Whose Time? Which Temporality?
Metadata
Highlights
- Pre-industrial culture was synchronized by the rhythms of nature, rhythms which were often imbued with sacral significance (a unity suggested by the shared root of cult, culture, and cultivate). Industrial culture was, as Lewis Mumford observed, driven not by the steam-engine but by the clock. Industrial time overthrew pre-industrial time—agricultural time, if you like—but yielded a new set of rhythms and patterns, with the 9-5 workday perhaps at its heart. Mass media, which is to say industrialized media, supplied its own public temporalities to the industrial age, a new quasi-sacral calendar with daily, seasonal, and yearly rituals, some of which were artificial simulations of the old pre-industrial rituals. (View Highlight)
- So how then do we understand the temporal heart beating out the rhythm of digital culture? I’d hazard the following thesis for disputation: digital culture is defined precisely by the fact that it exhibits no discernible temporal rhythm, and many of our social disorders, from the deprivations of private life to the disintegration of public life and the apparent stagnation of culture, stem from this fact. (View Highlight)
- This experience, however, is not a given for most of us. As I described earlier, we tend to transition from one fully lit space to another until suddenly, harshly even, we turn off the lights for the night. Consequently, as Kohák observed, “Surrounded by artifacts and constructs, we tend to lose sight, literally as well as metaphorically, of the rhythm of the day and the night, of the phases of the moon and the change of seasons, of the life of the cosmos and of our place therein.” (View Highlight)
- What I mean is this: to sit and observe the patterns of the non-human world—day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year—is to be reminded of how little depends on us, how much goes on without us, and how the world will carry on after us.
4
Perhaps the anxiety of control emerges in us to the same degree that we blind ourselves to the rhythms and patterns of the non-human world, the same world, of course, to which we all belong. (View Highlight)
- As an example, Kohák observed that “we can speak of a right time only in the matrix of natural time, the rhythm of human life and the cycle of the seasons. Here there is a time to be born, a time to rejoice and a time to mourn; there is also a time to die. On an infinite line of uniform numbered moments, however, the very notion of a ‘right’ time becomes wholly unintelligible.” To take the measure of something does not guarantee that we will understand its meaning, in fact, it may very well prevent us from doing so. (View Highlight)
- This architecture “continuously confirms and maintains the same structures of power that drain, tire, and exploit other people’s time, while elevating one group’s sense of temporal importance.” (View Highlight)
- temporal architecture—let us call it the temporal architecture of consumerist productivity—drains, tires, and exploits. This is so because this elaborate temporal architecture is still synced either to the rhythms of the machine or to the rhythmless effusions of digital culture. To put it another way, the temporal architecture of consumerist productivity is an example of what Jacques Ellul long ago called “human techniques.” These were the techniques (therapy, pharmacology, entertainment, etc.) that became necessary to apply to human beings when the human lifeworld was turned into a machine for the production of efficiency. But the techniques ultimately fail because they are not, in fact, ordered to the good of the human being or human communities. They are applied for the sake of the larger techno-economic system within which the human is but one component. (View Highlight)
- The temporal architecture of consumerist productivity also fails because it is almost always individualist. It carves out a temporal oasis for one within the otherwise inhuman or chaotic temporalities which make their demands of us. They tend not to create a communal time within which friendships may form and flourish. Neither do they generate public time within which political action may unfold.
5
Indeed, I’d put it more starkly. It is not simply that they do not provide for communal time or public time, they actively inhibit the emergence of such times (View Highlight)
- Note: capitalist, linear time as active stiflers of communal time and public time for collective action
- But Kohák adds that “to think of them as a triumph over the darkness, however, is far more problematic.” The emphasis for Kohák is on the word triumph suggesting conquest or vanquishment. “We have thought in those terms for so long,” he adds, “that night has come to appear alien and threatening, an enemy to be banished, no longer a place of our being.”
In this same spirit, he offers the following counsel: “It is good, deeply good, to kindle a light in the darkness, though not against it.”
That is, I think, a profoundly wise admonition. The devil is always, always, in the details, of course. But in this image, I think we can find a way of thinking through the whole of our relationship to technology, particularly with respect to how we imagine our standing in the world as it is mediated through technology. (View Highlight)
- As quaint as they may seem, consider, by way of illustration, the candle.
