Wesleyan University

A Note on Braudel's Structure as Duration

Author(s): Ulysses Santamaria and Anne M. Bailey
Reviewed work(s):
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Feb., 1984), pp. 78-83
Published by: Blackwell Publishing for Wesleyan University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2504972 .
Accessed: 22/07/2012 18:31

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Blackwell Publishing and Wesleyan University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to History and Theory.

http://www.jstor.org
 A NOTE ON BRAUDEL'S STRUCTURE AS DURATION

ULYSSES SANTAMARIA and ANNE M. BAILEYt

L'histoire est une dialectique de la duree; par elle, grace a elle, elle est l'6tude du social,
de tout le social, et donc du passe, et donc aussi du present ... [In history and sociology]
le vocabulaire est le mrme, ou devient le mrme, parce que de plus en plus, la proble-
matique est le mrme sous le signe de deux mots victorieux pour l'instant: modcle et
structure.I

In his first major work, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age
of Philip II, published in the same year as Levi-Strauss'sElementary Structures of Kin-
ship (1949), Fernand Braudel took as his object a vast geographical area and treated it
in terms of three time scales: the long term, the conjunctural, and that of events. The
fact that Braudel has, over the years, indicated his particular interest in one of these time
scales, the long term or longue duree, has affected the appreciation of his work by critics
and admirers alike, as well as the future of Annales, the journal founded in 1929 by
Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, in whose footsteps as editor he followed.
If Levi-Straussseeks and finds an epistemological guarantee for the concept of struc-
ture in the human brain, Braudel's adherence to historical time denies the possibility of
ultimate guarantees and of overcoming the epistemological problem of dualism. Al-
though for both Braudel and Levi-Straussthe term structure refers to a key concept, the
epistemological and ontological referents of structures are distinct for these authors.2
For Braudel, unlike Levi-Strauss,structures are very much a part of reality; a structure
is
a reality which can distort the effect of time, changing its scope and speed . . .
[structures] operate simultaneously as a support and an obstacle. As obstacles,
they act as limitations ("envelopes"in the mathematical sense) from which man and
his experiences can never escape.3
In this definition of structure, Braudel has seemingly raised structures to the level of
determinants, if only in a negative way -as limits to human action. Largely concerned
with elucidating the material constraints on human action -"geographical frameworks,
biological facts or barriers to productivity"4- Braudel does not treat structures as only
material, as commonly understood. Mental frameworks, mentalites, are equally to be
considered structures. Conversely, within Braudel's scheme of things, content, for

1. Fernand Braudel, Ecrits sur l'histoire (Paris, 1969), 104, 108.

2. From an "archeological" perspective these terms are contradictory, that is, their abstract
referent conflicts. However, "concepts may contradict each other at the level of meaning while the
way in which they function within the discourse may be perfectly equivalent." (J. C. Guedon,
"Michel Foucault: The Knowledge of Power and the Power of Knowledge,"Bulletin of the History
of Medicine 51 [1977], 258.)
3. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II
[1949] (London, 1972), 18.
4. Braudel, "History and the Social Sciences" in Economy and Society in Early Modern Europe,
ed. P. Burke (New York, 1972), 18.
 BRAUDEL'SSTRUCTUREAS DURATION 79
example, ecological factors, mentalites, or whatever, does not automatically imply a
reality of a certain duration, for "there is a short period for all forms of life, whether
economic, social, literary, institutional, religious, geographical (even a gust of wind, a
storm) or political."5 Structures are defined then first of all by duration and second by
their effects on human action.
An adequate understanding of Braudel's concept of structure requiresat the very least
a summary of his concept of time. Temporality as it specifies structures, conjunctures,
or events is defined by duration, the measurement of which is both "mathematical"and
"intersubjective."The second foundation of Braudel's notion of time is that of simul-
taneity, that is, the combined presence of the past, present, and future in an object of
historical examination.
According to Braudel, the historian's time separates him or her from the sociologists.
Like the structures which constrain human action generally, historical time is a prison
from which the historian cannot escape. This time is continuous and irreversible,it is
duration and measurement.6 Within this "exogenous, imperious time of the world itself"
historians carry out their tasks, fragmenting it, demonstrating continuities and discon-
tinuities, recording the social constructions of time dear to sociologists within it.
Braudel in fact moves from seeing his own fragmentation of duration from being one
of division in the formal or mathematical time to being one of material time. Thus,
while the long term, the conjuncture, and the event can be measured on one scale (of
formal time), "the final effect is to dissect historical time into geographical time, social
time and individual time."8 At first glance, it would appear that Braudel has rein-
troduced content as a means of specifying his threefold division of duration, an idea
which is reinforced by the tripartite division of the Mediterranean into "the role of the
environment," "collective destinies and general trends," and "events, politics and
people." Is it then that content, in practice, if not in theory, specifies duration, as
Braudel has been interpreted as saying by J. H. Hexter9 in the latter's location of the

