Is Time out of Joint?

On the Rise and Fall of the Modern Time Regime

Aleida Assmann, Sarah Clift

• Publisher: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781501742453
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Literature

Is, as Hamlet once complained, time out joint? Have the ways we understand the past and the future—and their relationship to the present—been reordered? The past, it seems, has returned with a vengeance: as aggressive nostalgia, as traumatic memory, or as atavistic origin narratives rooted in nation, race, or tribe. The future, meanwhile, has lost its utopian glamor, with the belief in progress and hope for a better future eroded by fears of ecological collapse.

In this provocative book, Aleida Assmann argues that the apparently solid moorings of our temporal orientation have collapsed within the span of a generation. To understand this profound cultural crisis, she reconstructs the rise and fall of what she calls "time regime of modernity" that underpins notions of modernization and progress, a shared understanding that is now under threat. Is Time Out of Joint? assesses the deep change in the temporality of modern Western culture as it relates to our historical experience, historical theory, and our life-world of shared experience, explaining what we have both gained and lost during this profound transformation.

1

TIME AND THE MODERN

Time and the modern are closely related to one another: The positive connotation of words such as “movement,” “change,” “transformation,” “renewal,” and “progress” indicate just how significant the passage of time is for the modern and for understandings of modernization. While time has always been associated with movement and change, it has not always been greeted with enthusiasm; enthusiasm about change and transformation is new and specific to modernity. Within the context of modernity, transition and change are no longer regarded as problems; rather, the fundamental conviction of modernity is that they are to be seized as important cultural resources. This positive evaluation of time and its dynamic understanding of culture brings out new standpoints and pairs of opposites. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has worked out three such pairs in his now-classic lexicon entry, “Modern, Modernität, Moderne,” found in the Lexikon historischer Grundbegriffe.¹ According to Gumbrecht, “modern” signifies:

1) the standpoint of the present in relation to something preceding and past,

2) the qualification of a thing as “new,” displacing something “old,” and

3) the experience of the fleeting and the transient over and against something stable and lasting.

The first pair involves a highly conscious positioning of oneself in the present and becomes a characteristically modern experience when the present continually breaks with a past that it deems no longer relevant. The second pair of opposites interprets the difference between what is current and what is past in terms of the dialectical opposites of new/old. As we shall see in greater detail in what follows, the modern concept of time can be understood as a mechanism that produces both the new and the old. At the same time, innovation becomes a central cultural imperative. The new is a relative concept that always needs a backdrop against which it can first emerge. Therefore, the production of the new cannot happen without the coproduction of the old. Finally, Gumbrecht’s third pair identifies the acceleration of time and the increasingly dynamic mode of perception as a specific feature of modern experience. So, according to him, “modern” means above all an increased awareness of time, a heightened reflection on time, and a heightened sense of how dependent temporal perception is on the condition of accelerated change.

All the meanings of “modern” that Gumbrecht lists—current, new, fleeting—point to a new emphasis on time. According to its own self-understanding, the modern era distinguishes itself from premodern times by virtue of how it leaves behind the temporal organization of all other cultures and historical epochs, and how it raises the concept of time borrowed from physics—that of a linear and irreversible “time’s arrow”—to the level of a binding principle. In so doing, it submits itself to the dictates of a time that continually, steadily, and irreversibly flows through all events and makes them chronologically measurable.² What is decisive in this new time is that it is completely detached from natural cycles and human activity. As a consequence, time becomes an objective dimension, in the strongest possible sense; that is, it lies outside of human control and manipulation. The temporal order of physics and its universal application are both modern discoveries. The culture of the modern is, in fact, founded on the temporal order of physics freed from human rhythms and attributions of meaning, and directs itself in accordance with that order. However, as we shall later see in greater detail, the putatively objective character of this temporal order actually becomes imbued with specifically modern cultural meanings, values, and imperatives. Therefore, a more precise formulation would be that modernity has “acculturated” the time of physics.

As we reflect on the cultural connection between time and modernity, we might begin with the first indications of how valuable time was in the context of how little of it there is. This insight became widespread throughout the seventeenth century when Puritans began to reflect on the short lifespan given to them. The time allotted to a this-worldly human existence was no longer understood to be merely a preliminary stage toward the only significant existence in the beyond, but instead a gift that humans had been given—one they had to put to the fullest possible use before the eyes of their divine creator and judge. This new and self-imposed time pressure brought with it a feeling of responsibility for the allotted time span, one that resulted in new forms of planning, self-control, and accounting. Max Weber has clearly shown how this new awareness of time among the Puritan middle-class became not only the foundation for a “methodical way of life” but also the engine for a burgeoning capitalism.³

As a point of entry into the connection between time and the modern, however, I have chosen to focus on an essay that appeared two centuries after the Puritans’ discovery of finite time. Written by Charles Baudelaire, the essay describes the discovery of the present as an utterly isolated and fleeting moment. The sense of time related to that discovery is, in the most literal sense, borderline. While extremely powerful as a paradigm of artistic perception that disrupts both routinized habits of seeing and conventions of representation, the borderline experience of time encapsulated by it is, however, incompatible with basic human needs like experience, sociality, activity, meaning, or identity. Therefore, we experience the present precisely not as a fleeting “now” but as an already extended span of time that, as will be explained in what follows, can be related to entirely different forms of duration. Following our examination of Baudelaire’s artistic determination of the present and the Zeitroman as a further, and decisively modern, experiment with time, we will conclude by exploring the connections between time and modernity in more recent historiographical theory.

