Situating ourselves in time
The present time is often discussed in terms of a series of crises with cumulative effects. Accounts tend to start with the financial crisis of 2008, move to climate change, then to the COVID-19 pandemic to conclude with the recent wars from the Russian aggression against Ukraine, indeed being called an «epochal turning-point» by the German head of government, to the attack of Hamas on Israel and Israel’s retaliation in the Gaza strip. Such a cumulation of critical events, as different as they may be at first sight, calls for attempts to identify the specificity of the present time. Looking at diagnoses of the present time, however, such attempts are rather striking for their absence.
Ways of diagnosing and addressing these crises are marked by a double divergence. First, those who advocate for piecemeal social engineering see themselves confronted with grand visions. The former underline the sudden emergency and call for urgent short-term measures: new banking regulation; carbon trading; vaccine development; stepping up arms production and diplomatic travel. The latter insist that such measures fail to recognize the deep roots of the crises and the long-term dynamics of global social developments. Those who hold grand visions, second, are in turn divided between techno-optimists and apocalyptic thinkers. Techno-optimists argue that humankind has faced many problems in the course of history, and it has overcome them by inventing new solutions. Despite setbacks, there is a recognizable path of progress in the human condition, as multiple measures from life expectancy to literacy, from comfort to freedom confirm. As Karl Marx already said, “mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve»;Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1977, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm. and we should remain confident that the current tasks will also be solved, and be it that some ill-defined revolution is needed to achieve that purpose. Apocalyptic thinkers, in turn, suggest that the end of the world is near, brought about by hubristic human action. Twentieth-century apocalyptic expectations were grounded on the risk of nuclear war, considered unavoidable once large amounts of nuclear weapons existed. Today, the predominant version is based on the prediction of such a degree of environmental exploitation and destruction that planetary boundaries will be exceeded.
As diverse as these attitudes are, none of them makes a serious effort at situating the present in historical time. The techno-optimistic version of the Enlightenment tradition does not need to do so, since it assumes steady continuity once humankind embarked on the trajectory of modernity. But the apocalyptic tradition does not do so either, since its ways of interpreting the present keep changing while the expected outcome remains constant. Piecemeal social engineers, by definition, look at the present only, without any sense of the past.
Furthermore, of course, there are numerous critical observers who agree that the contemporary world requires a radical social transformation and that one needs to act to bring this transformation about. But those who can embrace neither catastrophic nor optimistic visions are often without clear orientation about what to do. Historically, calls for radical transformation have operated with some way of situating one’s time in relation to other times. Transformations were long seen as necessary when a society or polity had deviated from a good path. The call for transformation can be supported by a reference to a better past to which one needed to return. This was the time-honoured view, from ancient Greek city states to the Glorious Revolution in England. From the late eighteenth century onwards, the reference changed. The horizon of expectations for the future was no longer limited by the space of past experience.Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten. Frankfurt/M, Suhrkamp, 1979. Social transformations were meant to set societies and polities on a new path, and the present time could be interpreted by positioning oneself on a trajectory. This view has been strong, if not always dominant, in Western societies for about two centuries. During the nineteenth century and far into the twentieth, one used to call the result of such an operation “historical consciousness” or «sense of history», allowing everything that happens now to gain meaning by being related to a past that is already well understood. But such historical consciousness has itself become something of the past, a kind of tradition of modernity. By and large, we have abandoned it today.
In their recent book, Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre analyze «political news» (l’actualité politique) - itself a very present-oriented expression - in terms of the weakening of the connection between the present and the past as well as of the present connections between the members of a polity.Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre, Qu’est-ce que l’actualité politique? Événements et opinions au xxie siècle, Paris, Gallimard, 2022. They relate the current uncertainty and insecurity to the loss of a “sense of History” (with capital H in the original, to refer to a common, extended history), that is, the difficulty of integrating the “succession of layers of topicality” with a view to carving out “the contours of an era,” as “an operation through which that which happens now is supposed to gain significance by being related to that which arrived earlier and to that which has the possibility of being generated tomorrow”.op. cit., p. 264 (our translation). Today, this often appears as an “impossible,” even “absurd” project because of the “powerlessness and [..] failing of the available interpretative tools” of which the social sciences used to be an important source.op. cit., p. 265 (our translation). The means to situate oneself in one’s own time are, so it appears, no longer available.François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité, présentisme et expériences du temps, Paris, Seuil, 2003 (and his contribution to this issue) spoke of a presentism which emerged at the end of the 20th century and which is now confronted with a planetary condition which imposes a new appreciation of the past and the future. Even if these reflections are close to mine, I would insist more on the plurality of relationships between experiences and expectations and on the need to interpret the Anthropocene instead of seeing it simply as the imposition of a new form of historicity.
