harry harootunian 2005 - space time problem

Some Thoughts on Comparability and the Space-Time Problem

Harry Harootunian

The primacy of space over time in general is an infallible character-istic of reactionary language; beginning with . . . illustrated supple-ments which call themselves ‘‘Nation and Space’’ (supplements ofleft-wing papers were called ‘‘Nation and Time’’) down to . . . ‘‘space-historical method’’ and geographical mediations.—Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times

‘‘Space, the Final Frontier’’

In this essay, I am primarily concerned with exploring the increasingcontemporary turn toward space and the resulting strategies of this movebased on the elucidation of spatial categories in the interpretative sciences.This particular awareness has been manifested in the now overwhelminginterest in tracking what moves between discrete spatial boundaries andacross them. By the same token, I would like to address the question oftemporality and the consequences of its recession from social and histori-cal analysis and perhaps suggest possible ways for a reunion with its spatial

boundary 2 32:2, 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press.

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complement. In short, I would like to look into some of the afterlives of areastudies and how its inaugural impulse for holism and comparison has beenreconfigured in such ways as to retain and even privilege the spatial. I wantto reflect on what, in effect, has enabled precisely those strategies that haveled to considerations of diasporic bodies and their movements crossing bor-ders, in-between states exhibiting hybrid combinations, the inside and out-side, and newer, enlarged bounded entities such as globe and empire. Onthe deficit side, I am thinking about the shifting relationship between thepresent and the past, and its intimations for a future, and how the withdrawalof time, as such, affects our capacity for comparative study. But it is impor-tant to add that I am not simply making a plea for a return to history, as itis so often invoked in the wake of the now-old new historicism, but rathercalling for a restoration of considerations of the crucial spatiotemporal rela-tionship that must attend any explanatory program. Part of this impulse hasbeen prompted by the desire to reconsider the possibilities that attendedarea studies at its inception, as well as the conviction that comparability istoo important a consideration to be left to disciplines such as comparativeliterature.

With the spatial turn and the resituating of its leading categories,such as culture, civilization, modernity itself, center and periphery, globaland empire, which bring with them fixity, positionality, location, and asyn-chrony, the spatiotemporal relationship seems to have disappeared underthe weight of these virtual continents. Perhaps this move represents a ‘‘spa-tialization of social theory’’ authorized by the retrospective discovery of thecentrality of space and communication in the constitution of social orders.1

What once was seen as a division of continents lying at great distances fromeach other has now been overcome: socially produced distances such asstate borders or cultural barriers appear as secondary effects of speed. Byappealing to enlarged, singular spatial categories—currently the global andempire dominate our agendas—the arena of social action has broadenedand displaced other kinds of causality traditionally employed to accountfor social phenomena. What had once been conceived as the things to beexplained—the outcome of a historical process—has now been transformedinto the explanation’s premise. It is the larger, encompassing spaces, suchas the globe and empire, that now explain the changing world of moder-nity rather than the reverse and that work against making a spatiotemporalproblematic the basis of any explanation.

1. Justin Rosenberg, The Follies of Globalization (London: Verso, 2000), 1.

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Harootunian / Comparability and the Space-Time Problem 25

Any discussion of modernity and its identification with change willlead to construing the historical process reflexively—temporalizing a mo-ment that immediately and, perhaps, necessarily marks off its location fromwhat came before and distinguishes discontinuous times contained withinthe same chronology.2 Reinhard Kosellek, quoting from J. G. Herder’sMeta-kritik of Kant, reminds us that ‘‘in actuality, every changing thing has themeasure of its own time within itself. No two worldly things have the samemeasure of time. . . .There are, therefore, . . . at any one time in the uni-verse innumerably many times.’’3 This is, I think, one of the great, genera-tive insights of the modern era that established for the first time a tempo-ral matrix that was able to mark out multiple moments and temporalitiesdemanding an awareness of simultaneously differing forms of temporaliza-tion within a single space, despite the nation-states’ effort to obliterate them.With this insight, Kosellek proposes that the late eighteenth-century per-ception already prefigured the practice to investigate historical events andsequences for their own ‘‘internal time.’’4 Yet he could have added (and didelsewhere) that the discovery of internal time—identifying the unique pointof time for a specific temporal period—authorized a comparative perspec-tive that would define the vocation of the human and social sciences, andthereafter bind its practice to it. It will be, therefore, my intention first to brieflyrehearse some of the familiar consequences of this comparative frameworkfor practice and to show how, conversely, it has encouraged strategies thathave ultimately privileged space at the expense of effacing precisely those

2. Reinhard Kosellek, Futures Past, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,1985), 94. But it should also be said that Kosellek is aware that ‘‘we are always using con-cepts that were originally conceived in spatial terms, but that nevertheless have a temporalmeaning.’’ See Reinhard Kosellek, ThePractice of Conceptual History, trans. Todd SamuelPresner and others (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 6–7. This observa-tion also implies the hegemony of space over historical time, which, as we shall see, wasrepudiated by writers such as Bakhtin, who, with his mathematically inspired concept ofthe chronotope, insisted on differing modes of relating between space and time accordingto shifting periods of history found in the appearance of different forms or genres of writ-ing. It should also be pointed out that the vocation of national history, which constitutesthe principal preoccupation of historical practice down to the present, is, as the epigraphabove suggests, more spatial than temporal, inasmuch as a completed past is fixed to aparticular geographical place. See Harry Harootunian, ‘‘Shadowing the Past: National His-tory and the Persistence of the Everyday,’’ Cultural Studies 18, no. 2/3 (March/May 2004):181–200.3. Kosellek, Futures Past, 247.4. Kosellek, Futures Past, 247.

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different temporalities produced by capitalism’s capacity for serializing andsegmenting a cumulative temporal process defined by its irreversibility.

The Spatial Ambition of Area Studies

Before I turn to this theme, however, I would like to take a slight detourand say something about the importance of area studies for the compara-tive project and how it has induced people to embark upon the study ofsocieties and cultures other than their own—distant, different, psychologi-cally remote, always escaping one’s reach, ultimately obliging them to spendentire lives in the precincts that are often alien and alienating and alwaysother. I think we need to revisit the conditions attending that decision inorder to understand the stakes that might have propelled this commitmentbecause, as it is well known now, area studies originally promised to providethe framework and perspective for the establishment of a proper study ofcomparative societies. One of the more remarkable but unobserved occur-rences invariably effaced by area studies is the obvious fact that the peoplesof the world outside of Euro-America have been forced to live lives com-paratively by virtue of experiencing some form of colonization or subjectionenforced by the specter of imperialism. This experience of living compara-tively inevitably disclosed the instrumentalizing force of classificatory strate-gies promoted by the imperial dominant that invariably hierarchized relation-ships everywhere colonialism and imperialism spread. The Japanese phi-losopher Watsuji Tetsuro, recognizing in the consequences of this assaultin the 1930s the formation of a ‘‘double life,’’ developed a theory of ‘‘layer-ing’’ ( jusosei ) that supposedly characterized Japan’s history since the timeof origins to explain why Japanese were compelled to live comparatively—life in double time—as a condition of their modern transformation.

Yet it must also be said that this move to study foreign and remotecultures was institutionalized in colleges and universities at the end of WorldWar II and the beginning of the Cold War, to become a permanent fixturein the academic procession, even though it remained at the end of it. Untilthe work of scholars such as Edward Said and the explosion of colonial andpostcolonial studies, area studies had successfully displaced the fact thatmuch of the world it studied had been dominated by imperial and colonialpowers. And this immense sleight of hand was consistent with the goalsof new area and regional programs organized after World War II to supplythe new national security state with useful information and knowledge aboutAmerica’s enemies and potential trouble spots around the globe. These

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regions were principally former colonized societies that came to constitutethe Third World. It—area studies—would create a space for encouragingsuch study and providing the resources to enable a generation of studentsto plunge into the acquisition of impossibly difficult languages and seem-ingly arcane cultures in order to enable encounter with and even residencein regions of the world that had only been imagined in exotic (and erotic) fan-tasies or experienced as zones of military combat. By the same measure,it would be wrong to conclude that people entered into the study of remoteregions of the world only because fellowships were plentiful, the opportunityfor foreign travel and residence an attractive necessity, and the prospect ofacademic or government jobs a promising certainty. The first recruits wereusually men, and a few women, who, through military service, had beentrained to be interrogators of prisoners; interpreters of captured documentsand intercepted communiqués; and translators, who, after the war, madeavailable a large pool of linguistic talent and who, with additional training,could become instant area specialists ready to reproduce the new academicorganizations once they acquired teaching posts. The offspring of mission-aries who had lived in Asia and Africa constituted another source of recruit-ment, numerically smaller than former service language officers but prob-ably more influential in the long run. Still later, there was a fairly large cohortof enlistees from the Peace Corps experience. For those without military ormissionary inducements, there was the naïve appeal of working in newlyopened areas, which, as I look back now, was not only wrong but a badidea that was constantly fated to fail to satisfy even the slightest intellectualexpectation, since it could not help but continually clash with the sensibilitiesand purpose informing area studies agendas and their custodians.

