A small bright sparkle at the end of time

With your arms spread wide again to represent all time on earth, look at one hand with its line of life. The Cambrian begins in the wrist, and the Permian Extinction is at the outer end of the palm. All of the Cenozoic is in a fingerprint, and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history. Geologists live with the geologic scale. Individually, they may or may not be alarmed by the rate of exploitation of the things they discover, but, like the environmentalists, they use these repetitive analogies to place the human record in perspective – to see the Age of Reflection, the last few thousand years, as a small bright sparkle at the end of time.

 

John McPhee, Annals of the Former World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000) p. 89

The book of events

Every beginning
is only a sequel after all,
and the book of events
is always open halfway through.

Wislawa Szymborska, 'Love at First Sight' in View with a Grain of Sand (faber & faber, 1995) p. 198

Forests reign in the past

Who knows the temporal dimensions of the forest? History is not enough. We should have to know how the forest experiences its great age; why, in the reign of the imagination, there are no young forests. [...] In the vast world of the non-I, the non-I of fields is not the same as the non-I of forests. The forest is a before-me, before-us, whereas for fields and meadows, my dreams and recollections accompany all the different phases of tilling and harvesting. When the dialectics of the I and the non-I grow more flexible, I feel that fields and meadows are with me, in the with-me, with-us. But forests reign in the past.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) p. 188

The spirit of things

I believe in the things that were done, and there are evidences of many things done on Mars. There are streets and houses, and there are books, I imagine, and big canals and clocks and places for stabling, if not horses, well, then some domestic animal, perhaps with twelve legs, who knows? Everywhere I look I see things that were used. They were touched and handled for centuries.

Ask me, then, if I believe in the spirit of the things as they were used, and I’ll say yes. They’re all here. All the things which had uses. All the mountains which had names. And we’ll never be able to use them without feeling uncomfortable. And somehow the mountains will never sound right to us; we’ll give them new names, but the old names are there, somewhere in time, and the mountains were shaped and seen under those names. The names we’ll give to the canals and mountains and cities will fall like so much water on the back of a mallard. No matter how we touch Mars, we’ll never touch it. And then we’ll get mad at it, and you know what we’ll do? We’ll rip it up, rip the skin off, and change it to fit ourselves.

Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (HarperCollins, 1995) p. 9x

The probability of the actual is absolute

You call forth the world which God has formed and that world only. Nor is this life of yours by which you set such store your doing, however you may choose to tell it. Its shape was forced in the void at the onset and all talk of what might otherwise have been is senseless for there is no otherwise. Of what could it be made? Where be hid? Or how make its appearance? The probability of the actual is absolute. That we have no power to guess it beforehand makes it no less certain. That we may imagine alternate histories means nothing at all.

[...]

Our decision do not have some alternative. We may contemplate a choice but we pursue one path only. The low of the world is composed of its entires, but it cannot be divided back into them. And at some point this log must outdistance any possible description of it and this I believe is what the dreamer saw. For as the power to speak of the world recedes from us so also must the story of the world lose its thread and therefore its authority. The world to come must be composed of what is past. No other material is at hand.

Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain (Picador, 2011) pp. 287-288

The world is always new

"The world is always new," said Coro Mean, "however old its roots."

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest (The Orion Publishing Group, 2015) p. 32

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning

I have no quarrel with the student of history who brings to his work a touchingly childish, innocent faith in the power of our minds and our methods to order reality; but first and foremost h must respect the incomprehensible truth, reality, and uniqueness of events. Studying history, my friend, is no joke and no irresponsible game. To study history on must know in advance that one is attempting something fundamentally impossible, yet necessary and highly important. To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.

Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (Penguin Books, 1985) p. 159

History's third dimension is always fiction

We must not forget that the writing of history – however dryly it is done and however sincere the desire for objectivity – remains literature. History's third dimension is always fiction.

Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (Penguin Books, 1985) p. 47

Mynt ≠ Allmän ekvivalens

Att mynt har cirkulerat i ett samhälle kan konstateras empiriskt, men detta är inte tillräckligt för att dra slutsatsen att samhällets invånare var marknadsaktörer som resonerade i termer av allmän ekvivalens.

Rasmus Fleischer, 'Kan Pengar Fördelas?' on RasmusFleischer, https://www.rasmusfleischer.se/2016/09/kan-pengar-fordelas/ (09/2016) 

The current destruction of the city

Universal history was born in cities, and it reached maturity with the city's decisive victory over the country. For Marx, one of the greatest merits of the bourgeoisie as a revolutionary class was the fact that it "subjected the country to the city," whose "very air is liberating." but if the history of the city is a history of freedom, it is also a history of tyranny – a history of state administrations controlling not only the countryside but the cities themselves. The city has served as the historical battleground for the struggle for freedom without yet having been able to win it. The city is the focal point of history because it embodies both a concentration of social power, which is what makes historical enterprises possible, and a consciousness of the past. The current destruction of the city is thus merely one more reflection of humanity's failure, thus far, to subordinate the economy to historical consciousness; of society's failure to unify itself by reappropriating the powers that have been alienated from it.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Soul Bay Press, 2012) pp. 125-126

An intrahistorical rejection of history

With the development of capitalism, irreversible time has become globally unified. Universal history becomes a reality because the entire world is brought under the sway of this time's development. But this history that us everywhere simultaneously the same is as yet nothing but an intrahistorical rejection of history. What appears the world over as the same day is merely the time of economic production, time cut up into equal abstract fragments. This unified irreversible time belongs to the global market, and this also to the global spectacle.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Soul Bay Press, 2012) p. 111

The victory of a profoundly historical time

The victory of the bourgeoisie is the victory of a profoundly historical time, because it is the time corresponding to an economic production that continuously transforms society from top to bottom. So long as agrarian production remains the predominant form of labor, the cyclical time that remains at the base of society reinforces the joint forces of tradition, which tend to hold back any historical movement. But the irreversible time of the bourgeois economy eradicates those vestiges throughout the world. History, which until then had seemed to involve only the actions of individual members of the ruling class, and which had thus been recorded as a mere chronology of events, is now understood as a general movement – a relentless movement that crushes any individuals in its path. By discovering its basis in political economy, history becomes aware of what had previously been unconscious; but this basis remains unconscious because it cannot be brought to light. This blind prehistory, this new fate that no one controls, is the only thing that the commodity economy has democratized.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Soul Bay Press, 2012) p. 109

History has always existed, but not always in its historical form

Man, "the negative being who is solely to the extent that he suppresses Being," is one with time. Man's appropriation of his own nature is at the same time his grasp of the development of the universe. "History is itself a real part of natural history, of the transformation of nature into man" (Marx). Conversely, this "natural history" has no real existence other than through the process of human history, the only vantage point from which one can take in that historical totality (like the modern telescope whose power enables one to look back in time at the receding nebulas at the periphery of the universe). History has always existed, but not always in its historical form. The temporalization of humanity, brought about through the mediation of a society, amounts to a humanization of time. The unconscious movement of time becomes manifest and true within historical consciousness.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Soul Bay Press, 2012) p. 100

History is inherently utopian

History is about the future in at least two ways. On the one hand, it is only from the standpoint of a particular future that the ultimate object of history – the unity of the human – can be thought. In this respect, history (like art) is inherently utopian. This is something that ties art to history. It is beyond the scope of all actually existing social subjects.

Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All (Verso, 2013) p. 194

Con-temporaneity

What seems distinctive and important about the changing temporal quality of the historical present over the last few decades is best expressed through the distinctive conceptual grammar of con-temporaneity, a coming together not simply 'in' time, but of times: we do not just live or exist together 'in time' with our contemporaries – as if time itself is indifferent to this existing together – but rather the present is increasingly characterized by a coming together of different but equally 'present' temporalities or 'times', a temporal unity in disjunction, or a disjunctive unity of present times.'

Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All (Verso, 2013) p. 17

Abstraction's modus operandi is devastation

Abstraction passes for an 'absence' – as distinct from the concrete 'presence' of objects, of things. Nothing could be more false. For abstraction's modus operandi is devastation, destruction (even if such destruction may sometimes herald creation). Signs have something lethal about them – not by virtue of 'latent' or so-called unconscious forces, but, on the contrary, by virtue of the forced introduction of abstraction into nature. The violence involved does not stem from some force intervening aside fro rationality, outside or beyond it. Rather, it manifests itself from the moment any action introduces the rational into the real, from the outside, by means of tools which strike, slice and cut – and keep doing so until the purpose of their aggression is achieved. For space is also instrumental – indeed it is the most general of tools. The space of the countryside, as contemplated by the walker in search of the natural, was the outcome of a first violation of nature. The violence of abstraction unfolds in parallel with what we call 'history'.

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Blackwell Publishing, 1991) p. 289

The complaints of change

It is useful, for example, to see three main periods of rural complaint in which a happier past is explicitly evoked: the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; the late eighteenth and early nineteenth; the late nineteenth and early twentieth. And it is clear enough that each of these corresponds to a period of exceptional change in the rural economy, which we find directly reflected in varying ways. But it is not only that each of these reflections comes to include other social and metaphysical ideas. It is also that the convention of the country as a settled way of life disturbed by unwanted and external change has been complicated, in our own century, by very similar ideas about towns and cities. The complaints of rural change might come from threatened small proprietors, or from commoners, or even, in the twentieth century, from a class of landlords, but it is fascinating to hear some of the same phrases – destruction of a local community, the driving out of small men, indifference to settled and customary ways – in the innumerable campaigns about the effects of redevelopment, urban planning, airport and motorway systems, in so many twentieth-century towns and even, very strongly, in parts of London. I have heard a defence of Covent Garden, against plans for development, which repeated in almost every particular the defence of the commons in the period of parliamentary enclosures. Clearly ideas of the country and the city have specific contents and histories, but just as clearly, at times, they are forms of isolation and identification of more general processes. People have often said 'the city' when they meant capitalism or bureaucracy or centralised power, while 'the country', as we have seen, has at times meant everything from independence to deprivation, and from the powers of an active imagination to a form of release from consciousness.

Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford University Press, 1975) p. 291

Supermodernity makes history into spectacle

What is seen by the spectator of modernity is the interweaving of old and new. Supermodernity, though, makes the old (history) into a specific spectacle, as it does with all exoticism and all local particularity.

Marc Augé, Non-places (Verso, 2008) p. 89

Places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories

Places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserve, remaining in an enigmatic state, symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure of the body. “I feel good here”: the well-being under-expressed in the language it appears in like a fleeting glimmer is a spatial practice.

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 1988) p. 108

An accidental history and a purely anecdotal historicity

Past, present, future: once more, what remains of the long duration of history or the short durations of the event in the face of the lack of duration involved in instantaneity, if not the beginnings of an accidental history and a purely anecdotal historicity?

Paul Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant (Polity Press, 2010) p. 100