Mentalities as History
The history of mentalities confronts various
concepts and experiences of time because it assumes that mentalities have a plural
history and this multiple narrative of history—its texts and counter-texts,
anti-texts and untexts—is experienced and recorded by human beings in various
cultural conditions in different periods and places. The two tendencies to stress the ontological
development of each person as an individual, a member of a collective, and a
part of the species homo sapiens and to focus on the discursive matrices of
different kinds of collectivities also means that time—the word and the
concept—must reveal within itself a vast and dynamic field of inquiry.
To begin, however, at the
beginning, I see the history of mentalities as being the history of the
relationship between things which are speakable and unspeakable, imaginable and
unimaginable, and conceivable and inconceivable. In other words, as a discipline it seeks to
examine the tension between conscious and unconscious ideas, feelings,
perceptions and social pressures and constraints. While there is certainly a clear distinction
to be made between those experiences which register in conventional, socially-acceptable
words, images and institutions and those which lie outside of normal individual
and collective awareness, there are also many places and times of overlap. In regard to history of long duration, when
transformations—with the fading out of older experiences and ideas and the
shading in of newer perceptions and concepts—occur so slowly as to be outside
of normal discourses and modes of artistic representation, we can work inwards
from either end of the spectrum, at least from those points where radically
different words, images, patterns and norms are operative towards those fuzzier
periods when two or more competing systems seem to be in dialogue and debate,
even if without full articulation; and we may be able to pinpoint some probable
moments when the old paradigm gives way to the new, though usually such radical
points where one critical mass is transferred to another remain beyond our
abilities to reach, if they exist at all.
In regard to micro-historical events, such as those involving such small
numbers of individuals or events of such limited influence that they exist
under any statistical scrutiny or comparative documentary verification, we
nevertheless can engage with them as evidence of variability and even
reversibility within human nature. As in
quantum physics, the very long and slow duration of millennia (eons) and the
very swift fluttering of a moment often operate by different laws than ordinary
time in the space allotted to it: memories precede actions and feelings, while
consequence determines cause and transforms the development of ordinary
consciousness.
Time therefore has to be considered
as more than a matter of existential continuance or of intensity of experience
that registers in written or archaeological records. Periodization by external markers such as
months, years, or centuries can be useful as indicators of relationship between
diverse cultures and dynasties, but tend to mislead in regard to political,
artistic or intellectual developments.
Internal markers, such as the reign of monarchs, the punctuated
occurrence of wars or economic crises, offer some more relevant ways to measure
endurance of trends and experience of phenomena, but do not allow flexibility
in regard to family histories, aesthetic fashions or architectural design or
city-planning schemes. Larger patterns
of developmental waves, as for instance, child-rearing and folk-customs, may
interact with one another and with shorter-term periods of social change,
meteorological events, and technological improvements, but do not necessarily
react in predictable ways. Similarly,
the apparent prevalence of certain physical or mental illnesses at one time or
place rather than others does not seem to square with economic stages of
history or supposed corrections in the status of debility under the law; name
changes cannot be trusted to prove shifts in social attitudes or individual
experience of discomfort or curtailment of mobility and emotional freedom. The mere passage of time, along with external
appearance of dress, decorations, and deportment does not sweep along in its
flow all other aspects of existence, and certainly not in a uniform or
proportionate manner.
The great river of time, gushing up
out of the secret depths of unfathomable darkness, [1]however
we imagine it to begin, does not run smoothly in one direction: there are
counter-currents, swirling eddies, under-flows, and the waters are filled with
visible and invisible hazards. Moreover,
not only do the banks close in here and widen there, but the bed of the river
changes from sand to rock, from smooth to rough, while smaller and larger
streams run into it, hidden channels feed in or drain off portions of the
current, and wind, rain and other external forces modify its flow.[ii]
Time too may be conceived a mass of
atomic particles, exploding from a never-ending sequence of ordinary moments,
expanding through a space it keeps creating from its own inner-energies,
condensing and collapsing into itself as new mass turns back to the centre: and
every particle or atom is a seed or crystal ready to grow out of itself, the
residue of accumulating dust, the formless nebulae of gases, the labyrinthine
swirls of electrical emissions, the pulsating chaos of fragments of sound and
light, weight and mass.