In any case, this singular experience, probably replicated endlessly,dramatizes the need to know why people would be willing to spend so muchtime, effort, and energy to learn languages over which it would ultimatelytake a lifetime and more to secure control, when they could have masteredseveral European languages in a fraction of the time. What earthly reasonwould send young people on this academic ‘‘children’s crusade,’’ scurryingto remote regions of the world and convincing them to make accommo-dations to living conditions, customs, and cultural patterns they could nothave known at the time, and whose mastery would also take a lifetime andyet would never fit like a second skin much less become a habituated sec-ond nature? To be sure, there were those who flocked to Asia for adven-turous exotic opportunities and erotic possibilities (both of which are stillincluded in the desire to learn the martial arts), for religious desire, for the

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multiple illusions (delusions?) of ‘‘passing’’ and its unfilled promises—for allkinds of reidentifications. Still more others shored up their wobbly senseof stakes by marrying into these cultures. These and other impulses werefulfilled by an agenda that approached an area or region holistically (oftenread off the boundaries of the nation-state), privileging spatial dimensionsover the temporal and inserting a country or culture into a geographic loca-tion but rarely considering its relationship either to the world or time. In fact,regions and areas were simply seen as singularly spatial and often time-less entities that were in the world but were not treated as if they belongedto it. This sense of the timeless was often pressed by historians as well,who appeared fixated on the figure of tradition and continuity, which alwaysseemed to be another way of positioning the spatial over the temporal. Ifsuch an approach, still prevailing in colleges and universities, aimed to pro-vide an understanding of the totality of a culture, echoing the older obses-sion with extracting an unchanging and essential national character prom-ised by the study of national literatures and histories, the spatial privilegepersisted like an impregnable mountain keep against all and any effort topromote a perspective capable of articulating the specific space-time rela-tionship that would have undermined the claims of holism and transparencyat the same time it resituated the area in multiple histories. Instead, thiseffort to rethink a perspective based on acknowledging the space-time rela-tionship was delayed and even displaced by the move to hermeneutic socialscience (in the United States), which sought to emphasize the primacy ofmeaning in the ‘‘interpretation of cultures.’’

The moment was famously exemplified by people such as CliffordGeertz and Robert Bellah (both former students of Talcott Parsons) andenthusiastic camp followers among historians and anthropologists. The taskwas either to find ways to comprehend native sensibilities by seeking tooccupy the place they were experienced, in the hope of securing an em-pathic identification that would have made Wilhelm Dilthey blush (after all, asa German national, he was not concerned with ‘‘natives’’ but only with Ger-many’s historical horizon), or, worse, to discover analogies to Weber’s Prot-estant Ethic in Asia, which would make such regions easier to grasp sincetheir cultural particularity was annexed to and assimilated into a systemof values we not only already understood (like second nature) but actuallyhad originated. What seems important about this intervention—for our pur-poses—is that it managed to forcefully reinforce the spatial prerogative ofthe area by positing the possibility of empathetic enactment in a static spa-tial location (Balinese cockfight, Indonesia, Tokugawa Japan) rather than

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the temporalities that must have attended the formations of the place underconsideration and accompanied whatever processes were being identifiedwith it. Too often such an approach led to a concern with producing placerather than the place of production. That is to say, the operation of get-ting into the shoes, of standing tall in them, so to speak, or of stepping intothe footprints of the ‘‘native’’ (in marked contrast to both Dilthey and R. G.Collingwood, who advised historians of getting into the mind[s] of the past),implied entering an atemporal and anahistorical zone—anytime, no timein particular—and made no effort whatsoever to account for the agency oftime—the moment—whether present or past. The apparent price paid forthis insensitivity to the mediation of time was the transmutation of spaceinto a nonplace, without duration and context. In area and historical studies,Geertz was the social scientist of choice, and the invocation of his namereverberated with totemic force the sound of scientific veracity and serious-ness. It is interesting to observe that despite the vast distance between hismoment in social science and postcolonial discourse, they both share thesame spatial terrain, inasmuch as the former works to transmute an areainto textual space to be read while the latter empties the postcolonial ofits timefulness—as implied by its reliance on the prefix post-, thus trans-muting chronology into cognition and a knowledge whose discursive utter-ances must constantly be read for slippages and what they say about thenot said. What area studies, in its many incarnations, failed to provide wasa persuasive attempt to account for its privilege of space (and place) and itsapparent exemption from an encounter with time. Part of this failure stemsfrom losing its calling for comparability.

The Specter of the Colonial Unconscious:Classification and Comparison

While area studies was explicitly implemented after World War II toencourage and even foster the development of new comparative perspec-tives across disciplines and between different culture regions, it was di-verted from this vocation by the desire to supply information crucial to theinterests of the national security state and then, later, private businesses.Instead of envisaging genuinely interdisciplinary agendas capable of inte-grating different disciplines, area studies often settled for the regime of asimple multidisciplinarism as the sign of a comparative method that mas-queraded coverage for the work of comparison, language acquisition formethod, the totality of the nation-state for theory. Too often, area studies

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by "paying attn to time," seems to be arguing for epistemology/historicization


became captive of a particular kind of social science which promoted aform of cultural holism that was made to stand in for a broader region,even though its true focus was the nation. Moreover, this social science,usually some variant of structural functionalism, invariably aimed to ‘‘natural-ize time’’5 in such a way as to affirm the primacy of the spatial and the opera-tion of distancing in the classification of societies. The inevitable impulse tocompare fused with a strategy to classify and categorize according to crite-ria based upon geopolitical privilege. As a result of this principle of classifica-tion, societies were invariably ranked according to spatial distance from anempowering model that radiated the achievement of industrial and techno-logical supremacy—namely, the countries of Euro-America—and expectedidentification with it. In a sense, this was simply a replication of the hierarch-ization of political power that froze positions and history during the Cold War.

This classification strategy, itself signifying the static synchronicity ofthe spatial, was mapped onto an evolutionary trajectory that succeeded inapotheosizing the model of natural history and thus defining the task of acomparative agenda, which, according to Johannes Fabian, constituted avast, ‘‘omnivorous intellectual machine permitting the ‘equal’ treatment ofhuman culture at all times and places.’’6 But evolutionary time transmutedpolitics and economics, both intimately concerned with human time, into anatural plot line that organized past culture and living societies according toa temporal grid called ‘‘the stream of time,’’ where some managed to moveupstream while others were drawn back downstream. In spite of appeal-ing to such concepts as evolution, development, industrialization, modern-ization, we must observe that these totalizations were more often than notspatially configured rather than temporally marked (recalling Kosellek’s ob-servation), functioning as more ‘‘natural’’ determinations than historicallyproduced forms. Often, the units employed to measure the movement intime as a signification of political and cultural meaning that denoted inter-vals between events resulted in fixing the quality of states rather than theactual lapse of time. In this way, comparison, implied by the apparatus of‘‘integrating’’ several disciplines into a unified approach and a diversity ofregional units, was driven by a logic that worked at naturalizing and spatial-izing conceptions of time to confer meaning on the distribution of societiesin space. Yet the spatial distribution signaled by distancing was a transfor-mation of earlier views that had defined temporality as both exclusion and

5. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).6. Fabian, Time and the Other, 16–17.


expansion. More importantly, the sense of otherness that must be conceptu-alized within a theory of knowledge based upon natural history (an Enlight-enment project that made possible the comparative method itself) emplotsall societies in all times on an arc that must designate relative distance fromor closeness to the present. ‘‘There would be no raison d’être for the com-parative method,’’ Fabian writes, ‘‘if it was not the classification of entitiesor traits which first have to be separate and distinct before their similari-ties can be used to establish taxonomies and developmental sequences.’’7

Hence the time of the observer’s present must be distinguished from thetime of the observed, even though the act of observation might be con-temporaneous with the object of observation. Even though the object ofknowledge must be expressed as a temporal categorization, the referent isnot, strictly speaking, an object or class of objects but a relationship. Thisis especially true of ethnographic and historical accounts, and indeed ofany discipline that is implicated, as we are, with the task of elucidating amomentous fissure between what once was described as the ‘‘West andthe Rest.’’

