“I am on very bad terms with space. I am on very bad terms with time.”
– Aimé Césaire, Indecent Behavior (h/t Katherine McKittrick on Twitter)
“The amount of time it takes for a substance to enter the ocean and then leave the ocean is called residence time. Human blood is salty, and sodium, Gardulski tells me, has a residence time of 260 million years. And what happens to the energy that is produced in the waters? It continues cycling like atoms in residence time. We, Black people, exist in the residence time of the wake, a time in which “everything is now. It is all now” (Morrison 1987, 198).”
– Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
“Time is…not a real process, not an actual succession that I am content to record. It arises from my relation to things.” – Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
“Not all speed is movement.” – Toni Cade Bambara
Maybe the biggest learning that has come from committing to write regular blog posts (which were in fact meant to be weekly blog posts) has not been my reflections on their content itself, but the demand to think consciously about the process that actually goes into my writing – and the revelation of just how out of linear time that process is. That what I feel as ‘just last week’, is a month ago and that intervening time is not a straight line from thinking to acting but instead, a series of spirals and trap doors and detours into other planes that definitely are related (I promise), but hard to string together in a way that is intelligible for others. And maybe most strikingly – because this project has given me the space to really sit down and read about it – learning about the relentless pathologizing of what I had previously never understood as upsetting or disordered, except when required to graft my experience of time onto those that are not my own.
Since my last entry I started three new books: David Graeber and David Wengrow’s blockbuster The Dawn of Everything, Ali Madanipour’s Cities in Time: Temporary Urbanism and the Future of the City, and Jay Jordan and Isa Fremeaux’s We Are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself. I finished one: Sarah Sharma’s In The Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics. I wrote an article reflecting on the Berlin housing struggle, arguing for challenging the Eurocentric property and voting rights discourse in favour of a more relational praxis. I watched two talks from the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network’s series Phenomenal Time: Perceiving Ecological Temporalities. I walked with a friend in the small urban forest of Plänterwald, in an attempt to recalibrate our relationship to the urgency of multiple unfolding crises. I printed a series of Risograph postcards using the image of a favourite healing weed which will be sent to prisoners in Belarus. I did a lot of research on how to build kaleidoscopes. These actions might be more or less clearly related to this project of thinking and writing on nonlinear time and on building relations, but no less connected than all of the other work/life events which also happened that I can’t describe as fitting so neatly. Maybe especially when it comes to work.
In Sarah Sharma’s In the Meantime (the one book this month I did finish) she argues it is an individual’s relationship to labour which configures their experience of time. Sharma theorizes the concept of power-chronography as an extension of Doreen Massey’s power-geometry, arguing that far more than space, temporality “is an invisible and unremarked relation of power,” which continues to go unrecognized, even in the many critiques that deal with an assumed increasing culture of speed. The shared experience of workers under capitalism, she argues, is not actually an increasing speed of life, but rather the individualized and depoliticized expectation that one must continually recalibrate ‘their time’ productively. She theorizes power-chronography as an attempt to politicize time by moving away from individualistic accounts and towards understanding how power is expressed temporally through social relationships.
Sharma begins the text by defining (Western capitalist) society as a space based culture, citing the work of political economist and media historian Harold Adams Innis and his theory of space-time bias. Innis argues that space based cultures tend to be imperial powers which see time as a resource, commodity, or sequence of events which can be managed and controlled, and as a result are prone to becoming overly invested in the present[1]:
“Innis’s work allows us to see that by all such determinations, global capital depends on a spatial treatment of time, on a spatially biased culture. It is not just that our dominating technologies are spatially biased; our ways of knowing, systems of power, and even notions of resistance tend to be spatial.”[2]
To unpack how time operates as a form of social power, Sharma follows the temporal worlds of business travellers, taxi drivers, and corporate yoga teachers through a series of interviews. The intersections of race, gender and citizenship status are noted as playing a role in shaping the conditions of their labour, but a discussion of disability at these intersections is notably absent. In reading this text with an interest in neurodivergent experiences of time, it is clear that the individualized demand to continually manage time and recalibrate our bodies for productive labour have distinct contours when it comes to disability, but power-chronography is quite a useful tool for thinking about them.
