This week, the Department of History at Queen's welcomes Dr. Ethan Kleinberg (Wesleyan University) to deliver the 2023-24 Nugent Lecture entitled "The Surge: Temporal Anarchy and the Pursuit of Dynamic History." Ahead of yet another highly anticipated event, Dr. Kleinberg sat down with Queen’s History this week to discuss his interdisciplinary roots as a student at UC Berkeley, how we might come to understand notions of temporal anarchy, and, of course, his equally mystifying and mesmerizing topic, “The Surge.”
Thanks for taking the time, Dr. Kleinberg! I first wanted to ask you about how exactly you personally came to “span the fields of history, philosophy, comparative literature, and religion,” as you state on your faculty profile page? What is the path by which you arrived at that nexus? Did you major in one and then acquire an interest in the others?
It’s a good question—and, of course, open for debate as to whether I do any of them well! But yes, you’ve hit the nail right on the head: when I was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, I started on a philosophy track and then kind of became disillusioned with philosophy for a number of reasons. A big part of it was that I didn’t think it was taking the context in which the ideas were happening as seriously as I wanted it to. So first I started gravitating toward religion because I was interested in thinkers like Kierkegaard, but then found myself by the end really focusing on intellectual history.
The part that’s interesting in all this is that by the time I really figured out what I wanted to do, I had a lot of classes in a lot of departments, but not enough in any to really be a major. Fortunately, at that time at Berkeley they had something called the “humanities field major” where a student could petition to create their own pathway and they’d have to find an advisor and write a two-semester senior thesis. I was able to do that working with Martin Jay and so by the time I got out, I had actually figured out a way to retrofit the different courses I had taken in literature, philosophy, history, and religious studies into one coherent thesis.
Going from there, I moved into a graduate program at UCLA in intellectual history, but thanks again to the proximity of UC Irvine, I was able to go down quite frequently and work with their critical theory thinkers and philosophers. In the end, I ended up putting together a dissertation committee that had historians of different viewpoints as well as scholars of comparative literature (even though they’d probably be classified as philosophers in Europe). But I guess you could say the entire thing was interdisciplinary all the way through; and then I was very fortunate because the job that I got at Wesleyan was a joint appointment in the history department and the College of Letters, which is an interdisciplinary college! I always just said, “I’ll keep doing it as long as they let me,” and when they say stop I’ll have to make a decision, but at least so far, I keep trundling along.
That’s really impressive, how you’ve managed to carve out such a unique path for yourself rooted in your various interests. Turning to the lecture itself, can you tell us a little bit about this concept of “temporal anarchy?” I mean, what exactly are we talking about here?
Well, one way to make it clearer is to put it in distinction from the ways we normally think about time and, especially, the way conventional historians work on time. It’s usually done so in a very orderly fashion and often contains within it what I would call a very “historicist” understanding of time, where time is seen to be a very homogenous thing that’s shared by everybody and in which we can situate events on a tidy chronological scale and then synchronize that.
But I think there’s something very restrictive about that both in terms of how we’re able to think about past, present, and future, and about time itself. To me, it’s just one way of organizing time, and you can look at different cultures, different places, and see that there have been different ways of organizing time that haven’t been as scientific. That leads me to think “Okay, what about the moment before time—or rather, temporality—is organized as such?” What happens if we go to the moment when we’re trying to set up a kind of schematic chronology or system of organization that allows us to put things in place? Maybe if we go to this moment of temporal anarchy first, before the organizing moment, that might open up some other logics for thinking about the way things in the past, present, and future relate to each other.
So, on the one hand, it might make other forms of organizing time available to us—the example I like to give is pieces of Indigenous artwork which are themselves histories and the past is present in them in a way that is quite different from what is often thought of as conventional history—but also things that people would say are myths or religious doctrines might also work in a different understanding of temporality. If you start putting those in conversation with one another, then our own way of thinking about time gets denaturalized.
I’m really interested in what happens if we do this, and one of the things I think it achieves is a more dynamic understanding of the relationship between past, present, and future. In one of my previous books, I explore the ways in which the past haunts the future; in the one that I’m working on now, I’ll be looking at how it surges up unexpectedly and certain things—forgotten, repressed, hidden—become available to us once again and cause time to fall a little bit out of joint. They make us have to question whether things work in such a neat, causal order. And it is getting at those moments, those other ways that the past becomes available, that I think historians should be attuned to at this moment. The “temporal anarchy,” therefore, is a space of opening, where we don’t assume the way things are going to work out, but we start looking for other ways they may have occurred. I don’t know if that helps or hurts your understanding of what I’m talking about, but it’s the dynamic relation of things like past, present, and future in an almost anarchic way that I find so compelling.
And I guess the last thing I’ll say on this is that, if you scratch the surface on most historical narratives, you’ll find time doesn’t work the way the historian claims it does because things get moved around more than you’d expect. You’ll find that things that should work in a chronological way have to be massaged in order to make the causal arguments and explanations that the historian wants to make about the relation between one event and another event. So, they’re up to a little mischief themselves!
Can I ask how you explain all this to family or friends unfamiliar with this sort of conceptual thinking? At a dinner party, for example, is there one thing that you’ve found tends to really grip people about the work you’re doing, or a moment that routinely causes eyes to glaze over? Are there ways in which you’ve managed to overcome the fact this kind of study, on its surface, may seem somewhat unapproachable to the general public?
Ha! Yeah, well, usually that’s the first look people get when I start talking: What is this guy doing? Is this even history?
But I do traffic a lot in literature and metaphor and have found that both can do a lot of work. One of the reasons I like starting with literature, especially in a public setting, is that some of the assumed coordinates of things like true/false or fact/fiction are just not on the table. And so you can get into a particular work of fiction like Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which is actually quite a profound historical telling despite being uncoupled from some conventions of disciplinary history, and then change the register. That allows you to move to some of the more vexing historical questions about things like representation and to have your interlocuters think about whether some of the things they’ve afforded to fiction could actually be quite useful in understanding a period or a time because of their metonymic function, where a small example stands in for a larger historical whole about the way warfare works at a given moment.
So, I do like moving between those quite a bit and I’ve found that that is something that can draw an audience or an interlocuter in. And then I like metaphors too. In Haunting History, which is about deconstruction, there’s a lot made of the ghost, and I think the ghost is a really good way of thinking about something like the past in which it’s really hard to say whether the past is presence or absence. The historian is always trying to make it present, but how much is them and how much is the past itself is also a vexing question, so when you put it in the metaphor of the ghost—this thing you don’t control, which is disobedient to the normal rules of time and space—you can all of a sudden come up with a lot questions about what we’re doing as historians. Are we conjurers, mediums, or necromancers forcing the past to behave how we would like?
These sorts of metaphors can be quite powerful, although eventually you want to bring it back to the historical or philosophical topic under discussion. But I think they do a lot of work in making it less mesmerizing because they give people something to hook on to, to be able to work with.
In the talk on Thursday, I’ll talk about something called “The Surge.” The Surge is an interesting, powerful force—it’s kind of an anonymous force—but it too is something people can hook on to. And if you think of the past coming up and making itself available at times, something we hadn’t thought of, but nonetheless was a past force, event, or factor, it can kind of just come up to us in lots of ways. It can be sneaky like a rolling current or it can really be a massive up-push, but it’s all a way of trying to get people with you as you’re trying to work through some of these more fine-grained or oftentimes confusing ideas.
How do these ideas extend to the realm of space? Are we as much haunted by the places of the past as the past itself?
Space is often where it happens and time and space are often coupled—although, and this is analytic philosophy stuff, I’ve always found it very interested that the problem of space is less vexing for some because you can theoretically return to where you’ve set out from but time doesn’t seem to work that way, at least not for us.
The part for me that’s interesting is precisely the spaces where you get this sense of temporal anarchy where the past isn’t quite gone. There’s something there—some kind of energy or force—that’s in a way more palpable and we can try and get at what this might be, but it’s precisely those sorts of spaces that hold something temporal. And I think there’s a lot of spaces like that.
You know, I was recently in Berlin because I think that’s a great space of temporal anarchy. There’s so many things that were either built over or not built over, conserved or not conserved, that if you get up high enough you can look over that landscape and see all these spatially different patches of time. I just think there is a lot of work that can be done when we imagine space as this kind of map of temporality; and so that’s the part of space that interests me the most.
That’s really interesting—sounds like an aerial view of Berlin would make for a good book cover! Lastly, you classify your research in part as studying “the past as future.” Where do you feel the past is most acutely breaking into the present and calling for future action? Is there one spot in particular where you think we could identify The Surge most easily today?
It's a good question. To my mind, the problem is not that the past is being activated in different places as much as it’s being deactivated. I’ll talk about this on Thursday, but because we restricted the kinds of past that we can imagine—this is to say that we are only working in a certain register of what we imagine having been possible in the past—we’ve also limited the kind of futures we can imagine.
As a result, it feels like we’re almost in a time loop right now. I’m not talking about a literal time loop exactly, but the solutions that we seem to be offering to crises that are occurring in our moment are old ones. Whether the left wants to return to a Marxist emancipatory notion of universalism and solidarity, or Progressives want to return to Enlightenment doctrines again of emancipation and cosmopolitanism or, on the right, it’s a return to populism, they’re going backwards and drawing from the same well, offering solutions that—quite frankly—have failed.
I would even go so far as to say that we may find them comforting because we know they’re going to fail and that way, we can avoid being distressed or surprised at their failure. It is precisely this kind of winnowing of the pasts we can imagine that has also winnowed the future so that it isn’t actually anything new. That’s where I think being attuned to The Surge, allowing you to reimagine what the past could be, actually kind of knocks you off that axis and allows you to reimagine what the future could be.
Furthermore, I think there’s a lot of interesting work going on in this. There are books by Massimiliano Tomba about insurgent universality and Jérôme Baschet looking at figures like the Zapatistas, both of which are attempts to recuperate pasts that didn’t move forward. I guess Gary Wilder’s Freedom Time would be an example of this too. Admittedly, I’m a bit suspicious of some of our attempts at going back to look at pasts that were neglected—or futures that were imagined in the past that were neglected—and trying to reactivate them for our time, but I am attracted to these alternative kinds of past and ways of assembling the past that can be mobilized to produce different ways of assembling the future.
The sociologist Niklas Luhmann talks about the way in which, when you’re futuring, you’re opening possibilities on your horizon and, when you’re defuturing, you’re trying to decide which one it is that you want to choose, and my concern is that there’s only one choice right now, one future that we all seem to be casting about toward over and over again. I want to re-open that, I want to re-future if you will, to provide us with choices and possibilities which are going to come from a different view of the past. I don’t know if that’s specific enough, but it can provide a teaser for the talk of Thursday. It’s precisely to get us out of this loop that I think we can look to The Surge.
For more on Kleinberg’s ideas surrounding temporal anarchy, see his latest publication “Deconstructing Historicist’s Time, or Time’s Scribe” in History & Theory volume 62, no. 4 (2023): 105-122. Be sure, also, to check out a number of his recently published works including Haunting History: For a Deconstructive Approach to the Past (Stanford University Press, 2017).
(Interview edited for clarity and concision)