This divide was early conceptualized in European social thought, butno thinker gave greater force to it than Max Weber in his theory of com-parative religious formations and his typology for a proper historical soci-ology. Weber not only widened the putative cleft between an implied unifiedWest and the world outside it but made it the basis of a comparative strategythat was both spatial and atemporal. (It is possible to see behind this ‘‘new’’typologizing the lengthening shadow of the ‘‘Asiatic Mode of Production.’’)A contemporary of Lenin, writing before World War I, Weber constructed apowerful argument that countered and ultimately replaced the Marxian ideaof the capitalist mode of production and the revolutionary break it estab-lished in European life. His intervention intended to upset a ruptural ver-sion of social life and its breach with the past that thinkers and writers hadalready acknowledged and instead proposed, as early as his book on Prot-estantism and capitalism (1904), a cofiguration between the capitalist spiritand a religious ethic. In this work, Weber sought to demonstrate how reli-gion—the carrier of cultural meaning—easily guaranteed continuity ratherthan a permanent pause in the line and that capitalist rationality derived fromthe resources available in the cultural endowment. Europe’s modernity wasalways already there. Instead of recognizing the actual fissure marked bycapitalism, Weber mapped it on the world outside Euro-America, propos-

7. Fabian, Time and the Other, 27.


ing that the Chinese and Indian religious traditions may have evolved someform of rationality but not one capable of producing capitalist calculation.In this way, Weber transmuted the rift between past and present in Euro-pean life into one between the West and the Rest, and thus cast out theRest from history as surely as Hegel had before him. At the same time, hemoved to repair or displace an internal rupture and temporal boundary sepa-rating present from past by appealing to the continuity of cultural/spiritualresources to project a split between Euro-America and the world beyond,usually the domain of colonies. With Weber, colonization revealed the markof advanced modernity, while Germany’s late arrival to this scene was a wor-risome reminder of insufficient rationality. By the same token, it was an easystep to turn colonies into sites of premodern culture, whose distance couldonly be overcome by rejecting an indigenous heritage and embracing thepromise of modern rationality. Modernity, rather than capitalism (and accu-mulation), was thus fixed to place and was distinguished by its distance fromthe space of the nonmodern. The irony is that Europe was exempted frombreaking with its past, while the rest of the world could claim no such immu-nity. What this substitution of modernity for capitalism represented was theconsequential replacement of culture (now seen as value) for capitalism andthe social relations of production and exchange value.

In this way, the deployment of comparative indexes immediatelycalled attention to a classifying system that ranked societies on the prin-ciple of gauging distance and separation.8 The less developed a society,the more distinct it will appear from the modular paradigm employed tostructure the relationship in order to affirm difference. The concept of latedeveloper, as it was used in modernization studies to describe societiessuch as Japan, China, and India, is an example of this strategy of distanc-ing, which transmuted what, in fact, was a chronological and quantitativemarker into a qualitative one: simple chronology into an attribute. Whatseems to have been left out of this comparative agenda is history, to be sure,but also a politics of time capable of locating practice immanently within amodernity that housed the temporalization of new cultural forms develop-ing everywhere. Such forms constituted coexisting and coeval equivalents,despite the apparent differences among them. But received comparativeapproaches have consistently denied a relationship of coevality to preciselythose societies targeted for study, misrecognizing a coexistent present weall inhabit by demanding a perspective located in a different temporal regis-

8. Fabian, Time and the Other, 26.


ter from those societies and cultures we are seeking to understand, makingthem outside to our inside. The disavowal implies a refusal to acknowl-edge that all temporal relations, including contemporaneity, are embeddedin socially, economically, and culturally organized practices coextensive withcapitalism.

If area studies has failed to deliver on its initial promise to producea viable agenda for comparison, the newer cultural studies has offered, inits effort to avoid totalities and essentialisms, to rethink the ground of com-parability by appealing to referents that exceed the units of the nation-statethat dominated the older approaches. Poststructuralism and post-Marxismshave so overdetermined the text that it probably is no longer necessaryto search for a logic competent to integrate the disciplines into a unifiedapproach. In our time, we have the appeal to larger units, regions, trans-nationality, globalization, hyperspace, where the diasporic flows of peopleare said to move across what are misrecognized as ‘‘porous’’ borders butactually attest to the vast deterritorializing force of capital and labor. Regard-less of its offer to implement new interpretative modes promising to avoid theproblems manifestly dogging the older developmental model and its binarylogic, the new cultural studies has often and unwittingly recuperated theaporias of the older approach it wishes to succeed. This is especially evidentin the way cultural studies has taken a spatial turn and in its evasion of therole of time. Even among such Marxists as Fredric Jameson, time seems toget lost in the spatial fixity of an untranscendable mode of production despiteits status as a primary temporal category, as he has recently disclosed in anessay on the ‘‘end of temporality.’’9 Fearful of slipping into subjectivistic vol-untarism, Marxists inadvertently risk robbing the mode of production of its

9. Fredric Jameson, ‘‘The End of Temporality,’’ Critical Inquiry 29, no. 4 (Summer 2003):695–718. It is hard not to conclude that Jameson, equating time with modernism, andspace with postmodernism, is still trying to find a place for the latter in his scheme of peri-odization. In this scheme, modernism represents a ‘‘culture of incomplete modernization,’’whereas the postmodern signifies full modernization and the disappearance of tempo-rality (becoming?) and the dispossession ‘‘of a differential sense of that deep time’’ livedand expressed by the moderns. The logic of this formulation suggests a shift from recog-nizable unevenness, denoting an awareness of the force of time, to the establishment ofan even ground announcing its end. Here, Jameson comes close to recuperating a para-digm advanced by structural-functional social science during the Cold War by presumingan automatic (and necessary) transposition from formal to real subsumption. This argu-ment has been proposed by Hardt and Negri recently, making ‘‘Empire’’ and ‘‘the Postmod-ern’’ members of the same family, but overlooks the palpable fact that capitalism is alwaysdevoted to producing unevenness.


fundamental timefulness by replicating arguments for ‘‘alternative moderni-ties’’ and their spatial fixation.

Cultural studies, especially its postcolonial inflection, has respondedto the rapid development of a variety of programs concentrating on global-ization, neoliberalism, post-Fordism—in fact, to all those recent signs of therestructuring of global social relations in our time and their consequences forsocial identity. Spurred by a special urgency provoked by the perception thatthe nation-state is in the process of withering away before the forces of glob-alization, postcoloniality has turned increasingly toward trying to fix identityin an age when older certainties once offered by the nation-state seem tobe disappearing. This effort has often been accompanied by a transfer ofinvestment to ‘‘subjects of metahistory and the politics of space and place,and away from their older concerns with (post)colonial subject constitutionin psychoanalytic epistemological senses.’’ 10 Here, Foucault and de Certeauhave been hoisted up to replace an earlier privilege accorded to Lacan andDerrida, genealogy and the specificity of place elevated over subjectivity asthe principal element in the construction of identity. Yet we must recognizein this repositioning the primacy of space, especially as it is worked out inthe fetishization of place and the lessening importance of forms of tempor-alization. While there are undoubtedly a number of reasons for bracketingthe temporal (and thus the historical), it principally reflects the proliferationof subject positions required by consumption on a global scale, which, atthe same time, works to mute the subjectivity of the worker and the sub-altern. But the really important aspect of this postcolonial preoccupationwith space and place is in the privileging of the conceptual figure of moder-nity as the sign of a ‘‘hegemonizing socio-historical project’’ of moderniza-tion. In this view, modernity is identified with a specific place that is moreimportant than its status as a secular and historical form of temporaliza-tion. For the historian of subalternity Dipesh Chakrabarty, the categories of‘‘capital’’ and ‘‘bourgeois’’ are simply alternative readings for ‘‘Europe.’’ Thesame could be said of ‘‘modernity.’’ 11 ‘‘ ‘The modern,’ then, he writes, quotingMeaghan Morris, ‘‘will be understood ‘as a known history, something whichhas already happened elsewhere and which is to be reproduced, mechani-

