Finally, a third text: an interesting little treatise, written by a Dane, Morten Swenstrup, called Towards a New Time Culture. Swenstrup begins from “Michael Serres’ insight that the principal component of the ecological crisis is time.” Sure, there have been moments in the natural history of the earth when there was as much CO2 in the atmosphere as there is now, but it took millions of years to build up – species had time to adapt. And climate change happened slowly enough to allow for the emergence of new species (e.g., homo sapiens). But if a giant asteroid hits . . . well, it’s just extinction of most and hope for the rest.
In this case, we are the asteroid. Swenstrup’s thesis is that “the mechanistic temporalities that exist in society” (i.e., clock time) can be countered by art, which “has a ‘knowledge’ of time” – a knowledge that is a bit more organic and phenomenological than Mr. Taylor’s stop-watch – “living rhythms, rather than goal-oriented production.” This might remind one of Henri Bergson’s distinction between clock-time and durée, time as experienced by the individual. Swenstrup cites Henri Lefebvre’s notion that “the body proportions the rhythms we sense.” Abstract temporalities become tangible in an actual “physical place, namely a human body . . .” In other words, the demand – need – for economic growth runs up against what the human body can take, a limit that is “an anchor value” for evaluating time. And, by extension, the biosphere becomes a kind of physical meta-body. The implication of all this is that art has a power to counter the ecological crisis by introducing a different temporality. This is all very nice, except in those cases where there are only two choices: speed-up or starvation. Human bodily limits are met and exceeded, one could argue, in chattel slavery and sweatshop labor. Taylorization is a kinder, gentler version of this drive. A striking might slow speed-up to zero, but it can also get you fired (or killed). None of that vitiates Swenstrup’s or Lefebvre’s point; quite the contrary. Or Ivan Illich’s observation that a “linear sense of time progression inherent in the idea of development implies that there is always a better and a more.” There aren’t. And what constitutes more-and-better depends on your subject position. In any event, clock-time turns the future into something abstract, a fungible resource, like money, composed of empty and equivalent units. Linear time and a disembodied future inevitably lead to acceleration – e.g., in the number of work hours necessary to earn a wage. This process is made to seem inevitable. Time is, in effect, an ideology. And work is not the only thing accelerated – so is information. The amount increases at a rate faster than the capability of the human nervous system to assimilate it. So everyone shouts louder to be heard, and soon all is noise. One no longer lives “in the world of things,” but in a semiosphere that spins faster and faster. One way that art can counter all this is by introducing and valuing cyclical, as opposed to linear, time. Some have argued that this move is feminist, insofar as cyclical tasks traditionally have been assigned to women and girls (think changing diapers), though that strikes me as a bit essentialist. In any case, in cyclical time, things change, to be sure, but at a much slower rate (cloth vs. Pampers). Having recently taught some Gertrude Stein, this idea makes some sense to me, in formal as well as thematic terms. But a thoroughgoing shift to cyclical time, it seems to me, would entail making art far more slowly and de-emphasizing innovation/originality. Many would see this move as regressive. But I think that’s Swenstrup’s point. “Art is a sphere in which many societal demands can partly be suspended,” he writes. This statement brings out my inner Situationist. For the French Situationists in the 1960s, the only possible context for free art, in the sense Swenstrup envisions, was that of a general strike (they made & performed a lot of art in Mai 1968). In other words, art and social organizing cannot be divorced, if one wishes to make changes to either. So the Situationists created “art” interventions that disrupted the ordinary economic flow of things (I think of the work of artists and writers in Extinction Rebellion as a kind of latter-day echo of this tactic). But then Swenstrup modifies his claim: “In any case, art offers the possibility of being less affected by acceleration. It may therefore be possible to encounter rhythms and temporalities in art that do not exist in very many other areas of society.”* Those are indeed possible possibilities – certainly the latter. The art work has “something to teach about time” if its “temporality takes the form of bodily experienced rhythms.” Can an art work self-consciously bring the other’s bodily rhythms into itself? Such a non-accelerative, cyclical temporality in literature might mean valorizing certain forms over others. The realist novel, with its linear chronology (even regressively linear “flashbacks”) would have to go. And cyclical forms in poetry (e.g., villanelle, sestina, Steinian “insistence”) might be more highly prized. Montage, as a form of narration, would embody this ideal more than plot, and perhaps more cyclical or recursive forms of narrative would do so as well. Concrete poetry (words, phonemes, characters as “things”) would be “in.” The avant-garde (qua avant-garde, anyway) would be “out,” insofar as it has to constantly come up with the New — constantly have something to be avant of (cf. Peter Bürger). Recycling of traditional forms & themes (pastoral, love poems, praise-songs, etc.) would be “in.” Both Futurism and Tennyson would be way, way “out.” But more than the textual form of the work, Swenstrup has in mind the social form of the work: its manner of production & consumption, distribution context, the audience’s use of it. All of these need to slow down: “[A] work of art takes all the time it needs,” he asserts. He doesn’t simply mean a long novel takes a long time to write – or the multi-century musical works composed by John Cage and others. “Even a poem can be said to have its own reading pace.” That is, if one isn’t skim-reading it to get to the next poem and the next, in order to be a more productive writer/teacher/reviewer. “Turning toward the work allows the artwork to lead an audience into its ‘drama,’ to become participants”: I think Swenstrup has in mind a somewhat passive attitude towards the work (Wordsworth’s “wise passivity”); a more active version of this sentiment might be found in Brecht’s epic theater (or Situationist situations). Finally, Swenstrup asserts, “Beauty means to eliminate ownership.” He doesn’t just mean eliminating ownership of artistic and intellectual work (though he did publish his treatise under a Creative Commons license). I think he means eliminating ownership period. And there’s the rub: ownership is pretty entrenched. But maybe subverting or sharing property, slowing down the labor-hours the bosses buy, the accidental sabot dropped into the gears, a transit strike, a general strike – these could be art forms, too. Maybe the most beautiful the world has ever known. ____________________________ * He calls an encounter with such art “the peaceful gaze,” indicating he is thinking primarily of visual art. We all want a peaceful gaze – or a peaceful anything. But capitalism and imperialism just won’t leave some people alone. I can’t help but think of the Clash’s song “Safe European Home.”
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |