The Politics of Time

The Politics of Time

Peter Osborne

The simple possibility that things might proceed otherwise ... is sufficient to change the whole experience of practice and, by the same token, its logic.

Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice

The simple possibility that things might proceed otherwise is something in which there is depressingly little belief at present. For all the enthusiasm for change manifest in the debates about postmodernism, there is probably currently less of a sense that `things might proceed otherwise' in Western capitalist societies than at any time since the early 1950s. At a theoretical level, this situation has been depicted in a number of ways: from the `realisation of nihilism' of Fukuyama's end of history, via the `realisation of positivism' of Jameson's postmodernism, to a series of more diffuse analyses of the end of politics and the crisis of the future. One thing which is distinctive about all these scenarios is their fulsome embrace of that hitherto discredited nineteenth century genre, the philosophy of history; albeit, more often than not, in negative or inverted forms. Indeed, the mere fact that Fukuyama crafts his argument at this level has been enough for some on the Left to identify him as a friend: the secret agent of the State Department's discontent with its own rule, perhaps.

Personally, I am less persuaded that the philosophy of history belongs intrinsically to the left than I am of the dystopian character of its more recent manifestations. Dystopias may once have functioned to raise an emancipatory alarm about the present, now they all too readily merely confirm the `worst case scenarios' of the policy planners - using the imagination to undercut, rather than underpin, the possibility that things might proceed in another way. Grand narrative forms of the philosophy of history have migrated to the Right, for fairly obvious conjunctural reasons. To declare the genre dead is simply to reproduce it in its presently most pervasive, if paradoxical form.

In Hegelian terms, this state of affairs has long appeared as some kind of crisis in the historical experience of `reason'. Yet the fact that a certain literature continues to articulate the crisis from this standpoint is less important than what it reveals about the temporal dimension of the conception of reason at stake. For the historical present does not just resist interpretation along the lines of any of the currently available Hegelian models, it positively mocks them, and not for the first time.

There is a range of views about precisely which events this century have been most destructive of the orthodox Hegelian perspective on history as the demonstrable realisation of the idea of reason as freedom - as opposed to those heterodox variants which require no more than the logical basis for a speculative hope. They reflect the experiences of a number of political generations across a variety of social groups: from the horrors of the First World War, through European fascism, the holocaust, Hiroshima and the prospect of a global nuclear annihilation, to an increased awareness of the role of genocide and racial slavery in the constitution of Western culture, the ecological crisis of the planet, and the collapse of historical communism - a veritable `slaughter-bench', as Hegel himself described history, `at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed', but in this case without the promise of reconciliation at its end.

Most decisive, perhaps, has been the cumulative impact of these events on a form of historical consciousness (narrative totalisations of history from the standpoint of a realised reason) which has, in any case, been progressively eroded by the power of temporal abstraction at work in the social processes of capitalist societies. This erosion is perhaps the most far- reaching cultural consequence of commodification. It appears in Habermas in quasi-Romantic form in the guise of the `colonisation' of the life-world by the system. It is associated more generally with the idea of `modernity'. Few, I think, would disagree with Ricoeur today when he writes that:

It now seems as though Hegel, seizing a favourable moment, a kairos, which has been revealed for what it was to our perspective and our experience, only totalised a few leading aspects of the spiritual history of Europe and of its geographical and historical enviroment, ones that, since that time, have come undone.

What has come undone, Ricoeur continues, is `the very substance of what Hegel sought to make into a concept'. Difference, he insists, `has turned against development, conceived as a Stufengang [succession of stages]'.