10. Neil Lazarus, ‘‘Hating Tradition Properly,’’ in Nationalism and Cultural Practice in thePostcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 28.11. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for‘Indian’ Pasts?’’ in A Subaltern Reader, 1986–1995, ed. Ranajit Guha (Minneapolis: Uni-versity of Minnesota Press, 1997), 267.


cally or otherwise, with a local content.’ ’’ 12 Like Partha Chatterjee, Chakra-barty rightly worries that this form of modernity will smother native imagi-nation only to recuperate ‘‘ ‘the project of positive unoriginality.’ ’’ 13 What thisprogram entails is a strategy of envisaging the modern—the new—as anideological misrecognition of the reproduction of capital accumulation andthe deterritorializing force of both capital and labor. More importantly, it actu-ally accepts the Weberian maneuver to overlook capitalism as a temporalcategory—where deterritorialization refers to the velocity of movement ina particular space—by installing cultural space in its place in the effort tosecure the effect of bracketing time. But the process is surely as temporaliz-ing—occurring through time—as it is a fixed spatialized identity associatedwith place. Although postcolonial discourse is correct to argue that moder-nity, as such, is fully compatible with imperialism, it often sacrifices the forceof this insight by seeing capitalism (sometimes dismissed as another West-ern metanarrative) as a movement in space rather than time that might dis-turb local certainties but not necessarily reproduce its original conditions ofsocial existence imperially and mechanically. In the end, postcoloniality hasfailed to conceal its identity as a wholly owned subsidiary of poststructural-ism, as Neil Larsen has proposed, that has offered to displace its disappoint-ment in the failure of Third World nation-states to the spatial terrain of thetext as something to be read rather than lived.

By hypostatizing the unity of the ‘‘West’’ or even ‘‘Europe’’ as the placeof modernity, postcolonial discourse has inadvertently recuperated some ofthe more baneful features of the very binarism that has imperially reducedthe rest of the world to the status of a second term. Paradoxically, this tac-tic incorporates the idea of late development as a guarantee of qualitativedifference that allows its proponents to envision something called an ‘‘alter-native’’ modernity. What distinguishes this alternative modernity is its spa-tial location, a place that is not Euro-America, and thus the authority of itsclaim to an identity that is uniquely different. Once this door is opened, itis possible to imagine all forms of native interiority that have succeeded inremaining immune to the deterritorialization forcibly imposed from without,which, as Fanon presciently observed, destroys all cultures of reference.Such appeals to cultural resources undisturbed by modernization—a folk-loric fiction not worth keeping, Fanon also remarked—are made to offer thesurety of an unmovable ground of authenticity on which to construct an iden-

12. Chakrabarty, ‘‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History,’’ 283.13. Chakrabarty, ‘‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History,’’ 283.


tity capable of preserving the autonomy of genuine difference. The appealto this illusionary authentic ground, as Japanese misconstrued it in the inter-war period, seems to offer the promise of ‘‘overcoming the modern,’’ as theycalled it, which will configure an alternative to a modernity made in the West.Moreover, the presumption of an alternative modernity reinforces the tem-poral difference between a putative original and now its ‘‘alternative,’’ asif the first term will always remain prior, full, and primary, while its subse-quent ‘‘revisions’’ can only resort to the consolations of difference rooted ina different past and place claiming native cultural authenticity. In order tooffset this spatially inspired asymmetry, some advocates of an alternativemodernity have looked to forms of identitarian anticolonial nationalism asevidence of difference resting on the claims of authentic cultural resourcesthat have managed to remain free from contamination. Here, it seems tome, the fixity of a cultural endowment not only recalls Weber’s perspectivebut matches perfectly a view that has privileged the stolidity of an enduringand apparently unchanging spatialscape where time is rooted in a primor-dial and infinite repetitiveness. But even here, we can see the shadow of thetime lag and the curious way that the present, a temporal category, conjuresup the past.

Anderson’s Haunt

The status of a muscular modular metonym dwarfing all before ithas been dramatically put into question in recent discussions concerningthe prospect for a proper comparative approach occasioned by the work ofBenedict Anderson. Targeting the influential Imagined Communities, whichput into play the repetition of a mode of modern nationalism based on theagency of print capitalism, Anderson’s account was more about print thancapitalism, more about communication than the deterritorializing forces ofcapital and labor. Misrecognizing late nineteenth-century European liberalnationalism based upon middle-class literacy as the model of national-ist modernity exported to the Third World, Anderson qualified this funda-mentally culturalist interpretation by proposing that it—the model—couldbe ‘‘pirated.’’ His accusers, however, have condemned his conception ofmodularity for having suffocated native imagination and reducing all to ‘‘con-sumers of modernity.’’ 14 What seems to have been at stake was the con-

14. See Partha Chatterjee, Fragments of the Nation and Its Colonial and Postcolonial His-tories (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 5.


viction of an ‘‘alternative’’ modernity that needed to be released from theiron cage of Anderson’s Eurocentric model and that could claim for itself theauthority and originality of the inner resources supplied by native culture,which, perhaps miraculously, had remained undisturbed by modular formsdevised elsewhere and imposed by colonial violence. Yet, it is hard not toconclude that the figure of an alternative modernity resembles the reifiedconception of tradition once confidently embraced by enthusiasts of mod-ernization theory. While some of the charges against Anderson border onthe tendentious, the critique of an all-empowering model for comparison ison the mark.

In his work The Spectre of Comparison, Anderson alerts us to one ofthe excluded possibilities lived by societies outside of Europe but implicatedin its imperial expansion, whose modern forms were introduced throughthe export of capital and colonial deterritorialization. Through a reading ofJosé Rizal’s late nineteenth-century novelNoli me tangere, Anderson is ableto demonstrate how the author has perceived that the gardens of Manilawere ‘‘shadowed . . . by images of their sister gardens in Europe. They canno longer be seen in their immediacy but only from a perspective simul-taneously close up and faraway.’’ 15 The novelist names this doubling the‘‘spectre of comparison,’’ as Anderson translates it, perhaps, too, a bedevil-ing comparison, carrying with it the association of a bad or difficult compari-son, the dilemma of not knowing which way to look, what I have called cul-tural diplopia. Moreover, Anderson, with Rizal’s help, designates SoutheastAsia as the site of this ‘‘haunting,’’ or devilish vision, housing the specter,the ghosts of Europe’s modernity in replicated forms, and thus sees it asthe primary place where this ambiguous optic and the difficulty of compari-son have materialized. The haunted house, so to speak, is always the placewhere the specters of modernity have taken up residence, which is, at thesame time, the site of comparison. But Anderson could just as easily haveseen in the novelistic form itself the sign of the devilish doubling that wouldprefigure the dilemma of subsequent sister images. Concerned with situ-ating the region of Southeast Asia, which, like most of the Asian and colo-nial worlds, remained Europe’s dimly seen outside in contemporary analy-sis, the doubling effect (noted also before the war by Watsuji, who could nothave read Rizal) necessitated thinking simultaneously about Europe andits outside, and mandated the establishment of a comparative perspective

15. Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparison: Politics, Culture, and the Nation (Lon-don: Verso, 1998), 6.


