Randolph StarnDepartment of History

University of California, BerkeleyUSA 94720-2550

Email: rstarn@berkeley.eduLitteraria Pragensia 17.34 ( 2007), pp. 131-52.

History without Periods: Deliverance and Dilemma*

People have probably subdivided historical timeand argued about the results for as long as they have thought of having a history. Only in the early twentieth century, however, do the terms “periodize” or “periodization” take on a specifichistorical meaning as “viewing or interpreting the past or things of the past in terms of historical periods.” Before that, in seventeenth-century English, “to periodize” meant to put an end to something, not necessarily in time. The earliest twentieth-century reference to historical“periodization” combines assertion and misgivings. A 1911 review of an economic history questions the rigidity of “attempts at periodization by assigningthe eleventh century to the aristocracy, the twelfth to the Church, the thirteenth century to the burghers.” In 1970 usage is skeptical but resigned: “periods in history are neither necessary nor self-evident…; periodization is a matter of convenience.” Five years later doubt rises to a high level of theoretical obscurity in aseverely challenged translation of the Marxist philosopher Louis Althussser: “Empirically

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visible history in which the time of all histories is the simple time of continuity and in which the “content” is the vacuity of events that occur in itwhich one later tries to determine with dividing procedures in order to ‘periodize’ that continuity.”1 Arguments about periodization too recent for the dictionary have made for odd bedfellows such as the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson (“history without periods is not history”) and George W. Bush, whose millennium begins every time he says 9/11.2

This little exercise in terminology begins to account for the uneasy coupling in my title. Wanting to be delivered from periodizing historicaltime does not mean being able to do without it. Itis evidently indispensable and suspect at the same time, and so we—some of us anyway—go around in circles about it. This is the “challenge of periodization,” to cite the title of a recent

1*This is a revised version of a lecture delivered on & October 2007 at the meeting of the European Network for Reception Studies organized by Martin Procházka (Charles University) and Elinor Shafter (University of London, British Academy) at Charles University, Prague. Special thanksto Martin Procházka for including the essay in Litteraria Pragensia and mostof all for many fruitful exchanges and much friendship over the years. Thanks also to Mario Biagioli for reading an earlier draft.

? Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., J. A. Simpson and E. S. Weiner (eds.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) s.v. “Periodization,” “Periodize, “Periodology,” citing The American Economic Review 1 [1911]: 817; Modern Literary History 1 [1970]: 127; L. Althusser and E. Balibar, Reading Capital [1975], trans. B. Beckett, 103.

2 The Jameson Reader (Oxford and Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000), 13; Sandra Silberstein, War of Words: Politics and 9/11 (London: Routledge, 2002).

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symposium.3 In what follows I want to identify some anti-periodizing or non-periodizing turns in humanities scholarship and in my own experience. Then I’ll go on to point out some forms of what I think of as Period Creep, that is, the persistence of periodizing pressures even where they have been discounted or dismissed. By way of a conclusion, far from trying to eliminate the “dilemma” of periodization, I’ll propose that we need to embraceit.

* * * Historian Robert J. Berkhofer, Jr. sums up the

more recent challenge to perodization as follows: whereas “normal historical practice” looks for “coherency, continuity, unity, system, and univocality,” much current thinking “prefers fragmenting, differentiating, specifying, particularizing, deconstituting practices to deconstruct the spurious unities and reveal the contradictions of social and textual practices….”4 3 Useful collections on the subject include: New Literary History 1:2 (1970), periodization issue; The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives, Lawrence Besserman (ed.) (New York and London: Garland, 1996); Modern Language Quarterly 62.4 (2001), special issue on periodization, Marshall Brown (ed.). For a broad survey and social science perspectives see the articles on categories of time, chronologies, and time series by E. K. Silverman , M. Sato et al. in Internatinal Encyhclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Neil Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (eds.), 23, 15683ff. 4 Robert R. Berkhofer, Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), 220, citing Vincent B. Leitch, Cultural Criticism, Literary Theory, Poststructuralism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 5-6. Similarly David Perkins, Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 64: “we require the concept of a unified period in order to deny it, and thus make apparent the particularity, local difference,

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In fact, one of the great coherence-and-unity literary critics had already admitted many years ago that “one cannot escape the conclusion that [periodization in literary history] constitutes anindefensible jumble of political, literary, and artistic labels.”5 So René Wellek in 1949. In the wake of postmodern criticism historians rallying to defend “normal historical practice” areperfectly willing to concede that “incredulity concerning metanarratives is a familiar theme in western thought.”6 Complaining about periodization is nothing new, especially when others do it.

Since the Renaissance practically invented the modern practice, such complaints are an occupational disease for me as a Renaissance historian. One chronic symptom is endless debate about the distinctiveness, or not, of the Renaissance and its place, or not, in modern history; another is the weary admission that we can’t really mean what we say when we talk about the Renaissance as a clean break from the past or as a “rebirth” or as just more of the medieval same. In Renaissance Studies, and not just there, periodization routinely makes liars or fools of us.It stakes out professional boundaries guarded by disciplinary border patrols; it does ideological heterogeneity, fluctuation, discontinuity, and strife that are now our preferred categories for understanding any moment of the past.” 5 René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949), 255.

6 Perez Zagorin, “History, the Referent and Narrative: Reflections on Postmodernism Now,” History and Theory 38.1 (February 1999): 6.

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work, plotting time to suit political preferences and cultural prejudices. To add insult to injury,it prompts the hectoring tones I’m falling into here.

