The Great Uncertainty: Thinking through questions of time

Czech Sociological Review

This article presents a critical review of ideas about time in modern societies and especially in the social sciences. Man in modern society perceives, reflects and registers time in a series of contexts, whether this involves questions of thought, the physical body, nature or society. Current studies that address the question of time in many cases do so through a comparison of archaic temporal awareness and modern temporal awareness, and attempt to describe when and how this historical shift came about. According to O. Rammstedt four distinct historical types of understanding time can be distinguished: (1) occasional awareness of time based on a distinction made between 'now' and 'not-now'; (2) cyclical awareness of time; (3) linear awareness of time with a closed future, and (4) linear awareness of time with an open future. In contemporary social sciences four main theoretical perspectives can be observed. The first one assumes that the basic principles of order are or should be considered as unchanging. These principles express themselves as invariants. In the 20th century we can find it in structural linguistics, and in social sciences with a structuralist orientation. The second approach resembles the previous one in that it also considers the existence of unchanging principles of order. However, it differs through the assumption that these principles reveal themselves in time. The third approach can be considered de facto a sort of special degree of the second, i.e. closed historical concept. Unlike the teleological characterof the latter, however, it considers human intervention as a necessary condition for the achievement of a future aim. The fourth concept is founded on the idea that the basic principles of order can be revealed only in time. Unlike the second, however, it does not consider the main organising principles to be unchanging, but rather concludes that in each contemporary period they are open to change. This fourth approach, which can be described as 'temporalised sociology' and which is expressed in works of such authors as G. H. Mead, A. Schütz, N. Elias, N. Luhmann or A. Giddens is stressing a relatively open future, emergence, novelty and the concept of discontinuity. In the opinion of the author of this study another concept should be added to our understanding of time: i.e. 'irreversibility'. It is a feature of those systems that are far form being balanced and in which, in order to be able to predict future states, it is not enough to know the laws and the initial conditions.

Les âges de Britannia, 2015

Published in J-F. Dunyach (ed.), Les âges de Britannia: Repenser l'histoire des mondes Britanniques: (Moyen Âge-XXIe siècle) (Paris, 2015), pp. 259-73 Also posted on PJC website as CorfieldPdf37.

2000

Loe de Jong about the German occupation of the Netherlands during the Second World War.

In 1958, in response to what he considered a general crisis in the human sciences and as a plea for their rapprochement, Fernand Braudel clarified his idea of time as a social construct, rather than a simple chronological parameter. This article begins by looking at the lessons of the idea of a plurality of social times, grounded in the concept of Braudel’s the longue durée, for social analysis. The first lesson was that we live in one singular “world.” His insight led to the basic premise of world-systems analysis that historical social systems come into being as a unique and indivisible sets of singular, longue durée structures with a beginning and an end, that is, recognizable over the long term, but not forever into the past or into the future. As Braudel observed, the reproduction of these structures —according to world-systems analysis, the axial division of labor, the interstate system, and the structures of knowledge— exhibit secular trends and cyclical rhythms that may be observed over the life of the system. Eventually, however, the processes reproducing these structures run up against asymptotes, or limitations, in overcoming the contradictions of the system and the system ceases to exist. The second great lesson of Braudel’s longue durée has been to allow us to see clearly not only the singularity of our world, but its uniqueness as well, that is, a world that has now expanded to become global, a world that consists of the three analytically distinct but functionally, and existentially, inseparable structural arenas, as never before existed. The third great lesson of the longue durée was to allow us to interpret crisis as the possibility for fundamental structural change. Finally this article examines the ethical and methodological consequences of the simultaneous exhaustion of the processes insuring endless accumulation and containing class struggle taking place contemporaneously with the collapse of their co-constitutive intellectual structures. * En 1958, en respuesta a lo que consideró una crisis general en las ciencias humanas y en un intento de reconciliación, Fernand Braudel replanteó su idea del tiempo como constructo social y no como un simple parámetro cronológico. El presente artículo comienza con las lecciones de la idea de pluralidad en tiempos sociales, con base en el concepto de Braudel de la Longue Durée para el análisis social. La primera lección fue que vivimos en un “mundo” singular. Su enfoque derivó en la premisa principal del análisis sistema-mundo que dicta que los sistemas sociales históricos surgen como un grupo de individuos únicos e indivisibles, Longue Durée de la larga duración dentro de un comienzo y un fin que son reconocibles a largo plazo pero no para siempre en el pasado ni en el futuro. Como observó Braudel, la reproducción de dichas estructuras —según el análisis de sistema—mundo, la división axial del trabajo, el sistema interestatal y las estructuras de conocimiento- muestran tendencias seculares y ritmos cíclicos que se pueden observar durante la vida del sistema. Sin embargo, en algún momento, los procesos que reproducen estas estructuras entran en confrontación con asíntotas o limitaciones para superar las contradicciones del sistema, causando que el sistema deje de existir. La segunda gran lección de la Longue Durée de Braudel fue permitirnos ver con claridad no solo la singularidad de nuestro mundo sino también su carácter único. Braudel muestra un mundo que se ha expandido para globalizarse, que está conformado por tres escenarios que son analíticamente diferentes pero funcionales, y existencialmente son inseparables a nivel estructural como no habían existido antes. La tercera gran lección de la Longue Durée fue permitirnos interpretar la crisis como una oportunidad para generar cambios estructurales fundamentales. Por último, este artículo estudia las consecuencias éticas y metodológicas del agotamiento simultáneo del proceso de aseguramiento de la interminable acumulación y contención de la lucha de clases que se presenta hoy en día tras el colapso de las estructuras intelectuales co-constitutivas.

