The site of meaning

For nearly a century, world history has commonly examined its topics with methods derived from evolutionary theory. Throughout the same time, a separate tradition of historical thought, also concerned with the global scale, has empathically resisted it.

Heidegger, like many others after the First World War, characterized the era in the language of crisis. Similar to the young Toynbee, he focused his attention on contemporary changes to the spatial parameters of identity, what he described as the “de-distancing of the ‘world'... the overcoming of distance.” In his first major volume Being and Time, he countered this placeless global dimension with the authenticity of the life-world.

Heidegger characterized these two public temporalities as “authentic” and “inauthentic,” or “of its own” and “not of its own” (eigentlich/uneigentlich). Modern historiography bolstered the latter, because it treated existence in time, rather than as time. Like mechanical clocks, historiography concealed the temporal span of the life-world when it altered a past event into a “time point.” Temporal existence “does not fill up an objectively present track,” but “rather stretches itself along.” This “historicity” could never appear in the work of historians, whose universalism instead “inverted” the stretch of time into “a supratemporal pattern." “Historiography,” he lectured elsewhere, “is a narcotic averting us from history.” By contrast, an authentic retrieval of history responded to past possibilities for the sake of future ones, what Heidegger called “heritage.” Historical thinking, in this sense, enabled “the community, the people” to “choose its heroes.” Only through this authentic retrieval could the community itself become “authentic” and “complete.” No antinomy divided it or its historical time.^[127]

Despite the “Heil Hitler” he brought to this “community,” Heidegger's attack on universalist historiography - in behalf of local temporality - deeply influenced later postmodern theory and critique.

Postmodern thought emerged in France from a complex combination of historical elements. The Holocaust, the embarrassment of collaboration, and the brutal failures of communism were all important. So too was decoloniza­tion, what Derrida described as the political and economic “decentering” of Europe. Already in his qualifying memoirs of 1954, Derrida pointed to “Europe” as a crucial though empty concept in the philosophy of Husserl. Later, he explored the “growing and threatening pressure” on Eurocentrism, arguing that Western concepts of human “universality” aimed to “interiorize this difference,” a domesticating endeavor he aligned with the US war on Vietnam. Another influential voice in this current, Jean-Frangois Lyotard, defined postmodernity as the split between global heterogeneity and the Western system of scientific and ethical legitimation. Foucault, in his first major volume, described his project as a study of the “confrontation” line between “European culture” and “what it is not.” In the prime instance of this, he wrote, Western “colonizing reason” delineated “the Orient” as both its origin and its externality, an “original division” that gave the West its identity, at once universal and unique.

By the 1980s, the postmodern critique ofhistory entered the discipline itself. Depending on the subfield, this occurred in assorted ways and to differing degrees. In the context of world history, subaltern and postcolonial studies advanced a substantial disciplinary challenge and secured a lasting impact. The authors of these influential works often distanced themselves in some manner from postmodernism, at times criticizing its own colonialist reinscriptions and “ethnocentric limitations.” Whatever the strengths of such claims, much of postcolonial historiography drew sharp-edged techniques and strategies from the previous generation's anti-foundationalism. Gyan Prakash dates the emer­gence of subaltern studies from the corrosion of national authority and its crisis of popular representation in 1970s India. From there, researchers probed intensely at the colonial and postcolonial construction of the nation. Ranajit Guha, in the opening pages of Subaltern Studies 1, declared the Indian nation a “failure,” the study of which now “constitutes the central problematic” of Indian historiography. The nation, Antoinette Burton later argued along these lines, was not a “sovereign ontological” identity, but “an unstable subject-in- the-making.”^[130] Such authors contested the historiographical nation by pulling it apart into contradictory halves. They attacked historiographical universal­ism as a discursive mode of national and national-imperial power, while empirically foregrounding the social fragments otherwise obscured.