in which the act of comparison was always identified with a haunting, theghostly. Sustaining this strategy, Anderson further employs the metaphor ofthe inverted telescope (an up-to-date revision of Marx’s camera obscura),which reinforces a comparative method driven by distance and exclusion.By looking through the large lens of the telescope, he perceives anotherimage of Southeast Asia that must be smaller, miniaturized, distant. Sincehe is in the position of the subject who is gazing through the telescope,he has, I believe, magnified his own position at the expense of miniaturiz-ing and diminishing the scene he is viewing. In fact, the distancing impliedby the gaze resembles the spatial distance necessary for the formation ofthe exotic program of an earlier generation of Europeans such as VictorSegelan, who always insisted on keeping the object at arm’s length. Underthis arrangement, there cannot be an equal doubling but rather only a hier-archization between what appears to be a larger original and a smaller copy,the putative ‘‘sister’’ image. The determination and distancing of the imagemeans only that it has won its apparent difference from an original by sacri-ficing the equality of scale and size. Even if Anderson warns us that he is nottrading in ‘‘imitations,’’ ‘‘copies,’’ and ‘‘derivative discourses,’’ his appeal tothe trope of the inverted telescope more than offsets his logic of ‘‘bound andunbound seriality’’ and its goal to dispel unwanted ‘‘bogeys.’’ To be sure, hereminded us in the earlier Imagined Communities that the idea of ‘‘nation’’could claim no patent since it was continually ‘‘pirated’’ by different peoplewith often ‘‘unexpected’’ results. Yet Anderson is closer to his critics thaneither suspects. If, on the one hand, he wishes to propose an approach thatmust take into consideration the role of some form of repetition in the migra-tion of his model to enable the late developed to embark upon the courseof capitalist modernization and national liberation and, on the other hand,his critics put forth the opposing proposition of an alternative modernity andantimodern communitarianism free from the corrosions of colonial and thusWestern mediations in figuring a modern, national identity, both risk recu-perating the second term of the very binary they are attempting to avoid.Both, moreover, manage to sustain the primacy of a relationship in spaceas the primary vocation of comparative study.

At the heart of these interpretative strategies is, as I have suggested,the relentless spatialization of time that has prompted Anderson and hiscritics to privilege place. Both approaches are rooted in the priority of thenation-state, which, apart from being fixed in space, means a commitment toa unit that is ‘‘incomparable,’’ inasmuch as it has claimed to derive its differ-ence from irreducible and essential elements (in Comparer l’incomparable,


Marcel Detienne proposes that because of the nation-state’s insistence onirreducible uniqueness, the act of carrying out comparison would meanmatching two incommensurables that could produce only an acknowledg-ment of simple differences16). With Anderson there still remains the inor-dinate emphasis on the origin of capitalism and nationalism, and it hardlymatters if it appears in Western Europe or the North and South Americancolonies of the eighteenth century. Despite his disclaimers of modularity, heis still convinced that subsequent transformations constitute ‘‘piratical’’ plun-dering of the original model. What he overlooks is how the model is rootedin a place rather than a process that cannot know an original from a copy,since instantiations will always be original. The importance of this move is tothus fix origins in a place and to fixate on the force of its geospatial location.It is, I believe, this fetishization of origin in place/space that subsequentlyprompts discourse to imagine and identify places that might constitute analternative. In more recent times, even some anti-postcolonial critics haveturned to place as a political sanctuary and refuge against a heartless glob-alization. When we interrogate this bonding of place and origins, in any case,we discover that it is simply a transformation of older spatialized categoriesthat shrilly announced the unity and universalism of the West over an incom-plete East, what Bloch once called ‘‘cultural gardens’’ or ‘‘souls’’ ‘‘withoutwindows, without connection,’’ 17 masking the horror of, and anxiety over, adeeply embedded relativism.

Time’s Envelope

What Anderson, Chakrabarty, and others have not provided in theirdetermined preference for space and spatial categories, which either dra-matizes the location of difference or situates place boundedness as an asy-lum for political and cultural resistance to globalization, is an adequate ac-count of the crucial space-time relationship. Too often their strategies haveignored the relationship of these categories itself and risked simply slidinginto a morphology of spatial forms. It is almost as if these writers have suc-cumbed to a globalizing ideology that calls for the constant condensationof time into space in order to proclaim its final banishment from all sub-

16. Marcel Detienne, Comparer l’incomparable (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2000), 9–11; seealso François Hartog, Regimes d’historicité (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2003), 54ff.17. Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice (Berkeley andLos Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 296. See also Fabian, Time and theOther, 44–45.


sequent considerations of determination. This request resembles capital-ism’s own refusal to envisage a time beyond its moment, which, ideologi-cally, appears as an endless present, as Georg Simmel once described it,where time enters a permafrost state to become space. By contrast, wehave available a number of examples that have made the question of space-time relationship fundamental to any social, cultural, and historical analysesthat manage to remind us of both the different ways this connection hasbeen conceptualized and how we might seek to restore this lost unity in ourown efforts to envisage comparative strategies. Henri Lefebvre’s Produc-tion of Space attempts to envision how time is linked to space, despite thelatter’s presumed hegemony in modern capitalist society; Bakhtin’s concep-tion of the chronotope authorizes the construction of a typology of historicalpoetics based on delineating different articulations between space and timeas manifest in different literary forms (implying but not foregrounding thetemporal and spatial dimensions of successive modes of production); andNikos Poulantzas imaginatively analyzes the nation-form in terms of spe-cific temporal and spatial matrices introduced by capitalism. With additionaltime, we might also fold into this mix Moishe Postone’s illuminating but com-plex discussion of abstract and concrete time in Marx—the former supply-ing an ‘‘absolute frame’’ but remaining constant despite changes in produc-tivity, retaining this constancy by occluding its ‘‘historical redeterminations’’in the form of present time; the latter constituting the ‘‘flow of time’’ and thecontinuing transformation of work, production, social life, and forms of con-sciousness. What seems significant in Postone’s account is his insistenceto call ‘‘abstract time’’ what others have referred to as space and its capacityto incorporate time.18

For Lefebvre, the advent of modernity, which includes the installa-tion of capitalism, announced the disappearance of time from social space.Lived time forfeits its form of social associations, except for time spent whileworking. Here, he argues that space subordinates time to itself, as both eco-nomics and politics thus seek to expel it as a force that has the capabilityto threaten political power and the circulation of commodities. Accordingly,this process of spatialization, undoubtedly connected to an incipient capital-ism, was, in Hegel’s account, actually produced by historical time, which thestate eventually commanded. Because History failed to realize the arche-type of the reasonable subject in the individual, it seized upon institutions,

18. Nikos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: Verso, 2000), 110. Hereafter, thiswork is cited parenthetically asSPS. Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).


groups, and systems—law, morality, family, the city, trade—to embed timewithin a rationality immanent with space. Hence, History was transformedfrom action to memory, production to contemplation—and time was hos-taged to repetitious circularity, overwhelmed by the establishment of a fixedspace that becomes the locus and environment of a now realized reason.19

Marx sought to defetishize space and restore time by identifying it with therevolutionary moment, while Lukács saw space as an instant of reification,a frozen, spatial countenance that a rediscovered sense of time—directedby class consciousness—promised to break the spell of its spatial primacy.Nietzsche, in turn, promoted the primordiality of space by giving preferen-tiality to the problematic of circular repetition and simultaneity, an argumentlater expanded by Heidegger when he posited the unavoidable primordialityof everyday life. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Lefebvre argued,the state was reconfigured on a world scale, furthering the logic of ratio-nality, which opened up the possibility of transgression—a new negativity,as he put it. But time still remains bonded to the working class and the prom-ise of struggle now focused on bringing about the eventual ‘‘withering ofwork.’’ In this connection, Lefebvre offered the category of ‘‘social space’’as a product now inseparable from its production, which is never entirelymastered by the forces that have engendered it, because it is lived, in mul-tiple manifestations, ‘‘before it is conceptualized.’’ The past leaves imprintsin this space, which might take the figure of the urban or even the every-day, since time has its own script. What Lefebvre meant is that the historicalconsequences, the particular ‘‘etymology of locations in the sense of whathappened’’ at a place, and ‘‘thereby change,’’ is invariably deposited and‘‘inscribed in space’’ (PS, 37). And this space is foremost temporal, inas-much as it is always ‘‘now’’ and ‘‘formerly’’ a present space. When socialspace is envisaged as everydayness, it no longer qualifies as a spatial cate-gory (even though its specific location lends a spatial dimension to it) butrather assumes the status of a primary temporal category—the now time,the present, whose apparent even surface is periodically rumpled, unsettledby the recognition of uneven intensities, discordant rhythms, that call atten-tion to moments of difference revealing a society’s position in the develop-mental arc (PS, 65). These rhythms, which Lefebvre classified bodily asinstants of eurhythmia, arrhythmia, polyrhythmia, invariably represent those

19. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford:Blackwell, 1995), 21. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as PS. See also Critiqueof Everyday Life, vol. 2, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 2002), and Rhythmanalysis,trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (London: Continuum, 2004).


moments that break the spell of routine to introduce different but coexist-ing temporalities best exemplified by Bloch’s recognition of ‘‘contemporane-ous non-contemporaneity,’’ where fragments of the past unexpectedly andsuddenly rise up to impinge upon the present. This unevenness, perhapslived more intensely in the space and time of everydayness, is preciselywhat the nation seeks to efface through a diversity of devices, beginning withthe construction of a national narrative. But its signs are everywhere in theeveryday, which, accordingly, houses the multiple rhythms and their differ-ent but coexisting temporalities. In this connection, Lefebvre also proposedthat the ‘‘production of space, having attained the conceptual and linguisticlevel, acts retroactively upon the past, disclosing aspects and moments ofit hitherto uncomprehended’’ (PS, 65). The past thus appears not only in a‘‘different light’’ but also looms up unpunctually to disturb the images of theprocess whereby it—the past—becomes the present. It should be pointedout that Lefebvre was convinced that the ‘‘law of unevenness’’ was becomingworldwide in its application and was presently dominant in the globalizationof the world.

