Historical Regimes Research Articles

Talking Filth: Abjection and Modernity in Post-Ottoman Crete

Theories of abjection usually approach it as a transhistorical and unchanging characteristic of human organization, a natural corollary of bodily and psychological functions. However, historical and post-colonial approaches in particular examine abjection as directly linked to the extension of disciplinary techniques of the Western state to colonized populations. Techniques of control and sanitation have thus become synonymous with the civilizing imperative of imperialist expansion. I hereby examine ambivalences towards abjection in post-Ottoman Iraklion, Crete, to imply that they are directly linked to the memory of such civilizing missions. At the beginning of the 20th century, the implementation of colonial technologies of rule by the British occupying forces happened simultaneously with the state-sanctioned urban reforms. These combined processes created a regime of historicity that appears in facetious stories that question its completeness, its political aims and the very foundations of Western civility. In performative speech acts, bodily functions become contested terrains for a critical recollection of state-sanctioned modernization. The purported passage from barbarism to civilization with the end of Ottoman suzerainty is questioned in a way that proposes that the distinctions it has created, between dirty and clean, Turkish and Greek, old and new, country and city, are only a facade for the collusion of state and privileged classes in their effort to modernize the city.

Rewriting Marx to expose the data society and AI

As I show with examples from the Grundrisse and the Capital, some fundamentals of Marx’s critique of political economy can be rewritten with simple substitutions to yield surprisingly pertinent analyses of today’s “information society” and the role that data and AI play in it. The reason behind this strange phenomenon is that Marx’s penetrating study of money as a dehumanizing abstraction and self-replicating capital can be extended with minor changes to the main abstraction and “automatic fetish” of our historical regime: digital data. As money-capital tends to grow by itself independently of humans, so does data. AI is the main engine of this new dangerous cycle.

State‐like and state dislike in the anthropological margins★

AbstractThis article argues for a return to the study of non‐state political institutions, and for the need to free them from their association with locally circumscribed, unmarked, or even ‘unthought’ practice. There are several reasons for this. On the one hand, there is a growing interest beyond anthropology in non‐state political arrangements, whether they are described negatively, as the result of ‘state failure’, or positively. On the other, a focus on the ‘non‐state’, historical and contemporary, opens up crucial perspectives on ‘the state’, and, through it, on questions of different regimes of historicity and region formation. In other words, it might provide insights into political anthropology as a study of shared thought and imagination, beyond ideal‐types of modern bureaucratic governance. This is what this article attempts to do, with special reference to North African and Saharan examples.

Factor Momentum and Regime-Switching Overlay Strategy

Investors are faced with challenges in diversifying risks and protecting capital during crash periods. In this article, the authors incorporate regime information in the portfolio optimization context by identifying regimes for historical time periods using an ℓ₁-trend filtering algorithm and exploring different machine learning techniques to forecast the probability of an upcoming stock market crash. They then apply a regime-based asset allocation to nominal risk parity strategy. Investors can further improve their investment performance by implementing a dollar-neutral factor momentum strategy as an overlay in conjunction with the core portfolio. The authors demonstrate that the time-series factor momentum strategy generates high risk-adjusted returns and exhibits pronounced defensive characteristics during market crashes. A volatility scaling approach is employed to manage the risk and further magnify the benefits of factor momentum. Empirical results suggest that the approach improves risk-adjusted returns by a substantial amount over the benchmark from both the standalone perspective and the contributory perspective. <b>Key Findings</b> ▪ The authors identify historical regimes with ℓ₁-trend filtering and implement a regime-switching risk parity strategy with supervised learning methods to optimize the core portfolio allocation. ▪ By adding a long–short factor momentum strategy on top of the core diversified portfolios, the authors are able to further enhance the portfolio’s risk-adjusted return. ▪ The factor momentum strategy exhibits defensive characteristics during crashes, and its risks can be further managed by scaling the leverage based on the realized volatility.

