Time: A Multidisciplinary Introduction 9783110690774, 9783110689051

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
Time: How and For Whom?
Part I: Time: An Interdisciplinary Overture
1 Thinking Temporally Today
2 What Does it Mean that Time is Culturally Constructed, Historically Contingent, and Socially Differentiated?
3 Time in Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Perspective
Part II: Time Across Disciplines: Selected Essays
Introduction to Part II
4 Circadian and Seasonal Clocks in Insects and Other Organisms
5 The Queue as Dystopia
6 Temporal Tactility in Trisha Brown’s Locus (1975)
7 Proust’s Novel Time
8 Time and the Earthworks
9 All the Time There Is: Cloth Sack as a Buddhist Metaphor for Time
10 The Temporalities of Sound in Elia Suleiman’s The Time That Remains
11 Media and the Cultivation of Time
12 Coral Reefs and Climate Change: We Are Running Out of Time
List of Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Time

Time and Periodization in History

Edited by Marcus Colla, Allegra Fryxell, Anna Gutgarts and Oded Steinberg

Volume 1

Time

A Multidisciplinary Introduction Edited by Sarit Kattan Gribetz and Lynn Kaye

ISBN 978-3-11-068905-1 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-069077-4 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-069080-4 ISSN 2699-6235 Library of Congress Control Number: 2023932796 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Ginny Zanger, Seasonal Rhythms, Monotype on Asian Paper, 13" × 27", Ginnyzanger.com. Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Acknowledgments We wish to thank Adélékè Adéẹ̀kó,̣ Jared Gardner, Leta Hendricks, Caitlin McGurk, Ila Nagar, Ryan Nash, William Palmer, Tamar Rudavsky, Stephen Petrill, and Kenneth Supowit who shared ideas about time across their varied disciplines. We are grateful to Mara Benjamin, Yuval Evri, Georgia Frank, Sylvia Fried and Yevgeniy Safronov for reading drafts of the introductory chapters, to Dakota Hampton for bibliographical assistance, and to Devon Thomas for the index. We are honored to feature Ginny Zanger’s “Seasonal Rhythms” on this book’s cover. We recognize how lucky we are for the friendship, love, and wisdom of Alex Kaye and Jonathan Gribetz, with whom we discussed many of the ideas in this book and who have been with us on this journey through time. The Ohio State University’s Office of Research, The Melton Center for Jewish Studies at the Ohio State University, Fordham University’s Center for Jewish Studies, and Fordham’s Manuscript and Book Publication Award all provided material support for this project and for the 2018 “Metaphors of the Time” conference we hosted at the Ohio State University. We also thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for awarding Sarit a course grant to teach “On Time and Value” at Fordham University, with special thanks to Natalie Reynoso and Nindyo Sasongko, who both became important interlocutors as teaching assistants. Thanks as well to the Ohio State University for awarding Lynn a course grant, and particularly to Tamar Rudavsky, with whom Lynn co-developed the course, “Engaging Time.” From the moment we shared the idea of this book with Oded Steinberg, he was enthusiastic about it, encouraging us to write it and shepherding it through the review process. We thank Oded along with his co-editors, Anna Gutgarts, Marcus Colla, and Allegra Fryxell, of the “Time and Periodization in History” series; we are honored that this book is inaugurating this important book series. We acknowledge with gratitude the feedback we received from two generous anonymous reviewers. At De Gruyter, Rabea Rittgerodt, Jana Fritsche, and Andreas Bandmair have been a delight to work with and we are grateful for all of their efforts throughout the publication process. While the essays in Part II were completed before the coronavirus pandemic, we co-wrote the majority of Part I during the first eighteen months of the pandemic, when it was especially difficult to focus on academic endeavors. We sent each other material each week over the course of that time, and slowly the material took shape, week after week and month after month. In other words, Part I, in addition to focusing on the topic of time, itself became a temporal writing exercise. They are chapters borne out of a time of crisis, both personal and global. Thinking about time across disciplines during such a time of upheaval became a form of comfort, a welcome distraction, and a way of processing the rapid changes happening around us. We’re grateful to have had this opportunity to write about time through these challenging times. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110690774-202

