the time of history and the history of times

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The Time of History and the History of Times Author(s): John R. Hall Source: History and Theory, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Feb., 1980), pp. 113-131Published by: for Wiley Wesleyan UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2504794Accessed: 17-11-2015 12:17 UTC

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THE TIME OF HISTORY AND THE HISTORY OF TIMES

JOHN R. HALL

Historiography, more than other human studies, has been confronted with the need to understand the nature of social time. Other disciplines, such as sociology and anthropology, often have pretended to escape time - sociology by looking to the eternal verities of social order, and anthropology by looking to the archaic social orders which construed themselves as eternal. True, sociology and anthropology have not totally ignored time. Especially these days, anthropologists have begun to recognize the need to account for contemporary "savage" societies in relation to "developed" societies. And sociology was born of the recognition of social change in the industrial revolution. At its inception, it offered counterpoint to historiography by positing social change as a shift over time in broad complexes of often "mundane" culture, social activities, and institutions. But the main tendency of both sociology and anthropology has been ahistorical, and even anti-historical.

Historians, on the other hand, have been concerned in large part with giving accounts of the unfoldings of past events; and this concern has re- quired, at least implicitly, a theory of social time. Too often historians have solved their temporal problematic by the fiat of posing objective, chronological time as the basis for observing the march of events.

By way of combatting this solution, theorists of historiography occasionally have suggested that the stuff of history itself is contained in other, potentially non-chronological, temporal phenomena. At least since the beginning of this century, the straightforward chronology of "scientific" history has been chal- lenged in two alternative developments. On the one hand, certain historians have explored the relativity of multiple scales of objective time. On the other hand, subjectivist philosophers have described the character of inner time- consciousness, or subjective time; and subjectivist historians have advanced a relativism based on the recognition of multiple social actors with diverse and often conflicting social interests. Each of these intellectual trends has tended to undermine the Rankean epistemology of history; no longer could a history of elites be taken to represent the autonomous unfolding spirit of historical development. But the relativities achieved in subjectivist and objectivist approaches remain incommensurate with one another, for they are based



114 JOHN R. HALL

on different conceptions of the nature of time and its relation to history. Consideration of these divergent approaches perhaps can lead to the development of a more profound historiographic conception of time.

The following examination of objectivist time in the light of certain subjectivist investigations reveals certain difficulties and limits, as well as critical insights of each. The Marxist structuralism of Louis Althusser is then dis- cussed in order to clarify the insights of the two approaches toward resolution of fundamental issues of historical time. Althusser's structuralism itself sets certain reasonable criteria for such a program; but it has yet to contend with its own problematic. In lieu of a structuralist program, I propose a compara- tive phenomenology of time as a basis for linking the temporal character of social action with the unfolding process of history. This program fortuitously reaffirms Max Weber's conception of the division of labor between historiography and sociology: it offers comprehension of the temporal character of action as a bridge between the generalizing ideal types of sociology and the idiosyncratic events of history. But the more basic concern is to sketch an approach to historiography which recognizes that because subjective and social temporal orientations themselves differ among individuals and groups and over chronological time, knowledge of historically given temporal orientations can tremendously enrich understandings of social order and social change.

I. THE RELATIVITY OF OBJECTIVE TIME

The Annales school of historiography has become especially identified with the relativity of objective time. Annales scholars like Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, and Fernand Braudel have been instrumental in setting the problematic and the methodologies of a revolution in historiography. As we all know, they rejected narrow political history which focuses solely on narration of events, and looked instead to histories of culture, to economic history, and to social history. At once they moved beyond the hermeneutic textual tradition of Ranke, and parted company with sociologists like Max Weber, who emphasized the importance of subjectively meaningful action. This they did by the simple tack of looking at processes which, they argued, lay beyond texts and beyond individuals' intentions. In this sense, the Annales historians traveled with their French sociological counterpart, Emile Durkheim, who regarded "social facts as things" which transcend human consciousness.

The empirical studies which have come out of the Annales orientation are diverse, and they defy any shorthand summary.' Moreover, the achievements of Annales historians go far beyond any methodological prescriptions which

1. Fernand Braudel, in Traian Stoianovich, French Historical Method: the Annales Paradigm (Ithaca, N.Y., 1976), 9.



THE TIME OF HISTORY AND THE HISTORY OF TIMES 115

serve to underpin their enterprises. Still, the Annales historians' concept of time provides an accessible key to understanding the framework of their analyses, and a critique of the objectivist aspects of their approach brings to light certain problems inherent in any historiography based solely on concepts of objective time.

Fernand Braudel, more than other Annales scholars, has made his special scheme of time the key axis of analysis. In his historical tour de force, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip the Second, Braudel demonstrated the temporal relativity of history by treating objective time essentially as a problem of scale. Braudel held that the nineteenth- century historiographic emphasis on the history of events deals only with brief and ephemeral moments, with what he has described as "surface dis- turbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs."2 These surface events what Braudel terms l'histoire evenementielle - take place in le temps court.

