Temporal Multiplicity in E. P. Thompson & Reinhart Koselleck
Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006)
This paper attempts to trace the semantic valences that invest particular textures of temporality with significance. I borrow the term “semantic valence” from the discipline of linguistics for reasons that should become more explicit. [1] We need not dwell on the more scientific implications of these terms for linguistics. For my purposes, semantic valences are the varying shades and degrees of formal meanings associated with a particular concept, synchronically or diachronically. With this understanding of semantic valence in mind, I contend that one method of undertaking such a “trace,” especially when its object of inquiry is the characterization of time, is a historiographical comparison. This “trace” will sketch out how two scholars—who have been received as paradigmatic in their respective spheres of influence—characterize, express, and represent temporal change and multiplicity. [2] In order to advance this inquiry, I will place E. P. Thompson’s seminal essay, “Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” and Reinhart Koselleck’s Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time into conversation.
E. P. Thompson (1924–1993)
Thompson and Koselleck conceive of the textures of temporality in contrastive and overlapping ways. While neither Thompson’s “Time” essay nor Koselleck’s Futures Past are texts about temporality per se, the authors explore time and changes in the experience of it in process-oriented language. At one point or another, both authors discuss a multiplicity of temporal discourses that either fade away or come to the fore, be it in premodernity or in modernity. While Thompson depicts plural and heterogenous premodern temporalities that are progressively subjected to the exigencies of modern capitalist time discipline, Koselleck understands a nearly homogenous premodern temporality whose greatest constituent component, “eschatological time,” is dissolved by a rational modern temporality that extends towards infinity. For Thompson, a compression of the notation of time is an effect of emerging, disciplinary clock time. For Koselleck, multiple temporalities in modernity result from potential futures that are progressively gained and pasts that are increasingly made less present. Should one follow Thompson’s narrative of temporal compression, our notation of time—and perhaps our experience of it—are constrained by industrial capitalism. If, however, we follow Koselleck’s line of thought, his narration of temporal change opens up new ways of experiencing time in modernity. The ways in which Thompson and Koselleck go about periodizing premodernity and modernity accordingly invest their articulation of these with a certain texture and specific senses that are subject to particular logics. Ultimately, the difference between these two conceptions of time is due to the kind of historical work that Thompson and Koselleck conceive.
In 1967, Past & Present published E. P. Thompson’s “Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” At the outset, he concedes that there occurred “important changes in the apprehension of time” in the “intellectual culture” of Western Europe. [3] He situates this transformation in the period between 1300 and 1650. His goal is to investigate the texture of this transformation in particular by discussing the “shift in time-sense,” modulations in “the inward apprehension of time,” and the “inward notion of time,” especially among working people. [4] Thompson’s framing of these research questions promises to wed an analysis of the lived experience of time discipline with aspects of his social-historical Marxist perspective. Thompson belonged to a group of Marxist thinkers who argued along similar lines in post-war Britain. This approach to Marxism was interested in questions of agency and the creative abilities of working people. Given that the transition to a “mature industrial society” entailed a “severe restructuring of working habits,” Thompson sought to discover how far this restructuring would be related to “changes in the inward notion of time.” He notes that this restructuring included “new disciplines,” “new incentives,” and even a “new human nature.” [5] Thompson engages the work of anthropologists and sociologists to characterize a multiplicity of time-senses. He notes the time-sense of the Nuer and Nandi peoples, highlighting an “occupational definition of time,” something that he later calls a “task-orientation” notation of time, as opposed to measured time. [6] Thompson’s social-historical Marxian inquiry allowed him to synthesize questions about the embodiment and affective dimensions of temporal experience with questions about temporality as a mentalité.
