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

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