Historical Time Ecologized

In Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, historian Reinhart Koselleck wrote about the impact of modernity on the experience of time. Among other things, he postulated that since the end of the eighteenth century, there has been a growing asymmetry in historical time between the field of experience (“present past, whose events have been and can be remembered”) and the horizon of expectations (the future made present, which “directs itself to the not-yet”)1 1  - Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004 [1979]), 259.. In Koselleck’s view, this expanding gap is inseparable from the acceleration of life resulting from technological advances and increases in productivity — an acceleration that leaves less and less time for the experience of the present, and this experience becomes so brief that temporality flees toward the future. As rhetoric, condition, and historical period, modernity offers a promise of progress (of novelty, perfectibility, and opportunity) achievable in a future that is composed of a devaluation of the past and an erasure of the present. Although modernity still holds sway, historian François Hartog maintains that the futurism of the modern regime of historicity is in the process of being replaced by a temporality that he describes as presentist.2 2  - François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2003), 27. Exploring the notion of the “regime of historicity,” Hartog endeavours to define how civilizations articulate the relationship among past, present, and future. In his view, the futurism of modernity has been transformed into a presentism that has abolished the prerogative of the future by affirming that of the present. In this new regime — whose traces have been manifest since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, an event that exemplified the collapse of communism as the last great “emancipation” story of the twentieth century — the temporal categories of past and future are absorbed by the present. The catastrophes of the twentieth century (wars, genocides, ideological shifts) are perceived as unresolved traumas of imagined futures of which we can barely reimagine the emancipatory potential. The past and the future exist only through the prism of the present, as a quest for memory and apprehension. Hartog’s hypothesis has much merit, but it does not take into account the pluralism of our contemporaneous worlds. Privileging the present — and this is where one of the most innovative aspects of contemporary art of the last twenty years comes into play — does not necessarily mean the absorption of the past and future by the present. It may also take the form of a critical necessity: that of imagining a future that stops devouring the present — as it did under the modern regime of historicity — so that it is instituted from within the present as well as through some retention of the past, by reducing the gap between the field of experience and the horizon of expectation. What modernity devalues (the present, the past) becomes that which may productively determine the future.

Since the 1990s, contemporary art has developed an aesthetic of temporalization of history that presentifies the futurism of the modern regime of historicity and makes room for what the historian Michel de Certeau called “the unthought” in the discipline of history: its temporal dimension.³ 3 - Michel de Certeau, Histoire et psychanalyse entre science et fiction (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 76. As it engages in this historical process, contemporary art reorganizes the modern relationship with past, present, and future by emptying the modern concept of progress of its ideality. Contemporary art does not try to fill the future with new content, as it does not recognize the modern utopian impulse. The temporal turning point that it embodies is situated not in the action of progress, but in the reconsideration of the idea of progress. It stirs up the vicissitudes and inconsistencies of the passage of time — what philosopher Yuval Dolev defines as “the becoming present of future events and then their becoming past” — to remove from the future its modern role of initiating change and integrating the human being with history. In art, the trajectories that mobilize this aesthetic are diverse and numerous: the development of a future archaeology, the emphasis of lost time, diversion of measured time, melancholization of obsolescence, advocacy of simultaneity and the interminable, for example. Here are four explorations of historical time, associated with the work of four artists. I chose them for their ecological orientation — simply because one of the most devastating impacts of the modern regime of historicity is the global deterioration that it imposes on the environment. What these practices have in common is that they implement an action (valorization of the present) in continuity with the past, with the goal of realizing the possibility of a future, thus revealing a connection to and intimacy with the environment.