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Enduring Time
By Lisa Baraitser
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY
iii
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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ISBN : HB : 9781350008120
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iv
To Simon
For Endurance and Care
v
vi
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
List of Images x
Introduction 1
1 Staying 23
2 Maintaining 47
3 Repeating 69
4 Delaying 93
5 Enduring 115
6 Recalling 139
7 Remaining 159
8 Ending 179
Bibliography 189
Index 213
vii
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to the kindness, time, and precious thoughts that Denise Riley,
Jackie Sumell, Barbara Loftus and Mierle Laderman Ukeles gave me, whose work
is the subject of this book.
I am grateful to both Birkbeck, University of London, and the Independent
Social Research Foundation, both rare institutions that still preserve the odd
idea that we need time to think and write. Two periods of research leave, funded
by each, enabled me to do just that.
Colleagues at Birkbeck, in particular Sasha Roseneil who mentored me
through the first stage of this project, and Miriam Zukas who was there
throughout, provided crucial support. Gail Lewis has been both generous and
thoughtful in her institutional role, and combined with final pep talks from
Leticia Sabsay, Laura Salisbury, Rachel Thomson and Imogen Tyler, allowed the
project to finally come to an end. Thanks also to Yasmeen Narayan, Lynne Segal,
Margarita Palacios and Amber Jacobs for many psychosocial conversations.
Special thanks to Liza Thompson at Bloomsbury for her tireless energy, editorial
support and belief in this project, and to Stella Sandford for close reading, and
the careful attention that philosophers can bring to those of us who come to
philosophy as willing amateurs. I am grateful to Judith Butler, for her kindness
and support, her ongoing attachment to a psychoanalytic sensibility, and for her
exemplary capacity to think things through.
I have been immensely lucky to have had a chance to speak to many friends,
colleagues and students about this project along its way. My gratitude, in no
particular order, goes to Melissa Midgen, Shaul Bar-Haim, Gill Partington,
Michelle Bastian, Sigal Spigel, Jane Haugh, Will Brook, Katie Gentile, Noreen
Giffney, Daniel Pick, Raluca Soreanu, Jess Edwards, Derek Hook, Samuel Bibby,
Stephen Frosh and Oliver Decker. Thanks also to Michael, Marion, Paula,
Alexandra, Joel and Saul Baraitser. They have been most patient!
Thanks to the organizers, panellists and audience members of the following
events where I spoke about the work as this project developed: The Fabric: Social
Reproduction, Women’s History and Art, University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh
College of Art, Social Science as Communication, ISRF, University of Edinburgh,
Unpunctual Encounters/Bottom Natures, CGP Gallery, London, Modernism’s
viii
Acknowledgements ix
Cover Art: Reproduced with kind permission of the Raqs Media Collective.
x
Introduction
Time’s suspension
In Time Lived, Without its Flow the poet and philosopher Denise Riley describes
the sudden arresting of time that followed the death of her adult son:
A sudden death, for the one left behind, does such violence to the experienced
‘flow’ of time that it stops, and then slowly wells up into a large pool. Instead of
the old line of forward time, now something like a globe holds you. You live
inside a great circle with no rim.
Riley 2012, 10
The new time Riley found herself living was neither stopped time nor
deadened time, but something like time’s ‘suspension’. Time conceived of as a
viscous fluid takes on a different form, no longer a line with direction or purpose
but a pool, the welling up of present time that will not pass and has no rim.
Suspended time allows the seeping of the materiality of time into consciousness.
It pools, like a great pocket of blood, that both holds and suspends time as
motion.
If time can be lived without its flow, then what can this suspended form of
time tell us about how we are currently living time? And if living such time
without its flow has something to do with persistent attachments we maintain
with others, including those who are dead, then what might suspended time tell
us about care, and our capacities to go on caring when time has pooled?
Over the time it has taken me to write this book I’ve developed a series of
short-hands to respond to the question ‘what are you working on’. It is a question
that implies a project, as Simon Bayly tells us, that recognizes the ‘futural meaning’
that work brings us, even as it staves off that future time that is the end of the
project (2013). ‘I’m working on things that take too long’, I reply, quietly meaning
the writing of this book and more overtly meaning practices of care that go on
and on – looking after the dead through practices of grief; mothering; keeping
1
2 Enduring Time
safe political ideas that no longer have efficacy in the now in the belief that one
day they may be useful; the ‘useless’ open-ended practice of psychoanalysis; all
sorts of ‘maintenance’ work that props up the lives of others and the social
institutions that support them. ‘I’m working on the feeling of always running out
of time, of feeling rushed yet impeded at the same time’, I go on, trying to get
hold of the stop-startness of everything I do. ‘I’m working on what it’s like to
wait, and go on waiting, and whether watchful waiting has anything to do with
gender, and with care’. The answers seemed to generate a momentary glimmer of
recognition – ‘oh yes, I’ve never got enough time’, which then gave way to ‘but
anyway, the world is running out of time’. After this exchange of banalities that
would move almost seamlessly from the quotidian experience of time slipping
through our fingers, to the pending end of the world brought about by the
ravages of global capitalism and the realities of climate disaster, the glimmer
would fade and the idea of working on the question of time and its relation to
care took on a distinctly unappealing veneer. It seemed to repel people, especially
my own stasis, and inability to bring the project to a conclusion. ‘You’re not still
working on that book on time’?
This, then, is an unfinishable book about time’s suspension – modes of waiting,
staying, delaying, enduring, persisting, repeating, maintaining, preserving and
remaining – that produce felt experiences of time not passing. These are affectively
dull or obdurate temporalities. They have none of the allure of the time of
rupture, epochal shift, or change. They involve social practices that are mostly
arduous, boring, and mundane, or simply unbearable. Yet, in staying attentive to
time not passing I have been pushed to think more carefully about the concept
of ‘care’, especially how we might attempt to take care of time when it seems to
pool, dammed up by a foreclosed future that no longer brings the promise of the
now and an historical past saturated with unrepresentable trauma. Although
often common and ordinary – Riley points out that millions of people worldwide
outlive their children, living through the death of someone they relate to as their
child, whatever their age (Riley and Baraitser 2015) – we might view such
quotidian experiences as exceptional both in their capacity to tip us into
experiences of temporal suspension, and through their invocation of temporal
imaginaries that have a tangential relation to those that characterize ‘the capitalist
everyday’, thereby stilling, even if they don’t manage to disrupt, modes of
production based on utility or exchange. Tracking the survival and quality of
these affectively dull yet persistent temporalities within what Elizabeth Povinelli
describes as ‘the seams of capitalism’ has turned out to be the project of this book
(2011). Staying, maintaining, repeating, delaying, enduring, waiting, recalling
Introduction 3
and remaining are forms of time’s suspension that tell us something about care
in what Žižek rather alarmingly calls ‘the end times’ (2010), or what Eric Cazdyn
describes as ‘the new chronic’, the ‘dull soreness of a meantime with no end’
(2012, 13).
Kimberly Hutchings, in her account of the role of unacknowledged narratives
of time in theories of world politics, attunes us to the patterns of categorization
that structure the temporality of social life (2008). She points to the coexistence
in most cultural formations of constructions of both everyday and exceptional
time. In European cultures these map on to the distinction between the Greek
terms chronos, the time we can measure associated with the inevitable shared
framing events of birth and death, and kairos, the transformational action of
time that interrupts chronos with the new or unexpected. The generalization of
clock time that began with wage labour and modern market relations in the
sixteenth century brought a conceptualization of time as neutral, constant and
measurable. Subsequent theories of thermodynamics in physics, and evolution
in biology, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries developed accounts of
time as infinite, linear, unidirectional and irreversible. And yet, Hutchings argues,
in modern Europe alongside chronotic time there have always been temporal
traces that rely on a ‘keirotic tension’ with infinite linear time. These include
categories such as beginning, ending, novelty, repetition, stasis and change.
Theories of world history that conceptualize time as static, for instance, or as
repetitively regressing after periods of progress into periods of decline, interrupt
narratives of time as neutral or undifferentiated flow, and remain at work,
Hutchings argues, in contemporary interpretations of world politics. And yet,
she warns:
If the ‘our’ is to have any meaning in the normative judgment of ‘our times’ in the
world-political present, then explanation and normative judgment of ‘our times’
has to become sensitive to a multiplicity of times and temporalities.
Hutchings 2008, 157
1
See Browne 2014 for a discussion of the distinction Fabian makes between synchronicity,
contemporaneity and coevalness.
Introduction 5
Living in the wake on a global level means living the disastrous time and
effects of continued marked migrations, Mediterranean and Caribbean disasters,
trans-American and -African migration, structural adjustment imposed by the
International Monetary Fund that continues imperialisms/colonialisms, and
more.
Sharpe 2016a, 15
The task, as she sees it, for Black thought, and for thinking itself, is to remain
in the wake, to occupy the ‘infinitive’ grammar of being ‘in’ the wake in order to
both inhabit and rupture it. This, for Sharpe, is a mode of care that attends to the
afterlife of the past as it refuses to pass. ‘Care’ understood through the figure of
the wake becomes itself a problem for thinking, and she maintains that both
‘thinking and care need to stay in the wake’. Just as queer thought has advocated
staying ‘in’ non-developmental time rather than passing through it, as a way
to disrupt what Elizabeth Freeman refers to as chromonormative developmental
time (2010), and feminist thought has long advocated a theoretical engagement
with the repetitive laborious time of social reproduction rather than its simple
repudiation, so what Sharpe calls ‘Black non/being in the world’ is what calls
thought to re-think itself as a mode of care. These are all theoretical articulations
of what I’m calling ‘unbecoming time’; time that pools without a rim. The project
of this book is to think about the varied conditions of time’s suspension in an
attempt to understand how to continue when time has stopped. Veering away
from rupture and disruption, it attempts to stay close to the experience of going
on, with, and in time that will not unfold.
This is not a timely book, or perhaps no longer a timely book. The fact that the
concepts of time and care that I am working with already feel ‘old’ says something
about the ways in which any notion of a ‘new’ twenty-first century ‘time crisis’
has itself become so quickly commonplace, or indeed perhaps misplaced.2 As
Judy Wajcman puts it in the opening to Pressed for Time, ‘There is a widespread
perception that life these days is faster than it used to be. We hear constant
laments that we live too fast, that time is scarce, that the pace of life is spiralling
2
See Roitman’s Anti-Crisis (2013) for a deconstruction of the analytical work of the concept of
crisis and how it functions as a narrative device to raise certain political questions and foreclose
others.
6 Enduring Time
out of control’ (2015, 1). Yet the notion of ‘time crisis’ arises at a particular
historical juncture and is the product of a shift in temporal experience that the
German historian Reinhardt Koselleck located in the fifteenth century in his
analysis of modern progressive time, in which the idea of progress itself is built
on a radical break or rupture between experience (the past) and expectation (the
yet to come) (2002, 2004). Modern time renders the past old and obsolete in
order for the new to emerge, precisely through its radical separation from the
past disparaged as past. Progress is the replacement of the old with the new,
leaving modern European time as a kind of suspension between what is rendered
as a dead past, and a progressive future that holds all the promise of betterment
in a generation always beyond our own. In the time of European modernity
what is new is produced at the cost of what was once new and now made old.3
And yet anachronism – what is ‘against’ time, what stubbornly remains within
the present as the no-longer-new, the out-of-date, the obdurate idea, practice, or
thought – nevertheless holds out something ‘productive’ even as it undoes the
very idea of productivity in terms of commodity, market, utility, labour, exchange.
It is not so much about simply counting the many costs of progressive time,
although this is a vital thing to do,4 but about noticing that modern time itself
contains within it obdurate strands of the anachronistic; of slowed, stilled or
stuck time.5
Movement, in other words, has always been the key to ‘modern time’. European
modernity is traditionally characterized by the shock, exhilaration and anxiety
produced by speed and travel in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the
contraction of an expansive time and space and the ‘future shock’ brought about
by technological developments and rapid rates of social change that gave rise to
the various aesthetic modernist movements in Europe and the parts of the world
3
Peter Osborne, in his seminal book, The Politics of Time (1995), worked through the semantic and
conceptual difficulties of speaking about modernity and postmodernity, for instance, as distinctive
historical periods. Despite ‘modernity’ specifically signalling a period of ‘new time consciousness’
that inaugurates a series of breaks or ruptures in the development of societies, this narrative itself
presumes an homogenous continuum of historical time, ‘across which comparative judgements
about social development may be made in abstraction from all qualitative temporal differences’
(Osborne 1995, 1). ‘Modernity’ then becomes fixed as a discrete historical period within its own
temporal scheme, and left stranded in the past. The replacement of ‘modernity’ with ‘the
contemporary’ fails to help matters, just as the shift from modernity to postmodernity ended up in
a semantic paradox. If the ‘modern’, Osborne argued, in its primary sense, is simply that ‘pertaining
to the present and recent times’, or ‘originating in the current age or period’, then ‘postmodernity’
was the name for a ‘new’ modernity, a kind of conceptual paradox that threw both terms into crisis.
4
See for example the ‘post-growth economy’ literature that counts the economic, social, political and
individual costs of the principle of perpetual economic growth. Examples include Banerjee 2003,
2008, Bauman 2012, Bjerg 2016, Carson 2000, D’Alisa et al. 2015, Daly 1996, Gorz 2012, Jackson
2009, and Johnsen et al. 2017.
5
See Koepnick 2014 and Salisbury 2008, 2017 on ‘slow modernism’.
Introduction 7
6
See Kern 2003, Koepnick 2014, Sheppard 2000.
7
See Rosa 2013, Rosa and Scheurman 2009, Virilio 1977, 1999, 2010.
8
See Nixon 2011 for an account of slow violence in relation to the environmentalism of the poor.
9
See Berlant 2011, Davis 2016, Graeber 2011, Puar 2009.
10
See Nixon 2011 and Rose, van Dooren and Chrulew, 2017.
8 Enduring Time
[B]orn with punk, the 1970s and ’80s witnessed the beginning of the slow
cancellation of the future. Now those bizarre predictions have become true. The
idea that the future has disappeared is of course rather whimsical, as while I
write these lines the future is not stopping to unfold [. . .] But when I say ‘future’
I am not referring to the direction of time. I am thinking, rather, of the
psychological perception, which emerged in the cultural situation of progressive
modernity, the cultural expectations that were fabricated during the long period
of modern civilization, reaching a peak in the years after the Second World War.
Those expectations were shaped in the conceptual frameworks of an ever
progressing development [. . .] We do not believe in the future in the same way.
Of course, we know that a time after the present is going to come, but we don’t
expect that this time will fulfill the promises of the present.
Berardi 2011, 24
11
For examples of what Sharma calls ‘speed theory’ see Armitage and Roberts 2003, Bauman 2012,
Crary 2013, Duffy 2009, Gleick 1999, Harvey 1989, Hassan 2003, Hassan and Purser 2007, Lübbe
2009, Rosa 2003, 2013, Rosa and Scheuerman 2009, Tomlinson 2007, Virilio 1977.
12
See Agamben 1998, Amin 2013, Berardi 2011, Virilio 2005, Žižek 2010.
Introduction 9
in which ‘time consists in an eternal present and, much further away, an inevitable
catastrophe, these two moments showing up distinctly on the registering apparatus
without overlapping or transitional states’ (1996, 70–71). We may argue that ‘the
contraction of the present’ is the collapsing of this sense of the ‘much further
away’ of the catastrophe, and the conceptual separation of these two temporal
moments. This contraction is in part the outcome of a shift from the strict linear
time of the Fordist production line governed by the factory clock, to the post-
Fordist obsession with productivity, creativity, and above all a flexible work-force,
giving rise to a present in which all time – work, social, leisure, family, ‘quality’, or
unemployed time – is penetrated or ‘qualified’ by the logic of work (Cederström
and Fleming 2012). Ivor Southwood, for instance, has described experiences of
the present in globalized network societies as a form of ‘non-stop inertia’, based on
his experience of years of precarious zero-hours contract work in the UK (2011).
Non-stop inertia is the result of the now permanent precariousness and mobility
of populations that are dependent on market-driven technology that must
constantly update itself, leading to a population revving up with nowhere to go.
‘The result is a kind of frenetic inactivity’ (11). Non-stop inertia, then, is the
temporality of downward mobility under conditions of economic austerity;
the search for diminishing viable accommodation, healthcare and welfare; the
temporality of the disabled and the under or unemployed who are kept
permanently busy being assessed for dwindling benefits, or working in low-paid
jobs that maintain steady states of poverty; and work that maintains and services
debt that is designed not to be repayable in the lifetime of the individuals
concerned (Adkins 2012). In this temporal imaginary the present is experienced
as time that is both relentlessly driven and yet refuses to flow. Socially necessary
labour time is not simply crystallized within the commodity, but in post-Fordist
economies where labour is more immaterial and social, time itself, and not just
money, goods, people and information, becomes one of capitalism’s ‘flows’, and
hence is also constantly destroyed, the immanent destruction of capital being as
integral to capitalism’s mechanism as the creation and circulation of value.
And yet, as Stephen Wright argues in his essay on ‘time without qualities’
we urgently need an analysis of ‘public time’ that moves away from the
individualized injunctions to spend ‘quality time’, and produces a more collective
response to what is perceived to be the ‘crisis’ of the present, eviscerated as it is of
both memory and forgetting (2009). ‘Might one not think of public time’, he asks
‘as carving out breathing spots, intervals, transitory breaches in the very core of
collective existence, time slots still unfettered by moral or political discipline?’
(129). Wright’s interest is in cracks in otherwise seamless time. If time now
10 Enduring Time
has various capitalized qualities then what is a time without qualities? What is a
time that is ‘available’, ‘an undisciplined time, a public time whose ideological and
moral density is tolerably low’ (130)? These intervals would constitute the
equivalent to the strange in-between spatial zones in and around cities – derelict
sites, empty parking lots, those bedraggled non-spaces before the city peters out.
Wright wants to know what the temporal equivalence might be to these ‘vague
terrains’, what vague time might feel like, a time between public and private time
that remains indistinct. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s insistence that the sphere
of democracy is always under construction, an interval, that is, between legal and
social identity, then that sphere is also temporal, and the sort of public time
Wright refers to as ‘without qualities’, unqualified and unquantified, is the very
condition of the possibility of democracy, of a sharing of public life (130). We
might then say that what we need is to understand how we come to share time;
an issue of generationality, of lateral as well as vertical relations, and of the
propping up of institutions and practices that make such relations viable.
Enduring Time seeks to respond to the question of how we come to share time.
This means the question of ‘whose time’ haunts the work without ever being fully
resolved. My ‘archive’ is cultural, rather than historical, and constitutes an odd
assemblage of objects that seem to have nothing in common. We will encounter
the work of an artist and political prisoner kept in solitary confinement for 42
years in North America; a British poet whose child has died; an Italian feminist
activist who undergoes a psychoanalysis whilst collecting political testimonies of
the political upheavals of 1968 in the wilderness years of the 1980s; an artist
incarcerated in Brazil for 50 years in an institution for the mentally insane who
makes over 800 artworks with bits of detritus; a feminist performance artist who
spends an entire lifetime paying attention to the disposal of waste in a city by one
social group on behalf of everyone else; a British photographer who graphically
documents his family’s acute poverty in the West Midlands through the 1990s; a
painter who works with her mother’s long forgotten traumatic memories of the
pre-war Nazi period in Germany. I’m no longer sure how these works and their
makers found their way to me, or me to them. The process by which we notice
and choose one thing over another is always conditioned by a process of
repression within the archive and within ourselves as researchers, and failures of
resuscitation of what cannot come to light.13 This failure can be worked with,
worked through, but cannot be overcome. Collectively, however, this eclectic
13
See Derrida 1995 and Hartman 2007 for discussions about memory and forgetting in relation to the
archive.
Introduction 11
archive draws attention to the question ‘whose time’ even as it fails to answer it
sufficiently, to the quality of the time of endurance, and the question of collectivity
itself. My suggestion is that if the ‘our’ of ‘our times’ can be tentatively constituted,
it is not just through loss, as Judith Butler would rightly posit (2004) but also
through paying myopic attention to the ways that ‘we’, as a heterogeneous
community of those ‘who have nothing in common’, to borrow Alphonso Lingis’
phrase (1994), or as ‘communities of the unalike’ to borrow Yasmin Gunaratnam’s
(2013), nevertheless at times, share time.
Unbecoming time
Why give primacy to duration over difference, endurance and persistence over
transgression, the slowness of chronic time over rupture? What might it mean to
deliberately try to think about staying, inertia, lack of the flow of time, lack of
obvious forms of action or psychosocial change, precisely as a way to understand
care, and for care to specifically and paradoxically be understood as itself a mode
of change that requires time not passing?
Two distinct ways of understanding processes of social change that have come
to saturate the humanities and social sciences coalesce around Alain Badiou’s
post-Marxist notion of the event, and those that remain wedded to a Deleuzian
concept of becoming. I do not intend here to give a full account of these
philosophical perspectives, but I want to draw attention to the kinds of idioms or
spatio-temporal forms that they rely on. Badiou’s ‘event’ is paradigmatic of a way
of theorizing change through rupture. It involves the appearance of something
new in a situation that requires the ongoing arduous fidelity to that new situation
in order for that event to signify at the level of historical time. Although Badiou
is concerned to articulate the double temporality of the truth of the event – both
its eternal and historical dimensions – truth remains immanent if it does not
erupt in such a way as to produce historical time. What Badiou calls ‘inconsistent
multiplicities’ in a situation, are strictly undecidable in the moment of the event,
and are only apprehended through what comes to be, brought about by a
supplement to that situation, that supplement being the event itself (2001, 25).
The event compels us to move from ordinary multiple-being to a new way of
being, and on the way to enter into the composing of a subject. Fidelity is thinking
the situation ‘according to’ the event, remaining faithful to the situation as if the
event had occurred, even if we cannot yet be sure, prompting new ways of being
and acting in the situation which bring about concrete changes and hence
12 Enduring Time
historical time. The truth, in other words, is not external to the situation but
both immanent, and simultaneously ‘a break in a situation’: a paradoxical
‘immanent break’ in the situation itself (42). A truth produced by the eventual
supplement of a situation therefore requires a double temporality – an ongoing
process of fidelity and a simultaneous break with whatever language and
knowledge went before. In this sense Badiou employs both the tropes of
persistence and breach, on-go and rupture, although inverting them, so that the
breach does not occur strictly ‘in historical time’, given that there can only be a
history of the eternal, the eternal proceeding from the event. As Meillassoux puts
it, the central paradox of Badiou’s thesis is that ‘there is only a history of truths
insofar as all truth is strictly eternal and impossible to reduce to any relativism’
(2011, 1).
Where Badiou’s tropes are the duality of eternal truths brought about through
the rupture of the event, theories of vitality and becoming that draw on Spinoza,
Bergson and Deleuze posit a pure ontology of motion. From this perspective
being is ‘life’ which is in constant movement, and stasis is simply the antithesis
of life. Bergson’s time, for instance, is a quality immanent in consciousness, a
force. Matter and time cannot be clearly distinguished as matter is always in
motion. The universe is composed of ‘dynamic matter’, understood as duration
made manifest. Because matter is always in motion, time is relationally defined
as the measure of the movement of an object (Grosz 1995, 93), even as Bergson
will insist that duration is mobile, heterogeneous, indistinct, incomplete. Drawing
on this philosophical tradition, Rosi Braidotti maintains that ‘post-finitude’
is infinite change, manifest as relational flows of capital, organic processes,
the human and inhuman, technologies, infrastructures, historically formed
and open ended assemblages that call for an ethics of response to the ‘now’
in order to create more just and open futures, and sustainable becomings (2013).
As a constant process of reassemblage and disassemblage between animal,
human, organic, technical, digital, capitalist and viral, the post-human emerges
from this work as a temporal form that names the constant process of ‘life’.
Even the related articulation of ‘plasticity’ that has surfaced in Catherine
Malabou’s work could be read as a way to understand movement as the
ultimate being of all that is: everything is in the process of transforming and
being transformed, giving and receiving form (2005).14 Whilst this does not
do away with the necessity of fixed entities,15 – being can only ever be in process
14
Her later work supplements plasticity as giving and receiving form, with a notion of destructive
plasticity, a negation without reserve. See Malabou 2012.
Introduction 13
of change through particular entities transforming one another – yet all entities
are plastic.
What does suspended time offer to notions of change as strung out between
the rupture of event and constant becoming? It is not that I am against rupture
or constant motion as ways to understand change. In previous work I have been
particularly concerned to notice the ways that constant interruption, for instance,
can open onto new ways of being and relating in the world (Baraitser, 2009). I
doubt I could possibly sustain a position in which I too did not agree that all
matter is in motion, that stasis is incompatible with life, or that change does not
require some kind of break with the already-existing in order for something new
to emerge. But I do not think these ways of conceptualizing change help us very
much as we live ‘the new chronic’. To pay arduous attention to what has changed
in a situation is absolutely the right thing to do, but when one’s lived experience
is that nothing at all is changing, when ‘something like a globe holds you’ then we
might say we are living in the time of waiting for the event. Similarly, I do not
believe that anyone lives a philosophy of becoming. Philosophies of becoming
are enlivening, intoxicating even, at the level of theory. But they are oddly both
too molecular and too molar to function as an explanation of the quotidian,
which is where I would contend psychosocial life is lived. I rarely feel like a
teaming flux of vibrant matter, even if I can see that this is what I am. I feel slow,
and stuck, and depressed quite a lot of the time. We may not experience ourselves
as flows and ebbs and intensities. We are mediums for these things, for sure, but
the affective experience of living in chronic time is not one, I would suggest, of
becoming.
I am seeking, then, to supplement these two perspectives by staying close to
lived experiences of time that appear neither eventful nor vital, and whose
‘multiplicity’ is overwhelmed by their singularity – the obdurate situation of
poverty that does not change, of incarceration with no end, of the dead who will
not return, of the slow circularity of time on the psychoanalytic couch. My aim
is simply to point towards those quiet rather uneventful processes of psychosocial
stasis that seem to produce change through someone’s capacity to paradoxically
remain faithful (to use Badiou’s term) to the non-event, the not-yet-happening,
indeed to what Badiou would call the situation that is not yet supplemented by
the event. I am drawn to temporal tropes that are linked together by an apparent
lack of dynamism or movement: waiting, staying, delaying, enduring, persisting,
repeating, maintaining, preserving and remaining, in an attempt not so much to
15
The category ‘woman’, still holds, Malabou argues, in Changing Difference, 2011.
14 Enduring Time
find respite from the acceleration of life in digital global capitalism, but to
investigate the potential for transcending the immanence of our own historical
moment in precisely the places that it looks simply impossible to happen, and to
understand this transcendence in terms of something I’m calling ‘care’.
Care
What is the relation between care, time and thinking? What does it mean to try
to think about the relation between care and time in a period in which the
present appears to have contracted? Care is often assumed to be a value, a
practice that takes the form of an affective engagement with others, a
choreography of historical material conditions and institutional arrangements
that enable the process of caring for, and caring about each other and the world.
In Joan Tronto’s early work with Berenice Fisher, she saw care as:
For Tronto, caring reaches out beyond the limits of the relational self to
include forms of action not limited to human action, but a broad spectrum of
ongoing culturally constrained practices and dispositions that have to do with
maintaining, continuing or repairing the world. Yet Elizabeth Povinelli writes
that ‘to care for others is to make a claim; it is to make a small theoretical gesture’
(2011: 160), complicating the idea that care flows out from the carer to the cared-
for, and raising the question of ‘theory’ or thinking as itself a form of care. And
earlier I noted Christina Sharpe’s comment:
‘I want to think “care” as a problem for thought [. . .] thinking needs care (“all
thought is Black thought”) and thinking and care need to stay in the wake’.
Sharpe 2016a, 5
to care involves some idea of a good life, and how such a good life comes into
being, even as such an idea is now ‘frayed’ at best, and that care will fall short of
its materialization.16 Yet to maintain contact with that frayed idea may itself
come to be understood retroactively as a form of careful attention, even when
that small theoretical gesture seems absurd in the temporality of the now.
Drawing on the environmentalist Maria Puig’s recent work (2010, 2012), Thom
van Dooren states:
Time and again I have witnessed how care for some individuals and species
translates into suffering and death for others, the ‘violent-care’ of conservation:
predators and competitors are culled, expendable animals provide food or
enrichment for the endangered, the list goes on. Beyond conservation worlds,
caring is often similarly fraught. In short, care is grounded in all of the
“inescapable troubles of interdependent existences,” and can offer no guarantee
of a “smooth harmonious world.”
van Dooren 2014a, 292
16
See Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011) for an account of the fraying of the promises of the post-war
settlement.
16 Enduring Time
17
See Baraitser 2008, Crittenden 2001, Gilligan 1982, Noddings 1984, Ruddick 1989, Tronto 1993,
2003 and Ungerson 1983 for a fuller discussion of the ethics of care.
18
See Hollway 2006, Sevenhuijsen 1998 and Tronto 1993 and further work on the gendered politics
of care by Esquivel 2014, Lynch 2007, Rummery and Fine 2012 and Wheelock 2001.
19
Roseneil 2004, Sevenhuijsen 1998 and Williams 2001.
Introduction 17
Yet care ethics never seems to fully shake off its entanglement with the
feminine. There has been a return to the figure of the mother, for instance, in
Adriana Cavarero’s notion that care has something to do with posture – an
ethical inclination towards another. Where ‘horrorism’ is Cavarero’s term for a
form of violence that offends the human condition at an ontological, rather than
simply a sociopolitical level, then this ontology must be thought of as one of
‘vulnerability’, whereby we are given over to each other in terms of exposure to
both care and harm (2009). This alternative between care and harm is the
‘generative nucleus’ of horror, a nucleus that contains the core vulnerability of
human life. Horrorism is the infliction of harm precisely where care is most
needed, revealing both the helplessness and what Cavarero calls the ‘dignity’ of
human being. In her recent work on ‘inclination’ she extends this reading of care
through a critique of the upright autoaffective male subject of European
philosophy, calling for an alternative figuration of the ‘inclined’ self (2016). Using
the mother–child relation as a figuration for the inclined self, she understands
care as a dilemma provoked by the utterly dependent other, in which the ‘mother’
chooses to give or receive care.
I didn’t begin this project with a theory of care. Instead I began with an
eclectic archive that seemed to speak to experiences of stuck or suspended time.
But working through them forced the question of care to the surface. And to
think about care, is to think with psychoanalysis, Black thought, and feminist
and queer thought about the way that to care for others makes a claim, a small
theoretical gesture, that may turn out to be the gesture that gives time.
Psychoanalytic time
20
See Bornstein 2001, Dufresne 2004, Mills 2002, Startey 1985, Shorter 1998 and Stepansky 2009, for
accounts of the demise of psychoanalysis.
