I. Good time

Should historiography beat history – social, cultural, or even media histories – into shapes that fit a principle determining the possibility or impossibility of objects, mentalities and events? To deal with this question, I refer to Jacques Rancière’s considerations presented in his 1997 lecture titled “The Trouble with Ana.”1 Rancière first developed the same argument in his 1992 book The Names of History.2 To me, this is still one of his most interesting books, productive as it is for the histories of cultures and sciences, even though it does not yet deal with aesthetic regimes or disagreement (mésentente). My own thoughts on the matter touch upon the question of the political in so far as they concern the relation between names or words and the places or “spaces” in which they appear. For as Rancière pointed out later in Disagreement, “Political activity is whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or changes a place’s destination. It makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard as discourse what was once only heard as noise.”3 Even before politics engages intentions, interests, needs, goals, and aims, it displaces or “undoes the perceptible divisions.”4

Historians and sociologists disagree, of course. Whatever happens, to them, has its own space and its own time: All in good time, as they say. Both the chronical and the epochal perception of time depend upon this normative principle, a kind of “police” in Rancière’s terms, of the “good time”: That everything happens in its own time (and in its own place) demonstrates the good morality of that time, the good morality of history as a whole. In the 20^th century, a new history or nouvelle histoire emerges in France to connect this orderly time to a specific conception of space: A space that functions as the sum of all those forces that retard, relativize, and functionalize the event, not only pluralizing the times of history, but relegating to a background the hectic rhythms at its surface, favoring instead the so-called longue durée with its series and periods that reach beyond generations and epochs. The geographicalization of history and the “territorialization of meaning”5 are supposed to guarantee that any word that is spoken and defiantly hurled against an existing power cannot reveal...