A rather famous colleague of mine (recently retired), whose books, arguments, and intellectual elegance I have admired ever since beginning my academic career, often says of himself, with seeming modesty, that, in all his life, he has had “only one good idea.” Then, after an artful pause to gauge the effect of his words, he changes his meaning by adding that this is hardly so serious a matter, since “most people don’t even have that much.” Here I would like to follow the example of the aforementioned party, whose name is Hayden White. In a good forty years of research and writing, my one idea (which has, I hope, had some impact) has taken the form of a hardheaded insistence that the things-of-the-world, however we encounter them, also possess a dimension of presence. This is the case despite our quotidian and scholarly focus on interpretation and meaning—and even if we almost always overlook the dimension of presence in our culture.
By “presence” I have meant—and still mean—that things inevitably stand at a distance from or in proximity to our bodies; whether they “touch” us directly or not, they have substance. I addressed this state of affairs in Production of Presence, which appeared in German as Diesseits der Hermeneutik. The book received this title—which may be rendered Hermeneutics of This World—because it is my impression that the dimension of presence might deserve a position of priority relative to the praxis of interpretation, which ascribes meaning to an object. This is not the case because presence is “more important” than the operations of consciousness and intention, but rather because, perhaps, it is “more elementary.” At the same time, the German title betrays something resembling the mild oedipal revolt of a man already over fifty. Relegating interpretation and hermeneutics to a restricted academic terrain (so to speak) was my small—and perhaps even petty—revenge against an overwhelming tradition of intellectual “depth,” which I had found embodied in some heroes of profundity among my academic “fathers.” Because of my background and (dis)inclinations, I had never felt entirely adequate to such depth.
Almost naturally—should, indeed, this be possible in the intellectual world—and without any particular programmatic objective, my intuition of presence developed in three directions. In 1926: Living on the Edge of Time, which preceded Production of Presence, I had asked what consequences attention to the dimension of presence might hold for our relationship to the past. An essay on the beauty of athletics addressed the same question with regard to aesthetic experience. Finally, in The Powers of Philology I tried to show that the dimension of presence invariably factors into encounters of a textual kind.
Afterward—and I still have not abandoned this hopeful ambition entirely—I wanted to see if I would enjoy the good fortune of striking upon a second idea. (In this I was prompted by Jorge Luis Borges and imagined that what is intellectually decisive does not consist of “discovering” or “producing” ideas so much as “stumbling upon” and “grasping for” them—intercepting ideas and giving them form.) Unfortunately, I have not yet “caught” a second idea, and all the projects I have pursued in recent years are clear extensions of my intuition concerning presence. I have attempted to describe Stimmung, the relationship we entertain with our environment, as a presence-phenomenon—the “lightest touch that occurs when the material world surrounding us affects the surface of our bodies.” At the moment, I am working on a book about the decade following the Second World War because I believe that in this period a form of “latency” predominated—a presence, to be understood as a kind of “stowaway,” that can produce effects and radiate energy while escaping efforts to identify and apprehend it.
After the books on presence had appeared, friends whose opinions I take very seriously surprised me by urging me to reflect systematically on, and write about, the existential and, indeed, the ethical consequences of these publications. The task, I suspect, would have demanded too much of me—or did I, half-consciously, feign modesty only to hide a visceral disinclination to “ethics” and other kinds of prescriptive “self-help” literature? At any rate, my reservations were hardly consistent. As attested by the chapters of the book at hand (to say nothing of other works), I have gladly been induced, time and again, to analyze contemporary social and cultural phenomena from the perspective of presence—or at least to sketch out the lines such an inquiry might assume. There were occasions and exhortations to do so behind every part of this book, even if I always sought a way out by pleading an utter lack of competency or adducing some other reason. It is both an obligation for, and a privilege of, humanists to practice “risky thinking.” That is to say, instead of subordinating ourselves to rational schemes of evidence and the constraints of systems, we “scientists of the mind” (Geisteswissenschaftler) should seek to confront and imagine whatever might entail a disruption of everyday life and the assumptions underlying its functions. To take a basic example: no one can simply “get away” from the rhythms and structures that constitute our globalized present and its forms of communication; yet, at the same time, it is important to hold firm to the possibility of doing so inasmuch as it provides an alternative to what is only too readily accepted as “normal.”