But if Berkhofer and other trendwatchers have it right, we should know much better by now. I thought so in the mid-1960s when I made what was called later the Linguistic Turn (as if we had evergiven up on language).7 By then I had revised and published a Ph.D dissertation steeped in manuscriptand archival research on the foreign secretary of the last Florentine Republic (1527-30). This was the office Machiavelli once held, and my man DonatoGiannotti was a friend of Machiavelli’s and in a long exile one of the last hold-outs in the Florentine republican tradition. On the rebound, Ilonged for the big picture that had drawn me to Renaissance Studies in the first place. Renaissance culture had mixed, without mastering, different forms of historical consciousness, and this was compelling for me because my cultural clocks were keeping such different times. I grew up in a small California town that prides itself onhaving as little historical consciousness as possible; one branch of my mother’s family were fire-and-brimstone preachers and my father lived a history of modernization in his own lifetime from farmboy to mechanic to businessman. In college I

7 The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method, Richard Rorty (ed.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) is the latest edition of this influential collection first published in 1967; for the migration of thelabel from philosophy to interdisciplinary studies in the humanities, see esp. Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (eds.) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

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had learned that Western Civilization went onward and, with cautionary setbacks from barbarians and tyrants, mostly upward from Plato to NATO; as a graduate student doing dissertation research in Florence I used to walk between the Biblioteca Nazionale and the old Archivio di Stato in the Uffizi on the Via de’ Neri imagining that the passersby had stepped out of Renaissance portraits.By the time I joined the history department in Berkeley in 1966, the Sixties were already beginning to look like a utopian sideshow taken down by the realities of disillusionment, war, and reaction.

My academic strategy for dealing with the confusion of times was to look into what I began tocall “chronotypes.” The basic idea was the simpleone that different conceptions of time structured different experiences of history, sometimes synchronically, sometimes (more often than not and more interestingly) coexisting and jostling with one another simultaneously. Different versions of the past, present, and future clashed and came apart all around me; thoughtful people, not to mention the ideologues and opportunists, cast aboutfor reasons to believe that history ran the way they wanted it to. So while following up on my dissertation with a wide-ranging study of exiles inmedieval and Renaissance Italy, I was trying to decode the forms and functions of notions such as “progress,” “decline,” “revolution,” and “crisis.” When I felt pulled in too many directions at once—Ihad also begun collaborating with my art historian colleague Loren Partridge, but that is another story—it helped to think that there might be

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analogies between losing one’s accustomed place andlosing a coherent sense of time. I capped off thisline of work in the late 1970s with a paper on “Historical Endings and the Historian’s Ends.” With ending and ends as my subject, I began on my robin’s egg blue Olivetti typewriter by concluding:

first, that historical endings exist only in the language of our occasions;second, that the endings in historical discourse focus and frame and by so doing engage and renounce the ends of historical inquiry [I must have meant that you could not have focusing and framing and history “wie es eigentlich gewesen” too];finally, that the ends of the historian lie indoing with and doing without the endings conventions provide.8

Along these lines, periodization could be understood as a language game with rules and routines for different narratives: they were indispensable and provisional at the same time. Mytalk’s reception was chilly to say the least—for good reasons as I look back upon it. Among other reasons, the one that matters here is that my Linguistic Turn had become a period piece, no less so because I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time. I thought I was breaking away. A dilettante 8 “Historical Ends and Endings,” unpublished paper, Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, School of Social Science, 31 January 1979; I had already published “Historians and Crisis,” Past and Present, no. 72 (1971):3-22, and “Meaning Levels in the Theme of Historical Decline,” History and Theory 14.1 (1975):1-31.

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in philosophy, linguistics, and literary criticism,I had only inklings that what looked fresh and pleasingly iconoclastic to me was old hat and highly developed from the Left Bank to, say, Pragueand Tartu and their New World satellites. I had learned something about “paradigms” from Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962); I read the original version in the International Encyclopedia ofUnified Science in the improbable setting of the Faculty of Economics and Business in the Universityof Florence. Michel Foucault, for all I knew, was a historian of psychology who hadn’t found a regular job. (Histoire de la folie à l’age classique [1961] was the first of Foucault’s works to appear in English translation [1963]; Les mots et les choses [1966] came out in English translation as The Order of Things only in 1970; it is still common for historians to dismiss Foucault as “bad history.”) The epic clashes (for intellectuals anyway) between Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jean-Paul Sartre over historicity and, in the later Sixties, betweenJacques Derrida and Foucault over structuralism were shadowy battles of giants on my far horizons. Hayden White’s Metahistory would not appear until 1973; I wouldn’t have read it until two or three years later—or Paul Ricoeur on time and narrative until a few years after that. Most of my scattered knowledge of structuralism and post-structuralism was second-hand. I had actually met Kuhn during a year as a graduate student in Berkeley, but he was famously uncommunicative, all the more so because, rejected by the Berkeley philosophers and hardly understood by Berkeley historians, he was bound for Princeton—which, as he

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discovered, couldn’t quite figure him out either. Hayden White was a little more than an hour away atthe new university campus at Santa Cruz, but until the mid-Seventies I knew about him from his work onGiambattista Vico.

