Godot is waiting too

Godot is waiting too Endings in thought and history PAUL E. CORCORAN University of Adelaide For there were no days and nights and months and years before the heaven was created .... They were all parts of time, and the past and future are categories of time that we ourselves have created and that we attribute, wrongly and unthinkingly, to the eternal essence. We say "was," "is," "will be," but the truth is that only "is" can be used in any adequate fashion. Plato, Tirnaeus 37e The "now" is the link of time.., and it is the limit of time. Aristotle, Physics, 4, 13 Historical endings It has long been unfashionable to write about historical causes and effects. Historical ends fall under a similar stricture, whether intended in a teleological sense to signify a purposive telos, a higher reality, or simply a finis beyond decline and fall. For even longer it has been been out of fashion to use the old organic metaphors to depict the painful birth, promising youth, prolific maturity, faltering old age, and final demise of an epoch or civilization. An empiricist rectitude may save the rare historiographer from such claims, but many humanists feel, or at least write, as if history has its origins, aims, and ends. Our language cannot prevent an indulgence in the mythical conceit that history has shape and purpose, and is even somehow a reflection, however distorted, of the hopes and sorrows of human life. We are intelligent enough to know, of course, that this is not really true, or cannot be held to be true. Yet history, as the very word implies, is a story that cannot be deprived of its fictive elements. Theory and Society 18: 4 9 5 - 5 2 9 , 1989. 9 1989 KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 496 Reflection upon historical endings inevitably broaches the confusing terrain of cultural history. Yet I hope to explore the idea of "endings" J unencumbered by the methodological rigors that proudly eschew the obscurity of "culture" and the fallacies of historical explanations based on great men and ideas, or "laws of development." Those debates are as irrelevant to my present task as the ancient accounts of divine genealogy, first and final causes, or Fortune. I suggest that a philosophical inquiry about historical endings is a separate concern from defending or debunking cyclical theories, cultural organicism, or any brand of eschatology. This is not to deny the importance or even the possibility of speculation under those topics. Intelligent people have proposed that we are now experiencing the "end of an age," and they have felt entitled to use the powerfully judgmental categories of cultural decay, political and military madness, and environmental self-annihilation. Critics of Western culture in centuries past as in the present day have looked back to a period of prodigious harvest in the arts and sciences, 2 followed by a glut, a time of unproductive inertia, and finally a loss of fertility. Some claim to have heard a voice of youthful, profligate, and creative rage signalling the passing of a withered, corrupt culture and the coming of a liberated, vigorous new age. 3 A difficulty quite other than historiographical method belies such metaphorical accounts, no matter how often and even eloquently they are proclaimed. What is most striking about the many intellectual claims of cultural desuetude is the failure to connect the evidence of historical endings to any pattern of meaning or foundations of belief and hope. The "endings" that are so often said to confront us do not, at least as yet, reveal an access to any imaginable future. Yet in a way that I hope to show in the second part of this article we are indeed doing something in the face of this impasse. The litany of woes Walter Laqueur, director of the Institute of Contemporary History in London and editor of the Journal of Contemporary History, claims: "That Europe is at present in a state of decline cannot be seriously disputed." In A Continent Astray: Europe 1970-78 (1979), he speaks of "a new ice age" for Europe, and a "paralysis of will" that he calls, using Carcot's term for listless behavior, "abulia." Laqueur argues that this 497 malady affects all aspects of European political life, criticizing conservatives, liberals, and social democrats alike. Raymond Williams, reviewi.ng the late E R. Leavis's book, The Critic as Anti-Philosopher, 4 quotes Leavis as proclaiming, "The urgency is extreme; disaster that threatens to be final is imminent." Denying any hope that education, and the university in particular, will save Western civilization, Leavis states: "2 don't want to save our civilization - on the contrary; I want to save humanity and life from it .... "Williams finds a parallel between Leavis's condemnation of democratic egalitarianism as "disastrous" (because a humane culture flows from faith rather than "civilization") with Rudolf Bahro, a German Marxist, who claims in Socialism and Survival (1982) that the transformation of modern industrial civilization cannot be accomplished by traditional socialist methods, "but by a movement of faith involving a basic conversion of values." Williams goes on to observe, "Indeed what may be happening, as in the first generation of the industrial revolution, is the end of one kind of politics and, while waiting for the beginning of another, an extraordinary overlap, convergence and confusion .... " Apocalyptic endings are also envisioned by prominent political theorists. John Dunn's Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future is startlingly candid. In some respects our sobriety at present is distinctly defective: decadent or, as the eighteenth century would have termed it, corrupt. The expectation that we may yet contrive to unite in practice the full extent of our explicit moral concern for others with an enjoyment of our present entitlements to ease and comfort is less than plausible. If that is how we expect the future to be, we are exposing ourselves to most disagreeable surprises. 5 J. G. A. Pocock, perhaps caught off-guard, dwells on notions of decline, and speaks of "the posthistoric phase of permanent total transformation" in which linguistic paradigms are quicky superseded by others. "To rebel against existing paradigms is indeed to go in search of new ones; but it is also to assert what it is like to be without them, to experience the terror and freedom of existential creativity.''6 Barry Cooper, in The End of History: An Essay on Modern Hegelianism, writes that "the notion of an end of history has its own coherence." Indeed, from the point of view of Hegelian historiography, we are entitled to say that history, strictly speakhag, has already ended. 7 Pierre Chaunu, a French historian, writes in Histoire de ddcadence that 498 "decadence is not a question of individuals. One need only open his eyes and look around. It is everywhere: in our morals, our conduct, our attitudes towards life, and in the poverty of our understanding of death. ''8 This theme pervades or, as he says, haunts his life's work. Chaunu argues that contemporary civilization is beset by profound moral instabilities, such as the nuclear arms race, the relations between rich and p o o r nations and, in particular, the West's capitulation, as he sees it, to birth control and abortion, and thus a devastating moral and genetic debasement of the human race. "Now the crisis today, which we are tempted to interpret as a process of decadence, is something else entirely .... In a word, it is not decadence that faces us, but the alternative between a new growth and the collapse of life and culture ... a collapse truly without precedent." Henri Vacquin, an industrial sociologist and former secretary of the National Union of Communist Students in France, wrote in Le Monde that "communism is a history of deaths, the bearer of the death of history...." Marxist thought, "in the totalitarian folly of mistaking itself for history, of being eternal, has ruled out the question of its own death. T h e o r y since its birth has negated its death, while death has been its history." Communist leaders in France, by their "belief in the inevitable victory of dogma" have produced "a gentle death of questioning which leads the Communist Party into a simulacrum of debate. "9 A French academic, Philippe Nemo, argues that many intellectuals feel they "no longer have any place" in the technological world. For university academics, "bewilderment is comprehensible. Educated for the sake of being educated, they now find themselves having either to go into business or disappear." ...they are generallysterile, and here is the reason: you've got to have a pretty low communicative valence yourself to be comfortable in an institution which has itself become marginalized and something of a ghetto .... That is why, despite the increase of student and faculty rolls, tittle or nothing new has come out of this [post-1968] university in nine years. No new concepts, no new language to mold culture and accelerate understanding of the contemporary world) ~ In a review of the New Right in America, "Intellectuals Agree: ' T h e r e are no Answers Any More,' " Bernard Nossiter finds a general consensus that ideologies of left and right offer no hope. The mainstream of ideas has broken into rivulets and "in some areas has dried up altogether." Government officials are finding that academic consultants 499 "haven't b e e n worth the plane fare" to Washington. Nathan Glazer, a leading voice of the N e w Right, says "Now there is nothing. N o new departures." Irving Kristol, another neo-conservative and editor of The Public Interest, resigned as the H e n r y R. Luce Professor of U r b a n Values at N e w York University, saying "I don't have anything to say any more. I don't think anybody does. W h e n a p r o b l e m b e c o m e s too difficult, you lose interest." H a r v a r d Professor Daniel Bell claims "nobody has any answers he is confident of. If he does, he's a fool." Irving Howe, the eminent literary and social critic, nicely conveys the same view in the argot of N e w York: "We're into disarray." 11 Allen Ginsberg, the archetype of cultural radicalism for the beat generation in the 1950s and 1960s, by the end of the seventies was a pessimist, resigned to a future with no promise. "I get less angry, I see less and less reason for anger. Partly because I think the whole situation is hopeless, and that the earth is irretrievably poisoned, we're at a dead end and there's no way out. A n d there is no reform possible" 12 Professor J e r o m e Lettvin, an M.I.T. "communications physiologist," argues that the despair of humanists and social critics is shared by scientists and ecologists: The comprehensive involvement of man in science is now fatal .... I, in common with many other teachers, have already conceded defeat. It is not apocalypse that we cry but a dull death-watch that we hold. The spirit has already become uniformly Antaeic, and the vision is of a moribund world plucking at the coverlet and babbling of clear water and green fields. Distant trees, blue skies, lassitude and anger, my hand and your body are truly, truly no more than appropriately long sets in a set-theoretically definable cosmos. It is not, sadly, what a programmer would call a neat universe, and the only frames of reference seem to be gallows. 13 James C a m e r o n , who personally witnessed the atomic test on Bikini Atoll in 1946, reminisced: "I believe that on the day when the first atom b o m b was exploded in Los Alamos, the world was irrevocably d o o m e d , sooner or later .... I decided that we had had it, we or our children's children. ''14 This chill of d o o m is expressed in a different context by the Polish novelist, Tadeusz Konwicki, in A Minor Apocalypse: "There is no example, no inspiration. It is night. A night of indifference, apathy, chaos." 15 T h e r e is little point in adducing m o r e of these depressing prognostications. T h e y seem to crop up everywhere in both p o p u l a r and professional journals. 16 T h e ubiquity of these views, whether in scholarly 500 writing, journalism, or novels, reveals how a theme of apocalypse is virtually taken for granted. Cultural decline and "post-history," ideas enjoying remarkable currency in recent years, are hardly n e w ? 