Harry Harootunian 2005 - Space Time Problem

Some Thoughts on Comparability and the Space-Time Problem
Harry Harootunian
The primacy of space over time in general is an infallible characteristic of reactionary language; beginning with . . . illustrated supplements which call themselves Nation and Space (supplements of left-wing papers were called Nation and Time) down to . . . spacehistorical method and geographical mediations. Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times Space, the Final Frontier In this essay, I am primarily concerned with exploring the increasing contemporary turn toward space and the resulting strategies of this move based on the elucidation of spatial categories in the interpretative sciences. This particular awareness has been manifested in the now overwhelming interest in tracking what moves between discrete spatial boundaries and across them. By the same token, I would like to address the question of temporality and the consequences of its recession from social and historical analysis and perhaps suggest possible ways for a reunion with its spatial
boundary 2 32:2, 2005. Copyright 2005 by Duke University Press.
24 boundary 2 / Summer 2005
complement. In short, I would like to look into some of the afterlives of area studies and how its inaugural impulse for holism and comparison has been recongured in such ways as to retain and even privilege the spatial. I want to reect on what, in effect, has enabled precisely those strategies that have led to considerations of diasporic bodies and their movements crossing borders, in-between states exhibiting hybrid combinations, the inside and outside, and newer, enlarged bounded entities such as globe and empire. On the decit side, I am thinking about the shifting relationship between the present and the past, and its intimations for a future, and how the withdrawal of time, as such, affects our capacity for comparative study. But it is important to add that I am not simply making a plea for a return to history, as it is so often invoked in the wake of the now-old new historicism, but rather calling for a restoration of considerations of the crucial spatiotemporal relationship that must attend any explanatory program. Part of this impulse has been prompted by the desire to reconsider the possibilities that attended area studies at its inception, as well as the conviction that comparability is too important a consideration to be left to disciplines such as comparative literature. With the spatial turn and the resituating of its leading categories, such as culture, civilization, modernity itself, center and periphery, global and empire, which bring with them xity, positionality, location, and asynchrony, the spatiotemporal relationship seems to have disappeared under the weight of these virtual continents. Perhaps this move represents a spatialization of social theory authorized by the retrospective discovery of the centrality of space and communication in the constitution of social orders.1 What once was seen as a division of continents lying at great distances from each other has now been overcome: socially produced distances such as state borders or cultural barriers appear as secondary effects of speed. By appealing to enlarged, singular spatial categoriescurrently the global and empire dominate our agendasthe arena of social action has broadened and displaced other kinds of causality traditionally employed to account for social phenomena. What had once been conceived as the things to be explainedthe outcome of a historical processhas now been transformed into the explanations premise. It is the larger, encompassing spaces, such as the globe and empire, that now explain the changing world of modernity rather than the reverse and that work against making a spatiotemporal problematic the basis of any explanation.
1. Justin Rosenberg, The Follies of Globalization (London: Verso, 2000), 1.
Harootunian / Comparability and the Space-Time Problem 25
Any discussion of modernity and its identication with change will lead to construing the historical process reexivelytemporalizing a moment that immediately and, perhaps, necessarily marks off its location from what came before and distinguishes discontinuous times contained within the same chronology.2 Reinhard Kosellek, quoting from J. G. Herders Metakritik of Kant, reminds us that in actuality, every changing thing has the measure of its own time within itself. No two worldly things have the same measure of time. . . .There are, therefore, . . . at any one time in the universe innumerably many times. 3 This is, I think, one of the great, generative insights of the modern era that established for the rst time a temporal matrix that was able to mark out multiple moments and temporalities demanding an awareness of simultaneously differing forms of temporalization within a single space, despite the nation-states effort to obliterate them. With this insight, Kosellek proposes that the late eighteenth-century perception already pregured the practice to investigate historical events and sequences for their own internal time. 4 Yet he could have added (and did elsewhere) that the discovery of internal timeidentifying the unique point of time for a specic temporal periodauthorized a comparative perspective that would dene the vocation of the human and social sciences, and thereafter bind its practice to it. It will be, therefore, my intention rst to briey rehearse some of the familiar consequences of this comparative framework for practice and to show how, conversely, it has encouraged strategies that have ultimately privileged space at the expense of effacing precisely those
2. Reinhard Kosellek, Futures Past, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 94. But it should also be said that Kosellek is aware that we are always using concepts that were originally conceived in spatial terms, but that nevertheless have a temporal meaning. See Reinhard Kosellek, The Practice of Conceptual History, trans. Todd Samuel Presner and others (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 67. This observation also implies the hegemony of space over historical time, which, as we shall see, was repudiated by writers such as Bakhtin, who, with his mathematically inspired concept of the chronotope, insisted on differing modes of relating between space and time according to shifting periods of history found in the appearance of different forms or genres of writing. It should also be pointed out that the vocation of national history, which constitutes the principal preoccupation of historical practice down to the present, is, as the epigraph above suggests, more spatial than temporal, inasmuch as a completed past is xed to a particular geographical place. See Harry Harootunian, Shadowing the Past: National History and the Persistence of the Everyday, Cultural Studies 18, no. 2/3 (March/May 2004): 181200. 3. Kosellek, Futures Past, 247. 4. Kosellek, Futures Past, 247.