Introduction 19
Through the figure of melancholia, psychoanalysis has its own internal way of
understanding the attachment that modernity may retain to psychoanalysis, as one
of its objects that it refuses to let go of, mourn the loss of, and move on from. Again,
this links psychoanalysis back to the conditions of its emergence in the modern
era, an idea that is central to Ranjana Khanna’s work that seeks to understand the
relation between psychoanalysis, post-coloniality and modes of criticality (2006,
2011). Putting together the interwar themes of loss and massive population
displacement, she notes the shift between the melancholia of Freud’s 1917 paper, in
which melancholia is distinguished from mourning, and that of the 1923 paper,
‘The Ego and the Id’, in which melancholia becomes the very condition of the
formation of the ego (2011). The critical agency that is precipitated in melancholia
‘proper’, that accompanies an unknowable and unmournable loss, is a self-critical
agency, Khanna argues, without recourse to authenticity, nativism or originality, an
agency that remains ‘in relation to an unknown and perpetual alterity’ (2011, 257).
The super-ego of the later 1923 paper, in contrast, is a regulatory mechanism
through which conscience ‘violently imposes itself on the ego’ (257). For Khanna,
the critical agency of melancholia proper allows us to theorize the colony, for
instance, without a discourse of a romanticized pre-colonial ‘nature’ or ‘culture’
destroyed by the colonizing power. This discourse would evoke a lost utopia that
mires post-colonial studies in a temporal romanticism, harking after a ‘prehistory’
that itself borders on a racist discourse. Instead, the loss is of an alternative future:
The loss is not of identity then, but of a longed for ideal, such as decolonization
or internationalism, resulting in self-berating, and a ‘diseased’ critical agency that
Khanna maintains is crucial for post-colonial studies.
The same, we could say, for psychoanalysis itself. In relation to its lost ideal of
clinical ‘usefulness’ and ‘validity’ in contemporary culture, we could say its
internal, self-berating, diseased critical agency is paradoxically what keeps it
chronically alive. Psychoanalysis survives as both colonial legacy and post-
colonial critique, as Anderson et al. suggest, but also as an anachronistic hope for
a form of recovery from an illness never quite articulated, never fully known,
and maintained through psychoanalysis’ own internal critique. We could say
that psychoanalysis is both chronic illness and chronic cure. It is within this
understanding of psychoanalysis that I follow its thread throughout this book.
20 Enduring Time
Enduring time
Enduring Time is a series of essays, short stories perhaps, on the temporal tropes
of staying, maintaining, repeating, waiting, delaying, preserving, enduring and
recalling. Rather than weaving a sustained argument I’ve tried to approach
suspended time through a number of ‘situations’ – a poet’s child dies, a painter
has coffee with her 80-year-old mother, a photographer takes pictures of his
family, an historian undergoes psychoanalysis, an artist straps a camera to her
wrist and sends images of her life over 24 hours to a political prisoner who has
lived in solitary confinement for 30 years, a man who is incarcerated in a mental
institution for 50 years makes piles of sculptures. It is not so much that these
situations are ‘unpacked’ but rather that they are read with, and alongside,
psychoanalytic, feminist, queer and post-colonial theories that are themselves
underpinned by a quiet affinity to ideas of time that fails to unfold. Some of these
situations produce art works that might be collected under the terms ‘social art’,
‘social practice’ or ‘socially engaged art’.21 Other works may be better situated
within more traditional definitions of sculpture, painting, photography or ‘art
brut’. And some of the situations I work with do not produce ‘art’, but a text, for
instance that hovers between anecdote, sociology, history and philosophy, or that
elusive form, the literary essay. I would prefer to gather these works, and the
theories I bring around them, under the rubric of ‘psychosocial practices’.
Although not subsumed by their content, they point us towards forms of
maternal grief-work; protest practices of ‘sitting-in’ or inter-generational ‘waiting’
as a politics of change; the never ending work of the world’s sanitation workers
and ‘useless’ attempts to disaggregate human waste into nameable substances;
the recording of the ongoing ‘dead’ time of living in acute poverty; the impulse to
create utopian projects over a period of time that turns out to have been an
entire lifetime; and persistent attachments to anachronistic ideals and theoretical
projects, and to ‘out-datedness’ itself. These psychosocial practices sit in a rather
uncomfortable relation to one another – drawn from different historical and
geopolitical contexts, roughly arranged, unable to flow into one another they
seem like rather obdurate objects refusing to get along. And yet each holds some
articulation of suspended temporality that I think speaks to our contemporary
predicament – a predicament that involves both time and care.
21
For a range of debates on social art, social practice, socially engaged art, collaborative art, and social
works see the following: Bishop 2012, Holmes 2009, Jackson 2011, Kester 2004, 2011, 2013, Léger
2013, Thompson 2012.
Introduction 21
22
I’m thinking here of the seminal durational work of Chris Burden who spent five days in a locker
in Five-Day Locker Piece (1971), and lived for 22 days in a bed in an art gallery in Bed Piece (1972);
Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance 1980–1981 (Time Clock Piece), in which for 12 months he
punched a time clock every hour, and Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–1984 (Rope Piece), in
which Hsieh and Linda Montano spent a year tied to each other by an eight-foot rope; The House
with the Ocean View (2003) in which Marina Abramović lived silently for 12 days without food or
entertainment on a stage entirely open to the audience; and the work of Roman Opalka who began
painting the numbers one to infinity in 1965 and reached 5.5 million in 2004.
22 Enduring Time
This is perhaps best made visible by an anecdote about a trip to IKEA , that
bastion of melamine that contains collective classed fantasies around European
ideals of cleanliness, efficiency, style and functionality. Areas of IKEA are set up
like domestic rooms, and in a very public manner we collectively troop through
the rooms, inhabiting what are designed to be intimate private spaces. We watch
each other lying on beds, bouncing on cushions, looking at ourselves in bathroom
mirrors. On one of many visits to IKEA across a lifetime of provisioning, I came
across a day-bed that looked rather like a psychoanalytic couch in a room
designated as a ‘lounge’. One after another, members of the public saw the couch
and recognized it as a site for the production of memory and desire; they lay on
it and joked about telling childhood secrets, they tried it out for size, they knew
what it was and accepted its presence in a public space, despite couch-based
therapy being an activity that has fallen into total dereliction as a form of mental
health treatment in the public sphere. This overt acceptance of the excessiveness
of psychoanalysis as a part of social and cultural life, seems to speak to the way
that psychoanalysis keeps something alive, even though hardly anyone practices
it, anymore, in its traditional form. What appears so individual, myopic and self-
driven, turns out to be reliant on a whole host of what we can think of as
‘unnecessary’ or excessive social relations that constitute a kind of ‘web’ that
allows the work of psychoanalysis to take place. And psychoanalysis points us to
the ways that the ‘unnecessary’ or the excessive dimensions of social relations –
the permanence of grief that belies the permanence of attachment, for instance
– are what prop up the world.
1
Staying
Trans-
Origin:
< Latin, combining form of trāns (adv. and preposition) across, beyond, through.
Collins English Dictionary 2009
23
24 Enduring Time
not so much the call of nostalgia, or a bid to go back to the ‘glory days’ of social
democracy, but a temporal drag that gave efficacy to those who had gone on
‘going on’ about what mattered to them all through the New Labour years. It was
not simply that the campaign voiced the concerns of ‘old’ labour, in relation to
‘new labour’. Rather, through a deliberate and perhaps strategic embracing of the
‘old’ in old labour, what was communicated was the refusal to see the ‘new’ as
necessarily better. An attachment to certain clusters of words put the campaign
completely at odds with the politics of the future as by definition ‘the new’,
making an intervention into public discourse at the level of temporality. A
small window opened up in which it was no longer completely laughable to
think that government intervention into the private housing rental market, the
renationalization of core areas of social provision, or nuclear disarmament,
might be a good idea.
We could see what happened as a form of ‘counter-memory’. In Nietzsche,
Genealogy, and History (1977) Foucault talks about counter-memory as a use
of history that paradoxically ‘severs its connection to memory’, therefore
transforming history into a totally different form of time:
The historical sense gives rise to three uses that oppose and correspond to the
three Platonic modalities of history. The first is parodic, directed against reality,
and opposes the theme of history as reminiscence or recognition; the second is
dissociative, directed against identity, and opposes history given as continuity or
representative of a tradition; the third is sacrificial, directed against truth and
opposes history as knowledge. They imply a use of history that severs its
connection to memory, its metaphysical and anthropological model, and
constructs a countermemory – a transformation of history into a totally different
form of time.
Foucault 1977, 160
memory, and what the memory opposes, producing memory formations that
run counter to the official histories of governments, mainstream mass media and
the society of the spectacle. Counter memories ‘record the singularity of events
outside of any monotonous finality’ breaking up historical continuity (Foucault
1977, 144). Their purpose is to ‘cultivate the details and accidents that accompany
every beginning’ describing ‘the endlessly repeated play of dominations’ (150).
Later, in Society Must Be Defended, Foucault shifted from counter-memory to a
notion of counter-history – a practice that reveals that:
thinking about psychic and social relations that are the objects of this discipline’s
study, we might confront the ways in which we cannot rid ourselves of concepts
and terms that do not come to full effect until after the event of their emergence
through a kind of delayed action reminiscent of the psychoanalytic term
‘après-coup’.1
What is ‘psychosocial studies’? In a foreword to a book entitled Psychosocial
Imaginaries, Judith Butler writes that the history of the relation between psychic
and social life has involved attempts to think how one domain shapes the other,
how hopes for psychic change are, at times, configured through the idea that it
will occur through changing social structures, or conversely that changing social
structures will lead to psychic transformations. Instead, she asks:
But what if the relationship between the two terms cannot rely on a causal or
narrative sequence? Even if we for the moment treat them as distinct spheres, it
may be that they are spheres that always impinge upon, and overlap with, one
another, without exactly collapsing into one another. And the analysis of their
relation is one that tracks forms and effects of permeability, impingement,
resonance, phantasmatic excess, the covert or implicit operations of psychic
investments in the organization of social life, the way that organization falters or
fails by virtue of the psychic forces it cannot fully organize, the psychic registers
in which social forms of power take hold?
Butler 2015, viii
1
Freud’s term, Nachträglichkeit, is translated variously as deferred action, retroaction, après-coup
and afterwardsness.
Staying 27
Trans-
Derek Hook, Gail Lewis, and Hortense Spillers to name a few. Or again, we could
approach the question of the place of psychoanalysis in psychosocial studies
through tracing the ways that key psychoanalytic concepts such as melancholia,
fantasy, desire, guilt and identification have been taken up and reworked in
relation to concepts such as identity, subjectivity and ethics.
However, there are elements of the field that do not work with a psychoanalytic
frame at all, or actively reject a version of Freudianism, and yet might still be
rendered ‘psychosocial’ in the particular ways that they draw on phenomenology,
symbolic interactionism and especially discursive theory for accounts of
subjectivity that have been taken up in a dialogue with critical psychology.2
These elements would include the particularly influential theories of affect and
emotion aligned with the work of Deleuze and Guattari and developed by Brian
Massumi, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Elizabeth Grosz, Rosi Braidotti and Sara
Ahmed, or the cultural theory of Lauren Berlant with her keen eye for the ways
intimate life operates in public spheres, where affect is released from the kind of
subject that possesses interiority, and suggests a ‘psychic’ life turned inside out,
exteriorized, a surface exemplified as a ‘body without organs’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1977). We could also include in this trajectory a renewed interest in the
category of ‘experience’ through the work of A.N. Whitehead, and we could add
to this cartography the possibilities for psychosocial readings of recent work on
materiality, objects, ecology, vibrancy and virtuality. These are broadly
perspectives that trouble distinctions between subjects and objects, either
drawing our attention to the social lives of human and non-human actors, or
insisting that ‘things’ do not precede their interaction with one another, but
emerge through particular inter- (or in Karen Barad’s words, intra-) actions
(2007). By shifting attention to assemblage and dispersal,3 psychosocial studies
becomes not just the study of the relation between the psychoanalytic decentred
self and the possibilities for social and political change, but how the material-
discursive phenomena that we cluster under ‘psyche’ and those under ‘social’
indeed come to permeate, impinge and resonate with one another.
This already places us in some kind of intensive interdisciplinary domain
which begs the question as to whether psychosocial studies might be better
described as a set of trans-disciplinary practices that allow movement across
different traditions of thought without having to fully belong anywhere. A
distinction can certainly be made between inter, multi and trans-disciplinarity,
2
See, for instance, Hook 2011, Parker 2002, 2007, Stenner 2008.
3
See, for instance, Middleton and Brown 2005, Stephenson and Papadopoulos 2006.
30 Enduring Time
whereby inter and multi disciplinary practices would include those in which
specific knowledges, concepts and methods are maintained, and a certain cross-
fertilization is sought so as to better elucidate a given phenomenon or problem
(Sandford 2015). The ‘trans’ describes something else, suggesting there are
practices, objects, methods, concepts and knowledges that do not firmly belong
within one disciplinary field or another, but move amongst them, somehow
beyond the reach of disciplinarity. Unlike the prefix ‘inter-’, which retains a
certain claustrophobia, signalling the situation of betweenness or amongness,
trans- seems to gesture towards the great outdoors. We could say that a certain
fantasy of freedom accompanies whatever the prefix trans- attaches itself to,
suggesting that a transdisciplinary concept, text, practice or method might be
free to roam, inserting itself within an otherwise homogenous field, much like
the genetic meaning of the term ‘transformation’. Despite trans- being used in
chemistry to describe a radical separation (in the definition above, the two atoms
linked by a double bond hold the pair of identical atoms in opposition, so that
their relationship is one constituted by a distance across an atomic terrain),
trans- may better evoke that other chemical example, the free radical. Here an
atom has an open electronic shell, making free radicals chemically promiscuous
with others, and also with themselves, highly reactive, transformational. The
bonds are suggestively described by chemists as ‘dangling’, somehow available for
polymerization as they move. So, as a concept departs from one disciplinary
domain and inserts itself in another, it may both underscore the distinction
between those domains, whilst at the same time, through its anomalous presence,
bring about some kind of change or re-formation.
The idea that the psychosocial may operate as a transdisciplinary practice is
certainly appealing, especially if trans- has something to do with a kind of
freedom of movement that allows untethered concepts, texts, ideas, objects,
practices or methods to cross disciplinary domains, with possibilities for
transformation that accompany the anomalous when it pops up in the realm of
the Same. However, I have also suggested that such movement may not be as
untethered as we wish, and that we are never free of the history of both normative
and emancipatory elements of field formation. This shifts our attention to how
transdisciplinary practices may operate in relation to time – how they sediment
over time, how they themselves operate as temporal entities, and how we may
trace the ways they come, over time, to appear as knowledge without recourse to
disciplinary traditions, that by definition do not apply. By thinking about
transdisciplinarity not just in spatial but in temporal terms, we can begin to
think about how concepts or methods may only become apparent, or useful, or
Staying 31
indeed reach the limit of their usefulness, when they are taken up at particular
historical junctures, or when other concepts also become available, allowing
them to perform their transformational work.
To think about the case of the psychosocial is to echo Lauren Berlant’s
understanding of case as genre (2007). For Berlant, the case is something that
takes shape in many different professional scenes and life scenarios –
psychoanalysis and law, of course, but also in the academy, in aesthetic forms like
documentary films, detective stories and fictional autobiography, and what she
calls ‘life scenes’ like chat shows or blogs. For Berlant, the case represents a
particular way in which the singular is folded into the general, in which
singularity and its relation to generality are managed, and most importantly
judged. Indeed, in all these genres, what matters is the idiom of judgment: cases
for Berlant are ‘problem-events that have animated some kind of judgment’
(2007, 665). The case of psychosocial studies for instance, may animate a
judgment on how transdisciplinary practices work across and through temporal
folding, as well as a more internal judgment that is constantly at work, that
has to do with assessing the usefulness of concepts, texts, critical operations
and research practices that have been otherwise rendered useless, or simply
wrong in contemporary disciplinary spaces. If psychosocial studies is a critical
transdisciplinary practice, then its critique is not so much about what the
disciplines of psychology and sociology ‘lack’, and that psychosocial studies
‘fills’, but in part to do with the deliberate reappraisal of what is no longer seen
as efficacious. This is not to suggest that this is the only way that psychosocial
studies proceeds. Psychosocial researchers do, of course, produce new and
hybrid concepts all the time, suggest new ways of approaching a range of
social problems, and develop new and innovative research methodologies
that are making a major contribution to qualitative research in the social
sciences.4 But I would contend that even these new developments require a
constant process of judgment about former, now obsolete texts, concepts, and
objects within the field, a process that we cannot escape by easy reference to
‘trans’.
Is it not simply an embarrassment, however, to even talk about the ‘psyche’, or
the ‘subject’ now that many have suggested that we dispense with objects and
subjects altogether, and embrace the notion that what we have is ‘various
materialities constantly engaged in a network of relations’, a ‘sticky web of
4
See for instance Hollway and Jefferson 2013, Roseneil 2012.
32 Enduring Time
connections’ as Jane Bennett puts it, an ecology rather than a psychosocial field
(2004, 354)? In Time Binds, Elizabeth Freeman develops this notion of the
embarrassment of former political positions or attachments to certain ideas.
Punning on the drag of time past, drag as gendered performance, and the drag
as a big bore, she reminds us of the ‘bind’ that lesbians committed to feminism,
for instance, find themselves in, in the wake of the transformations that queer
studies brought to feminist theory in the early 1990s:
[. . .] the lesbian feminist seems cast as the big drag. Even to entertain lesbian
feminist ideas seems to somehow inexorably hearken back to essentialised
bodies, normative visions of women’s sexuality, and single-issue identity politics
that exclude people of colour, the working class, and the transgendered.
Freeman 2010, 62
And yet many of the political interventions made by those who identified as
‘lesbian feminists’ speak to the now in interesting and important ways. In a
similar vein, Kathi Weekes, Stella Sandford and Mandy Merck have all contributed
important recent work that reappraises Marxist feminist thought from the 1970s,
(another embarrassment, let’s face it), to contemporary debates about post-work,
changing gendered patterns of labour, and what is emerging as a ‘feminist’
commons (Weekes 2011, Merck and Sandford 2010).
How, then, might we understand the ways that earlier, and in some senses
obsolete ideas and concepts become contemporary, how they might make
trouble in the form of an embarrassment, and how might they address the
particular kinds of social concerns about which psychosocial studies might want
to speak? Michel Serres, in his work across culture, science and philosophy has,
perhaps more than anyone, proposed a transdisciplinary approach to
understanding knowledge, critique, time and space. One of Serres’ favoured
figurations, for instance, is Hermes – literally translated as ‘transport’, the figure
who traverses, ‘exports and imports’ (Serres and Latour 1995, 66) in the name of
invention. Neither interdisciplinarity nor multidisciplinarity quite captures what
Serres proposes through the figure of Hermes. In his well-known series of
conversations with Bruno Latour he states:
Have you noticed the popularity among scientists of the word interface –
which supposes that the junction between two sciences or two concepts
Staying 33
Time does not always flow according to a line [. . .] nor according to a plan but,
rather, according to an extraordinarily complex mixture, as though it reflected
stopping points, ruptures, deep wells, chimneys of thunderous acceleration,
rendings, gaps – all sown at random at least in a visible disorder.
Serres and Latour 1995, 57
Time does not flow as much as ‘percolates’ (58), moving, that is, in a turbulent
manner. Steven Connor has written that because topology is concerned with
what remains invariant as a result of transformation, ‘it may be thought of
as geometry plus time, geometry given body by motion’ (2004). And one of
the most important of Serres’ applications of topological thought is to thinking
about history. History comes to resemble what chaos theory describes, in
that things that are very close to one another in cultural terms can appear
very distant due to the linear image of historical time. And reciprocally
5
Topology is the mathematical study of continuity and connectivity which describes the special
properties of objects that don’t tear or break, but whose morphology persists under homeomorphic
deformation.
34 Enduring Time
things that seem very close temporally speaking, can turn out to be very far
from one another conceptually. In place of the line of history (something
Serres identifies as inherently violent), he proposes time understood in terms
of dynamic volumes. Time is seen as a river or flame, forking, branching,
slewing, slowing, rolling back on itself. In particular time is a complex volume
that folds over on itself, both creating unexpected contiguities, and folding
time within it. Serres’ discussion of baker’s dough in Rome (1991)
exemplifies this:
The system grows old without letting time escape; it garners age – the new
emblems are caught up and subsumed by old ones; the baker molds memory.
[. . .] Time enters into the dough, a prisoner of its folds, a shadow of its folding
over.
Serres 1991, 81
Dough does not simply transform over time, or within time, but ‘gathers itself
up and releases time’ as Steven Connor puts it (2004). For Serres the notion
of the contemporary captures the doubleness of someone thinking in radically
new ways in their own times, and through that newness, through the ways that
those ideas are ‘out of time’ with their own era, they become available for
‘contemporary’ thought. Serres therefore puts together two issues of concern
here. The first is his deliberate resurrection of dead texts, and the problems with
repudiating the past as bygone and the present as authentic when time is
understood as linear. From a linear perspective, ‘our time’ is always conceived of
as the cutting edge, and in this way, ‘we’ are always right. In doing so, we condemn
what we think of as ‘false’ to being out-of-date or obsolete, belonging to an earlier
time, and thereby expel these ideas, modes of thought, practices, concepts
from the now. Serres argues for a suspension of judgment about what is ‘right’,
and an attention to what remains conserved, sometimes quite close to our
own era, including counting the cultural losses that correspond to the gains of
contemporary scientific discovery. The second has to do with interdisciplinarity.
Serres argues that as science becomes our only mode of contemporary discovery,
so the insights of literature and the humanities more generally become by
definition outmoded, ‘wrong’, along with all their sedimented gains. The
humanities can only then operate according to historicism, dealing with the
remains of the past, whereas the sciences completely cancel out their past,
overturning it with each new advance. In this way the problem of the relation
between different viable disciplines and the problem of time are one and the
same.
Staying 35
Let me begin by saying that I consider the term psychic reality anachronic. It
belongs to an earlier period of psychoanalysis. Its continued use in present-day
psychoanalytic conceptualization is unwarranted.
Arlow 1985, 521
For Arlow psychic reality is always a recollection of some kind. It does involve
an originary ‘event’, but this event is always already a complex mixture of fact and
fantasy, memory and perception. How the recollection of such psychic events
emerge in analysis, and what is done with them is entirely based, he claims, on
the orientation of the analyst. Given the multitude of orientations, we end up
with a multitude of psychic realities, rendering the concept, in his view, useless.
But what might it mean for psychic reality, an absolutely central concept in
psychoanalysis, to have become anachronistic in this way, even within the
discipline where it originated, and what might have happened to it, as it has
migrated beyond the clinical field? This is just the kind of transdisciplinary
concept that psychosocial studies might want to make use of, gesturing as it does,
towards internal mental processes, and a simultaneous engagement with
something excessive to psychic life, rendered here as ‘reality’. The problem, it
appears, is not just one of emphasis – either tracing a core reality within our
fantasy life, or the limitations of psychical operations that give rise to forms of
Staying 37
Considered psychologically, the paralysis of the arm consists in the fact that
the conception of the arm cannot enter into association with the other ideas
constituting the ego of which the subject’s body forms an important part. The
lesion would therefore be the abolition of the associative accessibility of the
conception of the arm. The arm behaves as though it did not exist for the play of
associations.
Freud 1893, 170
The arm has not disappeared from external reality, but in psychic reality it
behaves as though it does not exist, paralysed in terms of its capacities to enter
6
The passage continues: ‘There is no doubt that if the material conditions corresponding to the
conception of the arm are profoundly altered, the conception will also be lost. But I have to show
that it can be inaccessible without being destroyed and without its material substratum (the nervous
tissue of the corresponding region of the cortex) being damaged’. (Freud 1893, 170)
38 Enduring Time
into the play of associations that constitute an embodied ego. Freud develops
this idea in A Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) where he makes an initial
distinction between ‘thought reality’ and ‘external reality’, and in the work on
hysteria with Joseph Breuer in 1895, before he famously (and infamously)
abandoned his ‘seduction theory’ in 1897 in favour of a theory of unconscious
infantile fantasy. Hysteria, in this early work, was understood to arise in relation
to painful or traumatic ‘real’ events, the memories of which were repressed,
turned away from the conscious mind, and yet dynamically active in creating
disturbances elsewhere. Hysterical symptoms formed when this repression
broke down, the symptom acting as an alternative solution to keeping these
memories from consciousness. By 1906, by way of The Interpretation of Dreams
in 1900, Freud had revised his position on the nature of the events that cause the
production of hysterical symptoms, shifting the emphasis from what we could
call the materiality of sexual trauma to the psychic realm of fantasy and
unconscious wish, whereby memories are not the result of an event simply
inflicted from the outside, but as Lawrence Friedman has evocatively put it, are
‘structured by preference’ (1995, 26). Freud however, resisted a simple distinction
in which the internal world now triumphed over the external, offering a shifting
dynamic interaction between memory, perception, fantasy and the pressure of
the drive or wish in a field that could involve material trauma (he never repudiated
the existence of sexual trauma in many of his patients), but now decentralized in
relation to unconscious fantasy. As Laplanche and Pontalis put it:
It is right to emphasis at this point, however, that the expression ‘psychical reality’
itself is not simply synonymous with ‘internal world’, ‘psychological domain’, etc.
If taken in the most basic sense that it has for Freud, this expression denotes a
nucleus within that domain which is heterogeneous and resistant and which is
alone in being truly ‘real’ as compared with the majority of psychical phenomena.
Laplanche and Pontalis 1988, 315
That nucleus that is truly ‘real’ is the precursor for what Lacan would go on to
name the Real, the aspect of the wish that remains impossible, resistant,
heterogeneous to unconscious thought, extending Freud’s claim that ‘there are
no indications of reality in the unconscious’ (1897). At the same time, however,
Freud saw the unconscious as subsuming all areas of mental life, so that
consciousness was simply a small part of this wider ‘psychical reality’, claiming
paradoxically:
and the other person’ (633). In focusing on the link, Laplanche provides an account
of psychic reality as a third term that resists being co-opted as either a version of
internality or externality, and puts their relation as the condition for their
emergence – something on which Butler later builds. For Laplanche, ‘“psychic
reality” is not created by me; it is invasive. In this domain of the sexual, there is too
much reality at the beginning’ (680). As Laplanche indicates, the link between the
other thing and the other person takes the form of a message that is transmitted
between adult and infant in early life that is unconsciously sexual in its intent on
the part of the adult, and comes too early in psychic development for the child to
decode. The link therefore takes the form of a seduction, and not simply a
seduction fantasy on the part of the child. Freud, Laplanche tells us, makes an
enormous effort to manufacture the primal scene from just two ingredients –
perceptual reality on the one hand, and the child’s fantasy on the other. But the
reality that is not material but also not purely subjective has to do with the adult
proffering of the scene, a kind of unconscious intent on the part of the adults, an
offering, indeed a seduction, through an invitation to look, to witness, to receive a
message, regardless of what actually takes place. Laplanche therefore triangulates
the primal scene not simply in the child’s mind, but in the reality of the adult’s
enigmatic message which is aimed at the child at precisely the same time the adult
is caught up in the sexual relations with a third. The message says something like
‘I am showing you – or letting you see – something which, by definition, you
cannot understand, and in which you cannot take part’ (666).
The notion of psychic reality as a third reality, irreducible not only in the sense
of the Lacanian Real, but in the sense that Laplanche offers us, of something sexual
and yet completely impossible to decode that invades us from the other, provides a
bridge in Butler’s work between Freud and Foucault. A message, after all, is always
social, not a form of telepathy where by an adult psychic state is passed to a child.
Put in another way, projective identification (the process by which aspects of our
internal object relations are split off, in phantasy, and attributed to external objects)
can only occur if projection finds an object in the social world; that is, a subject.
Crucially, Laplanche’s rendition of psychic reality opens the way for psychic reality
to be understood to change the social norm, and not just the other way round.
I want therefore to turn to Judith Butler’s early account of psychic reality in The
Psychic Life of Power (1997). In what we could claim as a foundational text for
psychosocial studies, Butler creates a ‘new passage’ out of her reading of Freud
Staying 41
and Foucault, to offer us a story of the tenuous, always strained, but productive
relation between psychic and social spheres. This productivity is not just about
what may be produced as excessive to these categories, but the process by which
the border between internality and externality is itself produced and maintained.
Butler deliberately holds on to a notion of the psyche – a category neither
identical with the subject nor with Foucault’s ‘soul’ (1975) – as some kind of
gesturing towards interiority that is at the same time utterly predicated on the
sociality of its production. Through her reading of Freud and Foucault together,
I suggest she offers us a way of circumventing the ‘embarrassment’ of the
conjunction ‘psychic reality’, and enacts a temporal fold, in the sense that Serres
intends, that allows Freud’s term to become available in a contemporary scene as
a theoretical resource, through her reading of melancholia alongside an analytics
of power. In this sense Butler’s work is exemplary of a temporal transdisciplinary
practice in a psychosocial register. What I offer here is a brief reminder of
the work Butler does in The Psychic Life of Power to highlight a particular usage
of the terms ‘psyche’ and ‘social’ that allows us to access a psychoanalytic concept
of psychic reality in contemporary ways.
From a position that is concordant with both Foucault and Lacan, Butler
begins with a notion of the subject as a placeholder, created through linguistic
operations or discourses that predate us, and that we did not choose, and yet on
which we are dependent for our intelligibility and agency. However, discourse
understood in a Foucaultian sense of ‘dispositif ’ doesn’t free us from the problem
of attachment, or desire for subjection.7 Once power is no longer thought of as
simply pressing down on the subject from the outside, but as productive of the
subject, then at best we will have an ambiguous relation to power that is both
desiring and resistant at once. For Butler this means we must account for our
desire for subjection, i.e. for its psychic form. Moving away from the subject
caught in a nexus of external power, whose response to that power emanates
from somewhere ‘within’, Butler addresses the problem of how that ‘within’
comes into operation in relation to power. If she learns from Foucault that she
cannot posit a subject on whom power operates if power enunciates the subject,
so she is reliant on a figure or trope of ‘turning’ rather than resisting, for
7
Foucault states in the 1977 ‘The Confession of the Flesh’ interview, ‘What I’m trying to pick out with
this term is, firstly, a thoroughly heterogenous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions,
architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements,
philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions–in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such
are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be
established between these elements.’ 194
42 Enduring Time
understanding how power inaugurates the subject. ‘Trope’, the use of figurative
language, itself both means, and operates as, a kind of turning, so this becomes a
perfect vehicle for Butler in that she can pick up on how the trope of turning is
itself a kind of ‘turn on turning’, or a turn that turns in on itself – we could say, a
fold. Where an Althusserian account of interpellation demonstrates how the
subject is produced through the address of state authority and suggests that
conscience is already in operation with the regulatory norm, Butler highlights
how it is the formation of the psychic operation (the turn of turning) that needs
to be accounted for. Butler therefore attempts to work the groove between Freud
and Foucault – Freud because he deals with a precarious subjectivity that is
carved out of internalized attachments to what we have lost and yet remain
dependent on, and Foucault because he provides a productive account of power.
