RETHINKING TIME HANS RUIN & ANDRUSRETHINKING ERS (EDS.) TIME. SÖDERTÖRN ESSAYS ON PHILOSOPHICALHISTORY, MEMORY, STUDIES AND REPRESENTATION Rethinking Time Rethinking PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED TITLES SÖDERTÖRN PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES is a series connected to the Department 1. Hans Ruin and Nicholas Smith (eds.), Hermeneutik of Philosophy at Södertörn University. It och tradition: Gadamer och den grekiska filosofin publishes monographs and collections of (2003) articles in philosophy, with a special focus 2. Hans Ruin, Kommentar till Heideggers Varat och on the Continental­European tradition. It tiden (2005) seeks to provide a plat form for innovative contemporary philosophical research. The 3. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback and Hans Ruin (eds.) The Past’s Presence: Essays on the Historicity of RETHINKING TIME volumes are published mainly in English Philosophical Thought (2006) ESSAYS ON HISTORY, MEMORY, AND REPRESENTATION and Swedish. SÖDERTÖRN PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES 9 4. Jonna Bornemark (ed.), Det främmande i det egna: The series is edited by Marcia Sá Cavalcante­ Filosofiska essäer om bildning och person (2007) Schuback and Hans Ruin Questions about the temporality and historicity of knowledge ESSAYS ON HISTORY, MEMORY, AND REPRESENTATION 5. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback (ed.), Att tänka smärtan (2009) have gained new urgency in the human sciences in recent 6. Jonna Bornemark, Kunskapens gräns, gränsens decades. New modes of critical theorizing, coupled with a vetande. En fenomenologisk undersökning av reshaping of the historical space of Western culture following transcendens och kroppslighet (2009) the unification of Europe and intensified political and technol­ 7. Carl Cederberg and Hans Ruin (eds.), En annan humaniora, en annan tid (2009) ogical globalization, have highlighted the necessity of under­ 8. Jonna Bornemark and Hans Ruin (eds.), standing the formation of historical consciousness from new 9 Phenomenology and Religion: New Frontiers (2010) angles. The “uses of history”, the commodification of the past, the pathologies of memory, the chronological framework of historical narrative, and the technolog ical forms of represent­ ing and maintaining tradition all now require cross­disciplinary interpretation. This volume gathers a wide range of researchers from philosophy, history, archeology, and the aesthetic and social sciences in a collaborative effort to critically explore historical consciousness as time, memory, and representation. södertörn Hans Ruin is professor of Philosophy at Södertörn University Andrus Ers holds a PhD in Intellectual History at Södertörn University philosophical Contact: Time, Memory, Representation. Department of Culture and Communication, Södertörn University, SE­141 89 Huddinge, Sweden. www.histcon.se Cover painting: studies Jan Håfström, ”Incidents of Granma’s Travel in America”, 2009 9 rethinking time –––––– södertörn philosophical studies 10 2011 Rethinking Time essays on history, memory, and representation Hans Ruin & Andrus Ers (eds.) södertörn philosophical studies 10 Rethinking Time essays on history, memory, and representation Hans Ruin & Andrus Ers (eds.) södertörn philosophical studies 10 Södertörns högskola 2011 Södertörn Philosophical Studies 10 ISSN 1651-6834 ISBN 978-91-86069-32-2 © The authors Graphic design: Johan Laserna Distribution: Södertörns högskola, Biblioteket S-141 89 Huddinge Phone: + 46 (0)8 608 40 00 E-mail: [email protected] Table of Contents Preface hans ruin & andrus ers 9 1. concepts of time On the Historical Representation of Contemporary Art dan karlholm 19 The Productive Dilemmas of History peter aronsson 29 Is Every Tale a Fairy Tale? staffan carlshamre 39 Aporetics of Time and the Trace of the Other hans ruin 51 Hermeneutics of Tradition marcia sá cavalcante schuback 63 Requirements of an Aesthetic Concept of the Canon anders olsson 75 2. monuments of time Social Dreams of History: Museum, Utopia, Mythology johan redin 97 Walking Through History: Archaeology and Ethnography in Museum Narration johan hegardt 109 Creative Confusion: Modern Ruins and the Archaeology of the Present mats burström 119 Claiming Makunaima: Colonisation, Nation, and History in the Northern Amazon patricia lorenzoni 129 The Times of Television: Representing, Anticipating, Forgetting the Cold War staffan ericson 139 3. politics of time Year Zero: The Temporality of Revolution Studied Through the Example of the Khmer Rouge andrus ers 155 Ways of Warmaking jens bartelson 167 On the Historicity of Concepts: The Examples of Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism in Ellen Key rebecka lettevall 179 Network and Subaltern: The Antinomies of Global History stefan jonsson 189 Historians’ Picnic in