Contents Acknowledgments

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Sarit Kattan Gribetz and Lynn Kaye Time: How and For Whom? 1

Part I: Time: An Interdisciplinary Overture Sarit Kattan Gribetz and Lynn Kaye 1 Thinking Temporally Today

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Sarit Kattan Gribetz and Lynn Kaye 2 What Does it Mean that Time is Culturally Constructed, Historically Contingent, and Socially Differentiated? 21 Sarit Kattan Gribetz and Lynn Kaye 3 Time in Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Perspective

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Part II: Time Across Disciplines: Selected Essays Sarit Kattan Gribetz and Lynn Kaye Introduction to Part II 85 Megan Meuti 4 Circadian and Seasonal Clocks in Insects and Other Organisms Johanna Sellman 5 The Queue as Dystopia

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Hannah Kosstrin 6 Temporal Tactility in Trisha Brown’s Locus (1975) Katherine Elkins 7 Proust’s Novel Time

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Contents

Marti Chaatsmith and Christine Ballengee Morris 8 Time and the Earthworks 139 Melissa Anne-Marie Curley 9 All the Time There Is: Cloth Sack as a Buddhist Metaphor for Time 153 Michal Raizen 10 The Temporalities of Sound in Elia Suleiman’s The Time That Remains 163 Michael Jäckel 11 Media and the Cultivation of Time

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Andréa G. Grottoli 12 Coral Reefs and Climate Change: We Are Running Out of Time List of Contributors Index

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Time: How and For Whom? Imagine two images. In the first, golden fish swirl around a flowering mound of fiery red and mossy green coral, bursting forth under a canopy of shining aquamarine. In the second, a mottled ocean floor is covered by muted dune-colored coral tips stretching into the distance, interrupted by small clusters of lilac and pea green. These two images, which juxtapose vividly colored coral with bleached discolored coral, represent one type of timekeeping: a means of tracking rates of change of ocean temperature and acidity, as well as measuring rates of repair that reflect the resilience of certain species of coral compared to others. These snapshots, both drawn from one of the essays in this book, also capture another dimension of time: a climate scientist’s warning that humanity is “running out of time” to slow or reverse climate change, and that swift action must be taken before it is too late. This urgent sense of time focuses on the future, rather than the past, and highlights the scarcity of time remaining for the future of our planet. It can be difficult to imagine time apart from the ubiquitous clock and the press of work schedules that reign over many people’s days and years. Yet alternative conceptions of time – whether they are significant moments evoked by the melodies of a beloved song, memories of one’s childhood recalled by the taste of an old-fashioned cake, the slow accumulation of knowledge and skills cultivated in students by a committed teacher over the course of a semester, or contemplation of the future by someone suffering through long days in solitary confinement – all constitute the richness of human experiences of time. Beyond human experiences, the earth, too, contains multiple avenues for conceiving of planetary time through its rock formations, vegetation and trees, constellations, and circadian rhythms. Scholars of a variety of disciplines in the arts, humanities, and sciences all conceptualize time in their respective research. Working independently, those who study everything from particles to full organisms, to complex systems both theoretical and physical, utilize and construct diverse and distinct understandings of time. Usually, however, such different disciplinary and cultural ideas about time remain embedded in separate realms of inquiry and discourse. Many strides have been made in the study of time across disciplines in the past few decades, but rarely have physicists, philosophers, biologists, mathematicians, literary critics, historians, geologists, climate scientists, filmmakers, theologians, dancers, fashion designers, and others found meaningful ways of exchanging their ideas about time and learning about time from each other. Bringing together these different languages, images, and uses for time across disciplines in ways that are https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110690774-001