“The practice of subaltern history,” explained Dipesh Chakrabarty, “would aim to take history to a point where its unworking becomes visible.” In an extraordinary evaluation that bridged imperial and national historiography, Guha traced the function of “continuum” and “causality” in evacuating the Santal Uprising of its peasant consciousness and agency, an operation he incisively called the “counter-insurgency” of “assimilative thinking.” Stefan Tanaka likewise described disciplinary “chronology” as an “alibi” for the Japanese nation-state, an orchestration of divergent, contradictory, and non­national pasts into a reflection of itself. “Linear History,” according to Prasenjit Duara, was “the sublation of the other into the self,” an inoculation against “a rupture in the body of the nation.” To some advocates then, this strategy signaled the “dissolution of world history,” the “end of universal narratives.”^[131]

On the other side of the methodological fissure were the local and embed­ded horizons of community and belonging, what Chakrabarty called “very particular ways of being-in-the world.” Throughout his scholarship, Guha insisted on the human habitation of myths, spirits, stories, rituals, and prac­tices - the “primordial relations” of everyday community life and the “sover­eignty” of subaltern consciousness. As they depicted these sites of meaning and intention, postcolonial historians sought to shelter them against the abstraction of disciplinary equivalency, presenting instead a complex array of irreducible singularities, multiple narratives, and “different orders of temporality.” Histor­icity of the life-world thus represented a “radical heterogeneity” with the ruling powers of its time as well as with historical knowledge itself. By replacing national “evolution” with “multiplicity,” Duara explained, critical history offered a glimpse at those “meanings” once and still “repressed.”^[132]

Postcolonial history jolted powerfully at the discipline's nationalist, Euro­centric, and teleological defaults.

Such a way to be implies being with others in a social time based on a mutually subscribed notion of the past. Without the latter there can be no agreed codes of conduct or rules of comportment to enable people to form anything like a public, nor can there be a tradition or history for such a society to call its own.

How did this mutuality sustain itself through time? The past “comes alive again,” Guha explained, when “grasped in a creative manner.” Otherwise, the past would be reduced into the “dull uniformity” of mere traditionalism. In that case though, how could one determine whether the creative act recovered the previous subscription or founded something else? One would need to have already identified a public, a tradition, or a history. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak attempted to deflect this kind of problem by tossing it back onto historiography; she labeled it “a strategic use of positivist essen- tialism.” But the general form behind every specific “being with others” did not derive from historical facts or methods. It was rather an ontology of unalloyed community, what Theodor Adorno in a bitter attack on Heidegger called “the jargon of authenticity.”^[133]

As universal chronology, historiography dislodges this idealization of “primordial” community. Contrary to Heidegger's characterization, however, historiography also simultaneously localizes and differentiates. In their meticulous study of early modern clock time, Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift show that mechanical clocks did not segment and destroy existential time, but extended it. The authors characterize clock time as a “web of practices,” proliferating multiple possibilities that varied enormously by circumstance and temporal context. “Not everyone occupies the same now, because both the one and the now are plural events.” In microhistory generally, historio­graphical localization is stressed, and context analyzed as a multi-scalar “space of possibilities” for divergent manifestations of social life. This principle of differentiation aligns with the critical side of the subaltern strategy, which saw in all modern historiography only the dominance of temporal homogeneity and teleological direction. In an eloquent passage, Chakrabarty explained that for a historian to make past peoples intelligible, they must illuminate some aspect of life in the present. Modern historical understanding depended upon an “unstated... premise of identification” with these other ways of being. The historian's present thus contained within it “a plurality of times,” though in historiographical practice, heterogeneity was ironed out and “disavowed” by universal chronology. As Chakrabarty wrote elsewhere, “old Hegel has the last laugh.” This insight into the discipline's disjunctive temporality was a striking and much-needed elaboration. It echoed, however, Ranke's own antinomy and its limitation on universality. History, Ranke wrote, “does not conform to a concept.” The historian thus needed a “real appreciation for the varied forms of life that constitute the human race, an entity of which we are a part, forever continuous and always other.”^[134]