History in the plural: Reconfigurations of past-present-future
Zeynep Gülşah Çapan discusses the key points from her new Review of International Studies (RIS) article. If you'd like to know more you can read the full article at - History in the plural: Reconfigurations of past–present–future
Introduction
How to write the ‘pasts’ of the international has been a continuing concern for the field of International Relations (IR). The ‘historical turn’ and postcolonial interventions have been important in problematising some of the main narratives of the international whether with respect to the centrality accorded to Westphalia or the overlooking of empires. Despite these important contributions the historical turn in IR has predominantly focused on historicism as a solution in a way that has reified the categories of past, present and future and the relationship between them. This reification occurs through the construction of a ‘unified present’ whereby any historical event, development and idea made present within the narrative of the international is brought into that unitary historical time and specific configuration of past-present-future.
The article thus focuses on the problem of a unitary historical time and, building on the works that have interrogated the relationship between past, present, and the future, aims to develop an analytical vocabulary to further explore how to write history in the plural. How to write history in the plural will be explored through three different readings of the Haitian Revolution. The aim here is not to present silenced/forgotten aspects of the Haitian Revolution or elaborate further on the importance of the Haitian Revolution for the study of the international but use three readings of the Haitian Revolution to introduce an analytical vocabulary that might help in further problematising configurations of past-present-future.
Spatio-temporal hierarchies of the international
Spatio-temporal hierarchies spatially separate ‘Europe’ from other spaces. Consequently, any event, idea and development that is assigned as being progressive is understood to have happened within that space in a self-sustaining manner. The second aspect is then to situate every other space as temporally backward as the development deemed progressive ‘first’ happened in Europe and was then exported to the other spaces. Therefore, developments such as the sovereign state are narrated as having happened firstly in Europe because of characteristics that belong to that self-sustaining space and then as having diffused from that space to other spaces so that the ‘backward’ spaces could also become modern. Spatio-temporal hierarchies rest on the naturalisation of a series of binaries such as west/non-west, modern/traditional, progressive/backward, developed/underdeveloped, rational/emotional and knowledge/belief systems. These binaries are not just constructed as ‘different’ and opposites but in a spatio-temporal relationship to each other. Therefore, one side of the binary (west, modern, progressive, developed, rational and knowledge) represent Europe and all these characteristics are constructed as essential identities of that spatial demarcation. Furthermore, the other side of the binary (non-west, traditional, backward, underdeveloped, emotional, belief systems) becomes constructed as temporally behind the space of Europe and as a consequence representing the ‘past’ of Europe and it is through moving from one side of the binary to the other can other spaces enter into the ‘present’ or in other words be present in historical time and the time of the international.
The historical turn has used different timing devices to overcome the spatio-temporal hierarchies of the international. One of the central concerns in all approaches is the assumption that if the correct facts of the past are either reintegrated or re-narrated spatio-temporal hierarchies would no longer be reproduced. More historical accuracy within the existing narrative adds to our knowledge of events but is also not sufficient to overcome spatio-temporal hierarchies. The solution in these instances has been to re-narrate the making of the international in a more historically accurate manner which has worked to replicate the issue within another narrative. As such, co-presence or rather synchronous presence is constructed whereby the past is held constant and separated from the present and future through different timing strategies. Even if the overarching stadial narrative is no longer there, timing strategies continue to operate within historicist traditions and produce a narrative of unified co-presence that naturalise spatio-temporal hierarchies.
Temporalising History, Historicising the International
Historical time is established through notions of historical distance and the break between the past and present. As such, the invention of the historical is temporal. The discussion here focuses on the ‘invention’ of the historical and underlines how for the historical to exist there needs to be an invention of past. As such, the work of the historian begins when one decides what is ‘past’ and what is ‘present’. For example, one of the main turning points in the invention of the historical was the ‘division’ of the ‘medieval’ from the modern and the tripartite division of the Antiquity, Middle Ages and Modernity. The construction of the ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ is not an objective delineation but rather it is tied to specific knowledge systems and how these knowledge systems reproduce spatio-temporal hierarchies. In that sense there is a function to these divisions with respect to identifying the social conditions under which these divisions were conceptualised, how they have been reproduced and the politics behind these dynamics. Therefore, different timing strategies and the search for more correct narratives does not overcome spatio-temporal hierarchies but rather continues to reproduce them. As such, what needs to be further explored is how to approach historical time as heterotemporal and how to reconfigure the past-present-future relationship and write history in the plural.
The time of the Haitian Revolution
The aim of this section is to provide an analytical vocabulary into rethinking the relationship between past, present and future in narratives of the international. The aim is to further ways to reconfigure the past-present-future relationship so that what is made invisible in the dominant narratives can be made visible. The three readings of the Haitian revolution will be used as examples through which to discuss possible reconfigurations of the past-present-future and ways of writing history in the plural.