This essay welcomes the current return to long-term history, known as the Temporal Turn. Various implications follow. Historical periodisation is being reconsidered, to jettison outdated and rigid divisions. And attention is rightly returning to long-term causes, effects, and trends - not forgetting deep continuities. (To repeat) my own term for the interlinking dimensions of continuity (persistence), gradual change (evolution) and rapid transformation (turbulence) is historical trialectics.

Retelling Time: Alternative Temporalities from Premodern South Asia, edited by Shonaleeka Kaul, 2021

What is time? Reams of scholarship have long concluded that time, like one's shadow, may be that which most eludes the grasp of comprehension the more one tries to capture it. It cannot be known by either its affirmation (time is this) or its negation (time is not this). It is a point but also a duration. It is measurable but measureless. It finishes but does not end. It is absolute but relative. Objective but subjective. One could go on. Something so elusive has also, however, along with space, attained in the modern world the status of a fundamental dimension of existence-a measure and frame of all action and inaction, of change and of movement, of progress and growth and thereby of life and vitality itself. A first principle, if ever there was one. And yet-is time even real? Unlike space, does it have an existence, not to say substance, in and of itself, independent of experience or even apprehensible through the five forms of sensory perception? It may be reasonable to assert that it does not. In other words, there is no clarity about the ontological status of time. And this, together with the large number of paradoxes or aporia about it, only some of which are listed above, suggests that it is highly likely that time has been little more than a human construct. Further, the same qualities undermine the assumption of its given-ness. Not counting natural cycles and rhythms, time, as a human construct, may well be, as Norbert Elias put it, "first and foremost the medium of orientation for the social world, regulating it in relation to human life" (1988 : ix). Indeed this is precisely the awareness that thinking with the term 'temporalities' has effected: namely, the inseparability of time from human, rather than natural, configurations. But which social world or human configuration do we speak of? As such, and as this volume will also argue, it may be productive to think about time through its functions, its fields of operation, or its contextualization (Lebovic 2010 : 282)-and thereby through its multiplicity. However, while some have influentially argued that the discovery of this subjective multiplicity of time is itself a product of modernity (Koselleck 2002 : 110-11), Retelling Time contests this, demonstrating

Rethinking Historical Time: New Approaches to Presentism. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019

In his "Archaeology of the Human Sciences" (1969), Michel Foucault compared the history of knowledge with a powerful geological process: it happens sometimes that deeply buried plates of commonly acknowledged ideas and concepts, covered since ages by a continuous accumulation of sediments – made of successive interpretations – suddenly break down under the huge pressure of events and come to the surface, making the world shaking. Is that what is happening now? Like seismographs, most of the various fields of human and social sciences – and specially those dealing with the past – are recording the lift of new objects of enquiry, that are appearing under the thrust of a new force, previously hidden and unnoticed, that of the present. The French historian François Hartog has first given a name to this conceptual earthquake: presentism (2003, and, for an English translation, 2014). But where are we now? It has become obvious that the Hartogian notion of presentism is actually insufficient to grasp this new reality dominated by the present – since it is not anymore a specific question addressed to history and the historians. It is urgent to draw the state of the fields that have been actually contaminated, or affected, by the spread of the present, but more importantly, it is urgent to assess what is at stake under this compelling transformation. The conventional frontiers which used to separate the disciplines from the others are gradually falling down. But this is not just some sort of new academic debate: presentism – whatever the name we stamp this phenomenon with – is a symptom revealing the ideology of our present time, in other words, its new ontological situation.

2020

Differently from Philosophy and Natural Science, time has always been an important component in Social Research as human cognition tells us that the world is constantly changing in one temporal direction guided by the arrow of time. However, social time does not stand on its own. It connects to what is happening in the natural world as well as human individual psychological time. Classical conceptions ofKant and Husserl help to address the problem from its very foundation. It may well be that irreversibility is an objective natural phenomenon not just a subjective impression of living creatures. We must adopt an interdisciplinary view on time. The acceleration of speed in communication may have less significance for our lives than is normally expected, i.e. in the case of taking legal decisions. The only change we are currently experiencing in the context of application of Information Communication Technology in many spheres of social life may just be that many things happen more qu...