But this observation raises more questions. Is there at all something like «one’s own time»? And if so, how does one recognize it and relate it to other times? Why should it be important for action to situate our time in relation to the past, or to other times in general? Would it not be enough to just say that the time is out of joint? Or, to use a technical metaphor of precisely our time, to say that we need a reset? Both these expressions state that something is broken, does no longer work. The normality and continuity of practices is interrupted, or it should be interrupted. And they also suggest that interruption of time may occur and/or that one can bring such interruption about. But they do not emphasize a comparison of the present with the past. Of the past we can only surmise that it was «in joint» or that it worked once but now no longer.
Thus, the current arguments for transformation are different from the readings of history that were mobilized across the past centuries. Neither the claim that there is a good path to which one needs to - and: can - return nor the view that there is a positive direction forward that one can take is convincing any longer. Still, there is one element of these views that can be retained. And, I will argue, this element indeed should be retained. In contrast to the apocalyptic and the techno-optimistic view, namely, those views are based on some sense of historicity, of a specificity of different moments in historical time.
To sustain some sense of historicity, one does not need to assume that there is a direction of history, which is any sense steady or linear, as much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinking had it. But one may and should assume that there is a course of history, as crooked as it may be. Events can be connected to each other, even at some distance in time and space, in material ways, and also through the concepts that we create. Current action and interpretation relate to prior experiences. The actions and interpretations are neither just «out of joint» with the past, nor can the experiences be switched on and off at present will.
Having thus made the claim that we need to situate ourselves in our own time, we are led back, in a more concrete way, to the question we already asked before: What is exactly our present time, what makes our present different from other times? In what follows, I will briefly try to characterize the present time in two historical steps. Trying to show significant connections across time, I want to suggest that we still live in the long tail of a social transformation that started in the middle of the twentieth century, at the moment when Les Temps modernes devoted themselves to provide a reading of their present. This transformation was highly ambivalent in many respects, and this ambivalence played itself out in two phases, a first one roughly from the 1950s to the 1980s, and the second from the 1980s to our very present.
The rupture with tradition (Diagnosis of the present, phase 1)
The post-Second World War decades were marked by the rapid rebuilding of West European societies after the war destruction, a rebuilding that sometimes appeared to be «from scratch» and more often was interpreted like that. In political and economic terms, this was supposed to be «modernization», whereas artistically, it was the high time of «modernism». Even though the debate about «modernity» is older, this was the period when the term «modern» was increasingly used in opposition to «tradition». Sociologists, for instance, distinguished «modern societies» from «traditional societies». «Modernity», in this sense, meant overcoming tradition, often indeed destroying tradition, or at the very least relegating traditions to the margins of society, as folklore.
One can certainly argue that the diagnosed situation had earlier roots and beginnings. Hannah Arendt, for instance, spoke in terms of a rupture with tradition that had been prepared philosophically since the middle of the nineteenth century, and had been accomplished politically with the First World War and totalitarianism. But it nevertheless seems valid to say that the sense of a rupture became widespread after the Second World War. After all, this was when Arendt reached her diagnosis and when her friend Karl Jaspers reminded of «a metaphor of Max Weber: World history resembles a street paved by the devil with destroyed values».Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1968 (German orig. 1949).
Since this is not the place for deeper world-historical investigations, let me illustrate the point by referring to Italian debates about abstraction in art.With a note of thanks to Ara Merjian. Abstract art, Alberto Moravia said at the end of the 1950s, «corresponds to the historical moment in which the collapse of cultures occurs, the rejection of the procedures of the past, the breaking of the traditional relationship with reality (…). The abstract painter, by his own will and at the end of a conscious and rational labor, wipes seven thousand years of art away and tries to reach the archaic, primitive, irrational, chaotic zone».Quoted after Antonella Camarda, «L’élite ostile. La battaglia per l’arte contemporanea in Italia (1948-1975)», in: piano b. Arti e culture visive, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 1-27; DOI: 10.6092/issn.2531-9876/7264, p. 12 (our translation). Clearly, the «rejection» of the past, the «rupture» with tradition are here seen as a liberation. The cultural «breakdown» that Moravia already saw at the end of the 1950s came more generally to be associated with the rebellions at the end of the 1960s, which were mostly driven by the younger generation and often explicitly expressed as a rejection of the parental generation and their values. The rupture with all traditions then appeared to open an endless space of possibilities. All constraints were expected to disappear.