different temporalities produced by capitalisms capacity for serializing and segmenting a cumulative temporal process dened by its irreversibility. The Spatial Ambition of Area Studies Before I turn to this theme, however, I would like to take a slight detour and say something about the importance of area studies for the comparative project and how it has induced people to embark upon the study of societies and cultures other than their owndistant, different, psychologically remote, always escaping ones reach, ultimately obliging them to spend entire lives in the precincts that are often alien and alienating and always other. I think we need to revisit the conditions attending that decision in order to understand the stakes that might have propelled this commitment because, as it is well known now, area studies originally promised to provide the framework and perspective for the establishment of a proper study of comparative societies. One of the more remarkable but unobserved occurrences invariably effaced by area studies is the obvious fact that the peoples of the world outside of Euro-America have been forced to live lives comparatively by virtue of experiencing some form of colonization or subjection enforced by the specter of imperialism. This experience of living comparatively inevitably disclosed the instrumentalizing force of classicatory strategies promoted by the imperial dominant that invariably hierarchized relationships everywhere colonialism and imperialism spread. The Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsuro, recognizing in the consequences of this assault in the 1930s the formation of a double life, developed a theory of layering ( jusosei ) that supposedly characterized Japans history since the time of origins to explain why Japanese were compelled to live comparatively life in double timeas a condition of their modern transformation. Yet it must also be said that this move to study foreign and remote cultures was institutionalized in colleges and universities at the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, to become a permanent xture in the academic procession, even though it remained at the end of it. Until the work of scholars such as Edward Said and the explosion of colonial and postcolonial studies, area studies had successfully displaced the fact that much of the world it studied had been dominated by imperial and colonial powers. And this immense sleight of hand was consistent with the goals of new area and regional programs organized after World War II to supply the new national security state with useful information and knowledge about Americas enemies and potential trouble spots around the globe. These
regions were principally former colonized societies that came to constitute the Third World. Itarea studieswould create a space for encouraging such study and providing the resources to enable a generation of students to plunge into the acquisition of impossibly difcult languages and seemingly arcane cultures in order to enable encounter with and even residence in regions of the world that had only been imagined in exotic (and erotic) fantasies or experienced as zones of military combat. By the same measure, it would be wrong to conclude that people entered into the study of remote regions of the world only because fellowships were plentiful, the opportunity for foreign travel and residence an attractive necessity, and the prospect of academic or government jobs a promising certainty. The rst recruits were usually men, and a few women, who, through military service, had been trained to be interrogators of prisoners; interpreters of captured documents and intercepted communiqus; and translators, who, after the war, made available a large pool of linguistic talent and who, with additional training, could become instant area specialists ready to reproduce the new academic organizations once they acquired teaching posts. The offspring of missionaries who had lived in Asia and Africa constituted another source of recruitment, numerically smaller than former service language ofcers but probably more inuential in the long run. Still later, there was a fairly large cohort of enlistees from the Peace Corps experience. For those without military or missionary inducements, there was the nave appeal of working in newly opened areas, which, as I look back now, was not only wrong but a bad idea that was constantly fated to fail to satisfy even the slightest intellectual expectation, since it could not help but continually clash with the sensibilities and purpose informing area studies agendas and their custodians. In any case, this singular experience, probably replicated endlessly, dramatizes the need to know why people would be willing to spend so much time, effort, and energy to learn languages over which it would ultimately take a lifetime and more to secure control, when they could have mastered several European languages in a fraction of the time. What earthly reason would send young people on this academic childrens crusade, scurrying to remote regions of the world and convincing them to make accommodations to living conditions, customs, and cultural patterns they could not have known at the time, and whose mastery would also take a lifetime and yet would never t like a second skin much less become a habituated second nature? To be sure, there were those who ocked to Asia for adventurous exotic opportunities and erotic possibilities (both of which are still included in the desire to learn the martial arts), for religious desire, for the
multiple illusions (delusions?) of passing and its unlled promisesfor all kinds of reidentications. Still more others shored up their wobbly sense of stakes by marrying into these cultures. These and other impulses were fullled by an agenda that approached an area or region holistically (often read off the boundaries of the nation-state), privileging spatial dimensions over the temporal and inserting a country or culture into a geographic location but rarely considering its relationship either to the world or time. In fact, regions and areas were simply seen as singularly spatial and often timeless entities that were in the world but were not treated as if they belonged to it. This sense of the timeless was often pressed by historians as well, who appeared xated on the gure of tradition and continuity, which always seemed to be another way of positioning the spatial over the temporal. If such an approach, still prevailing in colleges and universities, aimed to provide an understanding of the totality of a culture, echoing the older obsession with extracting an unchanging and essential national character promised by the study of national literatures and histories, the spatial privilege persisted like an impregnable mountain keep against all and any effort to promote a perspective capable of articulating the specic space-time relationship that would have undermined the claims of holism and transparency at the same time it resituated the area in multiple histories. Instead, this effort to rethink a perspective based on acknowledging the space-time relationship was delayed and even displaced by the move to hermeneutic social science (in the United States), which sought to emphasize the primacy of meaning in the interpretation of cultures. The moment was famously exemplied by people such as Clifford Geertz and Robert Bellah (both former students of Talcott Parsons) and enthusiastic camp followers among historians and anthropologists. The task was either to nd ways to comprehend native sensibilities by seeking to occupy the place they were experienced, in the hope of securing an empathic identication that would have made Wilhelm Dilthey blush (after all, as a German national, he was not concerned with natives but only with Germanys historical horizon), or, worse, to discover analogies to Webers Protestant Ethic in Asia, which would make such regions easier to grasp since their cultural particularity was annexed to and assimilated into a system of values we not only already understood (like second nature) but actually had originated. What seems important about this interventionfor our purposesis that it managed to forcefully reinforce the spatial prerogative of the area by positing the possibility of empathetic enactment in a static spatial location (Balinese cockght, Indonesia, Tokugawa Japan) rather than
the temporalities that must have attended the formations of the place under consideration and accompanied whatever processes were being identied with it. Too often such an approach led to a concern with producing place rather than the place of production. That is to say, the operation of getting into the shoes, of standing tall in them, so to speak, or of stepping into the footprints of the native (in marked contrast to both Dilthey and R. G. Collingwood, who advised historians of getting into the mind[s] of the past), implied entering an atemporal and anahistorical zoneanytime, no time in particularand made no effort whatsoever to account for the agency of timethe momentwhether present or past. The apparent price paid for this insensitivity to the mediation of time was the transmutation of space into a nonplace, without duration and context. In area and historical studies, Geertz was the social scientist of choice, and the invocation of his name reverberated with totemic force the sound of scientic veracity and seriousness. It is interesting to observe that despite the vast distance between his moment in social science and postcolonial discourse, they both share the same spatial terrain, inasmuch as the former works to transmute an area into textual space to be read while the latter empties the postcolonial of its timefulnessas implied by its reliance on the prex post-, thus transmuting chronology into cognition and a knowledge whose discursive utterances must constantly be read for slippages and what they say about the not said. What area studies, in its many incarnations, failed to provide was a persuasive attempt to account for its privilege of space (and place) and its apparent exemption from an encounter with time. Part of this failure stems from losing its calling for comparability. The Specter of the Colonial Unconscious: Classication and Comparison While area studies was explicitly implemented after World War II to encourage and even foster the development of new comparative perspectives across disciplines and between different culture regions, it was diverted from this vocation by the desire to supply information crucial to the interests of the national security state and then, later, private businesses. Instead of envisaging genuinely interdisciplinary agendas capable of integrating different disciplines, area studies often settled for the regime of a simple multidisciplinarism as the sign of a comparative method that masqueraded coverage for the work of comparison, language acquisition for method, the totality of the nation-state for theory. Too often, area studies
became captive of a particular kind of social science which promoted a form of cultural holism that was made to stand in for a broader region, even though its true focus was the nation. Moreover, this social science, usually some variant of structural functionalism, invariably aimed to naturalize time 5 in such a way as to afrm the primacy of the spatial and the operation of distancing in the classication of societies. The inevitable impulse to compare fused with a strategy to classify and categorize according to criteria based upon geopolitical privilege. As a result of this principle of classication, societies were invariably ranked according to spatial distance from an empowering model that radiated the achievement of industrial and technological supremacynamely, the countries of Euro-Americaand expected identication with it. In a sense, this was simply a replication of the hierarchization of political power that froze positions and history during the Cold War. This classication strategy, itself signifying the static synchronicity of the spatial, was mapped onto an evolutionary trajectory that succeeded in apotheosizing the model of natural history and thus dening the task of a comparative agenda, which, according to Johannes Fabian, constituted a vast, omnivorous intellectual machine permitting the equal treatment of human culture at all times and places. 6 But evolutionary time transmuted politics and economics, both intimately concerned with human time, into a natural plot line that organized past culture and living societies according to a temporal grid called the stream of time, where some managed to move upstream while others were drawn back downstream. In spite of appealing to such concepts as evolution, development, industrialization, modernization, we must observe that these totalizations were more often than not spatially congured rather than temporally marked (recalling Koselleks observation), functioning as more natural determinations than historically produced forms. Often, the units employed to measure the movement in time as a signication of political and cultural meaning that denoted intervals between events resulted in xing the quality of states rather than the actual lapse of time. In this way, comparison, implied by the apparatus of integrating several disciplines into a unied approach and a diversity of regional units, was driven by a logic that worked at naturalizing and spatializing conceptions of time to confer meaning on the distribution of societies in space. Yet the spatial distribution signaled by distancing was a transformation of earlier views that had dened temporality as both exclusion and
5. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 6. Fabian, Time and the Other, 1617.
