Synchronizing the World: Synchronism as Historiographical Practice, Then and Now

The final version of this research has been published in History of the Present. © 2017 University of Illinois Pres

Blant spioner og diktere - opplysning og konspirasjon i Tyskland på 1700-tallet

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Blant spioner og diktere: Opplysning og konspirasjon i Tyskland på 1700-tallet

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TIDENS HENGSLER: Historieteoretiske refleksjoner om synkronisering og skalering fra Beda til i dag

Denne artikkelen diskuterer hva som gir sammenheng til fenomenet vi vanligvis omtaler som “tid”, eller, hvis vi ønsker å presisere ytterligere, «historisk tid». For å tilpasse en velkjent formulering fra Shakespeare utgjør artikkelen en undersøkelse av tidens «hengsler». Ifølge sin spesifikke eksistensmodus er tiden ikke en, men mange. Å bringe disse mangfoldige tidene sammen i et felles rammeverk for historieforskning og historisk narrativ krever arbeid. Artikkelen undersøker to aspekter ved dette arbeidet, oppsummert i begrepene «synkronisering» og «skalering». Det første opererer horisontalt, tilpasser og knytter sammen forskjellige varigheter, rytmer og hastigheter, til en felles tid, syn-chronos; den andre opererer vertikalt, produserer ikke en felles tid, men likevel en felles orden, en skala av tider, knyttet til liv og livsytringer, som i seg selv er skalerbare, etter størrelse, mengde, kompleksitet osv. Artikkelen undersøker hvordan disse to prinsippene for å organisere og stabilisere tiden som forståelsesramme, men også som motor og dynamisk prinsipp for historiens gang, kommer til anvendelse hos den engelske munken, teologen og historikeren Beda, kalt den ærverdige, som levde i overgangen mellom 600- og 700-tallet e. Kr, og den tyske teologen og filosofen Johann Gottfried Herder som levde fra annen halvdel av 1700- og ut på 1800-tallet

Europe at Different Speeds: Asynchronicities and Multiple Times in European Conceptual History

Over the last ten years or so we have become used to the idea and the formulation of ‘Europe at different speeds’, in terms of a conceptual and rhetorical response to the fact that the process of European integration, towards the goals of a common constitution, a common monetary system, a common foreign policy etc. have not unfolded in as a homogenous, linear and synchronous way as planned. The idea was a reaction to the unwelcome fact that some of the European countries were unwilling or indeed unable to keep up with the pace of integration set by some of the core countries. The global financial crisis of 2008, the Greek debt crisis, and most recently, the refugee or migration crisis, which hit Europe in the fall of 2015, have contributed to unveiling the multiple and often conflicting tempi and rhythms, the delays and accelerations in the Eurozone and turned them into a challenge that the EU can no longer ignore. In reaction to a speech by the British Prime Minister David Cameron, in which he announced a revision of Great Britain’s membership in the EU, the Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt warned: ‘Flexibility sounds fine, but if you open up to a 28-speed Europe, at the end of the day there is no Europe at all. Just a mess.’ In other, less politically loaded contexts, this ‘mess’ is called historical contingency, or simply history. The phrase ‘Europe at different speeds’ is not just a rhetorical device, but corresponds to a fundamental historical reality: that the European countries have indeed never moved at the same speed, or, in other words, they have never been completely synchronous in their social and political development. On the contrary, the history of Europe, including the history of Europe’s relationship to the world at large, has always been a history of temporal differences, of forwardness and backwardness, relative to a given goal, of lagging behind and catching up, relative to a perceived avantgarde. Europe has ‘multiple modernities’, to use a term from S.N. Eisenstadt, or, with an even more general argument, is less dependent on the highly ambiguous idea of ‘modernity’: Europe has ‘multiple temporalities’. 3 Often these various political and social times are even recognized and given labels, such as the German Sonderweg, the Nordic model, British insularity, or they are documented, for instance in the EU progress reports. This chapter appears in a larger collection published by © Berghahn Books (https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/SteinmetzConceptual)

Livstider. Tidsmangfold i det 21. århundre.

