past and the future, I have attempted from one chapter to the next to shed light on how the present has been construed—long ago, more recently, and today. Each chapter could doubtless have stood alone, which is a sign that it covered the ground of its journey too swiftly. Our Polynesian trip, with which I began, showed up the misunderstandings arising down there between Maoris and Europeans, while over here we glimpsed the debate between anthropology and history on the issue of types of history. We crossed the seas with Odysseus, and encountered the question of the past. It led us from the shores of Phaeacia to the Christian order of time, with Augustine. Then came the French Revolution, and the rapids of a crisis of time through which we accompanied Chateaubriand as he navigated between the Old and the New World, moving from the ancien régime’s historia magistra to the modern regime of historicity.

To characterize our present, I have used the term “presentism” throughout, and primarily in opposition to futurism, which had long dominated the European scene. When it disappeared, there emerged a disoriented time, marked by greater uncertainty, although uncertainty also became a category of thought and the object of scientific research. But I used the term also because I wanted to compare today’s present with those of the past, some of them at least, the most notable ones, those which have left the most indelible marks on European culture: the Homeric present, the present of the classical philosophers, the Renaissance humanists’ present, the eschatological or messianic present, and the modern present, produced by the modern regime of historicity.

Let us call on Péguy again: “And suddenly one turns away, and nothing looks the same again.”6 For us too, everything looks different. The crisis of the future unsettled our idea of progress and produced a sense of foreboding that cast a shadow over our present. The future did not disappear, but it seemed opaque and threatening. The atomic bomb on Hiroshima, initially hailed as a “scientific revolution,” inaugurated the era of nuclear threat, while in the same period Europe conclusively lost its “spatial and temporal centrality.”⁷ The development of the notion of heritage, as I traced it from the ruins of Rome—ruins which certainly came from the past but with a view to Rome’s renovatio in the present—up to the inclusion of the natural environment and the human gene pool within the category of heritage helped us grasp this reversal. But whereas a logic of heritage was previously summoned to seal over a perceived break, today it must additionally avert a perceived threat. In this configuration, intangible heritage has become increasingly important, and the issue of transmission is perceived as particularly critical.

These shifts in our experience of time have given rise to two compelling new areas of thought, the first organized around the “imperative of responsibility,” conceived and advocated by the philosopher Hans Jonas, and the second, a later development, organized around the “precautionary principle.”8 Although the two principles certainly differ—having neither the same origins, nor the same scope, nor the same applications—one can nevertheless consider the former to be the “philosophical bedrock” of the latter.⁹ I mention them in conclusion because they are particularly meaningful in the light of Péguy’s remark. Both principles seem to turn their back on presentism, understood as a confinement to the present alone and to the present’s vision of itself. And both are essentially concerned with taking the future seriously and even taking it in hand, with all its uncertainties. For the imperative of responsibility, this future has no visible end, while for the precautionary principle it is characterized first and foremost by uncertainty. But, as the philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy has argued recently, it is perhaps not a question of uncertainty but of belief, since in fact we know well enough what catastrophes await us, but we refuse to believe them. This argument forms the basis of Dupuy’s theorization of what he calls a “rational catastrophism.”¹⁰

The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age was published in 1979, but according to Jonas its conception dated back to the early 1960s. Its starting point was that Prometheus was “finally unbound.” Having mastered nature, man now took himself as the object of technological manipulation. Jonas was (still) targeting the Marxist futurist utopia, but his criticism was also (and already) valid for technology “in the anticipation of its extreme possibilities.”¹¹ The book’s success was probably due in part to the fact that it arrived at a crucial moment for relations to time, when a radiant future was fast transforming into a future of threat. The book targeted the illusions produced by the “principle of hope,”¹² which in Jonas’s view endangered the future while blithely sacrificing the present. Its publication also coincided with a time of particular vitality in ecological thinking. But by the time the French translation came out in 1990, one year after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the final collapse of the Marxist utopia, concerns had shifted over to the other side, onto the crisis of the future.