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both accessible and compelling to non-specialists has tremendous potential for understanding time – more than any single discipline or culture can convey on its own. This book seeks to understand time. It does so by changing the question from “what is time?” to “who” and “how”: who interprets, defines, or creates time and how do they do it? Apposing methods and questions of scholars of different subjects and from diverse cultures demonstrates that time is not just “relative” to an observer’s physical position, as Einstein described. What time may be depends on who is asking the question and how they engage the topic. The multiple approaches of many disciplines and cultures offer us a chance to grasp time with a unique sense of depth and dimension. This book is divided into two parts. Part I, titled “Time: An Interdisciplinary Overture,” introduces readers to the concept and study of time. The first chapter focuses on the topic of time in the contemporary moment, during the upheavals of the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, and related social crises, and why it matters to think about time today. The second chapter outlines some of the ways in which time is culturally constructed, historically contingent, and socially differentiated, in order to lay the groundwork for an inquiry into time across disciplines, cultures, and eras. The third chapter explores the study of time in disciplinary and interdisciplinary context, demonstrating how time has been conceived in distinct disciplines as well as the intersections between such conceptions of time across disciplines. Each of these chapters is aimed at prompting creative thinking about time that builds on the work of scientists, scholars of the humanities, artists, practitioners, performers, and many others. Part II, titled “Time Across Disciplines: Selected Essays,” collects nine distinct perspectives on time, drawn from different disciplines, cultures, and forms of expression. The essays in Part II are written by experts in particular fields of study, introducing their discipline through a single, accessible example of time in their work. For each chapter in this book, we can imagine dozens more that would shed new light on the diverse meanings of time. The book refuses to advance a static or universal definition of time, nor to claim comprehensiveness, which would be an inexhaustible pursuit. Time is most fully conceived when we examine it from multiple angles, rather than when we try to pin it down. We invite readers of this book to examine their respective conceptions and uses of time in dialogue with other ideas about time. We anticipate that each reader’s understanding of time will shift and develop in different ways as they read this book chapter by chapter. We encourage readers to think about time creatively and personally. Ultimately, we hope that readers will acquire new tools and ways of thinking about time and novel avenues to continue to study time, and, in turn, to join the conversation.

Part I: Time: An Interdisciplinary Overture

Sarit Kattan Gribetz and Lynn Kaye

1 Thinking Temporally Today This book argues that time is culturally constructed, historically contingent, socially differentiated, and disciplinarily specific. In other words, cultural frameworks, historical contexts, social locations, and disciplinary lenses all impact how time is experienced, understood, and described. The basic assumptions that people make about time are neither natural nor universal. Rather, they are products of the societies and communities in which people live and the disciplines that they study. This is true even when such assumptions about time seem natural or biological, bound up with processes such as the rising and setting sun, the phases of the moon, the changing of the seasons, or the aging of our bodies. Units of time such as years, months, weeks, days, and hours, as well as our experiences of these units and of time’s passage more generally, are created or inherited; they are not inevitable. Moreover, the way in which we divide time and how we decide to use our time are not arbitrary; quite the contrary: they reveal our deepest societal and individual contexts and values. How we choose to organize and spend our time is so often a reflection of what we value or of the values of the societies and communities in which we live. The sociologist Norbert Elias, in Time: An Essay (1988), argued similarly that marking time is an expression of society, and thus that time and its measurement mean different things in distinct societies. Building upon but also departing from the work of Elias and other sociologists of time, this volume presents many expressions of time, with versions of time in ancient and modern societies and in different disciplines side by side. The aim is to help the reader recognize the multi-facetedness of time from shifting perspectives, rather than to use social constructions of time to trace human social development. Our interest, in other words, centers on the diversity of expressions of time and what that diversity – cultural, historical, social, disciplinary – can teach us about time and the world. In order to appreciate the diversity of time that emerges when it is understood as dependent upon culture, history, and discipline, we must expand our imaginations. Alan Lightman’s work of speculative fiction, Einstein’s Dreams (1992), helps us in that imaginative project. The book is set in 1905, in Switzerland, during the period in which Albert Einstein worked as a clerk at the patent office and developed his theory of relativity. Lightman’s “Prologue” describes Einstein as a young man, arriving at his office early in the morning and hearing the minutes pass on the ticking clock, his mind carried away with thoughts about how time operates in the universe. The book’s “Interlude” and “Epilogue” similarly depict this confusing period in Einstein’s life, when he was reconceptualizing the fundamental physics of time. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110690774-002