Da Time utga sitt dobbeltnummer om helse i februar 2015, var forsideillutrasjonen et close-up av et babyansikt, med teksten: «This baby could live to be 142 years old». Nummeret er i sin helhet viet det magasinet selv kaller «The Longevity Report», som presenterer «the new data on how best to live a longer happier life». Dette essayet er i sin helhet et forsøk på å utvikle måter å tenke rundt denne situasjonen på, i et format som kunne kalles kulturanalytisk eller kulturhistorisk. I den forstand er dobbeltnummeret av Time både syptom og diagnose, som formidler en erfaring av pågående og aksellererende historisk endring. Et mulig resultat av denne endringsprosessen synes å innebære et brudd med selve den temporale ordenen, strukturen av tidserfaringer, som har vært karakteristisk for vestlige samfunn siden 1700-tallet – det som den franske historikeren Francois Hartog kaller «det moderne tidsregimet». 5 Dette tidsregimet, som den moderne verden for øvrig, hvis vi skal tro Carstensen, er «av og for de unge». Men hvis aldersammensetningen i samfunndet endrer seg dramatisk, er det all grunn til å tro at det samme vil skje med «tidsregimet», måtene vi erfarere og strukturer forholdet mellom fortid, nåtid og fremtid på. Målet med dette essayet er ikke finne belegg for denne tesen, men snarere å diskutere hva slags begreper og teoretiske innganger vi trenger for å formulere den. Rammen for diskusjonen er begrepet «livstider». © 2017 Makadam Förla

Philology and the Problem of Culture

At present philology seems to find itself in a decisive moment, from which there can be different ways forward. By taking two of the most recent attempts at reinvigorating and even reinventing philology, Turner’s Philology and Pollock, Elman, and Chang’s World Philology as a starting point, this article offers a retrospective glance at some of the investments made in the philological tradition in the last two hundred years. At the core of this tradition, I argue, is “the problem of culture”, which connects often very diverse authors and contributions from the early 19th century onward. Rereading some of the canonical texts in the history of the philology, by Friedrich Ast, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ferdinand de Saussure, Paul de Man and others, I claim that they are involved in similar ventures to liberate or protect the study of language and literature, in all their different forms, from the dominance of broad cultural categories, linking language to identity, politics, and ethics, and thus restricting dramatically the possibilities of language to produce new knowledge. Finally, the article returns to the present and asks what these rereadings could mean for how we see the future of philology and the philology of the future

Welt/Umwelt

Reinhart Koselleck (Fotograf): Großplastik - Ensemble für den Frieden und die Gerechtigkeit - (Xavier Fraissinette), Lyon 2002, Bildnachlass Reinhart Koselleck © Bildarchiv Foto Marburg/ Reinhart Koselleck. https://www.bildindex.de/document/que20172596?medium=fmk03-17-ka-0040a&part=1 Can there be something like a concept of the totality of being, including what lies outside and surrounds it? This is the self-contradictory, paradoxical question raised by the concepts Welt and Umwelt. They ar..

After supersynchronisation: How media synchronise the social

The multiple nature of time has by now been well established across a wide range of scholarly traditions in the humanities and social sciences. The article takes that insight as a starting point, in order to discuss the tools, work, sites and contestations involved in common temporal frameworks and structures that cross and join together time’s multiplicities. We thus articulate and discuss key components of synchronisation, a concept with significant potential for understanding common temporalities and social orders. Our emphasis is particularly on media, their technological and representational affordances for synchronisation. The article’s approach to social and mediated times presents an alternative to Hartmut Rosa and François Hartog’s influential theories about the temporal configuration of the present historical moment. Their understanding of the present tends more towards unity and uniformity, particularly by means of chronology. We follow Luhmann in arguing that ‘there is no supersynchronization’ producing such privileged, unitary temporal orders. We propose pursuing an understanding of both present and past through investigations of synchronisation itself, which always exists in plural, always involves different synchronisations in competition with each other, is subject to social and historical contingencies. The article combines theoretical and conceptual arguments with historical and contemporary cases. We investigate the synchronisation of national collectives by means of broadcast media, of individuals in everyday life by means of social media, and the recalibration of various contemporary media to a global scale in order to tackle the issue of climate change. These cases move from past and relatively comprehensive forms of synchronisation, via more localised forms today, to highly uncertain and heterogeneous ones in the future