The Thing Called Time

          I recently read James Elkin’s The Object Stares Back at You. Among other things it talked about the conditions of seeing, that blindness isn’t the opposite of vision rather it is its constant companion even the foundation of seeing itself. This came back to me when I read Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe: in trying to free itself from the first-Europe and then rest of the world model, his arguments are in constant conversation with European theorists. Similarly, historicism and what Chakrabarty calls decisionism aren’t opposites but mutually constitutive. But how does time feature into all of this?

          One of the important things that Chakrabarty aims to do is to problematize the notion of singular united time and to explore diverse ways of being in the world by delving on examples from the Bengali context. This then is a critique of historicism in non-western societies. If one were to use historicism, Chakrabarty writes that history of non-western societies would be like a "waiting room" where time is secular and those who haven’t realized political modernity in western terms wait for its arrival. Here is where the intervention of the subaltern studies collective occurs—the collective tries to democratize history through ideas of time itself (whether they succeed or not is a separate question). This challenges notions of singular united historical time in which we all exist as monolithic subjects. If read generously, the subaltern studies can also be seen as a critique of secular time. For instance, Guha puts it beautifully “the possibility of calling upon God [or gods] without being under an obligation to first establish his [or their] reality.”

             Chakrabarty also ties in ideas of past with futurity. Constantly fragmentary and irreducibly plural nature of the now affects our conceptions of the past.  The past is incomplete and perennially inaccessible in its full form to the historian who objectifies it through history. History then as much a project about futurity (a fragmented one) as much it is about the past. In many ways the subaltern collective is about futurity as well. Because the past haunts the moment that we have arrived in, shapes the questions that ask of archives which somehow constitute pastness it also retrieves futures by creating them, if not rendering them partially visible. Where does that leave us? In a fragmentary world of constantly shifting time that allows for multiple ways of being to translate some of its traces onto history. This plurality of time shapes the historian’s conception of their world and history writing. Consider Galeano’s larger than life almost super-natural history that reminds one of Marquez’s fiction. To write history then is an act of saving the past and a declaration of possibilities of future. Conceptions of time too are political.