AT THE TIME THIS BOOK WAS FIRST PUBLISHED, IN 2003, it already talked of a crisis of time, but obviously not of the crisis that has engulfed us since 2008—and I would not go so far as to claim for myself the gift of prophecy (not even with hindsight). However, it is not hard to see that links exist between the crisis, initially financial, which radiated out from the United States, and a world so enslaved to the present that no other viewpoint is considered admissible. What words have we been hearing since 2008? Essentially “crisis,” “recession,” “depression,” but also “(total) transformation” and even “change of era.” Some swear by the idea that “nothing will ever be the same again,” while others (or the same) just as noisily declare that “the economy is getting back on track” (that is, just like before), that “the green shoots” are visible, that the upturn is just around the corner and we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.…
And then no, hopes are dashed again, this recession is still with us—or rather, back it comes—and even more threateningly than before. In any case, “unemployment is due to rise” (again), and the only business plans anyone still dares to make are redundancy lists. In Europe it is now all the fault of certain countries’ public deficits, while financial speculation seems to have been forgotten and, besides, is doing nicely, thank you (and what more presentist phenomenon than this speculation?). The split-second time of the markets can be accommodated neither by the economy nor by politics, which itself obeys several times: the imperious time of the electoral calendar, the age-old idea of “saving time” (by deciding to defer decisions till later), and, last but not least, the time of the spin doctors (whose unit of measurement is media time). And so political leaders are required to “rescue” the euro, for instance—or the whole financial system, for that matter—every month or so, or at least to declare they are doing so. And this raises an even more fundamental problem: our old representative democracies are beginning to realize that they don’t really know how to adapt their methods and rhythms of decision making to this tyranny of the immediate without sacrificing precisely what made them democratic in the first place.
We have heard over and over again that there is a big, bad, short-termist financial capitalism, to be contrasted with a good old industrial capitalism and its managers of yesteryear, or only yesterday. But ever since historians started taking an interest in the history of capitalism, they have noted its malleability, and if there is any unity to the concept, in its path from thirteenth-century Italy to the whole of the Western world today, it resides first and foremost, as Fernand Braudel has argued, in its seemingly limitless plasticity, its capacity to mutate and adapt. Capitalism, which Braudel distinguished from the market economy, always goes where there are profits to be made: “It represents the high-profit zone.” The Belgian historian Henri Pirenne was also struck by the “truly surprising regularity with which phases of economic freedom and of economic regulation have succeeded each other” in capitalism’s history since the Middle Ages. And Marc Bloch pointed out, in a lecture given in 1937, that ever since Solon canceled all debts in sixth-century B.C. Athens, “economic progress has consisted of a series of bankruptcies.”
Without wishing to transform this preface into a commentary on our present crisis, I think it needs to be said that once the 2008 financial collapse had been dealt with in extremis, it seemed—and it still seems—extremely difficult to see beyond it. Reactions were legion, and actions few. A mantra such as “the recovery” could suddenly sound reassuring because “recovering” means “getting back to where we were before.” It is a candid expression of our collective inability to shake off what is generally called “short-termism” and which I prefer to call “presentism”: the sense that only the present exists, a present characterized at once by the tyranny of the instant and by the treadmill of an unending now.
WHAT DOES THE HISTORIAN HAVE TO OFFER? NOT “THE recovery,” obviously, but perhaps, by taking a step back, the discovery of something other than this mesmerizing present. The historian practices viewing from afar. In this book, I shall use and test out the notion of “regime of historicity” as a tool for creating this distance, with a view to having a finer understanding at the end of the process of what is close by. At least, that is my intention and my hope.1
My hypothesis (presentism) and my methodological instrument (the regime of historicity) belong together. The notion of a “regime of historicity” helps shape the hypothesis of presentism, and the latter helps flesh out the notion of a “regime of historicity.” The two are inseparable, at least in the first instance. Why “regime” rather than “form” (of historicity)? And why “regime of historicity” rather than “regime of temporality”? The term “regime” encompasses the senses of dietary regime (regimen in Latin, diaita in Greek), of political regime (politeia), of the regime of the winds, and in French the term extends to an engine’s speed (le régime d’un moteur), its revs per minute. What these relatively disparate domains have in common is the idea of degrees, of more or less, of mixtures and composites, and an always provisional or unstable equilibrium. Speaking of a “regime of historicity” is thus simply a way of linking together past, present, and future, or of mixing the three categories, in the same way that one talks of a “mixed constitution” in Greek political theory (combining elements of aristocracy, oligarchy, and democracy, one of which was always dominant in practice).
