Rethinking History

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The politics of time, the politics of history: who are

my contemporaries?

María Inés Mudrovcic

To cite this article: María Inés Mudrovcic (2019) The politics of time, the politics of history: who are
my contemporaries?, Rethinking History, 23:4, 456-473, DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2019.1677295

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2019.1677295

Published online: 27 Nov 2019.

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RETHINKING HISTORY
2019, VOL. 23, NO. 4, 456–473
https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2019.1677295

The politics of time, the politics of history: who are

my contemporaries?
María Inés Mudrovcic
Philosophy, National University of Comahue-IPEHCS-CONICET, Neuquén, Argentina

ABSTRACT
The article focuses on the notion of the ‘politics of time’ from a performative
point of view. I aim to show that periodization is a way we act upon time. The
first part of the article argues that, during the nineteenth century, ‘contempor-
aneity’ began to be understood as ‘sharing the present’. I focus mainly on the
writings of Taine and Tocqueville. I then show the normative presupposition
underlying the ‘contemporaneity/non-contemporaneity issue’. Finally, I explore
its consequences for a Western conception of the present.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 12 March 2018; Accepted 1 October 2019

KEYWORDS Politics of time; contemporaneity; present; temporal distance; temporal otherness

Introduction
On 10 December 2016, the Argentine government created the Ministry of
Modernization, one of the aims of which is to ‘Design, propose and coordinate
the policies of transformation and modernization of the State.’ Its minister said
that the Argentinian government had received an ‘archaic’ state, typical of the
‘nineteenth century’. In an article published by the newspaper El País on
6 April 2017, the English scientist Richard Dawkins openly confesses to the
‘contempt’ that ‘the moral, spiritual, political and intellectual pettiness of
British who voted in favor of Brexit in the referendum’ had provoked in
him. In an attempt at a quasi-Freudian explanation, Dawkins attributes the
pro-Brexit vote cast by those he calls ‘“gerontobrexiters” (hoary Brexiters)’ to
nostalgia for a ‘lost youth.’ In the first edition of Heritage of our Times
(Erbschaft dieser Zeit), published in 1935, Ernst Bloch examines his own
present in Germany. He states that neither the youth of the bourgeois nor
the peasantry are ‘in step with the barren Now’. Youth ‘more easily goes back
than passes through the today in order to reach the tomorrow’, and the
peasantry, still a ‘caste’, are ‘fixed in the ancient soil and in the cycle of the

CONTACT María Inés Mudrovcic mmudrovcic@gmail.com Philosophy, National University of

Comahue-IPEHCS-CONICET, Neuquén 1400, Argentina
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 RETHINKING HISTORY 457

seasons’ (1991 [1932], 97–103). These are but a few examples of what I will call
the ‘politics of time’ in this article.
In his 1962 classic, How to do things with words, J. L. Austin proposes that
the word ‘performative’ indicates that ‘the issuing of the utterance is the
performing of an action – it is not normally thought of as just saying
something’ (1962, 6–7). In line with this idea, I argue that the temporal
distinctions between present, past and future are performative distinctions,
that is, the results of linguistic actions carried out in the present. When we
periodize, we carry out actions that should not be confused with merely
describing what historical time is. When periodizing, we do more than speak
about time: we discriminate, for example, who or what belongs to the past or
to the present. Following Judith Butler´s analysis concerning the phrase
‘words which wound’ used by Mari Matsuda (1997) and Toni Morrison’s
conception of ‘oppressive language’ that performs violence (1993), I will also
address the question of why periodization, mainly in terms of contempor-
aneity, must be viewed as performative speech. Periodization is not merely
a representation of time but an act of language. To be called ‘non-
contemporaneous’ enacts its own type of violence by expelling some com-
munities from the present.
In 1983, the anthropologist Johannes Fabian (1983) tried – through
a linguistic operation that he calls ‘allochronism’ – to show how the ‘other’
is constructed in anthropology. Along the same lines, the philosopher Peter
Osborne (1995) calls the forms of periodization or chronological distinctions
between movements and styles in a culture the ‘politics of historical times’,
which he places in the context of the philosophical literature about time
produced during the period. Chris Lorenz and Berber Bevernage (2013) do
the same in relation to the philosophy and the theory of history in order to
discuss the ways these disciplines ‘negotiate’ between the past, present and
future. Further, in a recently published book, Jacques Le Goff (2016 [2014])
refers to historical periodization as the act of ‘cutting time into slices’. These
operations performed upon time are what I intend with the ‘politics of time’.
Such politics of time are actions upon time, more or less recognized as
such, that construct an ‘other’ by excluding it from the present. That which is
outside the present is commonly called anachronistic. Thus, in Argentina,
the ‘modern’ state stands against the ‘obsolete and archaic’ state inherited
from the past. In the United Kingdom, the political arena simplifies the
results of the Brexit vote generationally by expelling pro-Brexit voters from
the present as ‘old’, nostalgic persons. For Bloch, the peasantry more prop-
erly belong to the past than to the present, modern capitalist world. The
peasants and the petit bourgeois are non-contemporaneous
(‘Ungleichzeitigkeit’) with the present. The obsolete state, nostalgic elderly
persons and the peasantry and petite bourgeoisie are ‘anachronistic’ – they
are outside of the present.
458 M. I. MUDROVCIC