expansion. More importantly, the sense of otherness that must be conceptualized within a theory of knowledge based upon natural history (an Enlightenment project that made possible the comparative method itself) emplots all societies in all times on an arc that must designate relative distance from or closeness to the present. There would be no raison dtre for the comparative method, Fabian writes, if it was not the classication of entities or traits which rst have to be separate and distinct before their similarities can be used to establish taxonomies and developmental sequences. 7 Hence the time of the observers present must be distinguished from the time of the observed, even though the act of observation might be contemporaneous with the object of observation. Even though the object of knowledge must be expressed as a temporal categorization, the referent is not, strictly speaking, an object or class of objects but a relationship. This is especially true of ethnographic and historical accounts, and indeed of any discipline that is implicated, as we are, with the task of elucidating a momentous ssure between what once was described as the West and the Rest. This divide was early conceptualized in European social thought, but no thinker gave greater force to it than Max Weber in his theory of comparative religious formations and his typology for a proper historical sociology. Weber not only widened the putative cleft between an implied unied West and the world outside it but made it the basis of a comparative strategy that was both spatial and atemporal. (It is possible to see behind this new typologizing the lengthening shadow of the Asiatic Mode of Production.) A contemporary of Lenin, writing before World War I, Weber constructed a powerful argument that countered and ultimately replaced the Marxian idea of the capitalist mode of production and the revolutionary break it established in European life. His intervention intended to upset a ruptural version of social life and its breach with the past that thinkers and writers had already acknowledged and instead proposed, as early as his book on Protestantism and capitalism (1904), a coguration between the capitalist spirit and a religious ethic. In this work, Weber sought to demonstrate how religionthe carrier of cultural meaningeasily guaranteed continuity rather than a permanent pause in the line and that capitalist rationality derived from the resources available in the cultural endowment. Europes modernity was always already there. Instead of recognizing the actual ssure marked by capitalism, Weber mapped it on the world outside Euro-America, propos7. Fabian, Time and the Other, 27.
ing that the Chinese and Indian religious traditions may have evolved some form of rationality but not one capable of producing capitalist calculation. In this way, Weber transmuted the rift between past and present in European life into one between the West and the Rest, and thus cast out the Rest from history as surely as Hegel had before him. At the same time, he moved to repair or displace an internal rupture and temporal boundary separating present from past by appealing to the continuity of cultural/spiritual resources to project a split between Euro-America and the world beyond, usually the domain of colonies. With Weber, colonization revealed the mark of advanced modernity, while Germanys late arrival to this scene was a worrisome reminder of insufcient rationality. By the same token, it was an easy step to turn colonies into sites of premodern culture, whose distance could only be overcome by rejecting an indigenous heritage and embracing the promise of modern rationality. Modernity, rather than capitalism (and accumulation), was thus xed to place and was distinguished by its distance from the space of the nonmodern. The irony is that Europe was exempted from breaking with its past, while the rest of the world could claim no such immunity. What this substitution of modernity for capitalism represented was the consequential replacement of culture (now seen as value) for capitalism and the social relations of production and exchange value. In this way, the deployment of comparative indexes immediately called attention to a classifying system that ranked societies on the principle of gauging distance and separation.8 The less developed a society, the more distinct it will appear from the modular paradigm employed to structure the relationship in order to afrm difference. The concept of late developer, as it was used in modernization studies to describe societies such as Japan, China, and India, is an example of this strategy of distancing, which transmuted what, in fact, was a chronological and quantitative marker into a qualitative one: simple chronology into an attribute. What seems to have been left out of this comparative agenda is history, to be sure, but also a politics of time capable of locating practice immanently within a modernity that housed the temporalization of new cultural forms developing everywhere. Such forms constituted coexisting and coeval equivalents, despite the apparent differences among them. But received comparative approaches have consistently denied a relationship of coevality to precisely those societies targeted for study, misrecognizing a coexistent present we all inhabit by demanding a perspective located in a different temporal regis8. Fabian, Time and the Other, 26.
ter from those societies and cultures we are seeking to understand, making them outside to our inside. The disavowal implies a refusal to acknowledge that all temporal relations, including contemporaneity, are embedded in socially, economically, and culturally organized practices coextensive with capitalism. If area studies has failed to deliver on its initial promise to produce a viable agenda for comparison, the newer cultural studies has offered, in its effort to avoid totalities and essentialisms, to rethink the ground of comparability by appealing to referents that exceed the units of the nation-state that dominated the older approaches. Poststructuralism and post-Marxisms have so overdetermined the text that it probably is no longer necessary to search for a logic competent to integrate the disciplines into a unied approach. In our time, we have the appeal to larger units, regions, transnationality, globalization, hyperspace, where the diasporic ows of people are said to move across what are misrecognized as porous borders but actually attest to the vast deterritorializing force of capital and labor. Regardless of its offer to implement new interpretative modes promising to avoid the problems manifestly dogging the older developmental model and its binary logic, the new cultural studies has often and unwittingly recuperated the aporias of the older approach it wishes to succeed. This is especially evident in the way cultural studies has taken a spatial turn and in its evasion of the role of time. Even among such Marxists as Fredric Jameson, time seems to get lost in the spatial xity of an untranscendable mode of production despite its status as a primary temporal category, as he has recently disclosed in an essay on the end of temporality. 9 Fearful of slipping into subjectivistic voluntarism, Marxists inadvertently risk robbing the mode of production of its
9. Fredric Jameson, The End of Temporality, Critical Inquiry 29, no. 4 (Summer 2003): 695718. It is hard not to conclude that Jameson, equating time with modernism, and space with postmodernism, is still trying to nd a place for the latter in his scheme of periodization. In this scheme, modernism represents a culture of incomplete modernization, whereas the postmodern signies full modernization and the disappearance of temporality (becoming?) and the dispossession of a differential sense of that deep time lived and expressed by the moderns. The logic of this formulation suggests a shift from recognizable unevenness, denoting an awareness of the force of time, to the establishment of an even ground announcing its end. Here, Jameson comes close to recuperating a paradigm advanced by structural-functional social science during the Cold War by presuming an automatic (and necessary) transposition from formal to real subsumption. This argument has been proposed by Hardt and Negri recently, making Empire and the Postmodern members of the same family, but overlooks the palpable fact that capitalism is always devoted to producing unevenness.
fundamental timefulness by replicating arguments for alternative modernities and their spatial xation. Cultural studies, especially its postcolonial inection, has responded to the rapid development of a variety of programs concentrating on globalization, neoliberalism, post-Fordismin fact, to all those recent signs of the restructuring of global social relations in our time and their consequences for social identity. Spurred by a special urgency provoked by the perception that the nation-state is in the process of withering away before the forces of globalization, postcoloniality has turned increasingly toward trying to x identity in an age when older certainties once offered by the nation-state seem to be disappearing. This effort has often been accompanied by a transfer of investment to subjects of metahistory and the politics of space and place, and away from their older concerns with (post)colonial subject constitution in psychoanalytic epistemological senses. 10 Here, Foucault and de Certeau have been hoisted up to replace an earlier privilege accorded to Lacan and Derrida, genealogy and the specicity of place elevated over subjectivity as the principal element in the construction of identity. Yet we must recognize in this repositioning the primacy of space, especially as it is worked out in the fetishization of place and the lessening importance of forms of temporalization. While there are undoubtedly a number of reasons for bracketing the temporal (and thus the historical), it principally reects the proliferation of subject positions required by consumption on a global scale, which, at the same time, works to mute the subjectivity of the worker and the subaltern. But the really important aspect of this postcolonial preoccupation with space and place is in the privileging of the conceptual gure of modernity as the sign of a hegemonizing socio-historical project of modernization. In this view, modernity is identied with a specic place that is more important than its status as a secular and historical form of temporalization. For the historian of subalternity Dipesh Chakrabarty, the categories of capital and bourgeois are simply alternative readings for Europe. The same could be said of modernity. 11 The modern, then, he writes, quoting Meaghan Morris, will be understood as a known history, something which has already happened elsewhere and which is to be reproduced, mechani10. Neil Lazarus, Hating Tradition Properly, in Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 28. 11. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Postcoloniality and the Artice of History: Who Speaks for Indian Pasts? in A Subaltern Reader, 19861995, ed. Ranajit Guha (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 267.