Thompson relates this multiplicity of time-senses among “primitive people,” to “familiar processes in the cycle of work or domestic chores.” [7] In an examination of the people of the Aran Islands, Thompson notes a “disregard for clock time,” that could “only be possible in a crofting and fishing community whose framework of marketing and administration is minimal, and in which the day’s tasks…seem to disclose themselves, by the logic of need….” [8] Thompson characterizes this task-oriented temporal rhythm with a tripartite schema: (a) “it is more humanly comprehensible than timed labour,” (b) it shows the “least demarcation between ‘work’ and ‘life.’” Indeed, “Social intercourse and labour are intermingled – the working-day lengthens or contracts according to the task – and there is not great sense of conflict between labour and ‘passing the time of day,’” (c) people reared under capitalism see this “attitude to labour” as “wasteful and lacking in urgency.” [9]
Thompson marks a departure in the eighteenth century when “independent [peasants or craftsmen are more individualized].” In this transformation, “[time] is now currency: it is not passed but spent.” [10] The semantic difference between passing and spending is linked to the Marxist principle of the reification of commodities, especially the commodification of time. Thompson’s essay goes to great lengths to demonstrate how élites redefined and repurposed the logic of need and socially disciplined the perceived resistance of laborers to the encroaching loom of capitalist time discipline. Indeed, “[those] who are employed experience a distinction between their employer’s time and their ‘own’ time.” [11] He links this transformation, at least in part, to a material agent of this reification—the clock and its various permutations, from sundial, to pendulum, to the pocket watch. For Thompson, “a general diffusion of clocks and watches is occurring…at the exact moment when the industrial revolution demanded a greater synchronization of labour.” [12] Market capitalism is an imposed process that manifested itself in the temporal regimes of the senses: “The small instrument which regulated the new rhythms of industrial life was at the same time one of the more urgent of the new needs which industrial capitalism called forth to energize its advance.” [13] The early stages of capitalism saw the development of the putting-out system in which “manufacturing industry remained conducted upon a domestic or small workshop scale, without intricate subdivision of processes, the degree of synchronization demanded was slight, and task-orientation was prevalent.” [14] Thompson’s narrative characterization of transition includes a gradual transformation of time-sense that changed as a result of industrial capitalism.
Thompson characterizes premodern—that is to say, pre-capitalist—temporalities in the language of labor’s relation to temporality. More specifically, he argues that a common topos of this premodern temporality was “the characteristic irregularity of labour patterns before the coming of large-scale machine powered industry.” [15] Thompson specifies, stating that, “The irregular labour rhythms…help us to understand the severity of mercantilist doctrines as to the necessity for holding down wages as a preventative against idleness, and it would seem to be not until the second half of the eighteenth century that ‘normal’ capitalist wage incentives begin to become widely effective.” [16] Here we see Thompson evoking a modified modernization theory that is linked to Marxist commitments to a teleological progression of class dialectics. I claim this framework is modified because Thompson recognizes cultural factors in characterizing the transitions in question, rather than transition writ-large. [17] Indeed, he clarifies for his readers, “What we are examining here are not only changes in manufacturing technique which demand greater synchronization of labour and a greater exactitude in time-routines in any society; but also these changes as they were lived through in the society of nascent industrial capitalism.” [18]
Contrary to an explicitly Marxist framework (even if, as for Thompson, such a framework was affected by the concerns of social historical analysis), the historical theorizing of Reinhart Koselleck is difficult to grasp for many readers. In a 1987 review of Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, Peter Burke remarks that “Koselleck’s essays do not make easy reading. … [Readers] in the English-speaking world are likely to have difficulties when they encounter a conceptual universe…[invoking terms] such as ‘planes of historicity’, ‘space of experience’ [which] are not all naturalised in English. Rather, “[the] real problem,” he contends, “lies in rebus. The essays are difficult because they tackle a difficult subject; and that is why they are worth making an effort to read.” [19] Some scholars have even argued that Anglo-American scholarship has profoundly misunderstood Koselleck’s philosophy of temporality for many years until recently. [20]
While Thompson includes sociological discourse about “primitive people” in service to a social-historical and broadly Marxist conception of anthropology and subjectivity, Koselleck is primarily concerned with European, especially Western European, society. In the words of Helge Jordheim, Koselleck “presents his version of the advent of modernity understood as a shift from one experience of time and history to another, from history as a homogeneous, unchanging space to history as an indefinite and unstoppable movement or process, to which every historical object, every action, every intention is subjected.” [21]