5. Ibid., 14.
6. It is not possible within the confines of the present work to do justice to the complexity of
the issues involved in the philosophy of time. It is sufficient to mention at this point that Braudel
has sided with H. Bergson over M. Roupnel and G. Bachelard on the question of how time is
grasped. The philosophical controversy is over how the mind grasps time whether as duration or
as "moments." As H. Barreau has put it in his description of the opposition between Bergson and
Bachelard: "Le paradoxe de la philosophic bergsonienne c'6tait que la duree seule y 6tait revetue
de la reality temporelle, l'instant n'6tant qu'une possibility de division abstraite, introduite dans un
temps spatialis6. La philosophic bachelardienne du temps commence avec le paradoxe exactement
inverse: 'Le temps n'a qu'une reality, celle de l'instant,' et la duree apparait alors comme une
continuity imaginaire, construite sur des intervalles de neant." (H. Barrau, "Instant et duree chez
Bachelard" in Bachelard. Colloque de Cerisy [Paris, 1974], 330-331.)
7. Braudel's combined appreciation of the lineal succession and cyclical recurrenceof historical
phenomena parallels the distinction between formal and material time outlined by Nathan Roten-
streich: "irreversibilityis an essential feature of time as time, that is to say of formal time. Yet it
may happen that this feature (as in the concept of corsi and ricorsi as well as Nietzsche's 'doctrine
of eternal recurrence')does not find its complementary expression in the material order of time.
In this case, the formal feature of time does not actualize in experience, as it were, and there is
a gap between the irreversiblenature of time as time and the reversible order of things, looked at
from the material and not formal point of view. . . . Opposed to the difference between formal
and material realization in the historical rhythm is the liberal idea of progress. This idea, con-
sidered from the point of view of its principal trend, suggests an attempt to assume a harmony,
or at least a co-incidence, between the single direction of formal time and the single direction of
the material-meaningful process within time." (Nathan Rotenstreich, Between Past and Present. An
Essay on History (Keele, England, 1973), 65-66.
8. Braudel, Mediterranean, 21.
9. J. H. Hexter, "FernandBraudel and the Monde Braudelien," Journal of Modern History 44
(1972), 480-539.
80 ULYSSESSANTAMARIAand ANNE M. BAILEY
event of The Mediterranean within structural and conjunctural appraisal of Annales
and contemporary historiography?
Braudel, as Hexter points out, is hardly consistent in his position on the relationship
of content to temporality, or in the terms used here, of material and formal time. Thus
while Braudel would probably have little disagreement with a definition of historical
time such as that proposed by Rotenstreich,10his selective incorporation of .economic,
sociological, and anthropological theories in the construction of his tripartite scheme
of duration gives the impression that these divisions are of material time, rather than
segments of formal time that have been superimposed upon one another as an exposi-
tory device.11
Thus, within Braudel's historiography, there is an uneasy juxtaposition of duration,
understood in some formal, mathematical sense as "almost external to man"12and in-
tersubjective time (either of human beings generally or of particular subsets of the
human race, refracted through the theories of other subsets, that is, social scientists and
historians). As Braudel expresses this shifting balance and opposition: "En verit6, il y
a toujours une histoire qui peut s'accorder avec une sociologie-ou a l'inverse, evid&-
ment s'entredevoreravec elle."13From this perspective, the tongue dur&eof Braudel can
accommodate or at least coexist with Lkvi-Strauss'sstructures or mechanical models;
the medium term conjuncture parallels the cyclical ebb and flow rhythms of economic
cycles.14 In effect, within Braudel's analysis, the long term, the conjuncture, and the
event do not fit together easily because of the contradictions between the theoretical
underpinnings of these different durations that are derived from different disciplines
which assume the autonomy of their object. Unlike the purely mathematical measure
of duration, these superimposed theories are not enveloped by one another.
In the case of structures, these theoretical underpinnings of duration are fairly clearly
spelled out. First and foremost is the influence of Durkheimian sociology in the notion
of the exteriority of social facts which constrain and channel human behavior; it is the
exteriority of these facts over long periods of time which accounts for continuity. Here
Braudel follows in the footsteps of Bloch,'5 stressing those factors which inhibit trans-
formations. Further theoretical support for the long term is found in statistical facts:
in price series, in Kondratieff's theory of the long cycles in capitalism, and in demo-
graphy. With the advent of LUvi-Straussianstructuralism, the "unconscious" quality of
these external constraints is recognized.
In contrast to his construction of the long term, Braudel neither seeks nor finds
justification in the social sciences for the short term or event. Social science "virtually
abhors the event" and in the case of sociology "flees either to the perpetually fixed
moment . . . suspended above time, or to the recurrent phenomena that belong to no
single age . . . confining themselves to either the strictest concentration on the event or
to the very long-term."16
Although acknowledging the validity of the short term as a duration for historians