In retrospect, the fact that my Linguistic Turnwas a patchy improvisation makes the Period Creep in my chronicle of it all the more apparent. For, of course, I was climbing small trees in a large forest that I didn’t see at first. I was, after all, part of a tendency, a cluster of overlapping concerns and approaches, an interdisciplinary moment or even a movement in the interdisciplinary reception of structuralist and post-structuralist theory. This was reassuring as I came to realize it, but it was unsettling too. I was one of a crowd that was mostly farther along and much betterequipped than I was. Perhaps the closest I came tostepping outside of period was giving up on my history-as-language project before the Linguistic Turn became what Kuhn called “normal science” in the 1980s.

Except that this put me in the company of another movement whose time had come. In 1986, the Yale literary critic Hillis Miller, speaking more or less disapprovingly of new directions in literary studies, had pointed to “a lurch toward history, culture, society, politics, institutions, class and gender, the social context, the materialbase.” 9 Since then, the “lurch” has itself been

9 J. Hillis Miller, “Presidential Address 1986. The Triumph of Theory, the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of the Material Base,” PMLA102 (1987): 289

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wrapped in period trappings. 10 At the time my experience seemed a rather provincial tale revolving around an interdisciplinary humanities journal founded in Berkeley.

The first issue of the quarterly Representations was published by the University of California Pressin 1983.11 In a myth of origins that soon made therounds, a French, “deconstructionist” wave of literary critical theory in the east coast academy drove a “Berkeley school” to take up a historicallyinflected criticism and its own continental import,Michel Foucault. There was something to this, but not much. In October 1980 a group of friends and friends of friends from different Berkeley humanities and social science departments met “to discuss what, if anything, we might do to profit from each other’s work.”12 David Lodge’s hilarious1975 academic novel Changing Places had already sent up Berkeley as an obligatory stop on the literary studies circuit, but in Berkeley’s highly

10

?For an especially searching analysis, see James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1998), chap. 1 (“Cultural Specificity after Structuralism: Dating the ‘Return to History’”). 11

? For what follows I draw on my “Making Representations,” Chronicle of the University of California, no. 6 (Spring 2004): 161-67.12

?The archives of Representations, in a file tabbed "Representations; S. Greenblatt," include acceptances from Hayden White, Jim Clifford and Margaret Brose at University of California, Santa Cruz; an undated all-Berkeley checklist in Greenblatt's hand for the first meeting lists Charles Muscatine, Paul Alpers, Stephen Greenblatt, Frances Ferguson, Walter Benn Michaels, Catherine Gallagher, Joel Fineman, Steven Knapp, Svetlana Alpers, Thomas Laqueur, Randolph Starn, Leo Bersani, Howard Bloch, Lynn Hunt, and Michael Rogin: Starn, “Making Representations, 163.

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departmentalized culture interdisciplinary exchanges were most likely to occur in campus corridors or airports. After the October meeting those who were interested—not all of the original group were—met from time to time as an informal reading group, mostly to discuss our own work. It took nearly two years for the reading group to decide, among other options, to become the editorial board of a journal. Foucault, who first gave a Berkeley seminar as an obscure French philosopher in 1975, and returned occasionally as avisiting professor beginning in 1980, never attended any of our meetings.

The notion of “representation” had surfaced early on in its various senses—standing for a constituency; arguing a position; taking something or someone’s place. Cultural performances and productions did all that, though those who were inclined to think in formal terms worried about representation as just another reduction of the world to material detail while the more material orhistory-minded thought that representation smacked of formalism. Only in the plural did the idea really click, although the group shied away from manifestos and never published a full statement of principles. Admittedly, it was not for want of trying. Group lore converted failure into the virtue of running circles around theory police and border patrols on the lookout for disciplinary trespassing. The truth is that we were not good at formulating programmatic statements, but the reasons for this went beyond the lame, grant-writing prose of rejected drafts in the journal’s archives.

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Since there was no way for the group to represent all its differences, evasion was a positive gesture. The annals of scholarship are littered with proclamations of new movements, all of them eventually turned conventional and joined at the hip with the propositions they were rejecting. The movements that came to be identified with the journal were wobbly approximations. “New Historicism” was Stephen Greenblatt’s stab at a catchy title for a paper en route to deliver it in Australia; the “New CulturalHistory” was named, a little tongue-in-cheek, overlunch at an Indian restaurant in Berkeley. Despite the bow to history in the name, New Historicism was a literary-critical subculture. Its main constituencies were in the Renaissance andnineteenth-century branches of anglophone English departments. A literary-critical parasite on the muscle-bound body of history, New Historicism fortified a running critique of the New Criticism, with its cult of the self-sufficient work of art, and an old nominalism under the new rubric of literary deconstruction. The few professional historians who paid much attention were alternatelyamused and incensed by the literary piracy. Moving in the opposite direction, New Cultural History was the label under which a few more adventurous cultural historians fixed on literary criticism and cultural anthropology as an antidote to the real and imagined sclerotic literalism of historians.

A standard criticism of New Historicism by literary critics had it stuck in a diluted culturalmaterialism that real materialists found amateur; a

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standard criticism of New Cultural History by historians, if they were the least bit interested, was that it was all too literary and theoretical. Such imperfections of principle made it possible for the Representations editorial board to arrive at working arrangements that functioned remarkably well over the years. This near-miracle was largelydue to the fact that journal was an extension of a group used to talking and reading with one another,all at Berkeley and all assuming that an editorial board would be something like a collective or a cooperative; everyone expected to pitch in, to demand the best from ourselves and potential contributors, and to agree that we could disagree without disbanding.