cally or otherwise, with a local content. 12 Like Partha Chatterjee, Chakrabarty rightly worries that this form of modernity will smother native imagination only to recuperate the project of positive unoriginality. 13 What this program entails is a strategy of envisaging the modernthe newas an ideological misrecognition of the reproduction of capital accumulation and the deterritorializing force of both capital and labor. More importantly, it actually accepts the Weberian maneuver to overlook capitalism as a temporal categorywhere deterritorialization refers to the velocity of movement in a particular spaceby installing cultural space in its place in the effort to secure the effect of bracketing time. But the process is surely as temporalizingoccurring through timeas it is a xed spatialized identity associated with place. Although postcolonial discourse is correct to argue that modernity, as such, is fully compatible with imperialism, it often sacrices the force of this insight by seeing capitalism (sometimes dismissed as another Western metanarrative) as a movement in space rather than time that might disturb local certainties but not necessarily reproduce its original conditions of social existence imperially and mechanically. In the end, postcoloniality has failed to conceal its identity as a wholly owned subsidiary of poststructuralism, as Neil Larsen has proposed, that has offered to displace its disappointment in the failure of Third World nation-states to the spatial terrain of the text as something to be read rather than lived. By hypostatizing the unity of the West or even Europe as the place of modernity, postcolonial discourse has inadvertently recuperated some of the more baneful features of the very binarism that has imperially reduced the rest of the world to the status of a second term. Paradoxically, this tactic incorporates the idea of late development as a guarantee of qualitative difference that allows its proponents to envision something called an alternative modernity. What distinguishes this alternative modernity is its spatial location, a place that is not Euro-America, and thus the authority of its claim to an identity that is uniquely different. Once this door is opened, it is possible to imagine all forms of native interiority that have succeeded in remaining immune to the deterritorialization forcibly imposed from without, which, as Fanon presciently observed, destroys all cultures of reference. Such appeals to cultural resources undisturbed by modernizationa folkloric ction not worth keeping, Fanon also remarkedare made to offer the surety of an unmovable ground of authenticity on which to construct an iden12. Chakrabarty, Postcoloniality and the Artice of History, 283. 13. Chakrabarty, Postcoloniality and the Artice of History, 283.
tity capable of preserving the autonomy of genuine difference. The appeal to this illusionary authentic ground, as Japanese misconstrued it in the interwar period, seems to offer the promise of overcoming the modern, as they called it, which will congure an alternative to a modernity made in the West. Moreover, the presumption of an alternative modernity reinforces the temporal difference between a putative original and now its alternative, as if the rst term will always remain prior, full, and primary, while its subsequent revisions can only resort to the consolations of difference rooted in a different past and place claiming native cultural authenticity. In order to offset this spatially inspired asymmetry, some advocates of an alternative modernity have looked to forms of identitarian anticolonial nationalism as evidence of difference resting on the claims of authentic cultural resources that have managed to remain free from contamination. Here, it seems to me, the xity of a cultural endowment not only recalls Webers perspective but matches perfectly a view that has privileged the stolidity of an enduring and apparently unchanging spatialscape where time is rooted in a primordial and innite repetitiveness. But even here, we can see the shadow of the time lag and the curious way that the present, a temporal category, conjures up the past. Andersons Haunt The status of a muscular modular metonym dwarng all before it has been dramatically put into question in recent discussions concerning the prospect for a proper comparative approach occasioned by the work of Benedict Anderson. Targeting the inuential Imagined Communities, which put into play the repetition of a mode of modern nationalism based on the agency of print capitalism, Andersons account was more about print than capitalism, more about communication than the deterritorializing forces of capital and labor. Misrecognizing late nineteenth-century European liberal nationalism based upon middle-class literacy as the model of nationalist modernity exported to the Third World, Anderson qualied this fundamentally culturalist interpretation by proposing that itthe modelcould be pirated. His accusers, however, have condemned his conception of modularity for having suffocated native imagination and reducing all to consumers of modernity. 14 What seems to have been at stake was the con14. See Partha Chatterjee, Fragments of the Nation and Its Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 5.
viction of an alternative modernity that needed to be released from the iron cage of Andersons Eurocentric model and that could claim for itself the authority and originality of the inner resources supplied by native culture, which, perhaps miraculously, had remained undisturbed by modular forms devised elsewhere and imposed by colonial violence. Yet, it is hard not to conclude that the gure of an alternative modernity resembles the reied conception of tradition once condently embraced by enthusiasts of modernization theory. While some of the charges against Anderson border on the tendentious, the critique of an all-empowering model for comparison is on the mark. In his work The Spectre of Comparison, Anderson alerts us to one of the excluded possibilities lived by societies outside of Europe but implicated in its imperial expansion, whose modern forms were introduced through the export of capital and colonial deterritorialization. Through a reading of Jos Rizals late nineteenth-century novel Noli me tangere, Anderson is able to demonstrate how the author has perceived that the gardens of Manila were shadowed . . . by images of their sister gardens in Europe. They can no longer be seen in their immediacy but only from a perspective simultaneously close up and faraway. 15 The novelist names this doubling the spectre of comparison, as Anderson translates it, perhaps, too, a bedeviling comparison, carrying with it the association of a bad or difcult comparison, the dilemma of not knowing which way to look, what I have called cultural diplopia. Moreover, Anderson, with Rizals help, designates Southeast Asia as the site of this haunting, or devilish vision, housing the specter, the ghosts of Europes modernity in replicated forms, and thus sees it as the primary place where this ambiguous optic and the difculty of comparison have materialized. The haunted house, so to speak, is always the place where the specters of modernity have taken up residence, which is, at the same time, the site of comparison. But Anderson could just as easily have seen in the novelistic form itself the sign of the devilish doubling that would pregure the dilemma of subsequent sister images. Concerned with situating the region of Southeast Asia, which, like most of the Asian and colonial worlds, remained Europes dimly seen outside in contemporary analysis, the doubling effect (noted also before the war by Watsuji, who could not have read Rizal) necessitated thinking simultaneously about Europe and its outside, and mandated the establishment of a comparative perspective
15. Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparison: Politics, Culture, and the Nation (London: Verso, 1998), 6.