Butler’s key question concerns process, and indeed temporality, in the form of
repetition or iteration, is central to her theorizing. How, she wants to know, do
social norms become internalized, not just once, but again and again over time,
if we have done away with a simple distinction between social norm and interior
life? Her answer is that it is the process of internalization that allows that
distinction. As internalization (the taking in of the norm) works its ambivalent
process, the norm itself takes on different forms as psychic rather than social
phenomena. Through Foucault we know that norms, as internalized social
regulatory forces, almost totally take over internal life, so much so that the ‘soul’
for Foucault becomes a social rather than interior category. However, Butler
argues that ‘being psychic, the norm does not merely reinstate social power, it
becomes formative and vulnerable in highly specific ways’ (1997, 21). By
vulnerable, she is suggesting ‘mutable’, and hence what she offers us is a way to
think not just about resistance to the norm, but the process of producing changes
in conditions of intelligibility. As she reminds us, ‘to thwart the injunction to
produce a docile body is not the same as dismantling the injunction or changing
the terms of subject constitution’ (88). Undermining is one thing, and
rearticulating the symbolic terms by which subjects are constituted is another.
In order to understand our passionate attachment to the disciplinary regimes
that both produce and totalize the subject, Butler mines psychoanalysis for a
response to the ontological question of ‘who’ is there to make attachments prior
to subjectivation, that could lead to subject formation. Here she looks to Freud’s
account of how the ego paradoxically comes into being through melancholic
processes, through identification with lost objects and lost attachments. It is
unnecessary to rehearse Freud’s concept of melancholia fully here. What I want
to highlight is how, in Butler’s hands, melancholia becomes a way of
Staying 43
8
See Khanna 2006 and Kristeva 2000 as examples.
Staying 45
of one fold of the dough with another utterly transforms the dough through its
engagement, if you like, with its own history. The idea that a Foucaultian
perspective on power and the norm can surface within a psychoanalytic account
of the psyche positions these concepts as transdisciplinary. However, the story I
have told here has not just identified and traced key transdisciplinary concepts
that are active in the field of psychosocial studies, but has shown how psychosocial
studies proceeds by gathering up ‘dead’ or outmoded concepts and reading them
with and through others to produce the ‘contemporary’. In doing so, both are
transformed. It is this process of mutual transformation that is at the heart of
Judith Butler’s account of the psychic life of power. Butler’s account of psychic
reality could therefore be read as indicative of a form of temporal practice that I
am calling a psychosocial practice, although she may not, herself, name it as
such. Psychic reality, that Freud first articulates in 1893, is pronounced dead in
1985, but remains active, especially in its triangulation by Laplanche and his
insistence on the relationship between the other thing in me, and the other
beyond me. It reappears ‘beyond’ clinical psychoanalysis through the folding or
kneading Butler performs of Freud’s concept of melancholia and Foucault’s of
productive power, that produces a psychosocial account of a variable boundary
that both instigates and regulates psychic and social spheres. Through this
process we see how the norm comes to have ‘gotten in’, and how the psyche in its
turn can affect some leverage on socially produced norms and regulatory
practices of governance. Psychic reality, as neither simply reality, nor simply
internality, is reworked through the redoubling of effects as the two spheres are
constituted, so that power, subjection and our attachments to our subjection
produce one another. This political reading of psychic reality is then available to
be ‘offered back’ to the clinical sphere, so that the violence of social norms, and
their mutability can form part of our understanding of the emergence of the
subject in the clinic. Counter-memory – the transformation of history into a
totally different form of time through the practice of vigilant repetitions – is the
linguistic or discursive form that Serres’ articulates as dynamic volume, or the
retention of time within the dough: ‘Time enters into the dough, a prisoner of its
folds, a shadow of its folding over’. Whilst time may not be experienced as
‘unfolding’ currently in a colloquial sense, might we say, more accurately, that it
is ‘folding over’?
46
2
Maintaining
Maintain
47
48 Enduring Time
Capital caters to the clock that meters the life and lifestyle of some of its workers
and consumers. The others are left to recalibrate themselves to serve the
dominant temporality.
Sharma 2014, 139
1
Adam 1994, 1995, Nowotny 1994 and Zerubavel 1981 have contributed major work on the social
analysis of time. See Baldock 2000, Parreñas 2005, Williams 2010, Madianou 2012, Madianou and
Miller 2011, and Yeates 2009, 2012 for work on global care chains. See Folbre 2014, Folbre and
Bittman 2004, Gershuny 2003, Harkness 2008, Jacobs and Gerson 2004, Kilkey and Perrons 2010,
Sulivan 2000, 2004, Wacjman and Bitman 2000, Wheelock 2001 for extensive work on gender,
domestic labour, care and life/work balance. See Adkins 2012 for an account of ‘unemployed time’
in neoliberal conditions, and Bastian (2013) for work on the question of ‘shared time’.
Maintaining 49
with a home and children, is radically different from the time poverty of a
woman in externally enforced flexible labour who must be available at all hours
of the day, regardless of her other caring responsibilities, and yet we can say they
are both time-starved. In other words, there is a heterogeneous and uneven
response to speeded up time, heavily conditioned by the geopolitical terrain one
is attempting to live or work in, by the shapes and forms of our bodies, and how
those bodies may or may not be recognized at the level of the State, or the global
transnational employer. Everything does not simply get faster even though
everybody appears to run out of time. What proliferates is a multiplicity of
contradictory temporalities, although few of them escape the relentless push
towards the accumulation of profit.
Hidden forms of time, then, have a relation to the trapped time of disavowed
durational activities that sustain people, situations, phenomena, institutions
and art objects, and thereby underpin the maintenance of everyday life. By
maintenance I am referring to durational practices that keep ‘things’ going;
objects, selves, systems, hopes, ideals, networks, communities, relationships,
institutions. These durational practices are forms of labour that maintain the
material conditions of ourselves and others, maintain connections between
people, people and things, things and things, people and places, and social and
public institutions, along with the anachronistic ideals that often underpin them,
and that constitute the systems of sustenance and renewal that support ‘life’.2
Maintenance is in part generated by conditions of vulnerability that we all share,
and in part by the excesses and internal logics of capitalist cultures that make
maintenance so necessary – whilst at the same time utterly devaluing maintenance
practices by generating products, for instance, specifically designed to break
down without the possibility of being mended.3 As Carole Pateman argued in
The Sexual Contract in 1988, it is structural to both patriarchy and capitalism
that the labour of maintenance remains hidden.
What is hidden, however, is not just labour but the time embedded within this
labour, and hence the qualities of this time. It returns us, in other words, to an
earlier Marxist feminist question about how to value socially necessary labour
time that is precisely not embedded in the production of commodities and
services, and that does not appear to unfold or function in the same ways.4
Noticing the qualities of this time matters, not just to how we understand this
2
I am not making a distinction here between living systems and inanimate objects, but using instead
a spread notion of the liveliness of ‘things’, both animate and inanimate in order to understand who
and what maintains them.
3
See Graham and Thrift 2007, for a discussion of the maintenance of products designed to break.
4
See for example Costa 1975 and Cox and Federici 1976.
50 Enduring Time
Wearing out
Through the notion of desisting bodies, the cultural theorist Lauren Berlant
analyses practices such as overeating, attachments to ‘bad’ relationships, and our
ongoing commitments to defunct political processes as neither simply acts of
Maintaining 51
resistance to the wearing out of bodies and hopes for change brought about by
neoliberalism, nor simply acts of self-destruction, but what she calls ‘suspension’
of the self as a form of self-maintenance. Berlant’s argument is that the gap
between the fantasy of the good life – upward mobility, job security, political and
social equality, and lively durable intimacy – and the actual lives we now lead in
capitalist societies, is so far apart, that these acts that suspend the self are actually
forms of self care (2011).
Maintenance, however, has something to do with the withdrawal or suspension
of time, and not just the suspension of the self. Acts of maintenance are durational
and repetitious, they may concern time that seems frozen or unbearable in its
refusal to move on, and entail practices of bearing the state of nothing happening,
of the inability to bring about tangible or obvious forms of change. Berlant
gestures towards this with her notion of ‘impasse’: ‘a stretch of time in which one
moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and
enigmatic’ (4). We try to get close to the source of sustenance in these intensely
present moments of impasse, but the source of sustenance also evades us, making
the time of the impasse enigmatic too. Just as food, for instance, holds out the
promise of satisfaction, in overeating it is also ‘cruel’ in the way it wears out
already worn out bodies (115). The time of overeating then becomes both
intensely present and constantly evasive. Given that food is a key site for self-
expression and nourishment, overeating interrupts the project of the self, creates
a pause in agency, produces one of these elongated intervals, or non-times, in
which nothing in particular seems to be happening, which is not identical to
simply ‘survival’ because there is something pleasurable and expressive going on
when we overeat, and quite often something communal too. But it cannot be
thought of as what leads to flourishing:
In this scene some activity toward reproducing life is not identical to making it
or oneself better, or to a response to the structural conditions of a collective
failure to thrive, but to making a less bad experience.
Berlant 2011, 117
questions about the nature and quality of this time, and its relation to time as
development, progress, departure and arrival. We need to understand both how
we experience time phenomenologically, in the impasse of self-suspension, and
the implications of suspended time for foreclosed time, stuck time and
melancholic or traumatic time. My question then is how might we prise open
this impasse, and understand both its qualities and its possibilities. Where
Berlant is concerned to track our repeated attempts to stay close to a fraying
fantasy of a better life through the suspension of agency, I am concerned here to
better understand how suspended agency relates to suspended time, and how
suspended time is a form of heterogeneous time that doesn’t so much interrupt
historical time, but reveals its qualities through its own peculiar lack of qualities.
The impasse, thought of in this way, can therefore make a bridge back to a history
of feminist thought and practice that has always been concerned with lives ‘on
hold’, and with making a less bad experience for ourselves and others. And more
than this – with maintaining that the time bound up in maintenance is integral
to time’s ability to ‘progress’.
Maintenance time
flagging. The time of maintenance lies therefore at the intersection between the
lateral axis of stumbling blindly on, and the vertical axis of holding up, orientating
us towards a future, even when that future is uncertain, or may not be our own.
Whilst there is an inherent conservative, and even backwards impulse within
maintenance practices, there are also temporal modes of maintenance that reach
towards the future even as they attempt to keep things the same as they ever
were. It is here we can glimpse the double action of maintenance as a material
practice of sustaining people, things and connections, and the name for a
paradoxical ongoing relation or attachment to the promise of time.
Maintenance, then, is the temporal dimension of care – the disavowed
durational activity that gives the lie to being as conatus, Spinoza’s supposedly
innate inclination for a thing to go on being, or to somehow enhance itself.
Maintenance deals with states of dependency, with vulnerable states in which we
are reliant on both the practices and good will of other people, beings and things
to survive and thrive, vulnerabilities that emerge at different points in our
individual histories, as well as emerging differently in relation to histories of
oppression and resistance, and histories of power and agency. As the artist
Park McArthur reveals in her work, her reliance on a collective of people
to care for her as a disabled individual involves a temporal orchestration
governed by patterns of the day (McArthur 2012, Horisaki-Christens et al.,
2013). Carried and Held, for instance, follows the format of a series of museum
wall labels made up of text punctuated by emoticons that lists all the people who
have carried and held the artist’s body (McArthur 2012). Whilst McArthur
makes visible the affective, political and physical relationships of those in her
informal care collective, she also reveals the time of care embedded in this
network that includes people, institutions and sources of financial support that
have enabled her to survive and work. She shows how she is propped up, day in
and day out, and enabled to keep going through the time of care I am calling
maintenance.
Furthermore, as Gail Lewis has described in her writings on motherhood,
desire and imperialism, the vulnerabilities of an infant who needs care, and
whose demands to be propped up and kept going call forth an ethical response,
have to be thought through in relation to those of a carer who may be containing
not just her infant’s projections, but the affective dimensions of multiple social
projections including racialized hatred and socially ostracized desire (2009).
To care is never simply a matter of labour or simply a matter of the
wish to repair the world. To care is to deal in an ongoing and durational
way with affective states that may include the racialized, gendered and imperially
54 Enduring Time
imbued ambivalence that seeps into the ways we maintain the lives of
others.5 Care is an arduous temporal practice that entails the maintenance of
relations with ourselves and others through histories of oppression that return
in the present again and again.6
In what follows, I want to create a connection between ‘maintenance time’ and
‘the time that we have’ through an analysis of two bodies of artwork. The first is
the seminal work of the feminist performance and social artist Mierle Laderman
Ukeles. Since the late 1970s Ukeles has called herself a ‘maintenance artist’,
seeking, amongst other things, to raise the profile of waste and those, such as the
City of New York sanitation workers, who work on behalf of city dwellers to
process and manage the waste they endlessly produce. In linking feminist
concerns with making visible the ongoing work performed by women in the
daily domestic round of care, with broader agendas around those who do
society’s ‘dirty work’, as well as the now anachronistic belief in the central role of
public institutions in the management of the social fabric, Ukeles’ life-long
project proposes a renewed relation to time through championing the stuck time
of maintenance.
The second body of artwork is the photographer, Richard Billingham’s, first
artist’s book Ray’s a Laugh (1996), which graphically portrays Billingham’s
parents and brother living in acute poverty in their home in Cradley Heath in
the West Midlands during the mid-1990s. These photographs caused a stir when
they were displayed and published, for their graphic depiction of what people
read as the ‘squalor’ of the conditions Billingham’s family were living in,
prompting accusations of sensationalism. Here I offer a reading of Billingham’s
photographs within the framework of maintaining familial connections through
the act of picturing time. My aim is to think these projects of endurance and
suspension as attempts to grasp the time that we have.
In 1969 Mierle Laderman Ukeles wrote a manifesto. She was pregnant with her
first child, and had been told by her tutor at art school that now she could no
longer be an artist. Prior to this she had been making artwork that involved
5
See also Gunaratnam 2013.
6
See Coote et al. 2013, Gill 2009, Hale et al. 2013, Honore 2004, O’Neil 2014, Schulte 2014 and Vostal
2014.
Maintaining 55
wrapping and stuffing objects, but had become fed up with how the objects
seemed to need constant care and ‘schlepping around’, as she put it (2006).
She tried for a while to make massive inflatable air-filled objects instead,
with the intention of being able to fold them up at the end of an exhibition and
put them in her back pocket in order to deliberately circumvent this need for
objects to be cared for. However, she found that the process of making the
inflatables required a heavy reliance on the industrial processes of a heat-sealing
factory, upsetting her desire for an autonomous and portable artwork.
They also leaked. Her attempt, in other words, to uncouple herself from the
artworks, and to free herself of the material and ideological systems that
governed their, and her own, reproduction, had failed. Once she became
pregnant issues of freedom and autonomy became even more pressing, caught
in that classic tension between her desires to be with her children and to
continue to produce work. She then had what she described as ‘an epiphany’;
she realized that instead of trying to hide the maintenance work she was
involved in, so that she and the artwork could appear free and autonomous,
she would make maintenance work itself into art (Jackson 2011, Ukeles and
Baraitser 2015).
The manifesto was called Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal
for an exhibition ‘CARE’ (Ukeles 1969). Manifestos are wonderful literary
genres. They are often written in times of political rather than personal crisis
or change. Direct, polemical, critical, pragmatic, they orientate towards
action and producing changes in the present arrangement of things, ‘a genre
intent on changing the world rather than just interpreting it’ (Puchner 2005,
297). Ukeles’ maintenance manifesto, however, was not simply a call to
overturning patriarchal structures that kept women and their domestic
labour in the home and out of public life. Instead it critiques our very
understanding of action and change. It represents an attempt to think
through the temporal practices of maintenance that underpin revolutionary
change. Parenting, and maintenance in general, as the art critic Shannon
Jackson has written, became the formal problem that Ukeles was seeking
to address:
[T]he idea that people are diminished by recurring, repetitious work is a prevalent
and often unquestioned one. In ‘Manifesto for Maintenance Art’ Ukeles proposed
instead that enormous potential for creativity lay in the willingness to accept and
understand the broad social, political, and aesthetic implications of maintaining.’
Phillips 1995, 171
‘O maternal ditch, half full of muddy water! A factory gutter! I savored a mouthful
of strengthening muck which recalled the black teat of my Sudanese nurse!’
Marinetti 1909, n.p.
The sourball
of every revolution: after the revolution, who’s going
to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?’
Ukeles 1969, n.p.
58 Enduring Time
For Ukeles there was a relation she took seriously between the world’s ‘othered’
workers, the degraded object world and the degraded social systems and
institutions designed to manage social waste.
As well as being one of the first artists to perform female domestic labour in
the gallery, Ukeles staged a series of washing and cleaning performances
during the 1970s. These included washing the steps of the Wadsworth
Atheneum (Washing, Tracks, Maintenance: Outside, 1973), and cleaning
museum vitrines as a way to reveal the cleaning staff ’s daily hidden maintenance
of art (Transfer: The Maintenance of the Art Object, 1973). Then in 1977
Ukeles persuaded the New York City’s Department of Sanitation to let
her be their self-appointed unpaid artist-in-residence.7 Examining the
relationship between those who live in a community and those who serve it,
she wore away at the boundary between traditional art and routine life and
created a durational project, Touch Sanitation (1977–1984) that included
numerous artworks, performances and showings over a seven-year period. She
started off creating a cartography of the city, a map of its boroughs and
community districts. She then drew ten circles to match up with the schedule
of the shifts that the maintenance crew worked. Between 1977 and 1984 she
walked the ten full circuits, meeting all the sanitation workers in the entire
city, at every site, from rubbish collection, to landfill, to headquarters. This
entailed spending 8 hours of the 16-hour shift with the then all-male work force,
each circuit taking 11 months to complete. During a performance entitled
Handshake Ritual, which she undertook between 1978–1979, she shook hands
personally with 8,500 sanitation workers, thanking each of them individually
for keeping New York City alive.
Handshake Ritual was a temporal project, a kind of ‘falling in step’ as Phillips
has put it, with an entire workforce. By following the rubbish and those who
maintained the city’s cleanliness, Phillips has argued that Ukeles tracked the
flows of information, materials, desires, social relations and interpersonal
resonances of a vital public domain (1995). This entailed adopting and accepting
the rhythms and routines of an established workplace, with its polychromatic
7
She remains in this unpaid position today, some 40 years later.
Maintaining 59
I’ve talked a lot about ‘hands’ to ‘handle’ waste, ‘handling’ the pressures and
difficulties of the job, and finally – about ‘shaking, shaking, shaking hands.’ This
is an artwork about hand-energy. What you are expert at, what you do every day.
The touch, the hand of the artist and the hand of the sanman. I want to make a
chain of hands [. . .] A hand-chain to hold up the whole City.
Ukeles quoted in Phillips 1995, 183
Ukeles would sit every day on the kerb with her colleagues to eat lunch, as
many restaurants wouldn’t serve sanitation workers, designating them as ‘dirty’
or ‘smelly’, to be put outside with the rubbish. As one ‘sanman’ told her, ‘it’s like I
AM the garbage or the garbage is my fault’ (2006). So she did a name-cleaning
project in which sanitation workers listed the worst names that they had ever
been called by members of the public. She then wrote them on the two-storey-
high glass windows of a building on a prominent New York street, and invited
190 guests representing all sectors of society to wash the names off whilst the
sanitation workers watched their fellow citizens cleanse the bad names.
Numerous showings of other collaborative performances with the sanitary
workers emerged from the project that changed the material conditions of
their working lives – their shift times, the quality of their changing rooms and
toilet facilities. Through what Shannon Jackson has named as ‘public acts of
transference’ Ukeles challenged the public disavowal of rubbish, asking us to
take back our relationship with our own waste.
There are many ways Ukeles’ work could now be seen as anachronistic.
Municipal sanitation departments in most major cities in the global north have
been taken over, or their services outsourced, to vast multinational corporations
whose slow violence far outweighs that of the ailing social institutions that
Ukeles was seeking to investigate and prop up. We could even see her attachment
to a socialist agenda championing the daily lives of ‘workers’ as an echo of Soviet
art in the post-revolutionary period, and her work sits contextually within longer
histories of durational art practices that stage time and its relation to capital in
much more direct and overt ways.8 And yet, what Ukeles’ work reveals is
something about the quality of time in the impasse. Scrubbed clean of irony,
photographs and video footage show her throwing herself at the city in a totally
8
See, for instance, Chris Burden, Five-Day Locker Piece (1971) and Bed Piece (1972); Tehching Hsieh
One Year Performance 1980–1981 (Time Clock Piece), and Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–
1984 (Rope Piece), and Marina Abramović, The House with the Ocean View (2003).
60 Enduring Time
serious, engaged, rigorous and earnest way; at work in the dead time of repetitious
labour, cleaning, dusting, washing, shaking hands. Her aim is not simply to
show up the relation between art and capital, or between domestic labour and
the public sphere, but to actually help to maintain the city with her own hands,
to re-suture relations between degraded things (rubbish), the people who
produce them (city dwellers), and those who handle them (sanitation workers).
This means living in the impasse in order to reveal its qualities. The assumption
that maintenance time is a literal waste of time is challenged by her tracking
of waste and turning it, and those who handle it, back into discrete objects
who command respect and recognition. This changes the time of public life
by her constant reminder that public and domestic maintenance work are
connected.
More fundamentally it reveals the temporality of lives that are neither simply
about survival, nor aimed at event, but are rather ‘without project’, as Simon
Bayly has described in his work on the relation between art, work and ‘the project’;
lives involved in labour that cannot be discretely parcelled up into the ‘project
time’ that now organizes most industrialized and immaterial labour (2013).
Bayly maps out a contemporary distinction between those who are, are not, or at
least ought to be working, and those who are working ‘on’ something, those with
Maintaining 61
‘projects’ whose undertakings cast a long shadow into a future ‘that is both ‘open’
and urgently prescribed’ (161). The project, he argues:
[. . .] is suffused with a peculiar temporality that has come to shape the dominant
contemporary image of the future. This is an image of a fateful openness, full of
the libidinal possibility of what is ‘to come’ but which also invites and fends off
a depressive and deadly rapture – in other words, a form of the Freudian death
drive.
Bayly 2013, 162
To be ‘without project’, then, is to live in a form of time that does not define
itself in relation to a projection into an open libidinal future. Time emerges from
Ukeles’ work as the one thing we share – the potential, that is, for a life without
project, a way of being in time that is not about going anywhere, and is not about
going nowhere, but is perpetually concerned with what is produced, collected,
transported and buried, like the rubbish, 365 days a year. Instead of trying to get
away from such a life – to transform care work, revolutionize it, outsource it, shift
it elsewhere, or share it out – she dwells in and with it, showing us it is no longer
dire, but productive in keeping all productive systems going. There is no way to
reveal this time other than to live it, to provide what she calls ‘attentive reverence
for each mote of dust’ (2002, n.p.). Discussing her recent work at Fresh Kills on
Staten Island, once the largest landfill site in the world, she describes a process of
disaggregating rubbish or ‘mush’ into the distinct objects that once came together
to make it:
So that’s why, in this 50-year-old social sculpture we have all produced, of four
mountains made from 150 million cubic yards of the un-differentiated, un-
named, no-value garbage, whose every iota of material identity has been
banished, the memorial, graveyard – or whatever it is – needs to be created out
of an utterly opposite kind of social contract. The shattered taboo that enabled
this unholy shotgun marriage needs to be restored; a chasm-change in attitude
is required, one of very deliberate differentiating, of naming, of attentive
reverence for each mote of dust from each lost individual. Thus remembered,
this must become a place that returns identity to, not strips identity from, each
perished person.
Ukeles 2002, n.p.
The lives that Ukeles reveals in Touch Sanitation are not lives that exist outside
of structures of power, violence or capital, but her work provides a corrective
to seeing that the only way of engaging with such structures is through the
lens of agency, resilience, resistance or the unfolding of the event in relation to
62 Enduring Time
the object. Time in Ukeles’ work is chronic, stuck and repetitive, but it is the
time of maintenance that ‘infects’ everyone, and which is ultimately the time we
share.
Ray’s a Laugh
9
Billingham’s work was included in the original ‘Sensation’ exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts
in 1997.
Maintaining 63
and barely left his room. He had no structure to his life – day and night were an
indistinct pattern of waking, drinking, sleeping, waking and drinking again for
months at a time (Billingham 2013). Billingham has described his early work as
a response to what he has called the tragedy of his father’s situation, and an
attempt to instil some order into the chaos of their lives. These early photographs,
however, were not intended as photographs but as source material for paintings.
Billingham had developed an interest in the quiet shadowy figures depicted in
the interiors of Edwardian homes that one finds in the paintings of Walter
Sickert and members of the Camden Town Group. He had initially intended to
use the photographs to paint his father in the interior space of the room in the
flat that he had withdrawn into.
Later Ray moved to Liz’s flat in a nearby block in the same town, and his
brother Jason, who had been in care in his early adolescence came back to live
with the family, re-constituting a ‘family home’. During this period Billingham
left to study fine art at Sunderland University, and when his degree was over he
returned to Cradley Heath and worked in a local supermarket, continuing to
photograph his family. The images collected in Ray’s a Laugh therefore span a
six-year period, from Billingham’s adolescence through his art school days, and
his return home. They include images of his father, mother and brother, the
interior of the flat, their cats and dogs and possessions. They depict his family
eating, fighting, sitting, making a jigsaw puzzle, drinking, smoking, sleeping,
laughing, hugging and staring into space. There are animals in many of the
pictures, and the series is punctuated by a number of images of birds in branches
that gesture towards a natural world beyond the flat.
The area of the West Midlands where Billingham grew up is known as the
‘Black Country’, due to the black soot produced by intensive coal mining and
the iron and steel industries that dominated the area during the nineteenth
century. However, coal mining was in terminal decline by the end of the 1960s
and the neoliberal economic policies brought in by the Thatcher government
led to the near total closure of the steel industry and its associated factories
in the 1980s. By the 1990s areas like Cradley Heath saw phenomenal levels of
unemployment and poverty, and were amongst the most economically deprived
areas in the UK . A common response to Billingham’s photographs has been to
question whether the exposure of the family’s conditions of economic deprivation
was a form of voyeurism, sensationalizing working-class lives, even if they
were his own. Billingham, although acknowledging that the family he grew up in
was ‘dirt poor’ (Perkin 2007), has written of his desire to simply take beautiful
photographs:
64 Enduring Time
I guess I’ve always tried to make a good picture, a beautiful picture that’s all. I
mean I didn’t notice all the stains on the walls or anything, I was just trying to
make a picture of something. [. . .] It’s not my intention to shock, to offend,
sensationalize, be political or whatever, only to make work that is as spiritually
meaningful as I can make it – in all these photographs I never bothered with
things like the negatives. Some of them got marked and scratched. I just used the
cheapest film and took them to be processed at the cheapest place. I was just
trying to make order out of chaos.
Billingham 2001, n.p.
Neither I nor they (my parents and brother) are shocked by the directness of the
photographs in Ray’s a Laugh because we’re all well-enough acquainted with
having to live with poverty. After all, there are millions of other people in Britain
living similarly.
Billingham, quoted in Tarantino 2000, 87
Along with the photo book, Billingham made a number of video installation
pieces, and a 50-minute work produced with Adam Curtis for British television
entitled Fishtank, in which we spend time with members of his family, smoking,
playing video games, feeding the fish, swatting flies, drinking and arguing
(Billingham and Curtis 1998). The art critic Adrian Searle has described Fishtank
as ‘a book of hours’, marked not by religious offices but by the cycles of Ray’s
alcoholism and the family’s responses to it (1999). What we watch is the family
going through what appear to be unchanging cycles of fighting, silence,
absorption into activities, tenderness, fighting again and stretches of persistent
boredom in which time appears suspended, lived as endurance, a form of waiting
without end, without project.
There are numerous ways to respond to the photographs in Ray’s a Laugh –
their extraordinary formal qualities; the way Billingham draws the viewer’s eye
towards the material textures, colours and patterns that cut across the drabness of
stained walls and worn out furniture; the framing of people within the spaces of
home; the ways ambivalent relationships of dependency and care emerge between
people, things and animals; the struggle he invites the viewer to make, to move
beyond the revulsion of the vomit-stained broken toilet and engage with the figure
collapsed by its side. More than anything, however, Billingham invites us to
maintain our eye contact, to stay in contact with the images, to live with him within
the time-space of the flat in Cradley Heath. Of Fishtank he has written:
Maintaining 65
The best footage was when I’d been just looking and not really thinking (trance-
like) so that the camcorder was more an extension of the eye. Also, I did choose to
hold on things – a head, a mouth, the sky [. . .] – for long periods, in order to build
up emotional tension. The relationships that came out in the film, between my
father, mother, brother or me are inherent to looking through my eye in those ways.
Billingham 2002, n.p.
Billingham, then, suggests a link between maintaining eye contact over time, and
the emergence of relationships; relationships that are, after all, a product of the
strange randomness of being thrown together in a constellation we call ‘family’. The
images in Ray’s a Laugh and the long close-up sequences in Fishtank, ‘picture’ the
kind of persistent, obdurate time that I am concerned with here; time ‘without
project’, that I have called elsewhere ‘mush time’, that is the time of family life (2013).
Furthermore, in many of the images in Ray’s a Laugh, despite the ‘snapshot’ aesthetic,
and the elements of chance and spontaneity in their making, we are invited into a
sustained meditation on interiority; both the inner ‘trapped’ space of people living
on top of one another in conditions of poverty, and the inner life that we all veer
towards and away from, that includes a struggle to live in and with time. Many of
the photographs depict Ray and Liz in moments that hover between contemplation
and a kind of blankness, in which interiority is itself lived as endurance. It is this
picturing of the time of inner life that circumvents a crass reading of the photographs
as simply ‘about poverty’, or about the dead time of living without hope or future.
Michael Tarantino writes of Billingham’s work:
For Proust, an image cannot be separated from its temporal co-ordinates. And it
is the notion of a particular moment in time that gives Billingham’s photographs
[. . .] their sense of the uncanny. We can share in the moment as it unfolds in
space [. . .] we are witnesses to each scene or shot. But we can never fully partake
of the image in time. That would mean that we possessed all of the answers. And
only the photographer has those. He remembers what we merely see.
Tarantino 2000, n.p.