For all the editorial board’s leeriness about guidelines, you knew a Representations piece when yousaw it. A familiar strategy was to tease the viscous predictability of academic argument with unexpected connections and contexts. There was a predilection for the arresting anecdote and for seemingly asymmetrical juxtapositions that turned out, plausibly, to have everything to do with one another: so, at random from the early issues, History as Sorcery; Male Hysteria; Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Gold Standard; Medieval Fables and Freud’s Jewish Jokes; Elizabethan Literature and Tobacco. The aim was tobe theoretically literate but not literally theoretical, empirical without being square. This in-betweenness extended to cultural politics and led to accusations of both crypto-conservatism and fellow-traveling with the cultural Left in the culture wars of the 1980s and early 1990s. Without

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being prescribed, topics tended to cluster, occasionally coming to roost in special issues suchas those devoted to the politics of the human body,collective memory and commemoration, authority in science, the Old World and the New.

The period quality of all this was thrust upon me in 1997 when a young German literary scholar at a joint meeting of graduate students from Berkeley,Tübingen, and Vienna observed with polite frustration that his Berkeley counterparts didn’t seem to have a theory. “We have a Method,” he saidwithout knowing where his method got its name, “it’s called New Historicism.” A few years earlierFredric Jameson had taken “new historicism” to taskas a token name for “a shared writing practice” of an assortment of literary critical entrepreneurs; in James Chandler’s gloss, “as a movement that is not a movement, [new historicism] becomes, for Jameson, paradoxically ‘typical’ of Postmodernism itself, a condition which seems to prohibit the level of historical generality required to establish historical movements in the first place.”13 A method that was not really a method wasbeing swallowed up in a non-period that was really a period.

When the twentieth anniversary of Representationsarrived in 2003, the idea of closing shop, somewhere between a bang and a whimper, was seriously considered. Of the dozen or so original members of the board, I was one of three left. We

13 Chandler, England in 1891, 5, referring to Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Capitalism (Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 1991), 184.

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were all stretched thin by the surge of other commitments; it wasn’t clear that a new generation wanted to take on another’s projects —a not altogether joking suggestion was that Representationsshould be relaunched as Materialities. By then there were look-alikes contesting the need and dampening the enthusiasm for the original. A score of years would have amounted to a tidy period. In the end the journal did not self-destruct. It’s taken on new life, I’m happy to say, but the era is not the same.

*****I’ve drawn on my experience to suggest as

directly as I can how periodization creeps up on would-be avoidance or evasion. I take this to be the dilemma that comes with wishing good riddance to periodization schemes in detail or altogether. It is particularly intense just now in a period, soto speak, when many people seem neither able to abide nor to do without thinking of history in terms of periods. So, for example, the view associated with postmodernism that we can mix and match period styles that were once characteristic of some particular time. Then there are the apocalyptic moods of fear or hope for some rupture or rapture, instauration or restoration that will somehow disrupt an old and inaugurate a new periodic reckoning in history; this is a politicians’ and preachers’ gambit all too often abetted by the media and intellectuals who probablyknow better. Neoconservative predictions of “the end of history” with the impending triumph of liberal capitalism have given way to

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counterarguments, recantations, and facts on the ground, including the failure of those unaware thathistory is over to be convinced.14 Meanwhile scholars in history-minded disciplines who are mostly trained as period professionals continue to “do” their periods with the reasonably conscientious conviction that it’s hard enough to keep up in one’s own field and that this barbarian invasion, too, will pass. There are any number of variations, but it may be useful to offer a partialtaxonomy of the persistent tendency to think in terms of historical periods, however contradictory or discredited this may seem.

“Normal Turbulence”

To begin with, there is the large category of “normal turbulence.” Scholars are experts on the fungibility of temporal markers. Much of the work of period specialists consists of jousts overdefinition and turf—jousts because these contests are rarely fatal. To refer again to the field I know best, “early modernity” has become the fashionable megaperiodic term overriding subperiodic specialities and challenging the real and imagined biases of more conventional period labels—Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, etc. 15 English literary scholars will know much better than I do that the “eighteenth century” is 14 The touchstones of these debates are the books by Francis Fukuyama, esp. The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992); and America at the Crossroads (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006). .

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anything but fixed on the calendar; they may prefer the short (1713-63), the century-long (1688-1789), or the very long eighteenth century, from the Restoration to the parliamentary reforms of the nineteenth century (1688-1834). I won’t even try to summarize disputes over dating Romanticism.16 In more recent history Eric Hobsbawm’s twentieth century is short and Giovanni Arrighi’s is long, while Tony Judt’s history of Europe since World War II carves a new period out of the twentieth century beginning in 1945. It may be worth remembering here that Protestant apologists adopted the century as a polemical reckoning of time against Catholic claims for the perennial truths of scripture and tradition.17 Making a virtue out of the liabilities of professional practice, Hillis Miller writes (more eloquently than other literary scholars making a similar point): “Each period is itself equivocal. Periods differ from one another because there are

15Leah S. Marcus, “Renaissance/EarlyModern,” in Redrawing the Boundaries: TheTransformation of English and American Literary Studies, Stephen Greenblatt and GilesGunn (eds.) (New York: 1992) 41–63.; Randolph Starn,“The Early ModernMuddle,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 6.3 (2002): 297-307.

16Suffice it to cite two works I have found most valuable on these largeissues: Srinivas Aravamudan, “The Return of Anachronism,” in MLQ 62.4 (December 2001): 336, and Chandler, England in 1819 , pt. 1.

