Cover of Power and Time
Power and Time Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History
edited by Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos and Natasha Wheatley
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Cloth: 978-0-226-48162-3 | Electronic: 978-0-226-70601-6
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226706016.001.0001

AVAILABLE FROM

University of Chicago Press (cloth, ebook)
Barnes & Noble Nook
DeGruyter Multi-User Ebook Program
EBSCO eBooks (formerly NetLibrary)
Google Play
Kobo
University Press Scholarship Online (UPSO)
ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Time is the backdrop of historical inquiry, yet it is much more than a featureless setting for events. Different temporalities interact dynamically; sometimes they coexist tensely, sometimes they clash violently. In this innovative volume, editors Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley challenge how we interpret history by focusing on the nexus of two concepts—“power” and “time”—as they manifest in a wide variety of case studies. Analyzing history, culture, politics, technology, law, art, and science, this engaging book shows how power is constituted through the shaping of temporal regimes in historically specific ways. Power and Time includes seventeen essays on human rights; sovereignty; Islamic, European, Chinese, and Indian history; slavery; capitalism; revolution; the Supreme Court; the Anthropocene; and even the Manson Family. Power and Time will be an agenda-setting volume, highlighting the work of some of the world’s most respected and original contemporary historians and posing fundamental questions for the craft of history.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Dan Edelstein is the William H. Bonsall Professor of French and (by courtesy) professor of history at Stanford University. He is the author of The Terror of Natural Right, The Enlightenment, and On the Spirit of Rights, all published by the University of Chicago Press. Stefanos Geroulanos is professor of history at New York University. He is the author of Transparency in Postwar France and coauthor of The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe, published by the University of Chicago Press. Natasha Wheatley is assistant professor of history at Princeton University.

REVIEWS

“What a gift this magnificent edited volume will be for those of us who have long sought to identify the implicit and violent ways in which power is garnered in battles over timing and time. With conceptual and empirical acuity, this is a volume that ‘harasses’ disciplinary strictures as it explodes the most revered canons. Moving from ‘multiple temporalities’ to conflictual ones is at the heart of this collective agenda, each author showing why such a conceptual and methodological move disrupts the seamlessness of linear histories and are critical moves we need to make. Here is a volume of depth, creativity, and inspiration for those long obsessed with thinking time and temporalities and for those who have not broached how profoundly such thinking recalibrates our collective futures—both their dark diagnostics and enabling horizons.”
— Ann Stoler, The New School

“This exciting and wide-ranging collection explores a crucial nexus of modern life: how social-political visions and conceptions of time shape each other. Its dazzling collection of case studies brings to life political leaders, scientists, economists, activists, and jurists as the authors chart how the interaction between temporality and authority transformed life across the globe. With original research and fresh methodological insights, Power and Time is a vital contribution to our understanding of contemporary history.”
— Udi Greenberg, Dartmouth College

“In Power and Time, Edelstein, Geroulanos, and Wheatley have curated a constellation of essays that take up the fascinating and vexed relation between the history of time and the times of history. The essays provide incredible range but maintain a tight thematic focus through the analytical pairing of power and time. In doing so, they offer an original and comprehensive survey of temporal regimes and the reciprocal feedback loop between the nodes of power that create them and the means by which that power is maintained. Power and Time is impressive in scope and depth and an important contribution to the new metaphysics of time.”
— Ethan Kleinberg, Wesleyan University

“As the editors argue, the temporal landscape of history is always replete with conflict and conflict potential. And, as the essays amply demonstrate, this provides rich pickings for the attentive historian. ‘Chronocenosis’ not only attunes us to the complex temporal frequencies of power conflicts but also enables us to locate new conflicts that may otherwise lie hidden from the historian's eye. . . . There are seemingly few domains of historical research that could not benefit from this approach. The dazzling diversity of these essays is testament to this. . . . A genuinely productive foundation on which to expand the historical study of time in a very practical–and global–sense. . . . The book’s subject matter is expansive, its temporal registers vast. [It] is difficult to imagine a historian who could not benefit in some way from consulting it.”

