Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht - Our Broad Present
When Lyotard announced that our postmodern condition entailed no longer believing in gran récits, it was unclear what was going to replace it other than micro narratives. This was just another chapter in the Death of God, which in this case was the Death of History as driven by fundamental laws or forces that justify its movement of time. In the wake of Lyotard’s compelling argument, philosophy turned speculative: what mode of temporality replaces linear narratives that were no longer credible?
When we look around today, we see no gran récits of any kind. Even human evolution has been stripped of its biological and genetic determinants. CRISPR and similar technologies turn genetics into technical outcomes. We’ve outsourced evolution to technology — exo-Darwinism as Michel Serres called it. Certainly no economic-political ideology exists that would provide a unified view of history. Karl Popper’s critique of historicism seems quaint today. Even MAGA is backward looking and fueled by a no-longer dormant ressentiment.
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s Our Broad Present is an explicitly speculative attempt to think about what has replaced linear time where “mankind imagines itself on a linear path moving through time” (xii). He is leaning on the the historical work of Reinhart Kosellek to provide the description of the mode of “historical consciousness” as the form of the gran récits that has faded away. “Central to this framework is the idea that the configuration of time that developed in the early nineteenth century has, for about a half century now (and with effects that become clearer every day), been succeeded by another configuration for which no name as yet exists” (xii). In summarizing Kosellek’s analysis of Modern time, Gumbrecht emphasizes the Cartesian subject as a configuration of time: “Here was the site where the subject, adapting experiences from the past to the present and the future, made choices among the possibilities the latter offered. Picking options from what the future holds is the basis of — and frame for — what we call agency (Handeln)” (xiii).
The Cartesian subject experiences time as a smooth movement from a present receding into the past and the present opening out to a future that is determined only by the will exercised by the subject. The present is, therefore, a “mere moment of transition” the experience of which is “concentrated solely on functions of consciousness” (30). In this way, time is a line, and the present is narrow. Humanity is the principle motor of its own history along this line of progression toward its own telos. Progress could be open-ended (Darwinian evolution, capitalism), or it could be driven to a particular end point (various National Socialisms or Stalinist Communism): “At their historical high points, both socialism and capitalism shared historical consciousness as the chronotope of progress and, for this reason, as a common foundation and energy reserve for motivation” (31).
This chronotope “imploded decades ago” (31). But what has taken its place? Gumbrecht’s speculative concept is “the broad present” or “the expanding present.” Borrowing a phrase from Lyotard (71), Gumbrecht sees this temporality as “intransitive mobilization.” We are doing lots of projects, but they are not oriented toward collective progress, which is no longer believable. There are several consequences to this, which Gumbrecht calls oscillations. Rather than try to enumerate them here, I’ll focus on one of the oscillations that he finds in the work of Peter Sloterdijk, especially You Must Change Your Life!
Let’s start with Disney’s Tomorrowland. Its vision of the future offered in the 1950’s was one of decreasing human agency. Robots were going to do the work for us, and we would be in a permanent state of leisure. Tomorrowland was the envisioned perfection of the Nietzschean Last Man. Instead of robots, however, we’ve become obsessed with “exercise” (üben in Sloterdijk’s German original): “that is, with the individual acquisition of skills and with efforts of individual self-transformation, on more and more competitive levels without any ultimate limits” (23). Gumbrecht links Sloterdijk’s observation with his own observations about the new mode of time we have entered into: “…self-reflexive and self-transforming ‘exercise’ may respond to and compensate for a situation, i.e., the world of globalization, in which institutional contours are blurred and obligatory patterns of interaction are hard to identify” (22-3). This creates a “confrontation with ourselves” as compensation for the abstraction of globalization. When we are no longer oriented to the world by collective optimism about the future, we take refuge in ourselves as our own progressive projects without limits. You see this today in the mass adoption of training and nutrition regimens that are widely available to the weekend warrior. I am one of them. As a recreational cyclist who has taken part in amateur races, it is amazing to see how much training and nutritional information and commodities, which were once the province of high-level professionals, are now available everywhere. This self-transformative turn to intense exercise is an example of Lyotard’s “intransitive mobilization.”
This is a significant shift in Foucault’s analysis of biopower, which always saw disciplinary techniques of self-transformation as the offloading of power from the direct methods of the State to the individual via the surrogate institutions of family, schools, prisons, et cetera. The broad present has decoupled this disciplinary regime from these institutions: “power is wielded on the self — there is no authority that stands behind the activities in whose name they occur” (77). We appear to ourselves as disconnected individuals who can be at times optimistic and pessimistic about our own prospects and limits. In an interview with Robert Harrison from 2016, Gumbrecht talked about this asymmetry between a powerful pessimism about the collective future of humanity and our individual optimism about what we can achieve in our lives. The broad present pulls in all kinds of threads to make this personal existence optimistic — investment information, training/exercise regimens, nostalgic memories, classic rock stations. But it also becomes oscillating relationships to our bodies.
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To be sure, the linear time of historical consciousness (Kosellek) hasn’t completely disappeared. The broad present has not managed to completely eliminate gran récit time. The latter is alive and well in the reactionary nationalism of Donald Trump and other similar movements in Western democracies. MAGA is a ressentiment-fueld attempt to go back to the future and restore the birthright of the Last Man.