7 One is reminded that the theme of "endings" is profoundly embedded in Western civilization by a special edition of Magazine litt&aire, appearing, perhaps coincidentally, a few weeks after the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Editor Jean-Jacques Brochier writes: "From the earliest JudeoChristian writings to the ecological concerns of this century, the theme of the end of the world [la fin du monde] has constantly haunted the human spirit. But fear is always accompanied by a great hope: we wait, after the cataclysm, for a better time. The millennium of happiness promised by Hitler, similarly with Marxist messianism, follows in the tradition of Western millenarianism. ''18 It is telling that his prefatory reference to "a great hope.., for a better time" is nowhere else addressed in the collection of essays. French academicians in the poststructuralist and postmodern schools have had an extraordinary "communicative valence." They too have expressed their trepidation over the disfiguring "ends" of Western civilization, although their disciples might consider this to be surprising and inconsistent? 9 Just as there is no universal history, there is no "humanity" independent of contingent social discourse. In the interior of language ..., in the play of its possibilities stretched to their extreme point, what announces itself is that man has "come to an end," and that in reaching the summit of all possible speech, he arrives not at the very heart of himself, but at the edge of what limits him: in that region where death prowls, where thought is extinguished, where the promise of the origin indefinitely recedes. 2~ In his "analytic of finitude," Foucault describes modern man as a "vehicle for words" with "a face doomed to be erased in the course of history... ,' The "empirical positivities" of finite human life, the "concrete limitations of man's existence," are based upon "a fundamental finitude which rests on nothing but its own existence as fact" The 'Youndation" this analytic provides will "mark man's mode of being" with "repetition": "the death that anonymously gnaws at the daily existence of the living being is the same as that fundamental death on the basis of which my empirical life is given to me." M o d e r n thought, then, will contest even its own metaphysical impulses, and show that reflections upon life, labour, and language, in so far as they have value as analytics of finitude, express the end of metaphysics: the philosophy of life denounces metaphysics as a veil of illusion .... 501 But the end of metaphysics is only the negative side of a much more complex event in Western thought. This event is the appearance of man .... [M]odernity begins when the human being begins to exist within his organism, inside the shell of his head, inside the armature of his limbs, and in the whole structure of his physiology. . . . [Nlevertheless, at the archaeological level ... modern man - that man assignable in his corporeal, labouring, and speaking existence - is possible only as a figuration of finitude.2~ I n t h e p u r p o s e f u l instability o f F o u c a u l t ' s m e t h o d o l o g i c a l a n d h i s t o r i cal writings, t h e t h e m e o f d e s t r u c t i o n a n d s e l f - d e s t r u c t i o n is u n m i s t a k able. T h e v e r y writing o f h i s t o r y is a b a t t l e f i e l d w h e r e m u c h m o r e t h a n h i s t o r i c a l m e t h o d is at issue. 22 Yet d e s p i t e F o u c a u l t ' s u t t e r r e j e c t i o n o f a h i s t o r y t h a t tries to e s t a b l i s h continuities, m o r a l a b s o l u t e s , a n d m e t a p h y s i c a l infinities, h e c h a l l e n g e s h i m s e l f with a question: " W h a t is t h a t f e a r w h i c h m a k e s y o u seek, b e y o n d all b o u n d a r i e s , r u p t u r e s , shifts, a n d divisions, t h e g r e a t h i s t o r i c o - t r a n s c e n d e n t a l d e s t i n y o f t h e O c c i d e n t ? It s e e m s to m e t h a t the o n l y r e p l y to this q u e s t i o n is a p o l i t i c a l one. ''23 J a c q u e s D e r r i d a , a surviving l u m i n a r y of p h i l o s o p h i c a l d e c o n s t r u c t i o n , has a f r a n k l y a p o c a l y p t i c v i s i o n of t h e p r e d i c a m e n t o f W e s t e r n civilization. The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity. For that future world and for that within it which will have put into question the values of sign, words and writing, for that which guides our future anterior, there is as yet no exergue. 24 D e r r i d a ' s s y m p a t h y with F o u c a u l t is s h o w n in t h e e p i g r a m h e t a k e s f r o m The Order of Things: "As t h e a r c h e o l o g y o f o u r t h o u g h t easily shows, m a n is an i n v e n t i o n of r e c e n t date. A n d o n e p e r h a p s n e a r i n g its end. ''2s E l s e w h e r e , h e m i r r o r s F o u c a u l t ' s d i s c u s s i o n o f the e n d a n d b e g i n n i n g of m a n w h e n h e m e n t i o n s the " d e a t h o f t h e b o o k a n d t h e b i r t h o f writing. ''26 D e l i b e r a t e l y a n d at l e n g t h h e plays u p o n this t h e m e in " T h e E n d s o f M a n , " w h e r e h e a d v e r t s to "the p r e s e n t w o r l d crisis," d e s c r i b e d as a " r a d i c a l t r e m b l i n g ... p l a y e d o u t in the v i o l e n t r e l a t i o n ship o f t h e w h o l e o f t h e W e s t to its other." T h u s D e r r i d a , too, sees t h e e n d o f m a n as c e n t r a l to t h e e n t i r e W e s t e r n t r a d i t i o n . H i s p l a y o n "latin de l'hornrne tini," a p p a r e n t l y a gloss o n F o u c a u l t ' s "analytic o f finitude, ''27 b e c o m e s p u r p o s e f u l l y t e d i o u s . In the thinking and the language of Being, the end of man has been prescribed since always, and this prescription has never done anything but moderate the equivocality of the end, in the play of telos and death. In the reading of this play, one may take the following sequence in all its senses: the 502 end of man is the thinking of Being, man is the end of the thinking of Being, the end of man is the end of the thinking of Being. Man, since always, is his proper end, that is, the end of his proper. Being, since always, is its proper end, that is, the end of its proper. 2~ Jean-Franqois Lyotard also combines an apocalyptic tone with a concern for the tradition of Western thought and culture. He refers to Auschwitz as the "crime which introduced postmodernity.''29 The main idea [of "the postmodern"] is simple: we can observe with certainty a sort of decline in confidence which Westerners of the past two centuries place in the general progress of humanity. This idea of progress - possible, probable, or necessary - was rooted in a certainty that the development of the arts, technology, knowledge, and liberty would benefit humanity as a whole .... After these two centuries, we have become more sensitive to signs which indicate a contrary movement. Neither liberalism, economic or political, nor the various Marxisms, survive these two bloody centuries without sustaining accusations of crimes against humanity. 3~ No discussion of historical endings would be complete without a reference to the book of Ecclesiastes. Its poetic despair is an eloquent reminder that the "postmodern sensibility" refers to something like a timeless experience. Vanity of vanities! All is vanity. What does a man gain by all the toil at which a man toils under the sun? A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains for ever .... All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not filled with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun .... There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be remembrance of later things yet to happen among those who come after? ~ Why "endings" ? The "end of man" became a recurrent theme for two generations of post-World War If intellectuals convinced of a fragmentation of human values. Incoherence seemed to dominate the entire cultural terrain, in pofitical rhetoric, legal and social ethics, theater, art, and every endeavor aspiring to engage and challenge the human mind and feelings. Finitude, superfluity, cynicism, triteness, and complacency became commonplace terms in intellectual discourse to express these views. It 503 was as if all the problems had been canvassed, all the critical positions established, and all of these in turn set up and knocked down. In every field there were adepts speaking in fluent shorthand, but with arrogance and a proud narrowness. This description seemed especially apt for political theory. Scholars mined old ore -- contractarian theory, communitarian thought, individualism, libertarianism - as if suffixing an -ism, -Jan, or even both, made them new and productive lines of inquiry. Affixing meta- or post- was presumed to offer similar marvels in philosophy and sociology. As witnessed above, intellectual life frequently offered itself as a kind of impasse: not a culmination or resolution so much as a dissolution, yielding a dead end, a cul-de-sac, or at best a featureless landscape. Endings came into focus as a subject of study as my files grew heavy with dispirited but moving testimonies from poets, philosophers, social scientists, and historians who expressed both personal and professional views that their discipline had somehow reached a stage of impasse, inversion, or emptiness. For some, it was the fulfillment of a peculiarly Occidental intellectual and moral destiny, 32 for others a horrible mistake or simply exhaustion and bad luck. Endings was a congenial perspective for those who had come to beheve and to state with great stridency that all sorts of things no longer worked. 33 Institutions by their very nature seemed repressive and opposed to change, originality, and the liberation of thought and feeling. Criticism was directed not only at institutions of government and learning, but at virtually all social conventions: religion, marriage, the family, political parties, and corporations. Just as institutions no longer engaged a sense of obligation or trust in the general public, intellectual disciplines and traditional artistic performance no longer engaged "postmodern" minds and feelings? 4 Such judgments were not always the product of resignation or despair, but of a confident facility in the critical analysis of moral and political ideas, and a sophistication in the philosophies of science, history, art, and law, which increasingly came to be seen as forms of ideological control? -~ Specialization and critical self-consciousness in each of these areas plumbed to the depths of all axioms and hypotheses. Each field was clearly mapped; the dangers and uncertainties beyond these frontiers were also confidently surveyed. Success in getting to the bottom, or "end," of things sounds its own warning, and it seemed fundamentally dubious that this state of affairs should be so often articulated with smugness and irony? 6 504 It is important to avoid pitfalls. A report on "endings" and intellectual disorientation, like a messenger heralding defeat, could easily be damned as the work of a doom-sayer, cynic, misanthrope, or millenarian. No scholar wishes to invite critical scorn by having his work dismissed as the cry of Chicken Little. Lacking any interest in prophecy or doom, I also want to shun unproductive debates about logical fallacies lurking in the terms "decline" and "decadence.''37 Equally unappealing is another rehearsal of the dubious methods and faulty arguments of the grand histories that signalled the decline and fall of Western civilization. 3s Their Eurocentric weaknesses, literary strengths, and methodological shortcomings (which today must be loftily and disdainfully proclaimed) are well known. Indeed, they form a part of the worldweary sophistication already mentioned. Yet surely an inquiry into historical endings can move beyond a (psycho)logical critique of doomsayers or a mere semantic analysis of prophetic and apocalyptic statements. Something moves serious thinkers to throw methodological caution to the winds. Thinkers on both the political left and right discern a finis or telos of decline, decadence, or apocalypse to serve in place of mirror opposites: progress, redemption, and utopia. Others, reflecting the Continental influences of Nietzsche and Heidegger, have postulated an "after-time" in which the deceptions and false hopes of modem philosophy and science, the last metaphysics of absolute Being, are disavowed. Thus "post"-modernism39 can only begin to be erected on the humble acknowledgment of the end of "humanity." Raising the poet's bid, it is not that "the center does not hold," but that there is no center. "History" - the grand illusions of Nature, common origins, universal laws, and transcendent purposes - is over. Endings in time Claims of historical endings presuppose a concept of time.4~ The "end of an age," the approach or closing moments of an epoch, or even "eternity," are typical but do not exhaust the theoretical possibilities.41 Time is often understood as two inter-related dimensions: mundane (periodic, "reversible") temporality and eternal, "irreversible" time. An ending may therefore be conceived as "temporal" or eschatological ("post-temporal") - an account of, or an escape from, time. Not surprisingly, endings frequently employ the language of beginnings and endings in ancient religions.42 Claims about endings are prophetic. 