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At the heart of Lightman’s book are thirty short chapters, each a fictional dream that Einstein is imagined to have dreamt during this period of his life. The chapter titles are the day, month, and year of the dream. One dream, dated June 2, 1905, begins with “a mushy, brown peach lifted from the garbage and placed on the table to pinken” (Lightman 2004: 79). We soon learn that in this dream, processes of dissolution and decay move backwards: rather than fruits ripening and then rotting, they begin in the trash and slowly harden, gently placed on the table and then eventually back on a tree. We encounter “a withered woman” so old she can barely move, see, hear, or breath. She is presumably on her death bed. “Gradually, the woman gains strength, eats more, loses the heavy lines in her face” (Lightman 2004: 79–80). She regains her hearing, and slowly ventures out of her house. Her hair turns from grey to brown. Soon, she’s a strong woman, laughing, traveling. Then, she is a young child, and finally a baby. “She crawls. She nurses.” In this same dream, a man who stands at the grave of his friend can look forward to a time when that friend will be healthy and meet him for a drink. This dream is incredibly powerful. It prompts readers to consider that one of the temporal processes that we take for granted – the process of aging, of life proceeding from birth to death – is peculiar even as it feels so natural. This dream unsettles the unidirectionality of time even as it highlights that the world indeed operates thusly. In another dream, dated April 26, 1905, scientists have discovered that time moves more slowly in elevated places. “The effect is miniscule,” we learn, “but it can be measured with extremely sensitive instruments” (Lightman 2004: 22). People therefore choose to live high in the mountains, avoiding low places such as valleys and plains even for short durations, out of fear of aging more quickly. There are even those who build their homes on stilts, to maximize their height. “Height has become status,” Lightman shares (2004: 23). People only descend these heights for urgent matters, always hurrying. In fact, in our world, gravitational time dilation means that time moves faster the further one is from earth’s surface, the opposite of the scenario described by Lightman in this dream. The underlying principle is quite similar, however: time passes at different rates depending on one’s relative elevation. This phenomenon is real, but so slight that it is not perceptible to humans; the dream’s extreme vividness underscores an aspect of our temporal universe that we might otherwise miss. A third dream, from April 24, 1905, introduces the idea of two times existing simultaneously: mechanical time and body time. In this world, mechanical time is “as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth . . . unyielding, predetermined” (Lightman 2004: 18). It depends on clocks of various sorts to organize all aspects of the day, from the time of waking and sleeping to everything in between. Body time, on the other, is flexible, “like a bluefish in a bay” (Lightman 2004: 18), driven by the biological needs of each individual. Some