The politics of time qualify the past, the present and the future. A merely
quantitative chronological time that constitutes a disinterested and objective
parameter of human activities is unthinkable. Moreover, even if it was
conceivable, it would be the result of these politics of time. Importantly,
‘politics’ should not here be understood as a synonym for ideology or
political values but in the sense Hayden White gives it in the expression
‘the politics of interpretation’: as ‘a form of authority’ (White 1987, 58) that,
in the specific case of time, determines what or who belongs to the present.
The politics of time consist of a set of operations that, while sanctioning
what is proper or characteristic of the present, constructs an ‘other’, excluding
it diachronically or synchronically from that present. The other is anachronis-
tic. Even if all Brexit voters live in the same chronological present, not all of
them ‘belong’ to it: those who voted in favour of Brexit are the ‘relics of the
past’. Similarly, according to officials of the Argentine government, the current
state structure is not adequate for the ‘modern’ present. Bloch states the issue
directly: ‘not all people exist in the same now’ (1991 [1932], 97). But the
question is, why? What are the conditions that allow for the classification of
historical time in this way? To understand that, I intend to explore why
nothing can be identified as being exclusively ‘of its time.’ I will show how
these politics of time, like all actions, are carried out in the present, leading to
decisions about who inhabits this present, that is, decisions about who my
contemporaries are. The problem is why we discriminate in this way – why do
we create these forms of temporal otherness?
Contemporaneity/non-contemporaneity is not a self-evident issue. In what
follows, I attempt to rethink categories that have long remained untouched in
the fields of theory and philosophy of history. Most theoretical contributions to
the problem of ‘contemporaneity’ and ‘non-contemporaneity’ are found in art
criticism and literary theory. However, even in those contributions the ‘con-
temporary issue’ has not been related to historical time. Expressions such as
‘contemporary art’ or ‘contemporary literature’ take for granted the link to
a present that assumes a linear-chronological conception of time. It was not
until very recently that authors like Amelia Groom (2013) or Burgess and Elias
(2016), the founders of the Association for the Study of Arts of the Present,
challenged these notions of historicism by establishing a connection between
studies of contemporary art and new temporalities.
In this article, I address the idea of the politics of time from a heuristic
perspective, that is, as a tool – a ‘simple’ instrument – that helps us under-
stand the way in which certain linguistic acts in the present (de)construct the
articulations between past and future. When we believe that something that
is chronologically present already belongs to the past, as Bloch stated, or, on
the contrary, when a past seems too present to us, or when we think that the
future is closed or disconnected from the present, an interstice opens up that
allows us to question the experience of the present as ‘naturalized’, ‘given’ or
 RETHINKING HISTORY 459

‘observed’. In this, the notion of the politics of time enables us to question

how we set the boundaries of our present and create forms of temporal
otherness that are alien to mere chronological simultaneity.
First, I aim to show how, in the nineteenth century, contemporaneity began
to be understood as ‘sharing the present’. By this century and in Europe, the
original meaning derived from the Latin term cum tempore – ‘coexisting in the
same time’ – changed. To discuss this, I focus mainly on the writings of
Hippolyte Taine published between 1828 and 1893, and Alexis de Tocqueville
(1856). Second, I aim to show the presuppositions that underlie the experience of
the present as contemporary. I discuss how universal time is ‘spatialized’ in the
adoption of a single global meridian. I argue that the introduction of the norm in
this universal frame of time allows for a distinction to be made between
a quantitative (‘distant’) way and a qualitative (‘backwards’) way of being in
time. The norm is what Kathleen Davis calls ‘a specific position – whether
cultural, geographic, economic, political, or technological’, which is the privi-
leged position ‘from which a “present” is made apprehensible’ (2010, 823). The
norm conflating time and space is a necessary condition for creating contem-
poraneity as a reference time that discriminates synchronically and diachroni-
cally. Finally, I explore some of the consequences of Western culture’s
conception of the present as contemporary.

The present and the contemporary

What is the present? Who inhabits it? Who are my contemporaries? Both
theorists and philosophers of history have increasingly addressed the pro-
blem of historical time. However, the question of what the present is or what
its temporal structure is has rarely been explored (Bevernage 2016).
Although the notion of the present always forms part of the historiographical
task and constitutes a blind spot for history, it began to occupy a central place
only recently, above all in the works François Hartog (2002) and Hans Ulrich
Gumbrecht (2001). Consider, for example, the classic book by Reinhart
Koselleck 2004, Futures Past, in which the two central categories are ‘space
of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectations’ and where the present seems to
be reduced to a simple intersection or articulation between the two without
any density. Past and future have traditionally been the two temporal cate-
gories that have circumscribed history to the detriment of the present.
Time, like Aristotle’s Being, is expressed in many ways, and nineteenth-
century Europeans experienced their own present as contemporary. To be
contemporary was to live in that new present that occurred after the French
Revolution, which was experienced as the time reference from which ‘others’
were differentiated both diachronically and synchronically.
The original Latin term cum tempore (‘contemporary’) came from cum and
tempus, meaning to happen or to live in the same period of time. This is the way
460 M. I. MUDROVCIC