505 They may be predictions of "future" events, events that subsist in embryonic form, or "hidden" realities that cannot be discerned by the unprophetic mind. These claims often take the form of "revelations" arising from privileged access to "higher" principles and intentions. Decline and fall are condemnatory interpretations of structural or organic debilitation within a culture or civilization. This process excludes transcendent or immanent necessity, divine will, or material causality. It is not an effect of powers external to human freedom and action, such as Fate or divine will, but rather assumes that decline is the result of human folly or failing. It is, therefore, a secular claim. Statements about institutional decay, moral decline, or biological exhaustion are typical of this category. Apocalypse is the direct opposite of the notion of cultural decline. The "end of the age" is the result of a power of intervention, such as divine will, or an extra-civilizational force that descends upon an unwilling or unsuspecting people irrespective of their institutions, actions, or failings. Though implausible to its victims, the external force may well consider itself rational, or at least intentional. 43 Revelation is communicated by oracles, prophetic inspiration, and the interpreters of sacred texts. The import of revelation is that human experience, often catastrophic, is the effect of divine will. History is a working out of intentions not truly one's own. H u m a n action is eschatological, an instrument to attain higher "ends" Historical meaning therefore refers beyond the empirical realm; the end is meaningful to participants only if they acknowledge the transcendent purposes that their acts are bringing to fruition. It is nevertheless true that temporal events and human actions participate in revealing the transcendent purpose by embodying it in temporal, mundane realities. Annihilation is expressed in two forms: visions of a total destruction of human life, perhaps even of all life on earth by nuclear war or a technological "accident";44 and philosophical nihilism, a Nietzschean argument that destruction (negation) is an integral part of creation. In the latter, nature inexorably requires the negation of all creaturely things, including all that passes in an epoch for conscious life and culture. Philosophical nihilism differs from apocalyptic and revelationist claims in that it posits an immanent, natural, and material - rather than supernatural - process of negation arising from the material substratum of all life. This process is not brought about by accident or error, nor is it 506 in any sense the product of ordinary human will. Only superior beings recognize destruction as a creative principle, and heroically will annihilation on a grand scale. Ending as a point of departure What if we hypothetically accept the gloomy claims of intellectual, cultural, and historical endings? Testimony is evidence of a sort. Is it then possible to move beyond the intellectual impasse? Is there a possible range of thought beyond apocalypse and utopia? Suppose we suspend debate over the intellectually desiccated polarities: left/right, freedom/ order, rights/duties, individual/community, idealist/materialist, empirical/normative. They have become brittle, mechanical and, worse than wrong or inadequate, simply uninteresting. Where, then, may speculation recommence? If endings be defined as irreparable loss, the "evidence" is ready to hand. Environmental breakdown is not merely the defilement of natural resources, but also the neglect and obliteration of the "built environment" - cities, towns, neighborhoods, parks, and agricultural landscapes. 45 Other cultural endings are evidenced in the mutation and disappearance of generational, ethnic, family, and sexual identities in both underdeveloped and advanced societies. Language, art, symbolic ritual, and kinship structures are unmistakably lost in the "modernization" of aboriginal peoples, just as regional dialect and dress, rural culture, and religion disappear in industrial societies. Modern science and analytic philosophy have disabused us of the "other" world of mythic wonder and religious belief, implying a spiritual inversion in which not only the content of belief is lost - the "things" in the world that can no longer be true - but the possibility of belief itself. As a parallel to this, political endings are exemplified in the electronic mediation of political artifice and the obsolescence of parliamentary institutions. The "political," as it expands to include all aspects of life, is separated from legal, moral, and descriptive language seeking to define its place in actual life, and disappears as a discriminating field of action or inquiry. Though cultural losses and intellectual endings may be pervasive, there is no obvious "meaning" to such a condition, no stable perspective of evaluation. One who honestly reflects on a loss may well feel pathos or bereavement, but that is very different from perceiving the decline of an old order or the approach of a new one. Rather, an end may indicate 507 that some things are simply over; that a psychological reality is no longer real. Nor is there any reason to believe that impasses and endings are coherent. Each ending may be a sphere unto itself, unrelated by any governing principles, common elements, or underlying relationships. 46 Understood in this way, endings are simply the shadows of realities, the after-images of relations and familiarities that have simply dispersed, signifying neither the end nor the beginning of an "age" Rejecting this modest view would seem to be the purchase price of a millenarian's faith. Accepting the modest view implies two challenges. The first is to launch a speculative inquiry from a point beyond received categories, utopian schemes, shop-worn ideological viewpoints, the epistemological humilities of analytic philosophy and empiricism, and the audacity of postmodernism. ! willingly concede, and in the next few pages perhaps even demonstrate, that such an endeavor may be impossible. Secondly, should we reverse the traditional methodological constraints on our activities? Rather than ask whether it is legitimate to address the problem of an historical ending, thus violating some logical and evidentiary conventions of scholarly discourse, we might rather ask: Is it legitimate, or even possible, for the historian or social theorist to ignore the claims, experiences, and evidence of historical endings and lost realities? A metaphysics for the mean time Consciousness and time The important questions engaging students of the mind and human values in this century have to do with consciousness. The focus has been on the capacities, limits, ineffability, or absurdity of the conscious mind present to itself, especially the consciousness as a "witness" to its own fleeting moments of action and experience. The ancient ontological paradoxes (being and not-being, being and becoming, the unity of many in one) have been transformed. In such influential thinkers as Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and Sartre, the focus remains on being, but not its nature so much as its time and place. It is an ontological shift from orderly "states" of being to being here, 47 now, for itself: existence as a unity of mind and body in a liberating or oppressive context of present contingencies. 48 In such a view, "being" is a full-time occupation, an existence in an eternal "present." Sociologists have incorpo- 508 rated this emphasis at the very core of their concepts of social structure. A n t h o n y Giddens, in discussing the t h e m e of time and history, defines time as "perhaps the most enigmatic feature of h u m a n experience?' ... time, or the constitution of experience in time-space, is also a banal and evident feature of day-to-day life .... But the fundamental question of social theory, as I see it - the "problem of order"... - is to explicate how the limitations of individual "presence" are transcended by the "stretching of social relations across time" The durOe, "the repetitive character of day-to-day life, the routines," and the "reversible time of institutions" interact to constitute the "acting self," whose "being towards death" inhabits "irreversible time." This "time of the body, a frontier of presence" is "stretched" or transcended by "social relations. ''49 Sartre's way of "transcending" the self is also expressed as an orientation to time. A n authentic existence, free f r o m b a d faith, is emancipated f r o m the "past" through a life of unreflective action, transcending, rushing beyond any stultifying ego-identity, s~ Even self-awareness is a loss of freedom: consciousness which imprisons itself in the world in order to flee itself... projects its own spontaneity into the ego-obejct .... But this spontaneity, represented and hypostatized in an object, becomes a degraded and bastard spontaneity... [T]ranscendental consciousness is an impersonal spontaneity. It determines its existence at each instant, without our being able to conceive anything before it. Thus each instant of our conscious life reveals to us a creation ex nihilo? 1 Life, in this view, is lived in the imperative present perfect: be in it. That, in any case, is one portrayal of the implications of m o d e r n philosophy and psychology. N o illusions, no regrets. G e t on with life. Now. H o w e v e r familiar or inspiring that portrait of existential f r e e d o m and self-authentication may be, there are differing points of view. These remind us of how a h u m a n life has other time c o m m i t m e n t s than those of the fleeting present. I suppose there can 0nly be two types: hope, or what I shall t e r m waiting, and r e m e m b r a n c e . I want to deal here primarily with only the former. A b o u t m e m o r y much has been written f r o m the time of the ancients. Both Greeks and R o m a n s had deities to preside over and sustain the 509 past. 52 Philosophers and psychologists from the time of Aristotle have claimed that memory, in conjunction with language, distinguishes humankind from other species, enabling us to learn, plan, build and destory, as Virgil reminded the Trojans: "Fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts." 53 Waiting, to the ancients, signified not only the projection of human life onto larger meanings and distant purposes, but also correlated one's personal existence with the divine powers sustaining the universe. The coming of spring was certain, however long the winter must be endured. One simply waits. Marking time As a child, I learned a rhyme about the weather at springtime. "March winds bring April showers, April showers bring May flowers.''54 This little verse contains "truthful" information about the passing of time, providing that we situate its meaning in the proper latitude on earth's northern hemisphere. The relationship between April showers and May flowers is independent of the years which have past, measured by my age, or the enlargement of my own understanding of the meaning of springtime. Measuring. The conventional calendar has a more explicit, and no less certain, grounding in physical astronomy than our sense of the orderliness of the seasons. 