Feminism, Time, and Nonlinear History

V. Browne

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137413154
• eBook ISBN: 9781137413161
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy
• Index: Social Sciences

Interweaving phenomenological, hermeneutical, and sociopolitical analyses, this book considers the ways in which feminists conceptualize and produce the temporalities of feminism, including the time of the trace, narrative time, calendar time, and generational time.

C H A P T E R 1

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Lived Time and Polytemporality

Feminist movements and trajectories have always been manifold and diverse, with crossovers and points of connection as well as divergences and points of contention. “Feminism is not,” as Misha Kavka writes, “the object of a singular history, but rather a term under which people have in different times and places invested in a more general struggle for social justice and in doing so have participated in and produced multiple histories” (Kavka 2001, xii). It has become common, however, to narrate “feminist history” as a singular, progressive trajectory that is divided into “waves” or “phases.” Consequently, the “potentially enlightening and liberating spaces” produced by various feminisms have morphed into a “great hegemonic model,” which systematically misrepresents and curtails the ways in which feminist thought and activisms can be related, conceptualized, and mobilized (Sandoval 2000, 47).

In response to this historiographical malaise, several feminists have called for alternative models of historical time, to inform a more productive approach to feminist histories and historiography. For example, Fernandes (2010) and Roof (1997) propose the following:

Feminist thought . . . requires a conception of history that can contain both the insights of the past and the potential breakthroughs of the future within the messy, unresolved contestations of political and intellectual practice in the present. (Fernandes 2010, 114)

Can we conceive of time as multidirectional as well as linear? Can we conceive of cause and effect going both ways? (Roof 1997, 86)

While such multidirectional or multilinear models of historical time have been proposed, however, they are in need of elaboration and conceptual content. I suggest this is because the concept of historical time remains rather intangible and under-articulated, both within feminist historiography and within historiography and the philosophy of history more broadly speaking. There are very few philosophical essays or monographs that consider, for example, the extent to which determinations of historical time are bound by metaphysical, physical, or phenomenological models of time, or what kind of “reality” historical time has (see, e.g., Ricoeur 1984, 1985, 1988; or Osborne 1995). This can make it difficult to understand what it might actually mean to say that historical time “moves in more than one direction,” or that there are “different times at the same time.” Indeed, without conceptual elaboration, the danger is that such ideas can easily be dismissed as fanciful or incoherent, and business continues as usual (Felski 2000, 2).

The task of this chapter, therefore, is to outline my basic understanding of historical time, which will then be articulated in greater detail in the following chapters in relation to feminist historiography. The key aim is to advance a polytemporal conception of historical time, as a time that is generated through the intersection of various times and temporalities. To this end, I draw primarily upon the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty and Johannes Fabian, theorizing the interrelation of multiple times via the idea of “complex coevalness.” The chapter also considers the question of totality, challenging arguments made by Paul Ricoeur and Fredric Jameson that historiography requires a concept of historico-temporal totality as a “regulative idea” or “figurative device” guiding historical thought and practice. First, however, I set out my fundamental claim that historical time should be approached and theorized as a form of lived time. Framing historical time as a lived time guards against the reduction of historical time to the realm of pure textuality or imagination (it is “real” in its effects and manifestation in social practices); yet nevertheless affirms the importance of discursive mediation, and maintains the theoretical distinction between historical time and scientific, metaphysical, or transcendental concepts of time.

Lived Time

Within philosophical accounts of time, the concept of lived time foregrounds the experiential, relational, and discursive aspects of temporal existence, as opposed to scientific and metaphysical approaches that are interested in time as an objective condition or phenomenon of the universe. Scientific approaches do of course differ from metaphysical approaches. While scientific approaches use empirical data or mathematics to develop physical, biological, or astronomical theories of time, metaphysical approaches use speculative reason, often postulating that there is a gap between our empirical and cognitive grasp of the world and the world as it is “in itself.” That said, there is often a certain amount of mutual “borrowing,” given that both scientists and metaphysicians share an interest in the objective realities of time, regardless of how time might be perceived or conceived in a sociological or subjective sense (Dainton 2001).¹ The notion of lived time, in contrast, pertains to the way that different individuals and societies think, feel, behave, and relate to one another according to their experiences of, and ideas about, time.

