Enduring Time 9781350008120, 9781350008113, 9781350008151, 9781350008137

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Enduring Time

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Also Available from Bloomsbury Conflicting Humanities, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Paul Gilroy On Resistance, Howard Caygill Autarchies, David Ashford Slow Philosophy, Michelle Boulous Walker General Ecology, edited by Erich Hörl with James Burton

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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

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC 1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Lisa Baraitser, 2017 Lisa Baraitser has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN :

HB : PB : ePDF : ePub:

9781350008120 9781350008113 9781350008137 9781350008144

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Cover design by Catherine Wood Cover image © Raqs Media Collective Typeset by RefineCatch Limited Bungay, Suffolk

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To Simon For Endurance and Care

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Contents Acknowledgements List of Images Introduction

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Staying Maintaining Repeating Delaying Enduring Recalling Remaining Ending

Bibliography Index

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1 23 47 69 93 115 139 159 179 189 213

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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

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Acknowledgements

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Chronic Conditions, University of Exeter, Time Tricking, Association for Social Anthropologists Conference, University of Exeter, Visualizing From Memory, University of East London, European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies Conference, University of Helsinki, Austerity Futures Conference, Goldsmiths, University of London, Psychoanalysis and History Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, University of London, Motherhood in post–1968 Literature, Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing, Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of London, Temporal Bindings, The(e)ories: Advanced Seminars for Queer Research, Critical Temporalities Workshop, Temporal Belongings, University of Manchester, Non-Reproduction: Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics Conference, Birkbeck, University of London. I am especially grateful to Belinda Mandelbaum and her students for an invitation to teach a five-day lecture series at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, which allowed me to speak the project out loud, in its early form, and gave me courage to continue. Earlier versions of some chapters have appeared in journal article form. Chapter  1 appeared as ‘Baraitser, L., Transdisciplinarity as a Psychosocial Concept’, Special Issue, Transdisciplinary Problematics, eds, Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford, Eric Alliez, Theory, Culture & Society 32: 207–231, 2015. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications. Chapter 2 appeared as ‘Touching Time: Maintenance, Endurance, Care’, in Psychosocial Imaginaries, ed., Stephen Frosh, Palgrave, 2015. Chapter  4 appeared as ‘Baraitser, L., Collecting Time’, New Formations., 79: 8–25, 2013. Reprinted by permission of Lawrence and Wishart. I am grateful to the many colleagues who commented on earlier drafts of these pieces of writing.

List of Images 1 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation, 1978–1980. City-wide performance with 8,500 NYC sanitation workers. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York. 2 Richard Billingham, Untitled, 1994. Colour photograph mounted on aluminium, 75 × 50 cm. Private collection, courtesy Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London. 3 Richard Billingham, Untitled, 1995. Colour photograph mounted on aluminium. Copyright the artist, courtesy Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London. 4 Herman Wallace, 2006. Courtesy of Anne Harkness. 5 Herman’s Letter 2003. Courtesy of jackie sumell. 6 CAD drawing front of house, 2006. Courtesy of Dan Hatch Studios. 7 CAD drawing Herman’s pool. Courtesy of Dan Hatch Studios. 8 Barbara Loftus, Stamp (30.5 × 30.5 cm., oil on canvas, 2004). Copyright the artist, reproduced with kind permission. 9 Barbara Loftus, Hildegard under table I (91.5 × 122 cm., oil on canvas, 2004). Copyright the artist, reproduced with kind permission. 10 Works by Arthur ‘Bispo’ do Rosário, Venice Biennale, 2013. Copyright SunOfErat/Wikicommons. 11 Works by Arthur ‘Bispo’ do Rosário, 30th Biennale, São Paulo, Brazil. Photograph: Leo Eloy. Copyright Leo Eloy / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, reproduced with kind permission. 12 Works by Arthur ‘Bispo’ do Rosário, 30th Biennale, São Paulo, Brazil. Photograph: Leo Eloy. Copyright Leo Eloy / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, reproduced with kind permission. 13 Works by Arthur ‘Bispo’ do Rosário, 30th Biennale, São Paulo, Brazil. Photograph: Leo Eloy. Copyright Leo Eloy / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, reproduced with kind permission. Cover Art: Reproduced with kind permission of the Raqs Media Collective.

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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

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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

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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

Those working with a chronobiopolitical framework would be unsurprised by the need for sensitivity to a multiplicity of times and temporalities. European time operates through the enforcement of a particular conception of time that then comes to mediate forms of relating to, and representing, the world (Vázquez 2009). Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Silvia Federici have all argued in different ways that coloniality and modernity are constitutive of one another other, modernity emerging not simply through industrialization and the separation of the European worker from their means of subsistence but

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specifically through slavery, colonization and the control of women, originating, for Mignolo, in 1492 with the conquest of the Americas (2005), and for Federici through the violent destruction of the power of women through their extermination as ‘witches’ in the same early modern period (2004). Roland Vázquez has subsequently argued that the conquest of the Americas that situates Europe as the centre of the world in its own imaginary, does so through a particular politics of time; one that affirms the west as the present, and the present as the only legitimate site of reality. Modernity, he argues, produces an amnesic surface where reality and the present coincide, negating the possibility of relations between the self and the (non-European) other who is by definition ‘behind’ the times. In contrast relational temporalities drawn from indigenous philosophies, Vázquez argues, ‘decolonize’ modern time through their radical critique of the confinement of experience in the empty present (2009). They allow for a multiplicity of times that are not reducible to spatial representation, circumventing the argument that the ‘indigenous’ are somehow ‘prior’ to modernity, as Johannes Fabian famously articulated (1983).1 Hutchings’ response to her own call to become sensitive to a multiplicity of times and temporalities is to understand world-political time as immanent, a multitude of non-linear plural becomings that could then be said to constitute the ‘our’ of ‘our times’. Yet such appeals surely rely on an implicit model of timeas-movement, even when they seek to interrupt the idea of movement in a linear or predictable direction. My suggestion is that we engage instead with ‘unbecoming’ time – time that is lived as radically immoveable, experiences of time that are not just slow, sluggish, or even interminable in the sense of Heidegger’s account of boredom, but are radically suspended, ‘a great circle with no rim’. To live this time may turn out to be a question of ethics, inserted within a question of ontology – the arduous temporal practice of maintaining ongoing relations with others and the world which I will come to name as care. Theoretically this relationship between ethics and ontology is aligned with Christina Sharpe’s account of time in her lyrical work, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016a). The wake is a term that holds together the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, and the process of coming to consciousness in the sense of wakefulness. The ship, the dead, and consciousness coalesce in her work around what Saidiya Hartman calls ‘the afterlife of slavery’ (2007) and its relation to Black life in the diaspora:

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See Browne 2014 for a discussion of the distinction Fabian makes between synchronicity, contemporaneity and coevalness.

Introduction

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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.

Time without qualities 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

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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.

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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

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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. 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. See Koepnick 2014 and Salisbury 2008, 2017 on ‘slow modernism’.

Introduction

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it colonized.6 In the first decades of the twenty-first century, however, we are learning painfully to attune ourselves to the contradictions of both experiences of immediacy and the rapid acceleration in social life, on the one hand,7 and the simultaneous slow violences of contemporary capitalism on the other.8 These slow violences entail the ‘becoming uninhabitable’ of the globe for life systems including our own; the now permanent and irreversible loss of biodiversity, concerns about ‘deep time’ violence brought about through the prolonged yet delayed uncertain effects of nuclear waste; the injustices of wage slavery and new forms of debt bondage that are not only designed to be ‘managed’ life-long but to be inherited across generations; the temporally elongated control of subjugated populations including the permanent ‘warehousing’ of Black, Indigenous, migrant, queer and trans people and others who are imagined as major social problems in prisons around the world; and new and brutal forms of exclusion from public institutions that work to sustain life projects that lead to the now chronic deterioration of the mental and physical health of particular embodied subjects.9 These violences play out differentially, exacerbating existing inequalities of gender, ‘race’, sexuality, disability and age, but also what will become the inequalities between generations. Some of these violences are felt immediately and others are so slow they will not be noticed countless generations after they were instigated, producing a prolonged or chronic violence well into the ‘deep future’.10 Yet we appear to be holding our breath, waiting, not for a pending catastrophic ‘event’ in the sense that Fredric Jameson suggested characterized post-modern time (1996), but for a diffuse catastrophe that has already happened to unpredictably play itself out. As Nicholas Stern, author of the 2006 Stern Review on the economics of climate change asks simply, as the title of his recent book, ‘Why are we waiting’? (2015). And yet it is precisely the temporality raised by this question – the quality of the time in which we ask ‘why are we waiting’ – that may come to describe time consciousness in the twenty-first century. This caesura has duration. We differentially live it, are living in it, enduring it. It is now clear that there has been a return to the question of time, not just philosophically, but socially, politically, ecologically, psychosocially, even geographically, and that this may have something to do with millennial anxieties

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See Kern 2003, Koepnick 2014, Sheppard 2000. See Rosa 2013, Rosa and Scheurman 2009, Virilio 1977, 1999, 2010. See Nixon 2011 for an account of slow violence in relation to the environmentalism of the poor. See Berlant 2011, Davis 2016, Graeber 2011, Puar 2009. See Nixon 2011 and Rose, van Dooren and Chrulew, 2017.

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and a tendency towards apocalyptic visions at certain historical junctures. Sarah Sharma identifies many of the preoccupations with time in social theory as a form of ‘speed theory’ in that it raises a set of questions that have largely focused on the impact of technologies built for acceleration and faster-moving capital on the democratic fate of a sped-up globe (2014).11 Yet alongside speed theory we have seen the emergence of a different kind of articulation of the vicissitudes of time in the early twenty-first century, overshadowed by a collapse in twentieth-century modernity’s belief in progress and mastery over the future, that has given way to a sense that the future is now imagined or at least routinely narrated as uncertain, unpredictable, and for some simply ‘cancelled’ or foreclosed.12 For instance, in After the Future the Marxist theorist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi writes: [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

It is the psychological perception, then, of the future as development that has shifted. It has become emptied of its affective qualities such as hope, anticipation, longing, or the promise of satisfaction or betterment. The future will come, for sure, but it will bring no fulfilment of the promises of the now. In a sense the cancellation of the future has prompted a reciprocal analysis of the present as stuck, perpetually present and unable to change, leading to suggestions that we are now living within the ‘tyranny of real time’ (Virilio 1999), the ‘continuous present’ (Harvey 2010), or indeed a ‘contracted’ present (Lübbe 2009). In The Seeds of Time, Fredric Jameson situated postmodernity as a condition

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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. See Agamben 1998, Amin 2013, Berardi 2011, Virilio 2005, Žižek 2010.

Introduction

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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 postFordist 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

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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

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See Derrida 1995 and Hartman 2007 for discussions about memory and forgetting in relation to the archive.

Introduction

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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

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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: a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web. Tronto 1993, 103

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 caredfor, 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

Care, then, is inextricably bound up with histories of the antithesis to care, or failures of care, that bring on ways of thinking that we also need to take care of. These may involve the temporal practice of staying alongside others and ideas when care has failed; waiting, staying, delaying, enduring, returning, as the temporal forms that care takes. Care as a ‘small theoretical gesture’ suggests that

Introduction

15

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

‘Violent-care’ reminds us that from a psychoanalytic perspective care has its antecedents in the ways we have managed our own aggression towards what psychoanalysis calls our ‘internal objects’ and their relations, that results in guilt and a desire to repair what we imagine we have damaged. Care emerges in psychic life out of the management not only of the dilemmas of love and hate, but a more basic nameless dread, that in its turn requires containment by another who can react without retaliation to the dread that temporarily comes to reside in that other, through a process Wilfred Bion calls ‘reverie’ (1962). This notion that care has something to do with the shared management of vulnerable states, the ‘inescapable troubles of interdependent existences’ and intolerable and destructive states of mind, coupled with our reliance on both the practices and good will of others, might constitute a psychosocial reading of the ethics of care. But such a psychosocial perspective would also view care through its ties to guilt, destructiveness and a core fear for survival, the survival both of ourselves and of others, that is reliant on the specific circumstances in which anyone is able to offer care to another. The time of reparation, we could say, is the time of the ongoing shared management of these states. In other words, by shared, I mean to move away from the idea that we develop the capacity to care only out of a drive for the preservation of the ego, and for our own individual survival. As Judith Butler has reminded us in her engagement 16

See Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011) for an account of the fraying of the promises of the post-war settlement.

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Enduring Time

with Melanie Klein, we have to continue to deal with the problem of destructiveness as we move from drive theory to an account of relationality. Destructiveness in a relational theory is not simply separated from love. Love itself is always already ambivalent, being experienced as distinct from destructiveness at the very point that one can recognize that the two have come together, when we come to understand, that is, that care entails understanding failures of care. In other words, if, in what Klein calls the depressive position, we can acknowledge we have in fantasy hated and destroyed what we also love and depend on, then we might also be able to recognize that we might want to preserve, repair and care for that very same thing. As Butler puts it: it is a matter of recognizing that dependency fundamentally defines us: it is something I never quite outgrow, no matter how old and how individuated I may seem. And it isn’t that you and I are the same: rather, it is that we invariably lean towards and on each other, and it is impossible to think about either of us without the other. Butler 2014, 33

The ‘inescapable troubles of interdependent existences’, have, of course, also been a central concern for feminist care ethics. Initially using the mother–child encounter as a model for a particular kind of ethical work that was not purely governed by autonomy, independence and justice, mothering was seen as a paradigmatic type of caring relation, one that involved empathic understanding, interdependence, flexibility, relatedness, receptivity, responsiveness, attentive and preservative love, nurturance and training.17 These types of qualities were valorized by early theorists as a way of elevating maternal work to the status of ethical work, and in addition, opening up a debate about care and justice in the social and political sphere. ‘Care’ became a trope used to both soften up moral philosophy with its traditional concerns with justice, and to indicate new modes of social and political transformation.18 Yet this early work gave way to further attempts to move beyond the binary, care versus justice, with its connotations of public versus private and masculine versus feminine. Here care broke from associations with the mother–child model and instead was understood to structure all human relationships. The earlier reliance on the mother– child relation as a model for care was seen as universalist, normative, and reduced concern with the ethics of justice and of social equality.19 17

18

19

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. 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. 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 Time spent on the psychoanalytic couch is perhaps a pre-eminent example of a ‘waste’ of time in capitalist terms, a class-bound anachronistic practice long past its sell by date, one that cannot be speeded up, cannot be ‘justified’ and constitutes a dwelling in an indeterminate persistent situation that can be experienced as interminable. Sianne Ngai’s concept of ‘stuplimity’, as a description of a simultaneous state of overwhelming excitement and stultifying boredom emanating from the same object, seems to capture the affective experience of living in psychoanalytic time (2007). My wager, however, in Enduring Time, is that the practice of psychoanalysis – the long, ongoing, relentless, ‘wasteful’ working through of unconscious conflict, or working out of unconscious object relations, under the conditions of the transference – may be oddly suggestive for

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Enduring Time

attempts to think about social change as occurring in or through a form of chronic time. Adrian Johnston opens Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive, his thesis on the multiplicity of the Freudian drive, with the statement that ‘psychoanalysis is fundamentally a philosophical insight into the subject’s relationships with temporality’ (2005, xxix). This seems both right, and to cut both ways; whilst psychoanalysis does offer a philosophical discourse on the relations between subject and temporality, one that may hold open the possibility of reconfiguring the subject’s relationship to its own temporality, it also has its own chronic relations to the modern subject. We might view psychoanalysis itself as one of modernism’s chronic conditions; a form of knowledge that co-emerges at the turn of the last century with empire and the late colonial state, and the decolonization movements and independence struggles of the modern period that is from its inception on the verge of dying, and yet chronically persists. The psychoanalytic subject, ‘that figment of European high modernism’ is constitutively a colonial creature (Anderson et  al. 2011, 1). But more than this, as Anderson et  al. have argued, the universalized, seemingly generic psychoanalysable subject no longer requires the specific psychoanalytic scaffolding that once buttressed it, but has emerged as a ‘globalized subject’ which they trace through the history of psychoanalysis’ own internationalist desires. In relation to the rise of the psy-discourses throughout the last century, the hidden chronicity and persistence of psychoanalysis lies not so much in its survival as a rarefied mode of treatment, but in the production and promotion of a certain kind of generic universal self, a self, structured by its inner wildness, its ‘destabilizing colonial tropics’ (2011, 3). This wildness, psychoanalysis posits, is lodged deep in our interiority, and returns to haunt and shape the European imaginary, and representations of the ‘tropics’ themselves. Whilst tenacious, ‘colonizing’ and internationalist, the notion of psychoanalysis as an ongoingly dying profession, as one of the chronic illnesses of modernity, threads its way through contemporary psychoanalytic discussions that talk anxiously of the real dangers to the psychoanalytic profession posed by the demands for a narrow definition of evidence-based medicine, the promotion of short-term treatments such as cognitive behavioural therapy, and the general casual dismissal of depth psychology and ‘unsubstantiated’ notions of unconscious processes, infantile sexuality and fantasy within a wider mental health field.20

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 rather a political loss [. . .] the extraordinary hope of decolonization akin to the modernist utopian drive in relation to internationalism and the force of the sense of futurity encapsulated within that idea of hope. Khanna 2011, 256

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 postcolonial 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.

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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

Where I do approach works that situate themselves as artworks, they may have a relation to the political, but not necessarily in an overt sense, and none of them hail themselves as ‘political art’. Nor are they works that specifically foreground duration, in the sense of durational art, or art that takes time as its subject, of which there are many famous examples.22 They mostly take place outside the gallery, and are certainly ‘social works’ in the sense that Shannon Jackson outlines where sites of aesthetic and social provocations coincide (2011), but not all of them take on this intersection with the social at the level of social systems, for instance, such as the environment, or labour, or public infrastructures. Instead, what draws me to them is an odd quality of excessiveness that pervades them. When Mierle Laderman Ukeles elects to shake the hands of eight thousand five hundred sanitation workers and personally thank them for keeping New York City clean, she could have stopped at four thousand, content with making the gesture in order to make her point. When Jackie Sumell contacts Herman Wallace with the suggestion of drawing up plans for a house that he could imagine from his solitary cell, she could have created a collaborative artwork, and moved on to other things. Instead she spent 14 years in correspondence with Wallace, visiting him in prison, phoning him when allowed, designing and redesigning, so that The House that Herman Built is a project without end, even though Wallace has now passed away. When Arthur ‘Bispo’ do Rosário was incarcerated in a mental institution in Rio, he could have made a handful of artworks out of found materials, but instead he amassed almost 1,000 pieces, each meticulously stitched, wrapped, patched or sewn together, so that his room became impossible to move around in. And yet, each of these projects, despite their publicness, their excessive qualities, is also deeply private. Each had to find a way to painfully bring something private out into the public, not so much to reveal it, but perhaps to ‘disclose’ it: a disclosure of a kind of private knowledge through its ordinary and everyday encounter with things, ideas, people and social structures that condition the intelligibility of the world. This private knowledge, in other words, is never purely private, but always already public through practical day-to-day encounters that we can call sociality.

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.