10. "Historical time is material time, conditioned and logically preceded by formal time. This
conditionality means, among other things, that it is neither necessary nor possible to derive the
rhythm of time from the content of time. This rhythm is a part of the very temporality of the
phenomena in regard to which the form of succession and duration is applicable." (Rotenstreich,
73.)
11. Braudel, Mediterranean, 21.
12. Ibid., 36.
13. Braudel, Ecrits sur l'histoire, 99.
14. Braudel, Mediterranean, 899.
15. See R. C. Rhodes, "Emile Durkheim and the Historical Thought of Marc Bloch," Theory
and Society 5 (1978), 45-73.
16. Braudel, "History and the Social Sciences," 15, 38.
 BRAUDEL'S STRUCTURE AS DURATION 81
to study, Braudel leaves its conceptualization to the subjective interpretations of a
period, the short term
as it was felt, described and lived by contemporaries whose lives were as short and
short-sighted as ours.... Resounding events are often only momentary outbursts,
surface manifestations of these larger movements and explicable only in terms of
them. 17
For Braudel, situating the short-term within the longer durations which envelop it
means demonstrating its continuity or logicality within a structure or pinpointing the
position of this event along the cyclical movement of conjunctures. In this scheme of
things, the short term as a present moment is determined by both the past and future
within a totality which encompasses all three states simultaneously.
Braudel's lack of theorization of the short term as a present moment and the relega-
tion of its explanation to structures or conjunctures accounts for a number of failings
or lacunae attributed to the Annales over the past twenty years. Whether the con-
sequence of the longer-term strategies of Annalistes or the political and intellectual
conjuncture of the 1960s and early 1970s, Braudel's "bricolage" of durations reveals a
number of "oversights" in his and Annales historiography.
The first lacuna is the lack of research by Annalistes into contemporary history, and
equally the lack of impact of Annales and Braudelian historiography on the writing of
contemporary history. H. L. Wesseling has suggested that the reasons for this gap lie
in both historiographic trends and in the "essence" of the object of contemporary
history as distinguished from other historical periods.
As Wesseling expresses the first reason,
two historical cultures developed: one contemporary history, mainly descriptive and
oriented toward "&v6nements,"living by the year and by the day, strongly pre-
occupied by politics and ideologies, and revolving around axes such as world wars,
revolution, fascism etc., the other a new historiography, with a broader orientation
and analyzing in depth, with an eye for constants of environment and climate, large
geographical units, economic cycles and social structures and an inclination to the
long term.18

The second explanation for this divergence offered by Wesseling relies on an essential-
ist distinction between the pre-industrial and industrialized worlds. He suggests that
whereas the global history of the pre-industrial world was social history, where war,
revolution, and diplomacy did not essentially affect the slow undercurrents of the long
term, today the history of power is the foundation of global history, since "structures"
are no longer the effects of the limits of man's mastery over nature, but the product of
his almost limitless power over it. No doubt this distinction between the objects of con-
temporary and modern history and those of medieval or ancient history would find
support in the work of certain structural Marxists who have attempted to draw the
distinction between determination and dominance, by virtue of which historical totali-
ties may be differentiated-although they would perhaps place economics rather than
politics at the heart of the modern and contemporary world. In both cases, however,
this structuring of the social totality is unable to bridge the problem of transition.
Wesseling has perhaps inadvertently put his finger on the crucial problem inherent not
only in Braudel's structural history, but on what P. Bourdieu refers to as "objectivism"
current in the social sciences.19 Essentialist distinctions between pre-industrial and

