Drilling Down: Can Historians Operationalize Koselleck’s Stratigraphical Times?

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dc.citation.firstpage199
dc.citation.issueNumber2
dc.citation.journalTitleﾠConfigurations
dc.citation.lastpage215
dc.citation.volumeNumber23
dc.contributor.authorZammito, John
dc.date.accessioned2016-01-15T19:47:52Z
dc.date.available2016-01-15T19:47:52Z
dc.date.issued2015
dc.description.abstractAccording to Reinhart Koselleck, in every moment a congeries of “temporal strata” are effectively co-present, but not necessarily coherent, hence the “simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous.” Contrast this with the notion of a zeitgeist in which every aspect of a historical moment is integrated by some master principle. There are so many trajectories active in any present that it is unlikely that one might coordinate all of them, if not unwise even to believe that they are coordinated. Not only does each historical present demonstrate at best rhizomic or patchy coherences across domains, but it also registers different paces and intensities in the temporal deployment of the domains. Nevertheless, coherence remains a compelling regulative ideal. Fortunately, path-dependency—cumulation as constraint—is a discriminable feature of the several distinct “layers of time” or diachronic flows co-present in any given historical moment. Moreover, that some strata of experience remain roughly constant enables us to appraise the variation of others. If too many elements enter into simultaneous crisis, if we hit the “perfect storm,” then our capacity to comprehend (like that of our objects of inquiry) may be severely impaired. These insights from Koselleck are eminently applicable and deserve recognition and gratitude in historical epistemology.
dc.identifier.citationZammito, John. "Drilling Down: Can Historians Operationalize Koselleck’s Stratigraphical Times?." <i>ﾠConfigurations,</i> 23, no. 2 (2015) Johns Hopkins University Press: 199-215. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/con.2015.0015.
dc.identifier.doihttp://dx.doi.org/10.1353/con.2015.0015
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1911/87855
dc.language.isoeng
dc.publisherJohns Hopkins University Press
dc.rightsArticle is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
dc.titleDrilling Down: Can Historians Operationalize Koselleck’s Stratigraphical Times?
dc.typeJournal article
dc.type.dcmiText
dc.type.publicationpublisher version
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