in which the act of comparison was always identied with a haunting, the ghostly. Sustaining this strategy, Anderson further employs the metaphor of the inverted telescope (an up-to-date revision of Marxs camera obscura), which reinforces a comparative method driven by distance and exclusion. By looking through the large lens of the telescope, he perceives another image of Southeast Asia that must be smaller, miniaturized, distant. Since he is in the position of the subject who is gazing through the telescope, he has, I believe, magnied his own position at the expense of miniaturizing and diminishing the scene he is viewing. In fact, the distancing implied by the gaze resembles the spatial distance necessary for the formation of the exotic program of an earlier generation of Europeans such as Victor Segelan, who always insisted on keeping the object at arms length. Under this arrangement, there cannot be an equal doubling but rather only a hierarchization between what appears to be a larger original and a smaller copy, the putative sister image. The determination and distancing of the image means only that it has won its apparent difference from an original by sacricing the equality of scale and size. Even if Anderson warns us that he is not trading in imitations, copies, and derivative discourses, his appeal to the trope of the inverted telescope more than offsets his logic of bound and unbound seriality and its goal to dispel unwanted bogeys. To be sure, he reminded us in the earlier Imagined Communities that the idea of nation could claim no patent since it was continually pirated by different people with often unexpected results. Yet Anderson is closer to his critics than either suspects. If, on the one hand, he wishes to propose an approach that must take into consideration the role of some form of repetition in the migration of his model to enable the late developed to embark upon the course of capitalist modernization and national liberation and, on the other hand, his critics put forth the opposing proposition of an alternative modernity and antimodern communitarianism free from the corrosions of colonial and thus Western mediations in guring a modern, national identity, both risk recuperating the second term of the very binary they are attempting to avoid. Both, moreover, manage to sustain the primacy of a relationship in space as the primary vocation of comparative study. At the heart of these interpretative strategies is, as I have suggested, the relentless spatialization of time that has prompted Anderson and his critics to privilege place. Both approaches are rooted in the priority of the nation-state, which, apart from being xed in space, means a commitment to a unit that is incomparable, inasmuch as it has claimed to derive its difference from irreducible and essential elements (in Comparer lincomparable,
Marcel Detienne proposes that because of the nation-states insistence on irreducible uniqueness, the act of carrying out comparison would mean matching two incommensurables that could produce only an acknowledgment of simple differences 16). With Anderson there still remains the inordinate emphasis on the origin of capitalism and nationalism, and it hardly matters if it appears in Western Europe or the North and South American colonies of the eighteenth century. Despite his disclaimers of modularity, he is still convinced that subsequent transformations constitute piratical plundering of the original model. What he overlooks is how the model is rooted in a place rather than a process that cannot know an original from a copy, since instantiations will always be original. The importance of this move is to thus x origins in a place and to xate on the force of its geospatial location. It is, I believe, this fetishization of origin in place/space that subsequently prompts discourse to imagine and identify places that might constitute an alternative. In more recent times, even some anti-postcolonial critics have turned to place as a political sanctuary and refuge against a heartless globalization. When we interrogate this bonding of place and origins, in any case, we discover that it is simply a transformation of older spatialized categories that shrilly announced the unity and universalism of the West over an incomplete East, what Bloch once called cultural gardens or souls without windows, without connection, 17 masking the horror of, and anxiety over, a deeply embedded relativism. Times Envelope What Anderson, Chakrabarty, and others have not provided in their determined preference for space and spatial categories, which either dramatizes the location of difference or situates place boundedness as an asylum for political and cultural resistance to globalization, is an adequate account of the crucial space-time relationship. Too often their strategies have ignored the relationship of these categories itself and risked simply sliding into a morphology of spatial forms. It is almost as if these writers have succumbed to a globalizing ideology that calls for the constant condensation of time into space in order to proclaim its nal banishment from all sub16. Marcel Detienne, Comparer lincomparable (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2000), 911; see also Franois Hartog, Regimes dhistoricit (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2003), 54ff. 17. Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 296. See also Fabian, Time and the Other, 4445.
sequent considerations of determination. This request resembles capitalisms own refusal to envisage a time beyond its moment, which, ideologically, appears as an endless present, as Georg Simmel once described it, where time enters a permafrost state to become space. By contrast, we have available a number of examples that have made the question of spacetime relationship fundamental to any social, cultural, and historical analyses that manage to remind us of both the different ways this connection has been conceptualized and how we might seek to restore this lost unity in our own efforts to envisage comparative strategies. Henri Lefebvres Production of Space attempts to envision how time is linked to space, despite the latters presumed hegemony in modern capitalist society; Bakhtins conception of the chronotope authorizes the construction of a typology of historical poetics based on delineating different articulations between space and time as manifest in different literary forms (implying but not foregrounding the temporal and spatial dimensions of successive modes of production); and Nikos Poulantzas imaginatively analyzes the nation-form in terms of specic temporal and spatial matrices introduced by capitalism. With additional time, we might also fold into this mix Moishe Postones illuminating but complex discussion of abstract and concrete time in Marxthe former supplying an absolute frame but remaining constant despite changes in productivity, retaining this constancy by occluding its historical redeterminations in the form of present time; the latter constituting the ow of time and the continuing transformation of work, production, social life, and forms of consciousness. What seems signicant in Postones account is his insistence to call abstract time what others have referred to as space and its capacity to incorporate time.18 For Lefebvre, the advent of modernity, which includes the installation of capitalism, announced the disappearance of time from social space. Lived time forfeits its form of social associations, except for time spent while working. Here, he argues that space subordinates time to itself, as both economics and politics thus seek to expel it as a force that has the capability to threaten political power and the circulation of commodities. Accordingly, this process of spatialization, undoubtedly connected to an incipient capitalism, was, in Hegels account, actually produced by historical time, which the state eventually commanded. Because History failed to realize the archetype of the reasonable subject in the individual, it seized upon institutions,
18. Nikos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: Verso, 2000), 110. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as SPS. Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
groups, and systemslaw, morality, family, the city, tradeto embed time within a rationality immanent with space. Hence, History was transformed from action to memory, production to contemplationand time was hostaged to repetitious circularity, overwhelmed by the establishment of a xed space that becomes the locus and environment of a now realized reason.19 Marx sought to defetishize space and restore time by identifying it with the revolutionary moment, while Lukcs saw space as an instant of reication, a frozen, spatial countenance that a rediscovered sense of timedirected by class consciousnesspromised to break the spell of its spatial primacy. Nietzsche, in turn, promoted the primordiality of space by giving preferentiality to the problematic of circular repetition and simultaneity, an argument later expanded by Heidegger when he posited the unavoidable primordiality of everyday life. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Lefebvre argued, the state was recongured on a world scale, furthering the logic of rationality, which opened up the possibility of transgressiona new negativity, as he put it. But time still remains bonded to the working class and the promise of struggle now focused on bringing about the eventual withering of work. In this connection, Lefebvre offered the category of social space as a product now inseparable from its production, which is never entirely mastered by the forces that have engendered it, because it is lived, in multiple manifestations, before it is conceptualized. The past leaves imprints in this space, which might take the gure of the urban or even the everyday, since time has its own script. What Lefebvre meant is that the historical consequences, the particular etymology of locations in the sense of what happened at a place, and thereby change, is invariably deposited and inscribed in space (PS, 37). And this space is foremost temporal, inasmuch as it is always now and formerly a present space. When social space is envisaged as everydayness, it no longer qualies as a spatial category (even though its specic location lends a spatial dimension to it) but rather assumes the status of a primary temporal categorythe now time, the present, whose apparent even surface is periodically rumpled, unsettled by the recognition of uneven intensities, discordant rhythms, that call attention to moments of difference revealing a societys position in the developmental arc (PS, 65). These rhythms, which Lefebvre classied bodily as instants of eurhythmia, arrhythmia, polyrhythmia, invariably represent those
19. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 21. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as PS. See also Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 2, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 2002), and Rhythmanalysis, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (London: Continuum, 2004).
