The analysis of the use of time in a narrative centres around three aspects: order, duration and frequency (Genette 1980: chs 1-3, good summary in Jahn 2002: N5.2). One analyses the relation of story-time to discourse-time from these three angles. To recall, a narrative can be divided into elements of story, relating to questions of WHAT happens, and elements of discourse, relating to questions of HOW it is told (see Chatman’s distinctions in Story and Discourse).
Story-time is the sequence of events and the length of time that passes in the story. Discourse-time, on the other hand, covers the length of time that is taken up by the telling (or reading) of the story and the sequence of events as they are presented in discourse.
No narrative retells absolutely everything that presumably ‘happened’ in a story; those events that are considered most important will normally be told in some detail, others will be left out or summarised. This discrepancy between the events of the (assumed) story and the events as rendered by the narrative’s discourse is the focus of attention when one considers the aspect of duration.
In the case of a story about a man and his life which lasts 80 years, the duration of story-time would be 80 years. Story-time could be just one hour, if the story happens to be about a woman who is waiting for a train for an hour and who makes an important discovery in this hour which changes her life.
The duration of discourse-time in the case of the man’s 80 years of life is likely (or so one hopes) to be shorter than the 80 years of story-time. In the case of the woman waiting for a train it might easily be longer than one hour, if say, the woman remembers a lot about her past life which takes longer than an hour to narrate.
There are five possible relations between story-time and discourse-time: scene, summary, stretch, ellipsis and pause. All these influence the reader’s perception of the speed of a narrative. Notably, many stretches and pauses slow things down considerably, scene and ellipsis give the impression of things happening quickly
This paper uses an aspect of Baudrillard’s ideas on time and history to pose a critique to the idea, associated with Fukuyama, that history ends in liberal democracy. The paper examines the relationship between Baudrillard’s theory of the recycling of time and history and a ModernistEnlightenment conception of time and history, where history is moved by a universal, transcendental and metaphysical force and is a teleological process. The paper attempts to produce a dialogue between these two conceptions of history and show how Baudrillard’s theory of the recycling of time and history can be used to nuance, modify and enhance theorising about the movement of time and history, whilst recognising the theoretical plausibility of a Modernist-Enlightenment conception of history. The paper shows that Baudrillard’s theory on the recycling of history problematizes the theory of a teleological history. However, I conclude by suggesting that questioning the concept of a teleological theory of history does not mean that this conception of history must be dismantled. Instead, I argue that Baudrillard’s ideas on the movement of time and history can be used to modify, reconceptualise and improve the theory that liberal democracy is the end of history.
The view that history is not teleological and not governed by a geist is an ancient one. For instance, Aristotle and Machiavelli epitomise the cyclical theory of history, since their theories of history are based on the argument that no social/political system is stable and humans, therefore, cycle between regimes. It was in the Enlightenment, and particularly with Kant and Hegel that the idea of a universal and teleological history was fully developed. Thus one way out of Modernist-Enlightenment theories of history is to look back at notions of history that existed prior to this period. For instance, Kristol advises us that the best way, ‘to liberate oneself from… Hegelian sensibility and mode of thought is to go back to Aristotle, and to his understanding that all forms of government… are inherently unstable, that all political regimes are transitional, that the stability of all regimes is corrupted by the corrosive power of time.’4 Cyclical theories of time, as Hutchings explains, are in contrast to the Christian view of time, which is also based on a universal and teleological conception of history, where time follows a single, irreversible trajectory from Creation to Apocalypse; whereas, the cyclical theory of time is based on classical cosmology, where all aspects of the world are temporally organised in a cyclical pattern of birth and death, rise and fall, growth and decay, and structured in relation to the movement of the planets.
Time dilation refers to the seemingly odd fact that time passes at different rates for different observers, depending on their relative motion or positions in a gravitational field.
Here’s how that works. Time is relative. As counterintuitive as that sounds, it’s a consequence of Einstein’s theory of relativity. In everyday life, we’re used to speed being relative — so, for example, a car traveling at 60 mph (97 km/h) relative to a stationary observer would be seen as moving at 120 mph (193 km/h) by a driver going in the opposite direction at the same speed.
This same phenomenon also impacts time. Depending on an observer’s relative motion or their position within a gravitational field, that observer would experience time passing at a different rate than that of another observer. This effect, known as time dilation, becomes detectable only under certain conditions, although at a low level, we’re subject to it all the time. Let’s take a closer look at the theory of time dilation and some of its consequences, including GPS errors and the famous twin paradox.
The idea that history is moved by universal human desires and a universal mechanism appears to imply that we must reject Baudrillard’s idea that history should be understood as something which has descended into the order of the recyclable. However, my intention is to show that there is value in Baudrillard’s theory, and that we can benefit from using his theory and use it to nuance the idea that history is moved by a geist.
In the philosophy of space and time, eternalism[1] is an approach to the ontological nature of time, which takes the view that all existence in time is equally real, as opposed to presentism or the growing block universe theory of time, in which at least the future is not the same as any other time.[2] Some forms of eternalism give time a similar ontology to that of space, as a dimension, with different times being as real as different places, and future events are “already there” in the same sense other places are already there, and that there is no objective flow of time.[3]
It is sometimes referred to as the “block time” or “block universe” theory due to its description of space-time as an unchanging four-dimensional “block”, as opposed to the view of the world as a three-dimensional space modulated by the passage of time.