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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 selfdriven, 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

Trans1. A prefix occurring in loanwords from Latin (transcend; transfix); on this model used with the meanings “across,” “beyond,” “through,” “changing thoroughly,” “transverse,” in combination with elements of any origin: transisthmian; trans-Siberian; transempirical; transvalue. 2. Chemistry. A prefix denoting a geometric isomer having a pair of identical atoms or groups on the opposite sides of two atoms linked by a double bond. Compare cis-. 3. Astronomy. A prefix denoting something farther from the sun (than a given planet): trans-Martian; trans-Neptunian. Origin: < Latin, combining form of trāns (adv. and preposition) across, beyond, through. Collins English Dictionary 2009 Occasionally, political events occur that deliberately re-introduce an old rather than a new set of terms back into public speech. Although this is often a strategy of the Right, one example might be the campaign that Jeremy Corbyn, the veteran British Labour backbencher, ran for the Labour leadership in 2015, which was bound up with what we could view as an embarrassingly out-of-date lexicon. Terms like ‘rent regulation’, the ‘re-nationalization of the railways’, the ‘scrapping of Trident’ were the backdrop of the political discourse of the 1980s, as the Left attempted to respond to the onslaught of Margaret Thatcher’s government’s dismantling of a whole stratum of state institutions, legal frameworks and apparatuses that were seen as hampering the market. The reintroduction of this ‘old’ lexicon in the 2015 campaign was striking not only at the level of content, but precisely because it was anachronistic. In their radical outdatedness, to literally speak these words in public space became a political gesture. This was

23

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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

Whilst counter-memory might look like the negation of history as knowledge, memory or truth, for Foucault it is a specific historical sense, one that opposes historical practices in particular ways, and in doing so allows new practices to emerge. Donald Bouchard describes how, through vigilant repetitions – a refusal of the new that paradoxically brings on the new – counter-memory becomes an ‘action that recognizes itself in words’, opening the opportunity to question ‘the value of our values’ (1977). Foucault’s counter-memory is a speech-act that turns in on history as established knowledge, memory and truth, signalling an individual’s resistance against official versions of historical continuity. The important thing becomes who remembers, the context of

Staying

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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: [. . .] the light – famous dazzling effect of power – [. . .] is in fact a divisive light that illuminates one side of the social body but leaves the other in shadow or casts it into darkness. Foucault 2004, 70

In other words, as we see an increase in cultural memory narratives, we see a decrease in historical consciousness. The Turkish sociologist Meltem Ahıska argues counter-memory is a practice that questions traditions of memory and attends to the voids and gaps in narratives (2006). If memory is a construction, counter-memory is an alternative political construction, a montage of facts, objects, dreams, expectations, shadows and spectres. In this chapter I want to approach what happens to certain ideas and terms when they ‘stay’ within disciplinary formations, and through their staying power come to suggest an elongated present that has effects on that discipline’s capacity to speak itself. By tracking ideas, terms and concepts that endure through the retroactive work of embracing their anachronistic status and calling the new into question, a practice of counter-memory is enacted within the disciplinary formation itself, and a different way of approaching the ‘new’ emerges. ‘Staying’, as a temporal practice, allows us to remain proximal to anachronistic or outdated ideas. I am going to use the formation of ‘psychosocial studies’, a putatively ‘new’ field of study in the UK intellectual context as my test case, and the key notion of ‘psychic reality’ as a case study for a retroactive mode of intellectual work, pursuing the notion of ‘temporal drag’, and what drags a discipline back to outof-date debates or concepts, despite its desire to be free of them. My argument is that the central tenets, concepts and questions for psychosocial studies emerge out of a re-appropriation of what have become anachronistic or ‘useless’ concepts in other fields – ‘society’ for instance, within the discipline of sociology, or ‘the unconscious’ within psychology, or ‘hysteria’ even, for the field of psychoanalytic studies, all of which are routinely referred to as outmoded, superseded or simply medically discredited. By tracing the connections between different ways of

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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

This tracking of the implicit operations of psychic investments in the organization of social life, and the ways that organization falters by virtue of the psychic forces it cannot fully contain, is precisely the work that psychosocial studies claims as its core purpose, constituting itself as a ‘non-disciplinary space’ that calls for a constant acknowledgement of the mutually co-constitutive spheres of psychic and social life. Yet to describe an emerging discipline as nondisciplinary, and to imagine this non-disciplinarity as a ‘space’ is itself a sleight of hand, a slippage that is perhaps motivated by a politics of resisting enclosures, borders, edges and limits, and the ossification of thinking that has come to characterize powerful mainstream debates in the ‘master’ disciplines of psychology and sociology, that tend to maintain a distinction between psychological and social life even as they may seek to investigate their relation. Whilst there is always a question as to whether the institutionalization of such an emergent ‘non-discipline’ blunts the political edge of the terrain from which it 1

Freud’s term, Nachträglichkeit, is translated variously as deferred action, retroaction, après-coup and afterwardsness.

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emerges, the appeal to the non-disciplinary is perhaps an attempt to side with the marginal, fluid and nomadic practice of thinking across (or even hovering above), rather than between, pre-existing disciplines. It might even be an appeal to the perpetual motion of critique itself, a commitment to unsettle as soon as one settles, to deliberately look for the place where a field meets its breaking points and therefore faces its contingencies, and to reflexively reposition oneself wherever a new liminal space opens up. However, I am not sure this will really do. Whether we like it or not, the ‘psychosocial’ is weighed down by debates that have taken place in a host of disciplines in both their normative and emancipatory forms, that do anchor this discipline somewhere even if we are not quite sure where that somewhere is. I am not convinced that psychosocial studies can escape so easily the genealogies of the relation between psychic reality and social antagonisms that it seeks to understand in its appeal to the nomadism of the non-disciplinary, and that do continue to be debated within traditional disciplinary domains. Rather than the non-disciplinary, we could instead think of psychosocial studies as a kind of temporal ‘transdisciplinary’ practice, a test case perhaps for thinking about how disciplinary practices might operate not just through their permeability or impingement on one another, but through the temporal pressure they put on one another. Rather than viewing psychosocial studies as interdisciplinary in the sense of creating a new dialogue, say, between queer studies and affect studies (i.e. transdisciplinary in the sense of the production of categories that move across both disciplines and yet remain distinct from them), instead psychosocial studies is 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 speak to one another contemporaneously in generative ways. In what follows I look in more detail at how ‘trans-’ can operate as a temporal phenomenon. I then follow what might have happened to a key ‘embarrassment’ in psychoanalytic theory: the notion of psychic reality. I suggest, with Michel Serres, that this idea, which was ‘of its time’, is now ‘out of its time’, and thereby ‘wrong’ in that double sense that the contemporary suggests. However, psychic reality resurfaces in a strand of Judith Butler’s early work, through a particular contiguity, or ‘folding’ that she performs between Freud and Foucault, which allows the former gains of the concept to become active again. I use Butler’s reworking of psychic reality as simply an example of a kind of ‘psychosocial study’ that I hope can act as a general condition, a ‘case’ of the temporal transdisciplinarity of ‘Psychosocial Studies’. In doing so, a conceptualization of

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the temporality of ‘staying’ can be grasped. Freud’s original concept of psychic reality opened the question of how a disturbing or traumatic external event at the centre of psychic life gets reconsidered as a form of fantasy-taken-as-real. Butler’s elaboration of the psychic life of power draws Freud into an uneasy but creative tension with Foucault to understand the very production of a distinction between psychic and social domains. Rather than psychic reality being seen to have been surpassed, in what I am calling Butler’s ‘psychosocial’ reading it finds a way to ‘stay’, becoming available again, not to describe a mode of fantasy, but as an account of the very potential for the malleability of norms, and hence for social change. As we shift from a discussion of reality to one of power, or in other terms, from a distinction between the ‘Law’, to more socially mutable ‘norms’, so paradoxically a key area of psychoanalytic thought that has fallen into disrepair becomes available retroactively, gathered into this new psychosocial disciplinary domain.

TransOne particular question that hovers over psychosocial studies is whether it is a branch of psychoanalytic studies, in which psychoanalysis operates as its ‘master’ discourse. I certainly think a cartography of psychosocial studies would include a loosely termed ‘psychoanalytic-Marxist’ tradition that might include the work of early critical theorists such as Wilhelm Reich, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and Eric Fromm, as well as the developments of Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Cornelius Castoriadis and Alain Badiou. Certainly psychosocial studies might retrospectively read these authors as engaged with the wholesale deconstruction of a priori categories such as ‘individual’, ‘society’ or ‘collective’, where the radical decentring of the subject in psychoanalysis could be aligned with various accounts of the tensions between power and resistance in a bid to understand better the failure of social change. If we were to trace other psychoanalytic-social theories that might ‘govern’ psychosocial studies, we may turn to the long feminist psychoanalytic trajectory of which the work of Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Juliet Mitchell, Nancy Chodorow, Jessica Benjamin and Jacqueline Rose are examples; the engagements between psychoanalysis and philosophy exemplified in the work of Jacques Derrida; and the history of engagements between psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory that often takes the work of Frantz Fanon as its starting point and then develops in the texts of Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Ranjana Khanna,

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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 materialdiscursive 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 3

See, for instance, Hook 2011, Parker 2002, 2007, Stenner 2008. See, for instance, Middleton and Brown 2005, Stephenson and Papadopoulos 2006.

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whereby inter and multi disciplinary practices would include those in which specific knowledges, concepts and methods are maintained, and a certain crossfertilization 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

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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.

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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).

The baker’s dough 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

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is perfectly under control, or seamless, and poses no problems? On the contrary, I believe that these spaces between are more complicated than one thinks. This is why I have compared them to the Northwest Passage [in Hermès V. Le Passage du Nord-Ouest], with shores, islands, and fractal ice floes. Serres and Latour 1995, 70

Serres talks of the ‘field of comparativism,’ as not so much a moving between established disciplinary areas of thought (say, the sciences and the humanities), but the creation of such a passage, which is closer to what we are exploring here as transdisciplinary in its transformational potential. Though the metaphor is spatial and rests on Serres’ interest in topology,5 he develops a related notion of time that is centrally concerned with the relationship between contemporaneity and superseded or outmoded modes of thought. This he elaborates through various figurations; the baker kneading dough and the crumpling and folding of a handkerchief, drawing out the ways that temporal folding produces contiguities, proximities and confluences of thought, much like the ways apparently widely separated points on a handkerchief may be drawn together into adjacency (Serres 1991; Serres and Latour 1995, 60–61). Serres therefore invites us to understand time as chaotic but in a precise sense: 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.

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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.

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Psychic reality and the psychic life of power Taking Serres’ notion of temporal folding, can we open up a new discussion about ‘psychic’ life? I’ve suggested that references to the ‘psyche’ may show up as a kind of embarrassment in contemporary theory. It goes against the grain of mainstream psychological discourse where ‘psyche’ gave way some time ago to ‘mental’ and now simply to ‘neuro’, as the brain, albeit conceived of as plastic, emotional, responsive, porous and in some ways relational, has become the psychological subject, even more so than the mind, and certainly not the archaic referent, the psyche. The notion of a psychic life is tinged with something unsavoury, perhaps a leftover connection with the nineteenth-century interest in telepathy and the occult, linked historically in Britain to the Society for Psychical Research that Freud had some connection with, and interest in (Luckhurst 2002, Frosh 2013). Not only is it anachronistic to refer to psychic life, but in particular, the notion of ‘psychic reality’ has pretty much collapsed as a useful category in some traditions of psychoanalytic thinking. Marion Oliner has suggested that a twosided response to ‘reality’ in psychoanalytic thinking has developed over the decades (2012). On the one hand, psychoanalysis recognizes a group of patients who have experienced severe trauma, for whom reality has pressed in so forcefully that they remain passive to the enormity of this experience. Traumatic experiences, however, require assimilation over time as they prompt a range of psychic attempts at repair that often include unconscious omnipotence in relation to survival. Internal conflicts, in other words, are retroactively understood in relation to a process of psychically assimilating and managing the impact of trauma. On the other hand, there is another group of patients who are seen to have ‘failed’ or partial solutions to childhood internal conflict, and who could be said to be active agents in their suffering. Here concerns with alterity, intersubjectivity and figurability come to the fore, as a way to understand how we come to accept that the world has its own independent existence beyond the machinations of primary narcissism or omnipotence. Oliner argues that Freud’s original notion of self-preservation was initially enough to understand why one comes to deal with ‘reality’, but Freud’s own turn towards ‘psychic reality’ has led, in her view, to an ossification of the dual positions she lays out, and a stagnation of theoretical developments on how psychoanalysis conceptualizes the relation between ‘inside and out’. In fact, the American psychoanalyst Jacob Arlow also noted this ossification, and in 1985 declared ‘psychic reality’ dead:

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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. Whether one is a classical Freudian analyst, oriented in terms of childhood traumas of abandonment, loss of love, castration anxiety, oedipal defeat or penis envy, or a Kleinian tracing out the vicissitudes of the depressive and paranoid positions, or an object-relations theorist, concentrating on the deleterious effects of an environment that is not a safe, protective barrier, or a self-psychologist, searching out the failures of empathic communication and mirroring, or an attachment theorist eyeing the evidence of an unstable, unreassuring mother who cannot supply the protective holding environment – each one will orient himself differently towards the patient’s productions, selectively attending and responding to those elements that are consonant with his theory of pathogenesis. Each will find a different psychic reality in keeping with the favoured view of what process or events they believe caused neurotic illness and character deformation. Each one will find in his or her patient a different vision of psychic reality, i.e. a different version of the nature of the unconscious elements in the patient’s mind. Each will envision psychic reality in keeping with the favoured theory of pathogenesis. Under the circumstances, therefore, the concept of psychic reality furnishes no common ground for discourse. It has become an anachronism. Arlow 1996, 664

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

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psychical reality – but of ‘going astray’ theoretically, a proliferation of directions that theory has taken that has produced a dissipation of understanding. The notion that reality itself might be multiple, as Bruno Latour would hold, is not considered by Arlow. Multiplicity leads to fragmentation leads to anachronism. Although psychic reality may have been expelled from a particular Anglophone psychoanalytic scene, this is not uniformly the case. My contention is that by the time Judith Butler comes to the notion of the psyche in The Psychic Life of Power (1997), psychic reality had indeed become useless in psychoanalysis, but is reanimated in critical theory through a particular dialogue Butler sets up in relation to the work of Foucault. However, in order for Butler to make this move, there is a certain rendition of psychic reality in the work of both Lacan and Laplanche that conceptualizes a form reality takes, beyond the dualism of interiority and externality, which ‘stays’ in psychoanalytic theorizing beyond this dissipation, and provides the groundwork for Butler’s reading of the relation between power and psychic life. This involves the conceptualization of psychic reality as a third term, an idea that we could say remains rather latent in more mainstream psychoanalytic theory until its later reanimation in psychoanalysis beyond the clinic.

Freud and the third To briefly elaborate, psychic reality first appears in Freud’s early paper on Hysterical Paralyses (1893), where he begins to discuss how the ‘lesion’ that he believes is associated with hysteria is an alteration of a thought or an idea.6 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)

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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: The unconscious is the true psychical reality; in its innermost nature it is as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is as incompletely

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presented by the data of consciousness as is the external world by the communications of our sense organs. Freud 1900, 613

If both internal and external worlds remain partial in our apprehension of them, then there is some aspect of mental and social life that remains distinct from both material reality and what Laplanche and Pontalis call ‘pure psychology’, ‘extimate’ as Lacan would say. The particular move that Freud makes in relation to hysteria as he shifts from the aetiology of sexual trauma to that of fantasy is that hysterical individuals treat the fantasy, which is born of a repressed wish, as if it were real. A fantasy, once consciously understood as fantasy has none of the dynamic repressive force of a fantasy thought to be reality, which, though not identical with delusion, induces a range of unconscious psychical effects related to the original wish, such as guilt, envy, anxiety and identification. In other words, Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory was not simply about replacing real events with fantasies, but about embedding the difficulty with accepting a distinction between reality and fantasy as a core struggle in neurotic psychic life. In deluded states, if we follow Lacan, there is no such struggle, as the symbolic law that allows a distinction between reality and fantasy to be maintained is foreclosed, so that there is little awareness that fantasy and reality have not coincided. What has been internally abolished ‘returns from without’ and can only appear in the Real, as the entire area of symbolic functioning has been foreclosed. In hysteria, the patient knows the difference between fantasy and reality, but nevertheless treats fantasy as if it were real. Its reality describes the effects of being taken as real – the fantasy’s capacity to produce the ‘real’ psychic processes of guilt, envy, identification and so on. Where Lacan follows Freud in talking about an impossible Real – traumatic, unrepresentable, irreducible – Jean Laplanche goes in a different direction. For Laplanche, psychic reality is a particular instance in Freud’s thought in which the vector that usually moves from internality outwards is radically reversed. Although psychoanalysis makes what he describes as ‘ridiculous efforts to reconstruct the outside, objectivity, on the basis of the inside’ in such a way as to be worthy of the great idealist philosophies, there is a germ of a break with this Ptolemaic, selfcentred position in Freud’s own writing (Laplanche, 1995). This shows up at various moments in Freud’s work – in seduction and transference, the superego, persecution and delusion – that bring out the ways an irreducible otherness gives rise to psychic life. The most important discovery of psychoanalysis for Laplanche is the presence of the ‘other thing in me, and of the link between the other thing

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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.

The ‘soul’ and the psyche 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

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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

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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

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understanding the institution of a distinction between social and psychic life, and that the boundary that, in her terms ‘distributes’ the terrain between the two, is dependent on mutable social norms. This is a crucial point for psychosocial studies as Butler offers a way of articulating a social psyche that builds on Laplanche’s insistence on the constitution of psychic life through an encounter with alterity, but a socially constituted alterity, and therefore one that changes as it becomes psychic. Briefly, from Freud’s 1917 account of melancholia, a bond is formed between subject and object followed by a withdrawal of the object. The subject, instead of letting go of its attachments to the lost object, and loving a new object, withdraws the libidinal energy that had been caught up in the original attachment into the ego, where it cannot find anywhere to go. This state produces an identification of the ego with the abandoned object: ‘I’ am, like you, a lost and abandoned object. The loss of the object, however, also creates a split in the ego, caught in a dynamic interaction between ego-criticism (a condemning agency) and an ego modified by identification. By the time we get to ‘The Ego and the Id’ (1923) Freud states: ‘The character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and that it contains the history of those object choices’ (29). Melancholia becomes the generalized condition in which the lost object of an originary attachment is taken ‘in’ to an ego that is simultaneously built up and formed through that very process. The ego is precipitated then by loss, ‘sheltering’, as Butler puts it, the memory trace of that lost love. This also means that prior to ego formation there is some kind of originary traumatic encounter with an other that entails both identification and aggression, and which cannot be given up. The ego is instituted through taking in the remains of that loss and its affects. The ‘turn’ that constitutes psychic life contains both a change in direction, and a change in affect – from object to ego, and from love to hate – as the object-taken-in is berated and sadistically attacked by a condemning agency, as well as loved. The failure of the ego to fully take itself as its own love object, as it does in primary narcissism, creates a sliver of a gap between subject and object, and in doing so internal and external worlds are instituted. Crucially for Butler, and I would argue for psychosocial studies: [. . .] if the melancholic turn is the mechanism by which the distinction between internal and external worlds is instituted, then melancholia initiates a variable boundary between the psychic and the social, a boundary, [. . .] that distributes and regulates the psychic sphere in relation to prevailing norms of social regulation. Butler 1997, 171, emphasis added

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Butler’s argument is that as the ego is modified through identification with lost objects, so a whole range of social ideals, silences, repressions and prohibitions are also taken in. In other words, what is denoted in psychoanalysis as simply ‘object’ is actually an already configured social world, an other who is already regulated, governed and formed by norms. The berating agency is not simply internal. When the melancholic states ‘I have lost nothing’, this is not just as a psychic bolstering against loss, but a statement that reveals the social forms of power that regulate what losses can and cannot not be acknowledged or grieved, as much of Butler’s later work elaborates. ‘Conscience’ is an internal violence turned in on the self, but it originates not just in the drive, but in the violence of social norms that regulate the lost object. Finally, the counter-point to the psychic form that the violence of social norms takes, is the political promise that can be understood as part of the melancholic’s ‘plaint’. Many theorists have commented on the ‘spirit of revolt’ that Freud writes about in the melancholic, as they attempt to break the bond that they also want to sustain.8 Butler understands melancholia not as an individual pathology, but as a condition produced and reproduced through systematic cultural and social exclusions from dominant norms that provide recognition. The condition of melancholia, that is also the generalized condition of ego formation, institutes a boundary that produces and regulates a separation of psychic and social spheres, and in becoming ‘psychic’, social norms can in their turn be regulated and (re)produced. Whilst the ego cannot escape the incorporation of the violence of non-recognition, at the same time it is in revolt, seeking to break the bond on which its formation depends. Hence, for Butler, we ‘work through’ social regulation all the while we are constrained by it. Returning now to Michel Serres, we can recall that a system can grow old without letting time escape, and through a process of temporal folding or kneading, unexpected contiguities and proximities can be made and remade. Serres is particularly concerned with the fate of ‘dead’ texts or ideas, and how quickly they are relegated as ‘obsolete’. He urges us to pay attention to what has remained conserved, close to our own era, and deliberately suspends judgment on the insights from previous eras, proposing a kind of waiting until their usefulness can resurface again through their contiguity to other, more ostensibly ‘contemporary’ texts and ideas. This suspension of judgement is also a suspension of time, a refusal of the new to be only orientated towards the future, and equally a refusal to simply ‘resurrect’ the past. Kneading traps time, in that the proximity 8

See Khanna 2006 and Kristeva 2000 as examples.

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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’?

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Maintaining

Maintain 1. : to keep in an existing state (as of repair, efficiency, or validity): preserve from failure or decline 2. : to sustain against opposition or danger : uphold and defend 3. : to continue or persevere in : carry on, keep up 4. a : to support or provide for b : sustain

5. : to affirm in or as if in argument : assert Merriam-Webster Dictionary 2005 When time is caught in the fold, it is in danger of becoming hidden. Kneading, after all, like other forms of non-mechanized repetitive labour, was always a time consuming and physically arduous business, whether performed by artisans, or by women as part of the daily round of domestic labour. It takes time to fold time. Accelerated technologically driven capitalist societies that are ultimately organized around the urgency of seeking new markets and profits require new mechanisms for managing the outcomes of speeding up time. But, as Sarah Sharma has shown (2014), these new mechanisms play out unevenly across bodies and spaces. The politics of time and space ushered in by globalized capitalism is not simply about speed, but involves power relations as they emerge in time, and have to do with the interrelated, relational and entangled ways that one person’s time is used in the service of another’s. Coining the term ‘powerchronography’ (in a nod towards Doreen Massey’s ‘power-geometry’ that sought to complicate Fredric Jameson and David Harvey’s original accounts of timespace compression by paying attention to specific bodies, spaces and the power

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differentials between them), Sharma shows how capital invests in certain temporalities, and not others: 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

Sharma offers a ‘micropolitics of temporal coordination and social control’ that occurs through the differences between multiple embodied temporalities; frequent business travellers, for instance, who hail taxis to speed up their journeys are reliant on the hidden delayed waiting time and night-time working of those taxi drivers; hotels that are specifically set up to help support the constant movement of jet-lagged frequent flyers are serviced by those whose temporality is minutely controlled and micromanaged by their employers; slow food producers employ workers who must operate at a radically different pace from the slow food they cook and the lifestyle they promote. Sharma’s work chimes with a substantial sociological and anthropological literature that highlights that where time once played a part in the differential management of populations by separating those whose time was ‘precious’ (wage earners, the educated classes, the able-bodied) from those whose time could be squandered or had little value (the working classes, Bourdieu’s ‘unemployed’ with too much time on their hands, ‘delinquent’ adolescents, the bored middleclass housewife whose children had ‘flown the nest’, the disabled, elderly or sick), now time is a commodity that no-one has enough of, and yet power still operates to structure and condition different populations’ lack of time. The busy ‘work’ the unemployed do for their benefits in post-industrial nations does not necessarily translate into meaningful or paid work. Both the precarization and feminization of labour has meant that women increasingly work a double shift, especially those in ‘care chains’ who care for the children of middle-class women in the global north but continue to parent their own children in the global south via social media. And those on zero hours contracts work continuously but only to economically stand still.1 The time poverty of a woman in full-time employment,

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’.

