Notes Towards a Deep History of Night and Darkness
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Notes Towards a Deep History of Night and Darkness
The Premodern Night Through an Islamicate Lens, iii.: On the Convivial Night of Early Modernity
While reading L. M. Sacasas’ recent thought-provoking essay on time and night, I also recalled that I had never completed my own series on the topic, and that there is a very important genealogical connection between the ‘early modern transformation’ of the night that I and others have written about and the modern and ‘post’-modern experience of the night and of time in general. So towards completing this series of essays and bringing the early modern world into dialogue with our own I’d like to offer the following, to be eventually concluded with a bringing together of multiple time horizons of darkness, from the Paleolithic to the ‘Anthropocene.’
Before we think about the significance of early modern transformations of the night, it will be helpful to have a brief summary of just what we mean, based on my own area of expertise, the Islamicate world, but broadly applicable across the entire world during the early modern period, especially from the seventeenth century forward. From the 1500s forward, roughly speaking, options for night-time activities outside one’s home tended to expand in the Islamicate lands, urban and, to some extent, rural; some of these were religious and devotional, rooted in sufi ritual and community, in emergent forms of communal devotion to Muhammad, and so forth, alongside older well-established forms (observance of Ramadan, for instance). Alongside already ancient taverns, the coffeeshop developed as an alternative for daytime and nighttime gatherings; literary gatherings, poetry recitations, and iterations of what we’d now call ‘hanging out’ all seem to have flourished in early modernity. While many of these forms of nocturnal sociability were reserved for men, women had their own gatherings, and at least some nocturnal gatherings were mixed-gender (such as that of the Ottoman Armenians pictured above), much to the chagrin of puritanic reformers.
What is so striking about early modern interventions into the night—materially made possible by a range of factors, including caffeine, improved or cheaper lighting (candles and oil burning lamps, primarily), and the proliferation and elaboration of convivial liturgical and devotional forms—is that they remained, for the most part, sporadic, in the sense that they were not everyday patterns, but were more or less exceptional events, in the sense that one did not spend every night reciting poetry in a friend’s garden or attending a devotional soiree. Well, some people—those who didn’t have to go to work in the morning!—almost certainly did make a pattern of such behavior, but the larger point stands. Because overall energy dynamics had not yet fundamentally changed for most of the world, the night of the household or the individual remained, well, pretty dark, and would remain so essentially until the advent of electricity (to be sure there were intermediate stages via other energy sources in some parts of the world). The gradual electrification of the night, while also involving public spaces obviously (street lighting no small part of this dynamic, with its roots stretching back to well before electricity in Western Europe, but not in the Islamicate lands), would be even more transformative of private life, transforming the dark of home life through lighting and eventually all manner of electronic devices and media.
Yet despite the continued darkness of the average person’s home, the odds were good that across the early modern world, in city, town, and village, someone was holding a nocturnal gathering, some of which might stretch straight into the dawn, on any given night, regardless of where precisely one was in the world, from Japan to the Ottoman lands to the Americas. And these interruptions of the nightly schedule were no longer solitary, but fundamentally convivial and social; it was in gatherings of people for specific purposes that the night was illumined and charged with caffeine and tobacco (while also frequently being under the influence of other, older drugs with a less stimulating presence).
The transformation of the night in Islamicate early modernity unfolded primarily along the axis of the devotional and the ludic, with the two generally intimately connected, even if they certainly had ‘pure’ poles with a wide and diverse continuum stretching in between. I suspect—though I’m reluctant to speak with authority here—that a similar oscillation is visible elsewhere, with some other identifiable ‘poles’ of activity as well, such as the ‘political’ and the ‘intellectual’ (both of which certainly existed in the Islamicate lands too, usually, as elsewhere, intermingled with other forms of sociability).
