Some thoughts on comparability and the space-time problem

Boundary 2

Volumn 32, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 23-52

  Harootunian, Harry ^a  

^a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33745201461     PISSN: 01903659     EISSN: 15272141     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01903659-32-2-23     Document Type: Article

References (26)

1. Justin Rosenberg, The Follies of Globalization (London: Verso, 2000), 1
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."
3. See Reinhard Kosellek, The Practice of Conceptual History, trans. Todd Samuel Presner and others (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 6-7. 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 abovex suggests, more spatial than temporal, inasmuch as a completed past is fixed to a particular geographical place
4. See Harry Harootunian, "Shadowing the Past: National History and the Persistence of the Everyday," Cultural Studies 18, no. 2/3 (March/May 2004): 181-200
5. Kosellek, Futures Past, 247
6. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983)
7. Fabian, Time and the Other, 16-17
8. Fredric Jameson, "The End of Temporality," Critical Inquiry 29, no. 4 (Summer 2003): 695-718. It is hard not to conclude that Jameson, equating time with modernism, and space with postmodernism, is still trying to find a place for the latter in his scheme of periodization. In this scheme, modernism represents a "culture of incomplete modernization," whereas the postmodern signifies 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
9. Neil Lazarus, "Hating Tradition Properly," in Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 28
10. Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for 'Indian' Pasts?" in A Subaltern Reader, 1986-1995, ed. Ranajit Guha (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 267
11. Chakrabarty, "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History," 283
12. See Partha Chatterjee, Fragments of the Nation and Its Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 5
13. Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparison: Politics, Culture, and the Nation (London: Verso, 1998), 6
14. Marcel Détienne, Comparer l'incomparable (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2000), 9-11
15. see also François Hartog, Regimes d'historicité (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2003), 54ff
16. Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 296
17. Nikos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: Verso, 2000), 110
18. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as SPS. Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
19. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 21. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as PS
20. See also Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 2, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 2002)
21. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84
22. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 84
23. Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 78
24. Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinowitz (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971), 24-25
25. Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, 24-25
26. Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, 108