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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

3 4

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. See Graham and Thrift 2007, for a discussion of the maintenance of products designed to break. See for example Costa 1975 and Cox and Federici 1976.

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contemporary phase of capitalism and the social relations it produces, but to how we understand time. There is a relation between our current distinctive temporal imaginaries, and patterns of managing vulnerability and dependency through systems of maintenance. Maintenance systems, in other words, 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. My aim here, however, is not simply to revalorize hidden temporalities through their capacities to disrupt the dominant temporal imaginaries of our times, but to try to notice the qualities of time that has nevertheless become suspended. Suspended time is heterogeneous to the totally ‘qualified time’ of permanent work in which time and its qualities are sold back to us in the form of ‘quality time’ (Cederström and Fleming 2012). Work time, as Sharma shows us, is animated by the obscured temporalities embedded in the labour of maintenance that appear at first glance to also be without qualities, in that this time can feel stuck, immovable, interminable, and yet is time that allows for the renewal of everyday life. It is this paradoxical notion of renewal through maintenance (itself a form of stuck time) that I think allows us to begin to understand what it might mean to ‘grasp time’. If time is used to organize bodies towards maximum profitability, as Elizabeth Freeman (2010) has argued, then an analytics of such organization, as well charting the ways that bodies resist, or as Lauren Berlant would put it ‘desist’, being chrononormatively organized, is pressing (2011). But more than this, we need to understand the relation between bodies that desist, or refuse to ‘progress’, and the kinds of obdurate temporalities that desisting bodies perform. Desisting bodies ask us to think about the slowness of chronic time, rather than the time of rupture; the durational drag of staying alongside others, rather than the time of transgression; the elongated time of incremental change, rather than the time of breakthrough or revolution. Maintenance, in other words, takes the form of suspended time but through its suspension allows the renewal of everyday life. It maintains our relation with time itself, time we may be able to imagine, at least, that we can grasp and or have.

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

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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 selfexpression 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

Time, then, is not a backdrop to the push-pull of cruel optimism. Suspending the project of the self means suspending time as flow and living permanently within the time of the impasse. This notion that Berlant proposes, that certain practices of survival in late liberalism require living in a stretch of time that tethers us to an object that both can and can’t provide us with satisfaction, may lead us to ask certain philosophical

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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 The notion of maintenance appears to contain two temporal forms. In part maintenance is about trying to keep something going – keeping things functioning or in a steady state, allowing what already exists to continue or persevere, to carry on being. Maintenance is not the time of generation or production, or the eruption of the new. It is not revolutionary time, but the lateral time of ‘on-go’ that tries to sustain an elongated present. We maintain machinery, a position, our lives and the lives of others, our composure, our precarious mental states; maintenance is a bulwark against the time of entropy, and the propensity of all living systems to decay and eventually die. Maintenance requires an attachment to now-time that is not so much the time of the Benjaminian flash (Benjamin 1940), but of the slow burn of one moment looking much like the next. Secondly, to maintain is also to keep buoyant; to maintain one’s mood could be described as buoying oneself up, keeping oneself or someone else afloat during difficult times. Maintaining that the Earth is round when it looks flat is about upholding an idea, defending, and affirming it when it is challenged or attacked, raising its profile when it has slipped off the agenda. To maintain is to underpin, or prop up from below, to hold up when something or someone is

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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

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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.

Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969 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 6

See also Gunaratnam 2013. See Coote et al. 2013, Gill 2009, Hale et al. 2013, Honore 2004, O’Neil 2014, Schulte 2014 and Vostal 2014.

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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: Maintenance is a structure that exposed the disavowed durational activity behind a static object as well as the materialist activity that supported ‘dematerialized’ creativity, a realization that called the bluff of the art experimentation of the era. Jackson 2011, 88

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In the opening section of the manifesto, entitled ‘IDEAS ’, Ukeles takes up Freud’s distinction in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) between the death and life instinct. Death, Ukeles associates with separation, individuality, liberation, the avant-garde, the capacity to do one’s own thing, to follow one’s own path to death. The death drive, in other words, for Ukeles, is the marker of an autonomous life free of dependencies, and crucially free of others. Of the life instinct, on the other hand, she writes ‘unification; the eternal return; the/ perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species; survival/ systems and operations; equilibrium’ (1969). Out of this distinction Ukeles outlines two basic systems: those of development and maintenance. Development is linked to ‘pure individual creation; the new; change/ progress; advance; excitement; flight or fleeing’ (1969). Maintenance, on the other hand is the practice that underpins development: ‘keep the dust off the pure individual/ creation; preserve the new; sustain the change; protect progress; defend and prolong the advance/ renew the excitement; repeat the flight’ (1969). Development, in other words, is utterly dependent on practices of preservation, prolongation, repetition, protection and sustenance, which we can summarize with the term ‘dusting,’ echoing earlier feminist debates about reproduction and domestic labour that Simone de Beauvoir had begun and Hannah Arendt had taken up (Veltman 2010). Where development systems include room for change, maintenance systems are ‘dire’, as Ukeles writes, with little room for alteration: ‘C: Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time (lit.)’ (1969). Having laid out these two systems, Ukeles changes the direction of the drives – she deliberately realigns radicality not with the assertion of autonomous personhood, change and disruption, but with the habits of maintenance and care on which such autonomy is dependent. She asks not just for the recognition of the labour of maintenance, but for the efficacy of what she calls ‘maintenance art’, reversing the logic of the development/ maintenance system. In realizing that as an artist the one thing she gets to do is to define for herself what art is, she declares maintenance a viable form of art, making an intervention into the dichotomy between life and death. In other words, first she reverses the order so that life/maintenance is ‘dire’ rather than lively, and death/art is progress and liberation rather than deadliness, and then she flips the order, declaring maintenance a form of art. In doing this maintenance (cooking, cleaning, washing, dusting, keeping the home fires burning) becomes a vehicle for revealing all the hidden ‘life work’ that goes on, on behalf of others, without remarginalizing it, but without linking it to the time of progress. Instead Ukeles opens up the temporality of female labour to an association with liveliness

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through endurance, or reanimating the seemingly dead time of repetition and meaningless labour without associating it with development. This she then links to the male and female service workers who make up most of the workers of the world (whom she comes to name later as ‘sustainability workers’), as well as the ailing social institutions, such as sanitation departments, arts funders and NGO s that support maintenance work. Any art that claims to be autonomous is in fact ‘infected by strains of maintenance ideas, maintenance activities, and maintenance materials.’ Maintenance art on the other hand ‘zero(s) in/on pure maintenance, exhibit it as contemporary art, and/ yield, by utter opposition, clarity of issues’ (Ukeles 1969). As Patricia C. Phillips states, [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

It is worth contrasting Ukeles’ manifesto to Marinetti’s infamous 1909 Futurist Manifesto, a homage to speed, the car, and what he saw as the purifying potentials of war and violence. In a famous passage in which he describes a minor accident he had a year previously in which he swerved his car into a ditch to avoid two cyclists, Marinetti describes how he emerges reborn: ‘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.

Typically hyperbolic, and in part a satirical over-identification with the ‘new man’ of modernity, the appearance of the black maternal other in this defining modernist text nevertheless alerts us to an arch relation to revolutionary change that allows us to read Ukeles’ 1969 text as a direct rebuttal of the unacknowledged ‘muddy’ substrata of the speed of progress. The thrust of Ukeles’ work was precisely to reverse the figuration of the othered, raced, classed, maternalfeminine as simply a ditch offering up sustenance to the revolutionary moment of Marinetti’s epiphany, and to engage in a non-ironic, almost naïve way with questions of maintenance. Ukeles’ manifesto asks: The sourball of every revolution: after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?’ Ukeles 1969, n.p.

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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.

Touch Sanitation (1977–1984) 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.

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communications. In a letter that Ukeles wrote to the Department of Sanitation, concerning Handshake Ritual, she states: 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-storeyhigh 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).

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1 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation, 1978–1980. City-wide performance with 8,500 NYC sanitation workers.

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

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‘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, unnamed, 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

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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 Ray’s a Laugh is a set of images by the English photographer Richard Billingham depicting his family in their home in Cradley Heath, in the West Midlands. Published in 1996 as a book of photographs, and later exhibited all over the world, the images became iconic, both of a moment in British art history, and for their depiction of shocking levels of poverty in Britain in the 1990s.9 Billingham had started photographing his father Ray when he was still a teenager living alone with Ray after his mother Liz temporarily moved out. Ray had been made redundant before Liz left – they were conned into selling their terraced house, and moved into a tiny council flat where Ray began drinking heavily. Billingham has recounted how Ray did not leave the flat for 18 months during this period

2 Richard Billingham, Untitled, 1994. Colour photograph mounted on aluminium, 75 × 50 cm. 9

Billingham’s work was included in the original ‘Sensation’ exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1997.

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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:

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Speaking back to the classed assumptions underlying the critique he has stated: 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:

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The best footage was when I’d been just looking and not really thinking (trancelike) 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

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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’.

3 Richard Billingham, Untitled, 1995. Colour photograph mounted on aluminium.

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Time and the project 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: A lifework might be defined as art that involves the subjection of a life to a projected, sustained, and all consuming creative practice, where the body of the artist and their lived experience becomes a formative content inseparable from the artwork. Lifeworks often involve extended durations in order to mark and incorporate lived change, processes of accrual, aging, personal and material transformation: they trace the singularity of a bios in movement. [. . .] Such artworks are oriented towards an insistent regeneration of fugitive affects that for some time evade the existent forms of capture by capital and its social and cultural agencies. As a kind of non-utilitarian labour, they reflect a relentless mortal quest to make, be with and share “surplus values of life as values in themselves.” At stake here is the making and disclosure of new potentials of being, or what Kathleen Stewart has called “the kinds of agency that might or might not add up to something with some kind of intensity or duration.” Heathfield 2009, 14

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

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dependent. Maintenance is the time of noticing ‘each mote of dust’, as Billingham also instinctively knows, as he frames his father’s face staring back at him, or a squashed fly on the wall of his home. Their work allows us to attend to the qualities of a kind of suspended temporality that is not the time of the event, and is neither the time of progress and development. It shares with our current temporal imaginaries a sense of thick or viscous time, but maintenance time also points us towards the time involved in maintaining connections with one another, and hence with time that we share; whether that is the shared endeavour of keeping a city alive, or of keeping family connections intact through the suspended time of looking and picturing. I suggested at the beginning that what maintenance does is keep us attached to time itself, in that it recognizes that ‘betterment’ is not a time in the future, but the time we labour within the ‘now’, in its repetitious, bleak, and at times ugly forms. To grasp the time of maintenance is to take the time that doesn’t slip through our fingers as ‘our time’, the time that we have.

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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 Through my involvement in the women’s movement I realized that the reproduction of human beings is the foundation of every economic and political system, and that the immense amount of paid and unpaid domestic work done by women in the home is what keeps the world moving. Federici 2012, 2 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 Ukeles opened up the temporality of traditionally conceived ‘female labour’ – washing, cooking, cleaning, sewing, raising children and other forms of care work – to an association with liveliness through endurance, a kind of dedicated, non-ironic and persistent re-animation of the seemingly ‘dead time’ of maintenance work, without associating it with the time of development. Valorizing maintenance was precisely about not raising it to the level of ‘work’ or ‘labour’, with its assumptions of wage, productivity, market and value, but the opposite – keeping a focus on the kind of strange, ongoing, elongated timeframes that enable ‘keeping going’, and ‘keeping afloat’, that make visible an intimate relation between time and care. To maintain, became, in Ukeles’ practice, a way to reconstitute the borders between things that had otherwise been relegated as rubbish (both objects and the people who handle such objects), and a way to offer back names, and a singularity, to these people and things. To maintain, 69

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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:

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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

Work, on the other hand, in contrast to labour, produces durable artefacts and shapes the structure of the world. It is the accumulation of fabricated things that allows work to transcend the repetitive processes of natural life. Whilst de Beauvoir emphases the potential for self-realization and liberation within work, she shares with Arendt a basic distinction between the repetitious and consumptive processes in sustaining biological life and the creation of something durable over and above these natural processes. For Arendt it is the repetition of this labouring, and the fact that it leads to nothing of any permanence that renders it futile. A dichotomy opens up, then, with the temporality of repetition on the one side, and the ‘permanence’ of what goes beyond mere existence through transcendent activity, on the other. As well as repetition being opposed to permanence, an additional tension here, that also shows up in the Marxist and socialist feminist analyses of the oppression of women in patriarchy that occurred in the 1970s, is the tendency to

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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: [. . .] an ineffaceable “remains” in which “woman” refers to a subject overexposed to a specific type of violence. This violence can be defined fundamentally as a dual constraint or schizoid pressure: the pressure of work in society and at home. Malabou 2011, 93–94

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 childrearing 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

2

3

See for example Benston 1969, Costa and James 1973, Cox and Federici 1976, Federici 1999, Morton 1971. 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. 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).

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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 workingclass 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

5

6

See Baldock 2000, Madianou and Miller 2011, Madianou 2012, Parreñas 2005, Williams 2010, Yeates 2009, 2012. 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. 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.

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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

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attached to its labouring, whose labouring is a matter of attachment to that labour, as well as providing the general conditions, we could say, for attachment (the infant’s psychic struggle to become connected to the world) to take place. We could say the time of repetition under the condition that is maternity becomes the time of mattering, as opposed to the ‘meaningless’ time of reproduction: the time, that is, in which repetition may come to matter. This time can be felt as obdurate, distinctively uncertain in its outcome, both intensive and ‘empty’, and tethered by the pace of the development of another, figured within the maternal relation as a ‘child’. Whilst the debates of the 1970s on social reproduction (in which maternal labour was bundled) gave way in later decades to discussions about maternal desire, maternal ambivalence and the paradoxes of maternal subjectivity, as well as the disaggregation of the category of ‘woman’ to take in a nexus of interlocking conditions for recognition and agency including sexuality, ‘race’, class, disability and age, a central tension around how to conceptualize maternal time has therefore ossified around the relation between repetition and reproduction. This is best exemplified in Julia Kristeva’s influential essay ‘Women’s Time’ (1981) in which she offered an analysis of gendered time. At one pole was masculine time, the time of ‘project, teleology, linear and prospective unfolding; time as departure, progression, and arrival – in other words, the time of history’ (17). On the other was both cyclical time (the time of menstruation, pregnancy and the repetitive patterned cycles of life), and what she called ‘monumental’ or eternal time (the time of the reproduction of the species, and the genetic chain) that Kristeva argued were both accessed through the feminine: [. . .] female subjectivity would seem to provide a specific measure that essentially retains repetition and eternity from among the multiple modalities of time known through the history of civilizations. On the one hand, there are cycles, gestation, the eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm which conforms to that of nature and imposes a temporality whose stereotyping may shock, but whose regularity and unison with what is experienced as extrasubjective time, cosmic time, occasion vertiginous visions and unnameable jouissance. On the other hand, and perhaps as a consequence, there is the massive presence of a monumental temporality, without cleavage or escape, which has so little to do with linear time (which passes) that the very word “temporality” hardly fits. Kristeva 1981, 16

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

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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.

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structural and generative dimensions of human relations, politics and ethics. Such ethical and political dimensions may include the capacity to respond to the alterity of the ‘child’ against the grain of dominant social norms and discourses that are aimed so relentlessly at mothers.8 As Sophie Jones has put it, in her discussion about the notion of the ‘non-reproductive’: a feminist politics of (non)-reproduction recognizes all the ways in which childrearing might entail a refusal to reproduce the dominant order. Let’s think, then, about reproduction as non-reproduction: the way having children exposes the absurdity and irrationality of our ways of working, bringing new people into the world who might want to change things. Let’s think, at the same time, about nonreproduction as reproduction: about relations of care and affinity that flourish outside, or in defiance, of the nuclear family. Jones et al. 2014, n.p.

Here ‘reproduction’ is uncoupled from social reproduction understood as the production of the next generation of consumers and precarious workers, and encompasses ‘non-reproduction’, understood as both a form of refusal, a spanner in the capitalist machine, and as a form of reproduction itself. This articulation cuts across the tendency to see non-reproduction as only a form of refusal, especially the refusal of futurity that embraces the Freudian death drive as an articulation of ‘queer’, prominent in Lee Edelman’s oft-cited polemic, No Future (2004). As we shall see below, Edelman’s notion of non-reproduction is not the kind of broad political concept that Jones elucidates, that includes non-normative child-rearing within it, but the deliberate refusal of a child-focused social sphere that aligns futurity with reproduction through the figure of the child. Aligning queer with the death drive has not been the only way, however, of articulating queer temporality. Alongside Edelman’s influential account, a whole battery of temporal tropes in queer theory has emerged to help us think through the temporality of non-normative, non-developmental and non-reproductive time, from notions of ‘familial arrhythmia’, and ‘erotohistoriography’, in Elizabeth Freeman’s work (2010, 2011), in which she provides alternative accounts to heterochromonormative lives, through to J. Jack Halberstam’s notion of queer time in relation to transgender and subcultural ways of being (2005). So, on the one hand there has been a call in queer theory to embrace the repetitive circularity of the death drive in the name of ‘non-reproduction’, and on the other, 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).

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a call to notice the myriad ways that we deviate from chromonormative development through alternative temporal orchestrations. However, to bring ‘the maternal’ into proximity with the non-reproductive (rather than simply bringing the ‘reproductive’ and non-reproductive together, as Jones does) makes particular forms of trouble. What happens to time when we reintroduce the idea of motherhood or the maternal into discussions of nonreproduction? Does non-reproduction, as a social signifier, always carry the burden of ‘stilling’ time, against reproduction as productive of time itself, in the form of a future generation and hence a future at all? Does non-reproductive time necessarily ‘queer’ reproductive and teleological time? If so, what are the reciprocal implications for maternal time? Is reproduction, and the maternal more broadly, still routinely evoked as the normative shadow of the deliberately ‘stilled’ or ‘stalled’ time of the non-reproductive, caught between the temporal rhythms of birth, regeneration and death, and the dead ‘progressive’ narratives of departure and arrival? Can we use maternal time, deliberately embraced as repetitive time, as a way to rethink queer and the time of the death drive? If maternal time is understood purely as the time of futurity – the time, if you like that is ‘banked’ by maternal care, invested in the future and carried forwards by the child – is it damned by association with ‘chromonormativity’, setting up an opposition between maternal and queer time and producing the maternalfeminine as a normative category? If, on the other hand, maternal time maintains a relation to repetition, with its associations with the cyclical or eternal, or with meaningless reproduction rather than productive work, does it not re-suture maternal time to notions of both the ‘body clock’ and the ‘timelessness’ of repetition in the figure of the death drive, associations that feminism has historically been keen to break with? If maternal labour is ‘affective, invested, intersubjective’ then what kind of time does this give rise to? To return to my earlier question, what is the time of mattering? Here I’m going to take up the idea of repetition as something that is not just linked to the death drive, but is linked in fact to reproduction, but not necessarily the repetitive ‘meaningless’ reproduction of bare life. Firstly, I want to think about the argument Lee Edelman puts forward in No Future, when he pits developmental time (time that unfolds in relation to an ever receding yet hopeful future, figured as the child), against queer time, figured as the death drive. My sense is that a crisis in the fantasy of the future displaces the dichotomy between the future and the death drive that is central to Edelman’s polemic. Instead, I argue for bringing repetition and reproduction into relation with one another, in the name of queering maternity (i.e. uncoupling it from its normative

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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 Let’s take up Edelman’s polemical text, No Future (2004), then, as he provides a point of departure for a turn in queer theory, and also in disability studies, that rightly queries the relation between subjectivity and futurity. Edelman’s concern is a theoretical one – what happens not so much to queer lives but to a queer principle (the principle of constant refusal of all forms of normative identity) in psychic and social life under the regime of a social order that co-opts the figure of the child to secure a fantasy of social reproduction. In No Future Edelman argues that contemporary communal, public and social relations are organized through the absolute primacy of heteronormativity, so much so that the future can only be thought of in relation to the developmental sequence of a normative timeline – from birth, to sexual maturation, to heterosexual coupling, to the conception and birth of a child. Queer resistance to such an order then shows up specifically as resistance in opposition to this figure of the child who holds the

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heteronormative Symbolic realm in place. Rather than acceding to the dualism that this produces by contesting this ‘othered’ position in order to gain access to the social domain, Edelman proposes a deliberate identification with those who are ‘not fighting for the children’ (3), whereby queerness remains a radical form of non-identity, attaining its ethical value through an acceptance of its status as the ‘outside’ and ‘beyond’ of the social order’s political symptoms, a refusal which he names as the death drive. I want to note here, the connections between Edelman’s articulation of queer, and a feminist theoretical trajectory most clearly exemplified in the work of Luce Irigaray, that, at least in what is often situated as the early and middle phases of her work, has attempted to account for the non-subject of the maternal-feminine in order to rethink sexual difference. For Irigaray, the maternal-feminine is the name she gives to an excessive aspect of the symbolic that cannot be articulated within it, and can only take form through a strategic mimesis (1985a). The symbolic, as a cultural site that registers subjectivity through the unitary mono-masculine subject, can only count one, plus one, plus one, and therefore cannot by definition accommodate the principle of multiplicity and indeterminate morphology which comes to be named as the ‘maternalfeminine’ (1985b).9 Queer theories absorb this principle of multiplicity and the necessarily indeterminate nature of gendered and sexed subjectivity as a broader concept than can be captured by the maternal-feminine. The polemical move that Edelman makes in No Future is to name queer as a refusal ‘of every substantialization of identity, which is always oppositionally defined’ (4). The implications for temporality are clear: queer refuses, by extension, the notion of history as ‘linear narrative (the poor man’s teleology) in which meaning succeeds in revealing itself – as itself – through time’ (4). It is this refusal of linear narrative as the ground for establishing meaning, and the unfolding of time in normative patterns of progression, that is primarily at stake in No Future. Over and over, Edelman says ‘no’ through a paradoxical acceptance and embracing of the negativity assigned to queer, and over and over, the ‘no’, which takes the form of an embrace, a ‘yes’, is directed at the temporal category of the future understood in linear developmental terms. In saying no to the future, Edelman also refuses to pin down and neutralize negativity, that ‘pulsive force’ as he puts it, that would trap queer as a determinate position, a stable and positive form. Instead, ‘nothing, and certainly not what we call the “good,” can ever have any assurance at all in the order of the Symbolic’ (4). The temporality of this 9

See also Irigaray 1991, 1993a and 1993b.