we should understand phrases such as ‘Aristotle was a contemporary of Plato

and Alexander’ or ‘Winston Churchill was a contemporary of Adolf Hitler’. That
is, ‘contemporary’ is an adjective that relates events or persons that occur at the
same time. This sense, which is apparently quasi-chronological to the use of
contemporary as an adjective and is still in use, appears in the French language in
approximately the year 1475 (Rousso 2012, 29). A clear example of this usage is
in the Pensée of Blaise Pascal, where Pascal establishes the epistemological
principle that one should distrust all history that has not been written by those
who were contemporaries to the events narrated (Pascal 1963, 436–628).
However, during the nineteenth century, first in France and then in the rest
of Europe, another way of understanding contemporaneity was consolidated.
The contemporary now qualified the present. That is, contemporaries are those
who share the post-revolutionary present. Contemporary no longer referred
only to a mere temporal synchronization (coexisting in the same time); indeed,
synchronization is limited to the present of the ‘living’ generations that inhab-
ited Europe and North America after the French Revolution.
The French nineteenth century thus defined its present, which it calls
‘contemporary’, by establishing that the Revolution raised a barrier between
the present and what was called the ‘Old Regime’. The expression Ancien
Régime, known by the French revolutionaries and popularized by Alexis de
Tocqueville in The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856) and Hippolyte
Taine in Les origines de la France contemporaire written between 1828 and
1893, designates the ‘Feudal Regime’, a past that, for these authors, was very
close in time but was considered by both to already be entirely gone. For
Tocqueville, the mere act of coining that name opens an ‘abyss’ between the
pre-revolutionary past and its future: ‘The French made, in 1789, the greatest
effort that has been made by a people to tear their history in two parts, so to
speak, and open a gap between their past and their future’ (ii).
The Revolution is what separates the Old Regime from this present that is
conceived as totally different from the past. Contemporary time is that new
present shared by Europeans living after the French Revolution. Tocqueville
expresses this idea clearly: ‘Therefore it seemed to me that the proper way to
study the Revolution was to forget, for a moment, the France before us, to
examine, in its grave, the France that has left’ (1856, ii).
The France that Tocqueville has before him belongs to a present that is
experienced to be different from the past. It is a present that is distinguished
from its past as the living are from the dead – the contemporary present is
shared by the living who look at the dead in the tomb of the past. This past
that is already gone and dead is the feudal past of the Old Regime, which is
‘not very distant, in years, from our eyes, but which the Revolution hides’
(1856, ii). The present of this ‘new society’ (vi) is thus transformed into
a passage between a finished past and a future in which, despite its darkness,
some truths can be discerned.
 RETHINKING HISTORY 461

In Les origines de la France Contemporaine, Hippolyte Taine also

expresses this idea of the novelty with which the present is experienced
and which calls itself contemporary. Written between 1875 and 1893, the
work consists of five volumes organized around three themes: the Old
Regime, the Revolution and the Modern Regime. What is contemporary
(contemporaine) France? Taine asks this question in the preface that precedes
the volume dedicated to a discussion of the Old Regime. For him, it is the
France that has replaced, as an ‘insect’ through its metamorphosis, the old
France with the new one. The ‘new being’, contemporary France, is stable
and complete because

Its ancient organization is dissolved; it tears away its most precious tissues and
falls into convulsions, which seem mortal. Then, after multiplied throes and
a painful lethargy, it re-establishes itself. But its organization is no longer the
same: by silent interior labor a new being is substituted for the old (1986, 13).

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the human body and the
machine were the dominant metaphorical fields for communicating ideas
about political and social structures. During the nineteenth century, the
natural sciences and the natural world became central as metaphorical fields.
Hippolyte Taine’s insect metaphor and Georg W. F. Hegel’s famous meta-
phor of buds in the Preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit are examples of
this shift. Convinced of the benefits of science, Taine was sure ‘the natural
sciences . . . would serve as his model for constructing the laws of human
history’ (Leroux 2017, 22). For Taine, the contemporary present of France
can be understood when one considers chronologically ‘the terrible and
fruitful crisis for which the Old Regime has produced the Revolution, and
the Revolution the current Regime’ (1986, 14). Contemporary France is
transformed into the locus of a temporal continuum that is interpreted as
evolutive through the metaphor of an insect that develops along a linear
representation of time. A double movement occurs: a ‘temporal spatializa-
tion’ when Taine considers ‘backwards’ – the past – the achievements
reached by the French present and a ‘spatial temporalization’ when France
compares itself, from the perspective of political development, with the
nations that it coexists with. Although these nations coexist with France,
they are not all ‘contemporary’ to it; some are ‘more advanced’, others are
‘less developed’: ‘Around it, other nations, some more advanced (précoces),
others less developed (tardives), all with greater caution, some with better
results, attempt similarly a transformation from a feudal to a modern state;
the process takes place everywhere and all but simultaneously’ (13).
First was France, followed by Europe. In other words, that which since
1890 was going to be called ‘the West’ begins to become the temporal standard
by which to ‘measure’ other nations. As a ‘naturalist’ in front of an insect,
Taine explains the present situation that France is in by describing the stages
462 M. I. MUDROVCIC