Braudel sketches two other major scales of objective time which undergird this surface history. First, there is what might be called la moyenne duree: "If the expression had not been deflected from its full meaning, one could call it social history, the history of groups and groupings."' Here, Braudel wants to talk of the trends and gradual shifts of economic systems, cultures, and societies, and of the conjunctures of these trends and other conditions and events, which taken together seem to provide the broad direction of social history. This second scale of objective time deals with changes which may be imperceptible to the contemporary observer, simply because they are so gradual as to fall outside the range of perception. Thus Braudel occasionally terms this scale "unconscious" or "structural" history. Here he cites Levi-Strauss's quotation of Marx: "Men make history, but they are unaware that they do so."94

Aside from the structural history of la moyenne duree, Braudel notes a second, and even grander scale of time beyond le temps court, namely that of la tongue duree. This is basically an ecological history, "whose passage is almost imperceptible, that of man in relation to the environment, a history in which all change is slow, a history of constant repetition, everlasting cycles."5

Braudel uses all three scales of time as the framework for his analysis of the age of Philip the Second. But he is not content with letting this initial division

2. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip the Second [1966], transl. Sian Reynolds (New York, 1972), 27.

3. Ibid., 20. The term la moyenne duree was probably coined by J. H. Hexter, but as Hexter remarked, it seems appropriate to Braudel's scheme. See his "Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudellien," Journal of Modern History 44 (1972), 480-539.

4. Fernand Braudel, Ecrits sur l'Histoire (Paris, 1969), 62. 5. Braudel, Mediterranean, 20.



116 JOHN R. HALL

stand on its own. Useful as it may be for focusing analysis, the division is arbitrary. All phenomena, Braudel recognizes, have their own temporal phases. Even la tongue duree has its short cycles of the yearly seasons and the daily tides. Indeed, some ecological events, such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, are catastrophic, unique, and short-lived. Braudel also recognizes that the events of social history in diverse areas such as science, politics, mental outlooks (outillages mentaux), technology, and so on each have their own rhythms.6 Ultimately Braudel asks for a conception of historical processes which recognizes not simply three scales, but many streams of events, each with its own diverse and changing rhythms. Together the streams provide a total unfolding temporal texture analogous to that of an orchestra. In spite of a seeming multiplicity of times, in the orchestral meta- phor, Braudel finally asserts that there is only one time - the time of history, that is, objective world time. Thus, "long duration, conjuncture, event are interlocked without difficulty, because all are measured on the same scale."7

II. BRAUDEL AND SUBJECTIVE TIME

Braudel is aware of the potential for a subjectivist alternative to his own approach to time. Indeed, he uses his "temps imperieux du monde" to chal- lenge subjectivist conceptions, specifically in the dialectical version of Georges Gurvitch.8 Braudel cogently objects to a "synchronic" sociology which "freezes" time. Still, we need to pinpoint his complaint against those like Gurvitch who would explore temporal orientations among various social groups as a way of unmasking the relationship of social action to processes of history.

Gurvitch treats time as a variable dimension of social groupings, similar to class structure or the like. Braudel argues that unitary objective time cannot be reconstituted from the relativity of such fragmented social and subjective temporal orientations. In his view, Gurvitch's description of variable time loses touch with objective time, and thus escapes historical analysis. Accord- ing to Braudel, objective time is the necessary scale for historiographic inquiry, for this time pushes and constrains human actors.9 It is in this objective and nonreversible time that events occur in certain conjunctures, and these conjunctures themselves shape subsequent events.10 In this sense, against

6. Braudel, Ecrits, 46, 49. 7. Ibid., 76, my translation. 8. See Georges Gurvitch, "Continuite et discontinuity en histoire et en sociologie,"

Annales- Economies, Socigtes, Civilisations 12 annee (1957), 73-84, and The Spectrum of Social Time (Dordrecht, Holland, 1964).

9. Braudel, Ecrits, 77-79. 10. Braudel, Mediterranean, 355-375.




ahistorical anthropologists, Braudel is ready to assert that even "primitive" societies have history.1"

The subjectivists would not deny the objective and nonreversible flow of events which Braudel asserts. Both Alfred Schutz, the phenomenologist of social life, and his philosophical predecessor Edmund Husserl recognize that for each Now there is a past which has already happened and is thus closed to our intervention. Past events cannot be changed, and anticipated events may be affected only insofar as the action arrives "in time." Thus we know at the outset that the import of certain actions is lost because the actor made a decision on the basis of tardy news, or because circumstances changed between the moment action was initiated and the moment its consequences came to pass. Imagine, for example, an arrow traveling "through time and space" toward a target which has moved out of range during the elapsed time. Both Husserl's and Schutz's phenomenological analyses of subjective time acknowledge the passage of objective time indicated by this sort of phenomenon. In fact, both assert that the unity of objective time synthesizes the multiplicity of subjective temporal experiences.

But the subjectivist perspective does raise the issue of whether passage of objective time is always equally important, or, alternatively, whether whole social groups, as well as individuals, act differently toward the flux of events on the basis of different conceptions of a Now and its relation to past and future. If this latter view is the case, differences in temporal orientations would seem to share in shaping the nature of history itself. Although the flow of objective time may be measurable at a constant rate, variations in subjective temporal orientations are at least one source of the social rhythms, tempi, and conjunctures which converge on that flow.

