Performing the Present, Forfeiting the Future: The Problem of Prediction from the Perspective of Performative Time

A long-running critique goes that the Social Sciences are strong in predicting continuity, but weak in predicting change and instability. This criticism spiked after the Global Financial Crisis, and again after the unexpected outcomes of the Brexit vote and the US Presidential Elections in 2016. While the brunt of the 2008 fallout was borne by the Economics profession, the shocks of 2016 hit home in the Political Science profession. This paper attempts to explain this weakness from the perspective of performative time, which views time as a co-production between the observer and the observed. Theoretically, it draws from Husserl’s phenomenology of inner time and the theory of history (R. G. Collingwood, R. Koselleck), which base their time conceptions on the assumption of inseparability between subject and object. Viewed from the perspective of performative time, the omnipresent positivist conception of natural, linear time must itself be understood as a powerful enterprise in time production. Tapping recent theories of the “absolute” or “broad present” as developed by H.U. Gumbrecht, M. Fisher, A. Assmann and others, the paper argues that the production of linear time largely equals the production of continuity. As the mechanism behind this, it identifies the reification of the past as an observer-independent repository of “facts” and “dates”, which means that concepts and opinions of the present are taken as given and simply projected backward. Via causal analysis, they are then extrapolated from the past into the future, describing a perfect tautology. In this process, past occurrences of change and instability are effectively linearized, and their lessons unlearned (to be exemplified by the ex post rationalization of the events of 2008 and 2016). As a result, the observer entraps herself in the “limbo” of the continued present, in which yesterday is basically the same as tomorrow. As the tautological production of linear time increases self-similarity to the cost of verisimilitude to the real world, it becomes more and more asynchronous with other forms of time production as well as biological time rhythms (e.g. the human life span). Change then appears as the flipside of linear time production, being essentially “continuity-induced discontinuity”. Under this premise, change cannot be predicted by richer models or longer time-series analyses, but only by turning the observer into an object of reflection. This allows the observer to take a step back from herself – not a step in physical, but in “historical” or “inner time”. In the final part, the paper discusses how the perspective of performative time may serve not only retrospective analysis, but also prospective/ predictive purposes for public policy-making. In this context, the paper discusses its application for the design of conflict early warning systems (drawing from the authors dissertation research).