45 Despite the many fanciful religious and artistic interpretations of the earth's annual cycle around the sun, that cycle has a clearly observable duration and periodicity. There are obvious seasonal recurrences, such as spring flowers, which are indisputably linked to (indeed caused by) the earth's relative attitude to the sun throughout the cycle. The calendar, therefore, is a consummately objective measure, matrix, or program of this periodic cycle of the relative solar, terrestrial, and lunar motions. This program, if not an Archimedean foothold on the universe, provides at least a scientific canon: a rule of measurement linking human consciousness with surprising accuracy to natural phenomena. This is attested to by the achievements of many cultures: the Chinese, Egyptian, Hindu, Greek, Roman, and Mayan to name only the better known instances of lunar or lunisolar calendars. Internally, the program of the calendar provides objective rules for seasons, 510 phases of the moon, attitude to the sun, and the length of days, even though they vary according to where you read the program: one's physical location. The symmetry, elegance, and refinement of "internal" divisions of the cycle - the months, weeks, hours, minutes, and seconds - are social conventions.56 Yet despite these variables, a calendar of the year is an Archimedian point of reference for measuring time. As an index of recurrent physical phenomena - lunar phases, vernal equinox, summer solstice, eclipses - the solar calendar is a model of objective precision.47 Counting. No Archimedean point exists for counting time. When, for example, is one to begin? 58 A calendar provides no rules for linking or comparing one year with another, no basis for the accrual of time, no points of origin and end. Its principles of uniformity and periodicity require exactly the opposite. When we "tell a story" we accord a singular privilege to personal and intersubjective consciousness. This is the historian's, no less than the novelist's, essential task: to fashion an "account''59 of time expressed in human actions and social structures. We attempt to understand the nature of things in anthropomorphic terms: a human life, generations of lives, and psychic or social "ages." The cycle of seasons has a meaning elaborated by the language of physical astronomy, and that cycle is profoundly given. Yet we inhabit this time in other than cyclical ways: we fabricate meanings for what we do. Here time is a sequence, with a point of origin, trajectory, and cumulative tendency. Thus the language of personal and social experience constitutes time as a supernatural logos of epochal creation and apocalypse, beginning, middle, and end. These accounts take liberties with the Newtonian postulate of continuous astronomical time. Discontinuities of all kinds are expressed in spatial and temporal points of reference.6~ Time "stands still," races by, moves in circles, swings like a pendulum, or leaps ahead. 6j Toward all of these the motions of the universe, unlike the ancient gods, are profoundly indifferent and incommensurate. In ordinary speech we take for granted commonplace phrases such as "a long time," "it happens every time," "the last time," or a "time of peace" They are clear: we know what they mean. What is not readily appreciated is that even these simple phrases give place and order to our subjective experience, and presuppose the same teleological ends, valuations, and intentions we affirm in historical interpretation. Ordinary temporal distinctions force upon us a responsibility for the 511 meaning of and relation between conceptually different orders of time. The commonplace ideas of time that we use as measures of human endurance - "The doctor will be with you in just a moment" - parallel the historical idea of waiting62 for an end. Waiting. Questions of meaning, whether mundane, urgent, or philosophical, often have the quality of attendance. When shall we meet for dinner this evening? H o w much longer till 5:00 p.m.? When will the state wither away? What we want, or want to know, requires waiting. Successful action awaits a proper occasion, and requires opportune "timing.''63 This use of time is often posed as a question of virtue (patience, loyalty, faith) or vice (wasting time, buying and selling time). 64 Waiting, it seems, is an action that may be done well or badly. As ever, "time is of the essence." Waiting is what we do most of the time, and few of us are very good at it, Bureaucracies have seized this advantage, and have made waiting an institutional practice. Psychologists, observing this weakness, have identified it is an illness that can be treated. 65 Thus anxiety, fear, stress, and hyperactivity are "pathological" ways of dealing with time. 66 This of course leads to the question of the "normal" manner of dealing with time, and whether waiting in some sense is that way - a sense in which a purpose, destination, or end is inherent. Thus we invest time with meaning and commit ourselves to things which are worth waiting for. 6v The daily patterns of waiting are, in any case, imposed by ourselves and others. As individuals and as members of groups, we wait in attendance upon timely configurations with hopes and fears. Time does not pass simply. We await it with our impositions and impertinences: a belief that celestial time is not merely a turning axis, but a wheel of fortune; that the seasons are not indifferent material responses to solar proximity, but periods of rest and resurgence; that life is fleeting and death imminent. Indeed, we have every good reason to personify time - the Grim Reaper - as one who waits. There is an end ("The plane will be ready for boarding in only twenty minutes"), we await it more or less in the manner of tragi-comic characters, and this constitutes a meaning universally recognized in the human endeavor to transcend time, and in sporadic efforts to accept or even welcome defeat. 512 Waiting for Godot 6a Waiting, as with life itself, presupposes an end, a d~nouement, however remote, uncertain, or obscure. As a paradigm, waiting may be a useful why to address the concept of historical endings. Both terms imply that there is so little to do, so little we can actually k n o w about the meaning of life at any level, except to hope. Waiting might well be more interesting than the end, as Samuel Beckett's drama suggests. Di Di and Go G o 69 a r e waiting for Godot. Playing their waiting games on stage, they betray a sense of futility. They also provoke imaginary scenes of someone, off-stage, who will not come - but why? These meanings depend upon the gradually undermined assumption that Godot is out there, also waiting - not coming for reasons we need to know if we are to make sense of the characters before us. The audience, too, is forced to wait for Godot. We eventually sense that Di Di and Go Go may have no better idea than we do why they are waiting for Godot. Yet the resolute inaction on the featureless stage slowly offers us points of recognition. The earth is blasted into bleak infertility. Men are reduced to repulsive degradation, barely able to recognize each other. There are no women in evidence, c o m m e d'habitude, since we are considering serious matters. A meal is a radish or carrot. Physical pleasure is a piss without pain. Fortune is a pair of cast-off boots which fit. The only human contact is an occasional embrace when words, as always, fail. Other people, contra Sartre, are not hell but, nonetheless, among the damned. Lucky, a slave whose master calls him "pig," reveals an unmistakably academic vocabulary and temperament. His master, Pozzo, an eccentric aristocrat manqud 7~ - "made in God's image," he says - surely exemplifies Aristotle's idea that an incompetent master is more truly a slave than his servant. Nothing is promised. It is a bleak scene. Probably Di Di and Go Go are clowns, or fools, or both. Though we have paid $20.00 per ticket to attend. Perhaps Godot is an illusion. If he exists, he must be faithless, too busy, or quite reasonably unwilling t o keep an appointment with such wrecks of humanity. Yet despite the comic absurdity of the situation, the action is not surreal. We recognize that theirs is a dilemma of our own world. In the ordinary theatrical sense, nothing happens. There is no plot and 513 no action. The only development is the re-entry of Pozzo and Lucky, the master now blind and helpless, but still served by Lucky. Di Di and Go Go continue to wait for Godot. D G D G D G D : : : : : : : W h a t was I saying, we could go on f r o m there. W h a t w e r e you saying w h e n ? A t the very beginning. T h e beginning of W H A T ? This evening... I was saying... I was saying... l ' m not a historian. Wait... we e m b r a c e d . . , we were h a p p y . . . h a p p y . . , w h a t do we do n o w that we're h a p p y . . . go o n waiting.., waiting.., let m e t h i n k . . , it's c o m i n g . . , go o n waiting... What we have in this play, I believe, is a dramatization of postmodern 7I philosophy and morality. In the playful banter and abusive arguments between Di Di and Go Go, the voids are acknowledged. They are Nietzsche's sick ones, utterly baffled and marginal. Their hopes and expectations are absurd. They are reduced to Sartre's pure ego, stupefied and incapable of action. Their hopes and plans, their "reality," in Wittgenstein's view, is sheer nonsense: at best, poetry or a game. Their lives are a delusion. Godot is not dead; he never existed. He is a pure fantasy or, in Freudian terms, a projection and sublimation of their emasculated, powerless lives. They survive because they are clowns, buffeted by circumstances beyond their comprehension. Life is wretched, but then life is wretched. Only in this (reminiscent of politicians and loyal voters, delivering tried and true gag lines in vaudevillian false consciousness) are they less to be pitied than Lucky and Pozzo, who have truly endeavored to beat the system and are dying for their troubles. In brief, life has no stable meaning. Language is a game that entertains, a way to pass the time while waiting. This quickly involves them in selfdeception, misunderstanding, cruel abuse of their only fellow, and pure foolishness. They cannot communicate, cannot even remember events, statements, or each other from one day to the next. Social conventions are transparently selfish. There is nothing, or no one, out there. And while realizing this, they have nothing better to do than wait. Di Di and Go Go, of course, have never heard of Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre, Wittgenstein, Foucault, deconstruction, or postmodern criticism. Yet Beckett's pitiful characters inhabit the world created by these progenitors of the contemporary mentalitd. True to this vision, Marx provides no verve or color here. Class and oppression are caricatured 514 as m o r d a n t jokes. A d m i t t e d to this sparse terrain, Marx, bursting with illusions and regrets, could only be a c o m i c foil. H e too is waiting for Godot. N o t h i n g resembling society or c o m m u n i t y is even r e m o t e l y present. Beckett, as if to drive h o m e the point, is remorseless with his audience. W h e n the lights c o m e up in the s e c o n d act, the spindly scrub of a tree, f o r m e r l y completely dead, has two o r three green leaves precariously attached to it. It is a baited hook, and w h o in the a u d i e n c e does not take it, wanting, h o p i n g that we will be treated to renewal, spring, hope, rebirth? T h e tree of life? But o u r hopes, of course, are vain and foolish. T h e tree is there for a different dramatic p u r p o s e . Di Di and G o G o argue a b o u t w h o should h a n g himself first, b u t neither does, lacking the p r o p e r equipment. N o t h i n g is going to happen. A n d nothing does. T h e y have learned nothing, and d r a w n n o lesson. W h a t they are doing, w h a t they are capable of, is waiting. T h e witness to this bleak tale is m o c k e d and d a r e d to do any more. Feeling that someone m u s t be responsible for locating an intelligible m e a n i n g in the story, the audience tries m o r e solemnly than Di Di and G o G o to imagine w h o o r what G o d o t is, and w h y they wait. Is waiting utterly meaningless if G o d o t never c o m e s ? We t o o wait - "It passes the time" - and we r e c o r d the c o n s e q u e n c e s of the celestial cycles in the recurrent seasons and in o u r physical selves. Waiting m a y even have m u c h to d o with o u r social selves. Di Di and G o G o s e e m to recognize this, at times, towards each other. T h e fox in Saint-Exup~ry's Little Prince explains the point m o r e clearly w h e n the little prince asks the fox h o w he can b e tamed: 72 "You must be very patient ]' replied the fox. "First you will sit down at a little distance from me - like that - in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day...." The next day the litte prince came back. "It would have been better to come back at the same hour," said the fox. "If, for example, you came at four o'clock in the afternoon, then at three o'clock I