Thus, whatever standard time historiographers use to "map" events is simply one among a number of social conventions for mapping time. Attempts to reconstruct the historical succession of events may use a conventional system, but the relation of events to one another on a scale of objective time is problematic. There are events which, although they occur at the "same" time, bear little relation to one another, just as there are sudden and decisive events

11. Braudel, Ecrits, 57-58. Even so, the interesting problem remains: oral historians of "primitive" societies may themselves "telescope" or "lengthen" objective time, not only because certain events have lost their relevance, but also to provide a politically "correct" history. The experience of past objective time can thus be distorted by chroniclers as a way of affecting the course of current history. See David P. Henige, The Chronology of Oral Tradition: Quest for a Chimera (Oxford, 1974).

12. See Alfred Schutz, The Phenomeneology of the Social World [1932] (Evanston, Ill., 1964), 213; Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness [1928], transl. J. S. Churchill (Bloomington, Ind., 1964), 94-96, 143-145: and The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology [1954], transl. David Carr (Evanston, Ill., 1970), 169.



118 JOHN R. HALL

which have their causes in occurrences long past, intermittent sequences of social action, and revolutions which bring about sudden change. At the points of sudden discontinuities, chronology may become particularly crucial, as events strategically interact with one another. Conversely, relatively longer periods of objective time may involve a kind of stability in which chronology loses its importance due to the sheer absence of events which build upon one another.13 Thus, the character and meaningful content of social life in many ways give shape to the times of people's lives. Indeed, many events happen "outside" of objective time, that is, in realms of activity which are disconnected from any significant location on an objective temporal scale. Meas- ured objective time exists simply as a social convention, clearly more or less important in different ways for various participants and arenas of social life, as well as for historians.

Braudel's scheme contains the germ of recognizing the importance of subjective time in the assertion that certain consciously based social phenomena, such as politics and mental outlooks, can have their own rhythms. But in confronting Georges Gurvitch, Braudel shied away from this view, for fear that objective time could not be regained once a subjectivist turn had been taken. As we have seen, neither Husserl nor Schutz places streams of subjective time outside the stream of history. Thus, Braudel's consideration of Gurvitch misses the mark so far as a critique of the subjectivist model of time is concerned. But it does underscore the character of Braudel's own conception of objective time. This conception is not an insistence on objective time simply as a conventional standard for analytic purposes. It is an assertion about phenomenal reality which shores up Braudel's claim for the unity of history - a temporally-based unity which derives from the unfolding conjunctures of diverse events and rhythms in the one objective time. Thus, one who wants to understand an historical moment must "define a hierarchy of forces, currents, particular movements, and then recapture them in a whole constellation.'4 Individual rhythms and counter-rhythms, melodies and counter-melodies come into play as part of one grand "orchestral" performance. Braudel replaces the Rankean unity of history conceived as the unfolding individuality of the state with an "unconscious" or "structural" history which turns out to be a universal history writ large, beyond the "surface" histoire evenementielle. But teleological notions are not a part of this version of universal history; instead, the conception of a single "orchestral" time simply implies that wherever we might be headed, we are all headed there in trends and movements which converge in a single history.

13. See Siegfried Kracauer, "Time and History," History and Theory, Beihieft 6 (1966), 65-78; and Chester G. Starr, "Historical and Philosophical Time," History and Theory, Beiheft 6 (1966), 24-35.

14. Braudel, Ecrits, 55, my translation.




III. THE STRUCTURALIST CRITIQUE OF OBJECTIVE TIME

Fernand Braudel's universal objective world time - permeated by the relativity of diverse tempi, rhythms, and conjunctures - represents a formidable basis for the practice of historiography. From a subjectivist standpoint, its main defect is to gloss variable subjective temporal orientations toward action. The Marxist structuralism of Louis Althusser offers an alternative critique of Braudel's conception of time.15 Basically Althusser rejects objective time in favor of a Marxist structuralist concept in which social times are circum- scribed by a social "totality."'6

Like Braudel, Althusser criticizes the sociological trick which pretends to "freeze time" by examining structural relationships at one point in time ("synchronically" they say, in a poor use of the term) .17 Such freezing of time Althusser calls an "essential section" (coupe d'essence). He rejects the procedure because an "essential section" cannot reveal the character of the social formation (that is, economy and society structured as a totality). Why not? Althusser argues that there is no single Now in which all elements of a social formation come into play. On the contrary, different "levels" (such as economic, political, scientific) of the social formation have their own temporal characters. Each level has its own distinctive phases. In Althusser's view these unfolding "levels" themselves - and even less the relations of these

15. Althusser specifically dissociated his work from "structuralist ideology," though he recognized "structuralism" as a terminological parallel which could give rise to am- biguity. See Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital [1968], transl. Ben Brewster (London, 1970), 7. Subsequently Althusser went so far as to deny altogether that he was a structuralist. Apparently he had used the term to contrast his own reading of Marx with humanistic Marxism and economism. But Althusser himself was accused of formalist and idealist tendencies, for example, by Barry Hindess and Paul Q. Hirst, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (London, 1975), 316. Althusser then specifically dissociated himself from the "formalist idealism" of structuralism, which mechanistically produces the real by combining conceptual elements. See Louis Al- thusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, transl. Grahame Lock (London, 1976), 126-131. This clarification revises the context of Althusser's earlier ideas, but it does not seem to have any bearing on their substance. In what follows, "structuralism" refers only to Al- thusser's version of Marxist analysis.