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people who live in this world do not believe that mechanical time exists, ignoring the clock towers and their chimes, wearing watches as ornaments rather than timekeepers. Their heartbeat and their hunger dictate their moods and schedules; they eat lunch when they are hungry. Others, though, live by mechanical time, ignoring their bodies. They wake at the same hour each morning and they eat lunch at noon and supper at six, regardless of their hunger. This dream recalls the ancient Roman playwright Plautus’ remarks about a person whose belly was his sundial until he learned how to use an actual sundial, after which it was this new clock technology, rather than the physical sensation of hunger, that dictated when he ought to eat (Plautus 2013: 433; Ker 2009). By crafting two groups of people who relate to time in such radically divergent ways, one according to mechanical time and the other according to body time, Lightman highlights two different aspects of time that co-exist in a single society, such as our own, that uses technology to tell time. The asynchrony between the hour on the clock and the time of one’s body can sometimes be quite stark. In each of Einstein’s “dreams,” a different world is illustrated through its temporality. Dreams themselves exist in an alternative temporality; when a person sleeps, their consciousness is altered. Dreams represent alternative realities (not just alternative times, though the two are related), often giving form to fears and fantasies. Dreams, in other words, blur time and reality at once. In Lightman’s novel, Einstein imagines new temporal possibilities – alternate temporal realities – in his dreams. These dreams thus play with the blurring of time in the mind and time in the world, prompting us to conceive alternative conceptions of time and to sit with the reality that the world has always contained more than a single notion or practice of time within it. Einstein’s historical and cultural context is crucial for understanding his work in the field of physics. Time’s relativity – the idea that there can be conflicting times in different places, and that swift movement across space accentuates such relativity – was gaining steam in the late nineteenth century. Einstein reconceptualized the nature of time during an era in which practices of timekeeping were radically changing: electric motor trams, new clock systems, the telegraph, faster trains, and steam boats all altered experiences of time on a daily basis (Radiolab 2009). Einstein’s understanding of time’s relativity made time inextricable from motion in space and the perspective of the observer. While the seventeenthcentury Isaac Newton proposed an idea of absolute time, which passes at the same pace anywhere people measure time, Einstein’s approach connected space, motion and time. This made time relative, while light’s speed was constant everywhere. As ever-quicker technologies of travel, such as trains, and transmission of information, such as the telegraph, made it possible to pass people and information across distant spaces at greater speed, the synchronization of time across

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spatial expanses became necessary. The fact that time was local and relative became far more apparent and problematic when train schedules – and in turn local time – required standardization across vast territories in order to operate properly. Time also became a matter of debate and controversy in this period. Local communities resisted standardization, committed at first to maintaining temporal autonomy. In these ways, Einstein’s historical period was not so dissimilar from our own era of radical temporal shifts during the digital age of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries, which has been characterized not only by acceleration but also by heightened consciousness about time and its construction (Barnett 1999; Landes 2000; Wajcman 2015; Gribetz and Kaye 2019). Lightman’s invention of Einstein’s dreams are helpful because they further unsettle our basic assumptions about time, just as Einstein’s theory did a century ago.

Covid, Climate, and Times of Crisis We began writing this chapter in 2019, in a world very different from the one in which we later found ourselves as we finished the book. That world, pre-Covid-19 pandemic, was one in which the cultural and historical constructedness of time was not as obvious to most. How many people had contemplated, for example, the fact that the seven-day week was not the way that most people have organized their time throughout history, that dividing the day into twelve standard hours is a relatively recent phenomenon, or more generally that every dimension of time, from its linearity or circularity to its seemingly forward progression to it intangibility, is socially constructed or filtered through cultural experiences? In the early months of 2020, as cities shut down, routines were uprooted, and so many people began counting in cycles of daily new virus cases, weekly testing averages, and two-week quarantines, we became urgently aware of how even long-held conceptions of time can rapidly change, especially in times of crisis, and that time itself is an ever-evolving social construction. The pandemic made everyone an expert in time. Endless charts and graphs, both retrospective and predictive, traced the spread of the virus by day, week, and month. Still, no one knew how long the pandemic would last and when it would be safe to venture outdoors and to physically interact with others. Mitigation efforts also focused on time: the logic of “flattening the curve” was predicated on the idea that spreading infection over a longer stretch of time would allow hospitals to handle the numbers of people requiring emergency medical attention. During these early pandemic months, no one needed to be persuaded that time is culturally constructed and historically contingent – nor that time matters