Hardly anyone could express the ethos of those rebellions better than Michel Foucault (1984), even though with a bit of hindsight, when he described the mode of critique that does not “deduce from the form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and to know; but [..] will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think.”Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. by Paul Rabinow. London: Penguin, 1984, p. 46. Progress is here the liberation from the determination by the space and time one was born in. As Reinhart Koselleck had said about the period around 1800, I repeat, the wide horizon of expectations has completely detached from the limited experiences one had made. The way of thinking, thus, was not new in the 1960s. But in the late twentieth century, in contrast to the late eighteenth century, this image evoked imminent possibilities. It suggested a progress that was immediately on the horizon, a progress that one could witness personally, not a general but vague progress of human history.
In other words, the notion of progress underwent a parallel process of dehistoricization and individualization. But this was not widely observed at the time, and certainly not by most actors who unproblematically saw their own liberation in tandem with the liberation of humankind. One of the few who recognized the tension at the time was Pier Paolo Pasolini. Addressing abstract art in a way that seems a direct response to Moravia, but actually occurred a few years later, he observed: «Abstract painting, for example, is modern in the current sense of the word: for me it is instead, in the profound sense, old, old: putet, quatriduana est! (It stinks, it’s a four-day-old corpse.) A typical and glorious product of neo-capitalism, it represents it entirely: that is, it obeys the request for lack of intervention on the part of the artist: «Artist, take care of your internal things! May your art be the graph of your intimacy, perhaps the deepest and most unconscious one!»: This is what capital demands of the artist. And the abstract painter, triumphantly, carries out the command: and lost in the delicious, distressing meanders of his intimacy, he even has the privilege of not feeling devoid of pride. Indeed, he believes to be obeying the secret and less… bourgeois inspiration».Quoted after Camarda, «L’élite ostile», p. 12-13 (our translation).
Pasolini observed an individualizing trait in the trend towards abstract art that went well with the requirements of contemporary capitalism. Since then, the shedding of tradition that had appeared to be the major accomplishment of both (sociological) modernization and (artistic) modernism, has been analyzed more widely and more critically. Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello tried to trace the transformations of capitalism since the 1960s and observed how the «artistic critique» that became dominant during that period and eclipsed the «social critique» supported the rise of the project-oriented «third spirit» of capitalism, hailing autonomy and creativity.Luc Boltanski, and Ève Chiapello, Le Nouvel esprit du capitalisme, Paris, Gallimard, 1999. Even though inspiration, autonomy and creativity were the core of the artistic self-understanding, in economic terms, those new individuals would be instrumentally pursuing their ends. More broadly, the consequences of «1968» are now seen more in a cultural than in a political revolution.For a summary, Peter Wagner, «The project of emancipation and the possibility of politics, or, what’s wrong with post-1968 individualism?», Thesis Eleven, no. 68, February 2002, thematic issue on ‘1968-2001 – measuring the distance. Continuities and discontinuities in recent history’, p. 31-45. The following decade of the 1970s witnessed the end of collective utopias with the self-discrediting of postcolonial nationalism and existing socialism. The defence of individual human rights emerged in response as «the last utopia».(Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2010.)
What, then, is the outcome once one rejects the past and breaks with tradition? While not denying the liberating force of such moves, Michel Foucault also warned of “the affirmation or the empty dream of freedom”, which will lead into misconceived “projects that claim to be global or radical”.Foucault, op. cit., p. 46. These projects are exactly those that aim at the erasure of time and space, of all tradition. They come in a variety of political forms: the idea of individual enterprising selves relating to each other through self-regulating markets; the idea of individual human rights without any notion of the agency that guarantees these rights; the idea of cosmopolitan democracy devoid of an understanding of forms of political communication. Furthermore, they are enabling of the «endless frontier» of techno-scientific resource exploitation and of the «Great Acceleration» in the use of biophysical resources since 1950 because they are based on the illusion that human beings could decouple themselves from that which supports their lives, both in the sense of the material, biophysical resources of the planet and the ideational, communicative resources we live by. The 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi, directed by Godfrey Reggio, is a striking critical expression of this detachment.