16. Althusser's work is complicated, for it is based on a particular correspondence theory of object and concept in science. It has provoked controversy among Marxists and non-Marxists alike. See Norman Geras, "Althusser's Marxism: An Account and Assessment," New Left Review 71 (1972), 57-86; Andre Glucksmann, "A Ventriloquist Structuralism," New Left Review 72 (1972), 68-92; Miriam Glucksmann, Structuralist Analysis in Contemporary Social Thought: A Comparison of the Theories of Claude Le'vi-Strauss and Louis Althusser (London, 1974); Bryan S. Turner, "The Struc- turalist Critique of Max Weber's Sociology," British Journal of Sociology 28 (1977), 1-16; Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism; and Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst, Mode of Production and Social Formation (London, 1977).

17. Althusser and Balibar, 94. Cf. Braudel, Ecrits, 77.



120 JOHN R. HALL

levels to one another in the total historical process - are simply not available as realities with a single Now.

Althusser credits Braudel and his colleagues for breaking from the conception of history as the single and invariant stream of time by recognizing the multiplicity of rhythms and tempi. But he still faults them for falling back on "ordinary time" as the scale upon which these different times are measured. According to Althusser, this ordinary, continuous, objective time, like the coupe d'essence of frozen time, is an Hegelian concept. For Althusser, frozen time and the continuity of time are but two sides of the same coin: an ideological concept of time, one which is "merely a reflection of the conception Hegel had of the type of unity that constitutes the link between all the economic, political, religious, aesthetic, philosophical and other elements of the social whole."18

From rejection of this "ideological" concept of historical time, Althusser moves to display his Marxist structuralist conception of time. This conception rejects not only the correspondence of the Now for diverse "levels" of the social formation, but the continuity of time as well. In their place, Althusser would proceed from his own theory of the social formation, which he claims to derive from the "true" late Marx. In this approach, each "level" has its own time and history; and the historical "punctuations" (continuous developments, revolutions, breaks, and the like) of each level are "relatively autonomous" of other levels. However, this does not imply that the levels are inde- pendent of each other:

The specificity of these times and histories is . . . differential, since it is based on the differential relations between the different levels within the whole: the mode and degree of independence of each time and history is therefore necessarily determined by the mode and degree of dependence of each level within the set of articulations of the whole.'9

Alluding to Braudel, Althusser comments: "It is not enough to say, as modern historians do, that there are different periodizations for different times, that each time has its own rhythms, some short, some long."20 Instead, Althusser wants to pose the question of "invisible times" embodied in specific forms of human activity themselves. In this way, Braudel's relativity of objective time in historical analysis is replaced by an account of the character of various "levels" of social formations. It would no longer be sufficient, for example, to give a history of feudalism, or even to note the "frozen" nature of feudalism as a "social world." Instead, it would be necessary to penetrate to the temporal modalities of diverse "levels" of feudal activities themselves, and to provide an account of the independence/dependence of these activities in relation to the whole.

18. Althusser and Balibar, 96. 19. Ibid., 100. 20. Idem.




Beyond analysis of any given social formation, Althusser's structuralist conception of time has implications for understanding the succession of one social formation by another one. Since the structure of a given social formation is the only thing which gives coherence to the diverse, and often relatively autonomous, levels within that totality, there would be no point to giving a simple chronological account of the transition from, say, feudalism to capitalism. The temporal features of each social formation's various "levels" are articulated in relation to the social formation itself, and the two social formations therefore cannot be synchronized. Even though they may overlap in what is conventionally construed as objective time, and even though certain "levels" may be differentially connected to both a preceding and an emerging social formation, the two bear no overall temporal relation to one another. In this sense, "history" reduces to the diachronic transition from one social formation to another, though each is relatively disconnected from the other in objective time.

Consistently then, Althusser resists falling back upon a single reference time as a way of connecting different levels and different social formations. This would seem to require a total reconstruction of the historiographic problematic. The nature of the demanded reconstruction may be seen by considering a problem which is useful for our purposes because it raises the issue of subjective time. I refer to the seemingly eternal problem of the "role of the individual in history." Here Althusser wants to say that the historiographic problem is a red herring - one which mistakenly compares theoretical (for example, historiographic) knowledge of a determinate object ("events") with the empirical existence of another object, an individual. In other words, a theoretically reconstructed empirical actor - the individual - is placed upon an historical stage which has no existence except as a constructed thought-object of the historian. The Althusserian problem which replaces this "false" problem arises from the assertion that there is no single time and no essence of "the individual." This problem consists of constructing "the historical forms of existence of individuality."2' For Althusser, there is no answer to the spurious question about the role of the individual in history. This abstracted question of historiography is to be replaced by an historically situated one which places the forms of individual existence within their respective levels of particular social formations.22

Althusser's concern about the forms of individuality points to a difficulty in Braudel's objectivist conception of time, namely, that individual action is especially the province of l'histoire evenementielle. The connections between individuals (and, specifically, their temporal orientations) are largely lost when we move in Braudel's scheme from "surface events" to "structural

21. Ibid., 11 1-1 12, italics omitted. 22. See, for example, Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life (New

York, 1976) for an analysis of the rise of subjectivity in modern capitalist societies.



