Review: David Roberts, ‘History of the Present’
Review of David Roberts’ History of the Present: The Contemporary and its Culture (Routledge, 2021), 144 pages.
Abstract
History of the Present examines the shift from the culture of modernity to the culture of the contemporary, reflected in a realignment in the relationship between past, present and future. The book dissects six temporalities that, taken together, constitute our contemporary culture: the past present of traumatic memory, the present past of the heritage industry, the future present of science fiction, the present future of global literature, the present for the present of the museum of contemporary art and the absolute present of global responsibility.
Reviewed by Robert Savage
History of the Present is an ambitious work that attempts an analytical overview of where we are at, following the demise of the various grand narratives of modernity and their replacement by the culture of the contemporary. Or rather: when we are at, since the book unfolds as a series of meditations on the temporalities we come to inhabit once the present has been voided of its function as the culminating moment of the past and gateway to a progressively realised future. Now that the future hangs over us as a source of dread and the past appears as a standing reserve of endlessly citable materials, the present comes into its own as “the absolute present”: both postmodern playground of possibilities and index of global togetherness.
Roberts devotes his first two chapters to outlining the shift from the culture of modernity to the culture of the contemporary, understood as a “paradoxical unity of high and low culture” characterized by the productive interpenetration of the arts and sciences (16). The ubiquitous “aestheticization and scientization” of the contemporary lifeworld finds its apotheosis in the museum, no longer understood as secularized temple to the civilizational treasures of the past but as a space for staging the eternal return of fashion under the primacy of the event or happening. Taking György Markus’s theory of the constitution of cultural modernity as his starting point, Roberts shows how the functional elegance of this theory – its “methodological abstention, which replaces the grand narratives of the crisis of culture in modernity by the self-regulating constitution of a society” (12) – provides a better framework for understanding the culture of the contemporary than normative Kulturkritik. This culture de-differentiates the artistic and economic spheres to create diffuse “transaesthetic” atmospheres and spectacles in the space of the contemporary, which inherits and transforms the time of the modern.
Following this overview, the book proceeds by parsing its title into six different temporal modes that co-constitute our contemporary culture, “the chastened continuation of European modernism” (3). The past present (chapter three) evokes the traumas of the twentieth century to signify the irruption into the present of a catastrophic past, displacing the continuous history of the moderns. It resuscitates Walter Benjamin’s concept of Jetztzeit (‘time of the now’) as prescient of the “explosion of history” characteristic of the new regime of the contemporary that has emerged since the 1970s. Its counterpart and other, the present past (chapter four), dissects the post-historical cultural heritage industries that “reduc[e] the past to a construct of the present” (48). The boom in heritage organizations that climaxed in 2002, “the international year of heritage”, bears witness to a “new paradigm of culturalism” that “fuses nature and history into the one cultural form of preservation” (58). The “time-differential” inscribed in Benjamin’s Jetztzeit is here cancelled as the historically distant past is brought into indifferent presence under the auspices of a global aesthetic economy.
In chapters 5 and 6, Roberts turns to the future present of science fiction and the present future of the global literature that has supplanted the modern paradigm of world literature. The post-human, post-historical future present imagined in the 1930s in Elias Canetti’s Auto da Fe, and reprised sixty years later in Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised, looks back on the crisis of modern civilization and heralds its supersession by the principle of deindividuation: the modern individual submerged in the crowd (Canetti) or dissolved in the sea of identity through cloning (Houellebecq). Both pose the question of what a truly human society would look like beyond the self-destructive culture of the modern. An answer of sorts is offered by the present future of global literature, which establishes the “centrality of translation” (94) as the dominant form of a global cosmopolitan culture. In the success of “the open-border digital cosmopolitanism of Netflix” (98) – we could think here of the recent South Korean smash hit, Squid Game, a title that inadvertently captures the tentacular reach of cultural translation – Roberts sees the birth of a truly global culture that has moved beyond the centre-periphery model of world literature.
Roberts concludes with two chapters that foreground the presentism at the heart of the contemporary: the present for the present of the museum of contemporary art and an absolute present that creates and takes responsibility for its own past. The former finds expression in a “‘transhistorical’ exhibition practice that is turning the contemporary museum into a time machine” (3), the latter in the cannibalization of the past by the present as World Heritage. This presages a new “planetary consciousness” in which Hegel’s Absolute Spirit lives on in a universalized, culturally relativized form of historicism (137-8).
Here, we might ask whether this attenuated present overshadowed by a more significant past can offer any resources to counter the resurgent atavisms of our time, or whether it itself threatens to be overwhelmed by a history of repetition. At one stage, Roberts recalls the collective gasps of horror that greeted the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, conceived as an affront to the values of World Heritage. The very universality and univocity of our outrage at the time now seems to invite nostalgia. Given the shocks to “planetary consciousness” that have buffeted the West ever since, culminating in the COVID lockdowns and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, does the “absolute present” stand exposed as the time-bubble of a cosmopolitan elite, akin to the illusion shared by some post-war European intellectuals that history itself had come to an end (Niethammer)? Or might “planetary consciousness” prove strong enough to withstand the forces hell-bent on its unravelling?
In keeping with its concluding metaphor of the Railway Station for our “absolute present” (borrowed from Agnes Heller), History of the Present is at once a terminus and a new departure for one of our sharpest cultural critics. On the one hand, it gathers many of the key ideas and interests pursued by David Roberts over half a century of productive scholarship, beginning with his early study on the novels of Heinrich Mann (1971), here aligned with Walter Benjamin’s past summoned into presence at a moment of emergency, and continuing with his writings on Elias Canetti (1975, 1996) and Houellebecq, the great prophets of the suicide of the modern subject. It also brings to term – both completes and consummates – his trilogy on the paradoxical legacies of modernism: Art after Enlightenment (1991), which showed how the modernist exhaustion of latency gives way to the contingency of postwar art, Dialectic of Romanticism (1996), which exhumed the corpses of both Enlightenment and Romantic modernism, and The Total Work of Art in European Modernism (2011), an exploration of a counter-narrative to the grand narrative of progress in the form of a quest for the recovered plenitude of time. On the other hand, History of the Present points toward an ethics of global responsibility that could emerge from the dead ends of modernism: “Above all, our present seeks to find its meaning in a shared awareness of responsibility for the past and the future capable of transforming the contemporary into a truly global contemporaneity” (4). This is the late harvest of a scholar at the top of his game and an essential contribution to understanding the forces that have shaped our contemporary world.
References
Niethammer, L. (1992). Posthistoire. Has History Come to an End? Trans. P. Camiller. London: Verso.
Roberts, D. (1971). Artistic Consciousness and Political Conscience. The Novels of Heinrich Mann, 1900-1938. Bern: Lang.
Roberts, D. (1975). Kopf und Welt. Elias Canettis Roman ‘Die Blendung’. Munich: Hanser.
Roberts, D. (1991). Art and Enlightenment. Aesthetic Theory after Adorno. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Roberts, D. and Arnason, J. (1996) Elias Canetti’s Counter-Image of Society. Rochester: Camden House.
Roberts, D. (2011). The Total Work of Art in European Modernism. Cornell: Cornell University Press.
Robert Savage is the author of Hölderlin after the Catastrophe and translator of numerous books, most recently Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger’s Maria Theresa: The Habsburg Empress in her Time (Princeton University Press, 2022).
Email: robertsavage094@gmail.com
