Michel Foucault breaks with traditional ideas according to which history runs linearly, continuously and cumulatively, following an unchanging, endless, transcendental law – an a priori essence of reason, man or nature. Instead, people’s historical situatedness emerges contingently in the interplay of specific power relations and epistemic self-understandings. Historical time forms a potpourri of discrete and discontinuous more or less stable, i.e. only slowly evolving, epochs, each renegotiated in specific discourses of power and knowledge, which are characterized by contingent, suddenly and rapidly spreading, radical shifts in power relations and epistemic self-understanding different epochs are overturned.

Concepts of time play a major role in the contingent, specific epistemic self-image of an era. Foucault explains this using the example of a change at the turn of the 19th century, when the previous idealizing genealogies lost their credibility. These genealogies, now recognized as constructed, exposed people to a specific temporal bond and placed them firmly at the center of world events by inescapably linking them, through their origins, to irrefutably predetermined life contents and ways of life. From then on, historical events branched into a kaleidoscope of different designs and discourses (Marxism, positivism, phenomenology) that claimed the right to redefine and enforce the epistemic self-understanding based on human origin/origin and goal/purpose.

History is not governed by a struggle that implies continuity, but is subject to the Nietzschean-understood “concrete givenness of a development with its derailments, its extended periods of feverish activity, its powerlessness”. History appears as an ensemble of complex, interlocking conflicts between desires and powers that are hidden behind truth claims (will to truth). Given the conflicts over power and knowledge, which are dynamically reflected in historically constructed objects (dispositifs, time-dominating themes), history is neither continuous nor homogeneous. However, it is not completely chaotic because relationships between power and knowledge are not static distribution functions. Foucault speaks of transformation matrices (matrices of transformations) that produce organized time sequences under the conditions of local circumstances. History is subject to the double conditioning of transforming forces and concrete framework conditions that influence each other. According to Machon, the general shape of temporal processes looks like a bouquet of ascending or descending spirals.

The break involves not only a change in the dominant form of subjectification, but also a change in the form of temporality itself, which takes on a new rhythm. In the course of historical transformations, the subjective perception of time also varies. Foucault explains this using the example of the radical lifestyle changes caused by Constantine’s Christianization in the Roman Empire. Since the victory of Christianity, when life no longer became the object of stylization (self-design) but rather the object of hermeneutics (self-interpretation), a new type of historicity has dominated. Because the individual no longer had the task of perfecting himself, optimizing his behavior, his feelings and his existence, but rather of discovering himself, his inner secrets and his hidden truth, and because he no longer felt like himself towards his body must behave towards an object that is to be designed from outside, but rather must listen to it as in a discourse, time cannot be made up of a series of efforts to intensify the present and its slow progression. Instead, time becomes a journey to be traveled, in a present that is always determined by the future. With the institutionalization of the “subject of desire and want” the goal-oriented and always unbalanced historicity in which we still live today enters the stage.

For Foucault, being modern means seeing oneself as the object of perfection, as a project to make one’s entire existence into a work of art – an ethics as an aesthetics of existence. Such “practices of freedom” are forced to constantly produce something new as a timeless vertical, perpendicular to the course of history, in order to break through the passing of time.
For Foucault, time appears dependent on the (described) objects (dispositives) whose transformations it measures, but these objects are themselves tailored to moral and political projects. Time can be modeled as a stratified flow of temporalities running at different speeds, as a sequence of immobile blocks separated by rapid upheavals, as a succession of erupting events, as a series of spirally advancing sequences, as successive, slowly systematically drifting time periods, or as the present, which is its Freedom practices established orthogonally to the flow of time.

Literature:

Pascal Michon (2002) Strata Blocks Pieces Spirals Elastics and Verticals – Six figures of time in Michel Foucault, in Time & Society 11 (2/3), p. 163 ff.

Further Reading:

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