The Simpsons and Historicity Regimes

In episode number 500 (the fourteenth of the twenty-third season), the Simpsons were confronted with the banishment from Springfield and a new phase in their lives begun as they were accepted into a settlement of other “outlaws of society,” called in the “Cologne”. However, Homer and Marge return in secret, soon being discovered and oppressed by the angry inhabitants, who soon receive a lesson from Marge, who missed that place before realizing how petty those people were. Being honest she shows the old neighbors and acquaintances who they really were, and realizes that she was much better off in a place without internal plumbing, but where people accept others as they are. With those words, she herself turned her back on the people of Springfield and is soon followed by them, who now wish to join the Simpsons in “a better place”.

And despite the many lessons we could draw from that episode (which is itself already a milestone), I’d like to pay attention to something that hasn’t been revealed yet: when she notices the presence of her old friends — and more, since even Springfield’s institutions, such as corrupt government and inefficient education — in her new home, Marge declares that they had left everything behind. Then at this point she was interrupted by one of the most secondary characters in the series (Sideshow Mel) with the following sentence: You can’t escape civilization, Marge. Humanity is an inexorable march upward! Or it was — he punctuates, changing the imperative tone to another, of clear frustration — until the year 2000. But what does that mean? No wonder Sideshow Mel (whose real name is Melvin van Horne) says that now, in the second decade of the third millennium, amidst so many dystopian realities in popular culture and a stunning existential sensation in a crisis scenario.

It’s curious to note now — with the possibility of a slightly more distant and therefore “impartial” look — how the history of the last hundred years has seemed nothing but a continuous succession of crises, ruptures not only institutional, but structural and even temporal. These ruptures are what the historian François Hartog calls breaches in his work “Regimes of Historicity — Presentism and Experiences of Time”.

In fact, the first great rupture even happened after the year 2000, or even the 20th century. Hartog speaks of the French Revolution as the necessary “trauma” for Western civilization to break with the ancient order of time, of Christian and eschatological origins, where we all lived “at the end of time”, only the imminent expectation of the second coming of Christ. That order would be subverted by that of the Revolution — as Walter Benjamin brilliantly points out when he says:

The consciousness of blowing up the continuum of history is proper to the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action. The Great Revolution introduced a new calendar. The day with which the new calendar begins functions as a historical time condenser. And, deep down, it is the same day that always returns in the figure of the days of celebration, which are days of remembrance. Calendars, therefore, do not count time as clocks. They are monuments of an awareness of history of which, a hundred years ago, there seems to be no trace in Europe. As recently as the July Revolution, there was an incident in which this awareness was used. When evening fell on the first day of the struggle, shots were fired at the clocks of the towers at various points in Paris at the same time. An eyewitness, who perhaps owed his divinatory intuition to rhyme, then wrote: Qui le croirait! On dit qu’irrités contre l’heure. De nouveaux Josués, au pied de chaque tour. Tiraient sur les cadrans arréter le jour.

In its place the Revolution took the first step towards the modern order of time. The same one capable of using scientific knowledge to establish a linear conception of time, largely influenced by those philosophies of history that are progressive (like Hegel’s) and positivist (like Comte’s). Thus, the future was inaugurated, abolishing superstition and belief in the name of one (borrowing the words of Sideshow Mel) “inexorable march towards the top”, whether that top was the dictatorship of the proletarian, the abolition of the state, or the eternal economic growth conceived by liberal capitalism.

So it was the 19th century; not the 20th. In this sense we can notice that the new great rupture of the modern order of Time – made explicit by the assertiveness of a clown’s stagehand of ironical Jewish origins (which makes the whole situation almost tragicomic) and experienced, according to Hartog by the Europeans since the First World War – takes almost a century to make itself felt outside Europe, crystallizing in the rest of the world only with the “collapse of the communist ideal brought about by the future of the Revolution” (in Hartog’s own words) in 1989 (exactly two hundred years after the Great Revolution of Benjamin). So writes the French historian:

The very course of recent history, marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the communist ideal brought about by the future of the Revolution, as well as the escalation of multiple fundamentalisms, have brutally and durably shaken our relations with time. The order of time was called into question in both East and West. As a mixture of archaism and modernity, fundamentalist phenomena are influenced, in part, by a crisis of the future, while the traditions, to which they turn to respond to the misfortunes of the present, are, in the impossibility of drawing up a perspective of the future, largely “invented”. How, under these conditions, can the past, present and future be articulated? History, wrote François Furet in 1995, has again become “that tunnel into which man enters darkness, without knowing where his actions will lead him, uncertain of his destiny, devoid of the illusory security of a science of what he does. Deprived of God, the democratic individual sees the divinity of history trembling at its foundations at the end of the 20th century.

In the meantime, the frustrated and frustrating tone of Sideshow Mel is complete and undoubtedly understandable. Like the human beings who experienced the rupture imposed by the French Revolution (and which are illustrated in “Regimes of Historicity” by Chateaubriand and his shrewd gaze to capture the gap where the men of his time lived, between the eschatological order of the Old Regime and the progressive order of the Modern Regime) as the long and very deep crisis of the twentieth century (entitled with analytical clarity by Eric Hobsbawm as the “Age of Extremes” and represented in Hartog’s work as various names like Benjamin, Stefan Zweig and Lucien Febvre) Sideshow Mel sees the fundamentalist phenomenon of an obscurantist and antisocial anarchism as the tunnel at the end of the light and the beginning of the unknown represented by the advent of the third millennium, where everyone is impelled to “abandon the ship and swim with will”, but without direction defined in an experience that increasingly seems to be the only solid indication of the postmodern order of historical time and of everything that is enclosed in it.

Bibliography

HARTOG, Francois. Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica Editora, 2015.

LÖWY, Michel. Walter Benjamin — fire warning: a reading of the thesis “on the concept of history”. São Paulo: Boitempo Editorial, 2005.