Ray’s a Laugh reveals an attempt to maintain contact with both interior and
familial relations, through this gap between memory (that only the photographer
possesses) and image (which we can all partake in). Artist books function precisely
through modes of delay, as literal books of hours. The photographs cannot be
absorbed in one go, as our eye cannot flick between them in the way it can across
a gallery wall – we must take time to turn the page and in doing so, one image is
lost and replaced by another. A book is serial in this sense. For the images to work
together the viewer needs to hold the memory of one image in mind as we absorb
66 Enduring Time
the next, building a layered dense picture of the subject matter through the capacity
to hold images in mind over time and imaginatively associating them to one
another. Artist books are visual equivalents to narrative that also needs the medium
of time (of an unfolding future and a receding past) to function. Time lived as flow,
as a series of connections, in other words, is reinserted back into the stuck and
relentless presentness of family life through Billingham’s framing in the form of a
photo book. The images literally hold the family together, like a family album, and
put his family into relation with himself and one another through the act of
memory – here is the time Jason threw the cat, here is the time Liz did the puzzle
in her patterned dress, or Liz and Ray had a cuddle, or Ray was drunk again, or Liz
put her feet up on the sofa and stared at the TV. Making a family album is the kind
of thing that parents sometimes do for children to chart their growth and
development, and enable them to hold onto memories of earlier times. Albums
bind people into the temporal patterns of family life, patterns Elizabeth Freeman
describes as ‘choreographed displays of simultaneity [that] effect a latitudinal,
extensive set of belonging to one another’ (2010, 28). Where Freeman highlights
generational time that evolves around family rituals such as praying together or
eating together, events that might be recorded in family albums, here the photo
book stands in for a missing family album created by Billingham in response to the
tragedy of his family’s life. What it contains is images of their capacities to maintain
an inner life out of what others may see as detritus, whilst simultaneously
functioning formally to maintain a connection to ‘family time’.
I began this chapter with the assertion that noticing the qualities of time
embedded in maintenance matters, not just to how we understand this
contemporary phase of capitalism and the social relations it produces, but to
how we understand time. If maintenance systems are distinct from productive
systems that rely on them, they may produce different temporal arrangements
and temporal orderings that intervene in the dominant temporal imaginaries
of our times. I further suggested that it is this paradoxical notion of renewal
through maintenance (itself a form of stuck time) that allows us to begin to
understand what it may mean to ‘grasp time’.
In different ways, the work of Ukeles and Billingham speak to this paradox.
Both artists have spent years living in and through the experiences they are
documenting, and for both, time that is repetitious or refuses to unfold becomes
the subject of their work. Rather than thinking of this work as simply durational,
we might describe it more accurately as a ‘life work’ in the sense that Adrian
Heathfield describes:
What is distinct is that both Ukeles and Billingham insist on attending to the
suspension of the time of the ‘project of the self ’ that Berlant discusses, deeply
immersing themselves in lives without project as a potential response to the
conditions of the now. Ukeles offers us a model, through maintenance art, of
attending to the absolute singularity of beings and things, whilst at the same time
understanding how that singularity is constantly propped up by networks of
other singular beings and things and institutions and ideas, on whom we are all
68 Enduring Time
Repeating
We have borne and bred and washed and taught perhaps to the age of six or
seven years, the one thousand six hundred and twenty-three million human
beings who are, according to statistics, at present in existence, and that,
allowing that some had help, takes time.
Woolf 1993, 101
For in giving all one’s time, one gives all or the all, if all one gives is in time
and one gives all one’s time.
Derrida 1992, 1
69
70 Enduring Time
though repetitive, time consuming, and in some ways arduous, boring and
tedious, was also what constituted social relations through processes of touching,
in Touch Sanitation, and naming and making ‘things’ distinct, in Fresh Kills.
Through turning undifferentiated mushed up rubbish back into what might
approximate recognizable and nameable objects (though without necessarily
being able to reverse their status as overlooked, discarded, abandoned), Ukeles
demonstrated how both objects and time can become common and shareable
again.
But what is the time of repetition? And what is its relation to reproduction?
And what might we now mean by ‘maternal time’? Where the last chapter
was concerned with the repetitions of maintenance labour, particularly cleaning
up the city and our relations to rubbish, it was also concerned with the
tenuous processes of maintaining familial relations across and between
generations. This has something to do with the reproduction of temporality;
of a generation, that is, beyond our own, and the relation between repetition,
gender and engendering time. Although the figures in Virginia Woolf ’s quote
now seem quaint (did the world really only hold one thousand six hundred and
twenty-three million human beings barely one hundred years ago?), her
comment returns us to a longstanding struggle within feminist theory, a
theoretical provocation that occurs when reproduction and repetition are
brought into proximity with one another. The coupling and decoupling of
‘reproduction’ with the temporal trope of repetition, filters, for instance, through
the early work of both Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt, and their
concerns to differentiate the ‘meaningless’, non-productive, repetitive and
therefore ‘futile’ securing of survival that is traditionally associated with a
conglomerate of maternal, domestic and ‘female’ labour, from the productive,
inventive and generative sphere of ‘work’ that constitutes the public sphere,
and hence the possibility of ‘politics’ in Arendt’s terms (1958). The similarities
between de Beauvoir and Arendt’s concepts of labour are not always obvious.
However, Andrea Veltman has argued that for both writers, a justification for
living requires going beyond the simple maintenance of life, and for a life
to be meaningful it needs to either produce something durable, or through
creative activity, express the self (2006, 2008, 2010). De Beauvoir certainly
recognizes that without labour, life cannot continue. But labouring simply to
preserve life cannot provide a reason to live. Activities of immanence, as opposed
to those of constructive transcendent activity, are futile, and it is the combination
of necessity and futility involved in reproductive labour that renders it an
absurdity:
Repeating 71
Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does
is maintain itself, then living is only not dying, and human existence becomes
indistinguishable from an absurd vegetation.
de Beauvoir 1948, 83
For de Beauvoir it is the fact that household labour leads to nothing durable
that prompts her to conclude that though the tasks of cleaning, cooking
and raising children are necessary, they are ‘only means, not true ends’ (1949,
473). Where de Beauvoir works on a notion of immanence in which labour
that merely sustains life can be distinguished from transcendent activity,
Arendt distinguishes ‘work’ that produces durable artefacts, from ‘labour’
that leaves nothing behind. According to Veltman, Arendt’s concept of labour
is wider than de Beauvoir’s, taking in ‘biological life, fertility, privacy,
wealth, consumption and enslavement’ (2010, 61) although she does not
explicitly acknowledge that much of what she discusses relates to the racialized
or female body, and we could say the traditionally female and raced domains
of private space, with its cyclical processes of consumption and production.
Arendt writes:
It is indeed the mark of all laboring that it leaves nothing behind, that the result
of its effort is almost as quickly consumed as the effort is spent. And yet this
effort, despite its futility, is born of a great urgency and motivated by a more
powerful drive than anything else, because life itself depends upon it.
Arendt 1958, 87
collapse the specific work of mothering with the more general labour of
social reproduction.1 Where the concept of ‘social reproduction’ has been
expanded beyond the home to incorporate a much broader array of activities,
from the world’s subsistence farming that is still largely performed by women, to
the self-reproduction of communities, community-based structures and
communities of care (Federici 2012), we tend to lose sight of the specificities
of maternal care and hence maternal time when it is collapsed in this way
into the category of social reproduction (Sandford 2011). Contemporary time
starvation is particular to those who perform maternal care-work, whether
they are middle-class mothers working the double shift in relation to an
increasingly feminized workplace, or working-class mothers who have
always managed the complex temporalities of working whilst raising children.2
Indeed, Catherine Malabou goes so far as to propose a minimal concept for
‘woman’ as:
Whilst this definition remains troublingly austere, and does not distinguish
maternal care-work from other forms of work in the home, the focus on the
violence of the dual pressures on a woman’s time is in keeping with many
attempts to understand how the time of the double shift, specifically child-
rearing combined with paid employment, plays out for women and for capital.
Despite the classed figure of the ‘chav mum’ whom Imogen Tyler has argued is
supposed to have abundant time to mother, and who evokes a kind of gendered
class envy in their time-starved, harried and anxious middle-class counterparts
(2013), women who mother are overall working more than their male
counterparts, and have less ‘pure’ free time, whilst also performing most public
‘care work’ such as nursing and teaching, beyond the home.3 Their bodies, in
other words, endure the constant elongated ‘now time’ of permanent work more
1
See for example Benston 1969, Costa and James 1973, Cox and Federici 1976, Federici 1999,
Morton 1971.
2
See for instance Bianchi 2000, Bittman 2005, Bryson 2007, Craig 2006, Everingham 1994, 2002,
Folbre 1986, 2014, Folbre and Bittman 2004, Harkness 2008, Kan et al. 2011, Kilkey and Perrons
2010, Perrons 2017, Sullivan 1997, 2000, 2004, Wheelock 2001.
3
75% of local government workers are women; 1 in 8 of all jobs done by women are in local
government; 77% of NHS workers are women; 80% of adult social care workers are women; 82%
of education workers are women (Fawcett Society 2012).
Repeating 73
than others, meaning that maternal time is now in danger of becoming totally
subsumed by work-time, that is, completely ‘qualified’ time.
It is now well established that in most countries in the global north, and
Anglophone countries in the global south, whilst women’s paid work outside the
home has increased in the last four decades, men’s contribution to care work has
not kept pace, so that where care work is ‘delegated’ it is largely passed from
middle-class women to other women, rather than men, formerly to working-
class women, and increasingly to women from the global south whose care work
in their own homes is then taken up by extended family members, and also
maintained by transnational mothers via social media.4 Some studies have
shown that men’s share in total domestic work and care for family members
increased by only twelve per cent over a twenty year period in the US , Australia
and some European countries, such as France, where it represents an increase of
just ten minutes per day, whilst ‘parenting work’ – in the strict sense of activities
directly devoted to children and excluding leisure time shared with children –
remains a highly feminized preserve.5 Overall, whilst hours of domestic work
performed by householders themselves have fallen, the amount of time devoted
to caring has not. One of the stumbling blocks is that time is not infinitely
malleable or exchangeable between uses or between people, when it comes to
care. Christine Everingham’s Australian-based study showed that whilst the time
available to both men and women decreased when they had children, only
women, and especially mothers of young children experienced a deterioration in
its quality, so that their ‘free time’ became fragmented, and could only be found
in ‘short bursts’ (2002, 338). The picture, then, that emerges from the sociological
literature is that women’s care work is ‘constant, repetitive and unrelenting’ and
that their ‘free time’ is full of interruption, and multitasking (Wajcman 2008).
Even to make such free time, Everingham argues, mothers have to spend time
planning, anticipating, setting things up, getting things done ahead of time, and,
as many have documented, mothers remain disproportionally involved in the
production of communal activities, support networks and other activities that
may appear as ‘leisure’, but in fact can be thought of as part of maintaining the
supportive structures in which mothering can remain viable, and require a
certain kind of ‘work-time’ to make happen.6 Maternal time in late liberalism has
4
See Baldock 2000, Madianou and Miller 2011, Madianou 2012, Parreñas 2005, Williams 2010,
Yeates 2009, 2012.
5
See Gershuny 2003, Harkness 2008, Jacobs and Gerson, 2004, Kan et al. 2011, Kilkey and Perrons
2010, Sullivan 2000, 2004 and Wajcman and Bittman 2000.
6
See Mattingly and Bianchi 2003 for further research on gender and ‘free time’ and Gilles 2007 for a
discussion of the labour of maintaining supportive structures by marginalized mothers.
74 Enduring Time
much in common, then, with ‘dead man working’ (Cederström and Fleming
2012) and the permanent work-time of ‘non-stop inertia’ (Southwood 2011).
Beyond the sociological analysis of mothers’ time, the question remains,
however, as to whether there is something distinct about maternal time qua
time; whether the time involved in this particular relation of care can tell us
something about time itself. Whilst wanting to disaggregate maternal time from
the time of other forms of labour, we might approach this question paradoxically
from the uncomfortable conjunction, ‘maternal labour’ that, as Stella Sandford
has elaborated, pushes the limits of our understanding of both terms (2011). In
noting that a Marxist analysis of labour both excludes an adequate analysis of
the type of work we might identify as the raising and caring for children, and
also shares little with a non-Marxist feminist theory of motherhood and the
maternal more broadly, Sandford asks a series of pertinent questions about the
tensions that arise when ‘maternity’ and ‘labour’ are made proximal:
How can the concept of the maternal circulate alongside the category of labour
as anything other than an abjected, psychologistic and therefore idealist
theoretical deviance? What possible relation can the concept of the maternal
have to that of labour given the absence of a shared theoretical context? What
category of labour can bear the association with the maternal in the phrase
‘maternal labour’ without swallowing it up? What is the specificity of ‘maternal
labour’? And what would an adequate understanding of ‘maternal labour’ mean
for our understanding of labour and the maternal themselves?
Sandford 2011, n.p.
For Sandford, the problem hinges on the issue of indifference. Marx identifies
a shift in the category of labour in capitalist modernity in which individuals can
transfer from one form of labour to another, as a matter of ‘indifference’. Although
transferable labour power can be thought of in its general terms as applying to
all human beings in all epochs, Sandford teases out of Marx that, as an abstract
category, labour ‘is valid for all epochs but it only arises as valid for all epochs
under the specific conditions of capitalism in which it is realized in a general
form’ (Marx quoted in Sandford 2011, n.p.). And yet maternal labour, as distinct
from other forms of domestic labour – cooking, cleaning, household maintenance,
support work and what Kemp has called ‘status production’ (1994) – is precisely
not a matter of indifference to the individual who labours. Unlike cleaning, for
instance, the ‘labour’ of maternity is ‘affective, invested, intersubjective’ (Sandford
2011, n.p.), and retains an ethical dimension that is distinct. Here the maternal
body signifies as a permanently labouring body, but one that remains deeply
Repeating 75
Where women had traditionally been associated with space rather than time
(she quotes Joyce as referring to ‘Father’s time, mother’s species’, 15) Kristeva’s
76 Enduring Time
analysis showed how time accessed through the feminine – the repetitive time of
nature and the impossible species-driven time of eternity – lay outside of the
social configuration of time as space (departure, progression, arrival) and
remained heretical to masculine time, or ‘herethical’, to draw on her later
neologism. Trapped in the realm of ‘unnameable jouissance’ women’s time
remains threatening, unarticulated and excluded from symbolic representation.
The particularities of that threat are in the maternal associations that cling to
femininity (Baraitser 2009), leading to the repudiation of the maternal in some
feminist literature as both a biologistic and romanticized attachment to the
rhythms of nature, and, to return to Sandford’s words, ‘an abjected, psychologistic
and therefore idealist theoretical deviance’ (2011, n.p.)
What is missing then, is not so much the need to free women’s time from its
associations with monumental and cyclical time, but an adequate account of
maternal time. If, as I argued above, maternal time is the time of repetition that
comes to matter, then its articulation would need to tie together the time it takes
to become attached to one another through repetitive, obdurate, mundane
practices of maternal care, that is not fully encompassed by either teleological,
developmental, cyclical or monumental time, whilst at the same time signifying
‘otherwise’ to the dichotomy between repetition and permanence, work and
labour.
The non-reproductive
In earlier work I have tried to take seriously the question of what or who is
precipitated, not when female subjects are defined by their peculiar talents for
becoming two, but instead when we come to live in close proximity to a rapidly
changing other, an unfolding other, whose demands are ruthless, an ‘open
structure’ to use the late Sara Ruddick’s words, whose acts are ‘irregular,
unpredictable, often mysterious’ (1980, 352).7 These qualities – irregularity,
unpredictability, ruthlessness and the capacity to relentlessly interrupt our
going-on-ness and make demands from a position of profound vulnerability –
structure what I am calling ‘a child’ as a specifically unknowable other, a relation
to whom poses questions about ethics, identity and subjectivity. Understanding
the maternal subject as precipitated by a willing relation to such an enigmatic
other allows ‘the maternal’ to emerge as an open theoretical question about the
7
See Baraitser 2009.
Repeating 77
8
See extensive work by Imogen Tyler 2000, 2001, 2009a, 2009b, 2011b, 2013, Tyler and Baraitser
2013, as well as Garrett, Jensen and Voela 2016, Gilles 2007, Jensen 2012, 2016, and numerous
papers in the online open access journal Studies in the Maternal (www.mamsie.org).
78 Enduring Time
associations), but without aligning it with the death drive. In order to move
beyond the deadlock of maternity-futurity-reproduction we need an account of
the ways that maternal time is indeed repetitive, stuck and unfolding, and
therefore, in temporal terms, not really ‘on the side of the children’ either, if being
on the side of the children is to keep time with normative development, and yet
distinct from the temporality of meaningless repetition. Repetitive labour, after
all, is relationally and indeed communally produced, as Silvia Federici has
reminded us (2013). Instead I want to push for maternal time as the ‘time of
mattering’ that takes place through the suspended ‘non-developmental’ time that
we glimpse in Denise Riley’s powerful work, Time Lived, Without its Flow (2012)
in which it is precisely time’s suspension that attests to the ongoing relation
between a mother and child, paradoxically accessed through the death of that
child. In my discussion of Riley’s work, I argue for an account of maternal time
that shares with queer time a dynamic chronicity, alive to the potentials of not
moving on, whilst at the same time maintaining its link with the ethical principle
of one’s own future being bound up with the future of another. This articulation
then allows us to theorize ‘suspended time’ in the feminine, but without aligning
the time of the feminine with the cyclicality of ‘women’s time’ or with the
drudgery of domestic labour. Instead, the suspended time of allowing one life to
unfurl in relation to another makes visible the time of mattering, embedded in
maternity, that I argue remains radically queer.
No Future
9
See also Irigaray 1991, 1993a and 1993b.
Repeating 81
refusal (the no that is posed to the category of ‘the future’) is therefore not just
that of repetition, as in the cyclical repetitive return of the repressed, but that of
the constant. There can be no letting up of the no. The no is the ongoing,
unrelenting negativity that echoes the law of the Symbolic’s ‘foundational act, its
self-constituting negation’ (5). Whilst signification, which operates through the
deferral of meaning, does require a projection forwards, a relationship we could
say with the future, at the same time this future orientation is constantly undercut
by the death drive, which is also a function of the symbolic, and provides a
negative force against even the possibilities of deferral. The death drive, from
Edelman’s Lacanian reading has this particular quality of excess. Queer, Edelman
argues, can expose the constancy, the inescapability, of access to jouissance in the
social order itself, ‘even if that order can access its constant access to jouissance
only in the process of abjecting that constancy of access onto the queer’ (5). If the
death drive is the undoing of civil society, queer is a refusal to collude with the
notion that such a drive can be denied.
Two issues arise from Edelman’s conjoining then of ‘no’ with ‘future’. The first
is that for this negative embrace of the undoing of civil society to hold, the
distinction between the death drive, and the fantasy of an unfolding future – the
hopeful and deferred horizon that the child is meant to signify – needs to also
hold. However, I argued earlier that the hopeful and deferred horizon of the
future may itself be in some sort of ‘crisis’, producing, amongst other things, new
articulations of futurity that deviate from reproductive futurity. The issue of
survival, for instance, or the uncertainty of persisting as a species (or more
precisely, in the language of those who work in this field, the persisting of the
relationality of ‘multispecies assemblages’ (van Dooren et al. 2016)), has become
a central preoccupation that filters across many different disciplinary and
interdisciplinary debates, from Timothy Morton’s discussions of our struggles to
think about deep future time, and to acknowledge that human beings and the
world itself are always already ending, to discussions about the anthropocene, and
the sixth global mass extinction (2007, 2010, 2016). Survival, in these ecologically
inflected discussions, is not just an issue of persistence in the sense of things
continuing to persist in their species-being over short or longer periods of linear
time, but includes an appreciation and exploration of the heterogeneous
temporalities involved in persistence, and its ontological counterpart, extinction.
Whilst overall we are seeing a decline in biodiversity driven by climate change,
there is, perhaps counter-intuitively, some interest in also tracking the
potentialities of extinction – the emergence of new species precipitated by the
extinction of others, transforming ecosystems, even though, as Audra Mitchell
82 Enduring Time
10
See Bauman 2004 and Zournazi 2003 for further discussions of the politics of hope.
Repeating 83
What is crucial to the idea of a crisis of hope is that, as Amsler argues, it is not
that there appears to be no systemic turn away from capitalism as an organizing
principle of society, but that this system infuses a ‘whole ontology’ – a fundamental
way of being – that represses or eliminates conditions of possibility for imagining
how we might create other ways of being at all (Amsler 2015, Kompridis 2006,
120). Yet she, like Berlant, is concerned with tracking the ways hope persists,
even when it may do so through ostensibly self-destructive turnings in on
ourselves; overeating, the attachment to ideas of family, emancipatory politics.
Returning to Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, the contemporary west may be living
through the cultural collapse of one of the most important mythologies of
capitalist modernity – the linking of ‘the future’ with expansion and growth
(2011). As we saw earlier, Berardi claims that the commonly held notion of a
progressive future which reached its peak in the second half of the twentieth
century, has been replaced by a generalized condition of acceptance of ‘no future’.
Berardi’s advice, however, differs from Edelman’s: he suggests we ‘harmonize
with exhaustion’, strategically accepting the end of the fantasy of the future
understood as development, growth, expansion and accumulation. This would
undercut the embrace of the death drive that Edelman advocates, which aims at
the internal undoing of the fantasy sutured by the child. From Berardi’s
perspective, this fantasy quietly died towards the end of the twentieth century.
In addition, whilst Berardi characterizes our times as a kind of post-future,
there may be other fantasmatic operations at work in relation to the future that
do not necessarily recognize its figuration in terms of a child but can manage to
hold open a different kind of generativity. To return to Simon Bayly’s work on the
temporality of the project, he draws on Boris Groys to argue that unlike work, the
imaginary space of the project (what we are working on) is one that binds itself
to a projected future that is intended to transform for the better, in some small
way, the totality of the world, even when that world appears beyond repair. While
it may seem utterly insignificant on a wider scale, a project, Bayly argues, always
takes on the whole world, which is both its medium and its measure:
Although in some ways the project opens up a heterogenous time whose passage
may be pleasurably uncertain and unpredictable, it is nevertheless orientated to
a determinate future – even if that determination is nothing more than the
arbitrary termination of the project itself. So, working on the project, I live and
work in and for the future, not as something merely open and unspecified but
literally as a projection which either will or will not turn out to be the particular
version of the future to which the project has dedicated itself.
Bayly 2013, 165
84 Enduring Time
So, in this sense, the project comes to be a unit of finite time that is lived
within the already closed horizon of the future, fending off the collapse of other
forms of temporality – cyclical temporalities, or an open enlightenment future
of intergenerational transmission and betterment. My point here is simply that
as the ways we imagine futures shifts, our temporal imaginaries may no longer
be structured by that ‘poor man’s teleology’ that relies in the figure of the child
for its production, calling into question the Edelman’s defence of queer as a
deliberately recalcitrant refusal to fight for the future.
Secondly, in relation to this shift in how we might imagine a future, we need to
reconfigure the temporality of the death drive and its relation to repetition. Edelman’s
death drive, drawing on Lacan’s reading of Freud, takes the form of a constant
pressure in psychic and social life, and has the temporal structure of a permanently
thwarted relation to das Ding – Lacan’s articulation of an originary source of painful
pleasure, usually proximal in some ways to the elusive qualities of the maternal body.
Because the death drive is ‘beyond’ the pleasure principle, it marks out a different
temporal order from that of the repetitions of the ego’s attempts at binding libido. In
Edelman’s reading, this is return with no movement, and with no difference, a
repetition that must create a constant distance between the subject and das Ding.
Lacan states: ‘There is nothing so dreadful as dreaming that we are condemned to
live repeatedly (à répétition)’ (quoted in Johnston 2014, 205). What is death-like
about this articulation of the death drive, if you like, is simply the ongoingness of the
drive itself and the way it never lets up. Unlike the small amount of jouissance that
one can actually partake in, and that occurs through a relation to the objet petit a
(the substitute object for das Ding) which suggests a more conventional notion of
repetition, the death drive, as Edelman elucidates it, is the terrifying too-much-ness
of access to jouissance. Slavoj Žižek, writing in the same vein, describes the death
drive in terms of ‘the undead’, this insistence ‘beneath death’ that is behind the
compulsion to repeat that Freud was trying to understand. The death drive has
nothing to do with a thrust towards destruction or self-destruction but is:
[. . .] a name for the “undead” eternal life itself, for the horrible fate of being
caught in the endless repetitive cycle of wandering around in guilt and pain. The
paradox of the Freudian “death drive” is therefore that it is Freud’s name for its
very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis, for an
uncanny excess of life, for an “undead” urge which persists beyond the (biological)
cycle of life and death [. . .] Drive is not an infinite longing for the Thing which
gets fixated onto a partial object – “drive” is this fixation itself in which resides
the “death” dimension of every drive.
Žižek 2006, 62
Repeating 85
However, as Adrian Johnston has drawn out, drives do not operate according
to one monolithic temporality (2005). Johnston homes in on the tension in
Freud’s work between his developmental account of the drive in Three Essays on
the Theory of Sexuality (1905), in which the drive is articulated as maturing over
time, moving through various changes to zones and objects, and the idea in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), that the death drive is a constant, timeless,
repetitive feature of psychic life. He writes:
On the one hand the drives are shaped according to the telos of a developmental
progression; on the other hand the drives remain fundamentally unaffected by
chronological changes in the evolution of the libidinal economy.
Johnston 2005, 228
‘materialist and atheist cosmogony’ as Teresa de Lauretis (2010, 75) has put it, in
which the life of an organism (including the organism that is the human) is
figured as an ongoing deviation that seeks to maintain its existence by resisting
any path to death that does not conform to its own particular limits and
conditions for self-preservation. Freud states that these conditions:
[. . .] are component instincts whose function it is to assure that the organism
shall follow its own path to death, and to ward off any possible ways of returning
to inorganic existence other than those which are immanent in the organism
itself [. . .] what we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in
its own fashion.
Freud 1920, 311
Here again we find the notion of the utterly singular that is brought about
through the elongated temporality of repetition; the repetition of repetition that
brings about the specific. In a speculation about the origins of organic life Freud
writes:
For a long time, perhaps, living substance was thus being constantly created
afresh and easily dying, till decisive external influences altered in such a way as
to oblige the still surviving substance to diverge ever more widely from its
original course of life and to make ever more complicated détours before
reaching its aim of death.
Freud 1920, 311
linked to the everyday, and the everyday to woman. For feminists, this connection
can be a problem or a source of strength’ (2011, 25). Just as repetition structures
psychic life in the double sense of the death drive, it filters through the everyday
as a temporal trope that has specific resonance for women. Returning to
Sandford’s account of the conjunction ‘maternal labour’ she sees the contradiction
in the category as a reflection of a contradiction in reality: ‘between the demands
of capitalist production, according to which all aspects of existence must
accommodate themselves to the form of the market, and the aspects – or
remnants, as Adorno might say – of the subject’s resistance to this’ (2011, n.p.).
The contradiction between the capitalist subject and the maternal subject is a
lived contradiction, Sandford suggests, negotiated on a daily basis by individuals
involved in forms of labour that they are not indifferent to, an example, that is, of
many diverse forms of relational and collective work that the market requires,
and in some small ways may not completely infiltrate. Maternity, in its failure to
be indifferent to the specificity of its labour, implies a return, time and again, to
a scene that matters, a kind of repetition, that is, that is not quite captured by the
death drive as excessive access to jouissance, nor to the death drive as a deviation
towards a unique form of death, but might, after all have something to do with
generativity. The return to a scene that matters is not a kind of flowing time
(anyone who has spent time with small children will know this), and is not the
stultifying time of indifferent labour, but living in a suspended time, which is the
time it takes for mattering to take place.
Poet, writer, historian, philosopher, critical theorist, Denise Riley opens Time
Lived, Without its Flow, with the following statement:
I’ll not be writing about death, but about an altered condition of life. The
experience that not only preoccupied but occupied me was of living in suddenly
arrested time: that acute sensation of being cut off from any temporal flow
that can grip you after the sudden death of your child. And a child, it seems, of
any age.
Riley 2012, 7
Time Lived, Without its Flow is a response to the sudden and unexpected
death of Riley’s adult son. It is a response that Riley could only begin after a two-
and-a-half-year period in which she found that the desire, and perhaps the
88 Enduring Time
capacity, to write, had abandoned her. To write requires time’s flow, especially a
sense of living in a present that can give way to a future, yet it was precisely this
lack of flow that she encountered after her son’s death. She describes living in
‘crystalline time’, which was really not time as such, but its radical suspension:
No tenses any more. Among the recent labels here is ‘time dilation’ referring
to our temporal perception’s elasticity, its capacity to be baggy. Are there any
neurological accounts of this feeling of completely arrested time? It feels as if
some palpable cerebral alteration has taken place. As if, to make the obvious joke,
your temporal lobes have been flooded, and are now your a-temporal lobes.
Riley 2012, 24
Inside their senses of arrested time millions must live today, and have lived. The
death of their children, perhaps in wars or through natural disasters, is apt to
induce a profound dislocation in the experienced time of those left alive. They
are thrown into ‘timeless time’. Yet despite the fact that such human losses occur
constantly, the ensuing state of a-temporality seems largely to escape from
recorded notice.
Riley 2012, 49
and only in the rare literary instance of Emily Dickinson did she find a precise
articulation of ‘time lived without its consequence’:
The thought behind I strove to join
Unto the thought before,
But sequence raveled out of sound
Like balls upon a floor.
‘Sequence raveled out of sound’ indeed. One note no longer implies another’s
coming. You watch the water cascading from the tap to splash into the basin.
Yet noting small events and their effects doesn’t revive your former impression
of moving inside time.
Riley 2012, 34
All this entanglement with your dead child, though, becomes evident in thought
only as you look back. At the time, you’re naturally and easily inside several states.
Or inside two lives. For if timelessness is the time of your dead, then you will go
with them into their timelessness. Here you can live mundanely, indeed brightly.
Riley 2012, 39–40
What do the dead give us? A grip on the present instant in which we’re now
relentlessly inserted. Not in a contemplative sense, but vigorously. A carnal
sensation. If to be dead is to exist outside of earthly time, then this tough-minded
energetic living in the present is also the life of the dead. My new ability to live
in the present is a joining-in of that timelessness of being dead. Or the nearest I
can get to it.
Riley 2012, 23
Instead it is one’s relation to everyday life that goes through a dramatic shift,
one in which time can no longer unfold predictably or reliably. A crisis has
occurred in the reliability that the future will unfold. In one sense, time is
completely suspended, crystalline, a time in which nothing flows because
nothing can be expected, whilst at another it continues as a form of daily
engagement, or saturation with suspended time:
You are time. You are saturated with it, rather than standing apart from it as a
previously completed being who was free to move in it.
Riley 2012, 59
The surprise of my own sense of time having stopped was that it wasn’t as
disorientating as it sounds. It wasn’t unpleasant or distressing at all. Something
had certainly and rightly changed, but the compensation for that change was
that everything possessed a great immediacy and sharpness.
Riley and Baraitser 2016, n.p.
What can the a-temporality of a relation with a dead child tell us about
maternal time, about repetition and reproduction, and about the time of
mattering, that we have been pursuing here? In keeping with Sandford’s
desire to think about the particularity of maternal labour, of what happens
to the maternal when it comes into a relation with ‘labour’, Riley also tries
to get at what might be particular about losing a child, and why this loss may
feel so different from other, no less important, no less profound losses. She
writes:
Perhaps what’s specific is this: that with the death of your child, your own time
may be especially prone to disturbance, because the lost life had, so to speak,
previously unfurled itself inside your own life.