shall begin to be happy. I shall feel happier and happier as the hour advances. At four o'clock, I shall already be worrying and jumping about. I shall show you how happy I am! But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you .... One must observe the proper rites....,,v3 It is difficult to k n o w w h e t h e r the fox's w i s d o m a b o u t fellowship and time, "as the h o u r advances," is a sociological insight. E v e n m o r e ambiguous is the sociological u n d e r s t a n d i n g of la durOe, an "ordinary day- 515 to-day life" which seems very tame indeed. For example, Giddens seems to agree with the fox's view of proper rites when he takes exception to Freud's emphasis on the unconscious in motivating the complex "process" of human actions, which "are mediated by the social relations which individuals sustain in the routine practices of their daily lives .... " Ordinary day-to-day life ... involves an ontological security expressing an autonomy of bodily control within predictable routines. The psychological origins of ontological security are to be found in basic anxiety-controlling mechanisms .... The generation of feelings of trust in others, as the deepestlying element of the basic security system, depends substantially upon predictable and caring routines established by parental figures.TM The infant is very early on both a giver as well as a receiver of trust. As he or she becomes more autonomous, however, the child learns the importance of what are in Goffman's term "protective devices".... Ontological security is protected by such devices but maintained in a more fundamental way by the very predictability of routine, something which is radically disrupted in critical situations... [i.e.] the swamping of habitual modes of activity by anxiety which cannot be adequately contained by the basic security system.75 Elsewhere, speaking of "critical situations and the routine" with reference to the impact of mob behavior and prison camps on individual personality, Giddens's definition of critical situations calls to mind the plight of Di Di and Go Go: The radical disruption of routine produces a sort of corrosive effect upon the customary behavior of the actor, associated with the impact of anxiety or fear. This circumstance brings about heightened suggestibility, or vulnerability to the promptings of others; the correlate of such suggestibility is regressive behavior. The outcome of these is a new process of identification.., with an authority figure.76 The definition of regressive behavior, following Bettelheim, could be stage directions for Beckett's clowns: a diminution in the time-span of phenomenal experience, a concentration upon immediate events and loss of any long-term prospectives; rapid emotional oscillation swinging from elation to depression; and a reversal of the serious and trivial, whereby apparently minor events would be attributed with more significance than ones o f . . . greater consequence .... 77 Yet entering even an enlightened "correctional facility," vastly different from the systematic brutalization and personality destruction of the Nazi camps, must approximate Giddens's "critical situation." A prisoner's "day-to-day routine," dehumanizing or otherwise, is a paradigm of waiting. The task is surely not to restore the ordinary routine of "daily life," from which one is excluded, but to "do time," to survive in the "critical," and to wait for it to end, What I emphasize here is a tension 516 between what Giddens means by "ordinary" and "critical, ''78 and how this dichotomy simply fails to capture social situations that are very ordinary and absolutely critical: not only imprisonment, but those to which Beckett and Saint-Exup6ry draw our attention: fear, self-disclosure, and the unknown. "Predictable routines," far from securing "autonomy," may well lead to its loss, not only for the existentialist hero, but for sexual partners, the homeless, housewives, professionals, executives, scientists, and priests. No sanguine student of nuclear armaments, no ecologist or environmentalist, will be reassured that anxiety in a "critical situation" can be restored to "ontological security" by the "habitual modes, the predictable routines, of day-to-day life." Not even Di Di and Go Go believe that. Just waiting In Beckett's theatrical metaphor, Endgame, it is not quite clear whether Western civilization is approaching, or has actually reached, its finitude. Even if the wait is almost over, do we understand its meaning as well as the fox, or experience as intensely as Di Di and Go Go the hopes and terror of time? "Just waiting" has been dismissed by sociologists as either transparent or deviant, even in studies of the social structure and psychological basis of "routine" behavior. Waiting is treated as an interruption, breakdown, or hiatus in time. This is surprising, and worthy of comment on its own, because even the mildest reflection reveals that waiting is not "time standing still," a waste, or an aleatory malfunction of private and social life. Nor is it obviously a pathological obsession with the present. Waiting is a phenomenon of bureaucratic procedure; a necessity of material and professional scarcity ("please go to the end of the queue"); a prerogative of power and denial by postponement; and a neutral principle of equity ("please be seated and wait your turn"). It is clear that waiting could be functional for the functionalist, built into structures by the structuralist, or castigated as exploitation by the Marxist. But it has been ignored. Theorists have simply taken waiting for granted. No doubt they do their share of it too. There may be reasons other than oversight. Waiting is a meek posture compared to the ethical heroism of spontaneous existential freedom. One imagines that waiting, for Sartre, would be worse than hell: a life of reflexive bad faith, self-denial, and unfreedom. Similarly, Heidegger 517 contrasts the "complacency of the everyday" with authentic "ek-sistence," the "ek-static" life "beyond the self," although he does concede an interesting parallel between ecstasy and "boredom. ''79 Yet the idea of waiting as antipathetic - a repression of will, suppression of action and postponement of gratification - is not simply a philosophical notion. Di Di and Go Go are certainly not happy about their plight. On the other hand, it is far from clear that things would be better for them, or life very different, if Godot should come full of good cheer and promises. The point is this: waiting is doingsomething. It comprises a discipline, a "use of time" that involves them, as well as us - off-stage on this occasion - in familiar patterns of social behavior. The word itself suggests strong and purposive action: to keep watch, to lie in wait, to stalk a prey, to take by surprise. Its connotations are preparedness, stealth, and seeking advantage. In a society no longer dependent upon hunting and combat, those values may be less salient than other connotations: to attend, to serve or wait upon, to await patiently and in silence, to take one's turn, to delay or postpone, to maintain inactive anticipation. These kinds of waiting are civil and social in meaning. They imply, perhaps, deference, unequal status, and differential power, but also some degree of mutually acknowledged obligation, attendance, care, and interest. "I wait because I must" is not usually a claim of cosmic determinism or material necessity but a recognition of ethical constraints, social conventions, and a practical consideration of interests and outcomes. To wait is to be conscious of a relationship among oneself, others, and time. It is a temporal consideration of immediate, midrange, and long-term interests. These aspects, together with impatience, frustration, and boredom, indicate how waiting does in some measure reflect the contemporary priority on conscousness. The inward experience is often characterized as a psychological disorder (ennui, anxiety, alienation, abulia), but it is clear that waiting - how we "pass the time" - is more often a political or ethical issue. The arrival of Godot, and how that "ending" might heal the symptoms, would make for a less dramatically convincing climax than the one Beckett forces upon us: that each of us, the image of the other, waits for the end. s~ As noted earlier, waiting is what we do much of the time, and we sense ourselves to be neither very good at it nor happy about it. Most of us are anxious when sitting in attendance upon others. Nor are we in good conscience when those who wait upon us do so happily. Those who are reconciled to waiting, we assume, must be weak, impassive, or 518 servile. Misusing Saint-Exup~ry's term, they are too "tame" This oddly implies that it is "normal" to be both anxious and ungratified. Thus we have missed the fox's point. We wait with each other, for each other. Quite apart from the practical attention to time constraints and mutual obligations (to "be on time," to wait your turn), these "proper rites" engage passion, solidarity, self-disclosure, friendship, and hope. So understood, waiting is not submissive inaction, a lacuna in social time, or a psychopathic fixation upon a frozen present. Though waiting is meaningful social behavior, the historical and philosophical questions remain. Is waiting to be understood simply as rational and purposive activity, a utilitarian "means to an end"? 81 Must Godot really be out there, a "good," however postulated, waiting "in attendance" upon our engagement for a final d6nouement? Or past despair, with Di Di and Go Go, do we "just go on waiting" as an end in itself: waiting as a metaphysics for the "meantime," a way to "be in time"? This may well be an appropriately modest scope of historical and theoretical inquiry for those who recognize that other relations to time - the Great Cycle, the Wheel of Fortune, Transcendence, Apocalypse, Progress, Utopia - are no longer awaited. Waiting as an end in itself, a "proper" relationship to time, takes on ethical significance precisely when we believe such a use (or misuse) of time to be within the control of ourselves and others, s2 In the "meantime," there is no other telos, no other "historical ending" that we can await in good faith or demonstrate to our own satisfaction. Contemporary evocations of historical endings are rarely assertions of a systematic relationship between time and human experience based upon theological convictions, philosophical premises, or scientific theories. Rather, the endings express a malaise of intellectual impasse: the impossibility of establishing any connection between what is known and what is worth knowing, and the inability to identify any stable forms of cultural experience. Looming over this is the spectre of finitude in an absolute and physical sense: annihilation via nuclear war and ecological destruction. Postmodern thinkers have not, of their own volition or genius, deconstructed or "decentered" a rational order; nor did Beckett, whose dramatic silences evoked its broken terrain earlier and with greater immediacy. They have simply identified the cultural discontinuities and the grand metaphysical disappointments that have been plainly visible to all those who, with Di Di and Go Go, pause to lookY The post- 519 modern crevasse, the very stage on which Beckett's humble characters play, is an unlikely meeting place peopled by those who are anxiously, but insistently, waiting for not very much at all. In the meantime they are doing something, even if it is a struggle against profound silence in a feeble attempt to break it. Against indifference and respectable ways of thinking, they talk about historical endings. Waiting for the end Those who wait are perhaps more modestly resigned to their fate than some exponents of deconstruction, whose disunifying efforts border on the evangelical. Postmodernists (or poststructuralists) argue, with a unanimity they ought to consider disconcerting, that humankind is forced as if by a "natural" linguistic tropism into "totalities" of social order. These should be broken down to their elemental linguistic "in determinacies" by the purified caustic of critical philosophy. This is a philosophy radically disabused of rational and transcendental idealism, but it is certainly not bereft of faith in the power of the intellect to encourage a following and instill convictions. It has been described as an exercise in "decreation.''84 All structures of human experience are illegitimate usurpations (of status, possessions, power), "authorized" by false narratives of privilege, mythologizing symbols, and "positivities" (professions, rights, institutions) to preserve and extend them. "Total history" is the positivity whose task it is to incorporate all of these into a unified account, a grand metaphysical cover story.85 It follows from such an argument that persons have nothing truly authentic to share, even, especially, their language. There is no meaning: There are merely "signifiers" and what is "signified." By contrast, in Beckett's world, there is only meaning, even though it is only words breaking the void of silence. Even the solitary cry and the disembodied voice from a tape recorder 86 are words of defiance; they are not nothing. Words constitute a "speech situation," a fundamental civil relationship. This may take the form of whip and reins, the physical link between Pozzo and Lucky, or the desperate banter between Di Di and Go Go, which may be the best that can be hoped for. There-is nevertheless asserted a basic solidarity. Beckett visualizes this for us as a difficult, revealing conversation: "What shall we do now?" - "Go on waiting.,' The finale is not abortive, nor is it unrealized. That is the end. Time on our hands, nothing much happens: "Speak to me, Di Di. Tell me a story." 