Hans Jonas countered a “politics of utopia” for which it seemed legitimate to “use those living now as a mere means to a goal,”13 with the need to construct an ethics for the future, since unquestionably “action takes place for the sake of a future which neither the agent nor the victim nor their contemporaries will live to enjoy.” In other words, “the obligations upon the now issue from that future.”¹⁴ Also, “the ethic of revolutionary eschatology,” as Jonas calls it, is “an ethic of transition,” whereas the ethics he seeks to found should be noneschatological and anti-utopian: concerned both with the future and with the present, both with our contemporaries and with the generations to come, in the name of humankind. Against the temptation to “sacrifice [of] the present for the future,” Jonas posits that “every feeling and striving being is not only an end of nature but also an end-in-itself, namely, its own end,” while immediately adding to this first maxim an imperative: “Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life.”¹⁵ Unlike Kant’s categorical imperative, which does not extend beyond my present act, this imperative demands attention to the long-term effects of my actions. It can be formulated in Ricoeur’s terms: “Responsibility extends as far as our powers do in space and time.”¹⁶

The present is in some sense responsible for the whole of the future, since “a degraded legacy simultaneously degrades its heirs.” When we come to understand this “futurology of warning” and can recognize the “fate staring at us out of the future,” we feel “a mixture of fear and guilt: fear because what we see ahead is something terrible; guilt because we are conscious of our own causal role in bringing it about.”¹⁷ Jonas even readily uses a “heuristics of fear” in order to give full weight to the dangers ahead. His ethics is unreservedly critical of (utopian) futurism and its dangers, and he looks unflinchingly at the future staring out at us, which we endanger through our actions. In terms of relations to time, Jonas’s ethics wants a future without futurism and a present without presentism, associated or even linked one to the other by a legacy which must not be “degraded,” since in so doing both those who bequeath and those who receive are themselves “degraded.” Since we are already indebted to future generations, our responsibility begins today and starts afresh each day—in order that the humanity of humankind may endure.¹⁸

The second area of thought I mentioned above concerns the “precautionary principle.” It represents another figure of indebtedness in response to the same crisis of progress and new technological risks. In addition to the already-present risks of irreversible environmental changes, there are now the dangers associated with the biotechnologies. The precautionary principle caught on very rapidly, and on an international scale, to become a key 1990s term, partly due to ecological thinking, and to certain contemporary disasters and scandals. A report to the French prime minister of the time mentioned in its conclusions that precaution “responds to an evident social demand.”19 What had once been the nightmare of politicians could now become their mascot or, more trivially, a convenient way of passing the buck. And indeed, their tendency or temptation to make the precautionary principle into a principle of abstention was soon apparent, in a new version of “If in doubt, don’t,” countered by the adage “Nothing ventured nothing gained!”

This principle was first adopted at the International Conference on the Protection of the North Sea in 1987, concerning the protection of the environment. The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development in 1992 gave rise to a French law in 1995 providing that “the absence of certainty at a given stage of scientific and technical knowledge should not delay the adoption of effective and proportionate measures, at an economically acceptable cost, designed to avert a risk of serious and irreversible damage to the environment.”²⁰ The principle was thereafter applied also to the food industry and to health, and was extended further to become the central point of reference for advocates of sustainable development. It was the nodal point of debates around the debt to future generations and our corresponding duties.²¹

The precautionary principle was conceived precisely for situations of radical uncertainty, when science itself is unable to decide. The principle applies to risks that are not, and might never be, ascertained, but which are presumed to exist. It differs from the more familiar, even if not always implemented, principle of prevention, since the precautionary principle counts in terms of long or very long temporalities. But, as an economist asked, how are we to identify and interpret these “unclear signals coming from the future”?²² This is where Hans Jonas’s ethical meditation on the “fate staring at us out of the future” came into play, as well as Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s critique of precaution.