Riley 2012, 43
Repeating 91
If you had once sensed the time of your child as quietly uncoiling inside your
own, then when that child is cut away by its death, your doubled inner time is
also ‘untimely ripped’. Yours, and the child’s.
Riley 2012, 44
Riley’s account gets to the nub of maternal time. Paradoxically through the
death of her child we are able to retroactively understand the time of the
unfolding of one life in relation to another; the kind of stilled time that is neither
developmental, nor meaninglessly repetitive, but a kind of mutual unfurling or
uncoiling, images then of time circling outwards, out of a spiral but not caught
within its repetitive cycle. The time it takes for unfurling to happen, that we catch
retroactively through what happens to time when a child dies, is the time that
time takes for one life to come to matter to another.
If there is ever to be any movement again that moving will not be ‘on’. It will be
‘with’. With the carried-again child.
Riley 2012, 35
Delaying
Delay
93
94 Enduring Time
the delay’ as a form of waiting is linked therefore to the temporal drag of the past,
as it infects and anticipates the future. Lampert writes:
[. . .] the anxiety of delay holds the future hostage to the present momentum
originating in the past. Delay installs the future in the past, brings the past into
the present and endows each future with more futures [. . .] delay ties past,
present, and future into a single web in a way befitting the speciousness of their
independence.
Lampert 2012, 14
The resistant subject does not enjoy freedom; on the contrary, the resistant
subject finds itself in a predicament that does not admit the luxury of possibility.
[. . .] Resistant subjectivities deviate from the modern, revolutionary adventure
of the pursuit of freedom through autonomy inaugurated by Rousseau and Kant
[. . .]. Resistance is closer to the pre-modern doctrine of the virtues than to the
modern value of freedom: it responds to an implacable demand for justice with
actions characterized by fortitude or the ability to sustain courage over a long
period of time without any certainty of outcome, along with prudence in the
choice and deployment of limited means.
Caygill 2013, 97
the Zapatistas, and what he collectively calls ‘The Women of Greenham Common’,
Caygill tracks how resistance emerges as a mode of living, and a continual
affirmation of defiance, through various forms of non-action. For Caygill, the
‘strength’ of the ‘resistant subject’ that takes up Gandhian Satyagraha, for instance,
‘comes from the courage produced by being vowed to death’ (114). ‘Resistant
subjectivity’, he writes, ‘is in a sense already dead’ (98), a ‘posthumous subjectivity’
(98), as it involves a commitment that entails accepting one’s potential death at
the hands of the enemy, which frees the subject from the possibility of being
terrorized into submission.
I have been tracing, however, suspended temporalities that are framed not so
much through an encounter with the horizon of death (whether Heidegger’s
being-towards-death, or the ‘already dead’ of resistance), but through the horizon
of ‘birth’ in an Arendtian sense, the horizon of ‘new beginnings’, albeit those
paradoxically brought on by practices of endurance, repetition, maintenance
and staying. In The Human Condition, Arendt states that ‘natality and not
mortality, may be the central category of political thought’ (1958, 9). Politics, for
Arendt is the capacity to speak and act in the public sphere, proceeding from a
situation in which people who are ‘equals’ come together to discuss and debate
their differences, without aim, and without knowing what the outcome of such
debate will be. As before, Arendt’s concept of the public sphere is problematically
confined and shadowed by what she relegates to the private realm of ‘labour’. Yet
she is a rare philosopher in the sense that she marks out the political as, by
definition, always a new beginning, and therefore linked with an originary
beginning – that of birth itself. Birth, in the history of European philosophy and
Judeo-Christian religious thought, has tended to operate as a blind spot, stripped
of its associations with the female body, with life flowing in a direct line from
god to ‘man’. Following Augustine, Arendt argues that ‘beginning’ in a
philosophical sense is unique to human beings, and the beginning that birth
inaugurates is the foundational fact of all thought, politics and action. Without
the potentially transformational category of natality, there can be no freedom,
no revolution, no emancipation, and no human future. ‘Birth’ emerges, then, as
an ontological category in Arendt’s work as a way to articulate how ‘beginning’ is
itself brought into being, suggesting a natal politics that revolves around the
possibilities of the again-and-again of the present, rather than a politics of the
a-venir.1 The task, then, might be to think about the relation between delay and
the political from the perspective of birth rather than death. The elongated time
1
See Tyler and Baraitser 2013 for an extension of this argument.
96 Enduring Time
of delay, which is also the time of resistance to the law’s power to detain, is the
time of sustaining the capacity to begin again.
In this chapter I expand the time-frame of both waiting and delaying as
modes of doing politics, through a story about intergenerational waiting, the
delay that occurs between and across generations who enact the elongated time
of beginning again, as itself a form of political action. The backdrop to this story
are two predominant examples of elongated intergenerational delay, understood
in its Arendtian form, that have haunted the political landscape in the last
50 years – (post)apartheid South Africa, and the ongoing delay of a just solution
for the Palestinians in relation to the State of Israel. In a piece entitled ‘Indefinite
Delay: On (Post)Apartheid Temporality’, Derek Hook outlines a variety of forms
of temporal delay that compose what he calls ‘the time signatures of (post)
apartheid South Africa’, as a way of trying to understand the relation between
generations of ‘waiting’ for political change during the apartheid era (for both
the dominated and the dominators in the South African context), and the long
drawn out period of political transformation since the formal ‘end’ of apartheid,
characterized by what many regard as the glacial pace of institutional
transformation and political change (2015). In Hook’s view the (post)apartheid
period has a distinctive temporality:
the past, which Hook then names, after Fanon, as ‘petrification’, a way of
understanding the (post)apartheid condition as itself a form of petrified time.
Where, as Hook notes, earlier articulations in the writings of Robert Sobukwe,
Steve Biko and other prominent figures in the Black Consciousness movement
drew on a notion of historical change as ‘only a matter of time’, a practice of
sitting it out against an horizon of affective anticipation, Crapanzano’s study in
the mid-1980s of the effects of domination on those who dominate, revealed the
temporality of waiting for ‘something, anything, to happen’, as a form of anxious
delay imbued with a permanent state of agitation and unease. For the white
population, it was a matter of time’s refusal to develop or unfold, of living in the
closed and brutal impasse that apartheid had systematically created, in which
the fantasy of the good life was precisely felt to be permanently under threat and
affectively unattainable. Such contradictory temporal modes, where time both
produces and suspends change, Hook argues, may remain, bleeding into the next
generation, as it struggles to shift the structural conditions that would keep open
a hopeful futurity. It manifests as a form of petrification, one of the many painful
psychosocial effects of the (post)apartheid era.
Petrification, however, as a political strategy, rather than a description of a
fraught psychosocial field, may also be a way of approaching the time signatures
of Palestinian resistance that now spans more than half a century, a mode of
‘waiting’ for justice across four generations.2 Lynne Segal has spoken of the
struggle to resist despair when too much time goes by between the desire for
justice and its arrival (2015). She draws on John Berger’s powerful summary of
his impressions on visiting Palestine in 2005, in which he noted an ‘undefeated
despair’, rather than an undefeated hope, amongst the Palestinians he met.
Existence, or simply the on-go of survival becomes itself a form of resistance, an
insistence that ‘we are still here’ (2006). As Raja Shehadeh states in Occupation
Diaries, Palestinians ‘have no intention of going anywhere’, their politics is one of
staying (2012, 204). The stance of undefeated despair that Berger notes, works,
however, through the daily, sometimes mundane, sometimes small, but always
brave acts of resistance. A 50-year-old man he meets tells him:
2
I do not mean to imply that waiting is the only form of resistance that the Palestinian population
has taken up in relation to the conflict. See, for instance a range of work including Ben Ze’ve 2014,
Bucaille 2004, Hasso 2005, Halaka 2016, Holt 2014, Jayyussi 2007, Joronen 2017, Kassem 2011, Salih
and Richter-Devroe, 2014, Tariki 2006, for both political and cultural histories of each generation
of Palestinians, and their different strategies.
98 Enduring Time
our hunger-strikes. The most I did was twenty days. We won a quarter of an hour
more exercise time each day. In the long-sentence prisons they used to mask the
windows so there was no sunshine in the cells. We won back some sunshine.
Berger 2006, 28
3
Autobiography of a Generation was first published in Italian as Autoritratto Di Gruppo, in 1988. The
term ‘generation’ appears in the 1996 English translation by Erdberg for Wesleyan University Press,
as it is clear that Passerini is not simply describing a ‘group’, but a generational group who embarked
on the political struggles of the 1960s and 1970s in Italy. It is the notion of generation drawn out by
Erdberg’s English translation that I focus on here.
4
I am referring to ‘1968’ in its broad sense, to cover the period of worldwide militant foment from
1966 to 1975.
Delaying 99
of their contemporary manifestations.5 And yet ‘1968’ both changed and did not
change the world and was imbued with both generative and traumatic elements
that have remained active in its ‘time afterwards’. I return therefore, not to the
events of 1968 themselves, but to a later account of those events, through a
reading of Passerini’s text that details the Italian experience of 1968 and its
aftermath.
Autobiography of a Generation juxtaposes two narrative lines that alternate
throughout: the story of 1968 told through a variety of retrospective personal
testimonies that Passerini collects in the mid-1980s (the ‘winter years’, as
Félix Guattari once referred to them (2009)), and the story of Passerini’s
own psychoanalysis that takes place during the same period and charts the
reverberations of key events in her early childhood in the 1940s and 1950s. As
we read Autobiography of a Generation again in the ‘now’, we therefore read back
through three post-war generations, each later scene making possible a rendering
of the earlier one. Passerini, that is, attempts to apprehend the political events of
1968 through the personal narratives of those looking back on a political scene
from a second political scene located in the 1980s, the first of which can only be
understood retroactively through the work of giving political testimony. Thus,
I want to explore how we might read ‘1968’ as a symptom, produced in part to
ward off the anxiety of a generation, and the testimonials as ‘generative’ in their
capacity to enable a retrospective attachment to be made to the scenes of ’68.
This anxiety comes to be understood later as having been traumatic, in the
context of a second later political scene, in which that generation had to come to
terms with a partial collapse in the ideological underpinnings of the political left
and the subsequent backlash against post-’68 thinking. In working through this
anxious attachment to the first political scene, the relation between the personal
and political that was so forcefully posed by second-wave feminism at the time,
and forms a central and enduring part of post-1968 political thinking, comes
into a new and different focus. By juxtaposing political testimony with her own
contemporaneous psychoanalytic treatment, Passerini attempts the rocky road
towards apprehending a core traumatic kernel that coagulates around the death
of her mother when she was six, the news of which was withheld from her for
some months. Rather than calling for an understanding, as Carol Hanisch first
put it, that ‘personal problems are political problems’ (1970) we can read
Autobiography of a Generation as suggesting that it is political testimony (the
5
For a brief history of peaceful protest and uprising in the context of the Arab Spring see
Azoulay 2011 and Khalidi 2011.
100 Enduring Time
Generation
Afterwardsness
This attempt to make sense of something that one knows has occurred, and yet
in some profound way one seems to have missed, is at the core of a psychoanalytic
sensibility in which events come to be significant after an originary event that
has bypassed memory and language. Freud refers to this as ‘historical truth’ – the
indelible trace of experience on the psyche prior to the capacity for the event to
be encoded in a recallable way, a trace that can only be reproduced rather than
remembered, as its original form is lost (1939). We can trace this notion of
historical truth through Freud’s developing concept of Nachträglichkeit that,
Delaying 103
along with the notion that the unconscious is ‘timeless’, remains the central
organizing temporal concept in Freud’s thinking, a concept that appears in his
writings as early as the Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) and continues to
develop through the footnotes of Ratman (1909) right up until the time of
Freud’s study of Moses (1939). Nachträglichkeit encapsulates the bi-directional
traversal of developmental and synchronic time. The structure is that of two
scenes, separated by a dynamic period of psychosexual development, followed
by the third ‘scene’ of the adult in analysis – the scene of the transference, which
is itself an eruption of the past into the present-tense of the psychoanalytic
encounter. Between the early and later childhood scenes the drive is on the move
developmentally, as we saw earlier, operating, in one of its temporal axes, along a
linear vector in the forward direction of time, so that it is only with the relative
sexual and intellectual maturity that accompanies the second scene, that the first
repressed scene that has given rise to the symptom can be remembered. The
‘action’ of the early scene is delayed until the psyche has the capacity to make
sense of the sexual content in the context of the later scene, giving rise to the
English translation of Nachträglichkeit as ‘delayed action’.6 Although the first
scene is always at some level sexual, it comes too early for the infant to make any
sense of. Sexuality more generally, in the sense of bodily and psychic excitability
of erogenous zones, by definition comes too early, and the sexual knowledge that
helps to retroactively make sense of such excitations comes too late.
Trauma, however, is located in the second scene’s capacity to allow the first scene
to be remembered, and in this sense it is the bringing to light of the first repressed
scene, rather than the factual occurrence of the scene itself, that produces traumatic
effects. The memory occurs in the time of the second scene, either bringing forth,
or creating a representation of the first scene for the first time, thereby working
‘retroactively’. Lacan emphasized the retroactive, or backwards movement between
the two scenes (1953–1954). Somewhere in the interval between not being ready to
deal with sexuality, and being ready to make sense of something that is long past, is
what we call subjectivity, the hiatus being ‘captured’ through the act of speaking,
which, through repetition of the irreducible gap between signified and signifier,
allows us to endlessly reproduce ourselves. For Lacan we are temporal subjects,
through and through. It is in this sense that he can claim that the effect precedes the
cause, the future gives rise to the past, and not the other way around, a statement of
the radical anachrony of subjective experience (1953–1954).
6
Après-coups, deferred action, retroaction and afterwardsness are all related translations of Freud’s
term, Nachträglichkeit, meaning delayed or belated understanding, or the later pathogenic effect, of
earlier traumatic experience.
104 Enduring Time
Laplanche, on the other hand, settles for simply ‘afterwardsness’, rejecting the
idea that causality can operate backwards in time: ‘With psychoanalysis’,
Laplanche states, ‘the cause, however old-fashioned and archaic, has in effect
been reinstated’ (1992a, 432). As we saw earlier, Laplanche emphasizes the
forward vector in which the actuality of the encounter between the immature
infant and the adult’s sexual unconscious comes to have significance later on. It
is not that the future gives rise to the past, but that the future ‘finds its place in the
transference when provoked by the analyst’s enigmatic messages’ (Dahl 2010,
728). Here Laplanche re-orientates us towards the third scene – the scene of
analytic encounter, where the whole problematic of linear time is played out.
Following Freud, Laplanche states:
7
See Gentile 2006 for an object relational account of the emergence of psychic time.
Delaying 105
Not only does Passerini miss two originary events, one political and one personal,
as we will see, but through the political narratives she records, we see the
generation itself in search of its own historical truth. What emerges from
Passerini’s interviews are scenes that are not only full of fervent hope and
triumph, the throwing off of the older generation with its authoritarianism and
its institutions, which it undoubtedly was, but also traumatic scenes imbued, for
many who participated, with confusion, loss, hopelessness, despair and bitterness.
Perhaps this is most poignantly visible in the testimonies, collected in 1983, from
women talking about the gender dynamics of the movement, and the lateral
relations amongst women who were attempting to build a politics of collectivity:
106 Enduring Time
Chiara: The majority of women, even if students, had a minimally active role in
what was going on. The only one who protested and talked was C. and I dreamed
several times that she was drowning and I let her drown, smirking.
Passerini 1996, 98
Maria Teresa Fenoglio: In reality, I was very intimidated. I puffed myself up a lot
– in fact, every once in a while I ask how people remember me and they
remember me as a person who harangued the assemblies very forcefully and
decisively. Inside, I felt very insecure, but I wasn’t aware of it.
Passerini 1996, 98
The adventures of the feminine in our world pass through poverty and loneliness;
they include terrible trials, all the more terrible when accompanied by a political
and productive commitment, when accompanied by the conviction of doing
something right and useful for others.
Passerini 1996, 100
On the cultural level 1968 acts as a prism: the rays converge on it and emerge
from it refracted into different colours. What was invisible previously becomes
visible now and at the same time nothing is as it was before [. . .] In the immediate
aftermath disintegration remains the most evident phenomenon: what was
united is divided, separated, reduced to dust.
Passerini 1996, 125
Delaying 107
In these lives that carry the mark of an intense season – today forgotten by most
– the way one carries a secret it is always tempting to reveal, [. . .] memory
alternates between rage and happiness; the choices attempt to come to grips with
this alternation, in order not to shatter the biography a second time, in its own
recollection and in its narration.
Passerini 1996, 154
I never figured out if ’68 was good or bad. And now I discover myself once more
having the same ideas I had before ’68, about a lot of important things.
Passerini 1996, 152
when she was six, that we could read in relation to an earlier impossible historical
truth, remains untouched, despite other therapeutic gains. A shift, however,
occurs when her analyst, whom she usually experiences as laconic, erudite, witty
and reserved makes, in his own terms, a ‘mistake’. Here is the passage (G is
Passerini’s analyst, X is her lover):
G. says, after having heard some dreams about X: ‘Coming to get you from the
waiting room, I had the perception that the premature loss of your mother has
really left its mark on you’. Well then, my state of orphanhood is so visible.
Throughout the day I continue to do the normal things in my job and my routine.
In bed, alone, at night, all of a sudden it is as if past time were wiped out, more
than forty years. A growing hiccup, an almost asthmatic breathlessness, an
absence that takes my breath away: why did you go away, why aren’t you here,
why did this happen to me? Rancour, hate, terror, I won’t be able to survive.
Instead, I do survive, groping, like a stump, a wounded part. Scenes come back as
vivid as if they were yesterday; the withered roots become painful. A night spent
reliving images of rejection and abandonment. G. feels responsible. ‘One could
have not done it’. ‘That’s true, and yet one had to do it’.
‘Once I wouldn’t have done it’. ‘I realize that it involves a certain risk’. ‘Risk,
yes’. (One technique is to nod in agreement. Another is to repeat the last word,
be an echo. X gets nervous, says that I too do it with him more and more often).
G. emphasizes that he has not acted within a therapeutic strategy. I know that it
is very important to him not to hold himself out as healer, doctor, shaman. But,
I explain to him, for me it’s crucial, for various reasons, that he said that sentence
to me, that he thought that I could deal with it. Because my family, on the other
hand, had not thought so and had hidden from me for a long time the fact that
she was dead.
Passerini 1996, 114–115
What is it that occurs here? At one level Passerini’s analyst, in his intervention
simply says, ‘I can see that you are a child whose mother has died, even in the
middle-aged woman who sits in my waiting room’. He names her loss and its
lasting impact, and in doing so, collapses the 40 years that have passed, allowing
Passerini to make emotional contact with the psychic state of a child whose mother
has died, who has never fully felt the loss, who has never allowed herself to feel
the extent of her rancour, hate and terror at being left alone. In splitting off this
aspect of her psychic life, Passerini has lost touch with the traumatic elements of
that loss that have structured her entire life – her relationships, her politics, her
passionate attachments of all kinds. And yet this reading misses another – that
Passerini’s mother’s death is redoubled by the shock of being told months after
Delaying 109
the event that she had in fact died. The delay between the actual death, and being
told of her mother’s death is the time that is wiped out by the news of the death,
and is repeated by the therapeutic enactment. It is an absence of time that takes
her breath away. I thought you were here all this time, but actually you were
already dead.
What Passerini’s analyst’s comment does, then, is to notice that at some level
Passerini is still waiting for her mother to come home from hospital. As she
sits in the waiting room, what he sees is just that – a child waiting, rather than
a bereaved child. He stumbles, that is, not on the impact of the loss, but its
absence. The mother is not yet lost in Passerini’s psychic life – she is still alive,
in hospital, and Passerini is still waiting for her to come home. Passerini’s
psychic decision to continue to wait for her mother means that she cannot
fully claim her place within her own generation. She is caught, frozen within her
own mother’s generation, waiting to grow up. In placing herself, through
her own political testimony and the gathering of the testimony of others, within
her own generation, she can take in the analyst’s comment as important. She is
ready, she tells him, to know what a part of her already knows but cannot think
about.
This section of Autobiography of a Generation is recorded as having taken
place in June of the third year of Passerini’s analysis. It is in dialogue with her
own political testimony that grapples with the exhaustion and ideological
struggles of the early 1970s and then the violence on the Italian political left of
the late 1970s. Passerini writes of the period between 1969 and 1973:
The terrible years [. . .] I couldn’t raise my own eyes, given all those things that
hadn’t been cleared up, such as the derivation of terrorist violence from our
intellectual and existential milieu. Like many others, I had always assumed that
terrorism couldn’t come from anywhere but the right, that it was Fascist by
definition.
Passerini 1996, 121
110 Enduring Time
By situating her story within the stories of the generation of ’68, her generation,
Passerini can write her story, and the story she writes is not just her political story,
but the story of recognizing a disavowed loss that has structured her political life.
The analysis is the encounter with that loss in the present-tense of the transference.
It is a doubled encounter, as what Passerini recognizes is the very loss of the
present-tense encounter with her mother. What she mourns, in other words, is the
too-muchness of the originary maternal–infant encounter in which the binding
of time is instigated. In the delay – in re-inhabiting the dead time of waiting for
her dead mother to return – she glimpses, retroactively, the ongoing present-tense
of the intergenerational relation that allows her to feel ‘in’ time, or ‘in her time’:
Only now is the complementary nature of my two undertakings evident. If I had
not heard the life stories of the generation of ’68, I would not have been able to
write about myself; these stories have nourished mine, giving it the strength to
get to its feet and to speak. But I couldn’t have borne them, in their alternation of
being too full and too empty, if I had not confronted myself and my history with
the double motion of analysis and the exercise of remembering.
Passerini 1996, 124
I have teased out a story, one of many possible stories that could be told through
reading Autobiography of a Generation, that suggests how we might become
attached to the political events of our moment. It reveals the delay involved in
Delaying 111
noticing that we might be ‘touched’ by the trauma of such events, and the relation
between these events and a psychic substratum that has something to do with
the traumatic fact of sharing time across generations (Laplanche’s insistence on
the traumatic present-tense of adult–child relations), that continues as a
structuring object relation in adult and political life. The story reveals that our
capacities to retroactively situate ourselves generationally, to respond to the
times as ‘my time’, enable an engagement with other processes of working
through histories of trauma, including personal and intergenerational histories,
linking generation, understood as the collective time-frame of the political,
with generation understood as the productiveness of the too-much-ness of the
present tense.
I began, however, by situating this discussion in the context of two political
scenes of ‘petrification’; that of (post)apartheid South Africa, and the ongoing
intergenerational waiting for justice of the Palestinians. I mentioned too, a third
scene, the return to the political ‘camp’ as an aesthetic scene of politics that
re-emerged in a dramatically public way during the events of 2011, and how a
way of doing politics may ‘remain’ in a public imaginary, rather than just in
psychic life. It is here that I think we can see the passing on of the potential of
‘beginning’ that Arendt names as ‘politics’ (1958).
We have recently seen a return to forms of protest that deliberately make
visible different modes of ‘collectivity’, particularly the enactment of ways of
living together, in which ‘the protest camp’ includes temporary dwellings with
semi-permeable boundaries, such as tents and other temporary shelters,
collective and sustainable means to generate food and warmth, areas and
platforms for debate, education, learning and discussion, and areas for recreation,
regeneration and cultural and artistic expression. These forms of protest have
long histories and complex genealogies.8 Rashid Khalidi for instance, has pointed
out that the largely peaceful revolutionary upsurges in Tunisia and Egypt have
their own history of peaceful Arab uprisings that they draw on, and it may well
be that the aesthetics of peace protest that have been mobilized in European and
Arab contexts draw on quite different cultural imaginaries (2011). The point is
not, perhaps, that the events of 2011 that took place in different geopolitical
locations shared the same aesthetics or histories of protest, but that neither are
they completely ‘uncut’ from their own particular histories and aesthetics. The
Camp for Climate Action, which held its first gathering in the UK in 2006, for
8
See Hailey 2009.
112 Enduring Time
instance, has clear links with the aesthetics and politics of the Occupy movement
camps that originated in New York and spread to London, themselves also in
dialogue with pro-democracy camps in Egypt, Madrid and Athens in which the
camp itself demonstrates a mode of potentially sustainable living that both
experiments with and creates new collective imaginaries, generating both
utopian and anachronistic images that serve the function of dislodging what
Jacques Rancière describes as the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Bayly 2017). It
would also be strange to occlude the relation between the Camp for Climate
Action and the women’s camp at Greenham Common, which changed the face
of both the women’s movement and direct-action politics. As Yvonne Marshall,
Sasha Roseneil and Kayt Armstrong have written:
The camps were a testing ground for new forms of active, non-violent disruption
by occupation, practices which were taken up and reinvigorated from the mid–
1990s in anti-road, environmental and climate change actions, and at the
ongoing peace camps of Menwith Hill, Faslane and Aldermaston.
Marshall et al. 2009, 226
The peace camp also draws on histories of other forms of making the body
passive or inert, as a way of embodying non-violent forms of social change. The
anti-sweatshop sit-ins on US campuses in the late 1990s, for instance, evoked a
history of sitting-in, sitting down, and a refusal to physically budge, that drew
their aesthetic potency from the restaurant sit-ins conducted by the Congress of
Racial Equality as early as the 1940s, that were in their turn passed on to
later generations of protestors during the American Civil Rights Movement, so
that the 1960 Greensboro and Nashville sit-ins were already resonant with a
history of non-violent civil disobedience around racialization, segregation and
discrimination. These in their turn fed into strategies used by disability rights
movements, the bed-ins against the Vietnam War that Yoko Ono and John
Lennon made iconic, teach-ins that have challenged the corporatization of
education, work-ins against the erosion of employment rights, and more recently
the re-emergence of ‘die-ins’, in which participants figuratively ‘drop dead’ on
cue, which have been used to raise awareness of prominent acts of police and
extra-judicial killings, which draw on a history of anti-war campaigning, and the
campaign against nuclear weapons from the 1960s through to the 1980s.9
There are, of course, other more troubled aesthetics that run alongside peace
camps that were particularly prominent in the UK in the 1980s. The pivotal and
9
Three thousand people, for instance, performed a mass die-in in the centre of Glasgow in 1983 to
protest the ongoing investment made by the UK government in nuclear missiles.
Delaying 113
violent clash between striking coal miners in South Yorkshire and the British riot
police has become iconic in terms of protest that takes the form of battle. This
was made especially visible through Jeremy Deller’s art project, The Battle of
Orgreave (Deller and Figgis 2001), which entailed a full-scale re-enactment of
the events at Orgreave and their aftermath, using both historical re-enactors, and
members of the local community, many of whom were ex-miners, and some of
whom were involved in the original violent suppression of miners by the police.
The art project involved returning to, remembering, and literally re-enacting the
‘battle’. To do so Deller had to physically amass a huge number of riot police
helmets, shields and police uniforms, and ‘battle train’ the local extras and
original miners – material, social and artistic practices that retrospectively
revealed the original ‘aesthetics’ of war used by the British police.
For the camp to re-emerge as a form of protest requires, however, noticing a
missed generational beat. Sasha Roseneil writes about her ongoing engagements,
and re-engagements with Greenham over more than two decades:
I was surprised because during all the years I had worked on Greenham, it had
felt like few people were interested, at least amongst the feminist theorists,
historians and sociologists I encountered. Greenham was ‘old hat’ in its association
with ‘woolly hatted womanhood’ its memory tinged with unfashionable notions
of essentialism, maternalism, and un-deconstructed gender identities.
Marshall et al. 2009, 236
Enduring
The House That Herman Built is an ongoing social art project, a collaboration
between the American activist and artist Jackie Sumell, and the late political
prisoner and Black Panther, Herman Wallace.1 Herman Wallace spent 42 years in
solitary confinement, most of it in a Super-Maximum-Security Unit in the
Louisiana State prison known as ‘Angola’ in the United States. He protested his
innocence throughout. He lived in a 6-foot by 9-foot cell with no human contact
for 23 hours a day, 7 days a week, for those 42 years. He was held in Camp J,
an area of the prison known as the ‘dungeon’. In Sumell’s words ‘it is the place
where prisoners go to suffer’ (Sumell and Wallace 2006, n.p.). Wallace finally
had his conviction overturned and was freed three days before his death from
cancer at the age of 71, on the 4th of October 2013. He had spent more than
half of his life in solitary confinement. The project began as an exchange
between Sumell and Wallace, and over a twelve-year period became an ongoing
project, despite Wallace’s passing, and includes an exhibition of a reproduction
of the cell that housed Wallace that has toured worldwide; a book of the letters
and exchanges between Wallace and Sumell published in 2006; a documentary
film based on the project by Angad Bhalla; and a series of drawings, 3D imagery
and a model based on Wallace’s description of his ideal home which Sumell
would one day like to build in Wallace’s home town of New Orleans. At the
centre of the project is the imagined house – the house that a man who has
lived in a 6-foot by 9-foot cell creates through an intimate friendship with an
1
See http://hermanshouse.org/ for an account of the project.
115
116 Enduring Time
artist, which is at the same time the blueprint for a virtual house that,
through the struggle to get it built, acts as a hub for the wider struggle against
wrongful conviction, and the inhuman conditions of indefinite solitary
confinement.
In the last chapter, we saw how the temporal trope of delay is built into
experiences of political time in which, alongside the temporality of event, a more
elongated time opens up through practices of waiting, and the retroactive
working through of trauma, that could generate the statement ‘I have belonged
to a generation’. In the delay between generations, waiting emerges as a kind
of attachment to the ‘present tense’ of an intergenerational event, an event
that happened in the past, but continues to play out through time, structuring
our internal and political leanings. But there are conditions under which
attachment to the ‘present tense’ is neither choice, nor simply a matter of
remèmoration, but a structural condition of the present. By this I mean we have
to understand Wallace’s barely thinkable ordeal, his 42-year-long torture, as
not only the material condition of the perpetual present, but as a direct result
of what Christina Sharpe has called ‘the endurance of antiblackness in and
outside the contemporary’ (2016a, 14). In order to think about incarcerated time,
we cannot, in other words, approach the form of temporal extension that The
House That Herman Built suggests, without reading it with what Sharpe calls ‘the
wake’: ‘the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved
unfolding’ (14). Sharpe’s extraordinary work, In the Wake: On Blackness and
Being, provides a theoretical guide for this chapter, as I attempt to respond to
Jackie Sumell’s invitation to all of us, to ‘know’ about Wallace’s ordeal.