In his preface, Koselleck writes that the essays in the volume “will constantly ask: how, in a given present, are the temporal dimensions of past and future related?” [22] He is primarily interested in the development of a particular temporal register, which he terms “historical time,” that is, a temporality wherein an observer can view a piece of art in explicitly historical terms, for its aesthetic value. In other words, the work of art is viewed as a reflection of the time when the work originated. The observer will not place themselves into a historical narrative while observing the artwork; this is to say that historical distance is now elongated and made possible. Now, there is in modernity a past “out there” that is not reachable. [23] Jordheim helpfully summarizes that, “[at] the threshold of modernity in the period of Western history that [Koselleck] has famously coined Sattelzeit, [there is] the relationship between ‘space of experience [Erfahrungsraum]’ and ‘horizon of expectation [Erwartungshorizont]’ [which, in modernity] becomes increasingly asymmetrical and discontinuous.” [24] For the contemporary observer of the painting, then, their “experiences, [their] historical knowledge at any given point in time, [can] no longer serve as a solid foundation for predicting the future, or generally, for knowing what to expect,” and accordingly could not “read” the painting in a way that would naturally afford such an interpretation. [25]
The first chapter of Futures Past is titled, “Modernity and the Planes of Historicity.” If Thompson’s historical periodization framed the question of multiplicity and temporal transition from 1300 and 1650, Koselleck asks, “What new quality had historical time gained that occupies this period from about 1500 to 1800?” [26] Helpfully, Koselleck frames the period and central question under consideration early on: “[In] these centuries there occurs a temporalization [Verzeitlichung] of history, at the end of which there is the peculiar form of acceleration which characterizes modernity. We are thus concerned with the specificity of the so-called frühe Neuzeit—the period in which modernity is formed.” [27] The experiential texture of this modern temporality is characterized by a “discontinuous relationship to the past in terms of experiences, traditions, and origins, and correspondingly, by an almost obsessive interest in the future in the form of expectations, plans, prognoses, and utopias.” [28]
For Jordheim, “Koselleck’s theory of historical times is not a theory of periodization except in a very superficial sense. Regarded as a whole, what Koselleck has to offer is a radically different theory of overlapping temporal structures and layers, synchronicities and nonsynchronicities that defy periodization and…is even constructed with the purpose of defying periodization….” [29] Notwithstanding this important clarification and intervention in Koselleck’s reception, Futures Past does offer some temporal boundaries or landmarks that are supposed to illustrate particular changes in temporality, at least in a similar way that Thompson understands changes in “time sense” and notions of time—for the latter arriving with the ascendance of industrial capitalism. These changes relate to the experience of the past, present, and future, in relation to élite philosophical and cultural production. For Koselleck, the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution are two such temporal landmarks. He notes,
Robespierre’s providential phraseology cannot hide the fact that, compared with our point of departure, there has been an inversion in the horizon of expectations. For Luther, the compression of time is a visible sign that, according to God’s will, the Final Judgment is imminent, that the world is about to end. For Robespierre, the acceleration of time is a human task, presaging an epoch of freedom and happiness, the golden future. Both positions, insofar as the French Revolution descended from the Reformation, mark the beginning and end of our period. [30]
Yet, for Koselleck, time prior to the Reformation saw, rather than a multiplicity of temporalities (e.g., Thompson’s irregular work rhythms), a singular temporality that consumed all other time-senses: eschatological time.
Koselleck argues that, prior to the Reformation, “the future of the world and its end were made part of the history of the [Roman Catholic] Church; newly inflamed prophets necessarily exposed themselves to verdicts of heresy.” [31] Temporal equilibrium was established “between the threat of the End on the one hand and the hope of Parousia [the second return of Jesus Christ] on the other.” Koselleck provocatively argues that “The End of the World is only an integrating factor so long as its politico-historical meaning remains indeterminate.” In other words, the Church, while anticipating the Parousia, extended and effectively fended off the end of the world by interpreting contemporary geopolitical events through an apocalyptic hermeneutic. The institutional history of the church “remains the history of salvation.” [32] Koselleck remarks that “The most basic assumptions of this tradition were destroyed by the Reformation. Neither Church nor worldly powers were capable of containing the energies which Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin unleashed upon the European world…. The task of the empire in postponing the End of the World echoes through the plea of a man who saw no way out for this world. The empire had failed in its duty.” [33] In the language of cultural and intellectual history, Koselleck argues that time-sense began to change when temporal proliferation emerges, when possible futures are gained, and the past becomes compressed and distanced. Statecraft and rational, political prognoses contributed to this splintering of eschatological time in which the texture of temporality itself is refracted an infinite number of times, albeit within a limited range of possibilities. The cyclicality of astronomical revolution was refurnished in the cultural lexicon, an empty cipher that was filled, in modernity, with anxiety and uncertainty.
