Conclusion

In 1956, Roland Barthes closed his lengthy evaluation of “Myth Today” with a single, distilled contradiction: “It seems that this is a difficulty of our epoch... either posit a reality which is entirely permeable by history and ideologize; or else, inversely, posit a reality ultimately impenetrable, irreducible, and in this case, poeticize.” The latter approach, he explained, searched “for the inalienable meaning of things.” As in the sway of his own essay, between its poetical language and its epochal delineations, Barthes' antinomy obtained as a paradox of modern time.

A few years later, Siegfried Kracauer targeted this theme in the enigmatic subtitle of his neglected masterpiece History: The Last Things Before the Last. The time of last things is - as an ending - absolute. Yet here, it is also linked to the next time, itself an ending, and so another absolute. Kracauer named his chapter on periodization after “Ahasuerus,” the WanderingJew. He imagined him in frightening terms, “restlessly” trapped between his “many faces, each reflecting one of the periods which he traversed” and “the one time he is doomed to incarnate.”^{^[135]}

To use the language of Kracauer and Adorno, the historiographical period is a “force field.”^{^[136]} It is pulled between poles of chronology and immanence, perpetually in tension, and without resolution. This unique temporal disjuncture emerged out of the European imagination of the globe. In the eighteenth century, the unity of historical time reflected the natural unity of the earth; the disunity of particular times reflected the different and immeasurable pasts also present in the global space. The antipathy between world history and life-world is hardly “dated.”^{^[137]} It endures as a foundation of modern historical thought. For a long while, the gap was patched by historiographical nationalism.

Throughout the twentieth century, however, it became increasingly clear that the nation was an insufficient framework for understanding how the past became present. From the intense and violent reconfigurations of global power, world history and postcolonial history each essayed an alternative by moving toward one of the poles, and each generally backed away from the full implications of either chronology or incommensurability.

Perhaps today, the position of the poles is again changing. In his current, remarkable research, Chakrabarty seeks to align them anew. Planetary climate change, he says, requires a history for which his previous methodologies are insufficient. This dire aggregate of human actions points to “a human collectivity, an us.” It reveals in a tangible and unprecedented way the human as a “species.” At the same time though, the species offers no experience of itself and shares no self-identity. Despite its cognitive validity, it “cannot subsume particularities.” He calls his response, in a phrase from Adorno, “negative universal history.” Benjamin Lazier, in his outstanding history of planetary and life-world conceptions, likewise describes “the combination, and also the clash,

of the earthly with the Earthly that now conditions human experience.”^{^[138]} Between these poles - chronology and immanence, evolution and rupture, universality and meaning - historiography employs the period.

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Source: Christian D. (ed.). The Cambridge World History. Volume 1. Introducing World History, to 10,000 BCE. Cambridge University Press,2015. — 516 p.. 2015

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