The past futures of techno-scientific promises

Abstract Previous studies have shown that techno-scientific promises play key roles in the process of emergence of new technologies. The role of promises in the emergence of old technologies when they were young has, however, been overlooked. The main objective of this paper is to fill this gap. We draw on the concept of ‘regime of historicity’, defined as an organizational structure given societies impose on the experience of time and articulate the present, the past, and the future. Using four case studies, we argue that the way techno-scientific promises align with regimes of historicity is crucial. This paper shows that promising in the presentist regime using the modernist frame of innovation (creative destruction) raises many problems Instead, the building of horizons of hope may rest on promises based on processes of collective experimentation.

Post-socialist animism: personhood, necro-personas and public past in Inner Asia

This paper investigates the relationship between animism and public past in post-socialist Inner Asia. The analysis was based on three case studies highlighting key features of the relationship between local conceptions of personhood, non-human agency, and their role in structuring native visions of the past: (1) negotiations between families and the spirits of their ancestors – victims of communist purges in Mongolia, (2) a powerful necro-persona that allows local communities to gain political subjectivity and undermine conventional post-Soviet historical narratives, and (3) the return of the undead lama Itigilov that caused Buddhist revival in Buryatia. Posthuman agents have been involved in mythopraxis, through which native regimes of historicity are established.

Beyond Secularized Eschatology Introductory Remarks

History as a body of knowledge, a loose bundle of working routines and writing practices, of genres, memories, imaginaries, and institutions, has struggled with its relationship to “religion” for a long time. In the European tradition, but also elsewhere, historical writing often served to fill the gaps in the knowledge about the past that had been, in the main, supplied by scriptural tradition. At the same time, historical writing also became a competitor with this tradition. The resulting relationship was, and continues to be, uneasy. In its familiar present-day form, for example, the quality of being “historical,” i.e. “historicity,” requires the exclusion of divine agency as a permissible explanation of events in the course of worldly affairs. In what François Hartog calls the modern “regime of historicity,” the culture of historical writing after 1750 became dominated by scholarship and aligned with mechanist understandings of the philosophy of nature. Enlightenment-era historical writing increasingly conceived of the world as a nexus of cause–effect relations that afforded space to the divine agency only in the function of “prime mover.” History then appeared to fall in line with the other forces of reason-driven “secularization” that stripped religious knowledge of the privilege of explaining things in the world, ultimately transforming it into “dogma” and “belief,” both only tenuously connected to reality. Knowledge based on the divinely “revealed” texts and the divinely “inspired” thought of traditionally recognized religious authorities lost its previous epistemic standing. Yet this loss occurred, to the extent that it did, in the form of a highly complicated negotiation, with compromises stacked on top of other compromises, generating a continuously confusing and mobile state of affairs.

Reconnecting Forward: Nasjonal Samling’s Apocalyptic Temporality as a Key to the Fascist Regime of Historicity

Abstract This article analyses the conception of history or ‘regime of historicity’ structuring the ideology of the Norwegian fascist party, Nasjonal Samling (1933–1945). It highlights the value of the theory of palingenetic ultranationalism to the understanding of fascist temporality generically and specifically. Generically, because the findings show how Nasjonal Samling’s regime of historicity followed the same structure of revolution and eternity, decay and rebirth, as other fascist movements did. Specifically, because it also shows how Nasjonal Samling drew heavily on Norwegian national myths. The ideologues of ns recoded these myths, and integrated them into their own palingenetic, apocalyptic, and – after 1935 – antisemitic grand narratives. These crystallized in a triadic scheme, forming a fascist regime of historicity, structured around the myth of past greatness, followed by decadence, combined with a fantasy of a future revolutionary rebirth of the nation.

