Usefullness of Epochal Divisions

If in the beginning there was only one time, then that era would likely be referred to as A. We can also safely assume that no one who has ever thought of themselves as living in the one and only epoch of history would bother to cleave it from another epoch. If there was to be a division, it would likely only be made in juxtaposition to the past, and would require some sort of a clean break with it. The Christians broke with the Judaic calendar, itself fixed upon a starting point, before which there was simply nothing. A would have pre-A from which to define itself in opposition.

I want to interrogate a concept a bit more complicated then the BCE/CE split. Since perhaps the Enlightenment, writers have been writing of a break with the past, the era before people could fathom enlightenment and were groveling under the oppression of ignorance. We might consider this the Medieval/Enlightenment split, or A/B. As time goes on however, thinkers and writers begin to conceive of a modern era, an era built around the exacting forces of capitalism, international standards, the foreseeable death of primitivism, and a new dawn for human freedom and potential. Now we have a Medieval/Enlightenment/Modern split, or A/B/C. Such a division has been pursued in many literatures as the dark times before reason was known, the beginnings of rational thought and positivistic science, and when rational science matured and hit its stride ushering in “true” forms of modern science beyond mere rationalistic thought. Now, experts among us have identified yet another split, that of metastasized modernity: post-modernity is the condition of post-Fordist neoliberal capitalism, hyperspace, multiple identities, the death of scientific truth, plurality, and irony over earnestness. So we have A/B/C/D.

Is it all settled now? How can we move forward from this point? Historians and cultural critics have identified problems with these categories. World historians argue that medieval is not a suitable category for the pre-Enlightenment and pre-Westphalian system, neither in Europe nor outside of it. However, much of the world has exhibited a feudal system of some sort. Perhaps it would be best to insert a “pre-modernity” category before modernity to compensate for this discrepancy. This is an era marked by hunter-gatherers, advanced organic economies (AOEs), and capitalists anticipating industry. Now we have A/subB/B/C/D. By this point, A just means pre-rational, or pre-European rationality, which may or may not occur at the beginning of the Enlightenment or the beginning of the Italian Renaissance, or perhaps with Thomas Aquitaine (that would be a stretch). In any case, it starts to get messy when you try to figure out the exact extent of any of these global or local epochs.

So now we are in the era of post-modernity that is endorsed by many in the social sciences. Solid identity, permanent dwelling, the traditional family, and the worker/capitalist system were so very modern, and have come to pass. The shift can be traced back to the Bretton Woods accord if you are a political economist, or simply to the new domination of America if you just want to look at politics. Though you would have to disregard the decades of the 40s and 50s and 60s (except for the bit at the end), as they still belong to the modern era. During the modern era, most people believed in the power of modern art, the TV, and the infallibility of science. But then came the terror of the Atomic Age, the art of the Dadaists, HG Wells “War of the Worlds,” the Bloomsbury group, and Hip-Hop with its self-conscious appropriation of random bits of the past. But these things didn’t all happen at once, so maybe a new category should be added to meld these two latest epochs together. A/subB/B/C/CD/D.

Already, I feel that this description isn’t enough. Think of all the alternate cultures to ours in the world. In fact, in post-modernity, “ours” is unstable. I don’t know you any better than I know myself. And surely, I can’t agree with you, because to agree with you would be to approve of you, and to do that, I would likely have to judge you, which requires cognition of your acts. An inseparable gulf lies between us and within me. Schizophrenia. Multiplicities. Let’s scatter the categories. Everything is now contingent on particular cultures and societies which themselves are contingent on the whims and fancies of those reading them. However, to keep things partially clear, it would be good to try to redefine at least the last two of these categories (and their modifications) for the colonized world. So we might as well restate the equation as preC/Cm/CDm/Dm. No one is beyond Dm because it hasn’t been theorized yet, and likely, only turning into a vaporous ether could possibly describe this state.

Finally, a suitable set of categories for analysis within the social sciences has been established. Now we can discover meaning on the borders between or within these multiplicities. Like a merchant from subB Venice, we can again encounter the Other in a fashion that will not inspire us to wonder not about origins, but only [micro-]evolution, because we are no longer burdened with the staged [macro-]evolution of time and the oppressive weight of place. Home is nothing. The Highway is everything. We can dispatch with the abusive categories that reasonable thinkers have erroneously established in the past so that we can again analyze them using similar vocabulary, but devoid of anything but political economy and distrust. And we are back in the Medieval Era, looking only to our redemption by the cynical forces of post-modernity.