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for who we are and how we live, nor that to understand any society, past or present, we must examine that society’s conceptions and organizations of time. The time of a pandemic had fundamentally shifted long-held notions of time, and in so doing also highlighted the arbitrariness of definitions of time. In its first pandemic issue of March 20, 2020, The New Yorker magazine’s cover featured Eric Drooker’s depiction of Grand Central Terminal. This transportation hub usually represents the rushed schedules of commuters running to catch trains and arrive at work on time; it is a symbol of New York City’s quick tempo and the concentration of people that create this fast urban pace as they gather in crowded spaces. In Drooker’s image, however, the terminal now stands empty, its iconic clock at its center and a lone figure sweeping up in the foreground. A famous clock that usually gestures towards the frantic pace of urban life and represents a modern history of temporal acceleration and standardization associated with the railway system is now evoked by Drooker to communicate the opposite situation – the vigilance needed to decelerate the spread of a deadly disease, especially in one of the world’s pandemic epicenters. If one looks closely at the image, one also notices the constellations painted on the ceiling of the station, and the simultaneously bright sun shining through its windows, illuminating the empty station, perhaps allusions to the alternate temporalities of the heavenly bodies and the passage of time in nature, regardless of the time on a clock. The figure with the broom likewise reminds us that certain people needed to keep working to ensure the maintenance of the city, even as so many institutions shut down. The image, prominently placed on the cover of a city periodical (a publication that itself serves as a keeper of weekly time), beautifully captured the sense of uncertainty and fear, especially in New York, which was facing a particularly dramatic and dire situation, as we all ventured into an unprecedented time. In the first year of the pandemic, it became commonplace in the U.S. to describe the pandemic as a period “without time,” in which otherwise unremarkable incidents take on portentous significance. The edition dated November 21, 2020 of The Boston Globe ran a story on the front page of its Metro section about the removal, for scheduled replacement, of Boston’s Custom House Tower’s clock hands (Annear 2020). The article, titled “A Fitting Symbol for These Strange Times,” no doubt would have remained unwritten, or relegated to a brief note, in another year. Instead, the article began as follows: “The pandemic has warped our sense of time, at once blurring the days together and slowing them to a weary slog.” Within the established media’s focus on Covid-19 slowing or otherwise negatively changing time, the clock’s hands’ disappearance represented, for the author of this news article, an external, concrete confirmation of a shared and frequently observed interpretation of pandemic time.

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At the conclusion of the year, the Oxford English Dictionary announced that one of its “Words of 2020” was Blursday, which refers to how difficult it is to distinguish between days of the week during pandemic lockdown. “Monday,” “Tuesday,” and “Wednesday” have all become “Blursday.” This new word highlights how central altered experiences and conceptions of time were to experiences of the pandemic – and to the way we live our lives and order our societies more generally. A segment from May 18, 2020 on National Public Radio’s program “Short Wave,” began with “the most important question of the morning . . . What day is it?” When the host announces that the day is Monday, we hear: “That settles it. It’s Monday, another day in the pandemic time warp. Keeping track of time is something a lot of us are struggling with right now . . . instead of having Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, they [calendars now] just have day, day, day, day, day.” Eli Grober’s satirical article in McSweeney’s, titled “Here’s How Time Works Now” (2020) developed this theme in a humorous direction as well. It begins as follows: Here at Time, we’ve made a few changes you may already be experiencing that we think you should know about. Please see below. A Minute. A minute used to be sixty second long. We thought this could be spiced up. A minute can now either be one hour, or it can take 3.5 seconds. We hope you enjoy this new feature. A Day. You may remember that a day used to take place over the course of 24 hours. We felt this was too much. A day is now over the moment you first ask yourself, ‘What time is it?’ It does not matter what time it actually is when you do this. As soon as you ask or think, ‘What time is it’ for the first time that day, even if it is still ten in the morning, it will suddenly be eight at night.