Demagogic populism and media system: A preliminary articulation

Political communication studies has a long tradition of ‘crisis talk’ regarding the fate of public communication. Now, however, the field itself faces a kind of existential crisis as its core assumptions of ‘normal’ political communication are daily undermined. This ‘liberal normalcy’ shares much with orthodoxies in populism studies, most notably a tendency to bracket out demagogic communication, both in historical fascist regimes and democracies. Yet correcting these failings is not simply a matter of rejecting liberal models for left-populist ones. Rather, both fields need to broaden their historical parameters and deepen their theoretical frameworks. The article draws on the Weberian conception of modern demagogy and its revision in the wake of 'modern media' by Shils and Adorno. It further argues that a critical reworking of Hallin and Mancini’s media systems approach could benefit both fields. For Hallin and Mancini’s socio-historical use of Weberian ideal-typification complements Worsley’s never-completed plan for an ideal-typification of modes of populism and demagogic leadership.

Mapping climate change vulnerability of aquatic-riparian ecosystems using decision-relevant indicators

Climate change has and is projected to continue to alter historical regimes of temperature, precipitation, and hydrology. To assess the vulnerability of climate change from a land management perspective and spatially identify where the most extreme changes are anticipated to occur, we worked in collaboration with land managers to develop a climate change vulnerability map for the midwestern United States with a focus on riparian systems.The map is intended for use by regional administrators to help them work across various program areas (e.g. fisheries, endangered species) to prioritize locations needing support for adaptation planning. The tool can also be utilized locally by managers to better understand the effects that projected climate scenarios have on the hydrology of management units as they develop adaptation strategies. The vulnerability map is watershed-based (360 watershed units within the region) and combines 15 climate change indicators that were selected by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service natural resource managers based upon known and anticipated effects to species and habitats. The projected change in each of these indicators from the historical period (1986–2005) to the future period (2040–2059) was aggregated into a composite score for each watershed. Landscape-scale metrics reflective of a watershed’s adaptive capacity were combined with the climate change indicators to produce a vulnerability score. We found sub-regional variation in vulnerability to climate change with the greatest vulnerability in Iowa, central Illinois, and northwest Ohio. Greater vulnerability was seen in the higher greenhouse gas concentration scenario, Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 compared to the lower greenhouse gas concentration scenario RCP 4.5, when looking at the mean of the five downscaled climate models used in this study. By quantifying and mapping climate change vulnerability, natural resource managers can better understand the degree of vulnerability for individual watersheds and identify areas of prioritization in regional and local planning efforts.

Keeping you post-ed: Space-time regimes, metaphors, and post-apartheid

Societies that have undergone systemic change are characterized as ‘post’—post-socialist, post-colonial, etc.—to encapsulate the impact the past still has on their structure and functioning. Research on these societies has therefore tended to adopt a mostly temporal approach, investigating the tension between continuity and change. Using the example of post-apartheid South Africa, I make a case for a more balanced approach to post situations by including space as equally valuable. I draw my theoretical inspiration from Hartog’s notion of regimes of historicity and Massey’s space-time to argue that we should investigate space-time regimes. I show that a space-time regime of entanglement, often passéist, with blurred temporal boundaries and messy, place-bound experiences of time, characterizes post situations. Finally, using South Africa as my empirical grounding, I offer a set of metaphors to describe and analyze the concrete places that this entangled, post space-time produces.

Out of Time? Some Critical Reflections on François Hartog’s Presentism

The article offers a thoroughgoing critique of the concept of presentism, through which the famous French intellectual historian François Hartog conceptualized the modern sense of history. Introducing the concept of “the regime of historicity,” Har- tog pointed to the socio-cultural conditionality of the relationship between the pre- sent, past and future. He redefined Koselleck’s description of the genesis of modern history during the “saddle time” in terms of a transformation in the regimes of his- toricity. The author of the article points out the duality of Hartog’s presentism, which is both an “ideal type” and a description of a chronologically defined span of time. Although Hartog explicitly speaks of presentism as a heuristic tool designed to deal with the temporal experiences of people, he does not investigate them anthro- pologically or sociologically. Hartog describes the specific tendencies inherent in twentieth-century historiography — its memorialization and juridification, and the concepts that have become key in dealing with the past — memory, commemoration, heritage and identity. These arguments of Hartog’s contain normative judgments and indicate a negative attitude toward the change that he witnessed in the social status of historiography. Careful study shows that Hartog’s use of presentism as a diagnosis of the modern era is incompatible with presentism as an analytical category. The former assumes a progressive linear course of time and is the inverse of modernism. The latter is a way of pluralizing time. The half-heartedness of such a status can be seen by contrasting it with Achim Landwehr’s concept of chronoference, which explains the sociocultural nature of historical time. If the distinctions between past, present and future are not ontological (as the historians of modernity imagined them) but instead situational, then the dominance of any one order of time is impossible. But unlike Landwehr, Hartog is not ready to completely abandon the modernist concept of history.