17 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New York: Vintage Books, 1994; Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of our Times (London and New York: Verso, 1994); Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005); cf. on the “century” and much else of related interest, Daniel Milo, Trahir le temps (l’histoire) (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1991).

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different forms of heterogeneity, not because each period held a single coherent view of the world.”18

To be sure, scholars are a tiny minority under the rubric of “normal turbulence.” Virtual time-travel and actual travel across time zones have become banal routines; many people crave the illusion of “being there” in one or another historical past and, more impressively, pay large sums to be fooled. The phenomena of globalizationthat are said to be characteristic of our time (another instance of Period Creep) also highlight our differences; “glocalization” is a product that globalization supposedly overcomes—and that global capitalism needs, literally, to capitalize on. Weknow, with background accompaniment from Mozart or AK-47s, that different cultures have different waysof dividing up and living in time. Our secularizedtime scales—Before the Common Era (B.C.E.) and of the Common Era (C.E.)—have never seemed convincingly universal, the less so because they are a spin-off of Christian chronology--B.C. and A.D.--in thin disguise.

The history of Western chronologies is itself ahistory of “normal turbulence,” multiform and, if you will, even politically correct or “multicultural.” Medieval Christianity lived with 18Quoted by Lawrence Besserman, “The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives,” in The Challenge of Periodization (ed. Besserman) , 4; cf. similarly, Helen Vendler, “Periodizing Modern American Poetry,” in ibid., 242: “Periodization has never been very useful in identifying samenesses; there is almost no predicate that can be usefully applied to any two Romantic poets…. When one reaches for more than two poets, the predicate phrases become so absurdly general that they would apply to any two writers taken at random. Where periodization becomes useful is in demarcating differences.”

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concurrent time scales; not just B.C. and A.D., but also the Book of Daniel’s four empires; the three eras before the law, under the law, and in the time of grace; Joachim of Flora’s three ages of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; and the six-fold chronology adopted by St. Augustine (Adam to Noah, Noah to Abraham, Abraham to David, David to the Babylonian Exile, the Babylonian Exileto Christ, from Christ to the present). The year 1600 arrived at different times on Gregorian (Catholic) and Julian (Protestant) calendars, but most people probably didn’t know or care very much as they kept time by generation, season, or constellation. Although we have more actual experience of heterogeneous time, Renaissance scholars paid more serious attention to it, taking great pains to reconcile a welter of received chronologies. According to its designer Conrad Dasypodius, the stupendous Renaissance clock erected in the 1570s in the cathedral of Strasbourgmeasured clock time but also “eternity, the century, the periods of the planets, the yearly andmonthly revolutions of the sun and moon”; an iconographer’s dream (and nightmare), the Strasbourg clock was ornamented with “everything from history and poetry, sacred texts and profane ones, in which there is or can be a description of time.”19

19 Anthony Grafton, “Chronology and its Discontents in Renaissance Europe,” in Time; Histories and Ethnographies, Diane Owen Hughes and Thomas R. Trautmann (eds.) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 140, quoting Conrad Dasypodius, Heron mechanicus; seu de machanicis artibus atque disciplinis. Eiusdem horologii astronomici Argentorati in summon Templo erecti descriptio. (Strasbourg, 1580), sig. [F. iiii recto-verso]. The notes in Besserman,“The Challenge of Periodization, in The Challenge of Periodization (ed.

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It has often been pointed out that myths of periodization end up secularized as philosophies ofhistorical development. This idea has also been strongly contested as an affront to the legitimacy of the modern age—for example, by Hans Blumenberg.20

Hegel, Saint Simon, Marx and, later on, Spengler and Toynbee are among the preeminent exhibits. Whether and how they recycled the legacies of cyclical, linear, or tripartite time scales, or abrupt or lingering transitions, is too big a question to tackle in a brief survey. I cite these issues here only to underscore the scale of “normal turbulence” that a full dossier on periodization would need to address.

The Laocoön Effect

But what about deliberately radical breaks? It’s not at all clear that straining to get free ofperiodization does much more than tighten its hold.I call this the “Laocoön Effect” after the Trojan priest who wanted to expose the Trojan horse and ended up caught in the serpents’ toils.

The “Foucault Effect” updates the point. Against conventional narratives, Foucault, following Nietzsche, calls for “effective history” highlighting ruptures and discontinuities. In one of his more oracular pronouncements, he writes that“knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting”; it follows that the famous Besserman), 19-27, provide an excellent bibliography on (mostly Western)chronological schemes.

20 Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age [1976], trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1985).

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“epistemes” should have gaps between them. Yet Foucault’s sequencing of modern European culture (Renaissance, Age of Reason, Historicism) in The Order of Things is conventional; so too is his accountof the third age and of a “future, starting now,” avariation on the theme of modernity as an age of alienation, when “man” is dispossessed by the things and eventually by the discourses of his own creation. A chapter on periodization in the first volume of his late work, the History of Sexuality, posits two “ruptures” in the West’s repression of sexuality, one in the seventeenth, the other in thetwentieth century. First came the “promotion of adult marital sexuality”; next the constant exposure and analysis of sexuality “meant to yield multiple effects of displacement, intensification, reorientation, and modification of desire itself.” But, as commentators and critics have pointed out, the break is more apparent than real, “an inflexion,” as Foucault puts it, on a long “curve of repression.” 21

A more radical option is “sound- and-fury-signifying-nothing”; more prosaically, the belief,as a historian put it whose work makes one believe him, that history is “just one damned thing after another.”22 But in order to indict history as something like Gibbon’s theater of “crimes,

21

? There is a succinct but well-informed discussion in Besserman, “The Challenge of Periodization,” in The Challenge of Periodization (ed. Besserman), 13-19.