Grober’s satirical article continues to describe what has happened to weeks, weekends, months, and years. In those early pandemic days, we recall friends remarking that the situation was changing so quickly that “an hour felt like a day, a day felt like a week, a week felt like a year.” People began remembering the near past as though it was the distant past – “do you remember last week, which feels like a lifetime ago?” The early months of the pandemic were thus characterized by coexisting yet opposing temporalities. On the one hand, new rules and restrictions were imposed at a rapid pace, creating a time of withdrawal for most sectors of the population as schools and university campuses, restaurants and retail businesses, airports, and busy transportation systems emptied and ground to a halt. On the other hand, in the months thereafter, those confined to their homes for quarantines and lockdowns saw each day resemble the day before, weeks and weekends blended together, and the future felt like an infinite repetition of the slowness of the present. Not everyone’s time during the pandemic operated on the same tempo, however. For those who lost relatives and friends (often many in a single family or community), became ill (frequently for weeks or months – and some now years), found themselves unemployed or unhoused, or faced other tragedies, the pandemic, and

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often a particular moment or period within the span of the pandemic, constituted a temporal rupture in which what came “before” distinguished itself in clear ways from what came “after.” Especially because death became a solitary experience, with even the closest of relatives unable to physically accompany a person in their dying moments and thereafter grieving alone in isolation, such challenging life events became traumas, the pandemic starkly bifurcating the past and the present/ future. While the temporal rhythms of those with the luxury or necessity to stay home slowed down, and the time of those facing losses and mourning loved ones was thrown into upheaval, the frenzy of those who worked in hospitals and other essential services increased as they worked ceaselessly, to physical and emotional exhaustion, to save lives. As hospitals filled, efforts to locate enough ventilators and personal protective equipment for the sick and for those caring for them took on extreme urgency. The temporal rhythms of hospitals (shifts, schedules, breaks, rounds), which, as Eviatar Zerubavel (1979, 1981) demonstrated in his pioneering work on the sociology of time, are so integral to the culture and practice of health care, needed to be reimagined. Health care workers reported the fast pace of care and death as well as the difficult effects this had on their own wellbeing. Óscar Caicho Caicedo, an I.C.U. nurse in Guayaquil, Ecuador, explained: I would return home after doing 24-hour shifts and it was difficult to fall asleep despite how tired I was. I would spend the night thinking of people crying for help . . . We would leave the patients to get their prescriptions and, when we came back, they had passed away. We didn’t even have time to go to the bathroom. Some of us decided to wear diapers . . . I lost something every day: opportunities, moments, family, friends, neighbors (Cargill et al. 2020).

Caicedo describes the upending of schedules and sleep-wake cycles: long shifts in the hospital followed by sleepless nights at home reliving the suffering he witnessed, hospital time spilling into the privacy of the domestic sphere. He also highlights the swiftness with which patients died, in the blink of an eye, and the lack of any free time, even to care for his bodily needs. In Clover, South Carolina, another I.C.U. nurse, Jay Quinn, echoed Caicedo’s reflections of how hectic work at the hospital was and the inability to keep up with caring for those at death’s door: “Simultaneous codes [related to hospital protocols and emergencies] happening is often the norm.” Felino Taruc, a flight nurse from El Paso, Texas, also commented on the ceaseless arrival of patients at the hospitals. He shared that “sometimes it feels like it will slow down but then a new surge will hit, and we are overwhelmed again.” Anna Fong, an E.R. physician in Memphis, Tennessee captured the temporal acceleration of hospital rhythms