Wars of Memory: Memorial Legislation in the Post-Soviet Space

The origins and the phenomenon of memorial legislation are considered. Special attention is paid to the memorial laws adopted in Russia and Ukraine, as well as the experience of their application. Based on the ideas of F. Artog, the author connects memorial legislation with the new “regime of historicity”, proving that it is a certain type of commemorative practice. The sources for the work were the texts of the adopted legislative acts, the introduced bills and comments, articles in the media, enabling to judge the reaction of the public. On the basis of the studied material, the author draws the following conclusions: memorial legislation is of a political nature, memorial laws are an instrument for solving political problems; the development of memorial legislation makes law dependent on state historical policy, which can lead to a violation of the normative nature of the law; memorial legislation makes it possible to judge the development of historical consciousness and the directions of its change.

Russia and the North Caucasus: the Problem of Narrative Synthesis in Representing Their Shared History

The article discusses issues related to the problems of constructing general interpretations of the shared history of Russia and the North Caucasus. The central methodological problem of such interpretations is the problem of historical synthesis. Historical synthesis, realized in a generalizing national-regional narrative, has a specific nature and can be defined as “subjective” and at the same time “narrative” synthesis. The logical structure of narrative synthesis is determined by one or another correlation in it of the main modalities of historical time — past, present and future. The problems of constructing a narrative generalizing the Russian-North Caucasian historical process are considered in the article drawing on the concepts of “space of experience” and “horizon of expectations” by R. Kosellek and “regime of historicity” by F. Hartog. It is shown that the conceptualization of the present and future of the Russian Caucasus in the light of the future-oriented regime of historicity is a logically necessary element of the interpretation of its past. The shared history of Russia and the North Caucasus is not just a reality of the past that can be described in a historical narrative, but also an urgent problem, since it must be confirmed and modified in response to the conditions and challenges of the present and the future.

How Communities Scale into Civilizations: The Diffusion of Culture Across Historical Networks

I analyze structure and function in the network design of historical regimes of China and Western Europe to build a theory for the development of societies and states from endogenous mechanisms of social change. I show how their respective network structures evolved independently but share a global property: both are small world, meaning that any node in the network can reach any other node by a small number of steps. Probing the variations in network topologies and their role in diffusion and scaling, I account for differences in formal institutions, interpersonal trust, cultural norms, and moral protocols. Network structure as an independent variable moves the discussion of the divergence of East and West beyond the conventional, centralized China versus decentralized Europe debate. It allows us to identify an overlooked driver of structural change in the economy, helping to better discern what sets the development of world civilizations apart.

Epistemologia da passabilidade

Este artigo apresenta dez notas analíticas sobre a experiência de passabilidade trans, isto é, de pessoas que são assignadas como sendo de um sexo quando nascem e, em diferentes momentos de suas vidas, intencionalmente ou não, passam por alguém de outro sexo. Essas experiências são analisadas aqui a partir da compreensão de que elas caracterizam um regime histórico de (in)visibilidade (reconhecimento). O referencial teórico envolve teorias e estudos feministas, pós-coloniais, transfeministas, queer, decoloniais, entre outros. A discussão aponta para um regime de (in)visibilidade fundamentalmente do sexo, além de sugerir que a passabilidade envolve pessoas trans e não trans. Conclui-se que se trata de experiências interseccionais de gênero, sexualidade, raça/cor, classe e outros marcadores sociais.