22 There are other contenders for the attribution, but I remember first reading it in H.A.L. Fisher, A History of Europe (London: Collins, 1935).

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follies, and misfortunes,” the pessimists usually script the action and raise and lower or raise the footlights by periods. In a famously poignant counter-staging of history as step-by-step progress, Walter Benjamin glosses Paul Klee’s painting “Angelus Novus”: an angel faces history backwards and is blown away from piles upon piles of wreckage by the winds of paradise. From the sublime to the ridiculous, Y2K was anticipated withgreat misgiving and greater misinformation, but this apocalypse, end, or beginning of time turned out, as usual, to be a dud—does anyone even remember it now?23

Macrohistory and microhistory presume that periodization problems will disappear if you make your periods large or small enough. The historianFernand Braudel and the French journal Annales are often cited on “total history”and the longue durée. Braudel famously divided history into long-term continuity, economic and social conjoncture, and histoire évenémentielle, the history of events that aremerely “froth on the strong backs of waves beneath.” In Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s antic variation nothing much happens—he cites, tongue-in-cheek, Pascal’s divine revelation and the dinner fork—between the eleventh and eighteenth centuries,caught in the grim Malthusian bind of “motionless history.”24 David Christian’s recent work on “big

23Charles Cameron, “Y2K (the Year 2000 Computer Problem),” in Encyclopaedia of Millennialism and Millennial Movements, Richard A. Landes (ed.) (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), 443-445.

24Fernand Braudel, On History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980);Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, "L'histoire immobile," Annales: Economies, sociétés, civilisations, 29 (1974): 673-82, translated by John Day as "Motionless

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history” is even bigger than the annalistes’ or than fashionable extensions of “world history.” Christian is the only academic historian I know whois open-eyed and intellectually adventuresome aboutthe immensity of time in contemporary physical and biological science (in uncanny harmony with Asian sagas of world creation and destruction). His three eras of humankind are but a blip in the larger time scale, an era of discrete groups (3 million years ago), another of connections forged (250, 000 years ago), another of the world made one(500 years ago). How anticlimactic then, if perhaps predictably so, in keeping with the LaocoönEffect, that the last era retails a quite conventional story of a modern age of (basically European and North Atlantic) integration of the world by technology, communication, commerce, and capital.25 Microhistory operates on the principle that small is more—more likely to correct the flattening distortions and dilutions of even fairlymodest period markers. With their archives largelyspared by a belated national unification and beforethat by a failed Reformation and a short-lived Revolution, the Italians have perfected microhistory as a kind of surrogate national history.26 One of its most inspired practitioners, History," Social Science History, 1 (1977): 115-36.25

?David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 2004); cf. Jerry H. Bentley, “Cross-Cultural Interaction and Periodization in World History,” American Historical Review 101.3 (January 1996): 749-70. 26

?The best account I know is Edward Muir, “Introduction: Observing Trifles,” in Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe, Edward Muir and Guido

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Carlo Ginzburg, argues against critics who doubt the significance of a miller in Friuli who believesthe world began like a wormy ball of cheese or of peasants waving green stalks at witches. It is thestrangeness of the particular case, not its representative exemplarity that is most revealing, Ginzburg insists—a little disingenuously insofar asthe shock of alterity discloses and shapes norms, not only those of the inquisitors on the lookout for heresy but also those embedded in a peasant culture that Ginzburg believes he can trace back tothe primeval Russian steppes. Here again the découpage makes sense only in light of the big picture.27

The “boutique date” is a familiar microhistorical choice. It can be deployed in historical and literary studies as a theoretical proposition, a revisionist hypothesis, a working method, or a marketing ploy. Sooner or later, however, the specific date becomes a link to largerconnections and contexts and to other dates. Specificity turns periodic. One of my favorite examples of a vacant date charged with large, mostly present-day ideological interests is the year 1154; in the periodization frenzy around the turn of the millennium the American Dialect Societychose that date for the second millennium’s most Ruggiero (eds.) (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991), vii-xxviii.

27 See, e.g., “Making It Strange: the Prehistory of a Literary Device,” in Ginzburg’s Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance [1998], trans. Martin Ryleand Kate Soper (New York: Columbia UP, 2001), 2-18; Ginzburg’s fullest attempt at tracing primordial cultural motifs is Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (New York: Pantheon, 1991).

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significant English neologism—“she.”28 A notorious case of particular dates with periodization in tow is François Furet’s poison gift for the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. The events of the summer of 1789 in France were not ultimatelyeventful, argues Furet, because the French Revolution found its true meaning only with the Third Republic. Thus the events of 1789 culminatedonly in 1871, a recasting of chronology that subsumes several conventional periods, including the First and Second Republics, the Restoration, and the First and Second Empires. And now, with the Revolution correctly periodized, “La révolutionest finie.”29

Some of the most sophisticated examples of dates turned periodic are Friedrich Kittler’s 1800 and 1900 and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s 1926.30 The most important thing about 1926, according to Gumbrecht, is that no one has ever considered it important. Reviewers probably begged to differ—what about the first moving picture “talkie”; the publication of Mein Kampf (Part 2); the Ford Motor

28 Cited by Aravamudan , “The Return of Anachronism,” 334.

29 François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981); cf. Tropes of Revolution: Writers’ Reactions to the French Revolution, 1789-1989, C. C. Barfoot and Théo D’haen (eds.) (Radopi, 1992), 294. Cf. the brilliant observations on the combined specificityand plasticity of historical dates by István Rév, Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Postcommunism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005).

