What would history be like if you knocked out
the years, days, weeks, centuries? How would we show, for instance, change? In
one sense, philosophical history does just that – it rejects the mathematical
symbols of chronology as accidents of historical structure that have functioned
to place people in time for various interests – religious, political,
existential – but that veil the real pattern of change (and blocks of
changelessness). These are the crutches of the historian, according to the
philosophical historian, who brings a sort of human need – even a servile need –
into the telling of history. Instead, a philosophical history will find its
before-after structure in the actual substance of history, under the assumption
that there is an actual substance to history.
In the case of the most famous philosophical
history, Hegel’s, a before and after, a movement, is only given by the
conceptual figures that arise and interact in themselves. To introduce a date,
here, is to introduce a limit on the movement of the absolute. A limit which,
moreover, from the side of the absolute, seems to be merely a superstition, the
result of a ceremony of labeling founded on the arbitrary, and ultimately, on
the fear of time itself, that deathdealer.
Andrew Abbott, in his book, Time Matters,
issues an interesting defence of “narrative” as a legitimate sociological
method, which is founded on understanding time outside of a state or cult ordained
inventory. The chapter on turning points is especially rich.
“Note that this "narrative"
character of turning points emerges quite as
strongly in quantitative and variable-based
methods as in qualitative or
case-based ones. If quantitative turning
points could be identified merely
with reference to the past and the immediate
present, algorithms locating
turning points could beat the stock market.
It is precisely the "hindsight"
character of turning points-their definition
in terms of future as well as
past and present-that forbids this.
Given this narrative quality, we can reformulate
and generalize our con
cept of turning point to include simpler
"bends" in a curve. What defines a
turning point as such is the fact that the
turn that takes place within it con
trasts with a relative straightness outside
(both before and after).”
The turning point is definitionally linked to
the “new” and its value. The archetypal American turning point, I think, is
usually a conversion story. These stories are oddly powerful – x describes,
say, being a leftist and then confronting a reality that makes him or her
realize that leftism is bogus. In this story, what seems to be told about is x’s
variable judgment, which one would think would disqualify x from analysing
leftism or rightism. But that is not how the story signifies. It signifies as a
conversion experience, an account given from beyond some turning point. It
doesn’t imply the continuity of the foolishness of x, but x’s newfound wisdom.
These cases can be found throughout our newspapers, tv, movies, novels, poems,
etc. American conversion is a genre in itself.
Abbott digs into this a bit in his own way: “There
is for the individual actor a curious inversion of " causality" and "explanation"
in the trajectory-turning point model of careers or life cycles. From the point of view of the actor moving
from trajectory to trajectory, the "regular" periods of the
trajectories are far less consequential and causally important than are the
"random" periods of the turning points. The causally
comprehensible phase seems unimportant, while
the causally incomprehensible phase seems far more so.”
I think this says much about affect and time.
But time is short, and I have other non-turning points to turn to.
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