According to François Ewald, responses to uncertainty have taken three forms: foresight, prevention, and, today, precaution.23 The paradigm of responsibility (linked to the advent of liberalism) can be associated with foresight, that of solidarity (represented by the Welfare State) can be associated with prevention, and perhaps a new paradigm, for which a name has yet to be found, will come to be associated with precaution. Ewald proposes the paradigm of “security” and the concomitant emergence of a “Precautionary State.”²⁴ “Foresight” implies not overlooking the ups and downs of life, “prevention” means evaluating risks on the basis of scientific knowledge, and “precaution” acknowledges that even science is not infallible. With it, a new relation to harm and to time is introduced: “there exist the irreparable, the irremediable, the unpardonable, the harm which is beyond compensation and the crime whose prosecution is beyond time restrictions [imprescriptible].”²⁵ Irreversibility and sustainable development are concepts whose temporalities carry with them the idea of time as continuous and seamless, from us to future generations or from future generations back to us. Of course we look toward the future, but on the basis of an extended present, without interruption or revolution.

Critics of the precautionary principle have highlighted its negative effects, namely encouraging passivity and inaction, or at least excessively obstructing innovation. The principle could, paradoxically, generate a sort of defensive withdrawal into the present and hence bolster presentism even further. Along the same lines, Ewald has drawn our attention to an “extreme form of the figure of precaution,” according to which development itself would constitute a risk. Let us imagine a product with “an undetectable and unforeseeable defect, which only becomes apparent after a certain length of time. Moreover, the responsibility for the defect can be imputed to the product or producer only due to a scientific context different from the one existing when the product was first put into circulation, used and consumed.”²⁶ How determine civil or criminal liability in such a case? How can someone be held responsible after the fact for something he or she could not possibly have known at the time? In France, the law’s nonretroactivity was established already in 1789: “Legislation provides only for the future; it has no retrospective operation” (French Civil Code). Yet with development risk, when a danger is discovered at some future date, the past (in which the danger was unknown) is still considered to be part of the present of the risk’s discovery. This means that we never leave the present (or at least a legal present). The as yet unsuspected risk is (already) present, and once it has been proven, after the fact, it will continue to belong to that present; it will not be considered as past.

Thus a whole new configuration took shape, in which the direction of debt was reversed and reoriented toward the future through the pivotal concept of “responsibility.” Ricoeur proposed that responsibility have “an orientation that is more deliberately prospective as a function of which the idea of prevention of future harm will be added to that of reparation for harm already done”27 (responsibility toward the past, particularly in the form of an acknowledgment of the duty to remember, had already been reinforced). And the Nuremberg Charter lifted statutory time limitations on the prosecution of crimes against humanity, an innovation which was incorporated into the French Penal Code in 1994, and is now recognized by a majority of countries (since the decision, ratified by France in 2000, to create an International Criminal Court).

The nonapplicability of statutory time limitations to certain crimes means that ordinary justice, which is precisely governed by these, is annulled, as is the principle of the nonretroactivity of the law. The jurist Yan Thomas commented that, “the opposite of lifting statutory time limitations [l’imprescriptible] is not time passing but time having a term [le temps prescrit].” Both are equally constructions.²⁸ The lifting of statutory limitations here means that the criminal in crimes against humanity remains contemporary with his crime until his death, but by the same token we too are contemporary with the facts to be judged. Maurice Papon, for example, despite his ninety-two years, was not a day older: till the day of his death, vehement in his denial, he remained the administrative head of the Préfecture of the Gironde. If the “very nature” of crimes against humanity makes statutory time limitations fall away, then they ground a “legal atemporality” which can be understood as a sort of past in the present, a present past or rather an extension of the present, as from the present of the trial. The only place for historians in this temporality is, logically enough, as witnesses, called upon to express orally what they remember. The notion of responsibility generates here a certain elision or certain transfers between the time of law, with its own regimes of temporality, and the time of society. The extent to which the temporal regime associated with crimes against humanity has permeated public space is probably linked to the increasing litigiousness of our societies, which is another characteristic of our contemporary world.