While Lefebvre strove to demonstrate the unity of space-time in thenew, altered circumstances of late twentieth-century capitalism and tried torestore what capitalism and the advent of modernity had sundered—even‘‘murdered’’ (PS, 96), a ‘‘unity long misapprehended’’ and ‘‘superceded bythe rash attribution of priority to space over time’’ (PS, 219)—Bakhtin refor-mulated this reunion into a principle for classifying or typologizing literarygenre. With the concept of chronotope, Bakhtin was able to offer a powerfulway of connecting temporal and spatial into a specific but changing rela-tionship artistically expressed in literature at certain moments in humandevelopment. He suggested that even though the process of assimilating‘‘real historical time and space’’ is complicated, it was still possible to refractaspects of it—‘‘those available in a given historical stage of human develop-ment’’ that have been assimilated and match generic techniques devised forsuch ‘‘appropriated aspects of reality.’’20 Hence, the chronotope representeda formally constituted category that fused spatial and temporal indexes intoa unity—where ‘‘time,’’ as it were, ‘‘thickens out, takes on flesh, and becomesartistically visible, likewise space becomes charged and responsive to themovements of time, plot and history.’’21 Without ever saying so or reducing

20. Mikhail M. Bakhtin,TheDialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans.Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84.21. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 84.


the chronotope to prior determinations, it is not difficult to conclude thatBakhtin’s conceptualization was read off from the modes of production andperformed similarly, or at least formed a kinship with them. ‘‘These genericforms,’’ he wrote, ‘‘at first productive, were then reinforced by tradition; intheir subsequent development they continued stubbornly to exist, up to andbeyond the point at which they had lost any meaning that was productive inactuality. . . . This explains the simultaneous existence in literature of phe-nomena taken from widely separate periods of time, which greatly compli-cate the historical-literary process.’’22 In a sense, the concept resemblesPoulantzas’s ‘‘spatial and temporal matrices’’ that characterize precapital-ist and capitalist modes of production and their capacity to surpass theirgenerating impulses to be reworked in new and different situations.

For Bakhtin, the ‘‘realist’’ and folkloric chronotopes possessed spe-cial meaning. As for the realist chronotope, with its weaving of historicaland sociopublic events together with the personal and even deeply privateside of life, the ‘‘socio-quotidian’’ mingles historical sequences with ‘‘every-day and biographical sequences.’’ Biographical and everyday time are con-densed, concentrated, interconnected, merged in ‘‘unitary markers of theepoch.’’23 In the Bakhtinian perspective, the novel ultimately becomes theprivileged form of modernity and novelization, in all aspects permeates, andis penetrated by, everyday life in such a way as to become virtually indistin-guishable from it, an argument made by the Japanese literary critic Koba-yashi Hideo and authors Shiga Naoya and Kikuchi Kan, who, before WorldWar II, described the ‘‘I novel’’ (shishosetsu) as the meeting of ‘‘art and life.’’Hence, the epoch becomes not only graphically visible (space) but narra-tively manifest (time). For Bakhtin, Balzac actually ‘‘sees’’ time in space andsupplies as proof the author’s description of houses as materialized his-tory, of streets, cities, rural landscapes as manifesting how time and historyhave worked upon them. In Flaubert, he continued, the provincial town isthe locus for cyclical everyday time, with no events, no advancing ‘‘histori-cal movements,’’ and is often used for contrast with temporal sequencesthat are more charged with eventfulness. What seems important in Bakhtinis the chronotopic unification of a specific space and temporality—a locus,place, and a particular temporality, in the moment of everydayness—whosecombination demands specificity. Neither space nor time is essentialized, assuch, or hierarchized but is related in a specific way to constitute a configu-

22. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 85.23. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 247.


ration. The folkloric chronotope works comparably to Benjamin’s conceptionof remembrance and recalls in the present a consciousness of a preclassagrarian stage and the consciousness of the collective experience of work.Unlike Benjamin, Bakhtin stopped short of showing how this cyclical andrepetitive rhythm that constrained time’s forward movement might be mobi-lized in a later present, apart from its appropriation in more modern novelis-tic chronotopes. But his chronotopic observations and their relationship tothe production of genre save us from the imperialist effect risked by FrancoMoretti’s spatial and distributional model, since the appearance of new anddifferent generic forms will constitute specific inflections of a type to reflectwhen and where the new space-time pattern is established. In this scheme,novel and the replication of a ‘‘normative’’ model on a global scale are lessimportant than the process of novelization, whereby the form undergoesconstant modification and mutation by practices from the received cultureto convey the historical difference of a coeval modernizing experience.

Finally, with Poulantzas we have the combinatory of the nation-form,as a specific spatial site, and the determinations of the modes of produc-tion which signal specific matrices that the categories of space and timewill assume. Even though Poulantzas positioned the nation-state as a privi-leged space, the temporal and spatial matrices it relays are presumablyembedded in other social spaces—namely, the everyday—but do not, in-deed cannot, completely penetrate and master them. The importance ofhis account emphasizes how the social formation—‘‘the nodal point of ex-panded reproduction of social relations’’—intersects the boundaries of thenation-state. Moreover, the very unevenness that has attended capitalismsince its inception is now inscribed in the nation-state and acts to orches-trate their inter-relationship (SPS, 95). What he wished to clarify is howcapitalism mediates and changes received temporal and spatial meanings,and produces an unevenness that is now one of the ‘‘historical moments’’capable of ‘‘affecting differentiated, classified and distinct spaces’’ called thenation. Like Bakhtin’s chronotope, meanings are produced with the emer-gence of a new mode of production that now authorizes changes in thereceived ‘‘conceptual matrices of space and time.’’ Hence the modern nationis a product of the state and is assigned to embody precisely all those tem-poral and spatial matrices it has established as networks of power and domi-nation. In this way, the nation represents the modified constituent elements,such as the economy, territory, and tradition, that state activity has imple-mented to organize materially social space and time. Capitalist social space,because of the worker’s separation from the means of labor, is fractured,


serialized, and made irreversible, in contrast to premodern modes of spatialorganization. This new spatial configuration fixes the boundaries betweeninside and outside, within which the reproduction of capital takes place. Thestate acts to monopolize the organization of social space in such a way asto materialize its various apparatuses—‘‘army, school, central bureaucracy,penal system’’—and thus ‘‘pattern[s] in turn the subjects over whom it exer-cises power.’’ While this space splits the labor process into capitalist units ofproduction and reproduction, the particular ‘‘discontinuous morphology’’ is,in effect, ‘‘consubstantial’’ with the uneven development in its spatial dimen-sion (SPS, 104).