— Contemporary European History

"Despite its sheen, the study of time can sometimes feel like fool’s gold. It seems to hold something ineffable—and therefore intellectually alluring—but often reverts to an overly familiar ping-ponging analytic of circularity or linearity, reaction or revolution, rupture or continuity. Enter the recent volume Power and Time. . . edited by Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley, which, from its deliriously fractal cover featuring a drawing by the German
artist Jorinde Voigt onward seeks to explode any sense of predictability or narrowness in the subfield and to restore some of the antic diversity and unpredictable versions of the possible that the field always promises but infrequently delivers."
— G.L. Mosse Program in History Blog

"An impressive collection of essays. . . Edelstein, Geroulanos and Wheatley argue for a new mission for historians, to accept the multiplicity of times as a starting point for our study of the experience of time."
— Histoire Politique

"Brilliant. . . Taking competing 'temporal regimes' as an object of study, this collective work foregrounds how diverse and divergent models of time structure relations of power. Rather than seeking to unify (or reconcile) history, editors Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley ramify it. . . . The array of case studies in the volume is fittingly wide-ranging: touching on the temporal imaginaries of law from America to Australia; histories of brain science to frozen indigenous blood samples; narratives of prehistory to the geological past and future of plastic; the periodization of imperial China to that of the Muslim Golden Age; the temporal rupture of the French Revolution to the millenarian 'helter skelter' of the Manson family; fascist ideas of 'the new man' to postcolonial visions of futurity. Resisting narrative synthesis, the assembled chapters supplement the bold analytic intervention of the introduction, drawing it out in multiple directions."
— H-Diplo

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chronocenosis: An Introduction to Power and Time-Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley

Part I. Temporal Pluralities in Conflict


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226706016.003.0001
[sovereignty;legal pluralism;historical rights;settler colonialism;indigenous rights;Mabo;jurisdiction;terra nullius;Australia;Habsburg Empire]
We often think of legal pluralism in geographic terms, through reference to enclaves, anomalous zones, frontiers, and borderlands, for example. This chapter explores the idea that there might be genres of legal pluralism structured by a temporal logic rather than a spatial one—legal pluralisms voiced in the language of history rather than geography. It analyzes debates about “historical rights”—rights inherited “from the past” that qualify or frustrate sovereignty in the present. It first examines the question of the “survival” of indigenous land rights in settler colonial jurisdictions like Australia and Canada, with particular reference to the landmark Mabo decision by the High Court of Australia. It then broadens the frame to consider earlier instances of rights claims with a similar historical logic, with a focus on historical rights and residual sovereignties in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The author presents both cases as instances of “non-synchronous sovereignty”—that is, sovereignties that struggle to control and unify time. (pages 53 - 79)
This chapter is available at:
    University of Chicago Press
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226706016.003.0002
[Muslim Golden Age;universal history;Nahda;Rifa‘a Rafi‘a al-Tahtawi;Ibn Khaldun;Ernest Renan;Gustave Le Bon;Jamal al-Din al-Afghani;Jurji Zaidan;orientalism]
The history of science is a history of the world. Or so it began. As both a discourse and a discipline, it started off as the search for the universal history of civilizations. It was an episodic history, to be sure. Yet it assumed that science was a shared enterprise, a unified and ecumenical concept, and the key to humanity’s collective history. This essay traces this history through only one episode of this story: how the idea of an Arab, or Muslim, “golden age” of science was collectively and gradually constructed, or told and retold, between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, and how it participated in the creation of new—both universal and historical (or historicist)—temporalities. (pages 80 - 102)
This chapter is available at:
    University of Chicago Press
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226706016.003.0003
[Reinhart Koselleck;Sattelzeit;totalitarianism;genocide;Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe;semantic stockpiles;deceleration]
In this essay, I propose investigating Reinhart Koselleck's work, and specifically the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, with an emphasis on what seems to me its most glaring absence: political concepts invented in or active in the twentieth century. I argue that this lacuna is not incidental but reveals a highly significant weakness in Koselleck’s understanding of modernity. By restricting the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe to the Sattelzeit, conceptual history is incapacitated when it comes to the twentieth century. Concepts invented in the first half of the twentieth century, such as totalitarianism and genocide, are virtually the opposite of the concepts privileged by Koselleck, embodying a very different semantics of historical temporality. Instead of an open-ended horizon of expectation, they bring the catastrophic events of the twentieth century into the semantics of historical experience, emphasizing neither futurity nor acceleration but dystopia and deceleration. In the concluding section I attempt to demonstrate how totalitarianism and genocide incorporated this new structure of temporality. In other words, I show how the semantics of historical time were altered when the expectations of modernity were so tragically derailed. (pages 103 - 121)
This chapter is available at:
    University of Chicago Press
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226706016.003.0004
[deep future;deep time;history of geology;nostalgia;creative commensuration]
Applying the technofossil metaphor to plastic and its waste has greatly amplified the resonance of the notion, a resonance due to our collective experience with synthetic materials. Plastic waste looks different at different stages of decay and can be sorted accordingly. The essay follows this sequence back and forth using the actor’s category of plastic as a scaling device. It considers how plastic as a heuristic tool is propelling the societal impact on the earth system into the deep future. Second, it explores how plastic waste allows us to perceive the present as a deep present, drawing on methods developed in the study of the deep past or prehistory and transposed to the archaeology of our daily lives. Third, it shows how, from the mid-twentieth century on, the societal history of plastic has developed into a temporally stratified omnipresence. Finally, it shows that we can consider plastic’s temporalities not only as an academic domain but also as a sphere of mundane consumer practice and melancholic artistic reflection. The disciplinary disjunctures tend to be blurred by our imagining of plastic waste as an objectlike, archaeological artifact. Plastic as a technofossil invites us to zoom in on a large, yet historical, scale. (pages 122 - 144)
This chapter is available at:
    University of Chicago Press
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Part II. Loops, Layers, Assemblages