The five chapters comprising the book at hand have a superficial—which is not to say inconsequential—point of convergence with the contemporary world insofar as they came about when, accepting requests from others, I justified and excused what I subsequently wrote as instances of intellectual risk taking. Later, favorably inclined readers discovered—and, through their observations, I did too—that another plane of convergence existed where the analyses and arguments of the chapters connected, yielding a complex and contoured diagnosis of the present. The complementarity and coherence that were evident a posteriori are due, evidently, to the fact that each part of the book proceeds by taking up two chains of thought that are very different in origin and tonality. The first is the thesis (inspired by Michel Foucault and Niklas Luhmann) that the emergence of second-order observation has shaped the epistemological framework of Western culture since the early nineteenth century. Reinhart Koselleck dubbed the period between 1780 and 1830 the Sattelzeit (“saddle time” or “saddle period”); from then on, self-reflexive thought became the habitus of intellectuals, synonymous with thought itself.
But if, on the one hand, I sought to contextualize my account and analysis of the present day in terms of the consequences attending institutionalized second-order observation in 1800, I also yielded, time and again, to the temptation to impart, to the history of epistemology, a resonance that comes from the tradition of cultural criticism. Perhaps this melancholy tone was first heard in the early materialism of the seventeenth century, inasmuch as it represented the existential (and never really “political”) protest against a culture that, in a more and more one-sided fashion, posited a transcendental foundation for the structure and functions of human consciousness—a development accompanied by the thinning of concrete corporality as the substrate of human life. Today—when, for most people, the everyday occurs as a fusion of consciousness and software—this process has reached levels that can hardly be surpassed. I place emphasis on a culturally critical mood because here my thinking meets up with attempts by others to describe our present, even if, at the same time, it also differs from them. Under headings such as “biopolitics,” “body politics,” and “ecocriticism,” the human body—and with it, the things-of-the-world—are now receiving renewed attention and interest. For me, too, this is a point where multiple trajectories converge. The observations of my contemporaries almost always involve a critique of the present situation and suggestions for changing it. Owing, however, to a fundamental skepticism about the possibility of directing events—or even changing them in part—I prefer to retain a cautious distance. I believe that the situations faced today represent a continuation of human evolution “by cultural means.” For this reason—and notwithstanding appearances to the contrary—they lie entirely outside what we can hope to control.
An intellectual framework for the analysis of the present results where the history of epistemology that followed upon the emergence of second-order observation intersects with cultural criticism of the melancholy sort. In part, the chapters of the book presuppose this convergence; in part, they elaborate it. Central to this framework is the idea that the configuration of time that developed in the early nineteenth century has, for about half a century now (and with effects that become clearer every day), been succeeded by another configuration for which no name as yet exists. The title conferred upon the now obsolete chronotope—“historical thought/consciousness”—bears witness to the fact that it was once institutionalized so broadly and thoroughly that it could be mistaken for time tout court. It is Koselleck’s lasting achievement to have historicized, against this tendency, “historical consciousness” itself. To provide a background and contrast for the chronotope governing our own time, I would like to refer, in six points, to features of the historical mindset that Koselleck describes.
First, “historically conscious” mankind imagines itself on a linear path moving through time (therefore, it is not time itself that moves, as occurs in other chronotopes). Second, “historical thought” presumes that all phenomena are affected by change in time—time appears, that is, as an absolute agent of transformation. Third, as mankind moves along in time, it thinks it has left the past behind; the distance afforded by the present moment depreciates the value of past experiences as points of orientation. Fourth, the future presents itself as an open horizon of possibilities toward which humanity is making its way. Between the future and the past—and this is point five—the present narrows to a “brief, no-longer-perceptible moment of transition” (in the words of Baudelaire). It is my belief—point six—that the constricted present of this “history” came to provide the Cartesian subject with its epistemological habitat. Here was the site where the subject, adapting experiences from the past to the present and the future, made choices among the possibilities the latter offered. Picking options from what the future holds is the basis of—and frame for—what we call agency (Handeln).
