Notes on Time, Part 3
Apropos of conversations about time and temporality (Part 1 and Part 2), Abigail Green reviews Christopher Clark's Time and Power: Visions of History in German Politics from the Thirty Years' War to the Third Reich ("Prophetic Chronoscape," London Review of Books, vol. 42, no. 6, March 19, 2020, p. 13-14):
This is tangentially something I'm trying to think through in the book project (although I've not considered how that project connects to the 'temporal turn'), but this question of time, power, and perception has been on my mind a lot over the past two weeks. How many different understandings of time circulate around us? One of the opening exercises I try to do with students in geography courses is to ask them to think about all of the different places we occupy simultaneously. At any one time, we operate within a linked set of places - ranging from our intimate bodies to the globe to even the universe. And what seems to matter at any one time is not so much the question of 'Where are we?' as it is, 'How do we agree to share the same place?'
So I suppose what current events are reminding me is the importance of also asking: How do we agree to share the same relationship to time? And that relationship both involves how we conceptualize the relationship between the past, the present, and the future and the kinds of obligations that that conceptualization of time confers. After all, if you think - as I do - that the world in which we live today is (at least in part) the product of injustices and exclusions in the past, then we have a responsibility in the present to engage with those histories in order to create a more just and more inclusive future.
But that's not, of course, the only way of relating to the past - let bygones be bygones, let the past die, the past is never even past, etcetera. I'm thinking about Watchmen, and about the really remarkable way that that show stages a conflict between different experiences of time - how its characters grapple with trauma, violence, loss, responsibility. [And then there's a whole different set of questions: What does time look like to a virus? What does time look like if we decenter the human?]
The 'temporal turn,' which has recently become fashionable among historians, looks at the interplay between an individual's subjective experience of the world and the temporal systems that surround them. These systems are generated, on the one hand, by the infrastructure of modernity - clocks, railways, the internet - and, on the other, by ideas about stasis and change, and the past, present, and future.As she describes Clark's project, the book is an attempt to consider "what time meant to those who wielded power." [See also Sam Mustafa's H-Net review.]
This is tangentially something I'm trying to think through in the book project (although I've not considered how that project connects to the 'temporal turn'), but this question of time, power, and perception has been on my mind a lot over the past two weeks. How many different understandings of time circulate around us? One of the opening exercises I try to do with students in geography courses is to ask them to think about all of the different places we occupy simultaneously. At any one time, we operate within a linked set of places - ranging from our intimate bodies to the globe to even the universe. And what seems to matter at any one time is not so much the question of 'Where are we?' as it is, 'How do we agree to share the same place?'
So I suppose what current events are reminding me is the importance of also asking: How do we agree to share the same relationship to time? And that relationship both involves how we conceptualize the relationship between the past, the present, and the future and the kinds of obligations that that conceptualization of time confers. After all, if you think - as I do - that the world in which we live today is (at least in part) the product of injustices and exclusions in the past, then we have a responsibility in the present to engage with those histories in order to create a more just and more inclusive future.
But that's not, of course, the only way of relating to the past - let bygones be bygones, let the past die, the past is never even past, etcetera. I'm thinking about Watchmen, and about the really remarkable way that that show stages a conflict between different experiences of time - how its characters grapple with trauma, violence, loss, responsibility. [And then there's a whole different set of questions: What does time look like to a virus? What does time look like if we decenter the human?]
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