122 JOHN R. HALL

history."23 Thus, the Althusserian structuralist critique of Braudel's approach gives rise to more than recognition of the relative autonomy of different times within levels of the social formation; so far as individuals are concerned, it seems to require an account which can place them within various "levels" of the social formation and their temporal connections to these "levels." An example makes this scheme clear. A housewife who does not participate directly in industrial production partakes of the temporal rhythm of her com- munity, and she fits into institutionally scheduled events mainly as a con- sumer; her husband may work in a factory, performing routinized and repeti- tive activities of production for a precisely determined number of hours per day and days per year. Meanwhile a financial manager of the company which owns the factory is busy calculating abstract long-term relative shifts in profits; he wants to know what financial returns can be expected from alternative patterns of investment in repair of deteriorating labor-intensive assembly line machinery versus the purchase of new, largely automated production equipment. Each of these individuals participates in the same social formation; each of their lives at times may intersect with one of the others'. Still, each participates in large part in different "levels," each of which has its own "relatively autonomous" temporality.

It is possible to plot events on a scale of objective time, but the meaningful times are those of the levels themselves and their interconnections, not objective time. Only at moments of intersection between the "relatively autonomous levels" does objective time become important. Even in such instances, it is sometimes only the fact of intersection, or, at other times, the relative temporal location of intersection (before or after other events) rather than the absolute objective temporal location, which has significance for subsequent events. Beyond this, Althusser notes "invisible times" which are simply inac- cessible in the objectivist approach. Presumably, subjective temporal phenomena would fall in this category, as would, for example, the "abstract" time of capitalist financial calculation. In light of Althusser's approach, the objectivist approach to time seems to sift out arbitrarily one aspect of the flux of events -"when" they occur -to create a history which thus obscures the temporal interconnections of "levels" of the totality, as well as the nature of times within "levels."

Overall, Althusser's structuralist approach offers a clear alternative to scalar objective temporal relativity. It emphatically rejects as ideological the idea of a universal world time. It thereby also rejects the notion that an obiec- tive standard of time can be used as a mapping scheme for historiography,

23. Cf. J. H. Hexter, 533, who sees Braudel as simply tacking structural history on top of a Rankean political history without resolving "the perennial historiographical difficulty of linking the durable phenomena of history with those that involve rapid change."




because the phenomena of social formations themselves do not transpire within this conventionalized time frame. Althusser appreciates the recognition by Braudel that there are many rhythms and conjunctures, but he demands that these temporal phenomena be specified not in terms of objective time, but in terms of "levels" of the social formation in relation to the total social formation.

In his break with the objectivist approach, Althusser has opened up fundamental questions which are obscured by the concept of a single scale of time, namely: How can historiography come to terms with the historical emergence and predominance of different spheres and kinds of time? And how are we to comprehend alternative temporal relations of human activity themselves? These questions seem to me to force a synthesis of previously divergent approaches to historiography.

IV. ALTHUSSER AND SUBJECTIVISM

It is clear that Althusser would not entertain a subjectivist solution to his problematic of differential social times: he wants to look at structural processes, not at human subjects.24 He wants to maintain a radical separation between scientific concepts and theories on the one hand, and actual social developments on the other. For these reasons, Althusser would not be sympa- thetic to a phenomenology of time which begins with knowledge of the human subject.

Nevertheless, Althusser's approach to temporality must derive in part from his philosophical mentor Gaston Bachelard's dialectical analysis of subjective and objective time.25 It would seem nearly impossible to construct a concept of each kind of social time - as Althusser wants to do - without acknowledging that human activity and hence subjective time comes into play. Althusser seems to recognize this, for he appreciates Freud's study of the unconscious, and calls for conceptualization of the time of the unconscious "in order to obtain an understanding of certain biographical traits."26 Thus, while Althusser's epistemology is at odds with any subjectivist theory of time, his theoretical project must be somewhat receptive to developing structuralist concepts of subjective time. It is, after all, the temporally organized human activities for which Althusser wants to construct his structuralist theoretical concepts.

Yet Althusser never approaches empirical reality with his philosophical analysis. His discussion of time and his attempt to retrieve a concept of history for Marxist studies always remain in the domain of theory. His collaborator

24. Althusser, 94-99. 25. Gaston Bachelard, La Dialectique de la Dr&ee (Paris, 1950). 26. Althusser and Balibar, 103.



124 JOHN R. HALL

Etienne Balibar, however, provides a sketch of concrete analysis informed by Althusser's structuralist approach to time. This sketch, "The Basic Con- cepts of Historical Materialism," relies heavily on a revamped distinction between synchrony and diachrony: the former is held to be the "eternal" workings out of a particular mode of production, the latter, the transition from one mode of production to another. In his analysis, Balibar refuses to descend to the level of empirical events; in good Althusserian fashion he claims that there are no "facts" except those generated by theoretical concepts.27 Nor does Balibar treat individuals as anything other than those who enact the determinate structure. Theoretical analysis begets theoretical knowledge, which never need resort to "events." Of course this preposterous posture can only be maintained in epistemological pronouncements; in actual theoretical discussion, Balibar is forced at times into acknowledgement of empirical realities (such as how the "putting out" system of manufacture preceded industrialization in the development of the capitalist mode of production). But in no case is the consideration of human actors in lived time a focus of analysis. In short, Althusser and Balibar steadfastly maintain theory as a realm unto itself; and since they claim that the concept of mode of production is based on objective social relationships, they see little need to deal with individuals and hence with subjective time.

