Stefan Tanaka

Tanaka argues that the practice of history is too closely tied to an understanding of chronological time, which would obscure and exclude many other temporalities at play in favour of an Enlightenment understanding of change as progress. As its title suggests, 'History without Chronology' is a plea for historiography that could go without linear Newtonian time, opening the discipline to approaches of time informed by general systems theory, oral histories and the digital humanities.

Tanaka seems to have so many new ideas that he has trouble not to stumble over them himself on each new page, with references and quotes interrupting his flow of thought at every other sub clause. The upside of this is that the book is a treasure of references to lesser-known sources on historiography. But in my opinion the argument could have been made more clearly if Tanaka had focused on a discussion with just one or two authors, giving them their due attention, rather than rushing through so many different texts.… (plus d'informations)

Right from the start, Stefan Tanaka admits that the title of his book is provocative and should not be taken literally. Such relativizations come back several times and that is necessary. Because Tanaka again and again calls the use of an absolute, Newtonian chronology in history research to be catastrophic and leading away from ‘true reality’. He mainly focuses on progress-thinking and mechanistic causality. And I can certainly follow him in that. But in his enthusiasm, he definitely goes overboard: he turns the technique of chronological setting into a demon and claims that history research - and by extension the entire Western scientific approach - has stalled as a result. And that seems to me a bridge too far.
Tanaka's sources of inspiration are quite interesting: he discusses systems thinking, 2nd order cybernetics and complexity studies in detail; and he quotes almost continuously the French philosopher-Jesuit Michel de Certeau (Tanaka systematically drops the noble "de") and British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Of course, these are nice references. But the quotations and references tumble over one another in a sometimes rather confusing argument.
It seems to me that this book contains interesting ideas. And his central reasoning that “History must embrace the richness and variability of different times that exist throughout our lives, are evident in nonmodern societies and historical writings about them, and have become common in various sciences throughout the twentieth century” certainly is commendable. But it seems to me that Tanaka suffers from tunnel vision and disproportionately demonizes the problem of chronological historiography. The alternatives he proposes, including the systematic use of digital data, are not convincing.

For a more elaborate review, see my History-account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3154668591… (plus d'informations)