that, from the Old Regime to the Revolution, have led to the Modern Regime.
He begins with that period that, almost ‘in front of your eyes’, has totally
‘vanished’. For Tocqueville, on the other hand, the Revolution interposes an
insurmountable barrier between the vanished past of the Old Regime and
contemporary France. It is a past that belongs only to the ‘old’ France. Unlike
the unfinished present in which he lives, the past of the Revolution and the old
regime is ‘closed and complete’ (1986, 15). The contemporary present affirms
itself by excluding the past. The dead belong to the past.
This sense of rupture with the past, shared not only by the revolutionaries
but also by the reactionaries, was even realized in the extreme action of
modifying the calendar. This manner of opposition of the ‘contemporary
present’ to the past – a past that the National Assembly of August 1789 voted
‘to destroy completely’ – is entirely new (Hunt 2008, 67). The speed with
which the term contemporary is imposed is, for Koselleck, a clear index of
the epochal consciousness with which time itself was experienced (234).
In this way, the Revolution was experienced as the limit or hinge that
separated the world of the living (the ‘Contemporaries’) from the world of
the dead of the past (the ‘Old Regime’). The moderns, however, experienced
themselves as being in a ‘new time’ and opposed their present to a past that
they considered ‘old’, not ‘gone’ or ‘dead’. The famous quarrel between the
moderns and the ancients that developed at the end of the seventeenth
century and the beginning of the eighteenth clearly expressed this idea.
Even while living in a present much more distant from the past they
polemicized, they did not consider it ‘dead’ but ‘old’. This is the meaning
conveyed in the Dictionary of the French Academy in 1694, which defines the
modern world as ‘new, recent, what belongs to the last time. It is opposed to
old’. Curiously, until the eighth edition of the Dictionary, published between
1932 and 1935, the modern opposes the old, the ancient. Only in the last
edition, the ninth, published in 1986, does there appear an epochal notion
that the term ‘is also used as distinct from the Contemporary.’ The same
applies to contemporary as an adjective (contemporain-aine). In the ninth
edition, it is used to designate the present tense (in the sense expressed by
Tocqueville and Taine). In the previous editions, it appears with its original
meaning of ‘sharing the same time’ (Dictionnaire).

When the norm is introduced into time

In order for nineteenth-century Europeans to be able to experience their
present as contemporary, different elements had to converge. First, time had
to be considered universal; that is, the notion had to be conceived that
everyone on Earth is traversing a single chronological scheme that is linear.
This idea of chronological universality has its origin in the eighteenth
century, when Isaac Newton defined absolute time as the only ‘true and
 RETHINKING HISTORY 463

mathematical’ time that ‘flows uniformly unrelated to any external thing.’

This universal, linear, chronologically and geographically measurable time is
distinguished, for example, from both Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet’s universal
time as the sum of parts and the universal as a system in Immanuel Kant’s
world history.
In the ‘Avant-Propos’ of his Discours, Bossuet affirms that just as a general
map is related to particular maps, the same principle governs the relationship
between universal history and the history of each country and of each people
(1996 [1681], 40). The universality of time in history is conceived through
the metaphor of totality and particularity. As it is generally applicable to
a large number of cases, different time schedules can coexist. Indeed, when
Bossuet wants to date the completion of the Temple of Solomon, he men-
tions the ‘3000 years of the world, 488 since the departure from Egypt and, to
adjust the times of the holy history with those of the profane, the 180 from
the taking of Troy’ (58). Universal sacred time does not imply the adoption
of a single universal chronology. For Bossuet, two contemporaries (in the
original Latin sense of cum tempore) do not necessarily live in the same time.
When referring to ‘medieval worlds’, Alain de Libera clearly expressed this
idea when he stated that ‘the Baghdad of the third century of the Hegira and
the Aix of the ninth century of the Christian era are contemporaries, but they
are neither in the same time nor in the same world or in the same story’. For
the historian of medieval philosophy, there is ‘a multiplicity of durations:
a Latin duration, a Greek duration, an Arab-Muslim duration, a Jewish
duration’ (2000, 15–16). Each cultural world has its own peculiar time.
A multiplicity of times coexisted in Medieval Europe that also coexisted
with the peculiar times of American or African peoples with whom they had
no interaction.
In the same vein, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen suggests that rethinking tempor-
ality itself from a postcolonial perspective would allow us to avoid character-
izing the Middle Ages as a ‘field of undifferentiated otherness against which
Modernity emerged’ (2001, 4). This would allow for Medievalists to

displace the domination of Christianity . . . that means more work not only on
Islamic, Jewish, and other non-Christian cultures, both in their relationship to
Christianity . . . but also jettisoning of progress narratives that speak of ‘pre-
Christian’ eras and ‘the triumph of Christianity’ (7).