Beginning with Thompson and followed by Koselleck, this investigation traced the semantics of multiplicity, whether in its degradation (as in the case of the former) or its proliferation (in the latter). Koselleck’s theoretically robust conceptualization of modernity does not completely map onto Thompson’s periodization. As noted above, Jordheim has argued that Koselleck’s work is in fact inherently opposed to the periodizing impulse itself. While both thinkers work in and with the language of process-oriented, sedimented, and gradual change, their points of reference, philosophically and methodologically, are different, explicitly so. Thompson’s social-historical, Marxist frame of reference informs his analysis and the goals of his research. Koselleck’s deployment of Sattelzeit and Verzeitlichung challenge Thompson’s linear process-oriented narration of temporal irregularity being disciplined by clock time. For Koselleck, semantic valences take on a thicker, or perhaps simply different, degrees of significance between the Reformation and the French Revolution, rather than with the advent of industrial capitalism.
Works Cited
Burke, Peter. "Review: “Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time”." History of European Ideas 8, no. 6 (January 1987): 744-45.
Jordheim, Helge. "Against Periodization: Koselleck’s Theory of Multiple Temporalities." History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012): 151-71. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23277637.
Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004 [1985].
Thompson, E. P. "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism." Past & Present, no. 38 (1967): 56-97. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649749.
Notes
[1] The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics. 3 ed. Oxford University Press, 2014, s.v. “valency;” “semantic valency.” Traditionally, valency refers to “the range of elements either required or specifically permitted by a…lexical unit. Peter H. Matthews, the Dictionary’s author, provides the following example in the entry for valency: “the valency of eat includes a subject (I in I am eating) and an object (cheese in I am eating cheese).” The technical disciplinary understanding of semantic valency, then, is in regard to the valency of verbs and “the semantic roles that arguments [or other lexical units] have in relation to them.” Once more, Matthews explicates the following: “Thus eat and see both take a subject and an object; in that sense they have the same syntactic valency. But in I am eating it the subject of eat is an agent, while in I can see it that of see is an experiencer. Therefore these verbs have different semantic valencies.”
[2] The author is indebted to specific contributions and proposals for potential research agendas offered by Prof. Helmut Puff and Prof. Catherine Sanok in the University of Michigan MEMS Proseminar on Temporalities and Premodernities, particularly on 11 September 2018.
[3] E. P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," Past & Present, no. 38 (1967): 56, http://www.jstor.org/stable/649749.
[4] Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," 56-57.
[5] Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," 57.
[6] Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," 58, 60.
[7] Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," 58.
[8] Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," 59.
[9] Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," 60.
[10] Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," 61.
[11] Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," 61.
[12] Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," 69.
[13] Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," 69.
[14] Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," 70-71.
[15] Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," 71.
[16] Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," 81.
[17] Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," 80.
[18] Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," 80.
[19] Peter Burke, "Review: “Futures past: on the semantics of historical time”," History of European Ideas 8, no. 6 (January 1987): 744-45.
[20] Helge Jordheim, "Against Periodization: Koselleck’s Theory of Multiple Temporalities," History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012): 152, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23277637. Jordheim writes, “My argument is not that [Koselleck’s] often impressionistic, wide-ranging essays don’t also contain a theory of modernity, or as he puts it, of the Neuzeit, but rather that his theory of modernity is encompassed by another more abstract and general theory, a metatheory, of historical times. This theory grows out of his work with the relationship between language and history in the context of Begriffsgeschichte, but expands beyond the methodological framework for studying key concepts.”
[21] Jordheim, "Against Periodization: Koselleck’s Theory of Multiple Temporalities," 153.
[22] Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004 [1985]), 3.
[23] See Koselleck’s discussion of the Alexanderschlacht painting in the first chapter of Futures Past.
[24] Jordheim, "Against Periodization: Koselleck’s Theory of Multiple Temporalities," 153.
[25] Jordheim, "Against Periodization: Koselleck’s Theory of Multiple Temporalities," 153.
[26] Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, 10.
[27] Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, 11.
[28] Jordheim, "Against Periodization: Koselleck’s Theory of Multiple Temporalities," 153.
[29] Jordheim, "Against Periodization: Koselleck’s Theory of Multiple Temporalities," 157.
[30] Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, 12-13.
[31] Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, 13.
[32] Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, 13.
[33] Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, 13.