Fragmentation and recomposition of traditions (Diagnosis of the present, phase 2)
By now one can say that such critique of the critique of tradition has considerably intensified over time, to even become a commonplace. Thus, we are arguably now in a new situation, which for current purposes I will describe as the second phase of our long present.
We have seen before that both Alberto Moravia and Pier Paolo Pasolini assume some correspondence between the dominant form of art and the social formation or moment of history (this all-too-common assumption cannot be further interrogated here). Continuing to think in terms of a correspondence between society and art, Fredric Jameson addressed this relation for the second phase of our present.Fredric Jameson, «Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.» New Left Review, no. 146 (July-August) 1984: 59-92; Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, Duke University Press, 1991. He argued that postmodernism should be seen as the cultural logic of late capitalism, not least because of its weakening of historicity and its lack of depth. While widely praised at the moment, the diagnosis is utterly surprising in the light of both Moravia’s and Pasolini’s assessment of modernist visual art. As much as they stand opposed to each other, both Moravia and Pasolini see abstract painting as rejecting any past and breaking with any tradition and as instead focusing on the interior, on the subjectivity of the artist. In other words, they already see in modernism that which Jameson claims to happen in postmodernism.
In the background of Jameson’s reasoning, there is a theoretical argument that makes it possible to counterintuitively regard the break with tradition as a strong expression of historicity, as defining the moment in historical time. However, it is exactly the attempt at making sense of history, which Jameson tries to continue, that starts being questioned at the end of the twentieth century, as mentioned at the outset. Nevertheless, the second phase of our present is not merely the ratification of mindless consumerist capitalism, it is also the beginning of the insight that rejection of the past and rupture with tradition is not possible. Rather than weakening historicity and praising depthlessness, what is called postmodernism makes recourse to history at the moment of its abandonment and destruction in and through modernism.One could try to maintain a clear distinction between modernism and postmodernism by saying that the first breaks with history and the second with historicity. But what Pasolini observed tells us that the desire to break with history leads directly to a break with historicity. I thank Jeanne Etelain for her comments on this subject, which should be explored more deeply to grasp the possible forms of historicity in the present time.
At a closer look, Jameson is aware that his strong argument does not entirely hold. He says: «Yet everything in our culture suggests that we have not, for all that, ceased to be preoccupied by history; indeed, at the very moment in which we complain, as here, of the eclipse of historicity, we also universally diagnose contemporary culture as irredeemably historicist.»Jameson, Postmodernism, op. cit., p. 285. But he cannot allow himself to further reflect on this observation and rather discards it by immediately adding that this return to history occurs «in the bad sense of an omnipresent and indiscriminate appetite for dead styles and fashions; indeed, for all the styles and fashions of a dead past.» Loc. cit. True, one has to consider Jameson’s time of writing, the 1980s.
Then, the recourse to history in so-called postmodernist art was often done in a playful way through collage and pastiche, without considering the need or even possibility to place one’s own time into a larger framework of historicity. Clearly, there was no sense of any urgency whatsoever. And Jameson’s whole thinking, in contrast, was indeed driven by maintaining the quest for situating ourselves in our time. Now, however, one can see that even the playful return to history was part of such an attempt of rebuilding a relation to the past after its rejection in modernism, even though an initial, very tentative, and largely implicit one.
Jameson was writing at the beginning of what I call here the second phase of our present, whereas we find ourselves now - possibly - at the end of that second phase, with this end being marked by the accumulation of crises, mentioned before. Within the social sciences, the current constellation has been addressed as the search for a new «Great Transformation», using the term that Karl Polanyi coined for the historical self-defence of society, starting in the late nineteenth century, against the wreckage caused by the belief in self-regulation of markets.Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, New York, Farrar & Rinehart, 1944.
Looking at current attempts to bring something analogous to the Great Transformation about, one quickly notes that history and tradition are frequently referred to in search of resources to deal with the urgencies of our time. In relation to the ecological crisis, the search is for a renewal of a non-instrumental relation to nature, to be found, for instance, in the buen vivir of the Andean traditions. In the socio-economic crisis, there is nostalgia for the epoch of the social-democratic and Keynesian welfare state, which seemed to make capitalism compatible with democracy, at least in the Global North. In political communication, there is search for the re-establishment of some authority in a public sphere that has for the n-th time been «structurally transformed». More examples will be added below.
