Contrastingly, Rabinow defines the contemporary as a (re)assemblage of both old and new elements and their interactions and interfaces. This means, among other things, that contemporary problems and objects are emergent and consequently, by definition, contingent. Emergence refers to “a state in which multiple elements combine to produce an assemblage, whose significance cannot be reduced to prior elements and relations.” It follows that the History of the Present, while often helpful, is not fully adequate to work on the contemporary because by definition the contemporary is contingent.