The subsequent sub-sections present different narratives of the Haitian Revolution to demonstrate the different constructions of the relationship between past, present and future to think beyond the fixities imposed upon them. The first sub-section ‘Being Disjointed With Time’ discusses the notion of untimeliness and timeliness through Aimé Césaire’s writings on Toussaint L’Ouverture. As such, he elaborates on the tensions of futures being imagined, the presents being inhabited and what becomes timely or untimely in those constructions. The notion of timeliness/untimeliness thus helps us excavate what becomes invisible because it is disjointed with the ‘times of the day’ and this disjoint with time is seen as unnatural and/or unacceptable, as something that needs to be rectified.
The second sub-section ‘Past and Present in dialogue’ underlines how the past and present are not ontological entities but always in dialogue with each other. As such, the past and the present are not ready-made stages upon which we read events, but our reading of events constructs them. This sub-section will underline how the past and present are in constant dialogue through a discussion of Édouard Glissant and his play Monsieur Toussaint published in 1961. In the play, through making Toussaint enter into conversation with Macaia and Mackandal but also Mama Dio, Glissant aims to bring forth those tensions that reflect the relationship and dialogue of the past, present and future.
The third sub-section is titled in Search of the Marvelous and interrogates the notion of multiple presents. There is no ‘unified present’ from which to construct unified pasts and unified futures but rather there are multiple presents (and hence multiple pasts and multiple futures). The coexistence of the ‘real’ and the ‘marvelous real’ enables an exploration into reconfigurations of coexistence of ‘presents’ and/or ‘nows’. This is done through an engagement with Alejo Carpentier's (1957) novel The Kingdom of this World published in 1949 and translated first in 1957. The narrative structuring of the novel means that the ‘fantastic’ elements always remain an addition to the events and chronologies of the Haitian Revolution that are told separately, and that duality of the narrative is emblematic of the tensions that Carpentier is attempting to mediate through where there are more than one presents being inhabited. This underlines the necessity to allow for the possibility of two or multiple presents (along with multiple pasts and futures) in our narratives of the making of the international.
Reconfigurations
What the three readings demonstrate is the political possibilities that are opened up and how events, figures and developments can be related differently once the specific configuration of past, present and future is not adhered to. The first dynamic of timeliness/untimeliness thus opens up for ways to underline events, issues and developments that have become invisible in the narrative of the international because they did not fit into the past, present, future configuration and as such are deemed untimely. What is considered ‘timely’ and ‘untimely’ is related to the way an event and/or development is spatio-temporally ordered whereby the timing of the narrative aims to underline that some events are past making the present possible and the future imaginable. The way the relationship between the past-present-future is ordered have made and continue to make certain developments, figures, thinking untimely in our constructions of the past and imaginations of the future. As such, rather than trying to include them within an already existing past-present-future configuration or re-configuring a new past-present-future relationship, the way their timeliness/untimeliness constructs our pasts, presents and futures can be further explored.
The second dynamic underlines the fluidity between past, present and future whereby they are not ontologically given but constructed. The divisions between the past, present and future are ordered through spatio-temporal boundaries imposed on them. Therefore, breaking down the temporal and spatial boundaries allows for narratives that do not reproduce the sequential development of historical writing but enables us to approach the past, present and future as constantly intertwined and always in dialogue. This enables the breaking down of the spatio-temporal ordering that separates the past from the present making visible the entanglements of these ‘categories’. The third dynamic is that of two presents coexisting (which might be expanded to two or more pasts and/or two or more futures coexisting) which enables not having one understanding of the present dominate narratives of the international. The unified present spatio-temporally orders our understandings not only in terms of delineating a ‘now’, a ‘present’ but also constructing that ‘now’ and ‘present’ from a specific perspective. The notion of multiple presents helps us excavate what is made invisible in a unitary present of the international enabling an exploration of the multiple presents (and pasts and futures) that may be intertwined in multiple ways. These three different ways of reconfiguring the relationship between past-present-future provide a starting vocabulary to write history in the plural.
Conclusion
The article has interrogated how History has been brought into IR predominantly to address the issues of ahistoricism and presentism and therefore approached historicism (predominantly understood as contextualism) as the solution. This has meant that the historical work in the field has focused predominantly on how to make the historical narrative of the international more accurate aiming to situate concepts, events and developments in their time and space. The article has attempted to develop an analytical vocabulary that proposes ways to reconfigure the relationship between past-present-future and write history in the plural.
The desire for the Other (in this case the temporally othered past) to be stable, clearly identifiable as an object of study is part of the desire to resolve contradictions and settle epistemological debates which can never be satisfied. As such, the aim should not be to spatio-temporally fix our object of desire nor to lament in its constant loss and as such not to approach History as a closed system of signification from which information can be taken to ‘improve’ IR but rather to recognise that History – just as any disciplinary knowledge system such as IR – has its own debates, internal contradictions and discussions of how to overcome them. This might enable interrogations of historicity which rather than reproducing unified presents might open space for history in the plural.
Want to know more? You can read the full article at DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210524000573
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