17. Braudel, Mediterranean, 21.

18. H. L. Wesseling, "The Annales School and the Writing of Contemporary History," Review
1 (1978), 191.
19. P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, England, 1977), 26-27.
82 ULYSSESSANTAMARIAand ANNE M. BAILEY
industrial worlds, however, only postpone rather than solve the problem which appears
in Braudel's historiography as the prison-like quality of the exteriority of social facts
and absence of a theorization of the past as a present.
The second and interrelated gap in Annales historiography has perhaps been over-
simply stated as a lack of a theory of social change.
It is . . . striking to note that the history of the Annales is in no way concerned
with a theory of social change or with the shift from one historical model to its
successor. Those who were interested in these problems characteristically looked
elsewhere for their models of analysis, to the very theoreticians so ignored by most
French historiography: Marx for George Lefebvre and especially for Pierre Vilar;
or a Malthus revisited for LeRoy Ladurie (but in the latter case it is the search of
the negation of change).20
For Braudel, change is wrought through human action (intellectual, physical, poli-
tical, and economic) overcoming the limits imposed by structures seen as material and
mental constraints. Furthermore, what Braudel's plural time perspective does provide is
a more sophisticated methodological framework for formulating questions about
change, a framework which avoids lineal assumptions of evolutionary change. The line
of questioning made possible, if not actualized by Braudel, has been summed up by
Wallerstein in the following way: "you take an event and you look underneath it and
see it in terms of the long-term, asking was it epiphenomenal? was it momentary? was
it a kind of a flash? or did it really make a difference?"21
In this sense, Braudel's notion of plural time is a reminder that to speak of change,
any present must be weighed within a retrospectively and prospectively formulated
totality. Braudel's desire, however, to "imprison the event and restrict it to the short-
term"22in order to explain it in terms of longer durations, cannot be shared if one is
weighing change and continuity, for every present is explicable not only in terms of a
past and future which envelop it, but in terms of itself. To speak about change one has
to look "underneath"and "on top" of events, but to explain them one must equally look
"beside" them.
Finally, and despite Braudel's definition of history as a "dialectic of duration," his
historiography of plural time which superimposes durations upon one another restricts
the concept of the dialectic to the relationship between the historian's models and his-
tory as realia, or, as Aymard has expressed it, between the present and the past.23
What is absent in Braudel's historiography by virtue of the formal and material
"envelopment"of the event and conjuncture is the inquiry into the effects of action (over
a medium or short term) on the creation of structures, since there is an equation of the
creation of structures with the tongue dureie.Although Tulio Halperin Donghi's stric-
tures could in fact apply to certain structuralist readings of Marx, he locates the absence
of this sense of the dialectic:
Ces structures dans lesquelles on reconnaft autant de limites a l'action humaine, le
marxiste les consid&e, au contraire, comme autant de creations de cette action:
selon le contexte a la fois ideologique et culturel dans lequel l'historien se place, le
retour a la longue duree peut signifier la poursuite de determinismes extra-histo-

20. J. Revel, "The Annales: Continuities and Discontinuities," Review 1 (1978), 16.
21. I. Wallerstein et al., "Discussion," Review 1 (1978), 98.
22. Braudel, "History and the Social Sciences," 14.
23. N. Aymard, "The Annales and French Historiography (1929-1972)," Journal of European
Economic History 112 (1972), 496-497; see also M. Cedronio, "Profilo delle 'Annales' attraverso
le pagin delle 'Annales,' " in M. Cedronio, F. Diaz, and C. Russon, Storiografiafrancese di ieri et
di oggi (Naples, 1977).
 BRAUDEL'S STRUCTURE AS DURATION 83

riques ou bien une tentative d'61aborationd'une histoire des structures que montre
en elles le fruit de l'action humaine.24

In his search for the structures that envelop the products of short durations, Braudel
neither seeks contradictions within either the long term structures or the outcomes of
shorter durations, nor finds contradictions25 within the three temporalities which he
superimposes on any present moment. Continuity thus is not the working out of con-
tradictions, because "the long run always wins in the end."26
If Levi-Strauss sees structures as products which mimic their producer, the human
mind that exists beyond time or rather is the producer of time, Braudel's structures as
"limits and obstacles" avoid the theorization of their production which is lost in the
ravages of the tongue duree.

Maison des sciences de l'homme

Paris

24. T. Halperin Donghi, "Histoire et tongue dur&e:examen d'un probleme," Cahiers Vilfredo
Pareto 15 (1968), 132.
25. A. Soboul, "Probkmes theoriques de l'histoire de la revolution franqaise" in Aujourd'hui
l'histoire, ed A. Casanova and F. Rincker (Paris, 1974), distinguishes between structural and his-
torical analyses, by virtue of the recognition of contradiction by the latter. H. Lefebvre makes a
similar distinction between historical and structural analyses and argues that within each structure
elaborated on a given level whether viewed historically or in terms of the architecture of society,
"a process of destructuration is at work." (H. Lefebvre, The Explosion: Marxism and the French
Revolution [New York, 1969], 18.)
26. Braudel, Mediterranean, 1244.