Kathleen Davis’ critique of Reinhart Koselleck’s characterization of the Middle

Ages points to the same issue. Koselleck’s analysis of Albrecht Altdorfer’s
famous Alexanderschlacht exemplifies for Davis the linear and erroneous
reading that Koselleck proposes of the ‘premodern age’ with its ‘untempor-
alized sense of time and lack of historical consciousness’ (2004, 51–63).
The absence of a single chronological schema is also present in the
conception of universal history explored by Immanuel Kant in 1784 in
464 M. I. MUDROVCIC

Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose. The universal is

the plan or system of nature that unfolds systematically at different times or
stages, and the philosopher discovers it in the multiplicity of absurdities of
human things (1970, 41–53). Although Kant does not explain it, this idea of
the universal can also coexist in multiple temporal forms in different
cultures.
However, the contemporary present experienced by the nineteenth-century
experiences presupposes a universal time that is incompatible with the coex-
istence of other possible temporal frames. The contemporary present is trans-
formed into the ‘now’ of a single time frame in which all events acquire
a position. The temporal continuum can travel from the past to the present
or from the present to the past. Although Isaac Newton’s concept of absolute
time as ‘a time that is universal, continuous, and completely without depen-
dence of any natural regularity’ (Wilcox 1987, 16–17) has existed in the West
from the seventeenth century, it was necessary to conceive of it as crossing all
the regions of our planet. This idea took concrete form in 1884 in Washington
D.C. during ‘The International Meridian Conference’, attended by 41 delegates
from 24 nations: the ‘geographical world’ was divided into 24 time zones, and
the first meridian was assigned to Greenwich (England). Among the many
principles of the Conference, it was established that ‘it was desirable to adopt
a single global meridian to replace the many that coexist and that all countries
should adopt a universal day’ (Meridian Conference 1884). Universal time was
‘spatialized’, encompassing the entire planet. Even though not all countries
accepted it, this resulting in a power struggle between countries to impose
a unique timeframe (Hunt 2013, 205), the introduction of a chronological
standard for the entire world was a condition not only for the possibility of
creating a single ‘path’ from and to the present but also for conceiving a shared
universal temporal simultaneity. The metaphor of ‘temporal distance’ could
thus be conceived in quantitative terms, as when we say that the past ‘moves
away’ from the present. Chris Lorenz (2014, 46) expresses this idea of quanti-
tative temporal distance in relation to history well:

Historians presuppose that the past ‘goes away’ and is thus distant and absent
from the present. In other words: Historians presuppose that the hot present
‘cools off’ and transforms in a cold past by itself. It is the process in which both
the interests and the passions of the Zeitzeugen (eyewitnesses) literally die out,
and the ‘distant’ professional historians take over, armed with their critical
methods and their ‘impartial’ striving for ‘objectivity’.

The relation that the historian establishes between the ‘distant’ past and objec-
tivity presupposes that the metaphor of temporal distance is understood quanti-
tatively. The adoption of a universal geographical time does not necessarily
require denial of the plurality of different times. Universal geographical time
can coexist with a plurality of peculiar cultural times. One can measure the
 RETHINKING HISTORY 465

distance quantitatively between the ‘now’ of the historian and the past in relation
to the universal geographical time, with this time being independent from all
cultural times. However, when the global meridian was adopted, the Western B.
C./A.D. dating system and Newtonian absolute time were imposed all over the
world: ‘The same dating system can locate such . . . events as the battle of
Marathon, the period when people first engaged in agriculture, and even the
time when life on the earth began’ (Wilcox 1987, 7).
Second, if time is conceived as linear and universal, the temporal determina-
tion of a ‘contemporary present’ must be realized in relation to the totality of the
temporal continuum itself. Organizing epochs by means of dynastic succession
or by considering, for example, metals or sacred books, means determining time
by means of qualities that express the characteristics of a period and that in no
way depend on a single temporal scheme. The perfection of the arts and the
‘greatness’ of the human spirit are qualities that allow François-Marie Voltaire
(1954 [1751], 7) to select only ‘four centuries in the history of the world’, among
which the century of Louis XIV is the ‘happiest’ of all. For Voltaire, the century of
Louis XIV is the ‘most enlightened that ever existed.’ The characteristic ‘perfec-
tion of the arts and greatness of the human spirit’ are what determine for Voltaire
the selection of these centuries and not others. If the temporal determination is
different, for example, separated by dynasties or the ‘barbarism of the peoples’,
then the selection of times or periods would also change. As Donald J. Wilcox
states, ‘events created their own time frames. Before locating an event in time, the
historian had to make judgements about its meaning and its thematic relation to
other events’ (1987, 9). In contrast, ‘contemporaneity’ is a peculiarity that the
Europeans themselves experience when they put themselves in relation to
a temporary frame, from which they determine a past that is gone and dead
and experience their present as a ‘new time’. Temporal determination is not
independent of the temporal continuum. The novelty of the contemporary can
only be experienced as such when it is related to other periods that precede it and
from which it differs. Contemporaneity, when transformed into a concept of
epoch, presupposes a universal linear temporal matrix in which it is positioned as
the last of the periods. In contrast, the ‘Age of Louis XIV’ in Voltaire’s sense, for
example, is a unit in itself; when characterizing this period, it is not necessary to
take into account either the past (the century of ‘Philip and Alexander’ or ‘Caesar
and Augusto’) or the future. The contemporary present necessarily discriminates
the ‘before’ and the ‘after’; that is, it discriminates diachronically. The presuppo-
sition of the universality of time and that of temporal determination ‘spatialize’
time in a before and an after. The past of the dead is ‘behind’ the contemporary
present.
However, if we consider the universal geographical linear time matrix, not all
those that coexist or live simultaneously with the Europeans of the nineteenth
century are their contemporaries. Contemporaneity is defined not only in
relation to the universal temporal continuum of before and after but also
466 M. I. MUDROVCIC