Therefore the history of
mentalities cannot simply be built on the paradigms set out by political,
economic, or art historians, although these paradigms cannot be neglected
either. Unlike those social sciences
which seek to abstract general principles and formulate testable specimens of
human behaviour or thought, the history of mentalities seeks to engage with the
specificity of unique and unrepeatable events and transitional moments. It is not that the matrix of human affairs is
like a Heraclitean river never to be stepped into twice with the same effect;
rather than no two persons, actions, or responses are constituted in the same
way. Time in its diverse forms runs
along at different speeds, eddies about certain kinds of experiences, and
swirls back with particular individuals or small groups before returning to the
main stream. Indeed, there are occasions
when some event or persons seem to leap forward and begin to experience or
even articulate those aspects of the
developing culture long before anyone else is aware or capable of making the
break with the past and reacting consciously to the conditions elsewhere only
incipiently present.[iii]
A Dream-Like Instance
A few years ago, a tsunami swept from an island
off the coast of Indonesia all around the Indian Ocean and beyond into the
Pacific, wreaking havoc and costing hundreds of thousands of lives, and
disrupting the ordinary existence of millions of people. Given modern communications and its
concomitant sense of global concern, or even responsibility, international aid-workers
and supplies poured in to the effected areas, so that probably much greater
loss of life and disruption was prevented.
A hundred years ago, however, such a traumatic experience would have
taken much longer to become known and any sense of world-wide responsibility to
develop, if at all.[2] A millennia ago or more, and it may be that
news would have been lost altogether long before it travelled outside the
devastated regions themselves: the cumulative loss of life would have been
beyond counting, the disruptions to commerce and public life deeper and more
lasting, and in some cases virtually total.
Human structures would have been
completely swept away, arable lands saturated by salt water, and the few confused,
dazed survivors scattered, causing virtually irremediable ruptures in social
and intellectual continuity. In other
words, traditions would have been lost, or at least so radically fragmented and
distorted, that historical memories of existence in the devastated areas would
continue at best as vague legends, myths and nightmares. The disappearance of whole cadres of
professional specialists and skilled workers would mean profound forgetting of
many fields of knowledge and craftsmanship, with the failure of family members
or clans to pass on basic information and trade secrets. Consequently, instead of smooth evolution or
development of culture, there would be regions and periods of regression,
blankness and unexpected new directions of art, craft, legal and political
traditions.
Recollections of the original
trauma, mixed with archaic residue of previous disasters, along with private
nightmares of ontological anxiety and pain, would be all that could be passed
on, somehow coded into a few objects rescued from the deluge or imagined and
extrapolated from other people’s memories.
Anticipatory fears and intense hopes of avoidance and special privilege
would also drive the creation of acceptable narratives of what had happened. Meanwhile, to repress awareness of gaps in
knowledge and loss of skills, rationalized versions of the origin of new and
adopted replacements would be generated.
The suddenness of the disaster—which may have been all over in a matter
of minutes, leaving instead apocalyptic images of a world destroyed—could be
reduced even further in memory because, the real loss, the rupture from the
whole collective past of the society that has disappeared, would be almost too
much to bear: it therefore has to be effaced altogether, as though it never
existed, or be displaced to another time or space, still there, still waiting
to manifest itself in a better way. Time
is inverted, the past becoming the future, and the unfamiliar present made the
mythical grounds for belief in the changeless and endless world of pure
spiritual reality. The trauma exists
only as hallucination, and hallucination is institutionalized to assurance of a
more real, permanent and moral dimension to life.
Peculiarities of the Space-Time Continuum
At one point in the Jerusalem Talmud, as the
rabbis argue over how to judge cases where a girl of three years old has been
sexually interfered with, the old adage that a girl of under that age cannot be
physically deflowered but one over that age can be considered to have lost her
virginity, they pose themselves the question of what happens if the child’s
birthday occurs in Adar, a leap-month in the Hebrew calendar. They decide, since Adar is repeated in
certain years, they will push her birthday forward, so that she will have been
under the three-year limit. According to
Zvi Alexander Fleisher, “The moment the court announces the additional month,
her virginity physically returns.”[iv] The
ruling is found several times in the Talmud Yerushalmi, Ktubot,
2:1, Nedorim 6:8 and Tihilim 57:3. Moreover, Fleisher adds, “if her third
birthday was the first day of the month, and she lost her virginity on that day
and then the court announced that that day would be changed to then 30th
of the previous month, her virginity would physically return.” Putting aside social, ethical and legal
issues in regard to how and why the little girl was violated, Fleisher argues
that this is an example of the rabbis thinking and acting not just differently
but defiantly in the face of hegemonic Hellenistic philosophies. Whereas the Greeks in general allowed and
were even themselves curious as to the intellectual ideas in ancient Jewish
culture, they could not accept the idea that “studying the Torah is a guiding
light for sanctifying the physical. “The
Greeks could not accept his concept of the power of the Torah mastering over
the physical and therefore attempted to abolish the court announcing the new
moon or adding an additional month to then lunar calendar” (Fleisher).
Nor
could we, I suppose, if it were a matter of taking this whole rabbinical
discussion in a literal sense: as though time (when the child was raped) and
space (the intactness of her hymen) were subject to ethical will or
intellectual necessity. But, of course,
as historians of mentalities we are interested in seeing how different people
at different times and in different places imagined they could bend, reverse,
and repeat time and also condense, expand and fissure space into new kinds of
patterns.
