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鈥檚 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, 鈥淭he Surge.鈥
Thanks for taking the time, Dr. Kleinberg! I first wanted to ask you about how exactly you personally came to 鈥渟pan the fields of history, philosophy, comparative literature, and religion,鈥 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鈥檚 a good question鈥攁nd, of course, open for debate as to whether I do any of them well! But yes, you鈥檝e 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鈥檛 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鈥檚 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 鈥渉umanities field major鈥 where a student could petition to create their own pathway and they鈥檇 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鈥檇 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, 鈥淚鈥檒l keep doing it as long as they let me,鈥 and when they say stop I鈥檒l have to make a decision, but at least so far, I keep trundling along.
That鈥檚 really impressive, how you鈥檝e 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 鈥渢emporal anarchy?鈥 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鈥檚 usually done so in a very orderly fashion and often contains within it what I would call a very 鈥渉istoricist鈥 understanding of time, where time is seen to be a very homogenous thing that鈥檚 shared by everybody and in which we can situate events on a tidy chronological scale and then synchronize that.
But I think there鈥檚 something very restrictive about that both in terms of how we鈥檙e able to think about past, present, and future, and about time itself. To me, it鈥檚 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鈥檛 been as scientific. That leads me to think 鈥淥kay, what about the moment before time鈥攐r rather, temporality鈥攊s organized as such?鈥 What happens if we go to the moment when we鈥檙e 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鈥攖he 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鈥攂ut 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鈥檓 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鈥檓 working on now, I鈥檒l be looking at how it surges up unexpectedly and certain things鈥攆orgotten, repressed, hidden鈥攂ecome 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 鈥渢emporal anarchy,鈥 therefore, is a space of opening, where we don鈥檛 assume the way things are going to work out, but we start looking for other ways they may have occurred. I don鈥檛 know if that helps or hurts your understanding of what I鈥檓 talking about, but it鈥檚 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鈥檒l say on this is that, if you scratch the surface on most historical narratives, you鈥檒l find time doesn鈥檛 work the way the historian claims it does because things get moved around more than you鈥檇 expect. You鈥檒l 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鈥檙e 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鈥檝e found tends to really grip people about the work you鈥檙e doing, or a moment that routinely causes eyes to glaze over? Are there ways in which you鈥檝e 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 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鈥檝e 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鈥檝e 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 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鈥攖his thing you don鈥檛 control, which is disobedient to the normal rules of time and space鈥攜ou can all of a sudden come up with a lot questions about what we鈥檙e 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鈥檒l talk about something called 鈥淭he Surge.鈥 The Surge is an interesting, powerful force鈥攊t鈥檚 kind of an anonymous force鈥攂ut 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鈥檛 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鈥檚 all a way of trying to get people with you as you鈥檙e 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鈥攁lthough, and this is analytic philosophy stuff, I鈥檝e always found it very interested that the problem of space is less vexing for some because you can theoretically return to where you鈥檝e set out from but time doesn鈥檛 seem to work that way, at least not for us.
The part for me that鈥檚 interesting is precisely the spaces where you get this sense of temporal anarchy where the past isn鈥檛 quite gone. There鈥檚 something there鈥攕ome kind of energy or force鈥攖hat鈥檚 in a way more palpable and we can try and get at what this might be, but it鈥檚 precisely those sorts of spaces that hold something temporal. And I think there鈥檚 a lot of spaces like that.
You know, I was recently in Berlin because I think that鈥檚 a great space of temporal anarchy. There鈥檚 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鈥檚 the part of space that interests me the most.
That鈥檚 really interesting鈥攕ounds like an aerial view of Berlin would make for a good book cover! Lastly, you classify your research in part as studying 鈥渢he past as future.鈥 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鈥檚 being deactivated. I鈥檒l talk about this on Thursday, but because we restricted the kinds of past that we can imagine鈥攖his is to say that we are only working in a certain register of what we imagine having been possible in the past鈥攚e鈥檝e also limited the kind of futures we can imagine.
As a result, it feels like we鈥檙e almost in a time loop right now. I鈥檓 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鈥檚 a return to populism, they鈥檙e going backwards and drawing from the same well, offering solutions that鈥攓uite frankly鈥攈ave failed.
I would even go so far as to say that we may find them comforting because we know they鈥檙e 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鈥檛 actually anything new. That鈥檚 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鈥檚 a lot of interesting work going on in this. There are books by Massimiliano Tomba about insurgent universality and J茅r么me Baschet looking at figures like the Zapatistas, both of which are attempts to recuperate pasts that didn鈥檛 move forward. I guess Gary Wilder鈥檚 Freedom Time would be an example of this too. Admittedly, I鈥檓 a bit suspicious of some of our attempts at going back to look at pasts that were neglected鈥攐r futures that were imagined in the past that were neglected鈥攁nd 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鈥檙e futuring, you鈥檙e opening possibilities on your horizon and, when you鈥檙e defuturing, you鈥檙e trying to decide which one it is that you want to choose, and my concern is that there鈥檚 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鈥檛 know if that鈥檚 specific enough, but it can provide a teaser for the talk of Thursday. It鈥檚 precisely to get us out of this loop that I think we can look to The Surge.
For more on Kleinberg鈥檚 ideas surrounding temporal anarchy, see his latest publication 鈥淒econstructing Historicist鈥檚 Time, or Time鈥檚 Scribe鈥 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)