moments that break the spell of routine to introduce different but coexisting temporalities best exemplied by Blochs recognition of contemporaneous non-contemporaneity, where fragments of the past unexpectedly and suddenly rise up to impinge upon the present. This unevenness, perhaps lived more intensely in the space and time of everydayness, is precisely what the nation seeks to efface through a diversity of devices, beginning with the construction of a national narrative. But its signs are everywhere in the everyday, which, accordingly, houses the multiple rhythms and their different but coexisting temporalities. In this connection, Lefebvre also proposed that the production of space, having attained the conceptual and linguistic level, acts retroactively upon the past, disclosing aspects and moments of it hitherto uncomprehended (PS, 65). The past thus appears not only in a different light but also looms up unpunctually to disturb the images of the process whereby itthe pastbecomes the present. It should be pointed out that Lefebvre was convinced that the law of unevenness was becoming worldwide in its application and was presently dominant in the globalization of the world. While Lefebvre strove to demonstrate the unity of space-time in the new, altered circumstances of late twentieth-century capitalism and tried to restore what capitalism and the advent of modernity had sunderedeven murdered (PS, 96), a unity long misapprehended and superceded by the rash attribution of priority to space over time (PS, 219)Bakhtin reformulated this reunion into a principle for classifying or typologizing literary genre. With the concept of chronotope, Bakhtin was able to offer a powerful way of connecting temporal and spatial into a specic but changing relationship artistically expressed in literature at certain moments in human development. He suggested that even though the process of assimilating real historical time and space is complicated, it was still possible to refract aspects of itthose available in a given historical stage of human development that have been assimilated and match generic techniques devised for such appropriated aspects of reality. 20 Hence, the chronotope represented a formally constituted category that fused spatial and temporal indexes into a unitywhere time, as it were, thickens out, takes on esh, and becomes artistically visible, likewise space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. 21 Without ever saying so or reducing
20. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84. 21. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 84.
the chronotope to prior determinations, it is not difcult to conclude that Bakhtins conceptualization was read off from the modes of production and performed similarly, or at least formed a kinship with them. These generic forms, he wrote, at rst productive, were then reinforced by tradition; in their subsequent development they continued stubbornly to exist, up to and beyond the point at which they had lost any meaning that was productive in actuality. . . . This explains the simultaneous existence in literature of phenomena taken from widely separate periods of time, which greatly complicate the historical-literary process. 22 In a sense, the concept resembles Poulantzass spatial and temporal matrices that characterize precapitalist and capitalist modes of production and their capacity to surpass their generating impulses to be reworked in new and different situations. For Bakhtin, the realist and folkloric chronotopes possessed special meaning. As for the realist chronotope, with its weaving of historical and sociopublic events together with the personal and even deeply private side of life, the socio-quotidian mingles historical sequences with everyday and biographical sequences. Biographical and everyday time are condensed, concentrated, interconnected, merged in unitary markers of the epoch. 23 In the Bakhtinian perspective, the novel ultimately becomes the privileged form of modernity and novelization, in all aspects permeates, and is penetrated by, everyday life in such a way as to become virtually indistinguishable from it, an argument made by the Japanese literary critic Kobayashi Hideo and authors Shiga Naoya and Kikuchi Kan, who, before World War II, described the I novel (shishosetsu) as the meeting of art and life. Hence, the epoch becomes not only graphically visible (space) but narratively manifest (time). For Bakhtin, Balzac actually sees time in space and supplies as proof the authors description of houses as materialized history, of streets, cities, rural landscapes as manifesting how time and history have worked upon them. In Flaubert, he continued, the provincial town is the locus for cyclical everyday time, with no events, no advancing historical movements, and is often used for contrast with temporal sequences that are more charged with eventfulness. What seems important in Bakhtin is the chronotopic unication of a specic space and temporalitya locus, place, and a particular temporality, in the moment of everydaynesswhose combination demands specicity. Neither space nor time is essentialized, as such, or hierarchized but is related in a specic way to constitute a congu22. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 85. 23. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 247.
ration. The folkloric chronotope works comparably to Benjamins conception of remembrance and recalls in the present a consciousness of a preclass agrarian stage and the consciousness of the collective experience of work. Unlike Benjamin, Bakhtin stopped short of showing how this cyclical and repetitive rhythm that constrained times forward movement might be mobilized in a later present, apart from its appropriation in more modern novelistic chronotopes. But his chronotopic observations and their relationship to the production of genre save us from the imperialist effect risked by Franco Morettis spatial and distributional model, since the appearance of new and different generic forms will constitute specic inections of a type to reect when and where the new space-time pattern is established. In this scheme, novel and the replication of a normative model on a global scale are less important than the process of novelization, whereby the form undergoes constant modication and mutation by practices from the received culture to convey the historical difference of a coeval modernizing experience. Finally, with Poulantzas we have the combinatory of the nation-form, as a specic spatial site, and the determinations of the modes of production which signal specic matrices that the categories of space and time will assume. Even though Poulantzas positioned the nation-state as a privileged space, the temporal and spatial matrices it relays are presumably embedded in other social spacesnamely, the everydaybut do not, indeed cannot, completely penetrate and master them. The importance of his account emphasizes how the social formationthe nodal point of expanded reproduction of social relationsintersects the boundaries of the nation-state. Moreover, the very unevenness that has attended capitalism since its inception is now inscribed in the nation-state and acts to orchestrate their inter-relationship (SPS, 95). What he wished to clarify is how capitalism mediates and changes received temporal and spatial meanings, and produces an unevenness that is now one of the historical moments capable of affecting differentiated, classied and distinct spaces called the nation. Like Bakhtins chronotope, meanings are produced with the emergence of a new mode of production that now authorizes changes in the received conceptual matrices of space and time. Hence the modern nation is a product of the state and is assigned to embody precisely all those temporal and spatial matrices it has established as networks of power and domination. In this way, the nation represents the modied constituent elements, such as the economy, territory, and tradition, that state activity has implemented to organize materially social space and time. Capitalist social space, because of the workers separation from the means of labor, is fractured,