520 T h o s e w h o wait n e e d p a t i e n c e . O f t e n a t i m e o f a n x i e t y a n d d e s p a i r , it is n o t s u r p r i s i n g t h a t life is, literally, c a u g h t u p in t h e d a i l y routine. S o m e have i m p a t i e n t l y c l a i m e d that t h e y f o r e s e e t h e end. O t h e r s , with g r e a t e r impatience and an odd optimism, have claimed that the "end of man" has already c o m e . T h e " p r e s e n t " is n o t a n i m m i n e n c e b u t t h e a f t e r m a t h o f an end, a p o s t - h i s t o r i c a l e x i s t e n c e with "no e n d " E i t h e r p o s i t i o n a m b i t i o u s l y a s s u m e s t h a t w e c a n k n o w t h a t e n d , w h a t it really is o r was, through the consciousness not of Di Di and Go Go, but of Godot. We f o r e s e e t h e a f t e r m a t h , b u t p r e s u m e to be there still, l o o k i n g back. T h e e n i g m a f o r h i s t o r i a n s a n d social t h e o r i s t s is to b e a b l e to d i s t i n g u i s h w h e t h e r o u r efforts a r e t h o s e o f the h u m b l e c l o w n s o n - s t a g e , o r t h e invisible c h a r a c t e r with a view f r o m t h e wings. Notes 1. This term is used to refer to all ideas of epochal boundaries, cultural desuetude, or "end" to a historical or civilizationalperiod, e.g., decline, fall, and apocalypse. 2. Thomas Hobbes on philosophy: the "naturall plants of humane Reason" were cultivated into "Fields and Vineyards" producing the "Corn and Wine" of human virtue. Leviathan, Part IV, chap. 46 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 683. 3. This theme was popularized by political activists and young intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s. That tone of strident confidence from the "new Left" and "Youth Movement" is now heard in papers and articles by a new generation of scholars convinced of the redemptive effects of poststructuralist criticism and postmodern esthetics as this movement exposes and deconstructs "logocentric" deformities in politics, science, the arts, and sexual relations. 4. Edited by G. Singh (London: Chatto, 1982). Williams's review, "Movement of Faith," is in The Guardian (Nov. 21, 1982). 5. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 114-115. 6. Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (London: Methuen, 1972), at 277-278 and 281. 7. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 77; also 122, 177, 208, 233-234, 273. 8. (Paris: Perrin, 1981), 9, 321. My translation. 9. "Mort de question, question de mort," Le Monde (Jan. 2, 1982), 2. My translation. 10. "Thinkers But No Thought," The Guardian edition of Le Monde (June 3, 1979), 12. 11. The Guardian (May 27, 1979), 15. 12. From G. Dewan, "Bourgeoisification Time," The Guardian (June 24, 1979), 6. 13. "The Second Dark Ages," in Robin Clarke, editor, Notes for the Future (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), 141; 148-149. 14. "Goodnight Vienna - and Goodbye," The Guardian (June 24, 1979), 10. 15. Trans. Richard Lourie (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983), quoted from Irving Howe's review, "No Exit," New York Review of Books (Oct. 13, 1983), 19. 16. The mood ranges from Morris West's description of Pope John Paul II as "a man of the End-times, racing against the clock.to proclaim the Word in the hours before 521 the last midnight," The Australian (Jan. 26, 1984), to political scientists who decry the "scientific stagnation" and "the tendency toward theoretical ossification" in their discipline. E. B. Portis and D. F. Davis, "Policy Analysis and Scientific Ossification," PS, Vol. XV (Fall 1982), No. 4, 593-599. 17.. Daniel Bell addressed the theme of endings in The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1965), e.g., at 402-406. Robert Nisbet writes about twilight periods of civilization in Twilight of Authority (London: Heinemann, 1976), where he discusses such themes as "The Crumbling Walls of Politics," and in his History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 318, where he concludes that "Disbelief, doubt, disillusionment and despair have taken over." The preface to Theodore J. Lowi's The End of Liberalism, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1979) announces the end of the "first republic" in America. 18. (July-August, 1986), No. 232, 15. My translation. The edition contains fifteen essays on biblical apocalypse and revelation, religious millenarianism, European fascism and world war, genocide, Russian apocalypticism and the "New Man," nuclear terror, and ecological crisis. "Les grandes peurs," by Jean Delumeau, is a useful chronology and commentary on the "end of the world" theme, at 25-27. 19. See M. Cousins and A. Hussaln, Michel Foucault (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984), 78-84, for Foucault on the attempt of "total history" to establish metaphysical unities, continuities, and fundamental principles of human and social development. Yet Foucanlt looks for "fundamental mutations in intellectual history" (5), an impossible task without importing an organic metaphor. 20. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1970), 394-395. 21. The Order of Things, 313,315,317-318. 22. "The cry goes up that one is murdering history whenever.., one is seen to be using in too obvious a way the categories of discontinuity and difference, the notions of threshold, rupture and transformation... But one must not be deceived: what is being bewailed with such vehemence is not the disappearance of history, but the ... ideological use of history by which one tries to restore to man everything that has unceasingly eluded him..." Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 14. 23. Ibid., 210. 24. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 5. Derrida discusses apocalyptic philosophy in "D'une ton apocalyptique adoptd nagudre en philosophie," in P. Lacoue-Labarthe and J.-L. Nancy, Les Fins de l'Homme: A partir du travail de Jacques Derrida, (Paris, Galil6e, 1981), 445-479. 25. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 111, quoting Foucault, The Order of Things, 387. 26. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 13. 27. Derrida, Margins, 121: "The thinking of the end of man, therefore, is always already prescribed in metaphysics, in the thinking of the ti-uth of man." 28. Derrida, Margins, 133-134. Also, Positions, 51-52, for his desire to "put philosophy back on stage" with its central aim "the dismantling of logocentrism" - i.e., "the matrix of idealism." The "project of deconstruction" is identified as "the deconstitution of idealism or spiritualism in all its forms." 29. Jean-Francois Lyotard, Le Postmoderne expliqu~ aux enfants (Paris: Galil6e, 1986), 522 39-40. At 123, he explains, "I used the name "Auschwitz" to signify how the content of recent Western history appears inconsistent with regard to the "modern" project of emancipating humanity. What kind of thought is able to "rescue," in the sense of aufheben, "Auschwitz" by situating it, empirically or even speculatively, within a general development tending toward universal emancipation?" My translation. 30. Ibid., 122-123. The "decline in the "modern project" is, however, not a decadence. It is associated with the almost exponential growth of technoscience." (131) 31. Ecclesiastes, I: ii-iv, viii-ix. Oxford revised edition. 32. For Nietzsche's influence on this point of view, see Harry Redner, In the Beginning was the Deed: Reflections on the Passage of Faust (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), esp. at 164-179 and 261-289. The French poststructural tangency in Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard is illustrated above. 33. Such views spread in France during the heady days of student and worker strikes in May 1968. In America many were influenced by "the Movement" evolving out of civil rights marches, Vietnam war protests, university reforms, and greater "awareness" of cultural alternatives. "Locating" the sociological context of anti-institutional beliefs does not necessarily diminish their precision or aptness. 34. The "modernism" Irving Howe assails in The Decline of the New (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1970), 3-33, has been give a "post-". "The modernist sensibility posits a blockage, if not an end, of history: an apocalyptic cul-de-sac in which both teleological ends and secular progress are called into question, perhaps become obsolete" (5-6). Howe's cynical epitaph for modernism is prescient of what is now called postmodernism: "the decor of yesterday is appropriated and slicked up; the noise of revolt, magnified in a frolic of emptiness .... Modernism will not come to an end; its war chants will be repeated through the decades. For what seems to await it is a more painful and certainly less dignified conclusion than that of earlier cultural movements: what awaits it is publicity and sensation, the kind of savage parody which may indeed be the only fate worse than death." (33) 35. Edmund Burke warned about this in Reflections on the Revolution in France with respect to the sophistication of theology, philosophy and political science vis-fi-vis the church, morality, and monarchy. 36. Individual examples are unfair, but these illustrate the point. Robert Paul Wolff's The Poverty of Liberalism [Boston: Beacon Press, 1968[, 3, in a half-paragraph, asserts the "confusion of contemporary American political thought," identifying how this "shows itself nicely" by a paradox that liberals "seem congenitally unable to notice," and concludes that "As a radical, I view this conceptual chaos with a certain quiet satisfaction .... " Mark Poster, in Foucault, Marxism and History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), 71, writes that academic history is "shattered into countless splinters and will never again take on a recognizable shape" because of "the absence of theoretical reflection" among Marxist historians, who should know better: "Edward Thompson ... looks upon theory with no more understanding than his cat, to judge from his recent revealingly titled polemic against Althusser, The Poverty of History (1978)." 37. Richard Gilman, Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1971), 143, 152-153 and 158-159, examines the ambiguities of the term and argues vehemently against its use. At the other end of the debate is Arthur James Balfour, Decadence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908) and C. E. M. Joad, Decadence: A Philosophical Inquiry (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949). Decadence has always had advocates. A journal, Le D~cadent 523 (Paris, 1886), proclaimed its title as a fervent manifesto. A later enthusiasm is vaunted for the "me generation" by Jim Hougan, Decadence: Radical Nostalgia, Narcissism and Decline in the Seventies (New York: Morrow, 1975), 8-9: "That history recycles cultures more often than revolutions did is obvious, ironic and... okay. Nero correctly understood that beauty, music and irony can co-exist with disintegration, that the inevitable can be accompanied on the violin." 