Like space, the new temporal matrix seeks to unify and homoge-nize as it segments, divides, and makes the movement of time a one-waystreet, all directed toward the product. One of the seeming paradoxes ofboth temporal and spatial matrices under capitalism seems to be the per-sistent segmentation and proliferation of multiple spaces and temporalitiesthat, through the mediation of state and nation, manage to homogenizeand even universalize their apparent dissociations. Through the action ofdiverse state apparatuses, according to Poulantzas, national social forma-tions constitute both the ‘‘principal roots and focal points’’ (SPS, 106) ofthe uneven development of capitalism. With the installation of a new tem-poral matrix, with the production process and expanded reproduction andcapital accumulation as its unlimited goals, time is submitted to strict mea-sures of control by means of the clock, calendar, time-study regimes, andthe like. Yet such splitting and fragmenting raise anew the problem of uni-fication, which diminishes the differing temporalities by reducing them tosimple distances. But significantly, this ‘‘temporal matrix, for the first time,marks out the particular temporalities as different temporalities’’—variationsof a single, cumulative, and irreversible time. As a result of this transforma-tion, we have available a conception of time that opens up the possibilityof comparability no longer simply rooted in spatial differences between dis-crete nation-states whose claim to irreducible uniqueness leaves only therecognition of trivial differences as the basis of ‘‘comparing the incompara-ble’’ (SPS, 110). Under the circumstance of this unifying impulse, successivemoments accumulate and are totalized in such a way as to differentiate thepresent from what preceded it and what comes after. In Poulantzas’s view,the unevenness of capitalism peculiar to each formation (obviously referringto Althusser’s idea of semi-autonomous domains constituting the social for-mation, i.e., economic, political, ideological) connects with the state’s tem-porality, which seeks to unify it and realign the asymmetries produced by


differing (or uneven) and coexisting temporalities. The importance of Pou-lantzas’s explanation is not so much his imaginative treatment of nation-form and its implied relationship to the commodity and value, which losesits force and risks self-limitation in its desire to privilege the nation-state, butrather the way his decision to combine spatial and temporal matrices of capi-talism is able to demonstrate both how the spatial unevenness of diversespheres of the formation and the respective coexistence of different tempo-ralities constituted a function whose relationship is articulated by the state—a relationship between history (time) and territory (space) (SPS, 114). Whileit was undoubtedly important for him to see how the modern nation sup-plies the occasion for the intersection of these matrices—to produce a ‘‘his-toricity of territory’’ and ‘‘territorialization of a history’’—we need not restrictthis momentous conjunction merely to the nation-state and national his-tory (a social space and narrative time, if I can rephrase Lefebvre, which isthought before it is lived). What, I think, this formulation manages to offeris a grasp of the complex interrelationship between spatial densities andtemporal indexes and its possible utility for envisaging a ground of compa-rability, without reducing one to the other or displacing one by the other. Ifnothing else, Poulantzas reminds us of how all of these writers were con-cerned with addressing the complexity of temporal/spatial interactions andthe necessity of trying to think through a strategy based on their reunion, inorder to counter the specific ideological valence signified by the prominenceof space in current discussions.

Non-Contemporaneous Rhythms

If we can now return to and revisit Anderson’s identification of the‘‘ghostly’’ as the object of comparative study and juxtapose it to those strate-gies that have sought, as we have seen above, to find ways to articulatea relationship between time and space, we can see that the spatially con-tained idea of a spectral vision refers not to the past of the Asian or African(in Anderson’s case, Southeast Asia) but rather to an original and its reflec-tion, a copy, nonetheless, that is a reminder of another’s past and place, notthe past or place that is made into its telescoped projection. What Lefebvre,Bakhtin, and Poulantzas have all insisted on is the importance of trying toshow how time, usually history, has interacted with a specific space to forman identifiable relationship. In Anderson’s reckoning, there are only spacesdistinguished by distance and scale. The consequence of this strategy is tobypass instances in which a specific present animates and conjures up the


past to supply it with a new configuration. What Anderson risks ignoring isthe operation of a mutual negotiation between past and present, material-ized in the figure of an untimely appearance of the revenant in the present.This ghostly apparition appears less as a repetition of the past than as areminder of an intention that points to the future. In this way, the appeal toa putative tradition in a specific time and place takes the form of deferredaction, reflecting a nonlinear conception of lived time in which the past pro-duces itself retroactively in the present. There is, paradoxically, a glimpseof this conception of time and space in the diaries of Soetomo, the turn-of-the-century Indonesian nationalist, on whom Anderson has written so elo-quently, and, of course, in Watsuji’s double life and its necessary recogni-tion of living in double time—comparatively—in one place, that is to say,unevenly.

In other words, there is, I believe, the larger and more important spec-trality of societies deeply involved in fashioning a capitalist modernity coevaland coextensive with Euro-America, yet whose difference neither a simplenor mechanical reproduction manages to capture. These experiences dra-matize a different kind of haunting and the unscheduled migration of ghostsof what have been past, now forgotten, that will insist on coexisting withthe new in the present of everyday life. How could it be otherwise for suchsocieties? Unlike Anderson’s specters, which behave more like faint shad-ows and ambiguous silhouettes, these ghosts of a surviving past—the pre-modern culture of reference—return from a place out of time or a differ-ent temporality to haunt and disturb the historical present, to trouble thestable boundaries between past and present, subject and object, interiorand exterior. This relationship requires a willingness to envision a struc-ture of comparability that recognizes the role played by temporally rootedforms in the present and what Bloch referred to as non-contemporaneoussynchronisms, where past and present are not necessarily successive butsimultaneously produced, or coexist as uneven temporalities, just as thehere and there of modernity are coeval, even though the latter is forgottenin the former. What comparative practice has excluded in its desire to narra-tivize a cultural aspiration associated with Euro-America is the relationshipbetween its modernity and the modernities of the world outside of it thatmust share the same ground of temporality and agencies of transformation.This means addressing the question of how our present shows itself to usand finding in it a minimal unity provided by everyday life that has organizedand condensed the experience of modernity. But it also invites a furtherbreaking down of this unity represented by the everyday into smaller units,


what Lefebvre once called ‘‘moments’’ and then later ‘‘rhythms,’’ reflecting‘‘strong times and weak times, which return in accordance with a rule oflaw—long and short times, recurring in a recognizable way.’’24 By doingso, we confront the larger and immanent framework of capitalist moder-nity and its incessant transformations. Such an approach has the advan-tage of redirecting our attention to the role of capitalism, instead of a cul-ture of rationality, in its many manifestations throughout the world and thediverse historical routes it has taken; it also avoids displacing it to modernityor repressing it by alerting us to the relationship between lived experiencesof everydayness and the regime of the commodity form as the principalstructuring agent in the production of contemporary historical formations.Taking this step allows us, moreover, to bypass making the dangerous mis-recognition that identifies capitalism with universalism, or the triumph of realsubsumption.

Everydayness, thus, constitutes a social space of unevenness and acultural form that shares with modernity the experience of capitalism sinceit is coeval with it; it is also a primary temporal category that signifies itsbroader importance as a specific historical form. With everydayness, thereis a social space that is produced, which suggests both a fixed space anda temporality implicated in the producing process. Yet if we can representmodernity as the ever new, everydayness then must be seen as the dura-tional present, the site of vast temporal economic and cultural unevenness,incomplete but ‘‘situated at the intersection of two modes of repetition: thecyclical, which dominates in nature, and the linear, which dominates in theprocesses known as ‘rational.’ ’’25 According to the prewar Japanese thinkerTosaka Jun, everydayness displayed a form of temporalizing that departedfrom the category of the modern and combined the presentness of the Hei-deggarian Now with the repetition of pasts. For him, everydayness consti-tuted the domain of a specific spatiotime relationship that behaved verymuch like the commodity form, inasmuch as it ‘‘shelters’’ the ‘‘crystal’’ or‘‘germinal kernel’’ of historical time, the mystery of time’s difference in therepetitive routine and unfolding of one day after another. At one level, every-dayness thus served as the intersection of all repetitions both receivedand recent, past and present, and encompassed the site of ‘‘recurrences,’’which means ‘‘gestures of labor and leisure, mechanical movements both

24. Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 78.25. Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinowitz (NewYork: Harper Torchbooks, 1971), 24–25.


human and properly mechanic, hours, days, weeks, months, years, linearand cyclical repetitions.’’26 It is also ‘‘material culture,’’ clothing, especially forTosaka, life, furniture, houses, neighborhoods, environment—the solidity offilled space, Heidegger’s ‘‘there’’ (Da), the world of the present. This veiled,hidden, fugitive, and shadow existence contrasts sharply with Anderson’sghosts, and what he designated as the haunt, the place of comparison, byoffering the candidacy of the everyday present as a ground of comparability.Its claims are no less spectral since the shadows of another life constantlyact upon and are acted upon by the new, the modern, to produce the nar-rative effect of a continuing but dappled montage. The modern reveals thiseverydayness in its immediacy, while this everydayness is constantly medi-ating the new. Moreover, the everyday, as ‘‘practically untellable,’’ meetsthe modern, which now flashes before the present as the endlessly novel,worldly, transitory, and spectacular. In this momentous encounter, the new,now strategically misrepresented as modernity, functions as ‘‘repetitive ges-tures’’ masking the regular cycles of everyday as the monotony of every-dayness contains the new. Tosaka precisely saw this explosive encounteras one filled with ‘‘possibility’’ (unintentionally echoing Benjamin’s concep-tion of ‘‘actualization’’), while Lefebvre discerned in the repetitions the placewhere ‘‘everything changes.’’