serialized, and made irreversible, in contrast to premodern modes of spatial organization. This new spatial conguration xes the boundaries between inside and outside, within which the reproduction of capital takes place. The state acts to monopolize the organization of social space in such a way as to materialize its various apparatusesarmy, school, central bureaucracy, penal systemand thus pattern[s] in turn the subjects over whom it exercises power. While this space splits the labor process into capitalist units of production and reproduction, the particular discontinuous morphology is, in effect, consubstantial with the uneven development in its spatial dimension (SPS, 104). Like space, the new temporal matrix seeks to unify and homogenize as it segments, divides, and makes the movement of time a one-way street, all directed toward the product. One of the seeming paradoxes of both temporal and spatial matrices under capitalism seems to be the persistent segmentation and proliferation of multiple spaces and temporalities that, through the mediation of state and nation, manage to homogenize and even universalize their apparent dissociations. Through the action of diverse state apparatuses, according to Poulantzas, national social formations constitute both the principal roots and focal points (SPS, 106) of the uneven development of capitalism. With the installation of a new temporal matrix, with the production process and expanded reproduction and capital accumulation as its unlimited goals, time is submitted to strict measures of control by means of the clock, calendar, time-study regimes, and the like. Yet such splitting and fragmenting raise anew the problem of unication, which diminishes the differing temporalities by reducing them to simple distances. But signicantly, this temporal matrix, for the rst time, marks out the particular temporalities as different temporalitiesvariations of a single, cumulative, and irreversible time. As a result of this transformation, we have available a conception of time that opens up the possibility of comparability no longer simply rooted in spatial differences between discrete nation-states whose claim to irreducible uniqueness leaves only the recognition of trivial differences as the basis of comparing the incomparable (SPS, 110). Under the circumstance of this unifying impulse, successive moments accumulate and are totalized in such a way as to differentiate the present from what preceded it and what comes after. In Poulantzass view, the unevenness of capitalism peculiar to each formation (obviously referring to Althussers idea of semi-autonomous domains constituting the social formation, i.e., economic, political, ideological) connects with the states temporality, which seeks to unify it and realign the asymmetries produced by
differing (or uneven) and coexisting temporalities. The importance of Poulantzass explanation is not so much his imaginative treatment of nationform and its implied relationship to the commodity and value, which loses its force and risks self-limitation in its desire to privilege the nation-state, but rather the way his decision to combine spatial and temporal matrices of capitalism is able to demonstrate both how the spatial unevenness of diverse spheres of the formation and the respective coexistence of different temporalities constituted a function whose relationship is articulated by the state a relationship between history (time) and territory (space) (SPS, 114). While it was undoubtedly important for him to see how the modern nation supplies the occasion for the intersection of these matricesto produce a historicity of territory and territorialization of a historywe need not restrict this momentous conjunction merely to the nation-state and national history (a social space and narrative time, if I can rephrase Lefebvre, which is thought before it is lived). What, I think, this formulation manages to offer is a grasp of the complex interrelationship between spatial densities and temporal indexes and its possible utility for envisaging a ground of comparability, without reducing one to the other or displacing one by the other. If nothing else, Poulantzas reminds us of how all of these writers were concerned with addressing the complexity of temporal/spatial interactions and the necessity of trying to think through a strategy based on their reunion, in order to counter the specic ideological valence signied by the prominence of space in current discussions. Non-Contemporaneous Rhythms If we can now return to and revisit Andersons identication of the ghostly as the object of comparative study and juxtapose it to those strategies that have sought, as we have seen above, to nd ways to articulate a relationship between time and space, we can see that the spatially contained idea of a spectral vision refers not to the past of the Asian or African (in Andersons case, Southeast Asia) but rather to an original and its reection, a copy, nonetheless, that is a reminder of anothers past and place, not the past or place that is made into its telescoped projection. What Lefebvre, Bakhtin, and Poulantzas have all insisted on is the importance of trying to show how time, usually history, has interacted with a specic space to form an identiable relationship. In Andersons reckoning, there are only spaces distinguished by distance and scale. The consequence of this strategy is to bypass instances in which a specic present animates and conjures up the
past to supply it with a new conguration. What Anderson risks ignoring is the operation of a mutual negotiation between past and present, materialized in the gure of an untimely appearance of the revenant in the present. This ghostly apparition appears less as a repetition of the past than as a reminder of an intention that points to the future. In this way, the appeal to a putative tradition in a specic time and place takes the form of deferred action, reecting a nonlinear conception of lived time in which the past produces itself retroactively in the present. There is, paradoxically, a glimpse of this conception of time and space in the diaries of Soetomo, the turn-ofthe-century Indonesian nationalist, on whom Anderson has written so eloquently, and, of course, in Watsujis double life and its necessary recognition of living in double timecomparativelyin one place, that is to say, unevenly. In other words, there is, I believe, the larger and more important spectrality of societies deeply involved in fashioning a capitalist modernity coeval and coextensive with Euro-America, yet whose difference neither a simple nor mechanical reproduction manages to capture. These experiences dramatize a different kind of haunting and the unscheduled migration of ghosts of what have been past, now forgotten, that will insist on coexisting with the new in the present of everyday life. How could it be otherwise for such societies? Unlike Andersons specters, which behave more like faint shadows and ambiguous silhouettes, these ghosts of a surviving pastthe premodern culture of referencereturn from a place out of time or a different temporality to haunt and disturb the historical present, to trouble the stable boundaries between past and present, subject and object, interior and exterior. This relationship requires a willingness to envision a structure of comparability that recognizes the role played by temporally rooted forms in the present and what Bloch referred to as non-contemporaneous synchronisms, where past and present are not necessarily successive but simultaneously produced, or coexist as uneven temporalities, just as the here and there of modernity are coeval, even though the latter is forgotten in the former. What comparative practice has excluded in its desire to narrativize a cultural aspiration associated with Euro-America is the relationship between its modernity and the modernities of the world outside of it that must share the same ground of temporality and agencies of transformation. This means addressing the question of how our present shows itself to us and nding in it a minimal unity provided by everyday life that has organized and condensed the experience of modernity. But it also invites a further breaking down of this unity represented by the everyday into smaller units,
what Lefebvre once called moments and then later rhythms, reecting strong times and weak times, which return in accordance with a rule of lawlong and short times, recurring in a recognizable way. 24 By doing so, we confront the larger and immanent framework of capitalist modernity and its incessant transformations. Such an approach has the advantage of redirecting our attention to the role of capitalism, instead of a culture of rationality, in its many manifestations throughout the world and the diverse historical routes it has taken; it also avoids displacing it to modernity or repressing it by alerting us to the relationship between lived experiences of everydayness and the regime of the commodity form as the principal structuring agent in the production of contemporary historical formations. Taking this step allows us, moreover, to bypass making the dangerous misrecognition that identies capitalism with universalism, or the triumph of real subsumption. Everydayness, thus, constitutes a social space of unevenness and a cultural form that shares with modernity the experience of capitalism since it is coeval with it; it is also a primary temporal category that signies its broader importance as a specic historical form. With everydayness, there is a social space that is produced, which suggests both a xed space and a temporality implicated in the producing process. Yet if we can represent modernity as the ever new, everydayness then must be seen as the durational present, the site of vast temporal economic and cultural unevenness, incomplete but situated at the intersection of two modes of repetition: the cyclical, which dominates in nature, and the linear, which dominates in the processes known as rational. 25 According to the prewar Japanese thinker Tosaka Jun, everydayness displayed a form of temporalizing that departed from the category of the modern and combined the presentness of the Heideggarian Now with the repetition of pasts. For him, everydayness constituted the domain of a specic spatiotime relationship that behaved very much like the commodity form, inasmuch as it shelters the crystal or germinal kernel of historical time, the mystery of times difference in the repetitive routine and unfolding of one day after another. At one level, everydayness thus served as the intersection of all repetitions both received and recent, past and present, and encompassed the site of recurrences, which means gestures of labor and leisure, mechanical movements both
24. Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 78. 25. Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinowitz (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971), 2425.