Writing in 2008 about the possibilities for a new ‘time’ in the face of what he
saw as the impossibility of a genuinely new political landscape, Alain Badiou
stated:
First, I would retain the status of courage as a virtue – that is, not an innate
disposition, but something that constructs itself, and which one constructs, in
practice. Courage, then, is the virtue which manifests itself through endurance
in the impossible. This is not simply a matter of a momentary encounter with the
impossible: that would be heroism, not courage. Heroism has always been
represented not as a virtue but as a posture: as the moment when one turns
to meet the impossible face to face. The virtue of courage constructs itself
through endurance within the impossible; time is its raw material. What takes
courage is to operate in terms of a different durée to that imposed by the law of
the world.
Badiou 2008, n.p.
Enduring 117
Solitary
We have been apprehending, at the level of the quotidian, how ‘staying’ with the
affective embarrassment of out-of-date ideas can release their potential through
a form of theoretically folding or kneading time; how ‘maintaining’ time through
repetitive, and in some ways arduous, boring and tedious activities, can constitute
social relations that may allow us to ‘share’ time; how mothering a dead child
produces the oddly lively time of being with the dead that is not ‘outside’ of time,
nor ‘in’ time, but can nevertheless be lived as time without its flow; and how the
temporal delay that produces historical truth binds psychic time to the legacy of
previous generations. But the experience of solitary confinement is registered at
a different level; the level of the ‘raw material’ of time, an oppressive time that
‘alters one’s ontology’, as Jack Abbott, who spent 14 years in solitary confinement,
put it (1981, 67). The radical Black political prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal calls
prison simply a ‘temporal box’ (1996).
Sumell has named solitary as an ‘impossible’ situation (Sumell and Baraitser
2015). It entails living the impossibility of continuing to exist indefinitely, but
without social or physical contact with other people or living creatures, without
access to natural light, landscape, or any other elements of the natural world. It
entails living under conditions of permanent surveillance, yet with no relation,
contact or stimulation. In a regime of low-level constant artificial light that is the
norm, for instance, for solitary individuals in the US Federal Prison System,
there can be no coming and going of the day other than the enforced temporality
of domination imposed by the prison institution: the repetitive time of food
being shoved through a food hatch in the door, of being mandatorily strip
searched every time you leave your cell, being handcuffed or put in leg irons
every time you are taken out into the ‘dog run’, a euphemism for a strip of outside
space surrounded by concrete walls or densely meshed wire fencing, so there is
Enduring 119
no view beyond, except for a glimpse of the sky, a place to pace up and down
alone before returning in cuffs to a solitary cell (Guenther, 2013). The UN Special
Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or
Punishment defines solitary confinement as ‘the physical and social isolation of
individuals who are confined to their cells for 22 to 24 hours a day’ (Mendez
2014). The physical and psychological consequences of such treatment are clear.
Amnesty International’s 2014 report ‘Entombed: Isolation in the US Federal
Prison System’ states:
2
See also the 2002 Human Rights Watch World Report on the spread of ultra-modern ‘super-
maximum’ security prisons from the US to other parts of the world and Davis 2003 for the way this
process relies on and further promotes structures of racism.
120 Enduring Time
‘warehouses’ people who represent major social problems, all over the world,
and not just in the US (2016, 25). The ‘impossibility’ then, of living in solitary
becomes a way to think about the impossibility, and yet reality (the zone of
both being and not being), of other modes of social endurance or ‘social death’,
and the link between military, industrial and prison industries that generate
huge profits from processes of social destruction.3 Drawing on Dennis Child’s
articulation of the relationship between the slave ship hold, the barracoon, the
prison and the prison cargo-hold (2015), Christina Sharpe states,‘US incarceration
rates and carceral logics directly emerging from slavery and into the present
continue to be the signs that make Black bodies matter’ (2016a, 75).
Time in solitary is ‘petrified’, in the sense that we encountered earlier in Derek
Hook’s reading of the (post)apartheid psychosocial field (2013). The resonance
of the term ‘petrified’ comes to us from Fanon, where he talks specifically of the
obscenity of colonialism, slavery and racism as the very production of subjects
accommodated to their degradation, ‘petrified’ in terms of the restricted
possibilities of living within the oppressive environment of the zone of nonbeing
(1967, 61, 73). Petrified time, for Fanon, has a particular relation to Blackness in
the colonial situation and therefore cannot be disaggregated from what Sharpe
calls ‘the afterlife of property’ (2016a, 15). What is unique to Sumell’s artistic
collaboration, however, is the way she simply and effectively disputes the
impossibility of living in the wake. Despite enormous odds, Sumell makes a
lasting, deep and intense friendship over 14 years with a man who has had the
passing of time suspended from his life as an act of punishment. She makes
imaginative space and time in a situation in which he lives indefinitely in a 6-foot
by 9-foot cell with no human contact. And most importantly, as we will see, she
works with the ‘present time’ of incarceration to insert the passing of time into a
situation in which the future itself has been incarcerated. It is not so much that
Sumell opens up the affective horizon of hope (although I have no doubt that the
project also does do this), but that, through her engagement with Wallace’s
adamant refusal to give any ground on his political views and beliefs, she lifts the
temporality of preservation out of that of incarceration. The House That Herman
Built preserves for safe-keeping Wallace’s vision of a better world, a vision that
takes its political power from its distinction with the incarceration of the future
out of which it emerges. In providing a time in the future in which this preserved
time may come to pass, Sumell disrupts the incarceration of Wallace’s time, both
the time of his life, and the time of his political vision. Taking up Badiou’s notion
3
See Cacho 2012, Davis 2003, 2016, Guenther 2013, Mbembe 2001, 2003 and Patterson 1982.
Enduring 121
The Angola 3
The history of Herman Wallace, and his two fellow prisoners, Albert Woodfox
and Robert King Wilkerson, who became collectively known as the Angola 3, is
one of profound injustice, and is tragically neither uncommon nor unique. In
1970, at the age of 27, Wallace began a 25-year sentence for armed robbery and
was transferred to Louisiana State Penitentiary. ‘Angola’ was and remains a
systemically violent place. Built on the site of an antebellum slave plantation, the
prison has been repeatedly reported over its history as having poor work and
living conditions, high levels of inmate assaults, the circulation of arms amongst
prisoners, and a notorious sex slavery system. Today, as Marc Léger states, the
complex operates as an 180,000-acre work-camp where three-quarters of its
inmates are African American. In Léger’s terms, they are effectively paid between
4 and 20 cents per hour for their forced labour (2011).
When Wallace arrived in 1970 the prison was still racially segregated. In 1971,
he established the Angola Chapter of the Black Panther Party with Ronald
Ailsworth, Albert Woodfox and Gerald Bryant, after receiving permission from
the Panther central office in Oakland, one of the only prison Panther chapters
that were ever formed. Members of the Angola Chapter fought for changes in the
treatment of all prisoners, but especially highlighting the situation of black
122 Enduring Time
Then, in 1972 a prison guard named Brent Miller was stabbed to death and
Wallace, King and Woodfox were convicted for his murder. The men denied
killing the guard. Two separate all-white juries convicted them, and they were
given life sentences. Amnesty International has stated that ‘no physical evidence
links them to the crime’, the testimony of the main eyewitness has been
Enduring 123
4
See Amnesty International Action for Individuals at https://www.amnesty.org.uk/albert-woodfox-
angola–3-louisiana-usa-solitary and the film In the Land of the Free (2010) directed by Vadim Jean.
124 Enduring Time
computer screen. She reports that on receiving the pictures Wallace marvelled at
the new, yet ordinary complexity of the world, drinking up the detail of everyday
life that had been slowed down and stretched out over a 24-hour period so he
could see it, and contemplate it. With this offer of her time, Sumell opened up a
question as to whether it would be possible to imagine the world of another for
whom time does not pass in the same way (Sumell and Baraitser 2015).
‘Chronophobia’ describes a condition suffered by those in prison, as well as
the elderly, that entails a distinct fear, anxiety or unease about time. Commonly
referred to as ‘prison neurosis’, it remains one of the most common psychiatric
conditions for individuals held in confinement, in which a terror develops in
relation to the duration and immensity of time. Some of the most debilitating
symptoms include delusions, claustrophobia, depression and feelings of panic
and madness.5 At its core, chronophobia is a fear that the present time will never
come to an end. It is the affective experience of the too-much-ness of time, time
that will not pass, will not unfold onto a future of freedom, release or death. Here
the permanence of the suspended time of incarceration, exacerbated in solitary
confinement by enforced non-relationality and sensory deprivation, is felt to be
psychically intolerable. The psychiatrist Stuart Grassian, whose work concerns
the psychological harm caused by conditions of solitary, describes how people
need both external and internal stimulation to live, and without this will end up
agitated, delirious, confusional and potentially in a psychotic state (2006). The
removal of social and sensory stimulation, and its replacement with a kind of
permanent or stuck low-level state of stimulation in which lights are on all day,
the temperature remains the same, and there is no glimpse of the world turning,
means that there is no meaningful stimulation, even if there is perceptual
information. This, coupled with the kinds of overstimulation of prison – offensive
smells, loud and sudden alarming noises – Grassian argues, leads to profound
psychological difficulties. These are intensely frightening experiences, and
without any help managing or alleviating them, individuals come out of solitary
struggling to adjust again to non-solitary conditions within the ‘open’ prison
environment, leading to further punishment, and leading to further time in
solitary. Grassian maintains that once people get into this kind of vicious cycle,
they cannot get out. In this sense, solitary time, even for prisoners who are not
being punished for their political views, has its own deadly circularity, in which
the more time spent in solitary confinement, the more likely that person will be
to spend even more time in solitary confinement.
5
See American Psychiatric Association 2013.
Enduring 125
Lisa Guenther, in Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives (2013),
charts the development of solitary confinement in the US through three distinct
but interconnected phases. The early US penitentiary system, arising as a
standard technique of punishment by the early nineteenth century, was originally
conceived of as a humanitarian response to the penal customs of English colonial
rule: public humiliation, torture and execution (3). The ‘Great Law of Pennsylvania’
in 1692 put solitary as a central component of a new approach to imprisonment
in which corporal and capital punishment were supposed to give way to
confinement within a cell, with the express aim of promoting a confrontation
between the prisoner and his conscience through being left alone to reflect,
accept and eventually reform his ways. In the mid-eighteenth century, the penal
‘reformist’ Benjamin Rush’s distorted vision was that solitary confinement was
designed to be therapeutic, a way of wiping away the sins of the past through
atonement brought on by prolonged isolation and self-reflection. Yet by the time
Charles Dickens visited the Pennsylvania system in 1842, Guenther writes, the
punishment of solitary and its effects on prisoners truly horrified him, effecting
‘a complete derangement of the nervous system’, as Dickens’ guide put it when
Dickens enquired about the constant trembling of prisoners, their nervous tics,
difficulties making eye contact, talking, cringing and nervousness (19). The black
experience of incarceration, however, during this first wave of the US penitentiary
system, was distinct. Within the plantation, solitary could be meted out at the
whim of a master or overseer. Here solitary was not, Guenther points out, an
experience of failed redemption, but rather ‘one of forced labor, bodily pain,
public humiliation, and isolation to the point of social death’ (39). After the
Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, ‘freed’ black Americans were routinely
criminalized, and subject to new justifications for incarceration and slave labour
as convicts rather than slaves.
From the 1950s to the 1970s, Guenther charts a renewed desire to diagnose
and treat criminal offenders as if their crime were a disease, with behaviour
modification rather than religious redemption as its primary goal. However, by
the 1980s a third wave of solitary confinement had emerged. Any rhetoric of
rehabilitation and spiritual redemption had been removed and the new regime
was underpinned by an implicit and at times explicit aim to control, contain and
incapacitate prisoners (161). It is within this biopolitical regime that the
supermax-level prison cell emerges, with its host of insidious names that
obscure their use as modes of control and punishment: Special Housing Unit
(SHU ), Control Unit (CU ), Special Control Unit (SCU ), Administrative
Segregation Unit (ASU ), Administrative Maximum Facility (Ad-Max), Intensive
126 Enduring Time
You sit in solitary confinement stewing in nothingness, not merely your own
nothingness but the nothingness of society, others, the world. The lethargy of
months that add up to years in a cell, alone, entwines itself about every ‘physical’
activity of the living body and strangles it slowly to death, the horrible decay of
truly living death. [. . .] Time descends in your cell like the lid of a coffin in which
you lie and watch it as it slowly closes over you. When you neither move nor
think in your cell, you are awash in pure nothingness.
Abbott 1981, 43
December/07/2004, page 1
Through out my prison life, I think I’ve managed to endure the worst that could
happen to the human psyche and emotions. George Jackson spoke of this also in
his “Blood In My Eye” book when he said he had developed a “Proudflesh.” He
told a friend to think of her worst experience in life – her worst fear for that split
moment – is what he experiences 24/7.
Sumell and Wallace 2006, n.p.
6
See ‘Survivors Manual: Survival in Solitary’, written by and for people living in control units. Anon, 2012.
Enduring 127
ending on and on of the worst experience of one’s life. Whilst Wallace always said
to Sumell that although he was physically in prison, he was never totally in
prison, as part of himself was always free, Robert King Wilkerson stated on his
release: ‘I talk about my 29 years in solitary as if it was the past, but the truth is it
never leaves you. In some ways I am still there’ (2010, n.p.). The refusal of the past
to become past, what Trouillot calls the ‘past that is not past’ (Trouillot 1997 in
Sharpe 2016a), situates King’s experience as part of an ‘ontological negation’ as
Sharpe puts it, of Black life. The past of King’s experience of solitary that will not
pass, is also the past that will not pass of histories of incarceration in solitary
confinement of Black individuals, the incarceration of Black time. Taken together
these statements attest to elongated double time of doing time in solitary: of
the necessity of keeping internal contact with the knowledge that time continues
to pass outside of prison, and the internalization of time that closes over you
like the lid of a coffin, prison time, that never leaves you even in conditions of
relative freedom.
Sumell’s response to the problem of narrating time from within the conditions
of solitary was to propose an imaginative exercise that allowed her to engage
with what it might be like to live in Wallace’s life-world, circumventing the
impasse of attempting to know about a form of time – endurance within the
impossible – that it is impossible to know about. In 2003, two years into their
friendship, Sumell asked Wallace a simple question: ‘what kind of house does a
man who has lived in a 6-foot by 9-foot box for 30 years himself imagine?’ The
question was deceptively simple. It sounds like a question about space, and could
have been answered immediately, and left at that. But instead, over a 14-year
period that entailed hundreds of letters and phone calls, Sumell and Wallace
worked together on plans for Wallace’s imaginary house that became an
elongated temporal project, itself a project of endurance. Wallace writes of the
project:
house. I outlined the house and gave her the idea of what each room should be
and look like.
Sumell and Wallace 2006, n.p.
Sumell talks of the time delay built into the project – the painstaking practice
of letter writing, and the difficulty of maintaining the flow of conversation
constantly interrupted by the whim of prison authorities delaying or confiscating
letters and denying contact. These temporal delays slow down the relationship,
force it into a certain protracted, myopic and stuttering pace. In a letter dated
February 2006, three years into the project, when Wallace had produced some
sketches of his current surroundings, including his cell, and what he could see of
the corridor outside his door including the doors of the row of the other solitary
cells, Wallace writes to Sumell:
February/01/2006, page 1
Now I know you were depending on me for the art work. But I did not let you
down – I tried to surprise you and thought by now you would have had it.
However I’ve been dealing with security concerning that very matter. Everything
was confiscated. Someone in the mailroom made an issue about the drawing.
Inside my cell may have passed, but the drawing of all the buildings around me
is considered a security matter so everything was confiscated. [. . .] So, that idea
is dead issue – sorry.
Sumell and Wallace 2006, n.p.
And yet somehow they went on, for years, designing the house together, down to
every last detail. Sumell describes Wallace’s vision of the house itself as pretty regular,
unsurprising, she thinks, given that Wallace’s sensorium was so constricted. The
video of the CAD drawings shows the exterior view of a rather low, suburban-
looking, triangular roofed house surrounded by gardens and flowers, the kind of
house you might see everywhere or anywhere in the US, again deceptively simple,
plain. A terrace is cut out of the top floor that sits above the glazed doors of the
ground floor, both of which look out towards a garden. From the two-car garage, the
viewer enters the house, passing a storage space with a pantry for dry goods. Then
there is a library, guest rooms, and the dining and conference room, which has a Hall
of Fame with framed pictures of the abolitionists John Brown, Gabriel Prosser,
Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey. In the second-floor main bedroom
a huge animal skin lies across the bed, reflected in the mirrored ceiling, and there is
a drinks cabinet to one side with drinks and glasses on display. A fireplace leads to
an underground bunker with first aid, food, and firearms, vestiges, Sumell thinks, of
the impact of Wallace’s incarceration. A black panther is painted at the bottom of the
swimming pool at the back of the house, and there are spaces designed for activists
to meet, stay, discuss and organize. And yet this description misses the incredible
specificity contained in Wallace’s letters as he imagines, and re-imagines his house,
imagining as a way, that is of ‘doing time’. For instance, he writes to Sumell:
February/21/2006, page 1
Let me get right to it. 2-car garage – instead of empty boxes you want to hang
hose pipe on the wall – 2 spare tires in both sides and the cars should be parked
in them. Without the cars no one would figure it’s a garage. – In the pantry, there
should be ONIONS , POTATOS , TOBASCO, various bottles of WINE . The
hobby shop; yes, old typewriters, speakers, all good for viewing. I’m surprised
you remember my skills rigging the radio to transmit. All radios have amplifiers
– all you have to do it tap into it using two sets of headphones. I see you got a pot
of beans under a fire. That is alright. Put a sprinkler in ceiling – you want to bring
in a large refrigerator – what is a kitchen without a refrigerator? Let’s dress the
table with a plate of food by each chair – small basket of hot rolls. Put a skillet
under a fire making shrimp and oyster gravy.
Sumell and Wallace 2006, n.p.
The house does not exist in future time, the yet-to-come. As Sumell says,
Wallace talked of living in the house in the present, in real time, simultaneously
occupying his cell and the house as it evolved through their dialogue. ‘It was not
about the future for him, but the now’ (Sumell and Baraister 2015). In other
words, Sumell and Wallace built a house for him to live in now, even while he
continued to live in his cell, with hot rolls on the table and shrimp and oyster
gravy on the fire. In one way, this imaginative space, through which he could
move, eat, sleep, talk, meet and organize, forced time to pass within the
incarcerated time of his cell.
However, Wallace and Sumell’s project is more than this; it is a social and
political artwork in which the imagined future taken as now, becomes a kind of
agitation in present time, the release of imagined action in the now, as what
brings the future into the present and makes it happen. Wallace’s own ‘walk
through’ of the house reveals its utter reality for him in the present tense as a
place to both live and change the world:
Enduring 131
April/01/2003, page 3
Between the south-west and southeast base cabinets is a swing door that
leads to our dining/conference room with polished wooden floor. On the
wall shared with the kitchen is our wall of Revolutionary Fame. And off to the
right side of the same wall is a wall for videos. You will notice this room is
elevated by two 6-inch steps to illustrate its importance of that over all other
rooms. We have a 16 chair mahogany conference table with 3 large windows
overlooking the front entrance, our beautiful garden. We have tan curtains
to compliment the painting of the house. If you will notice on the far side of
the west wing flagstone wall is our living room of which is entered by the door
here on the west wing of the porch. It is equipped with blue carpeting and a
violet 7-seat L-shape sofa. Here in the far left corner is a 3-piece entertainment
set covering both the south and west wing walls with a medium size glass
table in the center of the room. This opening leads to our west wing hall also
with blue carpeting. Against the wall we have portraits of Prisoners of War
and those Missing in Action. [. . .] We have a small entertainment room adjacent
to the master bathroom. It consists of a 6’ x 9’ bathtub which is the exact size
of the cell I lived in for 26 years. It has a toilet with black and white tiger
covering, we have silver towel racks. Inside this room travertine stone is
everywhere. In the vanity tops and flooring. A double walk-in closet is also
featured. The master bathroom is connected with the fully paneled bedroom
with Wainscot paneling and private access to the bath. The suite accommodations
also include African statues, African masks and black carpeting and blue light
above the wall mirrors.
Sumell and Wallace 2006, n.p.
The House That Herman Built is a house that could both ‘house’ and preserve
Wallace’s relation to the efficacy of revolutionary politics, keeping it safe for
future generations as a gesture of defiance against its lock down. Burl Cain, the
warden of Angola has repeatedly voiced that Woodfox and Wallace were held in
solitary specifically because they subscribed to ‘Black Pantherism’. In a 2008
deposition, lawyers for Woodfox, for instance, asked Cain, ‘Let’s just for the sake
of argument assume, if you can, that he is not guilty of the murder of Brent
Miller.’ Cain responded:
Okay, I would still keep him in CCR [. . .] I still know that he is still trying to
practice Black Pantherism, and I still would not want him walking around my
prison because he would organize the young new inmates. I would have me all
kind of problems, more than I could stand, and I would have the blacks chasing
after them.
Ridgeway and Casela 2013, par. 10
132 Enduring Time
Angela Davis has noted that the Ten-Point Program of the Black Panther
Party (which calls for freedom, full employment, an end to capitalists robbery,
decent housing, education, healthcare, an end to police brutality, to all wars of
aggression and freedom of Black and oppressed people held in prisons),
recapitulates nineteenth-century abolitionist agendas that recognized that
slavery could only be abolished if former slaves could be incorporated into the
institutions of the new and developing democracy (2016, 72).7 As an imprisoned
Black Panther, Wallace embeds in the design of the house the traces of
revolutionary socialist theories, programmes and testaments to the struggles of
the late 1960s and 1970s civil rights movement. Alongside elements of a certain
kind of idea of luxury or opulence, are places to store, preserve or even hoard
things needed for survival; there are overt representations of political figures
involved in the struggle for human and civil rights and an emblematic panther
in the swimming pool; the house has a wooden-framed internal structure that
can be torched if necessary, as Wallace explains to Sumell, and a bunker and an
escape route in the event of reprisal for activist activities. Wallace writes:
February/01/2006, page 3
The house that you and I are constructing, is not just a house from some deep
dark hole in my psyche – it’s a house I believe that is born out of the years of
oppression I’ve endured mixed with and from a much younger and brighter
generation. Everything about this house is built with protection from the past
attacks.
Sumell and Wallace 2006, n.p.
7
See Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, The Black Panthers. Ten Point Programme, 1966.
Enduring 133
Wallace is not ‘stuck in the past’. Instead, the house is a place where certain
resources from the past can be preserved, along with the historical knowledge of
the dangers of acting on these ideas, and ways to protect oneself if needs be.
Their preservation acts as a provocation for discussion and renewed struggle in
the present. In a letter to Marc Léger, who asked Wallace about the project he
wrote:
The house is actually a people’s house. The building of this house has so far
brought hundreds of people together. It has brought together artists, activists,
designers, rich and poor. It is recognized by students around the world and
recently, Occidental College had forty of its students in New Orleans work on
rebuilding New Orleans and Angola 3 projects. These students set up a tour of
Angola Penitentiary and visited the notorious Camp J and Angola’s death House.
This tour was made possible as a result of the artistic criterion born out of
the unity of art and politics. This brings me back to a part of your interest
when you referred to a ‘reconnection’. There was never a disconnection of
activist and revolutionary art. Within the class struggle, you will always find the
political criterion first and the artistic criterion following. In building my House,
Jackie connects it with 38 years of my being forced to live here in a six-by-eight-
foot cell.
Léger 2013, n.p.
Whilst Herman’s House remains in virtual form, in 2008 Jackie Sumell bought
her own house close enough to Angola to be able to visit Herman and Albert
twice a month. She speaks of her own experience of becoming sick of these visits,
sick of the necessity of visiting those in prison, the invasion of privacy it involves,
and the degradation and humiliation that are built into the visiting process. As
the sheer numbers of people in prison continue to grow in the US (by sevenfold
over four decades) with its disproportionate incarceration of poor people, people
of colour, and queer and trans individuals, so ‘her people’, as Sumell names them,
continue to go to visit and are exhausted by it. So her house is given over to
whatever she can do to prevent others, especially children, from being
incarcerated. Her house in other words, is the vision of Herman’s house – she
offers young people a meal, a space to read a book, a ride to basketball and a
garden programme in the summer. She talks now of the dream of building
Herman’s House as a lifelong project, one that does not have to be done by a
certain time, or perhaps even ever. She quotes Wallace saying, ‘if you steeped in
shit you’ll come up stinking’. Poverty and marginalization means you come up
with everything stacked against you, unaware that other communities even exist.
Sumell’s project, thought in its totality, is an attempt to intervene in, or interrupt
134 Enduring Time
this process at the juncture between art and politics. Albert Woodfox, on his
release in February 2016 has stated: ‘It’s an evil. Solitary confinement is the most
torturous experience a human being can be put through in prison. It’s punishment
without ending’ (Pilkington 2016 par. 34). The grammar is significant – not
punishment without end, but without ending, a durational punishment that, in
not coming to an end, continues in the permanent stasis of ending. To live in the
wake of solitary time is surely endurance within the impossible.
Sumell too, talks about the impact of punishment without ending, and how
this structurally works against any forms of self-reflection, or individual or
community ownership for wrongs committed. Referencing the killing of the
black teenager Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, who was acquitted
of Martin’s murder and manslaughter in 2013, Sumell remarks that within a
system in which punishment is so elongated that it is unthinkable, it becomes
impossible for anyone who has committed a ‘wrong’ to say sorry, or to come to
an understanding that their actions may add up to a terrible and tragic mistake.
This means that there is no chance for the perpetrator to ‘work through’ an
experience that devastates the lives of others, or for there to be any sense of
recovery, either at the level of the individual or the community. The tension here
is between two different forms of ‘holding’ to the same idea. On the one hand, if
indefinite punishment, punishment without ending, is the outer horizon of a
response to crime, the ‘wrong’ itself becomes incarcerated in a part of the mind
and social body, and no working through can take place. On the other hand, The
House That Herman Built is a testament to an adamant refusal to ‘work through’
a political position as itself a form of politics. In Wallace’s words: ‘For 33 years
I’ve been kept in a very small cage because I refuse to renounce my political
views’ (Sumell and Wallace 2006, n.p.).
Unthinkable time
[. . .] marks and haunts the present through its recurrence and through the
trans* formations enacted on Black being in the wake of those ships. I move
through a variety of examples from film to text to image and to contemporary
quotidian horrific events that are not seen to be horrific except by those of us in
Enduring 135
the wake, in the ways that Black people are in the wake. We can all be said to be
in the wake but we are not all in the wake in the same way. Since some are
conferred humanity and for others there is the absolute denial of humanity.
Then in the Hold I’m really thinking about containment, regulation, punishment,
captivity, capture but also the ways in which the Hold cannot and does not hold
even as it remains. That there is something in excess of it.
Sharpe 2016b, n.p.
Wallace and Sumell are not in the wake in the same way. Burt Cain’s racist
statement makes that very clear. Wallace’s ordeal in solitary was on the grounds
of his Blackness, and his Black politics, and it is for this reason that he is denied
humanity through ‘containment, regulation, punishment, captivity, capture’. Yet
Sharpe alludes to something that is in excess of the Hold, that the Hold does not
hold. We can think of this excess as the time of the project. It entails Sumell’s
decision to know about Wallace’s time, and the endurance of Wallace’s political
views that he refuses to renounce, that are brought together in The House That
Herman Built. It is a house, as Wallace says, that despite it being virtual, brings
hundreds of people together, and that speaks to the potential for justice for those
who continue to live on in solitary. Guenther states:
replica of Wallace’s cell does the political work of raising awareness of the
violence of solitary confinement, the house, with its escape routes, its weaponry,
its Wall of Revolutionary Fame, its wooden frame that can be burnt if necessary
in the moment of escape, preserves Wallace’s lifelong commitment to a particular
mode and analysis of political change, a particular articulation of the violence of
racialization and of class struggle that gains its power through its very longevity
and the ways it functions to keep Wallace alive.
This takes us back to the earlier question: not just the phenomenological
question ‘what is it like to live courageous time’, but the ethical question ‘what
does it mean to decide to know about those who live impossible time?’ If we
think about this question with Freud, we might say that to know something that
is impossible to know requires a form of temporal work, what Freud calls
‘working through’. Working through involves an approach towards truth, a
veering away, and an approach again, in an ongoing attempt to keep proximal to
what is difficult and painful to know about ourselves and others. Working
through is the name for the ‘again and again’ of interpretation of unconscious
motives and desires that we refuse to know about. Sandor Rado compared it to
the labour of mourning. Freud writes, of the patient who comes to be known as
‘Ratman’:
It is never the aim of discussions like these to create convictions. They are only
intended to bring the repressed complexes into consciousness [. . .] and to
facilitate the emergence of fresh material from the unconscious. A sense of
conviction is only attained after the patient has himself worked over the
reclaimed material.
Freud 1909, 181
In other words, no-one can convince us that this work needs to be done.
It is solitary work, even when it is collaborative, when there is someone else
there to facilitate the emergence of fresh material with which to work. The
contents of the unconscious need to be approached again and again, chronically,
often over many years, going over the same material in order to work away at
psychic resistance, the chronic temporality of what Freud calls the ‘passive
inertia’ of psychic life. ‘Conviction’ on behalf of the patient, in the sense of an
acknowledgement of the existence of unconscious motives and desires, emerges
through working over the material in the absence of conviction on behalf of the
analyst. Neither attempt to convince the other, yet their time frames remain
structurally disjunct in that the again and the again of analytic interpretation
that connects the day-to-day material with unconscious content, meets with the
Enduring 137
I think of all of this as wake work because wake work takes as ground, as
knowledge, the position of the Black and then says, from this position and from
all of these things that wake means, how then do we struggle for a new world, the
end of the world as it is and for something new? How can we imagine otherwise?
Sharpe 2016b, n.p.
138
6
Recalling
The central image in Barbara Loftus’ artist’s book Sigismund’s Watch: A Tiny
Catastrophe (2011), is entitled ‘Stamp’. It depicts a woman’s foot in a distinctively
1920s bourgeois stocking and shoe, about to crush a gold pocket watch with
its heel. This is the dramatic highpoint of a sequence of paintings all of which
have the same uncanny, opaque, rather frozen, yet intensely intimate quality
to them. They bring to mind some instances of Paula Rego’s work, in particular
the paintings in the Nursery Rhymes series (1989), with their macabre, yet
dreamlike, drama. The paintings depict a girl under a table covered in a rich
carpet playing with toys; the inner mechanism of a watch, both intact and
broken; a woman’s hand snatching a gold pocket watch from a man; a stairwell
of a nineteenth-century building with the shadowy figure of a woman descending;
four women sitting around a table smoking and playing cards. In the artist’s
book the painting series sits alongside a number of quotations, drawings,
performance notes, sketches, photographs and essays on time and space,
narrative and memory, and German history. They make up a counter-archive
that we could think of as a response to, and a remaking of, the archive Loftus
discovered in her investigations into her family’s history – the Basch-Israel
family – that began in 1996, when Loftus came to Berlin to discover the
city where her mother Hildegard had grown up. The archive minutely details
the theft of the family’s property by the Nazis at the beginning of the Second
World War, and is the subject of another artist’s book, Loftus’ The Bureaucracy
of Terror: An Exhumation (2013), that charts her archival work in Germany.