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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

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notes, differences in degree and differences in kind get confused in these arguments (2015, 2016). In a parallel, more culturally focused scene, there are concerns about the survival and extinction of indigenous cultures, communities, languages and ways of life, that play out alongside biotic species decimation, in which the heterogeneous temporalities of processes of persisting and ceasing to persist altogether are seen not just as a tragedy, but as containing within them some potentialities for the creation of new hybrid multispecies communities (Sodikoff 2012), or at least an increased sense of responsibility for what is lost in extinction. For instance, Thom van Dooren writes in Flight Ways: I am interested in how rethinking albatrosses as beings that emerge from and live and die within dense webs of overlapping temporalities and inheritances remakes our understanding of the immensity of what is lost in extinction, while drawing us into new and deeper responsibilities. van Dooren 2014b, 34

Van Dooren is drawing out the ‘dull’ non-evental temporalities of extinctions that occur over time, and therefore the ways that extinction is tied to generations before and generations not to come, as well as to the very idea of the ‘generative’. Extinction has the potential, van Dooren argues, through its effects on human species, to draw out new and deeper responsibilities, potentialities of care that might lead, one might hope, to the protection of other species on the edge of extinction. From a social perspective, concerns have emerged that link survival to conditions of austerity brought about by neoliberal policies that are related to these wider discussions of inter-species survival. Here the discussion has centred more on social projects of survival and, in particular, the persistence of fantasies, concepts or material practices that sustain the affect of hope. Sarah Amsler, for instance, in The Education of Radical Democracy (2015), argues that many species, including our own, are living in intolerable and increasingly uninhabitable conditions brought about by the degradation of the social values of life and justice, and by more and more brutal forms of economic and social violence. The world’s majority are fighting for survival, the right to exist, the possibility of living in common with others, for equitable distribution of resources and recognition, dignity and self-determination (2015). In essence, increasingly financialized and militarized neoliberal capitalism leads to a crisis of hope.10 10

See Bauman 2004 and Zournazi 2003 for further discussions of the politics of hope.

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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

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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

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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

Johnston finds a resolution to this tension by reanimating the Freud of Instincts and Their Vicissitudes (1915). In distinguishing between the drive’s source, pressure, aim and object, Johnston maintains that Freud’s drives, including the death drive, are simultaneously temporal and timeless, oscillating between ‘the ‘too much’ of sublimation and the ‘not enough’ of instinctual renunciation’ (2005, 229). For Johnston, the drives are themselves internally split along two axes that take each view of time into account: an axis of iteration (which accounts for the constancy of the death drive), and an axis of alteration (which accounts for the capacity for the drive to change object and aim). This split multiple drive plays out in the psyche as the difference between what jouissance aims at (the Lacanian thing that is always already lost) and what it obtains (the objet petit a, the substitute object which is obtained but never quite satisfies). The drive is not simply the static distance between the subject and das Ding, and operates according to the temporality of afterwardsness, or Nachträglichkeit. Freud talks about an inherent urge in organic life to restore an earlier state of things, a time before existing out of which existence emerges, meaning the death drive contains within it a kind of backwards movement, as well as no movement (1920). We could say that Edelman’s death drive remains wedded to only one pole of the drive’s temporality, that of iteration, without acknowledging that the death drive also operates along an axis of alteration, in which the principle of development, if you, like survives. Crucially for what we are discussing here, the valorization of one axis over the other relegates development to the nether side of queer, and with it the time of maternity, of staying alongside the development of another. Furthermore, the peculiarity of the death drive is both captured and constrained by Freud’s attempt, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, to build a

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‘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

This divergence is a life. As Johnston puts it ‘we could succinctly encapsulate repetition as an intra-temporal resistance to time itself, a negation of time transpiring within time’ (2014, 215). What we have to contend with, however, is that this negation of time within time also has duration; the time it takes to live a life. A negation is not the same as timelessness. It can be thought of rather as a way that time turns in on itself. As Judith Butler expresses it, ‘repetition is a vain effort to stay, or indeed, to reverse time: Such repetition reveals a rancour against the present which feeds upon itself ’ (Butler quoted in Johnston 2014, 215). We could conclude that Edelman takes the temporality of the death drive as a turning away from developmental time, rather than the death drive as encompassing both the time of development and the time of constancy, both of which operate through repetition understood as an intra-temporal resistance to time. If the death drive includes, rather than negates, developmental time, how does this play out for those who have elected to arrange their temporality in relation to the developmental time of the other? Rita Felski reminds us that ‘repetition is

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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.

Time Lived, Without its Flow 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 twoand-a-half-year period in which she found that the desire, and perhaps the

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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: Five months after: Apparently almost half a year has gone by since J. disappeared, and it could be five minutes, or half a century, I don’t know which. There is so very little movement. At first I had to lie down flat for an hour each afternoon, because of the bodily draining and being crushed as if by a leaden sheet, but by now I don’t need to lie down. This slight physical change is my only intimation of time. Riley 2012, 16

Later she writes: 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

Yet what Riley identifies as a rather common experience of outliving a child, and the ‘seemingly a-temporal life’ that it gives rise to, she found barely articulated in any literatures that she searched, redoubling her sense that to write within this state of suspended time is an impossibility: 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

This psycho-corporeal perception of time’s suspension, that ‘profound dislocation in the experienced time of those left alive’ she found to be missing from the philosophical canon, from the academic literature on bereavement, and even from the literary output of Proust and other literary modernists so otherwise engaged with questions of temporal experience. Here and there she found an odd phrase in a novel, an allusion to living in time that no longer flows,

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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

Riley’s intimation then is that this absence of description is closely bound up with the assault on description that time’s arrest performs. Instead, we grasp too readily at the notion of trauma, as a way to articulate the stilling of time that an experience beyond our control can exact. Yet Riley distances herself from a psychoanalytic discourse of trauma, and from the framework of mourning and melancholia in which the relinquishing of a lost object is the ultimate end-point of the work of mourning, and the persistent attachment to the lost object is pathologized as incomplete grief-work. Instead she is concerned with what it means for time to stop and time to flow, and for another kind of stopped time, the lively and prolonged time of the dead, to occupy lived time. She talks of living in a completely immobile crystalline time as ‘rather captivating’ (Riley and Baraitser 2016), neither the time of mourning or of melancholia, but the time of time’s suspension, the ‘life’ of dead time, which is something else again. 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

‘Time stopped’, in other words, is an inadequate metaphor for the prolonged, arrested and oddly lively time that sets in after the death of a child. Although we can technically say that the time of the dead is timeless, in that the dead cannot return, and hence time as movement or change is somehow foreclosed by the ongoing deadness of the dead, one’s engagement with a dead child, she maintains, is in fact vivid, not the dead time, for instance, of depression. In other words, one continues to be involved on a day-to-day basis in an energetic and carnal way with the dead child:

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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

What is revealed in Riley’s poetic exploration of this extraordinary state is a way of being outside of time’s motion, within non-developmental time, that is, but without being outside of time: 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

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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

Furthermore, in unhooking maternal time from development, Riley allows us to grasp an aspect of maternal subjectivity that is not premised on the open future of the child, but the way motherhood requires a certain acceptance of what refuses development, what resists time, an intra-temporal resistance to time that allows us to realign maternal time with both the death drive, and a queer principle of veering away from the norm. Though I would not want to suggest that relations with a dead child are identical to relations with a living child, this parallel register is one in which the maternal subject bears the suspension of time, a kind of impossible waiting which is the time the child’s futurity requires of her. If one could write in these circumstances, then perhaps such writing would encode the time of maternal waiting as a certain kind of ethical labour. From this perspective, the conjunction ‘maternal time’ might then be understood as simply the time of the unfolding of one life in relation to another life, where that unfolding exposes the tender points of impingement and care, of agreements and refusals, and of the precarity of affecting and being affected by one another. After all, one might engage in practices of child-rearing that one hopes will not reproduce the dominant order, only to find that the other, in this case ‘the child’, will make what they will with the care that is offered, may desire to be recognized by the dominant order just as the unfolding of a maternal life desires its opposite. Perhaps the maternal relation, and hence maternal time, suggests simply a willingness on the part of one to stay alongside another regardless of the outcome.

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And later she writes: Half bitten away by the child’s disappearance, your time is nevertheless augmented – for the time of the dead is, from now on, contained within your own. Riley 2012, 73

The non-, then, of non-reproduction is not the same as the No of No Future. The non-, in relation to the no-longer living adult child who has unfolded in relation to one’s own time opens this crystalline time, time that is lived but does not flow. This is not the death drive, only thought of as constant excessive time that deviates from life, and neither is it the unfolding of a linear future, but something else that I want to hold onto as a way to articulate the temporality of (non)reproduction. We might call it a maternal death drive. Or perhaps, more simply, maternal time 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 allows us to theorize ‘suspended time’ as a relation to, and condition of the maternal, but without aligning the time of maternity with the cyclicality of ‘women’s time’ or with the permanent work of contemporary motherhood. It allows us to uncouple maternal time from chronoheteronormative time and align it, instead, with queer time in the sense of being radically outside of the time of normative development. Instead the suspended time of allowing one life to unfurl in relation to another makes visible the time of mattering, embedded in maternity, a very ‘queer’ time indeed.

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Delay

a. The action of delaying; the putting off or deferring of action, etc.; procrastination, loitering; waiting, lingering. b. The fact of being delayed or kept waiting for a time; hindrance to progress. Oxford English Dictionary To delay is to make something slow or late, to postpone or defer, to linger and loiter, to dither and procrastinate. Yet to delay, at least in English, is also to detain, to hold up, to retard or keep back. To defer or postpone is futural; the possibility of deferral is precisely premised on the yet-to-come. This is central, for instance, to Derrida’s critique of phenomenology, and his later writings on ethics, where he develops the idea that experience is only when it is deferred. Existence is structured through the messianic, through the wholly ‘other’ yet to come, just as hospitality, justice and mourning retain their ethical potential through the necessity of their postponement (1992, 1994, 1995). For Derrida, politics, and in particular democracy, functions through this delayed temporality (1997). Democracy, as a-venir, is what allows politics to remain open to revision, to resist the closure of ideology. In other words, politics, for Derrida, is a form of temporality. But in what ways might temporality be a form of politics? How might delay operate as a political strategy, an embodied form of political action or political thinking? How might delay open up the time in which psycho-political attachments can be formed and maintained? Jay Lampert, in his dialectical theory of staggered time that brings delay and simultaneity into relation with one another, points out that in the French notion of delay, there is a distinction between waiting or intervals (dans un délai), and excessive slowness, or being behind the times (retard, attardé), the latter being closer to the German Nachträglichkeit which suggests an event dragging behind (2012, 13). Being ‘in 93

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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

If there is an agony in delay that is distinct from that of simply waiting, it is the awareness of the relatedness between past and future, the speciousness of their independence, meaning that the present is never ‘free time’, freed, that is, from its obligations to the future based on its experience that is always already past. The present, in this sense, is always inter-generational, between two times. Yet, delay in the sense of detain, or more specifically the law’s power to detain, has the potential to incarcerate the futurity of delay, or at least to delay it for an entire lifetime, indefinitely delaying resistance to that law. Delay, we could say, is an element of the strategic relation that is power, as, for instance, Foucault describes resistance (2001,1560), just as it is also the ground for the ethics of hospitality. In On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance Howard Caygill builds a philosophy of the resistant subject, distinct from the ‘revolting’ subject, on the grounds that resistance, as a condition of both power and defiance, has remained intangible and resistant to philosophical critique: 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

Resistance, which we might read as the material embodiment of Derrida’s politics of the undecidable, must be a permanent state, a kind of ongoing delay of the closure of the future that opens onto the time of ethics, even as resistance may postpone a consideration of the desired endpoints of emancipation, freedom or revolution. Through an engagement with Ghandi, Passolini, Genet,

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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.

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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: It is a time in which accelerations, apparent ‘slow-downs’ and reversals of history co-exist alongside anxious periods of stasis, repetition, nostalgia and retroaction. True as this may be, it is hard to avoid a predominant motif – that of delay, whether this delay is to be understood along the lines of repetition, nostalgic fixity, anxious/fearful waiting, or the time of guilt and posited retribution. Hook 2015, 66–67

Drawing on Fanon (1967) and Mbembe’s (2008) analyses of the relation between time and domination, as well as Vincent Crapanzano’s classic 1985 study, Waiting: The Whites of South Africa, Hook argues that paradoxes and distortions of temporality can tell us something about the underlying psychosocial paradoxes of the social field. Drawing out of Mbembe’s work a notion of suspended historical consciousness that occurs when victims of white supremacy are unable to ‘project themselves forward in time’ (Hook 2013, 29), one such mode of temporal delay is the endless cycles of repetitions that occur in relation to a foreclosed futural sense, in which ‘temporality lived as stasis starts to make a revised future impossible’ (50). In conditions in which the lack of structural change suspends time, and with it hope for political change, the future can only be seen, according to Mbembe (2008), in terms of a recapitulation of

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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: Prison for us is a sort of education, a strange sort of university [. . .] Certain conditions have improved over the last forty years – improved thanks to us and 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.

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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

Twenty days of self-starvation for 15 minutes of exercise time. The political prisoner takes himself to the edge of his time in order to win back temporality – time that can be felt to pass, that remains attached to the cyclical time of day and night, as opposed to the impasse of time in the cell with no light. Undefeated despair renders time as force, resistance, endurance, survival, sunshine. These reflections are a starting point for a story I’m going to tell, through Luisa Passerini’s classic work, Autobiography of a Generation (1996),3 about the ‘afterwards’ time of a particular period of political fervent and turmoil – that of 19684 – to draw out an account of intergenerational delay as a mode of doing politics. Certain political scenes seem to only gain their potency ‘after the event’, that is, after a temporal delay, which allows later political scenes to retroactively make sense of earlier scenes of political action, both in their generative and traumatic dimensions. In particular, what concerns me is how a certain scene, or scenario, a gesture or idiom, those small and everyday mundane acts of ‘beginning’ are taken up or translated intergenerationally, and in doing so become available as a form of politics through the reverberations they establish with an earlier scene. If politics is a new beginning, as Arendt claims, then a politics of delay might entail not simply sitting it out, but passing on the potential for new beginnings, even as that new beginning may have faltered in its original form, and may falter again as it arises retroactively in the generation that comes after. The return to the aesthetics of the peace camp, for instance, during the pro-democracy uprisings that stretched from North Africa and the Middle East to the squares of Madrid and Athens in 2011, and the Occupy movement for social and economic justice that these uprisings inspired in the years after, drew on a history of encampment as a mode of protest that evoked particular intergenerational scenes that were instantly recognizable as belonging to the activist histories of protest camps, occupations and sit-ins in numerous geopolitical locations during 1968, as well as being highly specific to the locations 3

4

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. I am referring to ‘1968’ in its broad sense, to cover the period of worldwide militant foment from 1966 to 1975.

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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.

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retrospective narrativizing of collective action that at the time aimed at creating new political possibilities repressed by the dominant order), which entails the capacity to situate oneself within a ‘generation’, that is required for a personal and psychological narrative to emerge at all. Without being able to identify oneself as having belonged to a generation, the story that constitutes a psychoanalysis remains unanchored in a kind of floating temporal frame, one that recognizes family structure, but is un-tethered by the lateral temporal relations that bind it into a shared political era. This mirrors some of psychoanalysis’ own struggles to acknowledge the fundamental role of lateral or sibling relations, and the maternal laws that organize these relations, in the structuring of psychic space, in addition to the ‘vertical’ relations between adults and infants, as Juliet Mitchell has so assiduously pointed out (2003). My aim is to account for the temporality of such lateral relations in political rather than familial terms; to think about these coaffective encounters that are born out of collective action, thus continuing a feminist tradition of refusing to separate the scene of the political from that of psychic life – a new articulation, that is of ‘the personal is political’. I want to think generation (the collective time-frame of the political) with generation (that Bracha Ettinger calls the ‘matrixial’ substrata of psychic life (2006)).

Generation How do we understand the term ‘generation’? We think of a generation as something to do with a collectivity – the entire body of individuals who may not share the same geopolitical location, but live at roughly the same time, and who therefore share a temporal period with one another, albeit a period defined by its public, and hence political and cultural events. We could say a generation simply shares time. We talk, however, of ‘my’ generation, and therefore it is a collectivity that needs to be owned, identified with, related to as mine, as yours, as theirs. The collective that is a generation, in other words, cannot constitute itself without this act of claiming, in which individuals must sign up to belonging to it – something we usually think of in terms of group or national identity. But a generation is not the same as what group theorists refer to as a ‘very large group’ (Volkan 2006). In a generation individuals do not necessarily share a name, sentiments, belief systems, languages or representations of a shared history that constitute elements of large-group identity. Indeed, a generation gestures towards an entity that exceeds a very large group such as a nation, a people, or those who share political, religious or ethnic affiliations. Although, within this wider notion

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of generation, we may be able to identify distinct political generations (i.e. groups of people who share formative social conditions at approximately the same point in their lives and develop a common interpretive framework shaped by those historical circumstances), generation also signals towards something less localized than this. A generation is simply a collective of those who live at the same time, without necessarily sharing anything else – recalling Alphonso Lingis’ ‘community of those who have nothing in common’, in which what is shared by a community is something like the ‘noise’ of time (1994). A generation is therefore closer to an historical period that is not yet past – what will come to have been an historical period when the noise of the present has subsided. Of course, a generation can also be understood as roughly the 30-year period in which children grow up and have children of their own. It is the time taken to regenerate, or to begin anew. My generation, by definition is not my parents’ generation, even though I might live at roughly the same time as my parents. It is the time of siblings, peers and lateral relations, rather than the vertical relations of parents and children. To regenerate is to enact a beginning. The term ‘generation’, then, names the intersections between the collective experience of sharing the noise of time, and the periodicity of regeneration. Generation engenders a future, and to belong to a generation is to notice, to be touched by, or become attached to, an historical period that, as you live it, is not yet history. Both meanings of ‘generation’ include a form of temporal suspension. Their relation marks the intersection between vertical and horizontal conceptualizations of time. How then, might a generation write its autobiography? What Passerini suggests by her title is that one’s self is already collective by dint of a belonging that is neither chosen, nor graspable at the time, but comes to have been a collectively premised self through the retroactive gathering up of testimony. Passerini collects the narratives of men and women involved in the student uprisings, largely in Turin in 1968, and into the early 1970s, as the hopes and aspirations of 1968 begin to shift. She intersperses the political narratives with an account of her own psychoanalysis that she begins around the same time as the research process. Completed in September 1987, Autobiography of a Generation is four-and-a-half years in the making – the book includes an account of four full calendar years of psychoanalysis, broken down month by month. The interviews, Passerini tells us, are complete by the end of the first year (we can deduce this is 1983), and then the manuscript emerges over the subsequent three years, as the analysis does its work. The production of Autobiography of a Generation therefore appears to be premised on the work of psychoanalysis, and

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at the same time Passerini’s psychoanalysis is premised on the research process, with her autobiography and the autobiography of a generation emerging as mutually co-affective. Passerini is clear that she herself missed the initial student uprisings and occupation of the University in Turin. She was not in Italy in 1968. She was in Africa. Missed events are fascinating in their capacity to exert enormous influence over us. ‘Why talk about something I didn’t share, in what’s supposed to be an autobiography, albeit a collective autobiography?’ Passerini asks (60). She immediately, in other words, opens the question of generation – of sharing a temporal frame without sharing a geopolitical location. My biography and therefore my autobiography, my self-narration is, she insists, a thoroughly collective issue, and a political one at that, but I do not have to have been there in order to remember an event in that autobiography. Furthermore, the events of 1968 marked a distinctive attempt to turn from the individual to the collective, from the private to the public that has continued to have effects worldwide, and for generations to come. Reconstructing a particular local instance of these events that were globally so seminal, regardless of the fact that she herself missed them, is a way of continuing this influence, and tracking its further development. It is not important whether she was there or not – this would be only an individual concern. What really matters is the shift to the collective that the generation that was politically active in 1968 temporarily produced, but that can only be ascertained retroactively, through the process of collecting testimony some years after the events themselves. The generation who lived through 1968, in other words is the generation through whom the ideal of the collective returns. I read Passerini as suggesting that it is through the full reckoning with the meaning of this collectivity, that personal narrative can find its place.