Still today, we reproduce the topic of “historical time” in everyday conversation, as well as in intellectual and academic discourses, even if it no longer provides the basis for the ways we acquire experiences or act. That we no longer live in historical time can be seen most clearly with respect to the future. For us, the future no longer presents itself as an open horizon of possibilities; instead, it is a dimension increasingly closed to all prognoses—and which, at the same time, seems to draw near as a menace. Global warming will proceed with all the consequences that have been foreseen for quite some time; the question remains whether humanity will manage to accrue sufficient credit for a few additional years before the most catastrophic consequences of the situation arrive. Despite all the talk about how the past has supposedly gone missing, another problem the new chronotope presents is that we are no longer able to bequeath anything to posterity. Instead of ceasing to provide points of orientation, pasts flood our present; automated, electronic systems of memory play a central role in the process. Between the pasts that engulf us and the menacing future, the present has turned into a dimension of expanding simultaneities. All the pasts of recent memory form part of this spreading present; it is increasingly difficult for us to exclude any kind of fashion or music that originated in recent decades from the time now. The broad present, with its concurrent worlds, has, always and already, offered too many possibilities; therefore, the identity it possesses—if it has one at all—lacks clear contours. At the same time, the closure of futurity (at least in the strict sense) makes it impossible to act, since no action can occur where no place exists for its realization to be projected. The expanding present offers room to move toward the future and the past, yet such efforts seem ultimately to return to their point of departure. Here they produce the impression of intransitive “mobilization” (to borrow a metaphor from Lyotard). Such unmoving motion often reveals itself to be stagnant, the end of directed purpose. If, then, the narrow present of “history” was the epistemological habitat of the Cartesian subject, another figure of reference (and self-reference) must emerge in the broad present. Might the foregoing explain why we, for a few years now, have felt the intellectual pressure—which has only grown more intense—to make, once again, aspects of its physis part of the way we envision and conceptualize human beings?
In our present, the epistemological disposition to fashion a figure of self-reference that is more strongly rooted in the body and in space meets up with a yearning that emerged in reaction to a world determined by excessive emphasis on consciousness; this is the yearning that, as we have noted, found its tone and expression in the melancholy strain of cultural criticism. Within the new, expansive present, then, there are always already two dynamics pulling apart and, at the same time, forming a field of tension. On one side lies an insistence on concreteness, corporality, and the presence of human life, where the echo of cultural criticism merges with the effects of the new chronotope. Such an insistence stands opposed to radical spiritualization, which abstracts from space, the body, and sensory contact with the things-of-the-world—this is the “disenchantment” entailed by the “process of modernization.” Between these two powerful vectors, our new present has begun to unfold its particular form and to command a unique fascination.
I have often heard the criticism or objection that I clearly, and even nostalgically, side with presence and the senses against the cultural achievements of consciousness, abstraction, and, finally, electronic technology. Such observations are certainly accurate, and I do not care to defend myself against them. It seems unnecessary to do so, above all because I in no way seek to make a normative claim for my choices. Yet I would certainly appeal to the rights of age—an age that advances in years—that I be allowed to preserve some distance, and even a polemical distance, from the developments of recent times. I am sure that the electronic world, its rhythm and its forms of communication, are repugnant to me and difficult to accept because they began their march at a moment when I—at some forty years of age—had found certain arrangements in my everyday life and work that made me feel comfortable and productive. Many of them—for example, writing long notes on white index cards with a soft surface or dictating correspondence on a small tape recorder—today seem like islands of activity threatened by an electronic flood that will never recede.
The future of our increasingly warm planet transforms into a vision I have of a technological present, long since past, that extends into our broad present. Don’t those of us who are older have the right to remain on our islands for as long as possible? Why should we clumsily adapt to the demands of the electronic that dominate the new present? We are already living in a vast moment of simultaneities. There is no need to reject us—we who embody one of many pasts—from our havens in the broad present.