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226706016.003.0005
[dynasty;history of China;Three Kingdoms;regime of historicity;historical cycle;sempiternity;historiography]
This essay revisits the opening statement of the famous Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms as the quintessential expression of the idea of dynastic rise and fall in Chinese history. Discussing the concept of “dynasty” as the locus where space/time and power converge, it highlights the spatiotemporal dimensions of the Romance’s opening and its intimate connection to ways of thinking about history, time, and political authority in imperial China. Presenting the statement as a critical moment in a long process of contending Chineseideas about history and dynastic longevity, the essay shows how the concept of “rise and fall” was born as a subversive historical device, a “regime of historicity,” against the backdrop of political discourses about dynastic sempiternity and dynastic rise in late antiquity during the days of the Qin and Han dynasties. This device resurfaced later in critical moments in Chinese history, and this essay suggests that “Long divided must unite, long united must divide” was created, during the 1660s, against the backdrop of the rising Manchu-Qing dynasty and contemporary Manchu boasting concerning dynastic rise. The essay ends with the fall of the concept of “rise and fall” as a historical device in the early 20th century. (pages 147 - 172)
This chapter is available at:
    University of Chicago Press
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226706016.003.0006
[National Socialism;temporality;Adolf Hitler;Ernst Jünger;Albert Speer;ruin;New Man;antisemitism;colonization;present and future]
Historians and political theorists have long struggled with National Socialism’s temporal riddle: race, modernity, apocalypse, purity, novelty, acceleration—several temporal regimes competed in the Nazi period. This essay proposes a new approach to Nazi time, by studying the Europe-wide concept of the "New Man." In the 1930s, the National Socialists developed the most ideologically complex version of the New Man, all the while depicting the present time as empty, meaningless, conflict-ridden, dissolute. To overturn that presents through “awakening” and “building” would be the New Man’s first achievement, they proclaimed. Second, Hitler, Albert Speer, and others internalized a history of racial and physical ruin into their New German, to project into the future a vicious circle of triumph and collapse they identified in the past. This future replayed past destructions, and had to be postponed. Third, National Socialist thinkers compressed the ruinous future by worrying over an imminent catastrophe inflicted by Bolsheviks as new, mechanized “Asiatic hordes.” This argument extrapolated and radicalized insecurity about the “now” and legitimized the war and colonization of the East. Under the name of "Lebensraum," Germany's elite spatialized temporal anxieties and reimagined its "New Man" by way of genocide and apocalypse. (pages 173 - 200)
This chapter is available at:
    University of Chicago Press
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226706016.003.0007
[Georges Bataille;prehistory;posthistory;end of history;Hegel;Atomic Age;Lascaux Cave]
After the Second World War, the thinker who imagined the symmetrical rapport between pre- and posthistory in the most complex terms was Georges Bataille. His interpretation of history and time is all the thornier because it was completely opposed to his vision of history from the 1920s, notably as he had elaborated it in the journal 'Documents' (1929–1931). Prehistory as he had invented it in that early period undermined biological evolutionism, particularly by deconstructing the political rapports on which evolution’s political authority was founded. It had been the matrix of a contingent and formless conception of history that was devoid of any teleological compass. But after the war, Bataille placed prehistory in a highly antagonistic relationship with history. His reading of the cave paintings of Lascaux, determined by the catastrophes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, permitted him to weave a narrative of universal history. To reconstitute and analyze this narrative is to interrogate the relationships between history and fiction, between longue durée and the event, between evolutionism and catastrophism. In Bataille’s case, it allows us to track the movement of a thought that, fleeing the dystopian presentism of its era, took shelter in the Hegelian contemplation of the end of history. (pages 201 - 220)
This chapter is available at:
    University of Chicago Press
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Part III. The Splintered Present