And why “historicity”? This is a weighty philosophical term, with a long history behind it, extending from Hegel to Ricoeur, via Dilthey and Heidegger. Whatever the emphasis given—on the human being’s self-awareness as a historical being, on his finitude, or on his openness toward the future (in Heidegger’s “being-for-death”)—the term essentially refers to how individuals or groups situate themselves and develop in time, that is, the forms taken by their historical condition. But, you may ask, can one legitimately talk of “historicity” before even the advent of the modern concept of history (between the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century)? Yes, if by “historicity” we mean this primary experience of estrangement, of distance between self and self, to which the categories of past, present, and future give order and meaning, enabling it to be grasped and expressed. For example, going way back to Homer, one could cite the scene in which Odysseus hears his own exploits sung by the Phaeacian bard. Odysseus is suddenly confronted with his inability to link his previous identity as the glorious victor of Troy to his present one as a shipwrecked and destitute castaway who has lost everything, right down to his own name. What he lacks is precisely the category of the past through which he could recognize himself in that other who is nonetheless himself. A different, but related, experience from the early fifth century this time can be found in Saint Augustine’s major meditation on time, in chapter XI of the Confessions. At the outset, the problem is not abstract time, but the time he himself experiences, in its three modes of memory (the presence of the past), attention (the presence of the present), and expectation (the presence of the future). Arguably then, the notion of a “regime of historicity” is applicable prior to and independently of the crystallization of the modern concept of history, for example as Reinhart Koselleck has powerfully theorized it.
As for why I have opted for (regimes of) “historicity” rather than of “temporality,” the latter has the disadvantage of referring to an external standard of time, such as can still be found in Braudel, where the different durées are all measured against an “exogenous,” mathematical, or astronomical time (which Braudel himself calls the “imperious time of the world”).
So what is a regime of historicity, and what is it not? It is not a factual given. It cannot be observed directly, nor found in today’s almanacs. It is constructed by the historian. Regimes do not come in a series, one mechanically following another, whether these are understood as sent from heaven or emanating from the earth. They are not the same as Bossuet’s or Condorcet’s “stages” and are not remotely related to those vast and vague approximations we call civilizations. A regime of historicity is, rather, an artificial construct whose value lies in its heuristic potential. And it should be classed alongside Weber’s ideal type, as a formal category. Depending on whether the category of the past, the future, or the present is dominant, the order of time derived from it will obviously not be the same. Hence certain behaviors, certain actions, and certain forms of historiography are more possible than others, more—or less—in tune with the times, untimely or seemingly perfectly timed. A regime of historicity is a category (without content), which can elucidate our experiences of time, and nothing restricts it to the European or Western world alone. On the contrary, in its very conception it is intended as a tool for comparative study.
I will use “regime of historicity” sometimes in a broad, macrohistorical sense, and sometimes in a narrow, microhistorical one. It can help us understand the biography of an ordinary person or equally of a historical figure like Napoleon, caught between the modern regime introduced by the Revolution and the old regime symbolized by the Empire and his marriage to Marie Louise of Austria. With it, we can delve into a major work (whether literary or not), for instance Chateaubriand’s Memoirs, in which the author characterizes himself as “a swimmer who has plunged into the river of time, struggling between its two banks.” It can equally be used to examine a city’s architecture, past and present, or to compare the dominant rhythms and changing relations to time of different societies, near and far. Whatever the particular focus, I hope to generate new insights through close attention to moments of crisis of time and how these are expressed.
