Multiple Times and the Stratigraphies of History

Abstract

In this article one of the leading theorists of multiple historical time adopts the language of stratigraphy, which Krzysztof Pomian and Reinhart Koselleck used to refer to the layered time of history. It is obvious to the author that “world-time” now exists only as a set of “world-times.” However, unidirectional linear time continues be dominant in the culture, and therefore the main challenge is to come up with unconventional ways of conceptualizing multiple time. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the “temporalization of history” described by Koselleck took place in the form of “denaturalization” — an opposition between the orders of natural and human life. However, the author concludes that denaturalization today is no longer up to that previous task and calls for treating microbes, planets, rocks and human affairs as having various temporal regimes that permeate each other. The plurality of times is manifested both in practical matters and in branches of knowledge. Fernand Braudel suggested that historians turn to the longue durée of landscapes and climates in order to make history a nomothetic science, but today the task is to analyze the historical and natural worlds, studying their interweaving without reducing them to each other. The author sees the theory of multilayer time as a full-fledged alternative to the idea of linear unidirectional time. Nevertheless, there are phenomena that it cannot describe: how does the quickly streaming surface of everyday life dissolve away, and how do slowly formed events erupt on the surface as natural disasters? In conclusion, the author calls for the incorporation of historiography within a comprehensive theory covering many temporal scales, within which the historical life of people is intertwined with the historical life of rocks and geological deposits.