TEMPORARY DISCOMFORTS

“Harlan wanted to say: Woman, there’s no fun in Eternity. We work! We work to analyze all the details of Time from the beginning of Eternity until no human life is left on Earth. We try to exhaust the infinite possibilities of ‘everything that could have been,’ to choose a ‘could have been’ better than the current Reality, and then we decide where in Time it is possible to make a small change to convert the ‘is’ into the desired ‘could have been.’ And then we will have a new ‘is’ and we can start looking for another “could have been” and we can repeat the cycle again, always the same since the time Wikkor Mallansohn discovered the Temporal Field back in the 24th, so that it was possible to begin Eternity in the 27th(…)”^[1]Asimov, Isaac, The End of Eternity (1955)

With this fragment from The End of Eternity, we end this edition titled “Temporal Discomforts,” in which we have tried to create what “others could be” in relation to the chronometers that measure our current lives. It is revealing how unnecessary it is to explain what we mean by temporal discomforts, since all the people with whom we have shared the material these weeks have understood that statement through their own experience.

The voices of Lauradedíaz, Enric Puig Punyet and The Institute of Suspended Time,  along with contributions from Blanca Callén, who from the outset ignited the flame of this edition, have helped rethink these Temporary Discomforts, where we have sought to collectivize, once again, an ancient problem that is heightened today by technological mediation and for which real solutions must be found. Human time is not comparable to machine temporality, and life time cannot coincide with work time.

We are neither appealing to Luddites, nor celebrating technological mediation. Rather, we observe ourselves in the world and consider the ways to subvert certain established conditions, fully aware that we exist within a wild and phagocytic system. Regarding time, all the contributions in this issue are thus spaces of experimentation, where the proposers explore paths of analysis and/or temporal dissidence, aiming to recognize individual and collective temporalities others ^[2]This formulation refers to Foucault and his “other spaces” which, being a deliberately strange construction in French as well, allows us to understand that they are outside of the pre-established.. An act of generosity that might counter the fears that Arendt had already anticipated:

“The danger of future automation lies less in the much-deplored mechanization and artificialization of natural life, than in the fact that all human productivity, despite its artificiality, would be absorbed into an enormously intensified life process and would automatically, painlessly and effortlessly, follow its ever-repeated natural cycle. The rhythm of machines would greatly expand and intensify the natural rhythm of life, but it would not change, and instead it would make more deadly, the main character of life in relation to the world, which is to wear down “durability.”^[3]Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, (1958), Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2009, p. 139

So we ask ourselves: Shouldn’t it be the working bodies that determine when and how much they can work, or how much time they should have before starting the workday? How many flowers can be counted along the way, how many airplane trails are marked in the sky, simply by paying attention to an aleatory space?

Thus, we are concerned with time, of freeing ourselves from a chrono-normativity that others have named before us. And like Harlan, the protagonist of Asimov’s classic novel, who dedicated himself to working for, in and with time, those of us here are also trapped in their analysis and in the search for temporalities that make a better life possible. Thinking about the experience of time often involves slowing it down, and is, therefore, a way of stopping it, perhaps the first true temporal sovereignty we can achieve.

REFERENCES

• Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1958
• Asimov, Isaac, The End of Eternity, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc, 1955
• Foucault, Michel, Des espaces autres. Héterotopies. Conferencia, 1967. Digital version [Last checked 9/15/24]
• Freeman, Elizabeth, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Durham/Londres: Duke University Press, 2010

[Featured Image: Unease Beach, Sofía Chaves Hernandez. Installation, 2022 (created for the Master Data & Design – ELISAVA)]