Drilling Down: Can Historians Operationalize Koselleck’s Stratigraphical Times?

Abstract

According to Reinhart Koselleck, in every moment a congeries of "temporal strata" are effectively co-present, but not necessarily coherent, hence the "simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous." Contrast this with the notion of a zeitgeist in which every aspect of a historical moment is integrated by some master principle. There are so many trajectories active in any present that it is unlikely that one might coordinate all of them, if not unwise even to believe that they are coordinated. Not only does each historical present demonstrate at best rhizomic or patchy coherences across domains, but it also registers different paces and intensities in the temporal deployment of the domains. Nevertheless, coherence remains a compelling regulative ideal. Fortunately, path-dependency-cumulation as constraintis a discriminable feature of the several distinct "layers of time" or diachronic flows co-present in any given historical moment. Moreover, that some strata of experience remain roughly constant enables us to appraise the variation of others. If too many elements enter into simultaneous crisis, if we hit the "perfect storm," then our capacity to comprehend (like that of our objects of inquiry) may be severely impaired. These insights from Koselleck are eminently applicable and deserve recognition and gratitude in historical epistemology."The historian's special contribution is the discovery of the manifold shapes of time. The aim of the historian, regardless of his

Los tiempos de la modernidad. A propósito de Marshall Berman / Times of Modernity. Regarding Marshall Berman

“…'empírica', con la concepción ideológica del tiempo que la sostiene y recubre". 38 La necesidad de construir los tiempos históricos nace de que estos, como el resto de los objetos de investigación histórica, no son dados por el propio fluir del tiempo, no están ahí disponibles como cosas, sino que son el producto de la investigación; ese producir el tiempo histórico Althusser lo ejemplifica con los trabajos de Foucault sobre la historia de la locura y el nacimiento de la clínica. Con un concepto adecuado de tiempo, Althusser quiere romper con "el fondo del historicismo contemporáneo (y) que pretende hacernos confundir el objeto de conocimiento con el objeto real".…”