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226706016.003.0008
[modernity;accelleration;synchronization;belatedness;time measurement;experiment;Hermann von Helmholtz;laboratory;Wilhelm Wundt;Benjamin Libet]
In their analyses of modernity, sociologists from Simmel and Weber to Rosa highlighted the aspect of acceleration. According to this view, the shared feature of the differentiation of social systems, the process of rationalization, and the increase in control over nature is the acute mobilization and dynamization of societal life. This chapter argues that modernity relies on and refers to much more heterogeneous forms of time. Drawing on insights from Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Canguilhem, it argues that phenomena of synchronization and processes of deceleration are equally important for social and cultural modernity. The chapter focuses on history of the physiological and psychological time measurements in the 19th and 20th centuries. Reconstructing the material and semiotic culture of these “brain-time experiments,” it shows that performing them crucially relied on networked synchronization technologies such as telegraphs and computers. Against this background, laboratory scientists such as Hermann von Helmholtz, Wilhelm Wundt, and—in more recent times—Benjamin Libet were able to establish the belatedness of human beings with respect to themselves as a crucial feature of modern subjectivity. (pages 223 - 248)
This chapter is available at:
    University of Chicago Press
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226706016.003.0009
[cryopolitics;Australia;Aboriginal;Indigenous;freezing;cryopreservation;science;blood;biology;biospecimen]
Since the ability to freeze and successfully thaw living cells was developed in the mid-twentieth century, scientists have collected and frozen biological materials. To scientists, freezing promised to perpetually defer the death of individuals, populations, or species, transforming life itself in the process. This chapter considers the temporal implications of scientific freezing by focusing on specific kinds of frozen samples that are increasingly associated with controversy: those collected from people self-identified or marked as native, aboriginal, or indigenous. Some twentieth-century human biologists responded to the perceived endangerment of Indigenous peoples by freezing their genetic material, manipulating time to create a form of life without death. This chapter explores this form of time and life though the case of blood samples collected from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Australia. In particular, it focuses on one large collection first formed in the 1960s and currently maintained in various freezers at a major Australian university. This case illustrates two competing modes of temporality produced by the conjunction of Indigenous biospecimens and the freezer: latent life and incomplete death. Both are variations of “cryopolitics,” a theoretical frame we offer to analyze the effects of cryopreservation on time and life. (pages 249 - 269)
This chapter is available at:
    University of Chicago Press
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226706016.003.0010
[Manson Family;historicity;Helter Skelter;terrorism;voluntarism]
This chapter inquires into the theory and practice of Manson Family time. Drawing especially on the extensive transcripts of the 1970-71 Tate-LaBianca trial, the chapter answers the following questions: How was time understood within the Manson Family, why was it understood the way it was, and why did this understanding have traction? How did the Family construct its regime of time, implement, and experience it? And most importantly, how was this regime related to radicalization and the race war—or rather, revolution—that was Helter Skelter? In disaggregating and analyzing the layers of time that prepared the ground for the Tate-LaBianca murders, the chapter demonstrates a strong link between terror and temporality in the Manson Family that produced a state of hyperconscious historicity animating their will to violently intervene in the present for the sake of an exalted future. Such a link is characteristic of radicalization more generally, and therefore the essay locates the Helter Skelter narrative in the long history of politico-religious voluntarism. (pages 270 - 292)
This chapter is available at:
    University of Chicago Press
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Part IV. Speed(s)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226706016.003.0011
[British Empire;West Indies;Trinidad;Mauritius;legal panics;slavery;imperial constitution;slave trade;planters;amelioratiion]
This chapter analyzes the temporal dimensions of legal conflicts involving slavery in the early nineteenth-century British Empire. It shows that the pace of judicial actions, from criminal prosecutions of slave owners to campaigns for “amelioration” of slavery, shaped imperial constitutionalism, in particular in crises prompting calls for stronger imperial legal authority over colonial elites. Such crises, labeled here as “legal panics,” prompted metropolitan officials to repeatedly attempt to quell colonial disorder through legal reform, whether or not past reforms had been effective. The chapter illustrates the erratic alternation of slow and fast justice in two cases: one involving controversial imperial attempts to curb planter legal autonomy and the “fast justice” of slave discipline in the West Indies; and the other featuring the imperial response to the use of “slow justice” by planters in Mauritius to parry reforms aimed at regulating slavery. Legal panics focused attention on unresolved questions about the constitutional foundations of imperial rule. The patterns uncovered in this chapter illuminate broader processes across empires that linked visions of imperial legal ordering to the imagination of proper relations of time, power, and justice. (pages 295 - 316)
This chapter is available at:
    University of Chicago Press
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226706016.003.0012
[capitalism;business cycle;economic crisis;League of Nations;globalization]
This chapter investigates how European and American theorists of economic crisis and the business cycle understood the nature of time under conditions of industrial capitalism from the late nineteenth century onwards. While some have argued that modern conceptions of time and historical development are inherently linear, this chapter shows how the nineteenth century saw a return of traditional notions of cyclical temporality to the heart of economic thought. It looks, in particular, at how the emergence of a globalized world economy and the worldwide spread of capitalist economic processes, beginning in the late nineteenth century, was seen as gradually linking the entire world into shared patterns of cyclical economic rise and fall. (pages 317 - 334)
This chapter is available at:
    University of Chicago Press
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226706016.003.0013
[temporality;historicism;sovereignty;Jawaharlal Nehru;India]
Jawaharlal Nehru, a major figure in India’s anti-colonial nationalist movement and the first Prime Minister of independent India from 1947 until his death in 1964, was both an historian and a self-conscious agent of historical change. Bringing together these two perspectives—that of the historian and of the historical actor—this chapter examines how Nehru conceived of the relationship between power and time and, in particular, the ways in which he sought to mediate between the past, present, and future. The chapter argues for a perspective on his transition from anti-colonial dissident to prime minister amidst the world historical conjunctures of the mid-twentieth century and on his vision of the Indian nation-state that emphasizes the centrality of temporality and historicism to Nehru’s political thought. The idea of temporal sovereignty is used to describe the ways in which Nehru sought to command, direct, and navigate time as a fundamental problematic of political power. (pages 335 - 354)
This chapter is available at:
    University of Chicago Press
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Part V. “Already Here Just Not Evenly Distributed”: Heterochronies of the Future