38. The works of Edward Gibbon, Oswald Spengler, and Arnold Toynbee are exemplary of this tradition. The title of a much earlier treatise is suggestive of the genre: Claude Duret [Bourbonnois], Discours de la veritd des causes et effets des ddcadences, mutations, changements, conversions & ruines des monarchies, empires, royaumes &rOpubliques. Selon l'opinion &doctrines des anciens &modernes math6maticiens, astrologues, mages, philosophes, historiens, politiques & th~ologiens (Lyons: Benoist Rigaud, 1594). 39. See Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Note sur lessens de 'post-'," in Le Postmoderne expliqud, 117-126; also "Rdponse ~ la question: qu'est-ce que le postmodernisme," 13-34. The latter is translated in J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington, B. Massumi, and R. Durand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 71-82. A good overview of the wider context of postmodern thinking in relation to social, literary, and political theory is Jonathan Arac, editor, Postmodernism and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), Introduction, ix-xliii. 40. A broad and complex literature deals with time as a philosophical, scientific, and historical problem. My argument here attempts to establish an independent account, rather than conforming with the traditional modes of conceptualizing time from Plato onwards. An excellent general introduction to the problem of time in physical dynamics and science is David Park, The Image of Eternity: The Roots of Time in the Physical World (Amherst: University of Mass. Press, 1980), esp. 98113. A more comprehensive survey of time in its psychological, scientific, and philosophical ramifications is G. J. Whitrow, The Natural Philosophy of Time, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). For technical philosophical studies of time, see J. J. C. Smart, editor, Problems of Space and Time (New York: Macmillan, 1964); Richard M. Gale, editor, The Philosophy of Time (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1978); Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will (New York: Harper, 1960); Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962). On time as a historiographical problem, see L. R. B. Elton and H. Messel, Time and Man (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1978), and Nathan Rotenstreich, Time and Meaning in History (Boston: Reidel, 1987); and S. Toulmin and J. Goodfield, The Discovery of Time (New York: Harper, 1965). J. T. Fraser has devoted his career to the study of time. His latest book, Time: The Familiar Stranger (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987) provides an up to date bibliography. Fraser is also a co-editor of the voluminous published proceedings, The Study of Time, Vols. I-VI (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1972-88), of the International Society for the Study of Time. See below for references to the sociology of time, and studies of astronomy, calendars, and clocks. 41. A. J. Polan, Lenin and the End of Politics (London: Methuen, 1984), 182-206, discusses "a politics for the end of time" from a phenomenological and ontological perspective, and uses the idea of "the termination of time." The "end of time," a familiar figure of romantic, religious, and apocalyptic speech, invokes ideas of "timeless eternity" as well as planetary annihilation. 42. A concise statement of Judaic and Islamic cosmogonies is S. L. Goldman, "On the 524 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. Beginnings and Endings Of Time in Medieval Judaism and Islam," in J. T. Fraser, N. Lawrence, and D. Park, editors, The Study of Time 1V (New York: SpringerVerlag, 1981), 59-72. St. Augustine's Confessions, Book XI, was the first theory of time based on Christian revelation, in which the ancient idea of a cyclical universe is replaced by the idea that time is the measurement by human consciousness of the irreversible, rectilinear movement of history. The American war against Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge devastation of Kampuchea are examples of such an intervention. Nuclear fission accidents, environmental pollution, and uncontrollable epidemics resulting from the release of recombinant organisms are perhaps the most widely noted examples. Scientists seem optimistic about the viability of solar energy for "about another four billion years," although one cannot rule out the possibility of a more spectacular form of entropy, "a big crunch." D. Park, "The Beginning and End of Time in Physical Cosmology," in Fraser et al., editors, Study of Time IV, 111-113. These have been rebuilt as a new environment: the shopping mall. This proposition is perhaps over-stated. Endings - e.g., in aboriginal language and religion - may well be "related." The point here is that such relationships are complex, indeterminate, and unsystematic. The Peter Sellers film Being There humorously illustrates this point. A mentally retarded man, by virtue of his complete "freedom" from past and future, charms (and deceives) the rich and powerful with his innocent, simple understanding. In the postmodernist perspective there is no distinction between a subjective "self' and its "con-text of contingencies." The self is merely a discursive identity within a bonndary-less "text" or narrative of contested possibilities. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 34-36, uses terms developed by Claude L6vi-Strauss. Despite a common concern with being and presence, it should be noted that Giddens and Sartre have vastly different assumptions about human psychology. See discussion below. Jean-Paul Sartre, Transcendence of the Ego (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1957), 81 and 98-99. Both Greece and Rome followed Hesiod's conception of the Muses in Theogony (as the West still does in its "museums"). Clio, the Muse of history, is the daughter of Zeus and the Titan Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. Clio, the name meaning "to celebrate," holds in her right hand a trumpet to proclaim great events, a cithara to sing the exploits of heroes, or a water-clock to symbolize the chronological order of events. Frances A. Yates, "The Art of Memory in Greece: Memory and the Soul," in The Art of Memory (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 42-62, discusses this theme in Greek song, philosophy, and rhetoric, as well as its transmission into Latin and early Christian culture. Aeneid, ii, 48. At that age I did not know that the French Revolutionaries renamed March after the wind, Ventose. To the Romans, April commemorated the ancient Italic goddess Venus, protector of kitchen gardens, fertility, imd guarantor of the fertility of flowers and the ripening plants. In English, April derives from the Greek counterpart, Aphrodite. Prolific Maia - "she who is great" - was the Italic goddess born of Zeus, mother of Hermes and nursemaid to other children of Zeus. A good account of the French revolutionary calendar is Eviatar Zerubavel, The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week (New York: Free Press, 1985), 28-34. 525 55. The literature on calendars from ancient to modern times displays great erudition, a sophisticated command of astronomy, and often a refreshing na'ivet6 in the boldness of claims about "objective" measurement and the "fixed" locations of celestial bodies. Older studies I have consulted include Alexander Philip, The Calendar: Its History, Structure and Improvement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921); Reginald L. Poole, Medieval Reckonings of Time (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1918); B. Richmond, Time Measurement and Calendar Construction (Leiden: Brill, 1956); Henry Norris Russell et al., Time and Its Mysteries, Series III (New York: New York University Press, 1949); and P. W. Wilson, The Romance of the Calendar (London: Allen & Unwin, 1937). Excellent modern studies include W. M. O'Neil, Time and the Calendars (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1975); and A. E. Samuel, Greek and Roman Chronology: Calendars in Classical Antiquity (Miinchen: C.H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1972). 56. "Day" and "night" recur with predictable regularity in Norway, but their magnitude and meaning differ from, say, Rome. The length of a "month" has varied widely to approximate either lunar cycles or equal divisions of the solar cycle. The seven-day week of the Judeo-Christian tradition is entirely arbitrary, since no natural division arises between the day and the month. In other cultures it has varied from three to twenty-one days. Zerubavel, Seven Day Circle, 85-86, 139; and Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 17, 27. Zerubavel's "sociology of time" discusses how chronology and the calendar influence the spatio-temporal constructions of personality, family life, professions, the work-day, the weekend, and religion. These works contain many references to historical and technical studies of time, and generously acknowledge indebtedness to earlier sociological studies by Henri Hubert, Emile Durkheim, Pitrim Sorokin, and Robert K. Merton. 57. The asymmetry of lunar and solar cycles is an example, rather than a refutation, of this precision. O'Neil, Time and the Calendars, 17-22, explains the eccentricities, obliquities, wobbles, and drifts of planetary and solar motion. 58. The ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans considered the day to begin at sunset. P. Sorokin and R.K. Merton, "Social Time: A Methodological and Functional Analysis," American Journal of Sociology, 42 (1937), 623, argue: "In all cases the point of departure is social or imbued with profound implications: it is always an event which is regarded as one of peculiar social significance." The foundation of Rome, the destruction of the Second Temple, and the flight of Mohammed from Mecca served as calendrical origins. The weight of responsibility for new beginnings is shown by two failures: the revolutionary origin of years and a fully metricated French calendar, and the Soviet attempt to suppress Sunday and establish a seven-day work week. Zerubavel, The Seven Day Week, 28-34, 35-43. 59. This is captured in French, le conte, (story or tale), and Italian, la storia (history) and il racconto (story, narrative). 60. For a "chronogeographic perspective" on the interaction of time, space, and social processes see Tommy Carlstein, Time Resources, Society and Ecology, Vol. 1, Preindustrial Society (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982); T. Carlstein, D. Parkes, and N. J. Thrift, editors, Making Sense of Time (London: Edward Arnold, 1978); D. Parkes and N. J. Thrift, Time, Spaces, and Places: A Chronogeographic Perspective (New York: John Wiley, 1980); N.J. Thrift, "On the Determination of Social Action in Space and Time," Environment and Planning." Society and Space, 1 (1983), 23-57. 526 61. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1965), 345, discusses discontinuity and alteration in the social experience of time, in contrast to continuous astronomical time as postulated by Newton. Also see Georges Gurvitch, The Spectrum of Social Time (Dordrecht; Reidel, 1964), 1113, 30; Edmund R. Leach, "Two Essays Concerning the Symbolic Representation of Time," in Rethinking Anthropology (London: Athlone, 1961), 133-134; Kevin Lynch, What Time Is This Place? (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972); Anthony Giddens, "Time~ Space, and Social Change," in Central Problems in Social Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 198-233. Michael Young, The Metronomic Society: Natural Rhythms and Timetables (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), argues for the relation between chronobiological rhythms and social structure. 62. The Oxford English Dictionary entry for wait is a magisterial three and two-thirds pages long. Usages dating to Frankish and Germanic medieval origins connote "lying in wait" to surprise, attack, or take advantage of another. 63. "Time is as it were the husband of occasion." See Frederick Kiefer, "The Conflation of Fortuna and Occasione in Renaissance Thought and Iconography." Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 9 (1979), 1-27; also Samuel L. Macey, Patriarchs of Time: Dualism in Saturn-Cronus, Father Time, the Watch-Maker God, and Father Christmas (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987). 