Joshua Kates’ illuminating analysis of the possibilities and shortcomings of Althusser’s 1965 Reading Capital offers some unexpected resonance with my current research project exploring the ways that Thoreau resists homogenous temporal continuity across his oeuvre, and more specifically in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. As Kates outlines, Althusser complicates the cleanly segmented monoliths of periodization by atomizing the society into disparate aspects (arts, politics, law, economy, religion, etc.), which exhibit their own temporalities founded on the modes of production responsible for their own historical becomings, apart from the whole, allowing “society to be molded as a differential unity” (140). These aspects, though autonomous with their own internal governing principles, nonetheless, maintain a relation to the whole of society. The differences inherent within these social aspects exist simultaneously, in one sense, though, in another sense, they resonate on varying temporal planes because they themselves propagate a distinct, singular temporality, resulting in “multiple histories and multiple historical temporalities [that] become concretely articulated” (141). According to Kates (if I’ve understood him correctly), Althusser’s model of history as fundamentally heterogeneous, populated with a multitude of dissonant modes of production and temporalities, represents a rupture out of (and in) which theory first emerges as a viable epistemological field of inquiry, one whose very existence depends on the discontinuous temporal schemata latent in history. Theoretically, for Kates, Althusser’s historiographical departure into the realm of theory supposes a new kind of knowledge (147). Ultimately, in Kates’ estimation, Althusser fails to establish a theoretical mode because he cannot evade his structural, and therefore historical, presuppositions. Kates notes, however, that “Althusser already recognized, any truly revolutionary transformation of historiographical thinking extends far beyond the field of history itself” (157). That is, perhaps, into the un-temporal? Not the timeless per se, but into a conception of time that has not yet been conceived.
Like Althusser, Thoreau, in his own way, expresses a profound distrust in the notion of homogenous time and contemporaneity in A Week. In what I’ve deemed a sort of temporal disobedience, he attempts to destabilize and reconfigure history via the personal, spiritual experience. This temporal reorganization is what I’m calling pneumachronicity, which privileges the trans-temporal over the immediately historical present in order to locate oneself across time rather than merely in it. Consequently, mythology emerges as a key component of Thoreau’s pneumachronic imagination. For Thoreau, “mythology is only the most ancient history and biography. So far as being false or fabulous in a common sense, it contains only enduring and essential truth, and I and you, the here and there, the now and then, being omitted. Either time or rare wisdom writes it” (A Week 49). The Thoreauvian, and Transcendental, imperative to privilege the self over the collective, the social, comes to bear here because I do not think he implies that everyone should subscribe to his notion of time, adopt his particular temporal scheme as their own. But rather, he seems to suggest that each person exists at once a historical and eternal being, both within and without time: the body being anchored and bounded in the present and the spirit being perennial and timeless. Thoreau’s personal temporality emerges as a composite of varying spiritualties and mythologies, which correspond mainly to what he has read, studied, and experienced. He identifies with a number of spiritual systems and mythologies across time and sees himself as situated among them and not necessarily after them in the present. Thoreau’s concept of history, like Althusser’s, breaks history open. As Thoreau disrupts western historical flows and narratives of linear progress, he does not so readily differentiate between the past, present, and future. But rather, he entreats each to seek their own mythology, their own pneumachronicity by resisting the stringencies of hegemonic and mono-temporal history through temporal disobedience that develops around the self and not the collective.
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