Koselleck y los márgenes estéticos de la historia: anacronismo, memoria y latencia

Anacronismo, memoria y latencia, que en el pasado fueron expulsados hasta los márgenes del discurso historiográfico, pueden ser de gran utilidad para comprender la historia que se abre tras la crisis de la modernidad. La obra de Koselleck no solo proporciona las principales claves para elaborar el «régimen de historicidad» moderno, sino también ayuda a comprender estos tres conceptos «marginales». Como historiador de la «contemporaneidad de lo no contemporáneo» nos lleva a pensar en hechos y conceptos adelantados y atrasados en relación con la época en que aparecen. En sus estudios sobre los monumentos a los caídos ha descubierto nuevas manifestaciones históricas en las que el sentido del pasado ya no depende del futuro. Y, en polémica con Gadamer, ha abierto la posibilidad de explicar la historia con categorías que no pasan por la hermenéutica. A este tipo pertenece la Stimmung de latencia, con la que Gumbrecht piensa el final del cronotopo moderno.

Del sentido histórico a la agenda ampliada: la experiencia de la Mesa de Trabajo por los Derechos Humanos de Córdoba, Argentina

El artículo analiza la experiencia de la Mesa de Trabajo por los Derechos Humanos de Córdoba como referente paradigmático de articulación entre viejos y nuevos modos del compromiso político en el momento de su conformación y consolidación. En particular, reflexiona sobre las complejidades de la acción política y la cuestión de los derechos humanos en un régimen de historicidad diferente al relacionarlas con las derivas del tratamiento político e institucional de las demandas que la Mesa expresaba.

Crônicas da urgência: os desafios das ciências na criação do futuro no Antropoceno

O presente artigo tem como objetivo refletir acerca da renovação epistemológica e dos desafios científicos suscitados pela emergência do colapso ambiental. Para tanto, foi dividido em quatro partes. Na primeira, tendo como base o pensamento de Danowski, Viveiros de Castro e Latour, propõe uma reflexão filosófica sobre o esgotamento paradigmático dos modelos que constituíram as ciências modernas e analisa os novos objetos de estudo transdisciplinares que caracterizam o Novo Regime Climático, para usar a terminologia de Latour. No segundo momento, são analisados embates referentes à formalização do termo Antropoceno para designar a nova época geológica e sua decorrente inserção na Escala do Tempo Geológico. Em seguida, o foco incide sobre as considerações acerca do suposto caráter generalizante do termo Antropoceno para designar a época presente. Para isso, utiliza-se principalmente de conceitos desenvolvidos pelo historiador Jason W. Moore e pela filósofa Donna Haraway. A quarta parte indica, a partir das colocações de Reinhart Koselleck e François Hartog, as repercussões do Antropoceno sobre o regime de historicidade da sociedade global capitalizada na contemporaneidade. Ao mesmo tempo, reflete sobre alguns dos desafios enfrentados pela ciência, enquanto instituição, na tarefa de convencer a opinião pública de forma a mobilizá-la para que aumente a pressão sobre as instâncias políticas aptas a tomar medidas que mitigariam dos efeitos do Antropoceno.

Gender, the novel and the modern order of time

This article aims to analyze the 1814 novel The Wanderer, or female difficulties by English writer Frances Burney and how its depiction of Britain at the time of the French Revolution can contribute to the understanding of the emergence of what François Hartog called the modern regime of historicity. Like many authors analyzed by Hartog in his books Regimes of Historicityand Croire en Histoire, Burney was personally affected by the French revolutionary process, a fact that is reflected in her last work. However, the time of its publication – when the Napoleonic Wars were at their end – made it outdated, something that was compounded by the debates regarding the Revolution and issues of gender that it was steeped in. By analyzing this novel, I will argue that issues of gender also played a role in the changes of how men and women related to time at this period as part of the transformations in the concept of History that occurred at the turn of the eighteenth century.