Analyses of lived time in philosophy have been greatly influenced by Kant’s “Copernican turn,” which shifts away from a treatment of time as a mind-independent condition of the world, toward a treatment of time (and space) as a function of our minds and a framework through which we structure experience. This is the “first step” away from a physics and a metaphysics of time, toward a philosophy of lived time or temporality (Couzens Hoy 2009, 7). Yet in fact, Kant’s transcendental idealist account does not itself offer a philosophy of lived time because, for Kant, time is not something that is known or experienced. Instead, he proposes that time is a transcendental condition of knowledge and experience. “Time is not an empirical concept that has been derived from any experience,” he writes in his “Transcendental Aesthetic,” nor is it a “discursive concept” (Kant 2007, 74–5, A30/B46). Rather, time is an a priori form or “intuition” that is imposed on to the “manifold of sense experience” via three distinct modes: persistence or duration, simultaneity, and succession (ibid., 74–8, A31/B47).² He also characterizes time as the “form of inner sense,” which conditions the “intuition of ourselves and of our inner state,” and ultimately depends upon the “transcendental unity of apperception” (ibid., 77). As such, in Kant’s account, time itself is not something that is lived; it is a transcendental condition of sensible and intellectual life.

The following chapters thus do not treat historical time in terms of time as an objective condition “out there,” nor as a transcendental condition of subjective experience. As an investigation into lived time, my approach can be considered essentially phenomenological in the broadest sense that phenomenology is concerned with the perception and experience of time. The classical phenomenological method seeks to bracket what Husserl refers to as the “natural attitude”: an attitude that takes for granted metaphysical or scientific theories of time,³ and assumes an “unreflective belief that the world exists in a realm apart from consciousness, as an unproblematic objective reality” (Guenther 2013, 25). For phenomenologists, consciousness is not a “blank slate upon which external objects impose themselves” (ibid.); rather, consciousness is intentional, and co-related to the world. Bracketing the “natural attitude” means, therefore, that we attend to “the way in which [objects of experience] are given to consciousness and the way that consciousness orients itself toward these objects” (ibid., 26). In the case of time, this means examining the structures of consciousness that enable us to experience “temporal objects” as temporal: as having a duration, and as being “now,” “no longer,” and “not yet.” Indeed, Husserl claims that time-consciousness is the most important of all phenomenological problems, because all experience for intentional consciousness has a temporal character (Husserl 1964).⁴

In his lectures on The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (1964), Husserl proposes that the structures of time consciousness are essentially “retentional” and “protentional.” Conscious temporal experience is constituted through retentions of the “just passed”—the “comet’s tail” of what has been perceived—and protentions, or immediate anticipations of what will be perceived (Husserl 1964, 44–57). Unlike secondary “recollections” and “expectations” that come and go, and require an active awareness, retention and protention are passive, immediate phenomena that belong to all experience (ibid., 68–71). Husserl describes the retentional-protentional process as a “sinking,” “shading,” or “running-off phenomenon . . . a continuity of constant transformations . . . not severable into parts which could be by themselves nor divisible into phases, points of the continuity” (ibid., 48).⁵ The example Husserl gives is of hearing a melody. When hearing a melody, consciousness is not simply perceiving or “intending” the single tone given at that moment of listening. Indeed, experience of a melody would be impossible if consciousness were only ever conscious of a discrete now-point. Rather, consciousness retains the tonal phase that has just passed and protends or anticipates the imminent phase, such that the melody can be experienced as an unfolding unity, rather than as a simple succession or series of tones, one after the other (ibid., 43).

The crucial insight to be gained from classical Husserlian phenomenology is that “present,” “past,” and “future” are not successive, isolated moments or “parts of time,” but rather interrelated modes by which things appear as temporal (Kelly 2005). The way that time is lived does not conform to a simple, sequential temporal order; rather, temporal experience is always a complex blend of presence and absence, retention and protention, recollection and expectation. This basic phenomenological framework offers a useful entry into thinking about time as nonlinear. If we want to derive a concept of historical time as a lived time, however (as I argue in chapter 3), we need to extend the notion of lived time beyond the subject-centered frame of reference. Historical time is a “large-scale” time that transcends the limits of our personal experience or existence, and enables us to communicate, link, and organize multiple pasts, presents, and futures (Felski 2000, 18). As Paul Ricoeur contends, historical time is a mediated and a mediating time, which bridges or connects the time of the subject and the time of the public, or the time of the world (Ricoeur 1984). A theory of historical time thus needs to give due weight to the constitutive importance of intersubjective relations and encounters, and moreover, to sociocultural norms, institutions, and practices.