I think—and this is something that obviously requires additional study and analysis—that in the case of the Islamicate world at least the most salient feature of early modernity lies precisely in the expanded spheres of sociability and interaction, in both day and night. Social time and space became denser and more complex, building upon medieval exemplars while also seeing the emergence of entirely new spaces and communities. Both in night-time gatherings and during the day, crucially, people from across class, educational, cultural, geographical, and even confessional boundaries increasingly mixed and interacted, in ways that generally exceed what had been possible in the medieval period. I do not think that the other transformations of early modernity, be they political, intellectual, religious, literary, or so forth, would have been possible without this expansion and intensification of sociability and conviviality, with the increasingly exploited ‘frontier’ of the night a crucial component. Even transformations that might seem contrary to these social forms of interaction—such as, crucially, changed attitudes towards reading, textual production, knowledge acquisition, and the relative autonomy of the book—were bound up in various ways with these spheres of sociability.
Early modern modes of nocturnal conviviality are not dead, of course, but they are certainly not the dominant modes of our experience of the night anymore. Some of this is simply infrastructural, and affects all aspects of conviviality. The easily walkable neighborhood or city quarter or rural village either literally does not exist for many of us in that we live far apart physically from others, or socially does not exist; one can live in a dense amalgamation of people without it being in a strong sense a community, with each apartment or row house turned entirely inwardly (often towards consumptive electronic media). For many of my readers, I imagine, the single most sustained and important experience of nocturnal conviviality in the early modern mode took place in college, an institution that not coincidentally reproduces more vividly and enduringly pre-modern forms of life than just about any other in the contemporary world. People live in much closer proximity to one another, and have coordinating cultural, chronological, and other structures that encourage the forging of actual human community and not simply bodily proximity. And while students do have set schedules, they are generally less rigid than ordinary work schedules, and permit some flexibility—which combined with youthful capacity for late nights and (relatively) early mornings, makes late-night gatherings and revels possible in ways that become more circumscribed as one ages. It’s a cliché, but it’s true that a great deal of one’s learning happens in such settings, in a way that is not reducible to a set program or agenda.
Another key factor in the submergence of the convivial early modern night into the isolated modern night was the fact that illumination in the early modern world was not cheap or easy to come by. Early modernity was fundamentally energy poor compared to the nineteenth century and afterwards. The pooling of resources, or the drawing upon the resources of someone better off, was essential; the luxury we all have of turning on an electric lamp or firing up a computer screen in the privacy of our own homes simply did not exist for the majority of people (and obviously the luxury of the computer or television screen existed for no one, though shadow theatre was available—in public venues, however, and in the homes of the very wealthy, de facto semi-public spaces). Sharing illumination made simple economic sense, energy scarcity in this case acting as a driver towards sociability and human interaction.
One of the most optimistic—if rooted in somewhat dystopian prediction—suggestions about the longer-term effects of generative AI is that in coming years digital communication of all sorts will be heavily disrupted and perhaps even fatally, or semi-fatally, undermined by generative AI (such a scenario could easily play out in conjunction with the darker vision I laid out rather polemically in my previous essay). This could lead, somewhat counter-intuitively, to a re-emphasis on the oral and aural, on the face-to-face, and indeed I think it’s safe to say that in the aftermath of our collective covid experience in 2020 (and to varying extents geographically and individually in the two years following) there is in many quarters already a desire for the oral and personally, physically interactive. My sense is that while such desires have been widespread, they have been balanced if not outweighed by the further degradation of sociability that response to the pandemic facilitated—but even the strongest path dependency is not eternal, and the digital world is set for serious change in the coming years (or even months at the rate things have advanced lately).
Will there be another transformation of the night in the years to come, back towards something like the sociable night of early modernity? I don’t know, but on the whole it would be a positive development, if only from a utilitarian perspective: if it is indeed the case, as I argued above, that one of the main drivers of the early modern transformation was the expansion and diversification of sociability and of interchange and exchange from the personal level to the global, we can take quite a bit of hope from that reality. The ‘revolutions’ of early modernity, the genuinely positive (albeit mixed with far less positive things, to be sure) developments of the period, were not dependent upon the fossil fuel economy that would be at the heart of the industrial modernity to come.
If—as seems entirely possible, though hardly predetermined—the convergent crises of late modernity lead to a wind-down, collapse, or large-scale transformation of industrial modernity into something else, we can take a certain comfort in the fact that many of the best aspects of modernity are genealogically rooted in an early modern world largely devoid of the technological and energy sources we now take for granted. There are new chapters to the history of the night yet to be written, and we can look to past examples for inspiration and for ideas of what is possible and what might yet transpire.