through a third conceptualization. It discriminates in the same present: not

everything coexisting in the present is contemporary. Not every coeval shares the
same chronological present. Being contemporary in the nineteenth century
means belonging to a homogeneous class whose characteristic is to have left
behind a feudal past. Contemporaries are those who inhabit the modern state.
The modern state is the political norm that allows discrimination of ‘others’ in
the present and in the past. The ‘others’ are those who live under other political
norms (‘primitives’ or Ernst Bloch’s peasants, for example.).
Taking the modern state as the norm allows a further discrimination,
however: a retrospective one. The past belongs only to the dead who have
contributed to reaching the modern state. That is why there are peoples
‘without history’; although these peoples inhabited the past, their past has not
contributed to reaching the contemporary present.
The other nations that coexisted with or were chronologically simulta-
neous to France and the Europe of the nineteenth century, that is, the ‘West’,
may not have been their contemporaries. In the nineteenth century, being
‘contemporary’ and being ‘Western’ were two sides of the same coin (the
chronopolitical and the geopolitical). As Taine clearly states, even though the
emergence of the modern state is almost universal and simultaneous, there
are peoples who are ‘less developed’ because they have not abandoned the
feudal form of government. Contemporaneity not only reconfigures the past,
expelling it backwards as ‘feudal and dead’ (diachronic discrimination), but
also reconfigures the present by differentiating between those who are not
my contemporaries due to their not sharing the same political-cultural norm
(synchronic discrimination). Not all those who live in the same time, who are
coevals, are contemporaries. A political norm is introduced into a universal
geographical timeframe. Vital simultaneity or temporal coevality does not
guarantee political-cultural contemporaneity. The introduction of a political
norm into linear, geographical and universal time necessarily produces
a qualitative desynchronization.
The epochal experience of contemporaneity was born in the nineteenth
century from the exclusion of those who do not share the same political
present. Exclusion occurs necessarily because contemporaneity not only
creates a temporal relationship but also results in a normative decision,
a politics of time. Anachronism guides this action of exclusion that takes
place in the contemporary present and generates a qualitative temporal
alterity. The introduction of the norm serves to distinguish between all
coevals, that is, among contemporaries and non-contemporaries who live
simultaneously in the chronological present, and serves to discriminate
synchronously. The ‘modern state’ of the nineteenth century is the normative
reference that distinguishes contemporaries from ‘others’. Likewise, since all
exist in a single universal, geographical and linear temporal matrix, the
position occupied on the ‘spectrum’ is conceived of in terms of ‘distance’:
 RETHINKING HISTORY 467

the ‘others’ are more or less ‘backward’ (the Rest) in relation to the modern
contemporary state (the West). Sebastian Conrad expresses this spatial
metaphor qualitatively with reference to post-war Japan:
Japan and Europe differed not in terms of achievement but in terms of time. There
was nothing paradoxical, therefore, when Otsuka compared postwar Japan to
English society in the sixteenth century . . . In a sense, the Japan in 1945 was
behind by three to four centuries. This topos of ‘backwardness’ (in the temporal
sense) was almost ubiquitous in historical discourse of postwar Japan (1999, 74).

The metaphor of qualitative temporal distance (being older or living in an

earlier phase) is only possible when a norm is transformed on the basis of
a foundation or reference to a universal geographical temporal matrix. The
quantitative temporal distance (being distant or near in time) and the
qualitative temporal distance (being ‘backward’ in relation to the norm)
are only possible with the adoption of a unique universal time scheme into
which the norm is introduced. Only the norm can transform human time
into a reference time. Time and space conflate with the norm.
The contemporary present excludes the past as ‘other’: the ‘historical past’ is
the result of this diachronic anachronistic operation. However, the contempor-
ary present also excludes ‘others’ who live in the same chronological present:
non-contemporaries are the ‘others’ in this synchronic anachronistic operation.

The disciplines of the anachronistic: the dead and the savages

The contemporary present distinguishes and separates itself not only from the
past but also from those others who, living in the present, do not share the same
political stage. Anthropology and history were established as knowledge fields at
the end of the eighteenth century and became ‘professionalized’ during the
nineteenth century. The contemporary present creates two types of temporal
alterity, to which correspond two genres of knowledge with their respective
objects. The savage is the one who is not only geographically outside of
Western Europe but also lags in time; he is not a contemporary, but
a primitive. The distance between the primitive savage and the contemporary
civilized person is bridged by anthropology. Johannes Fabian (1983) performed
valuable work on this subject. History, for its part, builds a bridge between the
dead and a present that is understood as new.
Historical knowledge is based on the difference that the present establishes
with the past. Insofar as the past is the ‘other’ of the present, access to it must
change. Traces that become sources replace testimony and oral tradition, which
are examples of immediate knowledge (Rousso 2012, 47). The distinction that
the contemporary present makes with the past has the same consequence that
astronomy had on the conception of science during the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries. That the earth moves or that the sun has spots is not knowledge
468 M. I. MUDROVCIC