Accordingly, I suggest a preliminary definition of historical time as a socially and culturally mediated form of “large-scale” time that is lived and generated through intersubjective temporalizations of history. “Temporalization,” as Johannes Fabian explains, is “a complex praxis of encoding Time” with various dimensions including the linguistic, the interpretative, and the performative (Fabian 1983, 74). By “temporalizations of history,” therefore, I mean the collective practice of endowing “history” or historical trajectories with a particular temporal structure, and relating pasts, presents, and futures in socially and politically significant ways (Koselleck 2004; Osborne 1995, 200; Ricoeur 1988, 104). I am particularly interested in Fabian’s definition of temporalization as a complex “praxis” of encoding time as it implies that historical time is something that is put into practice, or operationalized. Approaching historical time in this way enables us to engage in what Peter Osborne calls a “politics of time”: examining competing articulations of historical time and the “struggles over the experience of time,” which are central to all politics (Osborne 1995, 200):

How do the practices in which we engage structure and produce, enable and distort, different senses of time and possibility? What kinds of experience of history do they make possible or impede? Whose futures do they ensure? These are the questions to which a politics of time would attend, interrogating temporal structures about the possibilities they encode or foreclose, in specific temporal modes. (ibid.)

It should be acknowledged that by treating historical time as a lived, mediated, operationalized time, my approach diverges from the “new materialist” feminist philosophers who have turned to scientific theories to rethink time and history. Elizabeth Grosz’s recent work has been particularly influential, such as The Nick of Time (2004), or Time Travels (2005), where she claims that feminism has left behind notions of nature and matter by focusing too exclusively upon epistemological questions and the historical effects of sexual difference.⁶ To rectify this occlusion, she suggests that the Darwinian model of evolution can provide a promising model of history and time, which “offers a subtle and complex critique of both essentialism and teleology,” through a “complex account of the movements of difference, bifurcation, and becoming that characterize all forms of life” (Grosz 2005, 17).⁷ Manuel De Landa’s A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997) is another influential materialist study that draws on scientific theory, examining the movements of matter and energy through human populations in the last millennium as a way of countering presumptions of linear progress and teleology.⁸

The forces and rhythms tracked by the natural sciences do inevitably affect historical time: the “arrow” of time,⁹ the “deep time” of geology,¹⁰ and the biological time of reproduction, birth, ageing, and death. Indeed, Grosz’s argument is that these forces and times are the very conditions of culture and history (Grosz 1999, 31–2), something that seems to be entirely disavowed by the conception of history as an arena of texts, archives, discourses, and ideologies, and also by the phenomenological attempt to bracket the “natural attitude.” On the other hand, however, historical time is a concept that is distinct from scientific concepts of “time,” “evolution,” and “change,” and the times and temporalities studied by natural scientists cannot be transformed unmediated into a concept of historical time (Koselleck 2004, 95–6).¹¹ Historical time is intertwined with biological, geological, and astronomical times and temporalities, but it is also determined through sociocultural systems of representation and schemas of shared experience (Chakrabarty 2000, 74). ¹²

Accordingly, while the insights brought to historiography by “new materialist” thinkers are vital and illuminating, my own interest is in the sociopolitical work and effects of temporalization, and so I draw upon philosophies and theories of lived time, rather than the natural sciences. This approach enables us to retain a critical view, and investigate why we conceive of historical time as we do and, moreover, the experiential and political implications. To claim that historical time is a mediated or operationalized form of time does not mean that historical time is not “real,” or that historiographical enquiry must retreat from all questions of ontology. Rather, from a non- or “postpositivist” perspective,¹³ the reality of an abstract idea or concept such as “historical time” exists in its effects: its manifestation in social practices, relations, and structures, and its role within conceptual schemas that give both content and form to social and individual experience.¹⁴

Further, insofar as we consider historical time to be a form of lived time, it cannot be dismissed as a straightforwardly “linear” time. Within modern historicism, historical time has consistently been presupposed as a homogenous or “empty” series of “now-points” as both Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin have so forcefully argued (Benjamin 2007; Heidegger 2009). Yet, if we rethink historical time as a form of lived time, we can move beyond the reductive historicist conception. The fundamental idea emerging from studies and accounts of lived time is that lived time is qualitatively different from serial, chronological temporality. Our experience is “directed towards, and itself assumes, temporally extended forms in which future, present and past mutually determine one another” (Carr 1986, 31). This means that the experiential schema of past, present, and future is never reducible to a serial succession of discrete instants or now-points (Husserl 1964, 48).¹⁵ Within lived time, there is no neat division between past, present, and future, and no compulsory or rudimentary chronological temporality. Rather, “it is because we live in time-knots that we can undertake the exercise of straightening out, as it were, some part of the knot (which is how we might think of chronology)” (Chakrabarty 2000, 112). And these “time-knots” become even more complex when we move beyond...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Feminism and Historical Time
• 1 Lived Time and Polytemporality
• 2 The Time of the Trace
• 3 Narrative Time
• 4 Calendar Time
• 5 Generational Time
• 6 Conclusion: The Politics of Feminist Time
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index