Discussion: papers by Jonathan Sachs and Daniel Fulda (transcript)

Fritz Breithaupt: My task as commentator is easy.These papers are very clear and powerful, they are an excellent introduction for us.But I won't simply step away at this point, because we have our rituals.And rituals of course have the wonderful function of suppressing futures.Our Workshop has a lot of ritual… and I have to complain heavily that we are not in our normal room [Editor's Note: the Distinguished Alumni Room was not available, so the first two panels happened in the IMU Maple Room], so it feels that our rituals are out of place.But we will be there again… tomorrow?At some other time in the future, at least.One of our rituals is that the speakers don't actually get to speak.Or, they get to speak, but only after a long comment.I will try not to make my own comment too long, I will just summarize, introduce the authors, and then try to push the two papers together by bringing out one conceptual pair that they don't really use but that could be interesting for us which is the relation between the individual and the collective.To introduce the authors, I could just say that Daniel Fulda is the European equivalent of Rebecca [Spang]: look at them [Laughter]….He has written two books and edited another ten or twelve on subjects from cannibalism to the objects of the eighteenth century.The paper that we have read by him makes a very bold claim.It takes apart something that I had always taken for granted, the claim by Reinhart Koselleck that the idea of an open future comes only from the late eighteenth century, from the "Saddle Time" of the 1760s and 1770s.Daniel Fulda says "no," if you look at the early eighteenth century, you see many authors already have this idea … Rebecca just asked us to pay attention to "genre," and if you look at the texts on which Daniel Fulda draws they are not just one genre, they are many genres.But they are all planning documents-the future is something that has to be planned.…The question I have is about causality.If the open future is there already in 1700, then what does that mean for the Enlightenment?I have always thought that first you have the Enlightenment, then the future can be open.But maybe it's the other way: maybe it's when the future isn't known, that then you can open your eyes and then there is Enlightenment.Koselleck says two things happen in the late eighteenth century: the future becomes "open" (that is, unknown and malleable) and the thinking of history itself changes.Suddenly there is a new idea that can weave history together as a narrative-not with a telos-but with narrative as a way of holding things together.Daniel splits these two developments: he agrees that the last happens in the late eighteenth century but the first, almost a hundred years earlier….My question for him: Could it be that this open future began around 1700 as a collective venture, and that then (around the 1770s) this collective open future got folded back into the individual?It therefore became much more manageable because it was individual-or it was totalistic, it involved all of us, but as individuals-and so it wasn't something that we had to plan collectively any more.So that's a big question, but I think it's one that could interest all of us.Another overall question might be about affect.Was the open future "dark"-that was Rebecca's immediate thought-or is it something else?Is it maybe sometimes dark and sometimes not?When was it dark and when was it inviting?Now I come to the second paper.Jonathan Sachs comes to us from Canada, where he is Associate Professor of English at Concordia University.…He has published widely on time [lists article titles and books, including "The Time of Decline."]Like Fulda's paper, his paper is very clear.I will focus on the second part: the main argument is that the acceleration that we usually Eighteenth-Century Futures 4B? 7/2+3(/0 NUMBER 5 (JUNE 2018)29associate with the period around 1800 is connected with the discovery of a new phenomenon, "slowness."That modernity is about speed, but it's even more about a recalibration between speed and slowness.… The interesting thing is that he discovers in speed, moments of slowness.There is too much going on, we can't register all of it, and so we become slow, stupid.Then there is the slowness of evolutionary processes that span enormous time periods… Jonathan suggests that Darwin may have been inspired by Wordsworth.So here, in Jonathan's paper, it is a jump from the individual to the collective level.When we talk about Wordsworth's depiction of the beggar, it's an individual who moves slowly.But when we get to Darwin, to evolution, there is no individual who is slow.Every animal and so on may be moving quite quickly, it's only for the observer-the second-order observer who wants to see change-that evolution is slow.… This slowness only appears if you skip from the individual to the collective.How did the line between individual and collective become so thin, that it was something you could skip around 1800?Is it about new media, or is speed itself a medium?So we will give you a brief chance to reply, but only brief, and then I will manage the slow and fast conversation around the room.Daniel Fulda: Yes.Thank you very much for your very exact condensation of my paper.I agree with this completely.But I am not sure if there is really a shift toward individual future in the 1770s.Yes.You are thinking about novels, perhaps?In the German literature, Bildungsromane.Normally these novels don't try to explore the way of the central figure into a wider future.Its central figures are young people, and when they marry, the story is finished, yes?I don't see this, this… Breithaupt: I was thinking… Fulda: … this direction onto the future in novels of the end of the eighteenth century.And on the other side… I think Condorcet's piece, Histoire tableau historique… Comment s'appelle exactement…yes, "d'un Tableau"….It's a picture of the development of society as a whole and not the development of individuals.Therefore, I don't agree with this idea that in the end of the eighteenth century, the perspective skips from collective future again to individual futures.Breithaupt: Mmhmm.Mmhmm.Okay.I mean that the collectives become treated as individual; like the nation state becomes a subject.But… Fulda: The nation state is an individual among other states.But it is a collective enterprise related to individuals, like you and me.Breithaupt: Mmmhmm.Mmmhmm.I'll respond later to that… [laughter] I want to open the floor.But first: Jon.Jonathan Sachs: I'm not sure how much I want to add to what you said already.I think it's a terrific summary of the two papers and a really nice way of thinking about how they might go together.I would add briefly to your suggestion that with the later part of the eighteenth century comes this transition from the individual back to the collective.There's one other aspect of

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