This article explores how historical understanding imposes limits on imaginaries of the future. The article fleshes out the 'anticipation paradox' to capture how this happens even in the most imaginative approaches of contemporary film and television. On the one hand, multiple futures - sociopolitical, ecological, technological, economic - take place simultaneously in highly complex interactions. On the other hand, contemporary film and television typically depicts imaginary worlds of reduced complexity. The anticipation paradox states that the more profoundly a cinematic imaginary ventures into exploring the possibilities and complexities of one future lifeworld the more it becomes unable to address the larger complexities arising out the interactions of the multiple futures that take place simultaneously. And, vice versa, the more a cinematic imaginary ventures into approaching the complexities of interacting multiple futures the more it reduces the level of intricacies intrinsic of any one future imaginary. The article explains the paradox by highlighting two ways in which historical understanding exercises a pull of the past on imaginaries of the future: trajectorism and prospective anachronism. Whereas the former extends the realm of the already known into the future by extrapolating historical trajectories, the latter populates future lifeworlds with the familiarities of the past.

With a touch of irony, the project-closing piece of the "Historical Futures" collective research endeavor pulls together the threads of its four years of explorative work by showcasing an opening of historical futures. Against the persisting myth of the closure of the future in contemporary societies, it claims that, as long as the future remains contested by virtue of the multiplicity of historical futures that societal practices and discourses entail or advocate, there can be no closure of the future. In support of this claim, the project-closing piece outlines the reasons why the future is more radically open than ever and surveys the findings of the project contributions with the frame provided by the contemporary opening of historical futures.

The article explores the exhaustion of narrative as a cognitive instrument in trying to make sense of the "disconnective futures" of the Anthropocene and runaway technological imaginaries. Having its point of departure in the organic ties between narrative form and modern historical understanding, the article's argument begins by sketching how the modern idea of a historical process entails constant crises of uncertainty, on the one hand, and functions simultaneously as the manager of the very crises it brings about, on the other. The means of this crisis management consists of crafting historical narratives which tame uncertainty and smooth ruptures in time into deeper continuities. It is this narrative crisis management of establishing connections between past, present, and futures, which breaks down when encountering the temporal disconnections of the Anthropocene and technological prospects. Narrative crisis management was created to attend to crises of uncertainty, but it is inadequate to cope with disconnective futures which are not merely uncertain, but unfathomable. Based on a distinction between uncertainty and unfathomability, the article argues that efforts to project narrative connections over disconnective futures produce cognitive failures, and concludes on a note of potential resolutions, hinting at the development of non-narrative and yet historically-minded cognitive instruments attuned to making sense of temporal disconnections.

Historical time is a notoriously elusive notion. Yet, as societies attempt to make sense of rapidly changing worlds, it gains a new significance in the twenty-first century. This Element sketches a theory of historical time as based on a distinction between temporality and historicity. It approaches the fabric of historical time as varying relational arrangements and interactions of multiple temporalities and historicities. In the fabric, kinds of temporalities and historicities emerge, come to being, fade out, transform, cease to exist, merge, coexist, overlap, arrange and rearrange in constellations, and clash and conflict in a dynamic without a predetermined plot. The Element pays special attention to the more-than-human temporalities of the Anthropocene, the technology-fueled historicities of runaway changes, and the conflicts in the fabric of historical time at the intersections of technological, ecological, and social change.

Against the backdrop of the growing footprint of the future in contemporary lifeworlds (caught in the midst of rapid ecological and technological transformations), the chapter asks the question of whether the past still matters. It contends that the past matters inasmuch as contemporary societies do, in fact, make the past matter by relating pasts to presents and anticipated futures in societal practices and discourses ranging from the persistence of colonial practices to the burden of nuclear waste. In exploring the ways in which the past is made to matter, the chapter conceptualizes a variety of pasts, such as the unfolding past, the recurring past, the present past, the associated past, the inherited past, the ahistorical past, and the cultivated past.

ABSTRACT Dipesh Chakrabarty's The Climate of History in a Planetary Age is, in three respects, far more than a synthesis of over a decade of pioneering conceptual work aimed at making sense of the Anthropocene/planetary predicament and its implications for historical understanding. First, the book makes visible an intellectual trajectory in which Chakrabarty's conceptual struggles with the Anthropocene gradually move from the centrality of the notion of the Anthropocene toward the centrality of the notion of the planet. Second, it highlights the relational complexities with which one needs to grapple when trying to make sense of the current predicament. Third, and finally, the book showcases a series of often overlapping conceptual distinctions that Chakrabarty has developed while navigating these complexities. Through a discussion of the above key aspects, this review essay highlights the achievements of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age and critically engages with its central themes. In dialogue with the book, it pays special attention to exploring the respective benefits and drawbacks of the notions of the Anthropocene and the planet, and to the character and role of human agency in the Anthropocene/planetary predicament. Finally, the essay concludes with a few thoughts concerning the question of what kind of a reinvention of historical understanding might be triggered, respectively, by the notions of the Anthropocene and the planet.

