Back to the future

By historian Matthias Sandberg

In times of crisis, time and the perception of time are subject to disruption, something made very clear by the current corona epidemic: for the first time (with the exception of the years of the two world wars), the Olympic Games of the modern period will break with the usual Olympic cycle. However, the organizers have not only decided to postpone the Games until the following year at the earliest, but also to continue to hold them under the name “Tokyo 2020”. This is undoubtedly unusual, but it goes beyond the economic calculation of brand protection and marketing measures already implemented: the forced anachronism seems to show defiant opposition to the epidemic and its manifold consequences. At the same time, it flirts with the half-joking suggestion frequently made that we should simply start the current year again, in a sense as a leap in time until order is restored – back to the future.
The symbolic effect of this decision and its justification also arise from the special temporality in times of crisis: scenarios of collective threat such as the current corona crisis represent a deviation from the everyday habits of those affected that impinges upon almost all areas of life, with these disruptions also affecting the perception of time.

In view of the unpredictable, the recourse to the liminal threshold time between the outbreak and the containment or disappearance of the epidemic not only serves to locate the epidemic itself and to justify the particular action taken to meet the exceptional situation; it also makes temporality itself an instrument for interpreting the crisis, with the discourse on the current epidemic often operating with the status quo ante and a supposed return to order. The collective hope for the rapid overcoming of the epidemic is manifested in the image of the restored past prior to the corona crisis, which thus becomes the ideal of lived order far from the state of emergency. The omnipresent wish is for things to be as they were before the epidemic, for time to ‘normalize’ itself.
The analepsis anticipating the hoped-for future thus raises (as it were) a normative claim, and normativity and temporality are therefore connected internally – as long as the situation of threat persists, the threshold period will prevail. But we can also read everything the other way around: the inherently ephemeral character of the disruption of norms by the epidemic has a half-life period.

However, the question of what happens when the crisis is over, i.e. when time has ‘normalized’ itself, not only touches on the hope for immunization or the disappearance of the epidemic, but also testifies to its potential as a fundamental caesura of a time before and a time after or with corona, or at least as a permanent change in everyday life.

In view of the imponderables of the corona epidemic, a look back may therefore help to contrast the uncertainty of the liminal present with the past as a normative idea of the best possible result of the epidemic developments. Whether the crisis will ultimately result in the restoration of the status quo or in a changed world will become apparent when the situation of threat is contained or at least becomes predictable; perhaps this will be the case at the Olympic Games next year, and the name “Tokyo 2020” will remind us of a period of crisis that has been overcome. Nonetheless, its anachronism and the perception of time in the current epidemic both point in the same direction: back to the future.