“The house is still dark and at peace,” Kohák notes somewhere along the way, “only over the table a golden circle of light inserts a sphere of human doing, at peace with the enfolding darkness.” “The lights of recent years, gas lights and electric lights, are qualitatively different,” he notes by contrast. “They flood the room, giving us the godlike power of banishing the night.”
One vanquishes, the other harmonizes; one disperses, the other gathers. (View Highlight)
- As quaint as they may seem, consider, by way of illustration, the candle.
“The house is still dark and at peace,” Kohák notes somewhere along the way, “only over the table a golden circle of light inserts a sphere of human doing, at peace with the enfolding darkness.” “The lights of recent years, gas lights and electric lights, are qualitatively different,” he notes by contrast. “They flood the room, giving us the godlike power of banishing the night.”
One vanquishes, the other harmonizes; one disperses, the other gathers. (View Highlight)
- But I find myself reaching beyond such concerns to something more ambivalent and amorphous, toward not just the healthy but the good, toward a deep recalibration of our being in the world according to a different order of time. And perhaps in thinking again about the meaning of our experience of light and dark and, perhaps especially, the transitions between the two, we can discern a different set of rhythms. “We are not only creatures of the light,” Kohák reminds us. “We are creatures of the rhythm of day and night, and the night, too, is our dwelling place.”
For my part, I decided at the start of this year that I would make an effort to get outside, even if only for a few moments, during dusk as the day slowly yields to the night. It’s been a good practice. I commend it to you, not that you may thereby be better prepared to resolve the conflicting claims laid upon you by industrial and digital time, but so that you may begin to feel another time altogether. (View Highlight)
- Kohák writes of his philosophical mentors, especially Husserl and Riceour: “Their stance was one of wonder, not of sophistication; the task they undertook was one of articulation—and their virtue was naïveté, a willingness to see before theorizing, to encounter the wonder of being rather than enclose themselves in cunningly devised theories. (View Highlight)
Whose Time? Which Temporality?
Metadata
Highlights
- Pre-industrial culture was synchronized by the rhythms of nature, rhythms which were often imbued with sacral significance (a unity suggested by the shared root of cult, culture, and cultivate). Industrial culture was, as Lewis Mumford observed, driven not by the steam-engine but by the clock. Industrial time overthrew pre-industrial time—agricultural time, if you like—but yielded a new set of rhythms and patterns, with the 9-5 workday perhaps at its heart. Mass media, which is to say industrialized media, supplied its own public temporalities to the industrial age, a new quasi-sacral calendar with daily, seasonal, and yearly rituals, some of which were artificial simulations of the old pre-industrial rituals. (View Highlight)
- So how then do we understand the temporal heart beating out the rhythm of digital culture? I’d hazard the following thesis for disputation: digital culture is defined precisely by the fact that it exhibits no discernible temporal rhythm, and many of our social disorders, from the deprivations of private life to the disintegration of public life and the apparent stagnation of culture, stem from this fact. (View Highlight)
- This experience, however, is not a given for most of us. As I described earlier, we tend to transition from one fully lit space to another until suddenly, harshly even, we turn off the lights for the night. Consequently, as Kohák observed, “Surrounded by artifacts and constructs, we tend to lose sight, literally as well as metaphorically, of the rhythm of the day and the night, of the phases of the moon and the change of seasons, of the life of the cosmos and of our place therein.” (View Highlight)
- What I mean is this: to sit and observe the patterns of the non-human world—day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year—is to be reminded of how little depends on us, how much goes on without us, and how the world will carry on after us.
