Transhistoricism and a New Regime of Temporality in Modern Historical Culture

Abstract

The author associates the return of interest in the historical past and conflicts over its interpretation with significant changes in the historical culture and in the regime of historical temporality. Public representations of history in the context of modern transformations appeal mainly not to reason and authenticity, but to imagination, affects, entertainment and a sense of belonging. These changes are associated with globalization, digitalization and the reorientation of modern society from production to consumption. In historical culture, the consequences of these transformations are plurality, virtualization and presentism. This provokes a blurring of the sense of historical duration and images of the future. The images of the past obey the retroactive logic of extrapolation of current ideas. The appeal to historical grand-narratives in these conditions does not allow, as it was before, to achieve social integration, but on the contrary, provokes conflicts. The new wars of memory are characterized by the hybrid historicism, which is seen as a product of the transformation of fragments of the old grand narratives that now function in a fundamentally changed society. Along with the signs indicating the crisis of the previous model of representation of history, new tendencies are observed. They are manifested, in particular, in the reassembly of history in the multiple perspectives of transhistoricism, a revolutionary view of history unlike the traditional one, the approach which contributes to the coexistence of antinomianism and conformism, the acceptance of differences and the establishment of the boundaries of one’s own identity, playfulness and the desire for authenticity. Thus, transhistorism serves as a vehicle to promote coexistence of multiple stories that work together and through their interconnectedness help to overcome contradictions that once were deemed impossible to handle and to add to a shared sense of unity. The new regime of temporality is considered in the context of removing the contradiction between the progressive spirit of modernism and the deconstruction of historicism in the postmodern idea of post-history. The temporality of transhistoricism is determined by the nonlinearity of the time of culture, in which complex interactions of the constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed, lost, acquired and restored take place.

Keywords

• historical temporality
• time
• historicism
• transhistoricism
• “hybrid historicism”
• virtualization
• public history