Kurdistan david gaunt 199 4. literatures of time Ambivalent Evolution: Euclides da Cunha, Olive Schreiner and the (De)Colonising of History stefan helgesson 217 Histories Matter: Materializing Politics in the Moment of the Sublime kristina fjelkestam 227 History and Mourning victoria fareld 237 Derrida on the Poetics and Politics of Witnessing irina sandomirskaja 247 Event, Crack-up and Line of Flight – Deleuze Reading Fitzgerald fredrika spindler 257 5. rewriting time Rethinking the Industrial Revolution and the Rise of the West: Historical Contingencies and the Global Prerequisites of Modern Technology alf hornborg 269 Enlightened Prejudices: Anti-Jewish Tropes in Modern Philosophy jayne svenungsson 279 Identity and Collective Memory in the Making of Nineteenth-Century Feminism ulla manns 291 Temporality and Metaphoricity inContemporary Swedish Feminist Historiography claudia lindén 301 Atomic Hindsight: Technology and Visibility as Factors in Historical Periodization trond lundemo 313 Index 323 Authors 323 Preface Where are we located in time? Are we still modern? Or are we post- modern, perhaps even post-post-modern? Or are we something for which we still have no name? In what age are we really living: the age of the atom, the age of information, or the age of some other technology still in the making? And what is the nature and locality of this “we” in the name of which these questions about temporal and historical location are constantly being posed? All such queries and concerns demonstrate the relevance of what Foucault once pointed out in relation to Kant’s pamphlet on Enlightenment, that this time – “our” time? modern times? – is uniquely preoccupied with its own present, with its actuality, and its now. It is a time for which the temporality of time constantly matters. In recent decades, the question of the temporality and historicity of knowledge has assumed increasing urgency in the human sciences. There are many sources for this intensified theoretical preoccupation. The emergence of new theoretical-critical impulses within the hu- manities brought with them new ways of conceptualizing time and historical understanding, captured, not least, in Lyotard’s proclama- tion of the collapse of the “meta-narratives”. Hermeneutics, critical theory, and deconstruction pointed to how the subject of knowledge is always already inscribed within the historical field that it is seeking to interpret, and also how the conceptualization of the past implies questions of justice, of application, and of redemption. Marxist and social history, Feminist history, and Subaltern or post- colonial studies emphasized the necessity of thinking about who writes history and for whom. Together, they have shown how social trans formation and power struggles are always reflected in the writing of history. More generally, they have strengthened the interest in the “uses of history”, that is, in how the writing of history and the formation 9 preface of historical consciousness are somehow always related to the present, to questions of suffering and oppression, and of possible liberation. The break-up of the Soviet empire and the unification of Europe did not only lead to the emergence of a new political order. It also opened up the frozen histories of the national states of Europe, prompting a rewriting of the history of the entire continent and a reassessment of the legacy of national memory and history with all its traumatic repercussions. The new political landscape has stimulated new ways of thinking about history, starting with the debate about the “End of history”, followed by attempts to rewrite European history and memory in the subsequent decades. As the late Tony Judt, a British historian, wrote in his celebrated history of post-war Europe some years ago, recent modernity has in a very concrete sense resulted in the collapse of “master narratives”.1 And, in a passionate coda to the book, he documents the upsurge of politics of memory and the creation of new monuments and institutes devoted to handling the traumas of a century of suffering and destruction without precedent. Moreover, increasing interest in the multifaceted phenomenon of globalization is influencing how history is thought and written. As global information technology expands rapidly, human culture has entered a new phase, in which presence is produced and mediated technologically, and in which everyone becomes potential witness and recorder of historical events. Throughout this intensified preoccupation with the historical and the temporal can be detected also a tendency towards the commodification of history. Finally, the symbolic arrival of a new millennium focused attention on the role of calendars and of time-measurement as cultural practices, and the way they constitute patterns of meaning and self-understanding. These examples serve to highlight