THE THREE MEDITATIONS ON RUINS AND THE THREE JOURNEYS TO America, described in the previous chapters, and which spanned more than half a century, gave form to three experiences of time. All three reflected a radical reappraisal of the order of time. Volney, Chateaubriand, and Tocqueville, each in his own way, expressed the realization that the old regime of historicity, which had so long been sustained by the model of historia magistra, could no longer work. In order for contemporary events to be intelligible, the categories of the past and the future had to be articulated differently, failing which “the mind could only proceed in darkness.”
Unsurprisingly, it is Chateaubriand who undergoes the most fundamental change. In the space of a mere quarter-century he evolved from considering America to be a primeval land of refuge for those peoples still living in harmony with nature (as the Scythians had traditionally been represented) to seeing it as a country that in no time at all had invented modern freedom. No longer a museum or a utopia of the past, America was the place where the future was being forged. No longer a New World that had been discovered, but a world of the new, of an equality toward which the Old World was also proceeding, if more slowly and laboriously. The “Old” World would henceforth be “old” in two senses: in the sixteenth-century sense, of course, but also in the (new) sense that it was less advanced than America. A gap had sprung up between the two shores of the Atlantic—between experience and expectation. Tocqueville’s trip was, ultimately, a way of reducing that gap, by “seeking out” experience in order better to understand and even stabilize expectation by giving direction to action. In so doing he still maintained the schema of historia magistra, but inverted it and situated the source of intelligibility in the future rather than the past. Through this revised schema he could ground his “new political science.”
Let us now leave the Atlantic and 1789 behind, to enter the waters of another major crisis of time, two centuries later, casting anchor around the now-symbolic date of 1989. The landscape is perhaps more familiar, because it is closer to us, but it is not necessarily easier to get one’s bearings, because it is precisely too close. There is so much material, and so much has been said and written about it already, with new volumes appearing regularly in the bookshop window. That is why it is even more important than in the preceding chapters, which were exercises in viewing from afar, to find for the ensuing chapters, which are exercises in viewing a contemporary landscape close up, an angle of attack as precise and revealing as possible. At the same time, we should not lose sight of what viewing from afar has brought to the debate. Two contemporary watchwords, notions which organize our public space, seem to meet the criteria: “memory” and “heritage.”
I shall not treat these two terms for themselves, nor explore them in all their many facets, but rather examine them for the light they throw on issues of time. The concept of memory will be introduced through Pierre Nora’s Lieux de mémoire, and for heritage I shall give an overview of the key moments in the notion’s development. What order of time do these concepts express or—perhaps an equally pertinent question—challenge? What crisis of time do they bring to light? Is the modern regime of historicity, which we have seen taking shape around 1789, still operative? That is, does the intelligibility of our world still and again come from the future, as the inventors of the idea of progress dared to imagine and later affirmed with increasing self-assurance? “New facts” could not but win out over “historical fact.” Today, in the apparent self-evidence of the value of memory, and the centrality of heritage, just as in the polemics around memory and history, should we see a “return” of the category of the past, a nostalgia for the old model of historia magistra? Or, rather, a hitherto unknown dominance of the category of the present, the heyday of presentism? But is the notion of heritage necessarily backward-looking? Not, as we shall see, when the transformation of the natural environment into heritage brings back the idea of the future.