This programmatic essay argues that meaningful historical engagement with the Anthropocene begins with recognizing that the concept arises not only from geology but also from Earth System science (ESS), which has evolved to incorporate both physical systems and human systems in an integrated view of our planet. It makes the case that this holistic understanding alters both the science and the history of the Anthropocene by introducing a novel form of human agency: Earth System agency. This radical new form of agency does not eclipse the individual and collective forms of agency that have always interacted with the environment but adds to them in complex and sometimes uncomfortable ways. It challenges us to develop a science-induced Anthropocene historiography and a humanities-induced Anthropocene science. The history of science is well positioned to play a dialectical role in developing a “critical friendship” between Anthropocene history and Anthropocene science—a process in which the history of science will likely be transformed as well.

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This article outlines the agenda of a collective research project that aims to explore modalities of historical futures that constitute our current historical condition. To present the collective work adequately, we have teamed up with History and Theory and initiated a long-term serial publishing experiment. In the coming years, each issue of the journal will feature contributions to this research endeavor. In our project-opening piece, we briefly introduce the experiment and the premises of the collective research agenda. We begin by recounting the many ways in which increasingly towering novel future prospects have begun to capture the scholarly world’s attention across disciplinary boundaries. We then introduce the notion of historical futures. Crediting theoretical inspirations and paying intellectual debts to conceptual relatives, we define “historical futures” as the plurality of transitional relations between apprehensions of the past and anticipated futures. At the core of the article, we formulate our call for a collective investigation of modalities of historical futures and sketch three basic sets of concerns that the explorative works in this experiment may address: kinds of transitions from past to futures, kinds of anticipatory practices , and kinds of registers as interpretive tools that position such practices on a variety of spectrums between two poles (for instance, a value register with the poles of catastrophic and redemptive futures). Finally, we close with a brief note about the necessity of collective endeavors.

Modernity is arguably one of the most popular punching bags of the post-World War II human and social sciences. It is also quite a durable one. The fact that we are still punching it across disciplines indicates at least that its implications, derivatives, benefits and harms stay with us, for better or worse (mostly the former in the recent writings of Steven Pinker, and typically the latter in contemporary humanities and social scientific knowledge production). So, too, its temporal regime may remain in effect, even though in an altered shape: according to Aleida Assmann’s wonderfully rich analysis, “the modern time regime has not completely lost its authority”; it only “has been placed within certain limits” (p. 200). What are those newly imposed limits and what exactly is the modern time regime whose rise and fall the book recounts? To answer these questions, let me proceed the same way Assmann does when noting that “it is only when alternatives present themselves on the horizon that the shape of something first becomes visible; until then, it had appeared as the self-evident and natural environment of the way things are” (p. 176). Alternatives to the modern time regime have presented themselves, as is apparent in the book’s discussions of the two perhaps most influential cultural diagnoses that serve both as reference points and competing interpretations to Assmann’s work on time to which Is Time Out of Joint? brings a synthesizing view. The first of these is Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s (2014) idea that a “broad present”— the broadening up of the present into the directions of both the past and the future—overtakes the modern chronotope in which the present served as the short transition between a past behind us and a future of open possibilities ahead. The second one is François Hartog’s (2015) idea that, since around 1989, a future-oriented modern “regime of historicity” gives way to a presentist one in which the internal relations of past, present and future are dominated by the viewpoint of the present. In Hartog’s view, between the rise of a heritage and memory culture that imposes a duty to remember (a sense of “debt” to the past) and a future increasingly approached along measures of precaution aimed at preempting coming catastrophes, the present is getting extended into both directions. Hartog’s diagnosis of presentism bears the heaviest footprint on Assmann’s approach, being the one relative to which Assmann positions her views. The disagreements, however, do not concern contemporary cultural phenomena and tendencies on which both reflect in equally insightful ways, but the evaluations and the judgments passed on those phenomena and tendencies. Where Hartog 1053995 MSS0010.1177/17506980211053995Memory StudiesBook Reviews book-review2021

In the most general sense, the modern idea of history is a conceptual tool deployed in order to domesticate experienced novelty and expectations of the future. In Western modernity, the operation we usually call historicization has been nothing other than an operation of temporal domestication: the integration of experienced and expected novelty into a larger processual scheme we associate with modern historical time. Based on these theoretical considerations, this article has a dual objective. First, through an analysis of historical approaches to the Anthropocene—that exemplifies present-day perceived radical novelty—it attempts to identify the linguistic-conceptual means of temporal domestication through historical time. Second, it raises the question of the politics of historical time today by focusing on the evaluative aspects of temporal domestication in an age when the future increasingly appears a threat. As a brief conclusion, the article calls for broader recognition of what it calls a plurihistoricity of “historical” transitions, the co-existence of multiple kinds of transformation and change over time.

This introduction describes the main themes of the special issue on temporal comparisons. It provides the background for individual contributions by sketching the way in which evaluations are intrinsic to conceptions of historical time. Inasmuch as different configurations of the relationship between past, present and future imply temporal comparisons between ‘now’ and ‘then’, historical time is subject to evaluations that we project onto the differences – or similarities – between the three dimensions. Practices of comparing between and across times pervade all spheres of activity: from high-level theory and historical reflection to the most trivial situations in everyday life. Tracking temporal comparisons is thus a way of exploring the broad middle ground between the consciously elaborated theories about time and the ordinary ways of dealing with time. Our introduction conveys this message in three steps. First, it provides a brief overview of the workings of historical time; second, it introduces the central notion of temporal comparisons while paying special attention to the scales in which they can be studied and their performative character; and third, it gives a quick glimpse into the main contentions of the contributions.