The present has thus extended both into the future and into the past. Into the future, through the notions of precaution and responsibility, through the acknowledgment of the irreparable and the irreversible, and through the notions of heritage and debt, the latter being the concept which cements and gives sense to the whole. And into the past, borne by similar concepts such as responsibility and the duty to remember, the drive to make every-thing into heritage, the lifting of time limitations, and last but not least the notion of “debt.” This double indebtedness, toward the past and the future, but derived from our present and weighing upon it, is another hallmark of our contemporary experience. The figure of debt is what transports us from the genocide of the Jews to the risks threatening the entire human species, from the obligation not to forget to the imperative of responsibility:29 in order that future generations may still have the life of human beings and never forget man’s inhumanity to man.

This extension of the present into the future gives rise, negatively, to catastrophism (not “rational” this time) or else, more positively, to work on uncertainty itself. The numerous fields affected by the “Probabilistic Revolution”—to use an expression adopted by the mathematician Henri Berestycki—are a sign of this.³⁰ Advances in computer technologies have given rise to a whole “risk technology” using virtual scenarios and simulations. In our uncertain universe, we no longer choose a single projection, through which we “foresee the future,” but instead we “measure the effects of several envisageable futures on the present,” such as to move forward virtually in several directions before deciding on one direction alone.³¹ This is what is called a “multidirectional” or “multiple” present. From my particular perspective of the relation to time, however, does this approach not simply extend the present still further? We “start out from” the present, but never really “leave” it? It is the source of all enlightenment. And in a sense there is nothing but the present, not as infinite, but as indefinite. The managerial response to uncertainty is called “flexibility,” where the idea is not so much to anticipate change as to be as flexible as possible at every moment, that is, to be able to be immediately present (“on the case”). It is worth noting that the centrality of uncertainty and of the present applies not only in relation to the future, but also in our approach to the past. It too can be reconstructed as multidirectional and multiple, at least up to a certain point.

So tell me now, “how do you interpret the present?” Not simply as a vast, seemingly endless expanse (which is why the past just won’t go away), no, our present is not simply that. For there is a type of “time which lasts,” a time of trauma, the time lived by concentration camp survivors, which resurfaces at certain moments. It is a kind of immobile, involuntary present, the present which Primo Levi identified as that of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner whenever “at an uncertain hour / That agony returns” and he then feels compelled to tell his tale.32 In my outline of the rise of presentism in chapter 3, I identified a present that was so close to omnipresence and eternity that it could almost be assimilated to the tota simul by which Augustine, and before him Plotinus, defined eternity, where “Nothing passes away, but the whole is simultaneously present.” I also mentioned Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, which already in 1909 was proclaiming the “tragic lyricism of ubiquity and omnipresent speed.” I concluded that however eternal this present might appear, it also avidly or anxiously sought to historicize itself, as though it were forced to project itself ahead, in order to turn back and see itself as already past, forgotten. Can this be interpreted as an attempt to fend off the unbearable uncertainty of events? I mentioned the regime of the contemporary event, in search of instant self-commemoration and as already that commemoration. But, in apparent contradiction with this regime, our dilated present, burdened with its twofold debt and twofold memory of the past and the future, is also shadowed by entropy. It is destined to be forgotten, consigned to the immediate, the instantaneous, and the ephemeral.

Such are the major traits of this manifold and multivalent present, a monstrous time. It is at once everything (there is nothing but the present) and almost nothing (reduced to the tyranny of the instant). One need only cite the famous lines from Faust II, “Now the spirit looks neither backwards nor forwards, the present alone is our happiness,” to understand that Goethe’s presentism is not, or can no longer be, ours. On the contrary, we are always looking both backwards and forwards, but without ever leaving this present that we have made into the limits of our world.

As we saw above, the humanists harbored a “hopeful expectation turned toward the past.” Enlightenment came from the glorious antique past, to which one should aspire through imitation and example. And the present—as the endpoint of this process—was capable of raising itself to the splendor of this past, through the operation of renovatio. In the modern regime of historicity, by contrast, the hopeful expectation was directed toward the future as source of enlightenment. The present was considered to be inferior to the future, and time became an agent; not only was it palpably accelerating, but one must make it move faster still. The future lay in speed. Attempts were made to break time in two and insert the future directly into the present.