that we can acquire directly. We can access these ‘truths’ of the world only
through calculations, measurements or instruments. The ‘real’ world is alien to
our senses, to all immediate knowledge. Nature is inaccessible to direct observa-
tion. The same occurs with the past. When excluded from the present, the past
cannot be known directly. The eyewitness loses the relevance he had for
Herodotus. Yet, until modernity, the present did not differ from the past.
Historians derived their demarcation from their own subjectivity: ‘meanwhile’,
‘in my time’, ‘before’, and so on. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the
historian’s perspective of the past became independent of the perspective of
those who lived in that time. The past is so other to the present that it is accessible
only through sources.
As Hannah Arendt notes, the two Greek words istoría and eidenai, meaning
‘to know’, derive from the root íd, ‘to see’, and istor originally meant ‘eyewitness’.
That is why historien has the double meaning of ‘giving testimony’ and ‘inves-
tigating’. Herodotus used the term in its dual sense, as testimony and investiga-
tion. Testimony implied true affirmations about the facts that had been
contemplated and was established as a guarantee of ‘what happened’, helping
to distinguish history from myth. At the end of the seventeenth century, when
the distinction between ‘primary evidence’ and ‘secondary evidence’ was firmly
established by antiquarians, testimony – redefined as ‘primary’ or ‘original’
evidence – lost its status as guarantor of the real past (Mudrovcic 2007). In
effect, the sayings of a witness are transformed into ‘original evidence’ of the past
when the historian can establish the truth of what is affirmed through other
methods. Testimony alone is not a guarantee of what occurred; rather, it is the
historian who gives it that stature, transforming it into evidence or evidence of
the past. In the nineteenth century, this distinction between primary and
secondary evidence disappears, leaving only the concept of historical evidence
as ‘existing vestiges of past situations once present but now forever gone’ (Ritter
1986, 144). The past thus shows all its otherness with the present and can only be
recovered through these traces: ‘the facts of the past can only be known through
the traces that have been preserved.’ The past thus reconstructed is the historical
past, the counterpart of the contemporary present. Just as the ‘real’ world is not
accessible to us except through science, the same occurs with the past. The
notion of the objectivity principle of history rests on this distinction between past
and present. Only from the past can the historian purport to have objective
knowledge, and for this reason, he must separate himself from his own con-
temporaneity. His own present is deceptive and unsafe for the historian. The
present is the scope of action, of politics: ‘The look that we have on present issues
is always concerned with our personal interests, prejudices or passions . . . But if
our regard is on the past, our look is calmer and more secure’ (Fustel de
Coulanges 1983 [1893], XV). History excludes itself from the study of the
contemporary present, leaving this field to anthropology, sociology and
journalism.
 RETHINKING HISTORY 469

Conclusion
J. L. Austin distinguishes the locutionary act from the illocutionary act. The act
of saying something is different from the act carried out while saying something
which organizes or classifies time, that is, if I say, ‘these are my contemporaries’,
in that moment I am discriminating against those ‘others’ who either belong to
the past or who are not perceived as my contemporaries, even though they share
my chronological present. Finally, Austin also identifies the perlocutionary act,
that is, the act carried out because something is said: those who are not
considered to be ‘contemporaries’ may feel ashamed for not being so, or further
actions may be taken so non-contemporaries may become contemporaneous,
and so on. By analysing the phrase ‘words which wound’ used by Mari Matsuda
et al. (1993) from Austin’s point of view, Judith Butler states that speech acts do
what they say on the occasion of the saying: ‘[they] work to the extent that they
are given in the form of a ritual, that is, repeated in time . . . the illocutionary
speech act performs its deed at the moment of the utterance’ (1997, 3). When we
address someone as non-contemporaneous we are expelling him/her from the
present, and non-contemporary people suffer temporal disorientation. In
Butler’s words: ‘Exposed at the moment of such a shattering is precisely the
volatility of one’s “place” within the community . . . such a place may be no place’
(3). In the same vein, Toni Morrison refers to ‘oppressive language’ in her 1993
Nobel Prize speech. Such a language ‘does more than represent violence; it is
violence” (1993, 16). Periodization is not merely a representation of time; it is
doing things with time. In terms of the ‘contemporary/non-contemporary’
binary, periodization constitutes an injurious linguistic act.
In 2006, History & Theory published a special issue on presence in which
many authors address the past as presence, as a past available to us. These can
be considered another example of how to act upon time by blurring and
shaking off the linearity of time. Dealing with the ‘contemporary/non-
contemporary issue’ is another way to deal with the question that Dipesh
Chakrabarty posed in his article ‘Where is the now?’ (2004). The ‘contempor-
ary’ is a way to imagine the ‘now’ through a Eurocentric lens. Hegemonic
values are presupposed in the temporal ‘toolbox’ that ‘contemporaneity’ uses to
organize time. ‘Non-contemporaneous people’ are, then, those who do not
satisfy the norm mostly because they are not citizens of a Western modern
state, this being the main reason for being expelled from the present. Such an
act constitutes negative discrimination.
Why are peasants who live in the same chronological present as other
citizens ejected to the past? To say, as Ernst Bloch states, that ‘they carry an
earlier element with them’ is to link them to a chronological line while
locating them ‘backwards’ to a present which is supposed to be ‘forward’.
Historicism is the serpent’s egg. The challenge is to think in ‘the synchroni-
city of the asynchronous,’ without any norm, only attending to the plurality
470 M. I. MUDROVCIC