This approach might seem sound so long as we avoid investigating the particulars of a given mode of production and social formation. But at some point it becomes necessary to examine the various "levels" of the social formation, the natures of their various times, and the temporal intersections of the levels in a total social formation. Yet such a project demands an understanding of subjective time and the intersections of individuals in an intersubjective temporal world. This requirement has nothing to do with any claim for the autonomy or "free will" of individuals. It is not an idealist assertion (for example, that subjective temporal orientation or consciousness in general "creates" social reality). That is a separate issue. Nor are we concerned at this point with epistemological stances treating the relation between theory and social life. What is at stake is the assumption that any social phenomenon is ultimately based upon participation by social actors who stand in meaningful relation to one another. For to be in a meaningful social relation is ipso facto to be in an intersubjective temporal relation. This is so, as Dilthey observed, because social meanings are produced on occasions. In Dilthey's view, each social occasion has subjective temporal locations keyed to the pasts and the anticipated futures of the persons involved. The meaningful connections of action thus tend to "transcend" the stream of unfolding time;

27. Ibid., 257. 28. Ibid., 252.




they are enmeshed in non-sequential subjective contexts of meaning, which give an extra-chronological character to unfolding social life.29

Given the subjective temporal basis of socially meaningful action, any project of conceptualizing social phenomena involves understanding the temporal orientations of active subjects. Whether those orientations are conceived as determined by structural processes or as having subjective sources is a separate matter. As Althusser suggests, this is a crucial line of demarcation between various theoretical and ideological positions; it cannot be ignored. But Althusser acknowledges that the initial demarcation is only a rough one; it must be "worked on" in order to understand the relation between subjects and structure.30 Balibar implicitly moves toward this task with his suggestive assertion that capitalism differs temporally from feudalism in the manner of surplus appropriation.31 He thus begins the same sort of temporal analysis of social formations called for by Althusser. But in his brief sketch, Balibar balks at considering active subjects, and his analysis therefore can only proceed so far. Even in such a structuralist approach to Marxist analysis of the social formation, it must be understood that a mode of production involves social actors in active relation to techniques of production, in relation to other social actors around the actual means of production, as well as (often anonymous) social relations of surplus appropriation. In short, modes of production involve ongoing interaction of human beings; and an understanding of their temporal natures therefore requires analysis of the temporal orientations of acting subjects.

Any serious consideration of Althusser's critique of temporal objectivism pushes beyond the limits of his Marxist structuralism. It seems both possible and necessary to incorporate subjective and intersubjective temporal concepts into this approach, but Althusser and Balibar have not done so. The main problem they would face is how to reconcile their epistemology - which denies the possibility of analyzing concrete phenomena - with the concrete yet nonchronological meaningful character of actual social life. If and when a conceptualization of subjective time is incorporated into structuralist Marxist theory, Althusserians would be well served if they simply raided the camp of subjectivist "bourgeois" social theorists, transforming their concepts of time so as to fit within the structuralist edifice. In any case, they will have to take on the problem which presently confronts the subjectivist approach, namely, the hiatus between the philosophical understanding of subjective time and the practice of historiographic and sociological analysis.

29. Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Writings, ed. and transl. H. P. Rickman (London, 1976) , 208-245.

30. Althusser, 98. 31. Althusser and Balibar, 221 ff.



126 JOHN R. HALL

V. REPRISE

Basing his studies on the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schutz, the phenomenologist of the social world, has given a thorough critique of Max Weber's concept of subjectively meaningful action. True to Husserl's emphasis on the stream of internal time-consciousness as the source of meaning, Schutz developed his critique from an examination of the temporal character of meaningful action. Beyond his critique of Weber, Schutz also provided a descriptive phenomenology of the temporal structures of the lifeworld - the world of paramount reality which humans act within and upon by means of our animate organisms. For his phenomenological project, Schutz described only the a priori temporal structures of the lifeworld, that is, those features which are invariant and essential. Schutz never drew on his analysis for any historiographic purposes of describing empirical variants of these temporal structures. Althusser's program reveals a gap and a shortcoming of subjectivist historiography: logically speaking, the temporal basis of subjective meaning should require a history of subjective temporal orientations. Instead, subjectivist historians have ignored Wilhelm Dilthey's early emphasis on subjective time, while the phenomenological analysis of time has remained de- cidedly ahistorical.