Two starting observations can be made in our attempt to understand this new return to history and tradition. First of all, even though play may be part of it, the return to history is not at all seen as playful any longer, if the term «play» is taken to refer to something that is not serious. The current references to history are part of a search for solutions to urgent questions, of an alternative to the present situation. They look at the past because there is no other place to look at, after the discrediting of earlier utopias.
Second, one can clearly recognize the deliberate attempt to go beyond the individualization that had emerged as a promise of liberation from the late 1960s onwards. By referring to history, these attempts indeed re-emphasize bonds between human beings. But they are far from reviving any notion of a universal history onto whose path of progress one can and should re-embark. Rather, particular memories and traditions are evoked to address the urgencies of our time.
Radically plural traditions
Traditionally, if I am permitted to say so, the term «tradition» used to refer to knowledge, customs, and habits that are indubitably valid and serve unquestioningly to orient our beliefs and actions. That is, for instance, how Max Weber defined «traditional action». The underlying assumption was that tradition comes from far away in time; and that is precisely what makes it indubitable and unquestionable. Furthermore, it was assumed that such habits were shared within a given collectivity, so that members of such collectivity would tend to think and act alike as well as confirm to each other the validity of those habits. This traditional understanding of tradition was certainly based on some view of common history among those who share a tradition, but how this history became common was rarely spelt out. Collectivities tended to be taken for granted.
The current recourse to history, in turn, is much more closely connected to experience - often indeed to lived experience, even though considerable allowance for the intergenerational transmission of experience is made. Thus, to come back to the three examples mentioned above, the buen vivir is seen to be alive in some regions of the Andes, or at least it can be recalled in the memory of the living. The social-democratic tradition of economic management and welfare development is advocated today by those who experienced it in their youth. Those who criticize the messy and dangerous chaos of public communication driven by social media often have some recollection of a past with a more orderly public sphere, in which apparently claims to validity and authority were effectively sorted, and they sustain their critique of the present by evoking that experience. (Let it just be added that, at least in the latter two cases, those who evoke a past often were critical of it when that past was their present, but that leads into a different story.)
These three examples are relatively benign. At least for the latter two, there is no obvious reason why one could not evoke them jointly when aiming at a social transformation today, as to some extent they refer to the «same» past in societies of the Global North (for want of a better short expression). But bringing the call on the buen vivir tradition in connection with the desired return to the «thirty glorious years» (Jean Fourastié) of the post-Second World War period is already much more complicated. There are compelling reasons to assume that the peace, freedom, and well-being in the North were created and maintained by undermining sustainable ways of life in the South. Attempts of Northern centre-left politics to conjoin the social-democratic and liberal traditions with the ecological one will not easily be able to paste over the past divide.
Further examples make the relation between tradition and experience yet more complex. Critically commenting on current apocalyptical thinking, T. J. Demos recently underlined that the historical experience of colonialism, slavery, and genocide meant for many people that «the end of the world has already happened, even already a long time ago».T.J. Demos, «Beyond the end of the world: the ZAD against the Anthropocene», in Eric C.H. de Bruyn and Sven Lüttiken, eds, Futurity Report, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020, p. 252. Reflecting on the so-called Arab Spring, in turn, Haytham El-Wardamy appears to arrive at the opposite conclusion: «The future is the shadow of catastrophe».[1] Haytham El-Wardany, «Notes on the necessity of overcoming the future», in Eric C.H. de Bruyn and Sven Lüttiken, eds, Futurity Report, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020, p. 241. As the experience of colonialism and its lasting consequences have recently been returned to the centre of political debate, a new dispute over the interpretation of history has arisen. Colonialism is now often characterized as the event with the greatest, even unique world-historical significance. Such assertion, though, confronts the reading of history that considers the Holocaust as a unique event that defies all comparison with others. This latter view is common in Jewish self-understanding, and it is quasi-official in Germany, the state and society that committed this crime against humanity. In occurrences in Germany, such as the disputes at the art exhibition documenta in Kassel in 2022, the apparent incompatibility of two ways of relating to history, the past, and traditions is often underlined;Natan Sznaider, Fluchtpunkte der Erinnerung. Über die Gegenwart von Holocaust und Kolonialismus, Munich: Hanser, 2022 and it became a key topic of global political debate with the current brutal intensification of violence in Palestine/Israel.