of cultural times. Only in this way will we be able to access a non-

discriminatory globalized time that we truly need.
Both meanings of the contemporary have been preserved in the present: that
derived from the Latin term (‘coexist in the same time’) and that born in the
nineteenth century (‘share the same present’). As Berber Bevernage (2016) stated
in an article recently published in this journal, the idea of the contemporaneity of
the historical present is neither natural nor an ‘undeniable given’ but a ‘social-
cultural construct’ because, it must be added, we act upon time. My objective in
this article was to show that this social-cultural concept, in its second meaning, is
the result of a certain politics of time, that is, that being contemporary is the
result of actions taken in the present that exclude others from it.
It does not matter if the ‘other’ coexists in the same chronological present
(the first meaning of the contemporary), because the ‘other’ does not belong
to or share my present – mainly because a political norm is introduced into
a universal time frame that was spatialized in adopting a single global
meridian. Taken together, these acts – these politics of time – produce or
perform a temporal otherness. These assumptions are rarely taken into
account, but they are part of our experience of life. They allow us to under-
stand that for the current Argentinian government, the state is obsolete, or
that those who voted in favour of Brexit or the peasantry and petite bour-
geoisie of Bloch do not belong to the present.
The discomfort felt by Johannes Fabian (1983) when he notes that the
anthropologist, in using terms such as primitive or savage, denies other cultures
the sociocultural contemporaneity of the anthropologist, is not solved by recog-
nizing a ‘shared intersubjective Time’. Even if, for technological and practical
reasons, daily life in this globalized world led to the adoption of a world
chronology, recognizing a heterogeneous temporality for cultural reasons
would have been possible. We can imagine a universal chronological time
disconnected from multiple cultural times. The problem arises when
a normative dimension – more appropriate to cultural worlds – is introduced
into this universal frame of geographical time. It is at this point that those who
share the norm distinguish themselves from ‘others’. The value or norm can be
the ‘modern state’ (as it was in the nineteenth century), ‘secularism’, ‘democracy’
(whatever is understood by that word) or simply ‘being white’ (otherwise, it does
not make sense why the culture of Argentine Mapuche citizens or the burka of
French Muslim citizens, for example, are considered ‘backwards’). Being con-
temporaneous is not something that has to do merely with the sharing of
a present time; it is also related to a sharing of norms that are considered better
than those of the ‘other’ who coexist in the present in a ‘pretend’ universal time
that marks the same hours for everyone who inhabits the earth.
I agree with Ewa Domanska (2010) and Zoltan B. Simon (2019) that
theories of history have to address ‘the global problems of our own times’
(Simon 2019, 65). A theory of history that tries to deal with the present,
 RETHINKING HISTORY 471

rethinking categories that help us ‘to live together in conflict’ (Domanska

2010, 126) without introducing categories that divide us further, is a task
worth undertaking. We have naturalized categories such as the ‘contempor-
ary’ and ‘contemporaneity’ without attending to their underlying normative
pre-suppositions. A good intellectual endeavour would involve unmasking
the historicism of such categories as well as the hegemonic locus from where
they are pronounced. They arrange time in boxes that are not for everyone.

Acknowledgments
I am grateful for the various insightful and exacting comments on an earlier version of
this article by Kalle Pihlainen, editor of Rethinking History. My thanks also to the
anonymous referees of this journal and María Inés La Greca who helped me with the
translation. The first version of this text was a lecture given at the Conference ‘IV
Congreso Internacional de Filosofía de la Historia’ at the Buenos Aires University
(UBA) on 8 November 2017, published in Spanish in ArtCultura vol. 20 (2018), no.
36: 7–14.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
This work was supported by the CONICET; National University of Comahue.

Notes on contributor
María Inés Mudrovcic is Titular Professor of Philosophy of History in the
Department of History and Philosophy at the University of Comahue (Argentina).
She is the Director of the Research Centre of Philosophy of Social Sciences and
Humanities and a Full Member of the Council of the Patagonian Research Institute
of Humanities and Social Sciences, National University of Comahue and Principal
Researcher for CONICET (National Council of Scientific and Technological Studies).
She has published Voltaire, el Iluminismo y la Historia (Buenos Aires: Fundec, 1996),
Historia, Narración y Memoria. Los debates actuales en filosofía de la historia
(Madrid: Akal, 2005), and edited Pasados recientes en conflicto. Representación,
mito y política (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2009) and co-edited En busca del tiempo
pasado. Temporalidad, historia y memoria (México: Siglo XXI, 2013). She has written
a variety of articles in different journals of philosophy and theory of history.

ORCID
María Inés Mudrovcic http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4563-0108
472 M. I. MUDROVCIC

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