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,

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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.

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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: [. . .] time or temporalization means binding events together to make a line, to make a discourse in its widest sense. We think of the unconscious as remainders of messages, remainders of bindings but without binding. Laplanche 1992b, 26

There is linear time that is produced by binding events together to make discourse, and another time which is not exactly ‘timeless’, but rather, a collection of left-over bindings (should we say ‘post-temporal’?), now unbound that characterizes unconscious time. What instigates both binding and unbinding, according to Laplanche is the infant’s contact with the enigmatic codes or signifiers from the adults involved in early care. These signifiers, whilst they may be conscious, carry an unconscious sexual code, (what he also calls ‘noise’) that are atemporal. The infant who is as yet unprepared for decoding adult sexuality, is set the task of psychic translation – attempts to decode, and therefore to temporalize the enigmatic signifiers which in effect instigates binding, and we could say instigates psychic time.7 Temporalization, then, is set in motion by the infant’s urgent need to deal with the atemporal, frozen noise of maternal and paternal unconscious sexuality. Each generation is brought into time by attempting to bind the ‘bindings without binding’ of the adults that preceded them, a dialectical and mutually metamorphosing process. What is crucial is that Laplanche re-instates the simultaneity of child and adult in this encounter – although the adult’s unconscious sexual code comes too early for the infant in the sense of the infant’s sexual maturity, adult and infant also occupy the same temporal moment, the present-tense of their exchange. To quote at length: 7

See Gentile 2006 for an object relational account of the emergence of psychic time.

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The child/adult couple is not to be conceived essentially as the one succeeding the other but as the one actually finding itself in the presence of the other, concretely, in the first years of life, from the earliest months. I believe that here we have the key to the notion of retroactivity: removing it from consideration of a single individual, where we remain trapped in an opposition that cannot be overcome, and asking ourselves whether the child is the cause of the adult or whether the adult freely reinterprets the child; asking ourselves whether determinism follows the arrow of time or, on the contrary, if it goes in the opposite direction from the arrow of time. A contrast that cannot be overcome unless we place the individual in the presence of the other, the child in the presence of the adult and receiving from him messages that are not raw givens but material “to be translated.” Laplanche 2007, 212

What this means is that instead of thinking about afterwardsness in terms of the trauma of childhood experience in the child-now-adult, Laplanche gives us the present-tense of the disjuncture of the intergenerational relation itself as traumatic; a relation that remains active as the structuring element of temporal life, that becomes available in the transference. In other words, what is ‘transferred’ from the past is the experience that living in present time, which is itself a traumatic encounter with what has come before you, is too much. We come to have an experience of time as discourse, events bound together into a relation with one another, through an originary encounter with the unbound time of the generation that came before, that instigates psychic time.

The time of protest 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:

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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 Simona: Relationships with other women were substantially nonexistent, in the best of cases, especially with those who ‘counted’ then, who had created their own political space for themselves. They looked through me, as if I were an empty space, or they handed me leaflets to mimeograph, as if I were a mimeo machine, and they made me suffer, I detested some of them. Passerini 1996, 99

Passerini’s own summary of these testimonies reads: 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

Attempts to manage destructive envy, intimidation and insecurity, and feelings of invisibility, gave rise to great suffering that could only be located after the event (‘I wasn’t aware of it’). These painful appraisals of the realities of 1968 for some women remained dormant until the 1980s when Passerini collects her testimonies, which allows a process of narrativization to begin to take place. As obscure hidden hurts, they operate like traumatic memory, and the temporal delay of their resurfacing takes the structure of Nachträglichkeit. Passerini situates the disintegration of the collective spirit of the student movement after 1968 as the repressed symptom: 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

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One of her participants, Franco-Apra states: Sixty-eight had been a utopia of organizing a huge collective effort, in which I personally participated most willingly. Because I was a little disgusted by a way of coping with the world, a way that later imposed itself as predominant and almost necessary – aggressive individualism. After ’68 this working hypothesis was destroyed [. . .] Passerini 1996, 127

Passerini intimates that the full impact of this disintegration of collectivity can only be identified as traumatic in the context of the 1980s, a time, after all, in which neoliberalism as an economic strategy has taken hold in many European countries, when many of those involved in the Women’s Liberation Movement and left politics more generally were exhausted and disillusioned. It is through the process of giving testimony on events some years earlier, that those events can come to be understood and felt as traumatic. Passerini states: 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

As one of the interviewed participants says: 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

As 1968 emerges in its traumatic after-effects, Passerini’s own psychoanalysis is unfolding along similar lines. The opening scenes of the analysis are full of reminiscences – we get the ‘story’ of Passerini’s early life, the development of intense and vital friendships after her mother’s early and untimely death when she was six, her first loves, her engagements with politics, her travels and political work in Africa, her return to Italy, and her own investments in the events of 1968. Alongside this life-story is a love-story, both a literal one, and the development of the transference in her analysis, a kind of love-hate story, we might say, that is a necessary part of any analysis. In the opening stages of her encounter with her analyst, vital narrative pathways are formed, allowing the tentative processes of attachment, idealization, dependency and helplessness to be tolerated. However, the trauma of her early childhood – the structuring effects of her mother’s death

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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

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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: [. . .] I remember one meeting, probably in ’72, where someone said ‘are we always going to take it, why don’t we see if we can’t be better armed, carry with us not just lemon for the tear-gas, but also something like a Molotov cocktail?’ and the answer of some comrades was ‘It’s okay with me, I’ve got nothing to lose’, because the disillusionment, the weariness were already immense, we felt more and more defenseless, disorganized, endangered. Passerini 1996, 111

Of 1978–1979 she writes: 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

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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

Passerini establishes her place retroactively in a generation of politically passionate, as well as politically troubled subjects, and doing so allows the psychic work of loss and mourning to take place. It is through the co-affective political subjectivities that are established in the testimonial work of Autobiography of a Generation that Passerini can access her own autobiography – an autobiography that entails acknowledging a profound loss that is also a remembering of a refusal to accept a severing from the present-tense of the maternal–infant encounter, even in its too-muchness, as this would entail a severing from the capacity to bind time. This then loops back to her commitment to accessing her own political autobiography: Now I too can be a mother, of myself above all. The mother can be happy and sparkling, not terrifying, grim, judgemental. Dancing and joking, [. . .] a young girl in body and spirit despite her age. And thus I can confront the last memories, reunite myself with the present. Passerini 1996, 118

The politics of waiting 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

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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.

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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.

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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

Roseneil has sought to challenge this erasure of Greenham from feminist collective memory, arguing for a reading of Greenham as an early instantiation of queer feminism (2000). And yet it is perhaps only through a recent return to Greenham, through the engagement with Common Ground, a multidisciplinary project made up of archaeologists, artists and women involved in Greenham that explicitly seeks to investigate the ‘leftovers’ of Greenham from the perspective of the now, including its material culture, and an appreciation of Greenham as a site for collective memory, that an intergenerational connection can begin to be generative. If Passerini’s text stands as testimony itself to the feminist desire to exceed all categories – generation, history, memory – through an insistence on the personal, the body and its traumas, and their place in the scene of politics, then we could argue that the glimpse of the personal – those all-too-fragile bodies going about their morning rituals in the varied protest camps during 2011 – revealed both a time delay, and the possibility for reconnection with something that has remained, perhaps unnoticed, in public life.

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To experience life, A Tree must live, To experience fire, A Tree must die. By Herman Wallace Sumell and Wallace 2006 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.

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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.

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For Badiou what comes to be understood as political courage is a practice that emerges out of a decision to operate in terms of a different durée to that of the on-go of the same political order; to decide to live time in and through the impossibility of political change in the now. It is not so much about simply waiting, but ‘endurance within the impossible’, enduring the situation, that is, of nothing changing, which turns time into ‘raw material’, to be dealt with. Elizabeth Povinelli, however, in Economies of Abandonment (2011), argues that the impossible is not simply the impossibility of political change in the now, but the lived, historically contingent, embodied experience of persisting within zones of social abandonment and vulnerability. Developing Fanon’s notion of the ‘zone of nonbeing’ that describes the condition of blackness as structurally non-human (1967, 2), she describes these liminal spaces of persistence and endurance as the ‘zone of being and not being’ (2011, 21). The paradox of endurance within the impossible, for Povinelli, opens up through a range of social practices, from constantly thwarted attempts by Indigenous Australians to embed traditional, historical and contemporary knowledge back into the landscape, through to equally thwarted strategies by alternative food movements in the context of the post-9/11 US securitized state to insert alternative food production into the monolithic corporate food industry. Both critical theory and forms of activism invest in the capacity to endure within these spaces of state and social abandonment, as a way to remain attached to the idea of hope. Zones of being and nonbeing therefore provide the potential, at least, for the emergence of a new ethics of life and sociality (128). However, lives within such zones are lived in such reduced and restricted conditions, that the desire for them to foster alternative worlds can seem, according to Povinelli, naïve at best and sadistic at worst (128). What she draws our attention to is that once we understand ‘potentiality’ as itself socially conditioned, and materially distributed, then: [. . .] we find ourselves in the morally viscous realm of excess, exhaustion, and endurance, a realm that includes affective, physical, and social conditions that can depress the brain and immune system, rupture organs as well as bonds with families and friends, and orient violence inward. Povinelli 2011, 128

Therefore, if we want to endure, we have to acknowledge that endurance within zones of social abandonment is not a matter of ‘escape’ through attempts at the overthrow of capitalism, but instead, a commitment to living in its seams, living ‘as spaciality, materiality, temporality’ (128). This means a form of endurance that includes the persistent knowledge that materiality-as-potentiality

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is never outside of organizations of power (128), and, drawing on Sharpe, that materiality-as-potentiality in relation to Black life is never outside of the wake of the afterlives of the violence and negation enacted by slavery. As Dennis Childs argues in Slaves of the State (2015), the chattel principle infuses modern-day practices of incarceration of black individuals in solitary confinement. Saidiya Hartman describes the afterlife of slavery as ‘skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment’ (2007, 6).

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

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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: There is a significant body of evidence that confining individuals in isolated conditions, even for relatively short periods of time, can cause serious psychological and sometimes physiological harm, with symptoms including anxiety and depression, insomnia, hypertension, extreme paranoia, perceptual distortions and psychosis. This damaging effect can be immediate and increases the longer the measure lasts and the more indeterminate it is. Isolation has been found to have negative effects on individuals with no pre-existing illness and to be particularly harmful in the case of those who already suffer from mental illness. Amnesty International 2014, 31

The report recommends that no-one should be held in prolonged or indefinite isolation, and yet, whilst it is difficult to obtain accurate figures, the NGO, Solitary Watch, states that the figures on the US Federal Prison System suggests ‘there are at least 80,000 prisoners in isolated confinement on any given day in America’s prisons and jails, including some 25,000 in long-term solitary in supermax prisons’ (Solitary Watch 2015, n.p.). The US has over 2 million individuals incarcerated at any one moment in time, the highest per capita rate in the world.2 Picking up on Mike Davis’ term (1995), Angela Davis has long called this ‘the prison-industrial-complex’, or the ‘penal-industrial complex’ in order to highlight both the historical and continued ideological links between the current US prison system and the institution of slavery, and the fact that black and indigenous individuals and other ‘non-conforming’ bodies are incarcerated at a much higher rate than others (2003, 2016). In addition, there is a disproportionate number of Black, Latino, Queer and Trans inmates held at what is known as ‘supermax’ level, a euphemism for solitary confinement (Arrigo and Bullock 2008, Stanley and Smith 2011). The institution of prison, from Davis’ perspective,

2

See also the 2002 Human Rights Watch World Report on the spread of ultra-modern ‘supermaximum’ 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.

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‘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.

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of courage, the phenomenological question that Sumell’s work pushes us to ask is ‘what is it like to live courageous time’, this time that is heterogeneous to durée imposed by the law of the world. Sumell and Wallace’s collaborative durational project, however, pushes this even further, not just to ask this phenomenological question, but the ethical question: ‘what does it mean to decide to know about those who live impossible time?’ This decision, to know about an unbearable experience of time, is itself a mode of politics, a form of ethics, and a way of ‘taking care’. It is one thing to know about suffering, and another to know about elongated enduring suffering without end. Indeed, if courage is something that one constructs in practice, as Badiou would have it, then endurance within the impossible might be best thought precisely as a practice of care, if we can extend care to mean a form of knowing that keeps safe and preserves the truth of the endurance of human suffering even as one seeks to alleviate it. Like Ukeles, Billingham and Riley, Sumell develops a practice of care through a mode of endurance that has to do with deciding to know, and continuing to know, about unbearable time.

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

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4 Herman Wallace, 2006.

prisoners, and campaigned for an ending to segregation, widespread violence and rape, through petitioning and organizing hunger strikes. In Wallace’s words: April/01/2003, page 1 (second audio tour) In 1971 I became a member of the Black Panther Party for self defense as a result of systematic discrimination, police brutality, murder, and the disproportion of African Americans in prison. Sumell and Wallace 2006, n.p.

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

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discredited, and there is evidence of bribing witnesses in exchange for favours and promises of pardon. Miller’s widow also came to believe that the three men who were convicted of her husband’s killing were innocent.4 Robert King Wilkerson and Herman Wallace had their convictions overturned and were released in 2001 and 2013 respectively, having spent 29 years and 42 years respectively in solitary confinement. Albert Woodfox was finally released on 19 February 2016 at the age of 69, after 43 years in solitary confinement. Federal judges who have overturned the convictions of all three men numerous times have cited racial discrimination, misconduct by the prosecution and inadequate defense in underpinning the repeated cases brought against them. The House That Herman Built began in 2001, 30 years into Wallace’s ordeal. At the time Jackie Sumell was an art student at Stanford University on a Fulbright scholarship, as yet uninvolved with the justice movement around the prison industrial complex and the politics of locking up and ‘warehousing’ America’s poor, and its communities of colour. Sumell has described finding herself studying elective programmes such as ‘Space as an Architectural Form’ but without having any real connection to what she was studying. After attending a lecture by Robert King Wilkerson who had just been released, she describes how her programme began to seem to her an indulgence. Sumell approached King after the talk, and asked what she could do. He told her simply to ‘write to my comrades’. As her disillusion with the art world grew she began, in her words to ‘flip the script’, using the privilege of being on a stipend, studying art in a prestigious institution, to do advocacy work on behalf of those with no access to justice (Sumell and Baraitser 2015). And yet this advocacy work, which entailed reaching out to an individual who himself had been so involved in agitating for change, began with a communication about slowed down, mundane, everyday time. We could say that Sumell had an artistic sense that what Wallace and Woodfox might need more than anything else was a ‘picture’ of time passing, and a picture of the world as it looked now, a world that they had not seen for 30 years, being effectively trapped in a cage that was also a time capsule. So she taped a camera to her wrist, and took a picture every hour for 24 hours, recording her daily surroundings, and these she sent to Wallace and Woodfox with the note ‘To Mr. Woodfox and To Mr. Wallace – here are 24 hours in my simple life’ (Sumell and Wallace 2006). She took pictures of the corners of her desk, the dashboard of her car, her view of the

4

See Amnesty International Action for Individuals at https://www.amnesty.org.uk/albert-woodfoxangola–3-louisiana-usa-solitary and the film In the Land of the Free (2010) directed by Vadim Jean.

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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.

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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

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Management Unit (IMU ) and even, as Guenther notes, Communication Management Unit (CMU ) (161). The names given by those confined to these spaces are ‘dungeons’, ‘hell holes’, ‘death traps’, ‘death houses’, ‘lock down’ or simply ‘the hole’.6 As Sumell says, to live in solitary is an ‘impossible’ situation, one that is simply not imaginable in any straightforward way from the outside. She can offer Wallace her 24-hours, but to imagine his experience of time, runs up against the same problems of the narration of suspended time that Denise Riley points to when time is suspended through the death of a child. What form of narrative can emerge from conditions of indefinite and prolonged solitary confinement when one’s capacity to narrate depends on time passing? As Elaine Scarry explains in The Body in Pain, pain functions precisely to break down the capacity to communicate experience in narrative form (1985). Solitary confinement is a specific and deliberate form of torture, one that threatens to break down the mind’s ability to imagine life beyond the space-time of the cell, from both within the cell, and from without. About his many years in solitary confinement, Jack Abbott wrote: 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

In Herman Wallace’s words: 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.

Wallace is describing endurance within the impossible, time as endurances’ raw material, the extraordinary courageous ‘proudflesh’ that endures the never 6

See ‘Survivors Manual: Survival in Solitary’, written by and for people living in control units. Anon, 2012.

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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.

The House That Herman Built 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: April/01/2003, page 1 (second audio tour) Even though she knew I was being held in the Supermax Dungeon at Camp J, Jackie did not let that stand in her way and immediately contacted me explaining she wanted to build a house, but wanted to do so from the vision of the type of house I would like to live in, given the fact of my having lived in a cage for 30 years at the time of the offer. So Jackie and I set out to build this

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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,

5 Herman’s Letter 2003.

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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, suburbanlooking, 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,

6 CAD drawing front of house, 2006.

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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:

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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

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7 CAD drawing Herman’s pool.

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.

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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-eightfoot 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

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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 How might we understand Sumell’s decision to know about Wallace’s time? In describing how the figure of the ‘Ship’ and the ‘Hold’ function in her work as a way to show how the slave ship lives on in the present, Christina Sharpe states that the Ship: [. . .] 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

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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: It is impossible to imagine. And yet both the attempt to imagine solitary confinement and the impossibility of knowing what it is like without having undergone it – and perhaps even having undergone it – are crucial for resistance. The act of imagining opens up an elsewhere and an otherwise within our current situation; it allows us to transpose ourselves into another place and time, another social position, and another subjectivity. Guenther 2013, 165

Sumell’s lifework, then, is a practice 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. Preservation always gestures towards the yet-to-come even if it does so through minute attention to the object, scene, memory, or affect, in the present. Incarceration is the destruction of the yet-to-come, through the enforcement of too-present time. Sumell, in deciding to know what it’s like to live in solitary time in its political dimension – that is as an experience that both incarcerates the future, and yet preserves a discourse of Black revolutionary politics that might otherwise be altered by the noise of time – enacts a practice of taking care of time that we can track in the detailed blueprint of Herman’s House. Whilst the worldwide touring of the

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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

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chronic time of the patient’s resistance. Waiting as an intensive and insistent experience of time, is the gap between the analyst’s practice of working through (the again and again of offering interpretation) and that of the analysand (the working over the reclaimed material). Though neither Wallace nor Sumell are each other’s analysts, we could say that the structural disjunction between the time of indefinite solitary confinement that Wallace occupies over the 12 years of the project, and the time of relative freedom that Sumell occupies, raises, again and again, the spectre of a disjunct and impossible knowledge – the knowledge of the endurance of human suffering – that we can choose to know or not know. For Sumell the choice is simple, and requires a certain simplicity, a refusal to make complicated the task of resistance that requires knowing about solitary time. Yet in the ‘sick and tiredness’ of the degradations of visiting, the interruptions to communication, and the brutalities of a ‘justice’ system that metes out injustice, a certain arduous temporal practice of care emerges from their work together, which is the ongoing struggle to keep knowing about punishment without ending. This is what Sharpe calls ‘wake work’: 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.

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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

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8 Barbara Loftus, Stamp (30.5 × 30.5 cm., oil on canvas, 2004).

In order to paint, Loftus sometimes re-stages her mother’s memories, in some cases literally dramatizing and re-enacting the memory with actors in order to produce the material she needs for drawing, and then composing the paintings. She calls these visual conceptualizations, dramatizations and re-enactments, for which she produces briefing notes for actors that read like mini playscripts, and which the actors perform in full period costume, which are then photographed, and Loftus uses as source material for drawings and paintings (Winckler 2012). What does it mean to attempt to restage one’s mother’s memories? And what is produced through this restaging that may have a tangential relation to those memories, but may tell us something about suspended time? And how might we

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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

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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 WorldIndustry and CommerceWorking in PrecisionTime and MotionTime 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).