A
few months ago (in May 2006) news broke into the popular press about a finding
that puts the relationship between languages, the workings of the brain, and
the cultural conceptions of time and space into question.[3] A proverbially small and isolated tribe in
the Amazon, composed of perhaps only 350 people, is said to conceive of the
past and the future in a strikingly bizarre way: for the Piraha of Brazil, the
past is seen in front of them before their eyes and so as something clearly
seen, whereas the future is a hidden dimension of speculative reality coming up
behind them, and they point to it back over their shoulders when they speak.[v] More than this perhaps only figure of speech
and quirk of gesturing to supplement such verbal structures, some claim that
the Piraha cannot conceive of numbers beyond one and a few, and even find it
difficult to accept that anyone or anything exists when it is not right in
front of their eyes. Time therefore
makes sense only when it is the existential moment, and, although it may linger
briefly as a residue of images once perceived, it cannot be extrapolated into
that which is not yet experienced, even as the probability of repetition or
recurrence. Similarly, space is
contracted into the immediacy of the present view, allowing, however, for that
phenomenon of the remembered present when the microsecond of delay between
external sensation of sight and the mind’s internal anticipatory adjustment,
correction and interpretation take place—hence the “past” that is seen in front
of a speaker begins in the moment not yet completely registered and continues
back into recharged previous experiences that normalize the prior moments into
a relatively trustworthy matrix of judgment and emotional fit; but there is no
space yet conceivable in which the future can flow in, take shape, and gain
recognition, except in a most unsteady and unsettling way. The future sneaks up on the speaker and her
audience. Without clues as to what
persons, ideas, or events it may continue or re-introduce, its sudden
appearance is a shock. And yet it is not
as though the Piraha existed in a perpetual epistemological crisis where
nothing new can be known, recollected and used to expand the field of
knowledge. Everett argues that “These people know the
names of every species in the jungle.
They know the behaviour of all the animals. They know their environment better than any
American [i.e., North American, educated bourgeois citizen] knows his [and
presumably hers].” Yet this may be
precisely the sticking point: theirs is an existential not a speculative or
imaginative knowledge, vast and timeless rather than critically focussed and
attuned to changes in the environment and in their own cumulative
experiences.
Where the antique rabbis could
playfully claim to control both time and spade on the basis of intellectual and
ethical authority but always recognizing the harsh and brutal realities of the
world they lived in—and were forced to live in by historical circumstances
beyond their control—the Amazonian Piraha, until recently, at least, when their
young men and women began to engage far more with the Portuguese-speaking and
hegemonic society impinging on their traditional ways, seem to filter out the
frightening concepts of extension or infinite otherness, on the one hand, and
the inevitable and ineluctable formation of the future out of the realities of
the present and the past.
Given these ways of textualizing
time and space, the historian of mentalities should be prepared to recognize
many others as well, whether Greek, Indian, Chinese, Polynesian or whatever, and neither think that he/she
can either transform them at will into a single natural or logical system or
censor out unwanted perceptions, conceptions and contradictions.[vi]
[i] Texts and anti-texts
are competing versions of a narrative or argument, and so they may be merged,
compromised, and accepted as mystically co-existent. Anti-texts and un-texts have more intense and
problematical relationships: the anti-text denies reality to the text and seeks
to eradicate it, giving no quarter, no room for compromise, no logical grounds
for accommodation; while the un-texts exceed that aggressive, fundamentalist
impulse to eradicate all opposition because they devour themselves, deny space
and time for textualization at all, and draw all memories and speculations down
into a great black hole of destruction.
[ii] I resist the temptation here to double over this metaphoric figure
by imagining time as a volcanic flow of lava, spreading into many fiery rivers
and burning its way towards the ocean; or even charging out of some undersea
source and flowing in streams of fire out towards the edges of islands and
continents.
[iii] One thinks of the weeks and months it took for the rest of Europe
to learn of the great Lisbon Earthquake in the mid-eighteenth century, or that
in Petosi , Peru
[iv] Zvi Alexander
Fleisher, “Sedrah Selections Va’Yeishev 5761 BS”D: L’iluy Nishmas Ovi Mori
R’Chaim B”R Simchoh z’l hk”m” Shema Yisroel Torah Network online at http://www.shemayisrael.co.il/parsha/fleisher/archives/
vayeishev61.
[v] Elizabeth Davies,
“Amazon Discovery Challenges Theory of Language”, The New Zealand Herald
(30 May 2006), an article taken from the Independent in the UK, and
based on many published reports going back a decade or more and on arguments
among Dan Everett, Peter Gordon and other linguists and anthropologists. For instance, see Inga Kiderra, “Backs to the
Future: Aymara Language and Gesture Point to Mirror-Image View of Time,
University of California at San Diego News (12 June 2006) online at
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/soc/ backfuture06.asp.
[vi] This essay was written
upon request and duly posted in, accepted, but then, so far as I know, was
never actually published. It is
retrieved and preserved here virtually as it was written more than six years
ago.
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