The focus and treatment of the present in Sharma’s work especially stood out. While the curated experience of “being in the moment” through yoga is lauded as both individually enriching for the office worker and economically beneficial for the company through increasing worker productivity, the neurodivergent experience of time as a continual present is pathologized as unproductive “time blindness”. When we are unable to recalibrate our experience of time towards economic production at will, suddenly “the power of now” is no longer seen as enriching, but disordered. Both the empowered and pathologized versions of now here share the same assumptions of a space based culture which treats time as an individual issue of control and management: take your medication or take ‘time out’ for you.
To escape from a lot of theory and go back to the beginning…reading Sharma crystallized for me that it isn’t “time blindness” as such which I experience as disordered, but the relational aspect of time – both as a mismatch between my own lived experience of time and that of my (space based) culture’s, and the demand (quite physically impossible, at least without medication) to regulate/recalibrate this experience at will for the demands of production in capitalist society.
If, as Sharma writes, in my culture, our ways of knowing the world down to our notions of resistance tend to be spatial, what might we learn about resistance from those whose lives are much more time based – whether that be through differences in culture, ability, or something else? What might temporal resistance even look like? Not merely ‘opting out of speed’ – a reflection that pretends to be a negation, which Sharma illustrates through her investigation of the slow food movement – but something else entirely. I don’t know, but I think immediately of some of the teachings I’ve learned from radical Black scholars and activists.
When Toni Morrison, Christina Sharpe or Denise Ferreira da Silva write it is all now, they are speaking explicitly in terms of a politicized relationship; a history that is not really history, but afterlives which exist simultaneously across space and time. When now is understood as continuous and relational, rather than as a fixed point in an individual time management strategy, it is all now might actually be a revolutionary and liberatory key. How do we live as if that were true?
For someone who thinks and writes a lot about relation, I feel that I struggle with it so much in life. I continuously question whether my preference for being alone, the comfort I find in books and images and my reluctance to engage with others in person are neurodivergent traits, or just a repetition of the dominant individualized and alienated social order. Surely I can push myself harder to be different? What I want to build centers relationships, presence, connection – but I am quickly exhausted by most social interactions. Sensory issues and unpredictable social demands make big groups or long stretches of interaction difficult and unenjoyable. The pandemic made these realizations even more acute. The initial thrill of being able to attend many more functions and meetings suddenly taking place virtually gave way to feeling even more disconnected, as the major narrative around this shift became the irreplaceable value of in person gatherings and how frustrated everyone felt at the inadequacy of these digital replacements – something I really couldn’t relate to. I realized that I don’t even know what practicing sustainable, radical relation might look like outside of these (neurotypical) narratives.
Recently I read Damian Milton’s Double Empathy Problem, which reframes autism from a ‘deficit theory of mind’ to a question of reciprocity and mutuality. The Double Empathy Problem proposes that the social and communication difficulties autistic people experience are not due to a deficit of social skills or empathy, but to a reciprocal lack of understanding and differences in communication style between autistic people and neurotypicals. Basically, it is an attempt to re-center relationality in the dominant pathologizing and individualizing discourses around autism. Maybe this is a place to start. In reading back through some of my older posts I realize I’ve returned to the same thought:
What if this feeling of perpetual now-ness, this inability to plan, this ‘time blindness’ is not a defect but a signifier of connection? What if it is all now? What if the spaces in between are in fact galaxies at different scales, binding us to other worlds? What if this dis/ordered sense is an order unto itself? An order of entanglement?
Riso printed postcards to be sent to prisoners. The text on the back, translated into Russian reads: “For generations, yarrow has been used as one of the most versatile healing herbs. It prefers to grow in disturbed soils, bringing restoration and balance to the places it is most needed."
[1] Innis, Harold Adams. The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951).
[2] Innis contrasts space-based cultures with time-based cultures, which tend to be oral cultures that treat time in terms of continuity, and space “as a sphere to be protected, rather than a means to extend power outward.” Lakota philosopher Vine DeLoria Jr. makes a parallel observation, arguing that in western (space based) cultures, meaning is derived from history and development as understood through linear time, while many Indigenous world views, which work from cyclical or concurrent understandings of time, derive meaning from place and relation to land. (DeLoria, Vine. God Is Red: A Native View of Religion. Golden: Fulcrum Publishing. 1992).
This post is part of a two month series exploring neurodivergent experiences of (non)linear time, supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. Some of the thinking of this blog series has been translated to the risoprint zine, How to Build a Kaleidoscope.