Thus, little is left of the «traditional» sense of the term tradition, referring to a single, comprehensive, and collectively shared framework that orients thought and action. Today, as even the few examples above show, there is a plurality of attempts at recuperating traditions, with tenuous connections to each other, and at times even in open contradiction with one another. While they may all relate to the crisis we are in, they address different aspects of it and they use different time-frames, sometimes referring to a remote history with little connection to the present, sometimes evoking experienced history that has hardly become a settled tradition. They are also often rooted in some world-regions only, and not in others, making recuperation not equally plausible everywhere. However, an eclectic and unargued recourse to a variety of traditions is very different from recuperating that which tradition once provided, or supposedly provided.
What, then, is to be done?
Thus, we have by now recognized that the idea of completely liberating ourselves from the past is neither possible nor desirable. But we cannot return either to some notion of History with a capital H or tradition that guides our actions towards the future. What, then, is to be done?
In contrast to what is often thought, Foucault did not wholeheartedly embrace the notion of liberation as going beyond the limitations imposed by the past, as quoted above. Rather, he insisted that this “work done at the limits of ourselves must, on the one hand, open up a realm of historical inquiry and, on the other, put itself to the test of reality, of contemporary reality, both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take”.Foucault, op. cit., p. 46. In this light, the above-mentioned attempts at recuperating traditions can be considered as part of such historical inquiry, at least by intention if not always by result. As such, this plurality is something that needs to be accepted, on both empirical and normative grounds. But rather than merely exploring the past, this plurality of ways of referring to history and tradition should itself become part of the test of contemporary reality that we need to undertake. In this sense, the test of contemporary reality has at least one major common component, specific to our time.
Sometimes it is argued that the recent anthropogenic destabilization of the earth - referred to as the Anthropocene or, in a more short-term perspective, the Great Acceleration - made humanity lose the ground, the only available ground, on which the intelligibility of the human condition could rest, the provider of ontic certainty.So, for instance, Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2021, p. 179-180, with reference to Edmund Husserl. If this were indeed so, then there would be no way beyond a plurality of ways of interpreting the world without any reasonable expectation of communicability between them.
True, the terms «Anthropocene» and «Great Acceleration» have been coined to show the limits of the human ways of inhabiting the earth, pointing to planetary boundaries. However, the scholarship behind these terms, as much as discussions go on, had made the planet and human life on it more intelligible rather than less. Rather than less we now know more about the earth as the ground of our experience. We even know much better that this ground is moving, and to some extent why. But it still remains the ground; it does not move as the ground of our knowledge, «Die Urerde bewegt sich nicht (the originary earth does not move)», as Husserl had put it.Quoted after Kenneth White, «Talking topology in the Finisterras», in Jeff Malpas and Kenneth White, The Fundamental Field: Thought, Poetics, World, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2021, p. 32.
The destabilizing impact of humanity on the planet is probably well captured by the term «globalization», which together with «individualization» was meant to designate the social trends of the present since the 1980s. Conceived as endless, globalization is equally senseless. The supposed and desired process expresses what Cornelius Castoriadis called «pseudo-rational pseudo-mastery» of the world.Cornelius Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990. In contrast to globalization, Jean-Luc Nancy had proposed to think and act in terms of «mondialisation», namely work at the interpretation of the present time - a «reality test» - with a view to world-making.Jean-Luc Nancy, La Création du monde ou la mondialisation, Paris, Galilée, 2002; see also Nathalie Karagiannis and Peter Wagner, eds, Varieties of World-Making: Beyond Globalization, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2007. As a political and moral commitment, world-making in our time has been discussed as cosmopolitanism. In these debates, though, cosmopolitanism appears like an obligation rather than as a condition. Our planetary situation, in contrast, suggests that we can develop a creative-constitutive understanding of what then would be aesthetic cosmopolitanism.For such an approach, see Nikos Papastergiadis, The Cosmos of Cosmopolitanism, Cambridge, Polity, 2023. The common planetary condition, and our both scientific and aesthetic knowledge about it, may provide the stimulus for making traditions talk to each other, generating a sounder understanding of the current urgency and elaborating measures to overcome it.
In the autumn of 1945, as we suggested above, there was already no way of returning to the sense of the direction of history which had marked much of the nineteenth century. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were well aware of the new situation and task when Les Temps modernes began. Since then, though, further historical transformations have yet again created a new situation, which we started to tentatively call the Anthropocene and the Great Acceleration, and posed the new task of situating ourselves in our own time, which is no longer the time of the Temps modernes.