{"id":4347,"date":"2020-10-20T10:04:34","date_gmt":"2020-10-20T14:04:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/o-matic.com\/blog-archive-2022\/?p=4347"},"modified":"2020-10-20T10:04:34","modified_gmt":"2020-10-20T14:04:34","slug":"out-of-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/o-matic.com\/blog-archive-2022\/blog\/2020\/10\/20\/out-of-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Out of Time"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Astra Taylor’s magnificent 2019 text, Out of Time<\/a>, for Laphams’ climate issue talks about all the temporalities the earth operates on, and how humans manage to or willfully experience so few. We are surrounded by chemical, geophysical, and biological clocks, yet <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Capitalism\u2019s clock ticks loudest in our ear<\/em>

I’d add: the time of a coal seam’s development, deep time, the time it takes for a drop of sea water to circumnavigate along the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt (1000 years).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his essay \u201cTime, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,\u201d the British historian\u00a0E.P. Thompson<\/a>\u00a0invokes Madagascar, where time was measured by \u201ca rice cooking\u201d (about half an hour) or \u201cthe frying of a locust\u201d (a moment), and tells of some native communities that spoke of how a \u201cman died in less than the time in which maize is not yet completely roasted\u201d (less than fifteen minutes)<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fossil fuels sped up time (via work demands, travel and mobility opportunities, the ease of obtaining objects, stuff).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe psychological results of carboniferous capitalism\u2014the lowered morale, the expectation of getting something for nothing, the disregard for a balanced mode of production and consumption, the habituation to wreckage and debris as part of the normal human environment\u2014all of these results were plainly mischievous.\u201d\u00a0<\/em> (Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization<\/em>, 1934)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cGlobal warming is a sun mercilessly projecting a new light onto history,\u201d writes Andreas Malm in\u00a0Fossil Capital, a history of steam power. \u201cIf we wait some time longer and then demolish the fossil economy in one giant blow, it would still cast a shadow far into the future: emissions slashed to zero, the sea might continue to rise for many hundreds of years.\u201d By burning up the past, we imperil everything to come.

We can see the danger in the environment around us. Nature\u2019s timekeeping methods are increasingly confused; delicately evolved biological clocks erratically speed up or slow down.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is another danger, and that is the human capacity to keep two sets of books, in terms of temporal accounting. Neither looks too far back or to the side; each book circulates around the economy of ourselves: our life spans, our generational entitlements (or traumas), and our right-now attachment to our “rights’ to fully enact a techno-utopian present. Taylor talks about biological mismatch theory: the desynchronization of biological clocks from current climatological realities; but capitalocene humans also evince mismatches between our brains’ capacities and the task at hand, to think beyond our selves, beyond the moment, in an enduring way, one that cannot be unfelt. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Humans) are out of sync with everything on earth and even with one another. There are 7.7 billion human beings and counting, each of us possessing a kind of inner clock, a unique expression of lived time. For\u00a0Homo sapiens<\/em>, time is strange not only because it is relative, as\u00a0Albert Einstein<\/a>\u00a0and others revealed, but because it is subjective; it is not only biological, like the clocks of flowers and trees, but also psychological. Our personal experiences of time are inconsistent, mutable. In childhood a month can linger for an eternity; for someone in middle age, a season unspools at a disorienting clip.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

P<\/i>art of the anxiety many of us feel around climate change is the fact that no one knows what will happen next. But perhaps that\u2019s the wrong way to think about it. The ancient Greek root\u00a0chronos<\/strong>\u00a0means chronological time, a sequential unfolding. But the ancient Greeks complemented it with\u00a0kairos<\/strong>, which meant a propitious moment, the time for decision or action\u2014a term that in modern Greek has coincidentally come to mean weather. Perhaps the opportune time to intervene is fleeting, like a passing thunderstorm or the peak of spring, and we risk a mismatch by striking too late.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

From first breath, each of us is bound in a complex web of relationships that transcend the current moment. Thinking of time as chronological might be part of what is holding us back from finding a sustainable path. Past, present, future\u2014climate change combines all these registers at once. Time is not an arrow, relentlessly moving forward, but something circular and strange, more akin to \u201ca lake in which the past, present, and future exist,\u201d to quote the Potawatomi botanist\u00a0Robin Wall Kimmerer<\/a>, than a rushing river. We need a new vocabulary and new understandings<\/strong>\u2014or maybe we need to revive concepts and traditions unjustly deemed relics of an outmoded, obsolete age by a dominant culture invested in their disappearance.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Taylor goes on to describe the time taken in Vancouver to save the Squamish language from extinction, and how many indigenous people believe that the equality<\/strong> of life we had before colonization was much better than we have now.\u00a0<\/em>(I hope that was in no way a typo). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Astra Taylor’s magnificent 2019 text, Out of Time, for Laphams’ climate issue talks about all the temporalities the earth operates on, and how humans manage to or willfully experience so few. We are surrounded by chemical, geophysical, and biological clocks, yet Capitalism\u2019s clock ticks loudest in our ear I’d add: the time of a coal … <\/p>\n

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