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226706016.003.0014
[political authority;revolution;legitimation;Maximilien Robespierre;Karl Marx;Georges Sorel;future;temporality]
How do revolutionary regimes legitimize their rule, in the absence of free elections and a constitution? This essay analyzes how four revolutionary theorists (Robespierre, Marx, Sorel, and Lenin) relied on “future perfect” legitimation: they defended non-elected regimes in the present in the name of what they will have achieved at some point in the future. Legitimation, in this model, is “prospectively retrospective”; as with a bill of exchange, political credit is borrowed against future repayment (a metaphor explicitly adopted by Marx). If such currency is accepted by the subjects of the regime, however, it is because future expectations are the emotional coin of the realm in revolutionary societies. Revolutionary theorists, therefore, do not invent new methods of legitimation; rather, they shape and redirect a pre-existing economy of time that revolutions after 1789 are wont to produce. (pages 357 - 378)
This chapter is available at:
    University of Chicago Press
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226706016.003.0015
[U.S. Constitution;U.S. Supreme Court;temporality;futurity;jurisprudence]
This essay is interested in the role temporality—and in particular the temporality of the future—plays in establishing the authority of the United States Supreme Court. The temporality typically associated with judicial power is not the future, but the past. The courts’ reliance on precedent ensures uniformity in the law, but it is also a statement of a present court’s neutrality.The judiciary faces a particular problem when it comes to the future. It has few tools for prediction or planning. But I show that the Supreme Court sometimes seeks to assert power and authority, and thereby constrain politics, by reaping a harvest of expectation rather than experience. The Court’s discussion of the future—in particular in its opinions—may in fact be a tool by which it also seeks to shape the politics of the future. Because the Court lacks the requisites of prediction and planning and immediate response, the only means it has to affect the future is through its words. (pages 379 - 399)
This chapter is available at:
    University of Chicago Press
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226706016.003.0016
[Russia;Soviet Union;Boris Yeltsin;end of history;timelessness]
Russian history and memory of the era of the Soviet collapse and the turbulent 1990s is an important topic for comprehension of contemporary Russian culture and politics, yet one that is poorly understood and minimally theorized. Work on Russian history and memory has focused primarily on representations of iconic personalities, events and processes: Soviet triumph in World War II, the era and figure of Joseph Stalin, issues of post-Soviet nostalgia and memory of collective trauma, etc. But what of other historical moments and events of equally great significance for contemporary Russia, such as the founding era of the current Russian polity at the start of the 1990s? This chapter turns attention to the history and memory of this “by no means unequivocal” period, as Vladimir Putin characterized it in his 2007 “Memorandum to the Russian Federal Assembly.” Russian discourse concerning the years of transition range from a studied silence among political elites to a managed cacophony of divergent non-official and semi-official representations. As analysis of monuments, educational materials, popular history, and public and political speech reveals, this unusual distribution of historical and memorial activity functions to disorient Russian political discourse by sustaining a regime of historical indistinction and “timelessness.” (pages 400 - 420)
This chapter is available at:
    University of Chicago Press
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Acknowledgments

Contributors

Index of Temporal Terms

Book published by University of Chicago Press, 2020. Page maintained by BiblioVault.