Cultures of Timelessness

The project on Cultures of Timelessness is part of my interest in a history of the ‘historical sense’, i.e. a new way of thinking and perceiving the world as subject to permanent change. Specific notions of timelessness, I want to argue, are a function of the emergence of a modern “historical sense” around 1800. Yet timelessness seems to be one of the blind spots of historical thought that may keep historians from coming to terms with phenomena that are arguably ‘beyond time’ but central to modern culture, such as the concept of peoples “without history” in early cultural anthropology and folklore, the psychoanalytical mapping of the “unconsciousness,” or the universalistic aspirations of modernist design. Despite the diversity of these phenomena, they share certain characteristics that I aim to describe in historical context by a systematic close reading of published texts and archival materials combined with an analysis of scholarly practices and material cultures related to it.

It is a truism that historians believe in the historicity of culture and rely on the—mostly implicit—assumption that all phenomena they observe are subject to historical change, but isn’t it most likely that they tend to miss phenomena that are beyond time, but central to our culture? Those phenomena of timelessness will be the objects of the proposed research. Therefore, this study touches upon one of the taboos of cultural analysis: that one cannot simply engage with “the real” in the first place since one can only perceive it as an—historically construed—symbolic and imaginary form.

In its initial phase the proposed project will focus on selected case studies that cover four main areas of inquiry:

• Timelessness in historical thinking
• The timeless character of the psychoanalytical unconscious
• "Timeless peoples" in history, anthropology, and folklore
• Organisms as precondition of evolutionary historical thought