To resolve this hiatus, philosophical phenomenology, particularly in the work of Husserl, and Schutz's phenomenology of the lifeworld must be brought to bear on the empirical tasks of interpretative sociology and historiography. This enterprise of "applied phenomenology" would restore the lifeworld as the zone of sociological analysis, and subjective time as the key- stone of meaning, hence of social action, of complex fields of social action, and of history.32 For an example of this kind of analysis, let us take Althus- ser's project of conceptualizing the temporal aspects of a given mode of production. As we have already seen, no matter whether a mode of production transcends any individual consciousness, the enactment of the mode of production involves definite human activity, and it is therefore embedded in subjective and intersubjective times.33

To conceptualize the temporal aspects of a given mode of production, it

32. John R. Hall, "Alfred Schutz, His Critics and Applied Phenomenology," Cuil- tural Herineneutics 4 (1977), 265-279.

33. Even the phenomena which Braudel would want to call unconsciousy are only unconscious in the objective sense, that is, from the point of view of change over objective time. The scale of objective temporal change may transcend the consciousness of any one individual, but the phenomena themselves embody subjective temporality. However much the observer may conceptualize a trans-subjective "drift" of folkways, the folkways themselves are enacted in events which transpire as human actions situated in subjective streams of temporality. If we are to avoid a kind of abstraction which obscures the nature of these phenomena, we must insist that every concept of social




would be necessary to understand the temporal character of various inte- grated processes of material production, the subjective temporal orientations of various social actors who staff positions in a mode of production, the nature of the social world time of those engaged in the social relationships of material production, and the temporal relationship of appropriation of surplus (that is, the temporality of class relationships). In analyzing the transition from one mode of production to another, it would be necessary to consider the shifts in the character of time in each of the dimensions just mentioned. At least one legitimate historiographic problem within this domain would involve tracing the social sources, elective affinities, and sequential emergences of various temporal transformations which embody a transition from one mode of production to another.

Tracing the changes in the material basis of social life is a central concern of both Marxist and other versions of historiography. Since materialist history conventionally is regarded as strictly an objectivist enterprise, it is an appropriately difficult case for which to sketch the nature of the temporally based analysis I am proposing. But other "levels," for example, political domination or the production of knowledge, should be amenable to the same sort of investigation.

For the purposes of these investigations, Husserl's phenomenological analysis of essential structures of time-consciousness can be used to derive alternative mundane (lifeworldly) concepts of time. These concepts of applied phenomenology can be used to enrich other sociological concepts, as well as to analyze specific historical developments.34 How might these concepts be derived?

Husserl's phenomenology of internal time consciousness moves from elab- orating the Now as a stream of consciousness to describing retention (or primary remembrance), reproduction (or secondary remembrance), and anticipation as acts of consciousness. Remembrance and anticipation inject into the Now objects of attention which are not immediately available to perception in the Now, either because they exist only as abstractions, as mem- ories of previous perceptions, or as intentions or expectations about things to come. For the purposes of applied phenomenological analysis of the lifeworld, it is possible to conceptualize four types of subjective temporal orientations, each based on different emphases of the a priori possibilities of time consciousness described by Husserl.

time (but not necessarily ecological time) be based in part on reference to temporal subjective acts of consciousness.

34. This investigative strategy is employed in John R. Hall, The Ways Out: Utopian Communal Groups in an Age of Babylon (London, 1978). Obviously the Althusserian strategy would differ somewhat.



128 JOHN R. HALL

First, there is the synchronic temporal orientation. Here "synchronic" has to be understood in a quite different sense from the conventional objectivist one. From the phenomenological point of view, as with Althusser, the conventional use of the term "synchronic" to refer to events occurring at the same point in objective time can lead only to obfuscation. Rather than deal- ing with the "synchronic" as an analytic device, it is necessary to understand it as referring to subjective and intersubjective temporal orientations in which the Now is the locus of individual and collective attention. In its (extreme) ideal-typical conceptualization, synchronic time is lived time, time totally contained within the unfolding perceptual stream of consciousness.35 While retention (primary remembrance) is an a priori aspect of the stream of consciousness, the sedimented experiences thus retained would never be recalled via reproduction (secondary remembrance), and anticipation would never guide action in the Now.

Second, and again offering counterpoint to the objectivist analytic dichot- omy between the synchronic and the diachronic, a phenomenal diachronic orientation toward time de-emphasizes the Now in favor of reproduction (from sedimented memory) of the past and anticipation of the future. This orientation treats the Now as a way-station between previously conceived projects or requirements (such as conventions, norms, recipes, policies) and anticipated completion of these projects in the future. In the empirical in- stance, this orientation can easily give rise to the use of rationalized physical duration as an external analogue to subjectively oriented diachrony. Then the clock may serve as a device for coordination of collective life.

Two other types of subjective temporal orientations both depend on the exclusive emphasis on either past or future as the source of meaning for the present. On the one hand, strategic time is totally goal-directed, and the anticipated future thus defines the meaning and utility of action in the Now. The past is significant only to the degree that it constrains the possibilities of present actions toward future goals. On the other hand, eternal time derives its meaning from a "mythical" past, from a past which precedes any frame of diachrony and thus attains an abstract character of timeless re-creation, "now and forever more."

