Dan Edelstein - Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History

EDITED BY DAN EDELSTEIN, STEFANOS GEROULANOS, AND NATASHA WHEATLEY

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2020 by The University of Chicago

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Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN -13: 978-0-226-48162-3 (cloth)

ISBN -13: 978-0-226-70601-6 (e-book)

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226706016.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Edelstein, Dan, editor. | Geroulanos, Stefanos, 1979 editor. | Wheatley, Natasha, editor.

Title: Power and time : temporalities in conflict and the making of history / edited by Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019054895 | ISBN 9780226481623 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226706016 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH : TimeSocial aspects. | TimeSocial aspectsHistory. | History, Modern19th century. | History, Modernth century. | History, Modern21st century. | Power (Social sciences)

Classification: LCC D210 . P76 2020 | DDC 909.08 dc

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019054895

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI / NISO Z 39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley

Natasha Wheatley

Marwa Elshakry

Anson Rabinbach

Andrea Westermann

Zvi Ben-Dor Benite

Stefanos Geroulanos

Maria Stavrinaki

Henning Schmidgen

Emma Kowal and Joanna Radin

Claudia Verhoeven

Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford

Jamie Martin

Sunil Purushotham

Dan Edelstein

Kristen Loveland

Kevin M. F. Platt

DAN EDELSTEIN, STEFANOS GEROULANOS, AND NATASHA WHEATLEY

Redeeming time when men least think I will.

PRINCE HAL , in Henry IV, Part I, 1.2.207

In the summer of 1971, a committee of experts met at the headquarters of the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization in Paris and produced a global typology of time. The group comprised the French priest and philosopher of Islam Louis Gardet, the Rwandan poet and ethnohistorian Alexis Kagame, the Spanish-Indian theologian Raimon Panikkar, the German-Jewish-Canadian art historian Raymond Klibansky, and a handful of others. Their brief was ambiguous: to develop a new UNESCO initiative under the rubric Time and History. A report on the three-day meeting recounted that the participants volunteered rapid, on the spotbut extremely livelydescriptions of African, Hindu, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Christian, and Islamic worlds of thought, setting the concepts of time and history in their context. Together they prepared a working document that presented the projects rationale. Their text reveals the temporal anxieties that accompanied the hardening demands of global interconnections:

Today, when time is filled with significant action and history gathers speed so rapidly that man is left behind, even though it is he who accelerates it, there is indeed an urgent need to analyse the basic conceptions of time and history prevalent in different cultures.... We are concerned not so much with a comparative analysis as with the effect on a diversified typology of what is becoming increasingly a whole and all-embracing history, sweeping on and ineluctably synchronizing different periods of time as they are variously experienced.

Their urgent need lay both in the global variety of time and in its mutation under the influence of this now all-embracing history. UNESCOs projects, which typically contrasted unity with diversity, had often tied cultural difference to problems of time. For example, the 1950 Statement of Experts on Questions of Race took on racism in part by targeting an overreliance on evolutionary approaches to progress. But time now had grown from a background theme into something that required its own experts, committees, and lists. It became the (self-)conscious work of an international institution.

The skeletal typology developed at the 1971 gathering found fuller elaboration when a second committee of experts met the following year. Under the banner Time and the Philosophies, those assembled produced a dense taxonomy of time, a project map that might tame the wild profusion of existing things.

UNESCOs time project represents a remarkable moment in the international intellectual history of temporality. This global taxonomy of time, and the methodological quagmires it tripped into, allows us to observe UNESCO striving to define its universalismtrying, that is, to ground a nonhierarchical universalism suitable for the new global era of cross-cultural understanding it hoped to usher into being. The project resulted in a series of promptly forgotten publications involving a no-less-complex international cast of hermeneuticians, monks, scientists, politicians, and anthropologists: Cultures and Time (1976), Time and the Philosophies (1977), Time and the Sciences (1979).

A new sort of global living-together required more than surface cultural exchangeit required a mutual comprehension on a deeper level, a dialogue across the incommunicability of the cultures involved. This was a universalism of dialogue through, or alongside, difference.

Overdetermined as its answers were, UNESCO tried something quite startling through its questions: to address the extraordinary plurality, cohabitation, and incommensurability of experiences and conceptions of time. New international orders had come into being, binding tales of time through increasingly complex systems of governance and the convergence of new political, social, and aesthetic tensions. UNESCOs project represents one of those moments in which historical actors themselves were highly conscious that new political formations required new temporal foundations.

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This book is about such foundations of time, both in the sense of the founding of temporal regimes and in that of the structures underlying such regimes. It takes up the history of time and the times of history in their intellectual, scientific, political, and global dimensions. It homes in on a pervasive problematic of which the UNESCO project was a symptomnamely, the co-constitution of temporal and political orders. Political reorganization, we contend, can be understood as temporal reorganization.

Capitalizing on the thirst for rigorous work on time and temporalities, our broad purpose in this volume is to bring direction to the field through the analytical pairing of power and time. Power always calls into being its own temporal explanations and calculations, its own fictions, prophesies, and preferred histories, relying on particular ways of dredging the past. In exploring this often conflictual relationship, we aim to bring a new generation of theoretically informed questions about time into the heart of modern European and international history, to relocate questions of temporality from the esoteric margins to the center of modern historiography.