30 Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 [1985], trans. Michael Meteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1990); Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).

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Company’s 8-hour day; the Yankees winning the WorldSeries? Pace the critics, it is the relative insignificance of 1926 that Gumbrecht takes to validate a neutral, metaphor-free exercise in “historical simultaneity” of seemingly discrete phenomena without recourse to naïve conceptions of an “age” or “spirit.” But it is not at all clear that Gumbrecht has exorcised a historicist ghost from his machine. To be sure, Kittler gives him anargument for saying so. In the “discourse network”of 1900 Kittler claims that industrial production and the reception of material signs replaced the “spirit,” the emblematic “sigh” of the “spirit of the age” back in 1800. Instantaneous connections along networks displaced time and space so that everything was potentially present; the time that once separated dispersed places and different eras was erased. The new immediacy also meant that the enabling connections would be mechanical, “discourses without sense or thought” seeming to efface human intention altogether. Thus the “network” allegedly triumphs over the “age”—if indeed it is not the other way around since it is fair to ask whether the revenant has not returned after all.31 In any case, the contrast between 1800and 1900 is clearly a contrast in period not just in date; not only that, a microhistorical date has metamorphosed into a historical period.

31 I am drawing on the discussion in Michael North, “Virtual Histories: the Year as Literary Period,” in MLQ , 407 ff; one thinks of Derrida’s “hauntology” here: Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994).

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The concept of revolution certainly deserves a place in any dossier on periodization. It is the modern signifier par excellence for wholesale change—and for the failure of promised brave new worlds tocome about. The mirror image of why a revolution or multiple revolutions were inevitable is the richliterature on why revolutions have not panned out as intended.32 I only mention this double bind in passing, one more sign of the hard times that have befallen revolution as a category in the wake of the collapse of communism. Revolution has come to look like a ghost, a fossil of old schemes of historical thinking, an advertising slogan, or a rather mindless form of technological determinism for, say, the digital revolution or revolutions in physics, biology, or medicine. It is in keeping with the “Laocoön Effect” that the concept of revolution has thus become periodized.

Some Limits of Periodological Poetics

So far as I know, there is no systematic analysis of the language of historical periodization. Hayden White’s “metahistory” is perhaps as close as we get, and I cite it here to suggest that a “periodological poetics,” for all the solvent of critical scrutiny it might apply toperiodization, would not dispense with it. For White history as distinct from chronicle is always a “followable story” whose point depends on “the

32 Krishnan Kumar, “Revolution,” in New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Maryanne Cline Horowitz (Detroit, New York, etc.: Charles Scribner’s Sons: 2005), vol. V, 2112-2121, offers a concise and judicious survey.

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structure of the entire series of events considered as a completed story.”33 He distinguishes modes of emplotment, argument, “ideological implication” and, underlying them, the linguistic tropes by which the stories history tells acquire an order and, intentionally or not, a moral. But to be “followable” and “complete” the story presumably would still have a beginning and an end; that is tosay, it would have periodizing temporal markers.

This criterion outlasts the shifting categories, juggled terminology, and multiple distinctions that scholars influenced by White haveproduced to the point of academic parody. Dale Porter, for example, distinguishes three types of plot —those of fortune, character, and of perspective; to each of these he assigns four or five varieties for a total of fourteen plot forms; which in combination with seven “levels of abstraction” give him a maximum of ninety-eight developmental schemes “to which any event or narrative account can be assigned.” Porter hardly needs to remind us not to take this very literally.34

For White himself, irony is the most privilegedof historiographical tropes by which “consciousnesscan prefigure areas of experience…in order subsequently to submit them to analysis and

33 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973) , 7 (White’s emphasis).

34 Dale Porter, The Emergence of the Past: A Theory of Historical Explanation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 146-60; on this and other versions of “emplotment,” see Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, chap. 5, 106-37.

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explanation.”35 By contrast with metaphor, metonomy, or synecdoche, irony, according to White, is not “naïve” but inherently “critical,” not only critical of some particular character or characterization but critical of the very possibility of achieving true representations in language. He traces this form of critical distancing from the Enlightenment to Nietzsche. Ironically or not, this is a fairly conventional periodization for European intellectual history.

In any case, ironic endings or outcomes leave unrequited that other side of modern historical consciousness developing in the nineteenth century:the longing for immediacy and the lived experience of the past. We can practically hear Michelet’s defiance at being shunted aside by a chapter heading like White’s “History as Romance.” “History,” he cries, “is not narration as Thierry thought, not analysis as Guizot thought, it is resurrection.”36 It may prove his point that condescension or ironic smiles at this “naïve” pronouncement serve to “resurrect” Thierry and Guizot. Pressed to reconsider his claim that therewas no way to choose among histories of the Holocaust, White had trouble with Carlo Ginzburg’s argument that the testimony of just one surviving

35 White, Metaphistory, 36.

36?Quoted by Arthur Mitzman, Michelet, ou la subversion du passé; quattre leçons au Collège de France (Paris: Boutique de L’Histoire, 1999), 113. On tensions between distance and immediacy in the origins of modern historical consciousness, see Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation ofHistory in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1984).