These lifeworld phenomenological possibilities must be understood as ideal types which could not exactly correspond to empirical reality. Following Weber's procedure of constructing ideal types, the four types of temporal orientations have been reduced to a conceptual clarity and adequacy on the level of meaning which simply does not obtain in the phenomenal world. But this is the very virtue of ideal-type analysis: the ideal types are fixed

35. Subtypes of temporal orientations can be developed by specifying other aspects of cognition; see ibid., 57-68.




theoretical "benchmarks"; they do not depend upon empirical realities for the confirmation of their validity. Instead, validity is a purely theoretical problem of utility and of parsimony in concept formation.36 These ideal types of subjective time and ones like them can be used to specify particular temporal formations, which involve the interplay of subjective temporal orientations, the interplay of subjectivities in vivid social situations, and the gearing in of these local temporal phenomena with the collective rhythms and dis- junctures of various social world times. It is possible, using these and similar concepts, to construct "secular theories" of the more complex empirical realities in which different temporal complexes of action interpenetrate in the actually unfolding "stream of history."

This procedure parallels and enriches Max Weber's analytic strategy.37 As Guenther Roth has described Weber's strategy, sociologically grounded historical explanation moves among three poles: 1) ideal types, or what Roth prefers to call socio-historical models (to emphasize the ultimate basis of concepts in the varieties of human social phenomena); 2) secular (or developmental) theories, which draw on ideal types for the description of long-term social transformations (such as the rise of capitalism in the West); and 3) situational analysis, which penetrates to the specific contingencies of a particular set of events for a particular set of involved social actors.38 Because Weber's approach is based on a postulate of subjective interpretation at the level of concept formation, subjectively meaningful action necessarily figures in explanations at both the secular and situational levels of analysis. However, it is important to note that Weber did not ever deny the effect of external events on the course of subjectively meaningful action.39 Thus, Weber allows for a subject-object relation; and because he draws on concepts clarified at a level of pure abstraction, his approach offers a sound basis for ful- filling the Althusserian rejection of a single unified and universal history. Indeed, this was exactly Weber's enterprise - to give a conceptual account of empirical events which recognizes some autonomous, some overlapping, some interpenetrating histories, each with its own typical and unique paths

36. Nevertheless, such concepts may be clarified through empirical investigation. The general procedure is described by Guenther Roth, "Sociological Typology and Historical Explanation," in Reinhard Bendix and Guenther Roth, Scholarship and Partisanship: Essays on Max Weber (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971), 109-128. For an effort at using this procedure to clarify the concept of charisma, see Bryan S. Turner, Weber and Islam (London, 1974).

37. "Lifeworld Phenomenology," Huiman Studies, forthcoming. 38. Guenther Roth, "Sociological Typology and Historical Explanation" and "His-

tory and Sociology in the Work of Max Weber," British Journal of Sociology 27 (1976), 306-318.

39. For example, see Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1977).



130 JOHN R. HALL

of social action directed to other people and to the natural and cultural worlds.40 Though Weber himself did not treat the history of time per se, it should be understood by now that the unfolding histories described by him must have their own temporal characters. These derive from the inherently temporal meanings of socially oriented subjective actions, carried out both within the frames of "institutionalized" typical social actions, and within the temporal cycles and punctuations of natural and social phenomena.

If the Weberian approach is to meet the Althusserian demand for a history of times, then the ideal types of subjective time just described must be employed in turn to enrich the Weberian ideal types which are employed in secular theories and situational analyses. For example, it is possible to suggest in passing that traditional authority involves eternal temporality, while charismatic authority may be either synchronic or strategic, and legal- rational authority is inherently diachronic. Once this kind of specification has been carried through with respect to ideal types, historical explanations may be enriched by exploring their temporal modalities as Althusser demands. For example, we would want to trace the origins of diachrony embedded in both the subjective participation in, and institutional organization of, early capitalism. One basis for doing this would be to explore the "elective affinity" between capitalism as a mode of production and Protestantism as embodying a subjective temporal orientation. Equally, we would want to know how the continuities of a diachronically organized social formation are "shot through with chips of Messianic time," as Walter Benjamin so aptly put it.41 With these kinds of investigations, those who hope for social inquiry beyond myth and ideology will be in better positions to assess previous historical explanations often simplistically labeled as "materialist" or "idealist."

As in all theoretical work, the outcome of these considerations is fore- shadowed by their presuppositions. I expect that the recognition of "many histories" will lead to a synthesis beyond subjectivist relativity based on the recognition of many subjects; nor will it be sufficient any more to rely on objectivist analysis of relativity derived from the scale perspective of linear time. Instead, subject and object relativity will be understood in relation to each other. The conflicting theoretical claims, if they are to be resolved in theoretical inquiry, can be resolved only by attempting to construct a temporally grounded theory of phenomena themselves, in which subject and the outer world are linked in momentous flux. The societal ideology of progress has had its parallel in the historiography which has focused history on sequences and rhythms of events in objective time; the current task is to

40. Weber rejected the kind of holism which Althusser has embraced. 41. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" [1940], transl. H. Zohn

and reprinted in Illuminations (New York, 1968), 265.




draw on temporally enriched, subjectively based ideal types in order to free historiography of this ideology so that we may come truly to understand alternative temporal social worlds in which, for example, history as it has been established is irrelevant. The objectivist time of history is to be replaced with a "history" of times.

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