Processing Time – On the Manifestations and Activations of Historical Consciousness

Abstract

The little girl sat by her grandmother’s kitchen table. The old woman told her about her childhood, several decades ago. The girl was bored. She did not understand why Grandma had not attended school, and why she said nothing about television programs and computer games. Trying to catch the attention of her granddaughter, the old woman anxiously waved her hands. The girl’s eyes fell on her grandmother’s palm, wrinkled and rough after many years of manual labor. Then she looked at her own soft and smooth hand. Suddenly a historical thought crossed her mind: once upon a time Grandma’s palm had been as soft and smooth as her own. Immediately, another thought, at least as well-advised as the first but rather future-oriented, came to her mind: in time, her own palm will also be wrinkled and rough. Thus, in a single line of thought, the little girl had depicted herself as a historical individual. She had entered into a mental process in which notions of the past and of the future became integrated aspects of her understanding of present life. The effort rapidly turned the strangeness and difference of her grandmother’s childhood into a notion of identity and familiarity. Consequently, the girl had put her historical consciousness to work.