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witness obliges the historian to attempt to reconstruct the past as such.37

Perhaps the ultimate irony is that the relativizing nominalism of a “periodology” may provoke a Period Leap (including self-annihilation), that takes satisfaction in costume fiction and film and fundamentalism in religion.

*****

At this point we might step back and enjoy theprofusion of false starts and contradictions. But academic Schadenfreude is particularly disagreeable when there are so many real troubles in the world. Let me try to turn what has become a rather depressing chronicle to good account. One possibility is to take the pragmatic view that periodization is only what it does for us—no more, but no less, either. Historical periods in this sense are tools for testing various interpretationsof history, and we shouldn’t expect more of them than that. No doubt scholars will go on shuffling period terms in teaching, publication, and academicpolitics and leave epistemological problems to specialists whose business it is to deal with such things. Why not just be responsible and accountable for our choices and leave it at that?

I’m taken with a recent essay by the brilliant philosopher and historian of science Bruno Latour where he writes, “The critic is not one who debunks37

? Hayden White, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,” Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” Saul Friedlander (ed.) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1994), 38; cf. Carlo Ginzburg, “Just One Witness,” in ibid., 82-96.

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but who assembles.”38 Since I have already assembled and collected here, I want to attempt a non-debunking conclusion.

There are said to be two types of people and kinds of projects—lumpers and splitters. I like this characterization better than Isaiah Berlin’s famous Aesopian quip about “hedgehogs” and “foxes” because it’s not just about knowledge—the hedgehogswho know a lot about a little, the foxes who know alittle about a lot—but about intuition and instincttoo. The great fact about periodization is that itmakes us lumpers and splitters at the same time. Periodicity is a kind of cut, to recall Foucault,

that brings things together; it produces a Before and an After and a sequence, common denominator, orwhole greater than the parts in between.

Putting it more precisely, historical inquiry requires a calculus along synchronic and diachronicaxes, an axis of continuity and an axis of change. In Sherman Stuart’s clever conceit, one is the tick-tick of chronos, the other the tick-tock of kairos.39 Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of the “historians’ code” along these lines is as pointedly elegant now as it was when he needled Sartre with it fifty years ago.40 The sine qua non 38

? Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam: From Matters of Factto Matters of Concern,” in Things, ed. Bill Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 171.

39 Sherman Stuart, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660-1785 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 11. 40

? Quotes from the last chapter of The Savage Mind (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1966); I am indebted here to the analysis in Chandler,England in 1819, 63 ff .

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of the historians’ code “consists in dates: there is no history without dates... [F]or history’s entire originality and distinctive nature lie in apprehending the relation between before and after,which would perforce dissolve if its terms could not be dated.” Of course dates have different functions; in Lévi-Strauss’s terms these functions are ordinal (ordering one thing after another), cardinal (signifying historical “density” such as “1789” or “1914” ), and classificatory (“hourly, daily, annual, secular, millennial,” etc.) So, inLévi-Strauss’s example, the “history of the 17th century is ‘annual,’ but the 17th century as a domain of history belongs to another class, which codes it in relation to earlier and later centuries; and this domain of modern time in its turn becomes an element of a class where it appearscorrelated with and opposed to other ‘times’: the middle ages, antiquity, the present day, etc.” The pay-off of these seemingly innocuous distinctions starts with the deceptively routine observation that historians regularly move up and down discreteclassificatory levels. This observation leads to the open secret of the “historians’ code”: moving up the scale to larger units of time increases their explanatory power; moving down the scale increases the richness of detailed information but diminishes explanation. In effect, the historian loses in information what he or she gains in comprehension or vice versa. This is, according toLévi-Strauss, historiography’s “dilemma.”

And this brings me back to my title. I have variously suggested that “history without periods”is both “deliverance and dilemma.” Try to

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dismantle or dispense with periods and they creep back in again; cling to periodization and it generates artificial coherence and authentic contradiction. Such are the horns of this particular dilemma. In the original meaning of theterm an orator presented his opponent with two alternatives, either of which was (or appeared to be) equally unpalatable to him; he lost the argument whichever one he chose. But surely nobodyin right mind would fight a two-horned dilemma. Can we be certain that dilemmas have to hurt?

The more arbitrary, more totalizing versions ofperiodization can certainly be reined in, but supposing we really could eliminate it altogether is not necessarily a reassuring prospect. The possibility of splitting up or collapsing our dilemma is what should trouble us most. That is the way to the denial of history, whether the fundamentalists’ who believe that history must notchange or the nihilists’ who believe that it is nothing but change. The enabling feature of the historians’ code is that is not the way to heaven or to hell, but that it submits history to a shifting calculus of registers of time.

To adapt another line from Bruno Latour, we might say that, with periodization too, we have never been modern and we should stop trying to be. Latour has in mind the false and indeed impossible split between (among other things or, as he thinks of them, quasi-things) nature and society, objects and subjects, abstract time and temporal contingency that disguises their interdependence. As for time, Latour insists that it “is not a general framework but a provisional result of the

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connection among entities…Connections among beings alone make time.” It is, he goes on, “the capacity to sort that appears essential to our morality and defines the human…”41 On similar lines we may say that historical periods are neither absolute nor phantasmatic; they are sortingdevices we use to contemplate the associations thatconnect us with pasts, presents, and one another.

41 Quotes from Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern [1991], trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 74, 78, 141. For an importantly wide-ranging discussion of the problems and possibilities of a “post-metaphysical” historiography, see David D. Roberts, Nothing but History: Reconstruction and Extremity after Metaphysics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995).