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time brought about by the technological innovations of the telephone, wireless telegraph, X-ray, cinema, bicycle, automobile and airplane; by the cultural and scientific developments of the stream-of-consciousness novel, the ways of representing time and movement in Cubism, and the theory of relativity in physics. On the one hand modernist writers, artists and scientists pursued their temporal experiments: Proust rejects public time for the erratic and contradictory time of personal memory; Kafka’s characters experience time as persecutory; Joyce’s heterogeneous time thickens and layers; Durkheim acknowledges that cultures have their own ways of understanding, explaining and experiencing time through festivals, holidays, feasts and rites. On the other, modernist temporalities remained concerned with the standardization and homogenization of time, the time of governmentality and the management of ‘life’, the temporality of the factory line, and attempts to hold onto the certainties of empire and the promise of a rational approach to economic and social problems that was the legacy of the Enlightenment. Alongside this classic double temporality of modernity, Lutz Koepnick, in On Slowness: Towards an Aesthetic of the Contemporary (2014), has also tracked forms of slowness that resisted modernism’s quest for newness, with its characterization of nervousness and distraction as a source of artistic experimentation. In relation to this figuration, slowness was seen as both anti-aesthetic and anti-progressive. To go slow was to resist the emancipation of the present from the normative weight of the past. Showing up in the ‘photodynamism’ works by Anton Guilio Bragaglia, for instance, Koepnick argues that slow modernism’s ‘primary ambition was to experience mobility as a force allowing us, not merely to move effectively from A to B, but to establish unpredictable connections and correspondences, to come across lateral and nonintentional perceptions, and to engage in categorically open interactions with nonidentical particulars’ (20). Modernist artists interested in slow motion were not so interested in bonding the future back to the past, but in defining mobility as a form of communication and interrelation able to sharpen the subject’s perception of the present. It is this that Koepnick uses to open up a notion of an expanded present within modernism. Where Ernst Bloch coined the terms noncontemporaneity and asynchronicity in the 1930s to refer to the co-existence of phenomena that belonged to different historical areas or stages of social development which he saw as dialectical, providing the potential for transformation between the old and new, utopian and actual, slow modernism, Koepnick argues, wanted rather to encounter the present as a space of various possible futures and the durations of multiple pasts, an open meeting ground of various streams of time (42).

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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 childspectator, 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

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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

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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

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interpretation of her mother’s memories (her work with actors to recreate the scene under the table, and her meticulous painterly technique) as a way of re-establishing not ‘what happened’ so much as precisely this relation between the time of memory and the time of historical truth. Not only are the paintings in the series imbued with an uncanny sense of action frozen in time which opens up the distance between foot and clock, hand and watch, hand and china figure, mother and father, but a distance is prized open between the events themselves in their sequential arrangement in the artist’s book as they narrativize through the temporal lacunae that they stage. More than this, it would seem likely that Hildegard’s later memory of the events of 1938, in which the SA arrive to humiliate the family and take away their precious possessions, functions as a screen memory for the earlier scene in which the parents’ row circles around an unarticulated humiliation and loss of not just possessions, but a whole way of life that so many assimilated German Jews had invested in, in order precisely to ‘pass’ as German and to effectively hide their Jewish identities and identifications. So we might read the paintings, in their depictions of bourgeois interiors emptied of their possessions, as gesturing towards this Jewishness that Hildegard’s memory functions to screen, and that constitutes the traumatic non-memory at the centre of the paintings’ subjects. I am suggesting, then, that in her work of translation and interpretation of her mother’s memory, Loftus stages the process of historical truth, as that is all we are able to glimpse, and that this has a psychosocial dimension – not just an everpresent historical memory of an originary murder that Freud insisted haunted all of us, but of a particular lost Jewish identity that haunts her mother. Like the analysts’ work of interpretation which can only point at the relation between memory and its lacunae, so Loftus’ work with her mother’s memory doesn’t fill in the gaps with the ‘truth’, but points at the relation between memory and the real, between the child under the table and the terror of her family’s financial and identificatory free fall.

The subject of old age 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?

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Should we assume an unconscious connection between the mother’s untold story and the daughter’s love of nineteenth-century porcelain in vitrines? The vitrine, as we know from Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with the Amber Eyes (2010), will have its own story to tell. But there is another set of questions, beyond the questions of trauma and survivor guilt, unconscious intergenerational transmission, and the protective mental acts of denial, about why Hildegard waits until she is 80 to speak, this lifetime of delay, and why she then speaks, and why she speaks to her daughter, and whether we can understand anything through Loftus’ work of a message that is passed between a mother and a daughter, a connection instigated through the offer of a memory, that circles around an absence, that comes too late, this late memory, that leaves us wondering about what else could have been communicated between a mother and a daughter through a lifetime of delay. What, in other words, is the time of late memory? Is late memory – memory that surfaces after a life-long pause between an event and its recall, and is recalled in the end-times of a life, in the phase we call old age – a distinct form of memory, with a distinct message? Can we think of this memory as a lively one, for instance, one that in some ways aims at generation and renewal, rather than death, without being a denial of the endtimes, or its production within the horizon of death? Lynne Segal’s radical book on ageing, Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing (2013), takes the form of feminist archive. This holds in an obvious sense. Segal gathers up an extraordinary collection of women’s writing, and in particular feminist writing, about ageing. The book includes discussions of the work of well-known ‘major’ writers on ageing such as Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, Grace Paley, Adrienne Rich and Penelope Lively, as well as a more ‘minoritarian’ literature1 that includes scholars working in what has, until recently, been the intensely unfashionable area of ageing studies, including Margaret Morganroth Gullette and Kathleen Woodward, and writers, activists and memoirists such as Mary Sarton, Joan Nestle, Alix Kates Shulman, Ruth Ray and June Arnold. Beyond a collection of writing on ageing that puts gender at the forefront, however, Segal’s archive is political in its intent, functioning more as a form of Foucaultian counter-memory that I discussed earlier (the transforming of history into a totally different form of time), than the way we might understand the retentive and preservative aspects of archive that we could draw out of Derrida’s understanding of archivation (1995). A feminist archive based on practices of counter-memory ‘resists assimilation or homologation into 1

See Deleuze and Guattari, 1986 for a discussion of minoritarian literature.

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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: I wonder how conscious or comprehensible our ability to reclaim those former selves might be. We are not really in charge of the process: we are no longer those people we once were, there is real loss and usually something for us to mourn: and yet, when contexts allow it, the residues of those former selves may not only be expressed, but can sometimes be seen and affirmed by others. In our minds, the whole history of our attachments, the shifting sense we have of ourselves over a lifetime, accompanies the external losses of ageing. The past returns, never exactly as it was, but also never truly lost. Segal 2013, 28

The self, constituted through a form of return, is a familiar notion. We came across it earlier, articulated in Judith Butler’s notion of an ‘ex-static’ subject that becomes a self through a form of ‘turning’ along an axis that involves the ego and its objects together with the socially produced, and therefore mutative norms, that conditions their relation (1997). Here the self can only be said to be that which returns, and in doing so, both social and psychic worlds can be delineated. We can trace this account back to Freud’s notion of the self as a place of encounter with a loss that cannot be fully understood or let go of, making us definitively vulnerable and dependent on both others and pre-existing disciplinary social norms for recognition or the very conditions of subjecthood (1923). What Segal does with her subject of old age, however, is to temporalize this ex-static subject: here it is the past, figured as lost time, and not simply the lost object, that returns,

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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

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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

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whether non-spatial time or duration applies to matter and things as well as human consciousness, led him to posit that things also endure in their own way, unaffected by human consciousness, propelled by a vital impulse, which he called élan vital, which allowed him to theorize human creativity, as well as a more lively version of the evolution of matter. With matter conceptualized as this halfway between representation and thing, perception for Bergson also emerges as a dynamic process, orientated towards action and in a feedback loop with mind and memory, as well as the thing itself. It is Bergson’s account of the past that might help us with understanding late memory. Bergson writes: 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

Where matter is a set of images somewhere between representation and thing, memory is a huge reservoir of virtual images, a small number of which may actually come into perception to aid the work of perception itself. The past is not so much a storehouse of memory, but works with perception to continuously augment perceptions with qualities related to past actions. Bergson states that memory ‘marks out upon matter the design of its eventual actions even before they are actual’ (12), akin to the workings of Freud’s historical truth that I discussed above, but no longer located in a place we could call the psyche, and rather existing somewhere between the virtual past and the apparatus of perception. Like historical truth, the past is not the present gone by, or a present that fades and can be recalled as a memory. The past is a process that constantly supplements perception in the present in such a way as to orientate it towards action, or interaction with matter: 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

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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 My impulse throughout this book, however, has been to be worry away at theories of non-totalizable multiplicity, as they tend to obscure experiences of suspended time in which nothing appears to be changing, as well as marginalizing the practices of care that allow us to live on in these stuck times. Whilst Bergson’s

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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

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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 objectrelational 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

By referring to intrauterine life, Ettinger is not positing that we think through the literal pre-birth experience of an individual, and its effects on psychic life. 2

See for example Kristeva 1986, and the work of Bronfen 1998 and Mitchell 2003.

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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’: coaffecting 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 notyet non-I. This transsubjective aspect of psychic life cannot be simply removed

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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.

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The other is a separate primary affective compassion in both mother and daughter, orientated in different directions, and not necessarily towards each other, and distinct from their own narcissistic fantasies or processes of abjection. This propels Loftus into a deep exploration of her mother’s life, her archival work, and the creation of a body of artwork that Ettinger would argue derives from the combination of primary compassion, awe and what she coins as ‘fascinance’; an aesthetic transformational and creative gaze in a different register than Lacan’s ‘fascinum’. These aspects of subjectivity that emerge from a coencounter with femininity endure in both psychic and social life, as tendencies towards the ethical, what Ettinger calls ‘borderlinking’. Loftus, to this degree, takes care of the late memory of her mother through accessing an aspect of her own originary emergence that was already a compassionate encounter between the not-yet I and the not-yet m(other) that may be the gestational remainder of us all.

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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).

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the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water,) and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions. Žižek 2010, x

In other words, Žižek makes explicit a relationship between catastrophic futures and the end, not so much of time, but of capitalism. As this particular hegemonic system of social relations, synonymous with modernity, heads towards internally driven meltdown, and with no viable alternative ways of imagining social relations, for Žižek, we are living within the end times in the shadow of the collapse of capitalism. What is the time of the ‘end times’? The picture that emerges from these accounts is one that includes the twin elements of perpetual capitalism on the one hand, and a frantic inertia, on the other, sutured together by a tenacious, though frayed fantasy of the promise of the good life, set against a pending catastrophic future in which capitalism implodes, but the threat of which is constantly disavowed. The philosopher William Large elaborates this point when he maps out three futures that emerge within the horizon of capitalism (2009). The first is the future of the disaster. This is the ‘reality’ of capitalism that will bring about the destruction of populations and the planet. The second is the future of progress, the fantasmatic future that capitalism promotes in which the future of the disaster is endlessly postponed in the name of more of the same, more capitalism. The third is what Large calls the messianic future, which entails the transformation of the present by the hidden possibilities in the everyday. Here Large holds out for the subversion of the temporal logic of capitalism (the temporality of the first two futures) through the capacity for ‘messianic time’ to resist the fantasy of the endless future, recognizing the future of the disaster rather than being seduced by the fantasmatic future of its endless postponement. Recognition, Large is keen to point out, is not the same as acceptance. Recognizing the future of the disaster, he argues, interrupts the empty time of progress, and therefore involves the temporality of indeterminancy, rather than its certainty (that is, the certainty of progress). Both disaster and messianism come out of a promise of time, but messianic time demands justice, and is therefore political, where as eschatological narratives focus on a catastrophe that is characterized as inevitable, and are therefore still reliant on linear conceptions of time rather than its interruption. All politics that is open to both justice, and the time out of joint that makes it possible, Large argues, is messianic. Messianic time – immanent, indeterminate, heterogeneous – is the present that is full of virtual possibilities that are not part of the present state of things.

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We inherit the characterization of the temporality of perpetual capitalism from Marx, where capitalism is empty mechanical time, the time of the same, the endless, cyclical, homogenous time of an unchanging future of capitalism itself (1867). However, the other temporal element in Marxist capital is the revolutionary disruptive time immanent within historical time, which brings us towards history proper, conceived of in orthodox Marxism as the end of capitalism. This twinning of empty cyclical time and revolutionary disruptive time is itself a particularly modernist figuration, distinct from non-stop inertia, in that it retains a relation to a future figured as an immanent instantaneous ‘flash’ of change, whether understood in vulgar Marxist terms, or in the more anti-teleological messianic visions of Walter Benjamin’s Jetztzeit or ‘now-time’ (1940). This ‘weak’ or secular messianism has run through a strand of European thought since the catastrophes of the two world wars, reaching its climax in the post-war period as the reality of man-made disaster becomes apparent within modernist thinking as the horrifying ‘real’ of post-Enlightenment historical progress (Bayly 2013). In particular, it is brought into play in order to imagine a future that is not the pseudo-progressive future of capitalism, or the teleological force of history, but in Benjamin’s terms, a future in which the history of past oppression pushes for recognition and in doing so, can be redeemed in non-progressive, non-linear time (1940). For Benjamin, the catastrophe that matters is always already behind us as we back into the future, but hidden within the ideology of progress are historical events that ‘flash up’, heterogeneous to linear time, through which the sparks of different potential futures are made visible and possible. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin explains that ‘the dialectical image is an image that emerges suddenly, in a flash’ (1999, 473). The instantaneous temporality of ‘now-time’ disrupts ‘the status quo’ which otherwise ‘threatens to be preserved’ (474). Now-time is Benjamin’s formulation for a kind of temporal loop within historical time, that appears itself to have no duration – the time it takes for time to flash up is immediate – and forms the basis for contemporary articulations of messianic time as ‘indeterminate’. Whilst a valuable critique of the temporal logic of capitalism, how does such indeterminacy actually emerge as a practice, and as a mode of sustaining life in the end times? Is the reality of disaster immanent in capitalism really so hidden, or does it now function more like Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘purloined letter’, a signifier that is hidden but on full view, something we fully know whilst simultaneously disavowing (Poe 1844)? Perhaps we could say that ‘neoliberal time’ is precisely marked as the demise of the imaginary of Jetztzeit, and its replacement with the temporality of suspension – that is, the continuous present gives rise to different

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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?

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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 zeropoint’ 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

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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.

The Time That Remains 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

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neither the time – representable but unthinkable – of chronological time, nor the instant – equally unthinkable – of its end. Nor is it a segment cut off from chronological time, a segment that goes from the resurrection up to the end of time. It is, rather, the operational time that drives chronological time and transforms it from within; it is the time it takes us to bring time to an end – in this sense: the time which is left to us. Agamben 2002, 5, emphasis in original

For Agamben, messianic time is a form of ending, a time between the announcement of the coming of the ‘end of days’ (in Jewish eschatology) and their arrival. In an attempt to put right some confusion between messianic and eschatological time in various readings of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Agamben shows how Paul’s messianic time is not the end times, but ‘time that contracts itself and begins to end’. His reading relies on the rabbinical interpretations of the description in Genesis of what was to become the Sabbath: ‘And on the seventh day God completed his work which he had made; and on the seventh day he rested from all his work’ (quoted in Agamben, 72). How could God both complete his work and rest at the same time? The early Greek translations of the Bible convert the first ‘seventh’ to read ‘sixth’, turning the day of rest into a day that is added on to the time of God’s creation of the earth. The Genesis Rabbah states: ‘Man, who knows not time, moment and hours, takes something from profane time and adds it to holy time; but the holy one, blessed be his name, who knows times, moments and hours, will enter on Saturday only by a breadth’ (quoted in Agamben, 72). For Agamben this opens up the possibility of messianic time: ‘Saturday – messianic time – is not another day, homogenous to others; rather it is that innermost disjointedness within time through one which may – by a hairsbreadth – grasp time and accomplish it’ (72). As Simon Bayly puts it, ‘Messianic time is thus not simply a time between two times. Instead it is time that entirely shifts our experience of time but without apparently adding the power of an extra time’ (2013, 16). If this ‘hairsbreadth’ could be said to possess duration in its contraction, then we need to think of this duration in non-spatial terms, as messianic time is precisely time that makes an intervention into the linear time of progress and history which demands a spatial image. However, unlike Benjamin’s weak messianism that functions through the trope of the flash – a radical, violent interruption into the flow of profane time that allows the voices of the oppressed to be heard within the fixed ideology of progress – Agamben’s

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reading of Paul is that messianic time has the paradoxical structure of both a suspension and a persistence of time through a peculiar form of withdrawal, an elongated interval that neither develops nor unfolds but takes the form of a shrinking, in which undifferentiated time makes the intervention of ‘differentiation’ itself into the time of the same. What ‘remains’, in other words, in the time that remains, indicates both the time that is left over or remaindered within the present, and the time which we finally have left to us, and returned to us, rather than the time we constantly run out of. This approach to time marks out something persistent (that remains) within historical time that is at once a suspension (what is left over) of historical time. Agamben therefore interprets messianic time as a ‘paradigm of historical time’ (2002, 3). Agamben draws out of the Pauline text the way messianic time allows us to have or grasp the presentness of time precisely because this form of time does not ‘pass’. It is not a third spatial ‘stretch’ of time between the beginning of the end and the end itself, but the withdrawal of historical or profane time within itself, that has a different sense of duration than linear time. Messianic time is not exterior to chronological time: it is, so to say, a portion (una porzione) of chronological time, a portion that undergoes a process of contraction which transforms it entirely. Agamben 2002, 3

The imaginary of ‘now-time’ as a redemptive ‘flash’ implies a social imaginary that can contain the image that the messiah has already come, and that in every instant exists the little door through which the messiah enters, a figuration Benjamin offered us at the tail end of modernism. Derrida picks up Benjamin’s now-time and develops a notion of time as ‘messianic without messianism’, rendering the concept of justice as only functioning through a mode of postponement, a future that remains heterogeneous and radically other (1994, 59). Agamben’s time-that-time-takes-to-come-to-an-end, however, we could view as the time which persists through material and affective attachments (what remains), at the level of the quotidian, mundane and everyday, supported by practices that I have been elaborating as modes of enduring time – waiting, staying, persisting, delaying, repeating, preserving, enduring, maintaining – that in their turn function as practices of care. There is perhaps a modernist utopian strand, in other words, that attempts to take care of hope (the capacity to imagine better times) through a kind of withdrawal within the everyday, in relation to past and future redemptive events that also persists in neoliberal time. Agamben’s

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notion that a present time that is graspable within profane time offers a figuration for this withdrawal.

The surpassing disaster [T]he surpassing disaster leads to the withdrawal not of everything, but of tradition, and touches not everyone, but a community, with the caveat that this community is reciprocally defined by it as the community of those affected by it, and this tradition is defined by it as that which withdraws as a result of the surpassing disaster. Toufic 2009, 81

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

This form of artistic ‘resurrection’ relates to works, cultural objects, buildings, historical artefacts, languages and monuments that, far from being literally or metaphorically ‘lost’, following a major cultural disaster such as a war, are seemingly accessible, ‘extant and available’. These are the aspects of tradition that appear to have survived the surpassing disaster: buildings that have not been

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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

Toufic is therefore talking about an ‘immaterial’ withdrawal of what comes to be recognized as ‘tradition’ that accompanies a literal destructive event, but one that is made visible through an engagement with what in a particular culture has survived ‘past’ the surpassing disaster. Thus the ‘resurrecting’ artist/thinker attempts to bring back what, to others, seems all too apparent and obvious, by somehow evidencing its essential unavailability. We could say tradition is there,

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but inactive, withdrawn, as if stunned by the disaster; or perhaps more precisely it is retroactively brought into the category of ‘tradition’ (what comes to be understood as valuable or important for a culture’s continuation) past the passing disaster. Despite the overt religious overtones of the term ‘resurrection’, Toufic is keen to point out that the ‘artist’ is not a heroic individual on a mission. Instead the ‘artistic’ understanding that one is indeed part of a community that has been subject to a surpassing disaster, may be simultaneously withdrawn from other social roles that the artist continues to occupy. What he seems to mean by this is that it becomes possible, for example, ‘as a person or a teacher’ to still experience the tradition as available, but at the same time to understand it as withdrawn from a simultaneously embodied artistic sensibility. In one position of experience such an individual may unproblematically engage and transmit ‘tradition’ by conventional means such as teaching, and yet in another they may engage in problematically attempting to resurrect what is already existent and available in their own artistic practice. Anyone attempting to resurrect a tradition withdrawn past a surpassing disaster, is likely to find their efforts regarded by others as either a failure or as fraudulent, pointing out that the tradition is, of course, readily available, including what Toufic calls the ‘teacher-identity’ of the artist/ thinker themselves – a kind of uncomfortable splitting of the self into a knowing and unknowing part in relation to the truth of the surpassing disaster. There is an oscillation, therefore, between these different positions of experience that both do and don’t know about one another. In addition to film, Toufic highlights photographic works, literature and poetry to which we could add his own image-based work and that of his colleague and fellow artist Walid Raad whose fictional collective, The Atlas Group, and its fictional archive, the Atlas Group Archive respond to the disaster of the Lebanese wars from 1975 to 1991.2 Toufic also multiplies the surpassing disasters to which these works respond: from the Holocaust, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, events occurring in Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine from the 1980s, through to the explosion of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in 1986. There are also surpassing disasters in which cultural resurrection has either failed, or was not attempted. Writing of an attempt to photograph wardamaged buildings that nevertheless survived bombardments in Beirut during

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.

