Current Issue

TRUE NORTH

ETHAN KLEINBERG

In this article, I suggest that our current relation to the sociopolitical future is one where we are blocked from changing our view of what that future is or could be. In this sense, we are trapped in a time loop wherein the challenges before us are continuously met with social and political solutions designed for futures past, old futures. These past possible futures are ones that failed to solve the problems they were offered to address. As such, there is no growth, change, or redemption that could activate a new future; there is only the rehearsal of the old ones: failed futures from the past. . . . Read more →

ADVENTURES IN TIMELAND

GAVIN LUCAS

One of the more significant issues to have emerged from the discourse surrounding the Anthropocene has concerned the apparent incommensurability of human and natural history and the vastly different timescales involved. More generally, such discourse raises critical questions about the very different way time is conceptualized in the natural sciences as opposed to in the social sciences and humanities. In this article, I draw on my own disciplinary background in archaeology in order to contribute to these differences and build bridges between the two disciplinary domains by foregrounding the materiality of time. . . . Read more →

THE UNCERTAIN STUFF OF HISTORY: OUTLINE OF A THEORY OF INTENTIONALITY—THING BY THING

LISA REGAZZONI

This article addresses the issue of historical knowledge in relation to material evidence. More specifically, it asks, What objects capture the historian's attention and what knowledge is gained from those objects? What does the historian's gaze select as “things of history” and thus as removed from a world of object assemblages and fluid matter? Is it the case that only artifacts deliberately produced or modified by humans (regardless of the purpose) count as “things of history”? Or do physical entities produced by unintended human and nonhuman factors also display temporal endurance or alteration occurring over time and resonate with humans? Are “things of history” only entities endowed with shape, or do formless materials qualify too? . . . Read more →

CLASS AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS ACCORDING TO E. P. THOMPSON

DANIEL CUNNINGHAM

In this article, I extract a theory of class from E. P. Thompson's historical works of the 1960s and 1970s, focusing especially on his 1963 magnum opus The Making of the English Working Class, the articles later collected in the 1991 volume Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture, and the essays “The Peculiarities of the English” and “Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?” . . . Read more →

BENEATH MEANING, ORIENTATIONAL NARRATIVES, AND DANTO’S ESSENTIALIST THEORY OF ART: ON NOËL CARROLL’S ELUCIDATIONS AND CONTESTATIONS

EKIN ERKAN

In this review of Noël Carroll's Arthur Danto's Philosophy of Art: Essays, I focus on the issue of Danto's philosophy of art history and Carroll's position that, unlike Danto, we ought to understand Danto's “end of art (history)” thesis as an orientational narrative (that is, a pragmatic-instrumental narrative with cognitive purchase) rather than as a historical-scientific narrative. In making this case, I show how Carroll's argument demonstrates that Danto's “end of art (history)” thesis is in tension with Danto's philosophy of history. . . . Read more →

QUESTIONS IN HISTORIOGRAPHY FROM THE NINETEENTH CENTURY TO THE AGE OF GENERATIVE AI

MARNIE HUGHES-WARRINGTON

Review of The Age of Questions: Or, A First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond, by Holly Case

History theory does not have a mature theory of questions. This reflects both historical and philosophical assumptions. As Holly Case has argued in The Age of Questions (2018), the big questions of the nineteenth century and their proposed final solutions arguably primed the murderous logic of genocide in the first half of the twentieth century. On her account, questions have become tamed as technical tools in historical monographs and reviews like this one. This picture of the twentieth century, though, runs up against R. G. Collingwood's historiographical logic of questions and the rise of erotetic logics in computer science. . . . Read more →

TRANSLATION IN HISTORY AND METAHISTORY

ALEXANDRA LIANERI

Review of Translation and History: A Textbook, by Theo Hermans

Theo Hermans's Translation and History: A Textbook offers an insightful, clear, and sophisticated account of debates in translation history as a transdisciplinary field that remained, until recently, at the margins of historiographical debates. It discusses essential theoretical and methodological tools through which historians of translation may wrestle with the problem of defining their object; with modalities of historicizing associated with specific fields and perspectives (including, for instance, memory studies, microhistory, and the history of concepts); and with questions of context, temporality, space, and agency by accounting for translation's transformative movement, migration, and metamorphosis. . . . Read more →

MAKING THE PAST SPEAK: ACCELERATION, RESONANCE, AND PRESENCE

JUHAN HELLERMA

Review of Resonance: A Sociology of our Relationship to the World, by Hartmut Rosa

This review essay offers an extended analysis of Hartmut Rosa's Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. By proposing a critical theory for our present times, the book dissects modes of being related to the world and how these relations are conditioned by the dynamic of escalation that is inscribed into modern social formations. Rosa argues that the wide-ranging compulsion to grow, accelerate, and innovate produces a distorted and alienated mode of being in the world, suppressing and limiting possibilities for developing dialogic and responsive relations that are characterized by the concept of resonance. This review essay parses the categorical distinction between alienation and resonance, critically interrogating Rosa's notion that resonant relations form the basis for a good and successful life. . . . Read more →

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