64. See Jacques le Goff, "Merchant's Time and Church's Time in the Middle Ages," in Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 29-52, E. P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," Past and Present, 38 (1967), 56-97; and I. W. Pollock, "Social Class and the Subjective Sense of Time," Archives of General Psychiatry, 21 (1969), 1-14. Dr. Helen Pringle has generously brought to my attention the rich literature on the ancient and modern understanding of time. 65. J. F. Rychlak, "Manifest Anxiety as Reflecting Commitment to the Psychological Present at the Expense of Cognitive Futurity," Journal of Consultant and Clinical Psychology, 38 (1972), 70-79. An important non-Freudian study of the psychopathology of time is Eugene Minkowski, Lived Time, trans. N. Metzel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). 66. John E. Orme, "Time: Psychological Effects," in Carlstein et al., editors, Making Sense of Time, 66-75, claims that "unfilled" time may lead to pathological "personality variations": "In depression, time might seem long and never ending, the future hopeless and everything dull and grey." Moreover, "it is usual to think positively about the future. Anxiety, on the other hand, tends to restrict a person to the psychological present. Similarly, psychopatic personalities tend to be overrestricted to the present .... Such time perspectives may (as always) reflect both genetic factors and environmental circumstances." These complacent generalizations are combined with astonishingly naive notions of time: "In schizophrenia, the psychotic process may result in even more marked abnormalities of the experience of time. He may somehow feel divorced from the normal flow [sic] of time." Later (74), he says: "too great an attention to the present tends to result in short-term goals, a lack of persistence and a rather childlike, even psychopathic, system of principles .... This rather hedonistic and nihilistic view is not really justified by any proper consideration of the known properties of time [sic]." Orme presses on: "The poorer classes are more present oriented than the better off ones .... To an extent, the orientation of poorer classes to the present is like that of psychopathic or delinquent groups." 527 67. Waiting as conventional behavior has been ignored in the literature on social time. Studies have focused upon the routines of institutional life in prisons and hospitals; the disciplines required in commuting, shopping, etc., in urban and suburban life; and the fragmentation of time in ceremonial and religious observances. Waiting is either vaguely alluded to as wasted, dead, or dysfunctional time, or dismissed as irrational (by sociologists looking for something to study!). Carlstein, Time Resources, 26ff et passim, provides multivariate graphs of social time as a finite resource - time .is a "a kind of money" (329-330) - which has been systematically ignored or underestimated by liberal and Marxist thinkers (28). Though he complains of "substitute concepts for time," such as energy, convenience, efficiency, stress, and strain (29-32), waiting is never mentioned. Parkes et al., Times, Spaces, and Places correlates personality and mood variables with fast and slow biorhythms - including unfilled time, anxiety, passivity, and boredom - but these "lifetimes" are discussed solely in relation to chemical and physiological rhythms of the human organism (53). Elsewhere rhythm, tempo, timing, routine, and erratic behavior are discussed (322-323), but never waiting. Richard Taylor's "Fatalism," in Gale, editor, Philosophy of Time, 221-231, temptingly fails to mention waiting: "A fatalist, in short, thinks of the future in the manner in which we [sic] all think of the past." Leonard W. Doob, "Time: Cultural and Social Anthropological Aspects," in Carlstein et al., editors, Making Sense of Time, 56-65, uses the word (61) in citing a study JR. D. Meade, "Psychological Time in India and America," Journal of Social Psychology, 76 (1968), 169-174] comparing subjects required to estimate whether "six minutes passed more quickly when they were solving mathematical problems than when they were waiting." The study concluded that students who found time to pass more quickly while doing the problems "came from cultures emphasizing achievement, so for them waiting was a bore .... "Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms, xvi, mentions waiting as a configuration of social time only when he rules it out. Claiming to emulate Weber's focus on the " 'rationalistic' character of modern culture," he aims "to focus my concerns exclusively around the introduction of the "rational" - precise, punctual, calculable, standard, bureaucratic, rigid, invariant, finely coordinated, and routine - into our lives. I have done that deliberately so as to concentrate on what I believe to be highly rationalized temporal orders (Zerubavel's emphasis). This involved.., a decision to deliberately ignore all nonrational or irrational manifestations of the temporal organization of social life - waiting, latecoming, spontaneity, and so on." His only deviation from this resolve to focus on the "durational expectancies" of modern rational life is a passing mention (12-13) of "temporal irregularity" leading to "a strong sense of uncertainty" in Bettelheim's study of the concentration camp: "the endless "anonymity" of time was ... destructive to personality." 68. Samuel Beckett's En attendant Godot, first produced in 1952 as "theater of the absurd," is now recognized as one of the preeminent plays of the twentieth century. Textual quotations are from Waiting for Godot (London: Faber and Faber, 1965). Beckett's Endgame(Fin de pattie, 1957), is an even darker evocation of the ritual of waiting, not for a person, but apparently for global annihilation. 69. Their somewhat grand proper names, Vladimir and Estragon, are never used except in Vladimir's opening line, when he is talking to himself. The diminutives reflect a prickly affection, but also underscore their ignoble circumstances. 70. Such a description is necessarily ambiguous. Pozzo speaks of his "professional worries," but also casually refers to his "manor." His dress is that of a gentleman. 71. "Postmodernism" is an ambiguous reference to a rejection of formalism and ration- 528 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. alism in art, architecture, and literature; and, in philosophy, morals, and politics, to an attack on "logocentric" institutional structures and privileges based upon of idealistic assumptions of individual autonomy and natural reason. "Postmodern man" was first used by Rudolf Pannwitz in Die Krisis der europdischen Kultur (1917), according to Wolfgang Welsch, Unsere postmoderne Moderne (Weinheim: Acta Humanoria, 1987), 12, who gives an excellent review of its variety in artistic and intellectual forms. Beckett is repeatedly invoked as an epitome by Hassan in Postmodern Turn, where he attempts to schematize rather than define the term, 91. At 85 and 94 n. 1, he locates its first appearance as postmodernismo in Federico de On/s, Antologia de la poesia espahola e hispanoamericana (1882-1932) [1934]. Arnold Toynbee used "postmodern" in his Study of History [1947 ed.] to describe what he saw as a transitional phase of Western civilization - a "mutation" or "departure" begun in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. See Matal Calinescu, Faces of Modernity: Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 133-134. They cannot play and be friends unless he is tamed: "It is an act too often neglected," said the fox. "It means to establish ties . . . . To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you ... have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, than we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world .... " / Antoine de Saint-Exup6ry, The Little Prince, trans. Katherine Woods (London: Pan Books, 1982), 65-66. I have corrected the translation of the last paragraph in accordance with the original text of Le petit prince (Paris: Gallimard, 1946), 69-70. Hobbes scholars would/ be happy to translate this sentence into seventeenthcentury English. / Giddens, Constitution of Society, 50-51. Emphasis in original. Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory, 123-128, quoting at 126. Ibid., 125. See also 216-219. Giddens's emphasis upon regression as the typical response to critical situations is reminscent of assertions cited above by Zerubavel that waiting is "irrational time" or with Orme, a pathological inability to deal with the "present." Giddens refers to Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart (Glencoe: Free Press, 1960). One might also cavil with the vagueness and breadth of "ordinary" and the apparently mechanistic assumption of a threshold effect separating the ordinary from the critical, or a binary relationship between the two. Heidegger, Being and Time, 222: "'Ek-sistence,' in fundamental contrast to every existentia and "existence,' is ecstatic dwelling in the nearness of Being." M.A. Gillespie, "Temporality and History in the Thought of Martin Heidegger," a paper presented to the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (1988), Washington, D.C., 5 and 16, notes that Heidegger considers "boredom and joy as similar revelatory experiences .... Boredom ... is a direct experience of time as such." Ordinarily, man "flees before death into the comfortable complacency of the everyday," but in a moment of heightened anxiety, when authentically facing death, comes "a moment of vision" in which we "adopt a completely new stance toward time. Time is experienced not as a linear, non-reversible, and homogeneous succession but as a stretching of our Being forward and backward out of the [present] moment... In this moment human Being is ecstatic, in the most literal sense, i.e., it is out of itself, there (Da). It is ahead of itself as that which is approach- 529 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. ing out of the future." William Barrett, "The Flow of Time," in Gale, The Philosophy of Time, 357, clarifies Heidegger's understanding of human existence as "Ek-sistenz, literally the standing beyond oneself... Our experience does not occur at a point-instant of space and time .... Heidegger calls this basic temporality "ekstatic" temporality, for in experiencing the present we already stand beyond it." See also Derrida, Margins', 131-133. Derrida, "The Ends of Man," 136, provides a parallel image: "Are we to understand the eve as the guard mounted around the house or as the awakening to the day that is coming, at whose eve we are? ... Perhaps we are between these two eves, which are also two ends of man. But who, we?" For example, an acknowledged mutual obligation to self-disclosure, self-restraint, and social solidarity; or to Big Brother; or to the Millennium. The point here is not that the significance of waiting depends upon the occurrence of this end, but rather that waiting is subordinate or prepositionally meaningful (i.e., not an end in itself) to another. This disposition to time is not so very different from societies that assumed that sacrifice, propitiation, or righteous living could influence the ruling deities. Lyotard, Le Postmoderne, 40, asks: in the shadow of Auschwitz, "the crime which opened postmodernity, ... how could any grand scheme of sovereignty remain credible?" Hassan, in The Postrnodern Turn, finds the "indeterminacies" of postmodern demystification arising from "the impulse of unmasking" (86) and "a vast will to unmaking" that affects "the entire realm of discourse in the West." (92) For Foucault, in Archeology of Knowledge (esp. 3-15), the "notion of discontinuity is a paradoxical one: because it is both an instrument and an object of research." (9) However, "We must not imagine that rupture is a sort of great rift that carries with it all discursive formations at once: rupture is not an undifferentiated interval [nor] a kind of lapsus that separates two periods .... The idea of a single break suddenly, at a given moment, dividing all discursive formations, interrupting them in a single moment and reconstituting them in accordance with these same rules - such an idea cannot be sustained." (175) Cf. Derrida, Positions, 24, "I do not believe in decisive ruptures, in an unequivocal "epistemological break," as it is called today. Breaks are always, and fatally, reinscribed in an old cloth that must continually, interminably be undone." Hassan, Postmodern Turn, 92. Foucault develops these arguments at length in Archeology of Knowledge, although they are treated widely in his works, and in the works of numerous others in the postmodern and deconstructionist genre. Beckett uses the recorded voice in Krapp's Last Tape (1958) and Rockaby (1980).