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the 1990s, whose ruins themselves were to be torn down to be replaced by new development, Toufic asks: Can photographs of these withdrawn buildings become available without resurrecting their withdrawn referents? It seems such photographs become themselves withdrawn. There is going then to be ‘a time of development’ of the chemically developed photographs taken during the latter stages of the war. The documentation is for the future not only in the sense that it preserves the present referent for future generations, but also in that it can function as a preservation of the referent only in the future, only when the work of resurrection has countered the withdrawal. Toufic 2009, 58–59

In Toufic’s withdrawn ‘undeveloped’ images of withdrawn, ruined buildings that are nevertheless physically present, we have a precise figuration of the rubble of progress that Benjamin describes as piling up at the feet of the angel of history in Paul Klee’s famous watercolour Angelus Novus. But crucially, there is no rubble in Klee’s painting, no visible evidence of disaster or anything else other than the angel. In Benjamin’s interpretation of the painting, the catastrophic event of the surpassing disaster is itself withdrawn and no longer available for representation. Projects that testify to the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster are thus always ahead of their time in this precise sense, according to Toufic, and appear to others as stupid or obscure. In fact, they are literally ‘advanced’, projected out of an excess of sensitivity to the ill-feeling and impossibility of recognition in the present, and into a time which we could think of as ‘past’ the future. In this sense, the project Toufic describes operates in the mode of an anterior posterity: the manifestation of the present withdrawal of the images and their referents is a tell-tale sign of their future intelligibility for a time when the work of resurrection has countered the withdrawal. The ‘time of development’ is then a messianic time, the time that remains between the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster and its eventual resurrection, akin to Agamben’s notion of messianic time. It is this time that artists working past a surpassing disaster make manifest. ‘Resurrection takes (and gives) time’, as Toufic puts it (2009, 14, emphasis in original). At that point, the past will actually come to fully ‘be’, finally accruing the meaning that was not afforded to it in the time of its own present and, in turn, this future will be shown as having been always inscribed in that present. Everything is already ruined prior to (as well as past) a surpassing disaster – and the fact of the permanent withdrawal of this universal ruination from thought is integral to it. It places the specific

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instances and dynamics of a surpassing disaster against a background of the universal disaster of modernity. We are therefore possibly talking of an unending process of documenting what doesn’t ostensibly need to be documented. Toufic’s examples of surpassing disasters tend towards specific instances of the destruction of tradition – war and conflict, and human-induced environmental disaster. However, in an era characterized by narratives of unending disaster, and strategies for living in permanent states of catastrophe, we have to extend the materiality of the surpassing disaster beyond the notion of the tangible or visible event. The diffuse disaster of environmental damage that Rob Nixon charts is agonizingly slow. It doesn’t take the form of an ‘event’ in the sense of a discrete or singular occurrence in time, but instead spreads catastrophic change over hundreds of generations, or thousands of years, so that the nature of the calamity unfolds so slowly it is difficult to grasp. Similarly, the effects of economic policies of austerity that have dominated the politics of Europe in the last decade, which further the effects of inter-generational poverty on populations of already-wornout bodies do not register as a ‘disaster’ in an obvious sense, but destroy tradition through the restriction of basic resources, that give rise to levels of exhaustion and hopelessness that make the renewal of ‘tradition’ almost impossible. This diffuse disaster is not so much the hidden yet overexposed ‘reality’ of the disaster inherent in capitalism, the apocalyptic end point that is constantly disavowed and yet obvious to everyone, but the particular collapse of the image of an open future with the associated affect of hope, that appears to have withdrawn. It is this image of some kind of future, even in its inverted Benjaminian form of backing into the future, that has been such a potent aspect of modernist traditions. Following Toufic, we could suggest, then, that one way to test this withdrawal past a more diffuse surpassing disaster, is to pay close attention to artists who may have tried to notice this fact, when its presence is at the same time easy to attest to. These would be artists who have noticed disaster itself as a diffuse event, something that leads to a dispersal of the elements of the world that would, under other circumstances, retain some connection with one another, some relationship that would enable an intact image of a future to emerge.

The time that we have 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

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10 Works by Arthur ‘Bispo’ do Rosário, Venice Biennale, 2013.

(Hidalgo 2009). Black, impoverished, undocumented, a descendent of slaves, Bispo was diagnosed in 1939 with ‘paranoid schizophrenia’ after having an experience in which he reported that he had been visited by angels and felt himself to be Jesus Christ. He was subsequently arrested, incarcerated and lived largely within the institution for the rest of his adult life. What he did, over those 50 years, was to amass a wide range of everyday ‘throwaway’ objects that he could access – buttons, bottles, paper, cardboard, threads made from unravelling hospital blankets and linens, cutlery, old uniforms, rubber boots – which he used to produce an extraordinary body of artwork. This includes close to 800 pieces of varied form – sculpture, collage, assemblages, free-standing objects, hanging objects, and textiles including banners, ceremonial garments and sashes – many of which are intricately embroidered, patched, stitched or bound with thread. Prior to his incarceration Bispo had joined the navy in 1925, working as a signaller, and the sea, ships and boats play a prominent role in the work, as do household objects, possibly related to his work as a domestic worker in the home of a family in Botafogo. In a rare documentary film made about Bispo by the Brazilian psychoanalyst Hugo Denizart in 1982, a few years before Bispo’s death, he speaks about his

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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

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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.

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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.

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13 Works by Arthur ‘Bispo’ do Rosário, 30th Biennale, São Paulo, Brazil. Photograph: Leo Eloy.

Sewing, stitching, patching, embroidering, binding, weaving. These practices are traditionally linked to the time-consuming, repetitive, labour intensive work of social reproduction that I discussed earlier. We saw that female labour, as a philosophical category, has been debated since de Beauvoir, and various attempts have been made to disaggregate what de Beauvoir saw as the meaningless and repetitive work of reproduction from other concepts of ‘work’ that produce, rather than repetitively reproduce. However, alongside this disaggregation have been reciprocal attempts to re-valorize domestic labour as labour, and with it various forms of domestic craft and community-related craftwork, as resources for linking politics with art-making.4 The key element of such work is that it is both labour intensive and time consuming, and highlights particular forms of female sociality – stitching, embroidering, sewing, cutting, and mending, are performed in many communities by groups of women who spend long hours in collective work alongside the time-consuming labour of child rearing, and in 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).

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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 reestablish 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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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

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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’.

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If maintenance is about a certain form of arduous repetition, then it suggests that it could be read ‘in the feminine’, given the long association of ‘women’s time’ with modes of cyclicality, on the one hand, and practices of social reproduction, on the other. In ‘Repeating’ I attempted to move through an impasse in feminist theorizing about what we might mean by ‘maternal time’. Critiquing Edelman’s use of the singular temporality of the death drive to render queer ‘those who are not fighting for the children’, I turned to Adrian Johnston to open up the multiplicity of the drive, and its twin temporalities of iteration and alteration, giving rise to a conceptualization of the drive that can contain both developmental and constant time. This allowed us to glimpse a distinction between ‘queer time’ on the one hand, and the ‘heteronormative time’ of motherhood on the other. This shift in perspective meant we could re-orientate maternal time towards the dynamic of chronicity, a time that is 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 meant suspended time could be understood as a relation to, and condition of, the maternal, but without aligning the time of maternity with the cyclicality of ‘women’s time’ or with the permanent work of contemporary motherhood. Denise Riley’s deep meditation on what happened to time after the death of her adult son opened a window onto the quality of this dynamic chronicity, the liveliness of the time of mothering a dead child. The idea that suspended time might be animated, full, perhaps too much, emerged also from a series of reflections on the permanent delay embedded in intergenerational time, and its relation to the delay that allows us to come to realise that we have belonged to a generation. Here I was concerned with delay as a mode of doing politics, and the retroactive way that we can locate a political moment as having been political after the event, when the repressed trauma of rupture can be acknowledged. However, through a story about intergenerational waiting in which a child waits for her dead mother as a way to keep her internally alive, we understood the permanent waiting that is the condition of intergenerationality, in which adult sexuality always comes too early for the infant, and the present-tenseness of this overwhelming encounter remains a structuring condition of psychic life. This intergenerational delay gives rise to psychic time, but in the story Luisa Passerini tells about her generation, could only be apprehended through the work of political testimony, in which individuals could situate themselves as having belonged to a generation after the event. This reworked the infamous slogan ‘the personal is political’ so that the personal did not so much give rise to the political but was precipitated by it.

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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

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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 But what happened? The ‘subversion’ of temporality that Julia Kristeva claims that the modernist trio, Heidegger, Bergson and Freud, all perform, is characterized in a specific way in Freud’s work. Temporality is not an expansion of consciousness, as in Bergson,

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nor a contraction of consciousness as in Heidegger, but Freud’s articulation relies, according to Kristeva, on ‘the scandal of the timeless (Zeitlos)’ (2003, 30). Freud makes a sequential move within his own thought from the time of consciousness, to the Zeitlos of the pleasure principle, to the Zeitlos of repetition and the compulsion to repeat, and finally to that of the death drive, the archaic, indestructible and immortal elements of psychic life. This atemporality proper to desire and then to death is unique, Kristeva claims, in that it brings to the fore an unconscious time that is not only not-conscious time, but borders on what she thinks of as a pre-psychical time that approaches the somatic. In the extreme it is the time of death. Psychical and biological death is not dead time, in other words, but has its own time, and it is this that is at the core of its scandalousness, a ‘matter of a detained temporality, a temporality that does not temporalize, a breach of a time that does not temporalize’ (31). This unbound time is not strictly negativity, but breaks with biological time and the time of consciousness, which Kristeva locates as the scandal produced by the very fact of psychoanalysis, and a major cause of cultural resistance that it incites. Furthermore, in the context of the slow linear time of becoming conscious that occurs in an analysis, Kristeva names three modalities of timelessness that articulate analytic experience. These are the memory trace, working through, and the dissolution of the transference. Memory, as we saw in our discussions of ‘remaining’ is a lasting trace of excitation, remaining in unconscious life, indestructible and yet displaceable. Working through, as we have also seen, deals with the struggle with resistance and the double-time of interpretation followed by stagnation, so that the analysand must approach, and approach again, what is resistant to knowledge in the present. In Kristeva’s words, working through ‘presents itself as a dead time, while in reality there is an acceptance of drives repressed by the lived experience of the transference’ (36). However, the dissolution of the transference signals the end of analysis, the time of separation from the analyst that confronts the subject with the possibility of the analysts’ death, and the analysand’s own susceptibility to dissolution. Living through this, according to Kristeva, means that what is in reality terminated is in fact ‘interminable’ to the degree that the analysand lives on, with and through the permanent knowledge of self-dissolution. The dissolution of the transference is the time of the interminable. We could say, then, that care without ending is neither the time of memory, which is the time that remains, nor the time of working through, which is the time of acceptance, but the interminable time of living on with the knowledge that one’s time will end. The time, then of ending.

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Ending I want to end, however, with a different kind of reflection on Freud’s notion of ending than the one Kristeva draws out. Throughout Enduring Time I’ve tried to keep an eye on a relation between temporalities of development and those of repetition in their gendered dimensions. These temporalities play out together, in parallel, so that their disjunction remains as a permanent inscription of, not the past, but the overwhelming experience of the present, in the misaligned relationship between the generations that is also a description, according to Ettinger, of ‘sexual’ difference. Adrian Johnson’s insight was that the drive is always already internally differentiated so that the axis of iteration and that of alteration, both of which operate through the dynamics of repetition, together produce an intra-temporal resistance to time. We can read this doubled axis alongside Laplanche’s insistence that the unbinding in the generation that comes before, instigates binding in the generation that comes after, not sequentially, but in the present encounter between adult and child. It is this present encounter that persists or remains as psychic time, neither developing, as such, nor repeating, but simply remaining as the ‘timeless’ aspect of any capacity for temporal experience, not exactly ‘dead time’ as Kristeva intimates, but persistently present time. And in a further feminist refraction, we encountered through Ettinger’s notion of the matrixial, the remains of the psychic time of the coaffective co-emergence of the subject and always already feminine other, an experience of gestation from which we cannot be severed, and that therefore also remains as a structuring principle in psychic life. Where for Laplanche sexual difference is the enigma of the sexual unconscious ‘unbindings’ of the adult other that engenders infantile psychic time, for Ettinger sexual difference is the name for a principle of mutual accommodation or hospitality, what she calls ‘wi(t) hness’, whereby the present can remain in psychic life as a less alarming borderlink, a capacity for transsubjectivity in adult life. In Analysis Terminable and Interminable, published in 1937 at the end of Freud’s life, he asks that intractable question ‘At which point, precisely, does psychoanalytic therapy end?’ This is a question concerning the end of the peculiar time of analysis, the time analysis takes to come to an end, which is of course, the time of an analysis. ‘Experience,’ Freud writes, ‘has taught us that psycho-analytic therapy – the freeing of someone from his neurotic symptoms, inhibitions and abnormalities of character – is a time-consuming business’ (1937, 216). Well yes, indeed. Freud had learnt many years previously that freeing oneself of neurotic symptoms cannot be achieved in a flash of insight brought

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about by the analysts’ interpretation. It is deeply painful to begin to know that we have an unconscious life, and that this unconscious life is largely structured around the insurmountable frustrations that psychoanalysis calls infantile sexuality. Because we fundamentally don’t want to know what drives us, and because our symptoms, despite making us suffer, also give us some modicum of pleasure, they trouble us less than the truth. Working through, as we have seen, aims at the resistance to becoming aware of the interior workings of memory and desire, and despite it looking like dead or repetitious time, there is an acceptance or accommodation of the drive that occurs through the analysts’ repeated reluctance to convince anyone of anything. Put a different way, beyond the scene of what can be thought about and interpreted in analysis, is what Betty Joseph calls the ‘total situation’ (1985); the whole living and moving organization of early internalized object relations, psychotic anxieties and defences at the core of psychic conflict, that are largely projected, and therefore ‘lived’ in the analysis through the analysts’ capacity to gauge, and interpret what is stirred up in themselves, and return as an echo, without memory or desire. In Analysis Terminable and Interminable, Freud, however, describes resistance not just in economic, but in temporal terms, as a form of ‘psychical inertia’ (1937, 241), a kind of passive refusal of developmental time. For much of an analysis, unconscious time plays out as neither developmental nor iterative time, but as chronic or inert time. Two temporal modes are at work on the couch: The ‘living’ transference, as Joseph would put it, which is the paradoxical time of waiting for psychic change, and the time of psychic inertia which is the temporality of working through; the slow and arduous process of not just learning something mildly interesting about yourself, but becoming yourself. But what of ending? Freud initially states that the analysis ends simply when the analyst and the patient cease to meet each other for the analytic session. This happens when two conditions have been fulfilled: when the patient no longer suffers from symptoms and has overcome her anxieties and inhibitions; and when the analyst judges that enough repressed material has been made conscious so as to not fear the patient falling back into a repetition of the pathological processes that brought her to analysis. But he worries away further: The other meaning of the ‘end’ of an analysis is much more ambitious. In this sense of it, what we are asking is whether the analyst has had such a far-reaching influence on the patient that no further change could be expected to take place in him if his analysis were continued. It is as though it were possible by means of analysis to attain to a level of absolute psychical normality . . . as though, perhaps,

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we had succeeded in resolving every one of the patient’s repressions and in filling in all the gaps in his memory. Freud 1937, 218–219

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

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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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212

Index Page numbers in bold refer to figures. 1968 98–9, 101–2, 105–10 A Project for a Scientific Psychology (Freud) 38 Abbott, Jack 118, 126 Abu-Jamal, Mumia 118 Adorno, Theodor 28, 87 affect, theories of 29 After the Future (Berardi) 8 afterwards time 98 afterwardsness 102–5 Agamben, Giorgio 163, 170, 182–3 The Time That Remains 162–3, 164–7 ageing 147–53 Ahıska, Meltem 25 Ailsworth, Ronald 121 alterity, socially constituted 43 Althusser, Louis 28 Amnesty International 119 Amsler, Sarah, The Education of Radical Democracy 82–3 anachronism 6, 25, 37, 167 radical outdatedness 23–4 Anderson, Warwick 18, 19 Andreas-Salome, Lou 145 Angelus Novus (Klee) 170 après-coup 26 Arendt, Hannah 56, 70–1, 98, 111 The Human Condition 95–6 Arlow, Jacob 35–6 Armstrong, Kayt 112 art brut 175 art works 20–1 artistic practice 167–71, 171–7, 172, 173, 174, 176 resurrection 167–71, 171–7, 172, 173, 174, 176, 183 asynchronicity 143 Atlas Group, the 169–70

attachment, permanence of 22 Augustine, St. 95 Auschwitz 141, 182 austerity 82, 171 Australia 73 autobiography 102, 110 Autobiography of a Generation (Passerini) 98–100, 101–2, 105–10, 110–11, 113 autonomy 55, 56 Badiou, Alain 11–12, 13, 28, 116–17, 120–1 bare life 78 Basch, Hildegard 139, 141–2, 144–5, 146–7, 148, 151, 157–8, 182 Battle of Orgreave, The (Deller) 113 Bayly, Simon 1, 60–1, 83, 165 becoming 11, 13 beginning 95–6, 98, 101, 188 Benjamin, Jessica 28 Benjamin, Walter 161, 165, 170 Benjaminian flash, the 52 Bennett, Jane 32 Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’ 8, 83 bereavement 87–92 Berger, John 97–8 Bergson, Henri 12, 141, 151–3, 153–4, 183–4 Berlant, Lauren 31, 50, 50–2, 83, 164 Berlin 139 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud) 56, 85, 85–6 Bhabha, Homi 28 Bhalla, Angad 115 Biko, Steve 97 Billingham, Richard 67, 68, 121, 180 Fishtank 64, 64–5 Ray’s a Laugh 54, 62–6, 62, 66 binding 104 biodiversity 7, 81

213

214 biography 102 Bion, Wilfred 15 Black Panther Party 121 Ten-Point Program 132 Black time 127 Bloch, Ernst 143 body clock 78 Body in Pain, The (Scarry) 126 borderlinking 156, 158 boredom 4 Bouchard, Donald 24 Bourdieu, Pierre 48 Bragaglia, Anton Guilio 143 Braidotti, Rosi 12, 149 brain, the 35 Bryant, Gerald 121 Burden, Chris 21 Bureaucracy of Terror: An Exhumation, The (Loftus) 139, 141–2 Butler, Judith 11, 15–6, 27, 40, 86, 149, 154, 180 The Psychic Life of Power 37, 40–5 Psychosocial Imaginaries 26 Cain, Burl 131, 135 Camden Town Group 63 Camp for Climate Action 111–12 capitalism digital global 14 end times 159–64 flows 9 neoliberal 82–3 perpetual 160–1 politics of time and space 47–8 reality of 160 seams of 2 slow violences 7 social relations of 50, 67 urgency 47 zero-point 159 capitalist everyday, the 2 care 2, 5, 14–17, 53–4, 182, 183–4 ethics 16–17 without ending 183, 184 case, the 31 Casela, Jean 131 Castoriadis, Cornelius 28 castration 154–5, 157 Cavarero, Adriana 17

Index Caygill, Howard, On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance 94–5 Cazdyn, Eric 3, 180 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 3–4 change 12–13, 97, 151 chaos theory 33–4 children 77, 104–5 Childs, Dennis 118, 120 Chodorow, Nancy 28 chromonormativity 78 chronic time 187–8 chronicity 92, 181 chronobiopolitical framework 3 chronophobia 124–5 chronos 3 chronotic time 3 circularity 13 Civil Rights Movement 112 Clairborne, Sybil 150 climate change 2, 81–2 clock time 3 cognitive behavioural therapy 18 collective action 98–100, 105–7, 111–13 memory 113 collectivity 11, 100–1, 105–7, 111 coloniality, and modernity 3–4 colonization 4, 19 communality 177 comparativism 33 Congress of Racial Equality 112 Connor, Steven 33, 34 conscience 44 contemporary, the 45 Corbyn, Jeremy 23 counter-history 25 counter-memory 24–5, 45, 148–9 courageous time 121, 136 Cradley Heath 62–6 Crapanzano, Vincent 96, 97 creation 56 critical psychology 29 theory 28 crystalline time 87–92, 182 Cubism 142 cultural artefacts 163 losses 34

Index memory 25 theory 29 Culture of Time and Space, The (Kern) 142 Curtis, Adam 64 Dahl, Gerhard 104 das Ding 84, 85, 146 Davis, Angela 119–20, 132 Davis, Mike 119 de Beauvoir, Simone 56, 70–1, 176 de Lauretis, Teresa 86 dead time 69, 89–90, 180, 184, 185, 186 death 56 death drive 77, 78, 79–87, 92, 181, 187 debt bondage 7 decolonization 19 deconstruction 28 deep time violence 7 deferred action 103 delay 93–100, 116, 128–9, 181–2 delayed action 103 Deleuze, G. 12, 29, 150, 151 Deller, Jeremy, The Battle of Orgreave 113 democracy 10, 93, 132 Denizart, Hugo 172–3 depression 89 Derrida, Jacques 28, 93, 94, 166 desire 29 desisting bodies 50, 50–2 despair 98 destructiveness, problem of 16 development 8, 56, 85, 91 developmental time 79–87, 103 Dickens, Charles 125 Dickinson, Emily 89 die-ins 112 disaster, surpassing 163–4, 167–71, 183 discourse 41 dislocation 88 dispositif 41 domestic labour 55–8, 71, 79, 176–7 downward mobility 9 duration 151–3 durational art 21 drag 50 practices 49 punishment 134 Durkheim, Emil 142