Baudelaire’s Discovery of the Present

Baudelaire was the first to bring together the notions of “time” and “the modern” in a systematic way. In the famous essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” he describes a new style of painting that he found and greatly admired in the work of his favorite painter and contemporary, Constantin Guys.⁴ Guys had rejected a ponderous style of oil painting on canvas in favor of experiments with lighter techniques such as watercolor and charcoal on paper. And in rejecting time-consuming studio techniques, he also gave up the safe classical style of academic painting and developed fleeting processes to convey a new quality of the spontaneous and dynamic. In the course of his reflections on this new style, Baudelaire developed important insights on the relation between time and art. The most famous sentence of his essay is the following: “Modernity is the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent” (la modernité, ç’est le transitoire, le fugitive, le contingent).⁵ The word transitoire would be better translated as “transitory” here, for the temporal sensibility of the modern that Baudelaire seeks to emphasize is radically different from the Baroque sensibility for the ephemeral. In the context of Baroque vanitas, everything sensual and this-worldly was seen as illusory and provisional because it was perceived against the backdrop of a religious promise of eternity. But Baudelaire’s transitory moment also differs from the “pregnant moment” of the German Classical period that Gotthold Ephraim Lessing would define as freighted with the past and pregnant with the future. In contrast to the pregnant moment that points beyond itself because it contains both the past and the future and thereby possesses the classical quality of wholeness, Baudelaire’s moment is fragmented, fleeting, and splintered, without a before and without an after, without past or future.

Interestingly enough, Baudelaire’s definition of the moment also includes a discussion of eternity—not a Christian eternity but an aesthetic one. The more complete citation of the passage in question reads as follows: “By modernity, I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.” Baudelaire understood Guys’ achievement to be that he was able to bring out the “strange beauty” of the immediate and living present without forcing it into the corset of a style from a previous epoch, as was so often done. For Baudelaire, only a modernity that can grasp the specific beauty of its own fleeting present deserves to become a formative classic that will be taken up again in the future.

Baudelaire begins his description of the present with another pair of opposites that should be added to Gumbrecht’s three pairs we discussed earlier. He distinguishes between Classical and Modern and, by means of that distinction, contrasts the fleetingness of the modern with the time-resistant solidity of the ancient. What is self-evident in the art world is precisely what the temporal order of physics does not allow: that there are pasts that do not pass away and that, quite simply, some things last. Indeed, all cultures reserve the right to pull carefully chosen objects out from the flow of time to canonize them and give them an enduring present. This detemporalizing is the product of performative activities such as selection, evaluation, and sacralization. No art and no culture are possible without such practices. Canonizing and maintaining specific collections ensure the relevance of those collections for the long term and allow them, as stable vanishing points, to run alongside the horizon of the ever-changing present. Beginning in the Renaissance, artists claimed for themselves the title of a secondus deus, a second creator, which gave them quasi-religious status and nourished in them a hope for immortality in the sense of permanent survival in the memory of those who came after them.

In the works of Baudelaire, time and the modern merge in a present that disappears as quickly as it arises. With that focus, he succeeded in developing an entirely new sensibility for the passing moment, for whose artistic expression there as yet existed no adequate expressive possibilities. A generation after Baudelaire, the impressionists sought to capture the fleetingness, the intensity, and the sensual radiance of the moment. One of the new forms of representation they invented in their quest to approximate the moment of the present is the series. Monet’s Haystacks and Cézanne’s Mont St. Victoire series powerfully show how the changed lighting of every single moment presents a new motif and, consequently, a chance for a new image.

In the course of his search for an artistic response to the fleeting present, Baudelaire discovered a new type of artist: the flaneur. The flaneur embodies the temporal borderline experience of modernity. He roams the streets of the modern metropolis and, as he does so, is highly conscious of balancing on the tipping-point of the moment. Theorists and writers of modernity have often described this metropolis stroller, led by no particular intentions and needs, as being the idealized embodiment of the modern experience of time. The flaneur lives by his senses and by his floating and evenly suspended attention in the transitory moment. He therefore embodies the thoroughly modern human being who has no memory, no past, and no expectations for the future and who unreservedly gives himself over to the present. Artists of the early twentieth century invented new, nonlinear, collage-like, and cubist forms of representation for their fragmented, kaleidoscopic, perceptual images.⁶ Hans Robert Jauß has rightly emphasized that “he who sweeps through the city, who euphorically takes in and enjoys every pregnant sight of current life” at the same time commits himself, unconditionally delivered over as he is to the moment, to the modern “experience of the fragmented, self-effacing I.” The flaneur as artist foregoes existential necessities like coherence, continuity, and identity: “The high price paid for the unanticipated expansion of limits in the modern experience of the world is the loss of the identity-guaranteeing Anamnesis.”⁷

This aesthetic rendering of the modern experience of time not only ignored the dimension of the past, but also foreclosed all notions of utopia, promise, hope, and progress. The fragmented images of the modernists registered the formlessness of life in the modern metropolis and made it out to be a disordered abundance of simultaneous sensory input. In the wake of Baudelaire, artistic reflection aims at capturing a radically modern temporal experience and giving it aesthetic expression. In this endeavor, it repeatedly returns to this idea of a fleeting moment, which has not yet been shaped by any cultural model or become part of any artistic repertoire.

How Long Does the Present Last?

“Come what come may, time and the hour runs through the roughest day.”⁸ Macbeth adopts this stance to quell his anxieties about the future; he seeks to fit those anxieties into the standard of a homogeneous empty time. Nonetheless, the regular hourly clang of the mechanical clock and the ticking o...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Time and the Modern
• 2. Work on the Modern Myth of History
• 3. Five Aspects of the Modern Temporal Regime
• 4. Concepts of Time in Late Modernity
• 5. Is Time out of Joint?
• 6. The Past Is Not Past; or, On Repairing the Modern Time Regime
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index