"As far as assumptions go, there are good things to be said about the idea that history flies forward on the back of time's arrow. It is, for example, a perfectly reasonable way of grappling with chains of cause and effect. Did the subprime crisis cause a shift in practices of financial regulation? Are there broader patterns in the relationship between financial crisis and regulatory change that can be inferred from the historical record? Such questions can be answered by equating historical time with chronological time - but at what cost? This book argues that the linear, essentialist conception of time misses something crucial about the dynamics of contemporary capitalism. Time may seem to flow in one direction (when we follow the movements of the stock market, for example), but often the sequence is scrambled. Sometimes time folds back on itself, such that the present takes shape through a vista of imagined pasts and projected futures (we remember the Great Depression, or we spy another on the horizon). This is the reflexive, non-linear aspect of temporal experience, and it is central to the character of historical time. Historical time emerges through the historical imagination. That is what makes it historical.
All of this has consequences for what we usually think of as history itself, because it opens up a series of strange loops between the historical imagination and the developmental aspects of history as a process. The future can act on the present, for example, through different modes of anticipation... ...Less acknowledged are the strange loops between present and past. These consist of a recursive action of the past on the present. Rather than each present leaving a set past behind it, the past circulates within the present as an evolving repertoire of abstract patterns - names, concepts, archetypes, and so on, all drawn from the recorded past and our efforts to give it order. These patterns are best viewed not as real historical legacies, but instead as vectors of the historical imagination - specifically modern modes of organizing temporal experience that derive their power from the discourse of history and our familiarity with it. The result is a quasi-historical process - a
strange history - in which the recollected past shapes the way we apprehend and negotiate the present.
Amin Samman History in Financial Times (2019) p4-5