It culminates with the laying of a commemorative Stolperstein in 2010 in
the pavement outside of 14 Keithstrasse, where the family lived, for Loftus’
grandparents, Sigismund and Herta and her uncle Heinz, and for the two
sisters of Julius van der Wall who were also living in what had become
the cramped conditions of 14 Keithstrasse with 40 other displaced Jews who
had been moved into the building in the months leading up to their deportation
in 1942.
139
140 Enduring Time
approach this restaging? Loftus tells us that in 1994 ‘my mother in old age broke
her silence about her early life to me’ (2013, 21). At the age of 80, Loftus’ mother
begins for the first time to share memories of her childhood in Germany in the
1920s during the build-up to the Anschluss. I want to try to imaginatively ‘restage’
this encounter as a response to Loftus’ own imaginative restaging of her mother’s
memories. In doing so, I want to try to glimpse, perhaps from the perspective of
my own middling years, the subject of old age – that is the subject who is brought
into being by ageing, and for whom time itself becomes a lost object. I draw
initially on Bergson’s notion of the virtual past and time as force, and then
approach the mother–daughter relation that, through the work of Bracha
Ettinger, we might think of as a different kind of legacy to that which we inherit
through memories that consciously surface of the past. Rather than attempting
some kind of psychohistory however, or to comment on the actual relationship
between Loftus and her mother, I am using the story of their encounter as a
figuration of an interaction between a mother at the end of her life, and her
grown-up daughter, and their attempts at an intergenerational exchange about
the relation between time and memory.
In 1994, Loftus tells us in ‘Disinheritance’, published in The Bureaucracy of
Terror: An Exhumation (2013), a morning coffee with her 80-year-old mother
Hildegard Basch in Loftus’ home released a long-held memory, triggered by
looking at a glass cabinet, a vitrine, containing some nineteenth-century
porcelain. This memory was of the days after Kristallnacht, some time in
November 1938, when the SA (the Sturmabteilung, the original paramilitary
wing of the Nazi Party) came to the family home at 14 Keithstrasse, to confiscate
their valuables, during which they wrapped and took away the porcelain from
the vitrine, as well as the family silver. Hildegard was 23 and soon after was to
come to Britain as a Jewish refugee, hoping to bring her own mother and father
and brother out too. Tragically they became trapped in Germany after the
outbreak of war in 1939, and were murdered in Auschwitz in 1942, leaving
Hildegard alone in London. During the conversations that ensued between
Loftus and her mother Hildegard, other memories emerged; memories of the
interior of 14 Keithstrasse, and earlier memories of Hildegard’s childhood
during the 1920s when the German currency collapsed leading to the years of
hyperinflation, and the humiliation, desperation and despair amongst the
German middle classes, including the kind of Jewish family Hildegard was born
into, as they witnessed the wholesale degradation of both private and public life.
These were the years during which Hildegard’s father Sigismund went bankrupt.
One of the memories that Hildegard offers to her daughter is a scene watched by
142 Enduring Time
Hildegard from beneath a covered table, surrounded by her toys, during which
her mother and father have a bitter row that culminates with Hildegard’s mother
snatching her father’s gold pocket watch in a fury, and crushing it with her heel.
Loftus has herself written beautifully about the double meaning in her work
of the watch and watching/witnessing. The gold pocket watch is a potent symbol
of the time of modernity:
The Gold Pocket Watch – that essentially masculine attribute of the businessman
[. . .] the watch worn next to his heart [. . .] his ticker
The Businessman [. . .]
The man of the World-
Industry and Commerce-
Working in Precision-
Time and Motion-
Time and Money
Loftus 2011, 76
As in Stephen Kern’s classic text on modernist time The Culture of Time and
Space, (1983) the watch becomes a symbol of a fundamental reorientation of
9 Barbara Loftus, Hildegard under table I (91.5 × 122 cm., oil on canvas, 2004).
Recalling 143
It is therefore important that whilst the watch draws our attention to the new
disorientating time of modernity and the pervasive anxiety about time that was
part of the European cultural moment, Loftus also focuses us on the silent child-
spectator, the one who watches and bears witness to the affective storm of her
parents’ relations, who occupies a slower, watchful time that is not the ‘watch’
time that becomes the symbol around which her parents’ argument is staged. It
is not clear how much of the story the child Hildegard knew (the fact that her
father has gone bankrupt), so what we see in Loftus’ painting, ‘Hildegard under
table’, is the child Hildegard’s attempts to decode her own mother’s fury that
culminates in the violent act of smashing the watch. The temporality of watching
is an alternative undercurrent to the speed and flow of modernity; the slow and
uncomprehending absorption of a scene that won’t fully cohere into meaning, a
dawning awareness that something fundamental has changed, and of the
impossibility of bringing back a childhood state prior to this new knowledge; a
state of harmony between the parents, or indeed the comfortable and assimilated
life prior to hyperinflation. The memory itself, Loftus reports, is a response to a
question she put to Hildegard during the same series of conversations that
took place in 1994, prompted by the first memory that was released by the
encounter with the vitrine: ‘when did you realize your parents were not happily
married?’ (2011, 27). Just as the vitrine allows access to the memories of 1938, so
a question about the slow undercurrents of relationality opens onto a memory
that is structured around a piece of missing information – the memory ties
together the enigma of the parental relation, and the unknown/unknowable
personal tragedy of bankruptcy in the context of national humiliation and
despair.
Loftus refers to her mother’s memory as a ‘primal scene’, and this is correct in
a precise sense (2011, 27). As we’ve seen in relation to Laplanche’s work, a primal
scene involves an attempt to make sense of something that has intruded on
psychic life too early, before the capacity to fully understand it. In Freudian terms
the primal scene is always imbued with violence, leaving the child ‘positively
splintered up by it’ (1918, 43–44). The enigmatic message from adult to child that
Laplanche speaks of – the proffering of the scene itself, the scene being already
triangular, rather than a dyadic interaction that the child witnesses – arrives as
both opaque and overwhelming. Otto Fenichel talks of the ‘overwhelming
unknown’ in relation to the excitement and disturbance stirred up by the primal
fantasies of castration, seduction and parental intercourse (1939, 270). In Loftus’s
primal scene, it is not just the sexual and aggressive quality of the parental
relation that remains enigmatic, however, but the scene is structured around a
Recalling 145
piece of missing information – how much of the bankruptcy does the child
really know about? Enough to know that the ‘stamp’ on the watch has meaning
beyond the parental couple, an intrusion from the social field that neither parent
can contain. The child-spectator knows that something is happening, and is left
trying to piece together the meaning of affective and visual traces of raised
voices, the watch being snatched from her father’s pocket, her mother’s stamp
with the heel of her shoe. The paintings convey exactly this sense of pervasive
menacing enigma; that something has passed between the parents that the child
cannot yet understand, but understands nevertheless that something has
happened. It has come too early in both psychosexual, and we could say
psychopolitical development.
The primal scene itself is haunted by an even earlier traumatic event that
Freud refers to in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salome as ‘historical truth’ (1897) and
later in Moses and Monotheism (1939), and in ‘Constructions in Analysis’ (1937).
This truth has bypassed not just language or visualization but also memory. This
is linked to Freud’s notion of phylogenesis, and the idea of a truth ‘that brings a
return of the past’ (the murder of the father by the primal horde), rather than a
truth that resides within the past event of individual prehistory. As we saw earlier,
‘historical truth’ is the indelible trace of experience on the psyche prior to the
capacity for memory or language, a trace that can only be reproduced rather than
remembered, as its original form is irretrievably lost. There is a fundamentally
absent referent that is only known through its effects. Lacan extends this emphasis
on the production of the past rather than the remembrance of already encoded
past events, in his separation of two kinds of memory – reminiscence and
remémoration (1953–4) Reminiscence is our everyday experience of memory,
the kinds of memories we can recall and that allow us to form an historical
narrative out of our lives. Through reminiscence we re-live our experiences.
Remémoration is what Lacan calls symbolic memory, the history of the subject
which cannot be simply ‘recalled’ and yet organizes the subject’s very existence.
Both Freud and Lacan gesture towards an early fantasmatic experience (or early
loss, usually linked with the loss of the maternal body) that cannot leave its mark
in terms of positive difference but only as a structure of lack. In Seminar VII ,
Lacan elaborates this lost object as das Ding, the Thing in its ‘dumb reality’ that
cannot be encoded in language, and remains impossible to imagine, unknowable
and beyond symbolization (1959–60). Its representation must be made anew
each time, created rather than recollected as its original form was never encoded
in symbolic terms. This allows Lacan to insist that the process of analysis ‘is less a
matter of remembering than rewriting’ (1953–4, 14), or famously, ‘what matters is
146 Enduring Time
what the analysand reconstructs of his past’ (13). Whilst an analysand may
continually throw up reminiscences – memories from the past that may include
actual early childhood traumas – this only operates at the level of the imaginary.
It is at the point that something cannot be recalled that remémoration or symbolic
memory operates. In ‘Hildegard under table I’, our attention is drawn in two
directions – towards the invisible scene that the child is watching, somewhere
towards the right of the frame, the scene of reminiscence, and the invisible scene
of remémoration behind the carpet that covers the table, the impossibility of
memory being gestured towards precisely as the lacunae of memory are being
encircled.
Early on Freud realized that remembering actual childhood scenes during
an analysis is not enough to shift our symptoms. Identifying our resistances
to remembering, and trying to understand what the resistances mean, is
what moves us on. Jason Jones describes how it is not the childhood wish or
desire or traumatic event itself that can be recalled through processes of
remembering in analysis, but a kind of attitude or approach to the world, we
could say an idiom, in which one might assume that a present-day desire means
one thing and not another, or can be satisfied in one way and not another (2004).
This approach to the world, or idiom, is what is remembered; the signifying
structure, that is, that causes the originary trauma to be ‘not-remembered’ but in
specific and highly individual ways; what Lacan later calls sinthome (1975–6). In
Seminar VII Lacan tells us that the pleasure principle maintains the subject at a
certain distance from das Ding, so that we endlessly circle around it without ever
reaching it, which prevents desire from grinding to a halt (1959–60). The pleasure
principle must remember precisely where psychically that object was lost so it
will not be directly re-found. This spatialization of the unconscious mind,
however, misses the fact that das Ding is not a place, but a time in individual
prehistory, an always-already-lost time that instigates processes of memory and
recall. We might say that memory, which is the lasting trace of excitation, both
indestructible and yet displaceable, always exists in relation to a time before,
Freud’s historical truth, which provides a constant temporal pressure (what
Jones calls syntax) outside of the coming and going of remembering and
forgetting.
We could speculate that for an unknown reason Hildegard speaks to her
daughter in 1994 because the system for throwing up substitutes for the lost
Thing has stopped working, and the insistent constant pressure of the time
before breaks through the process of displacement that allows ordinary memory
to function. And we could read Loftus’ detailed gesture of translation and
Recalling 147
Let’s go back to the scene between the mother and daughter in 1994 that I’m
attempting to restage. We know that there is coffee in the daughter’s home, and a
series of long-held memories are released by the sight of a vitrine holding
nineteenth-century porcelain. Should we assume that the vitrine is new, or that
the mother has seen it many times before without the memories being triggered?
148 Enduring Time
1
See Deleuze and Guattari, 1986 for a discussion of minoritarian literature.
Recalling 149
dominant ways of representing the self. It includes those who forget to forget
injustice’, as that other feminist archivist, Rosi Braidotti puts it (2011, 27). When
we forget to forget the injustices of old age – both what old age does to us and
what we do to older people – then a feminist archive insists on making visible
such injustices and calls on us to change the ways we think and act.
Perhaps the most profound implications of Segal’s book, however, have to do
with the ways she dislodges dominant ways of representing the self. Segal poses
an implicit question about what happens when we take the subject of old age as
the norm – when we engage a vulnerable, dependent, narcissistic, aggressive,
fragile, desirous, grieving, always-already-ageing subject that we all are, whatever
our age, but which emerges in its distinctiveness in this phase we call ‘old age’ – as
a position from which to try to understand the self and its representations.
Of the many ways that Segal approaches this question, one instantly recognizable
refrain is that of the self precipitated through an ongoing, although at times
tense relationship with former, younger selves that are not always accessible to us
in easy ways:
never as it was, but also never truly lost. The past – whether our own embodied
memory of ourselves or others, or those attachments and affirmation by others
of former selves that Segal refers to – in old age turns back and is taken in as if it
were a lost object with all the ambivalence that comes along with it. For the old
person, time turns and returns, becoming the self that constitutes and reconfigures
the self.
Perhaps this is what makes it possible, as Segal recounts, for Sybil Clairborne
to ask, as she lies dying of cancer in a hospice with her friend Grace Paley, ‘Grace,
the real question is – how are we to live our lives?’ (2013, 222). Clairborne knows
she is dying. Here the question is therefore not simply an expression of the
defiance of old age, or an insistence that we are only ever orientated toward a
future, however diminishing, even when there are only seconds of life left.
Instead I read it as itself a lost statement (there is no more time in which that
question could be answered; it belongs to a former self, a former time) that
returns to constitute the dying self. What is therefore radical about the subject of
old age proposed in Out of Time is that it temporalizes the self, instituting a
subject for whom time, as the lost object, is constitutive, hence the double
meaning of ‘out of time’ – to run out of time is also to emerge out of time. This
temporalization allows Segal to explore a range of fears and pleasures about
beginnings and endings, the duration and precarity of attachments, the
maintenance of ourselves and others, and practices of care. Through this ageing
subject, for whom time is running out and yet for whom lost time is constitutive,
we can view our more general fears of dying, of the loss of youth and beauty; our
fears of love not coming again, of the loss of power, independence and potency;
fears of vulnerability, shame, foolishness, incapacity. Repetition is never to repeat
what is the same but to alter what is the same through the act of repetition, as
Deleuze tells us in Difference and Repetition (1968). So, for the subject of old age,
the past of course returns – we experience younger psychic states within our
older bodies – but its repetition as the return of the lost object (time itself) also
brings on a certain shift in the way a question is framed. How, indeed, in the face
of diminishing time, with the past piled up behind us, are we to live our lives?
To evoke this question is to evoke a past life in which there is still time to
attempt to answer this question, and simultaneously to show how we continue to
be structured by the same questions that never let us alone. A mother and
daughter have coffee in the daughter’s house, and the sight of a vitrine allows the
mother to remember a scene that acts as a screen memory for another scene that
is structured around an enigmatic absence that has shaped the questions of the
mother’s life. Like Clairborne’s late memory of the question ‘how are we to live
Recalling 151
our lives?’, so Hildegard’s core question returns to her in the form of lost time,
and is simultaneously offered to Loftus, who reworks her mother’s lost time
through these scenes that re-establish the particular relation between desire and
their objects.
However, it is perhaps not Freud who is potentially helpful here, in
thinking through the implications of late memory, but Henri Bergson. Where
psychoanalytic theory assumes a relationship between time, memory and
trauma, what is emerging here is the way that time acts as a generative resource
for subject formation, if we take the subject of old age as the norm. Bergson, just
three years younger than Freud, and outlasting Freud by two, was a hugely
popular and much lauded philosopher during his lifetime, winning the Nobel
Prize for literature in 1928 and the Legion of Honour in 1930. Yet Bertrand
Russell famously described Bergson’s philosophy as ‘emotive speculation,’
positioning him as a bit of a philosophical quack, resonating with some of the
scepticism that Freud encountered in the early part of his own career (1912).
Bergson’s fame and influence was short lived and by the 1950s Lévi-Strauss
dismissively commented that Bergson’s ontology had reduced everything to a
state of mush in order to bring out its inherent ineffability (Ansell-Pearson
1999). Thanks in part to Gilles Deleuze and a generation of post-Deleuzian
thinkers, Bergson’s central notions of becoming, élan vital, continuous creation,
difference, virtuality and multiplicity, have re-emerged in the latter part of the
last century, galvanized in particular in order to articulate the relation between
time, newness and processes of continual change.
Bergson’s core insight was that processes that produce change emerge
spontaneously, rather than causally, and these can be accessed through a method
of intuition rather than formal analysis. Time, for Bergson, is force, rather than a
container or backdrop to events. Time doesn’t simply pass, or go by, but figures
rather as non-spatial continuous multiplicity. Bergson therefore used the term
‘duration’ as a way to describe a reality that was distinct from a series of passing
perceptual events which would always remain tied to conceptions of space.
Instead, duration is heterogeneous, mobile and indistinct. In Bergson’s early
work, Time and Free Will (1889), his interest in duration was as a phenomenon
of consciousness, as an aspect of human perception. Later, in Matter and Memory
(1896), he came to deal with the relation between human perception and ‘matter’,
coming to a kind of halfway position between idealism and realism, in which
matter breaks its allegiance with objective reality, and is conceptualized as a
collection of ‘images’, ‘more than that which the idealist calls a representation,
but less than that which the realist calls a thing’ (9). Bergson’s question about
152 Enduring Time
There is no perception which is not full of memories. With the immediate and
present data of our senses, we mingle a thousand details of our past experience.
Bergson 1896, 24
If it still deserves the name memory, it is not because it conserves bygone images,
but because it prolongs their useful effect into the present moment.
Bergson 1896, 82
One of Bergson’s figurations for the relation between past and present is that
of two spools joined by a tape, but turning in only one direction so that one
spool (the past) necessarily gets bigger as the other (the future) gets smaller.
In old age we accumulate the past, but Bergson’s image is that all of the past
coexists with the present (the whole spool and not just the recent section of tape
that might correspond to what you selectively remember) making the past not a
dimension of time but what Bergson would call the synthesis of all time, of which
Recalling 153
the present and the future are only dimensions. Although we cannot have the
past back again (the spool simply will not turn the other way), it also doesn’t
‘pass’ as such, as the turning of the spool changes the reservoir of memory all the
time. This virtual archive is an archive of difference, as the Deleuzians would
put it, a non-totalizable multiplicity. For Bergson, therefore, duration is not the
elongation of dead time, or past time over a ‘space’ of a lifetime, but a vital and
ever mobile version of the interaction between past and present, where the
present is reduced to a concentrated point, constantly in flux with a dynamic
virtual past. Here we have a present that is the past, as in the psychoanalytic
notion of the transference, but a past that is the vital and dynamic force of time.
If the subject of old age (figured here as Hildegard) is the subject who is
constituted through a relation not so much to a series of lost objects but to lost
time, then old age would be the fullest encounter with the virtual past, a
generative, creative encounter, as Bergson would put it, that calls on us not to
simply remember traumatic events or former selves within the now ageing body,
but that might even refuse this timeline altogether by thinking about the past as
virtual, that is, as internally differentiated, actualizing itself, with difference as
immanent within time. The subject of old age is exposed to the full intensity of
this virtual past, this dynamic difference.
If the past constantly supplements perceptions in the present, bringing to the
present more than the recall of past images but rather an orientation towards
action, then one reading of our scene – the one with the ageing mother and the
daughter, the coffee and the vitrine and the porcelain – would maintain that
memory is not passively provoked by the vitrine, or the daughter’s question, and
brought back from the past, but is a force that was immanent, always shaping the
present in the long delay, a dynamic force that produces change; a change in the
relations between mother, daughter, coffee, vitrine, memory, that in its turn
produces more changes in the relations between porcelain, stairwell, piano,
archive, memory, and that culminates in the setting of commemoration stones in
the pavement outside of 14 Keithstrasse.
The matrixial
virtual past is an aspect of mental life that cannot be lost, in perpetual motion,
even if it is not always perceptually present, I want now to link this to the ways
that Bracha Ettinger, herself a painter, as well as a psychoanalyst and theorist,
thinks about the development of an aspect of psychic life that also cannot be lost,
that she calls the ‘matrixial’, and remains with us throughout our lives through
compassionate encounters, ethical relations and aesthetic experience (2006). The
temporality of the matrixial pertains precisely to the mother–daughter relation.
I want to try to attend to the psychic labour that Loftus does on behalf of her
mother, her practice of taking care of her mother’s memories, that allow or
facilitate her constitution of a subject of late memory.
One of the main stories that psychoanalysis tells itself is that in order to
emerge as selves and to function in the world as autonomous individuals who are
capable of relating to others and accepting a degree of reality, we need to have
tolerated a series of separations, and have accepted a series of losses, both actual
and fantasmatic, which relate in some way to an originary loss of the maternal
body. This has operated as a universal principle in traditional psychoanalytic
theorizing, not something that can be assigned to social convention or norms.
According to this line of thought, without psychic differentiation from the
maternal body, there can be no sociality, language, reproduction, culture and,
perhaps most importantly, no sexual difference. It is with the capacity to accept
that we cannot be or have everything that we supposedly line up along psychically
gendered lines, regardless of our anatomy. Whilst one strand of feminist
theorizing has long challenged the way the feminine, as psychic structure, still
consists of a double lack (the female subject must give up what she does not have,
whereas the male subject must face giving up what he already has in order to
negotiate Oedipus), another strand has challenged the law of castration
itself, questioning its universality, and whether it is the only law at work in the
production of psychosexual difference. Part of this second strand of theorizing
calls for an account of the emergence of subjectivity ‘otherwise’ than a fundamental
separation, without denying that separation may be an integral part of psychic
maturation. If we only operate within a phallic order, we are constantly in danger
of mistaking ‘what is’ for the production of ‘what is’ by a phallic law that instigates
itself as law through its own enunciation. This is the thrust of Judith Butler’s
theorizing of the place of phallic law (the law of castration, the law that insists on
separation from the maternal body) which creates itself as law through a social
process of iteration, as well as creating the originary ‘material’ maternal body that
the male subject must separate from (2004). Thinking ‘otherwise’ to this law does
not do away with the law, the phallus, separation, castration or the speaking
Recalling 155
subject – it does not return us to the ‘lawlessness’ of the maternal body – but
allows alternative paradigms or ways of thinking to emerge in co-existence with
this law. Whilst Kristeva focused on tracing the semiotic in language – the
remnants of bodily modes of communication between mother and baby and the
ways they erupt into the symbolic – others have articulated different forms of
‘staying with’ aspects of the maternal that co-exist with the law of castration,
rather than substitute for it or oppose it.2
Drawing on this tradition, Ettinger takes as her starting point an analysis of
the two major strands of psychoanalytic theorizing that we can think of under
the rubric of the paternal and maternal positions of experience. On the one
hand, we have the Freudian/Lacanian trajectory that posits the subject as
emerging out of a series of separations, retroactively gathered up as having been
precipitated by birth and culminating with Oedipus, in which the drive-directed
subject is alienated in language, constantly chasing its lost objects – specifically
figured in Lacanian terms as ‘objet a’. On the other, we have a diverse object-
relational tradition that understands the emergence of subjectivity through the
intricate play of emotional life in the actual and fantasmatic early infant/carer
relation, that we find in the work of Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott and
Wilfred Bion. In a similar vein to the feminist theorists Luce Irigaray, Adriana
Cavarero and Rosi Braidotti, Ettinger seeks to move beyond this paternal/
maternal binary altogether, in order to overcome the signification of the feminine
in negative terms. Her project is part of the theoretical field that seeks to think
sexual difference differently – to think feminine difference in positive terms.
To do so, Ettinger attends to the final stage of intrauterine life which she
draws on for the figure she names the ‘matrixial’, a neologism that draws together
the notion of the matrix with that of the maternal. She writes:
The Matrix is modelled upon certain dimensions of the prenatal state which are
culturally foreclosed, occluded or repressed. It corresponds to a feminine dimension
of the symbolic order dealing with asymmetrical, plural, and fragmented subjects,
composed of the known as well as the not-rejected and not-assimilated unknown,
and to unconscious processes of change and transgression in borderlines, limits,
and thresholds of the “I” and the “non-I” emerging in co-existence.
Ettinger 1992, 176–177
2
See for example Kristeva 1986, and the work of Bronfen 1998 and Mitchell 2003.
156 Enduring Time
Instead she is drawing out the potential of a model that has at least two subjective
elements in play:
I am proposing that with the help of the notions of Matrix and metramorphosis,
experiences concerning the prenatal, the intrauterine, gestation and pregnancy
can deconstruct and dissolve the concept of the unitary separate phallic subject
split by the castration mechanism, rejecting its abject, and mourning its m/Other.
However, they do not stand just for presubjectivity, for the pre-phallic or the
pre-Oedipal, but for a transsubjectivity that accompanies the phallic subjectivity
all along its voyage in time and place, even if its sources are in the “pre-”.
Ettinger 2006, 182
What is particular to the late intrauterine period (roughly the last few months
of pregnancy), and why it can function as a model for what Ettinger calls
‘transsubjectivity’, is the emerging relationship between a not-yet infant and a
not-yet mother. Ettinger calls this the ‘matrixial borderspace’, where the emerging
I of the infant in relation to what is not quite yet its non-I, the mother, ‘co-emerge
and co-fade’ in a process she calls ‘borderlinking’ (2006). Intrauterine exchange
between the not-yet infant and the not-yet mother is the space of ‘co-events’: co-
affecting encounters between two partial objects that lay down a primordial
capacity for being together without merger, and being together without
catastrophic separation that is retained as the capacity for ‘transsubjectivity’
in adult life. In this sense, the matrixial is a principle of severality (at least two)
that supplements the phallic processes of separation, and is the basis for ethical
encounter – an encounter that does not destroy or paralyse the other, but allows
the other to be, without colonization, intrusion, or knowing. To complicate
matters slightly, this principle is what Ettinger will then call ‘sexual difference’, in
that it is a form of difference that is inscribed in the feminine (it is specific to
gestation within a maternal body), that is not about establishing ways we are
different from the other, but is difference that is established in a state of ‘wit(h)-
ness’ (another neologism referring to both witnessing and being with). Subjectivity
that is established in a state of ‘wit(h)-ness’ rather than castration is the feminine;
the aspect of being with others that all birthed human subjects carry with them,
and yet distinct from ‘merger’ or ‘symbiosis’. This locates the matrixial as the
condition for sexual difference that refuses, or exceeds binary logic.
Ettinger is clear that although she notionally places the source of the matrixial
in the ‘pre’, it remains active and cannot be lost or given up. To have been gestated
is to have emerged out of a co-affective encounter between the not-yet I and not-
yet non-I. This transsubjective aspect of psychic life cannot be simply removed
Recalling 157
from the subject through castration or abjection. This means that the matrixial
continues to sustain psychic life ‘all along its voyage in time and place’ and in this
sense it ‘remains’, cutting across the temporality of both development, and
cyclical repetition. The temporality of the matrixial shares something with
Bergson’s duration, a temporality that has no image, in which there is no negation
and therefore no difference that operates through negation. As we have seen,
difference, in duration, operates instead through shifts in quality, intensity and
experience, which is the continual elaboration of the absolutely new. However, if
there were always at least two, if the subject emerges out of co-affective exchange
under the conditions of severality, then subjectivity is the singularization (or
unity) of being with others in such a way that we cannot know or predict, but
underpinned by a shared experience of the continuity or ‘remains’ of severality
from which we cannot be severed. Each encounter continues to be absolutely
new, but what remains, from intrauterine life, is the embodied knowledge of
radical difference.
In her work on what she calls the ‘ready-made mother monster’, which
attempts to augment Freud’s primal scene, Ettinger describes how the infant
meets the maternal subject through its own primary affective compassion (2010).
Compassion allows what she calls ‘primal psychic access to the other’. Compassion
is not a reaction to the other, but an arousal, like anxiety, an affective signal.
Along with primary affective ‘awe’, these states mitigate early experiences of fear,
guilt and shame, which are also charged with anger. Alongside the primal
fantasies of the primal scene, castration and seduction, that we were discussing
earlier, that help us to understand intergeneration difference, loss and desire,
Ettinger adds three new fantasies relating to the mother: the devouring mother,
the not-enough mother and the abandoning mother. These are existential fears.
It is part of the condition of being human, she argues, to be anxious about being
abandoned, invaded and withheld from. What is crucial, in her view, is to
recognize that these are primal fantasies, distinct from narcissistic fantasies, and
from actual abuses that some parents enact on their children. Primal fantasies
have a beneficial regulatory sense-giving function, and they allow the
continuation of access to compassion and awe in adult life. We must be able to
play with them, she suggests, in order to come to terms with reality.
So, returning to our scene between an 80-year-old mother and her daughter,
the scene with the coffee, and the vitrine, and the emergence of what I’ve been
calling ‘late memory’, perhaps we could say that when Hildegard communicates
to her daughter a memory of a ‘primal scene’, two things are set in motion. One
is the mother’s working through of trauma, identity, loss, grief and separation.
158 Enduring Time
Remaining
In one of many predictions of the end of the future, as the global capitalist system
approaches its ‘zero-point’ (Žižek 2010, x), the late cultural critic, Mark Fisher,
alluded to the slow cancellation of the future in Ghosts of My Life (2014). Through
the figuration of ghosting, he charted a series of futures in popular culture and
music since the 1980s that failed to happen, showing up an inertia that he saw
characterizing twenty-first-century cultural production – an undertow of stasis
buried under a frenetic compulsion for the new and for perpetual movement,
echoing Ivor Southwood’s notion of ‘non-stop inertia’ as a chronotope for what
we could call ‘neoliberal’ or ‘late liberal’ time.1 In doing so Fisher outlined a
collapse in a collective capacity to invest in the future simply on the grounds that
it is the future, a collective capacity that once underpinned modernist progressive
narratives of an unfolding, open and limitless future, even where this was
conceived of as a secular account of an endlessly postponed ‘end time’. Fisher
opened his book with the final image of the 1980s British time-travel detective
television series Sapphire and Steel. Despite having travelled through time in
all possible directions, the entire series comes to an end with the main character’s
definitive yet bewildered statement: ‘there is no time here, not any more’. Fisher
mused:
The feeling that time was running out, or had run out, that we had all run out of
time, was linked to a change that I sensed in how we were collectively talking
about the future.
Fisher 2014, 8
Slavoj Žižek links narratives of the ‘end times’ to ‘four riders of the apocalypse’
that are the warning signs of an end brought about by:
1
For a discussion of the periodicity of neoliberalism itself, see Gilbert, 2016. ‘Late Liberalism’ is
Povinelli’s term for ‘the shape that liberal governmentality has taken as it responds to a series of
legitimacy crises in the wake of anti-colonial, new social movements, and new Islamic movements.’
In other words, it is the idea that liberalism has had a late, or belated response to the challenge of
social difference (2011, 24).
159
160 Enduring Time
temporal practices of suspending the self, suspending hope for change, and
suspending an unfolding future, a kind of withdrawal of time, that is, that
embraces the modes of waiting, staying, delay, endurance and maintenance we
have been tracking?