Although the figure of unevenness stands at the heart of everydaylife, it is, as Marx observed, the insertion of capitalism into societies at differ-ential moments and different rates of velocity that accounts for the coexis-tence of different forms of economic and cultural practices. It is possible toagree with Lefebvre and David Harvey that capitalism in the twentieth cen-tury has survived principally by necessarily expanding into space, ‘‘by pro-ducing space.’’ But its success has been based upon its capacity to gener-ate vast temporal unevenness along its route, not just between societies butwithin them. In fact, it would be wrong to overlook the fact that the process ofexpansion occurred in time. In other words, this spatial movement demandsa reconfiguration of the relationship between time and space in any effort toconstruct a comparative framework capable of grasping the manifestation ofcapitalist modernities. Hence, the expansion of capitalism, whether carriedon within a national society or overseas, is inextricably linked to the pro-duction of unevenness (noted by Lefebvre but articulated earlier by Bloch inthe concept of a contemporary non-contemporaneousness—Gleichzeitig-keit der Ungleichzeitigen). It seems to me that one of the ways of thinking

26. Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, 24–25.


about this new reconfiguration is to concentrate on how unevenness, theexperience expressed paradigmatically in the Blochian idea of contempo-rary non-contemporaneousness, is actualized in those places and spacesthat have committed their resources to the transformations of capitalist mod-ernization. What I want to propose is that the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous allows us to return to the question of temporality andthe temporalization of forms through which it is expressed in those socialspaces whose appearance have been spatialized by the capitalist nation-state. Initially resulting from overseas expansion, this sense of a dissonanttemporal asymmetry as it is experienced in the everyday supplies a possiblesuggestion for constructing a comparative framework on a global scale thatmight account for local differences without exceptionalizing the location of aspace as an ‘‘alternative’’ to a prior, original model.27 The geographic open-ing of the globe and its subsequent colonization brought the recognition ofcoexisting cultures that, through a kind of synchronous classification, wereordered diachronically—to make a ‘‘civilized’’ Europe appear ahead of an‘‘uncivilized’’ Asia and Africa from a backward glance. But if such compari-sons promoted the emergence of an experience of a possible world historyin terms of ‘‘development’’ and ‘‘progress,’’ they also set the stage for recon-sidering and reconfiguring the simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous in sucha way as to highlight the production of difference any society would experi-ence in confronting the unevenness caused by the interactions of its past inits present and confronting the odd temporality of a lost but now recoveredintention from the past. It was, I believe, precisely this observation that ledBloch to account for the arrival and success of fascism in Germany, eventhough his analysis never exceeded this cultural and historical horizon oreven acknowledged the larger geographical origins of this perception. Moresignificantly, his unit of analysis for capitalist reproduction and accumulationremained riveted to the nation-state rather than the everydayness of capi-talist society. For Bloch, the argument stalled in a comparison of Germany,France, and England, which performed more as alibi than explanation. Ger-man capitalism, he was convinced, was hostaged to late development andfailed, therefore, to integrate the social, political, and economic realms, thusopening the way to the continuous surfacing of older practices and residualmentalities—the non-contemporaneous—that fascism successfully appro-priated and Marxism misunderstood, even though he acknowledged thepersistence of an ‘‘unequal rate of development’’ in Germany for a long time.

27. Kosellek, Futures Past, 256.


Yet, by confining this form of temporalizing to Germany, he unintentionallyand inadvertently exceptionalized the German experience of moderniza-tion (Sonderweg) (actually inhibiting the possibility of further comparisonalready prefigured in his emphasis on the nation-state, despite the prom-ise of his conceptualization of the non-contemporaneous) and reinforced anargument already made by the fascists he was holding up for derision. Onthe other side of the world, Tosaka was observing a similar phenomenonin Japan that he called ‘‘archaism,’’ but he clearly recognized in it merelya local manifestation and variation of a wider experience found throughoutthe industrializing world of the 1930s. And in Italy, Gramsci’s theorization ofhegemony barely concealed a disguised recognition of the continuing andirresolvable nature of unevenness.

If, in any case, the instance of unevenness invariably accompaniesthe historical spread of capitalism everywhere, it must still continue to oc-cupy a commanding ‘‘space of experience’’ because it constitutes one ofits principal conditions of reproduction. In other words, unevenness is not adevelopmental stage that eventually is to be overcome but a principal con-dition that capitalism must constantly produce and reproduce. But whenBloch’s conception of the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneousis coupled with Lefebvre’s perception of ‘‘rhythmanalysis’’ of the everyday,we have, I believe, the possible beginnings of a productive way of envisag-ing comparisons. What I am referring to here is Lefebvre’s observation ofthe ‘‘double measure.’’ ‘‘Rhythm,’’ he wrote, ‘‘brings with it a differentiatedtime, a qualified duration. The same can be said of repetitions, rupturesand resumptions. Therefore a measure, but an internalmeasure, which dis-tinguishes itself strongly though without separating itself from an externalmeasure, with time (the time of the clock or metronome) consisting in onlya quantitative and homogenous parameter.’’ The external measure super-imposes itself on the internal measure but can never assimilate it, sincethey do not share either the same beginning or end. Hence, the doublemeasure enters into the definition and character of a rhythm and, accord-ingly, is ‘‘irreducible to a simple determination, implying . . . complex (dia-lectical) relations.’’28 In this scheme, only ‘‘non-mechanical movements’’ arecapable of having rhythm and thus quality, as against the purely quantitative,mechanical, and abstract domain standing apart from it. But everything isgrasped ‘‘symphonically.’’ In this regard, Bloch envisioned a double gesturein the contradictions of the non-contemporaneous contradiction. ‘‘Thus,’’ he

28. Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 78.


wrote, ‘‘the contradictory element is here, inwardly or subjectively, a muf-fled remnant,’’ a ‘‘non-desire for the Now,’’ and ‘‘accumulated rage.’’ But cor-responding to this ‘‘is the objectively non-contemporaneous element . . .of older circumstances and forms of production,’’ ‘‘older superstructures,’’and that ‘‘which is distant and alien to the present.’’ Above all, it ‘‘embraces’’‘‘declining remnants,’’ embodying different temporalities, and, more signifi-cantly, an ‘‘unrefurbished past ’’ that has not yet been resolved in capitalistterms.29 Lefebvre could easily agree with Bloch, as we could, that ‘‘Historyis no entity advancing along a single line, in which capitalism . . . as the finalstage, has resolved all the previous ones; but it is a polyrhythmic and multi-spatial entity, with enough unmastered and as yet by no means revealedand resolved corners.’’30

In the 1920s, nevertheless, the Japanese native ethnologist YanagitaKunio named this combined development he was already recording in Japanas ‘‘mixed or hybrid civilization,’’ which could be found throughout East Asia,at the same time the Indonesian nationalist Soetomo was acknowledgingthe constant unevenness of life produced by the interaction of the past withhis present. But both could just as easily have been describing that pro-cess everywhere by which modernity and everyday life were responding andcorresponding to each other. While a focus on the development of uneventemporalities within modernities easily replaces the space occupied by afixed place that still fails to conceal its status as the second term, it alsodiverts our attention away from the singularity of the nation as such, and itscounterclaims to uniqueness, which, it now seems, have all along been try-ing to bridge the difference between modernity and everyday life. If, in anyevent, our strategies of comparison are to have any utility at all, they mustbe embedded in specific temporal and spatial forms, in which social space islived and experienced to write its own history everywhere, perhaps as a his-tory of dissonant rhythms, as a continuing and never completed conjurationof the past in the present.

29. Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, 108.30. Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, 62.

harry harootunian 2005 - space time problem

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