4
Perhaps the anxiety of control emerges in us to the same degree that we blind ourselves to the rhythms and patterns of the non-human world, the same world, of course, to which we all belong. (View Highlight)
- As an example, Kohák observed that “we can speak of a right time only in the matrix of natural time, the rhythm of human life and the cycle of the seasons. Here there is a time to be born, a time to rejoice and a time to mourn; there is also a time to die. On an infinite line of uniform numbered moments, however, the very notion of a ‘right’ time becomes wholly unintelligible.” To take the measure of something does not guarantee that we will understand its meaning, in fact, it may very well prevent us from doing so. (View Highlight)
- This architecture “continuously confirms and maintains the same structures of power that drain, tire, and exploit other people’s time, while elevating one group’s sense of temporal importance.” (View Highlight)
- temporal architecture—let us call it the temporal architecture of consumerist productivity—drains, tires, and exploits. This is so because this elaborate temporal architecture is still synced either to the rhythms of the machine or to the rhythmless effusions of digital culture. To put it another way, the temporal architecture of consumerist productivity is an example of what Jacques Ellul long ago called “human techniques.” These were the techniques (therapy, pharmacology, entertainment, etc.) that became necessary to apply to human beings when the human lifeworld was turned into a machine for the production of efficiency. But the techniques ultimately fail because they are not, in fact, ordered to the good of the human being or human communities. They are applied for the sake of the larger techno-economic system within which the human is but one component. (View Highlight)
- The temporal architecture of consumerist productivity also fails because it is almost always individualist. It carves out a temporal oasis for one within the otherwise inhuman or chaotic temporalities which make their demands of us. They tend not to create a communal time within which friendships may form and flourish. Neither do they generate public time within which political action may unfold.
5
Indeed, I’d put it more starkly. It is not simply that they do not provide for communal time or public time, they actively inhibit the emergence of such times (View Highlight)
- Note: capitalist, linear time as active stiflers of communal time and public time for collective action
- But Kohák adds that “to think of them as a triumph over the darkness, however, is far more problematic.” The emphasis for Kohák is on the word triumph suggesting conquest or vanquishment. “We have thought in those terms for so long,” he adds, “that night has come to appear alien and threatening, an enemy to be banished, no longer a place of our being.”
In this same spirit, he offers the following counsel: “It is good, deeply good, to kindle a light in the darkness, though not against it.”
That is, I think, a profoundly wise admonition. The devil is always, always, in the details, of course. But in this image, I think we can find a way of thinking through the whole of our relationship to technology, particularly with respect to how we imagine our standing in the world as it is mediated through technology. (View Highlight)
- As quaint as they may seem, consider, by way of illustration, the candle.
“The house is still dark and at peace,” Kohák notes somewhere along the way, “only over the table a golden circle of light inserts a sphere of human doing, at peace with the enfolding darkness.” “The lights of recent years, gas lights and electric lights, are qualitatively different,” he notes by contrast. “They flood the room, giving us the godlike power of banishing the night.”
One vanquishes, the other harmonizes; one disperses, the other gathers. (View Highlight)
- As quaint as they may seem, consider, by way of illustration, the candle.
“The house is still dark and at peace,” Kohák notes somewhere along the way, “only over the table a golden circle of light inserts a sphere of human doing, at peace with the enfolding darkness.” “The lights of recent years, gas lights and electric lights, are qualitatively different,” he notes by contrast. “They flood the room, giving us the godlike power of banishing the night.”
One vanquishes, the other harmonizes; one disperses, the other gathers. (View Highlight)
- But I find myself reaching beyond such concerns to something more ambivalent and amorphous, toward not just the healthy but the good, toward a deep recalibration of our being in the world according to a different order of time. And perhaps in thinking again about the meaning of our experience of light and dark and, perhaps especially, the transitions between the two, we can discern a different set of rhythms. “We are not only creatures of the light,” Kohák reminds us. “We are creatures of the rhythm of day and night, and the night, too, is our dwelling place.”
For my part, I decided at the start of this year that I would make an effort to get outside, even if only for a few moments, during dusk as the day slowly yields to the night. It’s been a good practice. I commend it to you, not that you may thereby be better prepared to resolve the conflicting claims laid upon you by industrial and digital time, but so that you may begin to feel another time altogether. (View Highlight)
- Kohák writes of his philosophical mentors, especially Husserl and Riceour: “Their stance was one of wonder, not of sophistication; the task they undertook was one of articulation—and their virtue was naïveté, a willingness to see before theorizing, to encounter the wonder of being rather than enclose themselves in cunningly devised theories. (View Highlight)