human and properly mechanic, hours, days, weeks, months, years, linear and cyclical repetitions. 26 It is also material culture, clothing, especially for Tosaka, life, furniture, houses, neighborhoods, environmentthe solidity of lled space, Heideggers there (Da), the world of the present. This veiled, hidden, fugitive, and shadow existence contrasts sharply with Andersons ghosts, and what he designated as the haunt, the place of comparison, by offering the candidacy of the everyday present as a ground of comparability. Its claims are no less spectral since the shadows of another life constantly act upon and are acted upon by the new, the modern, to produce the narrative effect of a continuing but dappled montage. The modern reveals this everydayness in its immediacy, while this everydayness is constantly mediating the new. Moreover, the everyday, as practically untellable, meets the modern, which now ashes before the present as the endlessly novel, worldly, transitory, and spectacular. In this momentous encounter, the new, now strategically misrepresented as modernity, functions as repetitive gestures masking the regular cycles of everyday as the monotony of everydayness contains the new. Tosaka precisely saw this explosive encounter as one lled with possibility (unintentionally echoing Benjamins conception of actualization), while Lefebvre discerned in the repetitions the place where everything changes. Although the gure of unevenness stands at the heart of everyday life, it is, as Marx observed, the insertion of capitalism into societies at differential moments and different rates of velocity that accounts for the coexistence of different forms of economic and cultural practices. It is possible to agree with Lefebvre and David Harvey that capitalism in the twentieth century has survived principally by necessarily expanding into space, by producing space. But its success has been based upon its capacity to generate vast temporal unevenness along its route, not just between societies but within them. In fact, it would be wrong to overlook the fact that the process of expansion occurred in time. In other words, this spatial movement demands a reconguration of the relationship between time and space in any effort to construct a comparative framework capable of grasping the manifestation of capitalist modernities. Hence, the expansion of capitalism, whether carried on within a national society or overseas, is inextricably linked to the production of unevenness (noted by Lefebvre but articulated earlier by Bloch in the concept of a contemporary non-contemporaneousnessGleichzeitigkeit der Ungleichzeitigen). It seems to me that one of the ways of thinking
26. Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, 2425.
about this new reconguration is to concentrate on how unevenness, the experience expressed paradigmatically in the Blochian idea of contemporary non-contemporaneousness, is actualized in those places and spaces that have committed their resources to the transformations of capitalist modernization. What I want to propose is that the contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous allows us to return to the question of temporality and the temporalization of forms through which it is expressed in those social spaces whose appearance have been spatialized by the capitalist nationstate. Initially resulting from overseas expansion, this sense of a dissonant temporal asymmetry as it is experienced in the everyday supplies a possible suggestion for constructing a comparative framework on a global scale that might account for local differences without exceptionalizing the location of a space as an alternative to a prior, original model.27 The geographic opening of the globe and its subsequent colonization brought the recognition of coexisting cultures that, through a kind of synchronous classication, were ordered diachronicallyto make a civilized Europe appear ahead of an uncivilized Asia and Africa from a backward glance. But if such comparisons promoted the emergence of an experience of a possible world history in terms of development and progress, they also set the stage for reconsidering and reconguring the simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous in such a way as to highlight the production of difference any society would experience in confronting the unevenness caused by the interactions of its past in its present and confronting the odd temporality of a lost but now recovered intention from the past. It was, I believe, precisely this observation that led Bloch to account for the arrival and success of fascism in Germany, even though his analysis never exceeded this cultural and historical horizon or even acknowledged the larger geographical origins of this perception. More signicantly, his unit of analysis for capitalist reproduction and accumulation remained riveted to the nation-state rather than the everydayness of capitalist society. For Bloch, the argument stalled in a comparison of Germany, France, and England, which performed more as alibi than explanation. German capitalism, he was convinced, was hostaged to late development and failed, therefore, to integrate the social, political, and economic realms, thus opening the way to the continuous surfacing of older practices and residual mentalitiesthe non-contemporaneousthat fascism successfully appropriated and Marxism misunderstood, even though he acknowledged the persistence of an unequal rate of development in Germany for a long time.
27. Kosellek, Futures Past, 256.
Yet, by conning this form of temporalizing to Germany, he unintentionally and inadvertently exceptionalized the German experience of modernization (Sonderweg ) (actually inhibiting the possibility of further comparison already pregured in his emphasis on the nation-state, despite the promise of his conceptualization of the non-contemporaneous) and reinforced an argument already made by the fascists he was holding up for derision. On the other side of the world, Tosaka was observing a similar phenomenon in Japan that he called archaism, but he clearly recognized in it merely a local manifestation and variation of a wider experience found throughout the industrializing world of the 1930s. And in Italy, Gramscis theorization of hegemony barely concealed a disguised recognition of the continuing and irresolvable nature of unevenness. If, in any case, the instance of unevenness invariably accompanies the historical spread of capitalism everywhere, it must still continue to occupy a commanding space of experience because it constitutes one of its principal conditions of reproduction. In other words, unevenness is not a developmental stage that eventually is to be overcome but a principal condition that capitalism must constantly produce and reproduce. But when Blochs conception of the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous is coupled with Lefebvres perception of rhythmanalysis of the everyday, we have, I believe, the possible beginnings of a productive way of envisaging comparisons. What I am referring to here is Lefebvres observation of the double measure. Rhythm, he wrote, brings with it a differentiated time, a qualied duration. The same can be said of repetitions, ruptures and resumptions. Therefore a measure, but an internal measure, which distinguishes itself strongly though without separating itself from an external measure, with time (the time of the clock or metronome) consisting in only a quantitative and homogenous parameter. The external measure superimposes itself on the internal measure but can never assimilate it, since they do not share either the same beginning or end. Hence, the double measure enters into the denition and character of a rhythm and, accordingly, is irreducible to a simple determination, implying . . . complex (dialectical) relations. 28 In this scheme, only non-mechanical movements are capable of having rhythm and thus quality, as against the purely quantitative, mechanical, and abstract domain standing apart from it. But everything is grasped symphonically. In this regard, Bloch envisioned a double gesture in the contradictions of the non-contemporaneous contradiction. Thus, he
28. Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 78.
wrote, the contradictory element is here, inwardly or subjectively, a mufed remnant, a non-desire for the Now, and accumulated rage. But corresponding to this is the objectively non-contemporaneous element . . . of older circumstances and forms of production, older superstructures, and that which is distant and alien to the present. Above all, it embraces declining remnants, embodying different temporalities, and, more signicantly, an unrefurbished past that has not yet been resolved in capitalist terms.29 Lefebvre could easily agree with Bloch, as we could, that History is no entity advancing along a single line, in which capitalism . . . as the nal stage, has resolved all the previous ones; but it is a polyrhythmic and multispatial entity, with enough unmastered and as yet by no means revealed and resolved corners. 30 In the 1920s, nevertheless, the Japanese native ethnologist Yanagita Kunio named this combined development he was already recording in Japan as mixed or hybrid civilization, which could be found throughout East Asia, at the same time the Indonesian nationalist Soetomo was acknowledging the constant unevenness of life produced by the interaction of the past with his present. But both could just as easily have been describing that process everywhere by which modernity and everyday life were responding and corresponding to each other. While a focus on the development of uneven temporalities within modernities easily replaces the space occupied by a xed place that still fails to conceal its status as the second term, it also diverts our attention away from the singularity of the nation as such, and its counterclaims to uniqueness, which, it now seems, have all along been trying to bridge the difference between modernity and everyday life. If, in any event, our strategies of comparison are to have any utility at all, they must be embedded in specic temporal and spatial forms, in which social space is lived and experienced to write its own history everywhere, perhaps as a history of dissonant rhythms, as a continuing and never completed conjuration of the past in the present.
29. Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, 108. 30. Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, 62.

Harry Harootunian 2005 - Space Time Problem

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Some Thoughts on Comparability and the Space-Time Problem

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