LET ME ATTEMPT AT THE OUTSET TO DISPEL SOME misunderstandings, first and foremost the possible confusion of “presentism” with “the present.” My hypothesis of presentism does not automatically imply that I condemn or am hostile to the present. My position is neither nostalgic (in relation to another, better regime) nor accusatory, but it also rejects any uncritical acceptance of the present order of time as it stands. Evoking an omnipresent present in no way exempts us from exploring ways out of it but quite the contrary: in a world in which presentism reigns supreme, the historian’s place is more than ever among those who “vigilantly watch over the present [les guetteurs du présent],” in Charles Péguy’s words.
The French neologism le présentisme [presentism] was first coined by analogy with le futurisme [futurism], in which the future laid down the law. For me “presentism” was initially a hypothesis, which came with a series of questions: does our way of articulating past, present, and future have something specific to it, something which makes today’s present, here and now, different from previous presents? Convinced that yes, there is something specific about our present, I was led to a further question not yet formulated in those terms in the book’s first edition: is our presentism a stopgap or a new state? Is it simply a pause, a moment of stasis before we move on again to a more or less “radiant” future, a futurist type of future (given that we are unlikely to turn to a past-oriented regime)? Or is this omnipresent present (“omnipresent” like “omnivorous”) a substantial state? In which case it might indicate a new experience of time and a new regime of historicity, all the more distinctive for the fact that the West has spent the last two hundred years dancing to the tune of the future—and making others do likewise. It is too early to tell. This presentist present is by no means uniform or clear-cut, and it is experienced very differently, depending on one’s position in society. On the one hand there is the time of flows and acceleration, and of a valued and valorizing mobility, and on the other what the sociologist Robert Castel calls the “status of casual workers [le précariat],” whose present is languishing before their very eyes, who have no past except in a complicated way (especially in the case of immigrants, exiles, and migrants), and no real future either (the temporality of plans and projects is denied them). Today’s presentism can thus be experienced as emancipation or enclosure: ever greater speed and mobility or living from hand to mouth in a stagnating present. Not to forget a further aspect of our present: that the future is perceived as a threat not a promise. The future is a time of disasters, and ones we have, moreover, brought upon ourselves.
It becomes clear, therefore, that a lot more thought is needed to understand this crisis through which we are struggling somewhat blindly. The concept of presentism alone cannot explain it (and makes no pretence to, either), but perhaps it can highlight the risks and consequences of living in a world governed solely by an omnipresent and omnipotent present, in which immediacy alone has value. What I am endeavoring to do in this context is, as previously, to understand our present conjuncture through the questions I ask as a historian, working alongside others, and steering clear of any nostalgic outpourings or dogmatic pronouncements. In order that, in Michel de Certeau’s resonant words, we may move from “the uncanniness of ‘what happens’ today” to “the discursivity of ‘understanding.’”
People in search of a presentist experience need only look around them at certain cityscapes, replicated across the globe, for which the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas has invented the concept “Generic City,” associated with the notion of “Junkspace.” This is where presentism is really at home, eating up space and reducing or banishing time. The Generic City, freed from its enslavement to the center, is without history, even if it goes to great lengths to advertise its pseudo-historical district, where history is a service provided, complete with quaint trains and horse-drawn carriages. And if, despite everything, a center survives, it has to be at once “the most old and the most new,” “the most fixed and the most dynamic.” As the product of “an encounter between escalator and air-conditioning, conceived in an incubator of Sheetrock,” Junkspace never ages: it knows only self-destruction and on-site rebuilding or else almost instantaneous dilapidation. Airports, completed or (constantly) under construction (the ubiquitous “Work in progress. We apologize for the temporary inconvenience caused”) have become emblematic of the Generic City. They are forever transforming and mutating, while imposing ever more complex trajectories on their temporary inhabitants. As bubbles of expanding, transformable space, they epitomize Junkspace, and are its principle producers. Such space leaves no trace in our memories, because “its refusal to freeze ensures instant amnesia.”2 But can one actually live in a presentist city?