An orientation towards a foreclosed future begs the question, then, of the
temporality of the ‘end times’ rather than the temporality of the end of time, a
distinction, that is, between messianic and eschatological time. If the future may
no longer be assumed to be open, then beyond a religious framework that gives
figuration to the ‘end of time’, what kind of time are we left with, as we live a
present that cannot promise a future, in which the idea of ‘future’ as ‘promise’
seems to have collapsed? In this chapter I want to return to the question, then, of
how to imagine, characterize and live the time of the ‘end times’. What temporal
futural imaginaries can emerge in relation to an immanently closed horizon of
the ‘time afterwards’? How do we endure in this time? What is its relation to the
trauma of foreclosure, if indeed we can use that term to describe the assault, or
slow violence, on future deep time that may turn out to be the distinctive product
of late capitalism?
In an attempt to answer these questions, I turn first to Giorgio Agamben’s
thesis in The Time That Remains, in which Agamben defines messianic time as
‘the time that time takes to come to an end’ (2005, 67). Messianic time is usually
thought of as the time announced by the coming of the messiah, and gestures
towards another temporal horizon, that of the end of time. However, Agamben
notices something about messianic time that is so obvious it’s oddly easy to miss:
Between the coming of the messiah, and the end of time, is a time that Agamben
claims is truly messianic, a time that itself has duration, and which he believes
allows us to ‘take hold’ of time. For Agamben this interstitial time, which is the
time that time takes to come to an end, is the only real time that we can be said
to have. Between profane, or historical, everyday time that constantly slips
through our fingers (the time we never have enough of, the time we are always
running out of), and the end of time that signals a point at which time ceases to
operate as flux or unfolding, messianic time can be thought of as a suspension of
profane time, akin to what Agamben calls the ‘contraction’ of time within the
horizon of eternal time. Perhaps the figure of time taking time to come to an end
might furnish us with a way to ‘grasp’ the temporality of the end times that is
neither time lived in the shadow of a pending or already unfolding catastrophe,
nor the time of simply waiting for a better future, but a time that is worth
preserving, living in its suspension, for as long as we possibly can. Indeed, what
else can we do, other than try to elongate this time?
Remaining 163
I read Agamben’s notion that time takes time to come to an end, through two
disparate bodies of work that I think, nevertheless, have a suggestive relation to
one another, and to the notion of the time of the end times. The first is the writings
of the Lebanese author and artist Jalal Toufic, who develops the notion of what he
calls a ‘surpassing disaster’ (2009). Toufic is interested in the ways that cultural
traditions ‘withdraw’ when a major disaster occurs, such as a war, or an equivalent
cultural trauma that radically shatters a culture’s relation to its own tradition. This
withdrawal is paradoxical, according to Toufic, in that it appears in the form of
its opposite – a capacity to survive. Cultural artefacts, for instance, may not have
been destroyed materially – libraries, objects, texts, films, monuments, languages,
practices and places of collective memorialization may all still be intact, and may
look as if they are still available and functioning. And yet, some artists do
something very strange after a surpassing disaster. Despite the appearance that
cultural traditions have survived, they nevertheless go about trying to resurrect
the tradition as if it had withdrawn. In doing so, they draw our attention to the
fact that what Toufic calls simply ‘tradition’ has indeed withdrawn in relation to
the ‘surpassing disaster’, despite appearances otherwise. The temporality of the
surpassing disaster (a time in which tradition withdraws prior to its subsequent
‘resurrection’ by artists who attempt to remake what is already in existence)
therefore shares something of Agamben’s ‘time itself ’, in which we make present a
form of time that can otherwise only be understood as already lost, or yet to come.
For Toufic, this making present is what recreates community, albeit a community
reciprocally defined as those affected by the surpassing disaster. This ‘making
present’ that results in community may be a way to recast the ‘apocalyptic zero-
point’ of the end times in which the future or the past is visioned as a series of
evental disasters or crises. Like a surpassing disaster, we may not know we have
reached various tipping points or withdrawals brought on by the brutalities of
capitalism unless we pay close attention to those who notice that something has
indeed happened, even though we don’t know yet that it has happened.
Although Toufic’s ‘surpassing disaster’ remains immanent, and is only revealed
through the work of artists and others who constantly reveal the traumatic loss
of tradition whilst it appears to have survived, it is nevertheless precipitated by a
monstrous event – a war or ecological disaster on such a scale that all can see and
name it as a disaster, even if it doesn’t appear to have destroyed tradition in an
obvious sense. Toufic therefore works within the horizon of the event. Is it
possible, however, to think about surpassing disasters as happening at the level
of the quotidian? Don’t some surpassing disasters unfold in a more diffuse and
pernicious way than the monumental events of war? Those everyday destructions
164 Enduring Time
of life-worlds that Lauren Berlant writes about as ‘cruel’, even if they are
optimistically embraced as acts of self-preservation, are disasters that may look
minor to those outside of the situations in which they occur: the removal of a
certain social benefit to a group of people who depend on it, a small change in
the mode of assessment of the right to that benefit, the closure of a certain
resource that keeps a community going. These produce what Povinelli calls
‘traditions of dysfunction’ (2011, 47) that can be used to re-marginalize those
already marginalized by structural racism, state neglect and other forms of social
violence, but are produced at the level of the everyday through these small,
almost imperceptible acts of destruction. They constitute the destruction of
affective attachments and practical relationships that allow ‘tradition’, in the
sense of life-world, to survive and endure.
To try to understand the slow surpassing disaster of capitalism that shows up,
and is lived, at the level of the quotidian, I read Toufic alongside the work of the
Brazilian artist Arthur ‘Bispo’ do Rosário, whose meticulously hand embroidered
banners and garments made during a lifetime spent incarcerated in a psychiatric
institution represent an attempt, in his own terms, to gather together and name
the entire world. What Bispo’s arduous stitching together of a dispersed world
that doesn’t appear to be dispersed, suggests, is the very fact of the dispersal or
loosening of affective attachments and social relations that underlie the many
ways in which we appear to be connected to one another. Bispo, then, understands
precisely this dispersal as a surpassing disaster, one that I suggest he responds to
through a material practice long associated as ‘women’s work’: sewing buttons,
embroidering, wrapping, binding and patching. Here, it seems to me, we can take
up the thread that runs through this book, that enduring time is neither simply
about reproductive labour and the time of development, nor the temporalities of
cyclicality, repetition, or monumental time, but about a principle in psychic and
social life of the permanent non-severance of selves, others and institutions from
what sustains them. Bispo, through the material practices of sewing together
material objects that have no obvious relation to one another, that appear not to
have been dispersed, performs a form of endurance that tells us something about
this permanent inability to move beyond our relations to one another.
I can now propose a first definition of messianic time: it is the time it takes
for time to come to an end, to accomplish itself. Or, more exactly, the time we need
in order to accomplish, to bring to an end our representation of time. It is
Remaining 165
notion that a present time that is graspable within profane time offers a figuration
for this withdrawal.
The Lebanese author and artist Jalal Toufic, writing out of the ongoing
experiences of a shattered and war-weary part of the Middle East, describes how,
in specific circumstances, ‘tradition’ withdraws past what he calls a ‘surpassing
disaster’. This evoking of tradition in relation to either culture or art is itself a
form of anachronism. Contemporary artistic practice is currently more likely to
be bound up with novelty or rupture from previous forms, techniques and
subject matter, than with the deliberate cultivation and incorporation of
historical antecedents, or an historical sense. Where artists engage in the
recreation of archaic forms, it is often to demonstrate their absence, rather than
through the desire to re-engage or directly reanimate a tradition in a concrete or
literal way. However, rather than directly delineating the surpassing disaster or
the notion of tradition, Toufic shows how they may both be recognized
symptomatically:
One of the surest ways to detect whether there’s been a surpassing disaster is to
see when some of the most intuitive and sensitive filmmakers and/or writers
and/or thinkers began to feel the need to resurrect what to most others, and
to the filmmaker and/or writer and/or thinker himself or herself as a person or
teacher, i.e., in so far as he or she remains human, all too human, is extant and
available.
Toufic 2009, 29, emphasis added
destroyed amongst the obvious rubble of those that have; films that are available,
and continue to be watched past the surpassing disaster; books and libraries that
mark the tradition’s apparent survival; artefacts and cultural objects that remain
intact. What is resurrected, however, is not brought back immediately into some
kind of pretence at full presence, as in practices of restoration or revival. Instead
they can only be resurrected through the demonstration that they have indeed
withdrawn – that is, through practices of documenting what doesn’t ostensibly
need to be documented. Toufic’s notion of artistic ‘resurrection’ therefore has
some affinity to the repetitive practices of care that Ukeles employs – a kind of
serious, earnest and arduous going-through-the-motions of putting back in
place things that are not out of place. This may include photographing the
standing buildings, repetitive practices of remaking films or scenes from films
even though the original films exist, documenting and recording the existence
of collections in libraries and museums even though they have survived,
meticulously studying languages that have not been forgotten.
So, for example, Toufic detects symptomatic resurrections of this order, in
echolalic scenes in the works of Murnau, Tarkovsky, Godard and Wenders.
Herzog’s post-war remake of Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), for instance, ‘can be
viewed not so much as a sound and colour version of a silent film, but rather as
an attempt to resurrect Murnau’s film after its withdrawal following a surpassing
disaster, the Nazi period’ (2009, 16). It is not that Murnau’s film literally
disappeared during the Nazi period. Material copies of the film were still
accessible for viewing after the war. But for Toufic, Herzog understood that the
‘tradition’ that Murnau worked out of had indeed withdrawn, and Herzog’s
remake is an attempt to show this:
Herzog’s Nosferatu: a vampire film trying to resurrect an extant film about the
undead, about what simultaneously is and is not there, as is made clear by the
mirror in which the vampire does not appear notwithstanding that he is standing
in front of it; but which, because of the surpassing disaster of the Nazi period, is
itself there and not there for the generation following that surpassing disaster.
Toufic 2009, 16
2
The Atlas Group is a project established in 1999 to research and document the contemporary
history of Lebanon. See www.theatlasgroup.org. See, in addition, Raad 2004, Raad and Toufic 2006,
and Toufic 2004.
170 Enduring Time
the 1990s, whose ruins themselves were to be torn down to be replaced by new
development, Toufic asks:
It is not exactly clear when Arthur ‘Bispo’ do Rosário was born, but it appears
to have been in the region of 1909, and he died in 1989 having lived for almost
50 years in Colônia Juliano Moreira ‘mental hospital’ in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil
172 Enduring Time
11 Works by Arthur ‘Bispo’ do Rosário, 30th Biennale, São Paulo, Brazil. Photograph:
Leo Eloy.
work from his hospital attic room where he lived, which is literally crammed
with artworks. They pile up, piece after piece, but within each piece are further
hoards of everyday objects, embroidered words, buttons, beads, threads and
string. His work prefigures works by artists such as Song Dong, who collected
and displayed over 10,000 everyday objects that his mother had accumulated
over her lifetime – the full complement of her worldly goods gathered in China
over the same period as Bispo was accumulating, stitching and patching the
world in Brazil. Hovering then, between a form of hoarding or gathering, a
process of sorting and positioning, a practice of naming (stitched wording plays
a significant part in the work as a whole), Bispo appears to have wanted to collect
and name the entire world. This is certainly something that he told to a social
worker, Conception Robaina, when she interviewed him just before his death in
1989. He described hearing a voice sometime in 1967 telling him his mission: ‘to
create an archive of the human world’ (Robaina 1988). This he dedicated his life
to literarily and diligently attempting to do.
His most well-known work, the Manto da Anunciação (Annunciation
Garment), is a huge cape, embroidered inside and out with both images and
hundreds of names of places, and adorned with tassels and ropes, which was to
174 Enduring Time
12 Works by Arthur ‘Bispo’ do Rosário, 30th Biennale, São Paulo, Brazil. Photograph:
Leo Eloy.
be used by Bispo on the day of judgement in order to mark the passing of God
on earth. It represents the ingathering of the entire world.
Bispo’s attempt to create an archive of the human world has been largely
interpreted in the light of his messianic mission – to rebuild a dispersed world in
order to reveal it to God on Judgement Day – and has been read as part of a
psychic strategy in which forms of psychic delirium function to stabilize current
social relations, an attempt not just at personal ‘recovery’, as Freud would put it
(1911), but as a form of social cure. From this perspective, a ‘symptom’ is not
simply a psychic solution to an internal conflict, but may be an attempt to
stabilize what Lacanian psychoanalysts and schizoanalysts call ‘the social bond’
or ‘the social link’, an attempt, that is, to articulate and enhance social connections
between people and things in the world (Corpas and Viera 2012).3 It is offered to
the world in the name of renewing social connections that appear to have been
broken, or gone into abeyance. From this perspective Bispo’s work is not simply
representational – a gathering of what is – but could be read as an attempt to
3
For example, Fink’s translation of Lacan’s ‘Encore’ (1998) reads “discourse should be taken as a
social link . . . founded on language.” (17). More generally the elaboration Lacan makes in Seminar
XVII (1968–69) of the four discourses as four possible permutations of social relations can be
thought of as a theory of social bonds or links.
Remaining 175
generate new material relationships between people, words and things. What
this implies is that the world has already both dispersed and withdrawn, and
needs to be re-sutured and re-socialized, or simply resurrected, in Toufic’s terms,
in order for an image of the future (here, in the figure of the end of time) to
emerge. What I am suggesting, in other words, is that we read Bispo’s enormous
50-year-long durational project as an artistic response to a surpassing disaster
– not just his own personal disaster of his incarceration, but the disaster that he
notices in the withdrawal of tradition brought on by a collapse in a form of social
bond or connectedness, through a lifetime of documenting connections between
things, words and people, that appear not to need to be resurrected, and to many
people must have seemed simply mad.
There is, of course, a substantial debate about art brut, or ‘outsider art’,
where psychosis and artistic production are seen as mutually co-productive.
As above, the breakdown of social bonds or links experienced by a black,
impoverished, undocumented, indigenous man in Brazil throughout the last
century would require a broad and nuanced reading of psychosis precisely as
an attempt to attend to, or repair a broken social bond at personal and social
levels. However, I am less concerned as to whether the term ‘psychotic’ refers
to Bispo or his work, even in the sense of ‘ordinary psychosis’ that can describe
a non-symptomatic psychosis that pertains to psychic structure rather than
its manifestations (Redmond 2014). Instead I suggest that we understand
Bispo’s response to his incarceration as itself a form of artistic practice, both
in terms of his life-long durational project that takes place within an attic of
the institution, and in terms of his embracing of the practices of collecting
and hoarding, sorting and ordering, placing, sewing, embroidering, wrapping
and patching. Like the endless documentation that artists engage in, past a
surpassing disaster, Bispo endlessly ‘patches up’, sews together, and sutures
the world. Toufic alerts us to the fact that although many artists, writers
and thinkers are viewed, or view themselves as ‘avant-garde’, ahead of their
time, ‘when the surpassing disaster happens their works are withdrawn as
a consequence of it, this implying that, unlike the vast majority of living
humans, who are behind their time, artists, writers and thinkers are exactly of
their time’ (2009, 14, emphasis added). Bispo appears to occupy the very time
loop that we have been calling messianic time – appears, that is, to grasp the
time we have, through giving over his entire life to literally ‘repairing’ the social
world, a world that doesn’t appear to have been affected by a surpassing disaster,
but in fact can be seen to have become unavailable through the act of
its resurrection.
176 Enduring Time
13 Works by Arthur ‘Bispo’ do Rosário, 30th Biennale, São Paulo, Brazil. Photograph:
Leo Eloy.
4
Early examples from the 1970s include the work of Judy Chicago, Kiki Smith and Joyce Weiland,
and later significant collections of feminist craft-based artwork, such as the landmark 1988
exhibition, ‘The Subversive Stitch; Women and Textiles Today’ in Manchester that followed the
publication of Rozsika Parker’s book, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the
Feminine (1984).
Remaining 177
doing so, create conditions for communality. As Silvia Federici has argued for
near on 40 years, this reproductive work has always been exploited by capital,
and needs to be replaced by a politics of the commons in which the means of
(re)production are reclaimed, shared and managed collectively. This would
constitute, in Federici’s terms ‘a reproduction of our everyday life’ thought in
terms of a feminist commons (2010).
This artistic practice of gathering and stitching together, that in effect gathers
the time of communality, seems to me to demonstrate some kind of withdrawal
of time that I began with – the ways that managing the commodification of time
under neoliberal conditions may involve modes of waiting and suspending
hope. Bispo seems to embrace this reproductive labour in a political act of
gathering and patching that takes time to show time’s withdrawal. By taking on
practices that take too much time, during a lifetime dedicated to a process of
‘useless’ recovery of the entire world, what is revealed is that the time of a
communal future has indeed withdrawn, and can only be resurrected through
the arduous noticing of its withdrawal through time-consuming practices.
Bispo’s work draws attention to the surpassing disaster of a diminishing
commons that includes the image of a generative future, and works to re-
establish a relationship of communality between people and things. But the
ingathering that his extraordinary cape performs is not of the ‘exiles’ as in the
Judaic tradition, but of all the things that need to be (re)related to one another,
in order to constitute a world that can imagine a future. Toufic’s notion of the
work that artists do to attempt to resurrect tradition after its withdrawal past a
surpassing disaster provides us with an artistic model of activity that does not
aim at producing the new, but through arduous, iterative and repetitive
enactments reveals what has already been lost, and in doing so re-establishes a
relation with present time. Bispo’s stitching up, embroidering over, sewing
together, patching and binding remains an enduring reminder of the world’s
dispersal and the loss of a communal future that urgently needs resurrecting. But
more than this, Bispo’s life-long labour makes present a form of time that
otherwise is only ever lost or yet to come. He allows us to grasp the time that
remains.
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8
Ending
At the end of the analysis, it can happen that neither the analyst nor the
patient knows exactly what happened. There’s a story about the analyst Annie
Reich, who once described a very good analysis at a conference. People were
impressed, and said, ‘You should write up this analysis,’ and she said, ‘I’m not
ready to write about it, because I haven’t figured out what happened.’ The
analysis had been finished for several years, and she still hadn’t figured it out.
Malcolm 2004, 161
What happened? The essays in this book have attempted to get hold of a peculiar
form of time – time that becomes suspended and cannot, or will not, flow. I tried
to stay in proximity to some cultural objects that I was drawn to, that I thought
could tell us something, not just about what it might be like to live in this time,
but about the efficacy, or we could say the ethics of attempting to do so. I had a
sense that to decide to remain in this time, to live it consciously, arduously,
routinely, in its quotidian form, might tell us something about a mode of
attachment to ourselves, others and the world, that I have named as ‘care’ – if to
care is to deal in an ongoing and durational way with affective states that may
include the deep social ambivalence that seeps into the ways we maintain the
lives of ourselves and others. What struck me about the objects that I had
amassed – a book by a poet whose son dies, a series of photographs showing a
family living in acute poverty, some images of an artist washing the stairs of an
art-gallery, an account of a psychoanalytic treatment that unfolds during an
attempt to gather testimonies about a time of political upheaval, a collaborative
art project between two activists and artists, one of whom is being held
indefinitely in solitary confinement, some paintings of a woman stamping on a
watch, the embroidered and hand-stitched garments made by a man incarcerated
for 50 years in a mental institution – was that enduring time had a particular
relation to repetition, a temporality classically linked with women’s time, that
was neither simply about reproductive labour and the time of development, nor
179
180 Enduring Time
the temporalities of cyclicality, but about a principle in psychic and social life of
the permanent non-severance of selves, others and institutions from what
sustains them. This permanence seemed to me to offer a way to think about
living in ‘the new chronic’, in the ‘dull soreness of a meantime with no end’
(Cazdyn 2012, 13).
I started with the ‘case’ of the new disciplinary formation of psychosocial
studies, and whether it could be understood as an opportunity for anachronistic
concepts – ones that have come to be sensed as ‘embarrassments’ in contemporary
theory – to be reanimated, and where ‘old’ and ‘new’ ideas could speak to one
another contemporaneously in generative ways. Michel Serres drew our attention
to dead texts or ideas, and how quickly they are relegated as ‘obsolete’. He urged
us to engage a kind of waiting, until the usefulness of such ideas and texts can
resurface again through their contiguity to other, more ostensibly ‘contemporary’
texts and ideas, and I noticed Judith Butler’s capacity to ‘trap time’ in her
conceptualization of psychic reality, that brought this idea that had fallen into
dereliction in psychoanalysis back into circulation. Like the baker’s dough,
concepts were understood to ‘stay’, through the ways that time can fold-over,
rather than unfold over time.
If we could come to care about embarrassing and out-of-date ideas through a
temporal practice of folding, what was the time of caring for other discarded
things – the fate of undifferentiated ‘mush’, and the lives of those whose task it is
to handle it, on behalf of everyone, everyday, as the pattern of their lives? What
was the time of caring about ‘lives without project’, those that are neither about
survival, nor aimed at event, but operate through a different kind of suspended
temporality? In ‘Maintaining’ I sought to understand the suspended time of
managing vulnerability and dependency through systems of maintenance.
Maintenance time is integral to time’s ability to ‘progress’, and maintenance
systems are distinct from productive systems, in that they rely on, and to some
degree produce, different temporal arrangements and temporal orderings that
intervene in dominant temporal imaginaries. Through the paradoxical notion of
renewal through maintenance (itself a form of stuck time) we saw what it might
mean to ‘grasp time’, to have it, and therefore to share it. I read Mierle Laderman
Ukeles’ persistent, non-ironic, dedicated re-animation of the seemingly dead
time of maintenance, and Richard Billingham’s capacity to preserve familial
relations when lives are without project, as potential responses to the conditions
of the now. Through Ukeles’ idea of ‘maintenance art’, our attention was drawn to
the absolute singularity of beings and things, whereby maintenance became the
time of noticing ‘each mote of dust’.
Ending 181
The delay that occurs between and across generations engenders the elongated
time of beginning again, as itself a form of political action.
‘Enduring’ took the notion of living in crystalline time to its limits. It involved
the choices we make to know, and not know, about enduring within the
impossible situation of indefinite solitary confinement, and the terror of dealing
with ‘raw time’. It charted the decision the artist and activist Jackie Sumell made
to ‘know’ about the impossible situation of solitary, and her response to it, in the
form of the artwork The House That Herman Built. The house allowed Herman
Wallace, a political prisoner, to both live in it, whilst living in his cell, and to
preserve for future generations the idea of a commitment to a form of political
thinking. Certain resources from the past could be preserved, along with the
historical knowledge of the dangers of acting on these ideas, and ways to protect
oneself if need be. I read Sumell’s lifework as an act of care, performed through
her capacity to bear to know about the violence of solitary confinement,
especially the violence it does to a subject’s experience of time, and the work of
preservation within conditions that incarcerate or lock down the future.
Perhaps we are always ‘out of time’. The choice to know about enduring within
the impossible led us to ‘late memory’ and the subject of old age – both the
subject that is old age, and the subject who is precipitated by old age. The artist
Barbara Loftus’ mother, Hildegard Basch, was silent for most of her life about her
experiences of fleeing Germany as a Jewish refugee in 1939, and only late, in
older age, did she begin to talk to her daughter about her memories of her
childhood during the recession in Germany between the wars, the murder of her
parents and brother in Auschwitz, and the loss of their home and all their
belongings. The subject of old age emerged as the subject constituted not only by
a relation to lost objects, as Freud describes, but a relation to lost time, whereby
the past itself becomes constitutive of the self when understood in a Bergsonian
sense, where memory is conceived as a virtual archive. ‘Recalling’ linked the
subjectivity of the ageing mother of Loftus’ work, for whom memory is
constitutive, to the emergence of a daughter, for whom the co-affective traces of
such memory are generative.
Finally, we returned to the question of living in the ‘end times’, and the ways
that temporal imaginaries that foreclose the future as a viable promise of the
present affect how we live the present as the future’s suspension. How can we
take hold of present time under these conditions other than through a
melancholic attachment to the past, or a passive mode of waiting for something,
anything, to change? Agamben offered us a figuration of the present as the
future’s suspension, as the time that time takes to come to an end, a time that has
Ending 183
duration, and neither runs out, nor flashes up, but ‘remains’ and can be said to be
the only time that we ‘have’. Jalal Toufic’s notion of the surpassing disaster – a
time of the withdrawal of tradition prior to its ‘resurrection’ in which artists
work to remake what is already in existence – seemed to me a more general
condition than he suggests, and its temporality shares something of Agamben’s
‘time itself ’, in which we make present a form of time that can otherwise only be
understood as already lost, or yet to come. For Toufic, this making present is
what recreates community, albeit a community reciprocally defined as those
affected by the surpassing disaster. It was with the surpassing disaster that we
read an extraordinary body of work created by the artist Arthur ‘Bispo’ do
Rosário through practices of finding, collecting and hoarding objects, and
then wrapping, stitching and patching them, along with cloths, banners and
clothes. Bispo’s desire to collect and name the entire world is an artistic gesture
that Toufic describes, but where the surpassing disaster is neither war nor
environmental calamity, but the general loosening of the social bond, the
diminishing of the commons, and commonality between people and things.
All of the cultural objects I found along the way, and that spoke to me,
suggested a way of remaining in suspended time, not just of living in, and
through it, but of living it. I’ve tried throughout to apprehend the way that
remaining is itself a form of care. Perhaps, more precisely, what they suggest is a
form of ‘care without ending’ – that is, maintaining, preserving, waiting, delaying,
staying, recalling, remaining as practices of care that emerge in response to
punishment without ending, political stasis without ending, dependency without
ending, grief without ending, memory without ending, and the permanent
disaster of capitalism without ending. ‘Care without ending’ paradoxically relies
on the capacity to stay in relation to an elongated present, to bear the
embarrassment of anachronism, the dynamic chronicity of the death drive, the
overwhelming effects of the present-tense of intergenerational difference, to
decide to know the unbearable, to grasp time, and in doing so, to take care of
time.
Care
Ending
The end is not just the end of the time of analysis (the cessation of meetings),
but the end of the time of neurosis, the time, that is, of cure. If analysis is to have
an end, in the sense of a cure, it is through a process Freud calls a ‘correction’ of
the original process of repression, which can then assist and strengthen the ego.
But, just as Freud proposes this, he backs away. He knows full well, as patients we
only want a partial recovery – we long, that is, for chronic illness. Who could live
with all the gaps in memory filled in? In the end we have to be ‘content’, he states
‘with an incomplete solution’ (230).
This pessimism about the potentials of a treatment finds its fullest expression
towards the end of the paper, when Freud returns to his preoccupations with two
interminable elements of psychic life. One is the death drive. Whilst there is one
force which defends itself from recovery, which is a sense of guilt and need for
punishment localized in the superego that something can be done about, there is
something beyond this, the scandal, the temporality of which is opposed to the
time of consciousness. The other is the repudiation of femininity that Freud saw
as structural in both men and women. It is these two forces, the death drive and
the repudiation of femininity, that remain the ‘bedrock’ against which all analyses
are wrecked. Freud therefore makes a distinction between the force that defends
itself against recovery, which we could call our desires for the chronic, and the
bedrock that simply cannot be shifted, making analysis not just chronic, but
interminable. This is a different sense of the interminable than Kristeva’s allusion
to the interminable facing of one’s own dissolution that goes on after the end of
the analysis. Where the chronic, we could say, suspends time as critical juncture
in a sequential development of the already existing, akin to the suspension of
time that Agamben describes, in the time of the interminable in Freud’s late
articulation, time encounters its own ‘bedrock’ and as sequence, simply collapses.
We might see the end of analysis, then, as the veering from the interminable
back towards chronic time. After all, the transference is never ‘dissolved’. Perhaps,
if we can talk of the constant pressure of the death drive, we can also talk about
the constant pressure of psychic inertia, rethought not as resistance, but as the
kind of non-developmental and non-repetitious time of what remains from the
present-tense encounter between generations, and between the analyst and
analysand; a time that is activated in the transference, but crucially remains
beyond it, not just as a permanent awareness of the possibilities of our own
188 Enduring Time
dissolution, but also the possibilities of our own permanent beginnings, and our
capacities to start anew. This emphasis on natality rather than mortality might be
an articulation of chronic time, time that has the qualities of intensity and
insistence ‘in the feminine’.
Rather than ending with a vision of an alternative temporal imaginary to that
which we are living through, or an appeal to the maintenance of hope to counter
the on-go of time without qualities, my ending, then is to understand chronicity
as itself the only condition for newness, where newness is neither breach, rupture
or flash, but a quiet noticing that something remains, which is the permanent
capacity to begin again.
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Index
213
214 Index
Sumell, Jackie 21, 118, 120, 122, 126, 127, time-consuming practices 177
134–7 timelessness 78, 184
The House That Herman Built 115–16, time’s flow, lack of 87–92
120–1, 123–4, 127–34, 130, 132, time-space compression 47–8
135, 182 time-that-time-takes-to-come-to-an-end
Sunderland University 63 164–7
superego 187 topology 33
surpassing disasters 163–4, 167–71, Touch Sanitation (Ukeles) 58–62, 60,
183 70
suspended time 50, 51–2, 79, 87–92, 126, Toufic, Jalal 163–4, 167–71, 175, 177,
140–1, 179–82 183
suspension, of time 1–5 tradition 167–71, 183
sustainability workers 57 trans- 27, 28–31
Symbolic, the 80–1 transdisciplinarity 27–8, 29–31
symbolic memory 145–6 transdisciplinary practice 27, 29–31, 31,
symbolization 145–6 41, 45
synchronic time 103 transference 17, 39, 59, 103, 104–5, 107–10,
184, 186, 187
Tarantino, Michael 65 transsubjectivity 156
technological innovations 142 trapped
temporal space 65
drag 94 time 49
folding 33–4, 35, 41, 44–5, 47, 180 trauma 89, 103, 105–6, 181
orderings 67 traumatic memory 103, 106
suspension 1–5 Tronto, Joan 14
temporality truth 12, 145, 147, 152
distortions of 96 Tunisia 111
of social life 3 Turin, student uprisings, 1968 102
temporalization 104 Tyler, Imogen 72
testimonial work 110
Thatcher, Margaret 23, 63 Ukeles, Mierle Laderman 21, 54, 67, 69–70,
thermodynamics 3 121, 180
thought reality 38 Handshake Ritual 58–9
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!
(Freud) 85 Proposal for an exhibition
Time and Free Will (Bergson) 151 ‘CARE ’ 55–8
Time Binds (Freeman) 32 name-cleaning project 59
time crisis 5–6 Touch Sanitation 58–62, 60, 70
Time Driven (Johnston) 18 washing and cleaning performances
time lived without its consequence 89 58
Time Lived, Without its Flow (Riley) 1, 2, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and
79, 87–92 other Cruel, Inhuman or
time not passing 1–5 Degrading Treatment or
time poverty 49 Punishment 119
time starvation 72 unbearable time 121
Time That Remains, The (Agamben) unbecoming time 4, 5, 11–14
162–3, 164–7 unbinding 104, 185
time without qualities 10 unbound time 184
time-as-movement 4 unconscious, the 25, 38, 38–9
Index 223