215

Edelman, Lee 181 No Future 77, 79–87 Education of Radical Democracy, The (Amsler) 82–3 ego 42–4 ego-criticism 43 Egypt 111 embarrassment 32 embodied memory 150 empty present, the 4 end of days 164–7 end times 3, 159–64, 182–3 ending 185–8 endurance and enduring 11, 69, 117–18, 121, 127, 137, 179, 182 environmental disaster 171 ethics 29 Ettinger, Bracha 100, 141, 154–8, 185 European time 3–4 event, the 11–2 Everingham, Christine 73 everyday, the 87 everyday objects 173 evolution 3 exclusion 7 expectation 6 experience 4, 6, 155–8 external reality 38 externality 41 extinctions 81–2 Fabian, Johannes 4 familial relations 70 family time 62–6 Fanon, Franz 28, 96, 97, 117, 120 fantasy 29, 39 fantasy life 36 fantasy-taken-as-real 28 fascinance 158 Federici, Silvia 3–4, 79, 177 Felski, Rita 86–7 female labour 69–76, 176–7 feminine, the 75–6 femininity, repudiation of 187 feminist psychoanalytic trajectory 28 theory 32, 70 Fenichel, Otto 144 Fink, Bruce 174 Fisher, Berenice 14

216

Index

Fisher, Mark, Ghosts of My Life 159 Fishtank (Billingham) 64, 64–5 Flightways (van Dooren) 82 Foucault, Michel 24–5, 37, 40, 41–2, 94 France 73 free time 94 freedom 30, 55 Freeman, Elizabeth 5, 32, 50, 66, 77 Freud, Sigmund 19, 26, 28, 35, 37–40, 41–4, 45, 84, 102–3, 136, 144, 146, 147, 157, 174, 182 Analysis Terminable and Interminable 185–7 Beyond the Pleasure Principle 56, 85, 85–6 ‘Constructions in Analysis’ 145 Instincts and Their Vicissitudes 85 The Interpretation of Dreams 38 Moses and Monotheism 145 Project for a Scientific Psychology 38, 103 ‘The Ego and the Id’ 43 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality 85 Zeitlos 184 Freudianism 29 Friedman, Lawrence 38 Fromm, Eric 28 futural meaning 1–2 future, the cancellation of 8 as development 8 end times 159–64 foreclosed 162 future shock 6 Futurist Manifesto 57 futurity, and subjectivity 79–87 gathering 173 gender 70 generation, definition 100–2 generational time 105–10, 181–2 genre 31 Germany 139, 141–2, 147, 182 ghosting 159 Ghosts of My Life (Fisher) 159 globalized network societies 9 good life 15, 51

Grassian, Stuart 124–5 Greenham Common peace camp 112, 113 Greensboro 112 grief, permanence of 22 group identity 100 Groys, Boris 83 Guattari, Félix 29, 99 Guenther, Lisa, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives 125–6, 135 guilt 29 Gunaratnam, Yasmin 11 Halberstam, J. Jack 77 Hall, Stuart 28 Handshake Ritual (Ukeles) 58 Hanisch, Carol 99 harm 17 Hartman, Saidiya 4–5 Harvey, David 47–8 Heathfield, Adrian 67 Heidegger, Martin 4, 184 Hermes 32–3 Herzog, Werner 168 heterochromonormative developmental time 5 heteronormativity 79–87, 181 hidden temporalities 50 Hildegaard Under Table I (Loftus) 143, 144–5, 146–7 historical consciousness 96 time 34, 51–2, 166 truth 102–3, 145, 147, 152 history 24–5, 33–4, 80–1 hoarding 173 Hook, Derek 29, 96, 120 hope 166 hope, crisis of 82–3 Horkheimer, Max 28 horrorism 17 House That Herman Built, The (Wallace and Sumell) 115–16, 120–1, 123–4, 127–34, 130, 132, 135, 182 Hsieh, Tehching 21 Human Condition, The (Arendt) 95–6 Human Rights Watch World Report 119 Hutchings, Kimberly 3, 4 hysteria 25, 37–8

Index identification 29 identity 29, 100 IKEA 22 imagined action 130 immanence 71 imprisonment 115–16, 121–7, 122, 136 chronophobia 124–5 security 129 solitary 118–21, 123–7, 127, 131, 134, 135, 137, 182 visiting process 133, 137 In Slowness: Towards and Aesthetic of the Contemporary (Koepnick) 142 In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Sharpe) 4–5, 116 inconsistent multiplicities 11 ‘Indefinite Delay: On (Post)Apartheid Temporality’, Hook 96–7 Indigenous Australians 117 industrialization 3–4 Instincts and Their Vicissitudes (Freud) 85 inter- 29, 30 inter-generational, present, the as 94 intergenerational connection 113 intergenerational events 116 inter-generational waiting 20, 181–2 intergenerationality 181 internal objects 15 internality 41 internalization 42 internationalism 19 interpellation 42 Interpretation of Dreams, The (Freud) 38 Irigaray, Luce 28, 80 irregularity 76 Israel 96 Jackson, George 126–7 Jackson, Shannon 21, 55–6 Jameson, Fredric 7, 8–9, 47–8 Jetztzeit 161–2 Johnston, Adrian 18, 85, 86, 181, 185 Jones, Sophie 77, 78 Joseph, Betty 186 jouissance 75–6, 81, 85, 87 Judgement Day 174 judgment 31 suspension of 34, 44–5 justice 16, 160

217

Kafka, Franz 142 Kairos 3 keirotic tension 3 Kemp, Alice A. 74 Kern, Stephen, The Culture of Time and Space 142 Khalidi, Rashid 111 Khanna, Ranjana 19, 28 King Wilkerson, Robert 121, 123, 127 Klee, Paul, Angelus Novus 170 Klein, Melanie 16 Koepnick, Lutz, In Slowness: Towards and Aesthetic of the Contemporary 142 Koselleck, Reinhardt 6 Kristeva, Julia 28, 75–6, 155, 183–4, 185 labour 95 domestic 55–8, 71, 79, 176–7 durational practices 49 female 69–76, 176–7 feminization 48 flexible 49 gendered patterns of 32 maternal 74–5, 87, 90 precarization 48 project time 60–1 repetitive 79 work time 50 labour time 9 Lacan, Jacques 28, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 84, 103, 145–6, 146, 155, 158, 174 Lampert, Jay 93–4 Laplanche, Jean 37, 38, 39, 39–40, 45, 104–5, 111, 144, 185 Large, William 160 Late Liberalism 159 late memory 147–53, 153–8, 182 Latour, Bruno 33, 37 Law, the 28 Léger, Marc 121–7, 133 Lennon, John 112 letters 128–9 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 151 Lewis, Gail 29, 53–4 liberalism 51–2 life instinct 56 work 57, 67

218

Index

linear narrative, refusal of 80–1 perspective 33–4 time 104 Lingis, Alphonso 11, 101 lives without project 62–6, 67–8 Ray’s a Laugh (Billingham) 62–6, 62, 66 Touch Sanitation (Ukeles) 58–62, 60 living time 1 Loftus, Barbara 139–42, 148, 157–8, 182 The Bureaucracy of Terror: An Exhumation 139, 141–2 Hildegaard Under Table I 143, 144–5, 146–7 Stamp 139, 140 loss 108–10 lost time 182 Louisiana State Penitentiary 121–7 McArthur, Park 53 maintenance 49–50, 50, 67, 69, 180–1 art 56–8, 67, 180 self 51 temporal forms 52–3 temporal practices 55–8 time 51, 52–4, 60, 62, 68 Malabou, Catherine 12–13, 72 Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an exhibition ‘CARE ’ (Ukeles) 55–8 manifestos 55 Manto da Anunciação (Annunciation Garment) (Rosário) 173–4 Marcuse, Herbert 28 market relations 3 Marshall, Yvonne 112 Martin, Trayvon 134 Marx, Karl 74, 161 Massey, Doreen 47–8 maternal care-work 72–6 death drive 92 grief-work 20 labour 74–5, 87, 90 time 72–6, 78, 79, 91, 181 maternal-feminine, the 80 matrixial, the 153–8, 185 Matter and Memory (Bergson) 151 Mbembe, Achille 96–7

Meillassoux, Quentin 12 melancholia 19, 29, 42–4, 45 memory 139–47, 184 artist books 65–6 collective 113 cultural 25 embodied 150 Foucault on 24–5 late 147–53, 153–8, 182 the matrixial 153–8 and old age 147–53 remembering 146 remémoration 145, 146–7 reminiscence 145 restaging 140–1 sharing 141–2, 146–7, 148, 157–8 symbolic 145–6 time of 142 traumatic 103, 106 triggering 147–8 men, domestic labour 73 Merck, Mandy 32 messianic future 160 time 160, 162, 164–7, 170 Mignolo, Walter 3–4 Miller, Brent 123, 131 miners strike 113 mission, sense of 173, 174 Mitchell, Audra 81–2 Mitchell, Juliet 28, 100 modern time 6 modernity 6, 6 and coloniality 3–4 double temporality 142–4 and psychoanalysis 19 Montano, Linda 21 monumental time 75–6 Morton, Timothy 81 Moses and Monotheism (Freud) 145 mother–child relation 16–17 mother–daughter relation, the 141, 148, 150–1 motherhood 53–4, 92, 181 mourning 136 movement 4, 6, 12–13 multispecies assemblages, relationality of 81 mush time 65

Index Nachträglichkeit 93, 102–3, 106 naming 173 narrating time 127–34 narrativization 106 narrativizing 99 Nashville 112 natality 95, 188 negation of time 86 neoliberal time 161–2, 166 neoliberalism 159 new chronic, the 3 New Labour 24 New York City, Department of Sanitation 58–62, 60 newness 188 Ngai, Sianne 17 Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History (Foucault) 24–5 Nixon, Rob 171 No Future (Edelman) 77, 79–87 noncontemporaneity 143 nondevelopmental time 5, 79, 87–92 disciplinary space 26–7 event, the 13 recognition, violence of 44 reproductive, the 76–9 child death 87–92 non-developmental time 87–92 queer theory 79–87 stop inertia 9, 74, 159 norms 28, 42, 45 violence of 44 Nosferatu (film) 168 nostalgia 24 now, the 68 now-time 72–3, 161–2, 166 objective reality 151 objet a 155 Occupy movement 112 old age 147–53, 182 Oliner, Marion 35 On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance, Caygill 94–5 Ono, Yoko 112 ontological negation 127 Opalka, Roman 21 Osborne, Peter, The Politics of Time 6

219

our time 4, 34 Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing (Segal) 148–50 outdatedness, radical 23–4 outsider art 175 overeating 51 pace of life, loss of control 5–6 pain 126 Palestinians 96, 97–8, 111 paradoxes 96 paranoid schizophrenia 172 parenting work 73 Passerini, Luisa 181–2 Autobiography of a Generation 98–100, 101–2, 105–10, 110–11, 113 passive inertia 136 past, the 6, 147–53 refusal of 127 virtual 141, 154 Pateman, Carole, The Sexual Contract 49 patriarchy 72 Paul, St 165–6 Pennsylvania 125 petrification 97, 111–13, 120 phallic law 154–5 Phillips, Patricia C. 57 phylogenesis 145 plasticity 12–13 Poe, Edgar Allen 161 political art 21 events 23–4 generations 101 time 111–31, 16 politics 93, 95–6, 111, 181–2 Politics of Time, The (Osborne) 6 Pontalis, J. B. 38, 39 population management 48 positioning 173 postcolonial theory 28–9 future 83 modern time 7 postmodernity 8–9 potentiality 117 poverty 20, 48–9, 171 Povinelli, Elizabeth 2, 14, 117, 164 power 28, 37, 40–5, 94

220 power-chronography 47–8 pre-psychical time 184 present, the contraction of 9 crisis of 9 imagined action 130 as inter-generational 94 stuck 8–9 present tense, attachment to 116 presentness 166 Pressed for Time (Wajcman) 5–6 primal scenes 144–5, 157–8 prison neurosis 124–5 progress 6, 50, 161, 165–6, 180 Project for a Scientific Psychology, (Freud) 103 project time 60–1, 67–8, 180 projective identification 40 protest, time of 105–10 protest camps 111–13 protest practices 20 Proust, Marcel 88, 142 psychic differentiation 154 inertia 187 life 29, 35, 181–2 the matrixial 153–8 and power 37 reality 25, 27, 28, 35–7 Butler’s account of 40–5 Freud and 37–40 and power 40–5 as a third reality 37–40 time 181–2, 185 transformations 26 Psychic Life of Power, The (Butler) 37, 40–5 psychoanalysis 17–9, 22, 25, 29, 35, 36, 39–40, 42, 45, 100, 101–2, 104, 107–10, 154, 185–7 psychoanalytic time 17–19 psychoanalytic-Marxist tradition 28 psychology 25 psychosexual development 103 Psychosocial Imaginaries (Butler) 26 psychosocial practices 20 studies 25, 26–7, 28–9, 31–2, 41, 43, 180

Index Puchner, M, 55 Puig, Maria 15 punishment, durational 134 pure psychology 39 qualified time 50, 73 quality time 9, 50 queer studies 32 theory 77–8, 79–87 time 77, 78, 79, 79–87, 92, 181 question of time, return to 7–8 Quijano, Aníbal 3–4 quotidian experiences 2 Raad, Walid 169–70 radical suspension 87–92 Rado, Sandor 136 Rancière, Jacques 10, 112 Ray’s a Laugh (Billingham) 54, 62–6, 62, 66 Real, the 38, 39, 40 real time 130 reality accepting 154 Butler’s account of 40–5 of capitalism 160 external 38 objective 151 psychic 25, 27, 28, 35–7, 37–40, 40–5 a third 37–40 thought 38 Rego, Paula 139 Reich, Wilhelm 28 relationality 16, 144 relativity, theory of 142 remémoration 145, 146 reminiscence 145 repetition 42, 70–2, 75, 78, 86, 87, 118, 150, 176, 179, 181, 184, 186 repetitive labour 79 reproduction 77, 78 and repetition 70 reproductive labour 71 research methodologies 31 resistance 94–5, 186 resurrection, artistic 167–71, 171–7, 172, 173, 174, 176, 177, 183

Index retroaction 103 reverie 15 Ridgeway, James 131 Riley, Denise 121, 126, 181 Time Lived, Without its Flow 1, 2, 79, 87–92 Robaina, Conception 173 Roitman, Janet 5 Rome (Serres) 34 Rosário, Arthur ‘Bispo’ do 21, 164, 171–7, 172, 173, 174, 176, 183 Rose, Jacqueline 28 Roseneil, Sasha 112, 113 Ruddick, Sara 76 Russell, Bertrand 151 ruthlessness 76 Sandford, Stella 32, 74–5, 87, 90 Satyagraha 95 Scarry, Elaine 126 scientific discovery 34 seduction theory 38 Seeds of Time, The (Jameson) 8–9 Segal, Lynne 97–8, 148–50 self, the 149–50 selfmaintenance 51 narration 102 preservation 35 realization 71 Serres, Michel 27, 32–4, 41, 44–5, 180 Sexual Contract, The (Pateman) 49 sexual difference 80, 156, 185 sexuality and sexual knowledge 103–5, 181 Sharma, Sarah 8, 47–8, 50 Sharpe, Christina 14, 118, 120, 127, 134–5, 137 In the Wake: On Blackness and Being 4–5, 116 Shehadeh, Raja 97 Sickert, Walter 63 signification 81 signifiers 104 simultaneity 66, 93, 104 slavery 4, 118, 134–5 Slaves of the State (Childs) 118 slow movement, the 54 violence 7, 54

221

slowness 50, 54, 93, 142–3 Sobukwe, Robert 97 social abandonment, zones of 117–18 antagonisms 27 art 20 bond, the 174–5 change 6–7, 11–14 connections 174–5 equality 16 social life psychic investments 26 temporality of 3 media 73 practice 20 psyche 43 reproduction 72, 75, 77 works 21 socially engaged art 20 society 25 Society for Psychical Research 35 Society Must Be Defended (Foucault) 25 sociology 25 solitary confinement 118–21, 123–7, 127, 131, 134, 135, 137, 182 Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives, (Guenther) 125–6, 135 Solitary Watch 119 Song Dong 173 sorting 173 soul 41 South Africa 96–7, 111 Southwood, Ivor 9, 159 speech-acts 24 speed 57 theory 8 staggered time 93–4 Stanford University 123 stasis 12, 134 staying 25 Stern, Nicholas 7 Stewart, Kathleen 67 stimulation, meaningful 124 stream-of- consciousness 142 stuplimity 17 subjection, desire for 41 subjectivity 29, 79–87

222 Sumell, Jackie 21, 118, 120, 122, 126, 127, 134–7 The House That Herman Built 115–16, 120–1, 123–4, 127–34, 130, 132, 135, 182 Sunderland University 63 superego 187 surpassing disasters 163–4, 167–71, 183 suspended time 50, 51–2, 79, 87–92, 126, 140–1, 179–82 suspension, of time 1–5 sustainability workers 57 Symbolic, the 80–1 symbolic memory 145–6 symbolization 145–6 synchronic time 103 Tarantino, Michael 65 technological innovations 142 temporal drag 94 folding 33–4, 35, 41, 44–5, 47, 180 orderings 67 suspension 1–5 temporality distortions of 96 of social life 3 temporalization 104 testimonial work 110 Thatcher, Margaret 23, 63 thermodynamics 3 thought reality 38 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Freud) 85 Time and Free Will (Bergson) 151 Time Binds (Freeman) 32 time crisis 5–6 Time Driven (Johnston) 18 time lived without its consequence 89 Time Lived, Without its Flow (Riley) 1, 2, 79, 87–92 time not passing 1–5 time poverty 49 time starvation 72 Time That Remains, The (Agamben) 162–3, 164–7 time without qualities 10 time-as-movement 4

Index time-consuming practices 177 timelessness 78, 184 time’s flow, lack of 87–92 time-space compression 47–8 time-that-time-takes-to-come-to-an-end 164–7 topology 33 Touch Sanitation (Ukeles) 58–62, 60, 70 Toufic, Jalal 163–4, 167–71, 175, 177, 183 tradition 167–71, 183 trans- 27, 28–31 transdisciplinarity 27–8, 29–31 transdisciplinary practice 27, 29–31, 31, 41, 45 transference 17, 39, 59, 103, 104–5, 107–10, 184, 186, 187 transsubjectivity 156 trapped space 65 time 49 trauma 89, 103, 105–6, 181 traumatic memory 103, 106 Tronto, Joan 14 truth 12, 145, 147, 152 Tunisia 111 Turin, student uprisings, 1968 102 Tyler, Imogen 72 Ukeles, Mierle Laderman 21, 54, 67, 69–70, 121, 180 Handshake Ritual 58–9 Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an exhibition ‘CARE ’ 55–8 name-cleaning project 59 Touch Sanitation 58–62, 60, 70 washing and cleaning performances 58 UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment 119 unbearable time 121 unbecoming time 4, 5, 11–14 unbinding 104, 185 unbound time 184 unconscious, the 25, 38, 38–9

Index unemployed, the 48 United Kingdom, protest camps 111–12, 112–13 United States of America 73 Civil Rights Movement 112 Federal Prison System 118, 119 incarcaration rate 119, 120 protest camps 112 securitized state 117 solitary confinement 125–6 unpredictability 76 unthinkable time 134–7 urgency 47 utopian projects 20 van Dooren, Thom 15, 82 Vázquez, Roland 4 Veltman, Andrea 70–1 Vietnam War 112 violence slow 7, 54 of social norms 44 of solitary confinement 135 violent-care 15 virtual past, the 141, 154 viscous time 68 Volkan, Vamik D. 100 wage labour 3 waiting 7, 93–4, 96, 97–8, 137, 181 end times 182–3 and loss 108–10 modes of 2 politics of 110–13 Wajcman, Judy 5–6 wake work 137

223

Wallace, Herman 21, 128 The House That Herman Built 115–16, 120–1, 123–4, 127–34, 130, 132, 135, 182 imprisonment 121–7, 122, 126–7, 134, 136 solitary confinement 123–7, 127, 131, 135, 137 warehousing 7 watching/witnessing 142 Weekes, Kathi 32 Whitehead, A.N. 29 witches 4 women control of 4 domestic labour 55–8 and the everyday 87 maternal care-work 72–6 now time 72–3 poverty 48–9 Women’s Liberation Movement 107 women’s time 79, 92, 179–80, 181 ‘Women’s Time’ (Kristeva) 75–6 Woodfox, Albert 121, 123–4, 131, 133, 134 Woolf, Virginia 70 work time 50 working through 136, 157–8, 184 world politics 3 world-political time 4 Wright, Stephen 9–10 Zeitlos 184 zero-hours contracts 9, 48 Zimmerman, George 134 Žižek, Slavoj 3, 28, 84, 159, 159–60 zones of being 117

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