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well in her observation that “Our twice-a-day prayer over the hospital intercom broadcasts hourly now” (Cargill et al. 2020). In addition to reflecting on the accelerated and continuous crises in hospitals around the world, health care workers also experienced their own version of “blursday,” though days were indistinguishable not because nothing happened, but because of the tremendous and unceasing suffering of the sick and their caregivers: “The virus is the first thing I think about when I wake up and the last thing on my mind when I get into bed, exhausted. This is day after day after day. I’m not the same person I was a few months ago,” Charline Kass, an I.C.U. doctor, in Antofagasta, Chile confessed. Some described their experiences as going back in time. Kimberly Brown, an E.R. doctor in Memphis, Tennessee, said that “Covid-19 has shaken me to my core. I feel like an intern again. My days off have been filled with paralyzing anxiety” (Cargill et al. 2020). Others looked ahead to how this pandemic experience will impact the future. Several health care workers noted, for example, that the experience will have permanent effects on them. Echoing the sentiments of Dr. Kass, who mentioned that her days were indistinguishable but that she herself was markedly changed, Federica Brena, an oncologist working in one of the earliest Covid epicenters in Bergamo, Italy, confided that “On April 27, I returned to work [after having coronavirus]. But I am never going to be the same doctor I was before . . . This situation changed us all in an irreversible way.” Others thought about future communal effects. Vanda Ortega Witoto, a nursing technician from Parque das Tribos in Manaus, Brazil articulated the hope that the pandemic might precipitate more lasting positive changes for communities whose experiences of the pandemic highlighted long-standing inequalities and systems of oppression ignored for too long: “Many people want everything to go back to ‘normal.’ I don’t want to go back to what is ‘normal’ here for Indigenous lives” (Cargill et al. 2020). Beyond those in the health-care sector, other workers whose in-person duties required them to leave home experienced different temporal rhythms as well. In the United States, disparities were largely determined by factors of race and socio-economic status, as wealthier people were those more likely to have higherpaying jobs that allowed for remote work or to have the financial cushion to afford to take a break, while those without financial resources, especially those whose work entailed in-person service such as transportation, food, and nursing (deemed “essential” but usually not compensated accordingly), were unable to slow down. Zadie Smith captures these disparities in her collection of essays, Intimations: Six Essay, published during the pandemic (2020: 14–15):

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the supposed democratic nature of plague – the way in which it can strike all registered voters equally – turns out to be somewhat overstated. A plague it is, but American hierarchies, hundreds of years in the making, are not so easily overturned . . . Black and Latino people are now dying at twice the rate of white and Asian people. More poor people are dying than rich . . . The virus map of the New York boroughs turns redder along precisely the same lines as it would if the relative shade of crimson counted not infection and death but income brackets and middle school ratings.

The slower tempo afforded the privileged saved certain lives, often at the expense of others. The work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, artist-in-residence of the New York City Department of Sanitation, entitled, “For ⟶ forever . . .” recognizes the continued work and distinct pandemic time of New York City’s transportation workers, sanitation workers, and other essential workers commuting on the transit system, who in Ukeles’s words, “keep the city alive” (Greenberger 2020). In a series of public video installations and signs exhibited in 2020–2021 in Times Square, across the subway system, and on the façade of the Queens Museum of Art, a handwritten note appears across a digital screen, which cycles through bright red, orange, and fluorescent greens, the colors of workers’ safety vests. It read: “Dear Service Worker, ‘Thank you for keeping NYC alive!’ For ⟶ forever . . .” In the piece, Ukeles challenges prevalent conceptions of pandemic time as a time of stopping. As she explained in an interview, “subway workers, bus drivers, sanitation workers, they were out there, the work had become dangerous, but they were out there, they kept coming back to work . . . .” This contemporary pandemic thank you note echoed the artist’s 1978–1980 conceptual work, “Touch Sanitation,” in which she shook the hand of every one of the 8,500 sanitation workers of New York City. As Ukeles shook hands, she said, “Thank you for keeping New York City alive.” In all of her work, Ukeles challenges the distinction between maintenance activities, such as cleaning and caregiving, and art, arguing that many more people should be eligible to make art and be recognized for the beauty of their efforts. Art, in this view, is not just about the exceptional or the standout, but also about the quotidian and the continual. “You want culture, this is the beginning of culture: moving garbage, keeping streets open, moving the flow of material from coming in, being created, being used,” Ukeles writes. “These are fabulous things” (Tauer 2020). Her new pandemic work, “For ⟶ forever . . .” makes yet another temporal argument. Highlighting the continuity of public service and maintenance work – work that has been done continuously from 1979 until 2021 – disrupts the accepted notion of the pandemic as an exceptional time (whether a slower or faster pace): for many essential workers, life’s temporal rhythms continued just as before, even in the face of danger and death.

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Figure 1: Merle Laderman Ukeles, “For ⟶ forever . . .” Queens Museum of Art, New York. Photo of Ukeles’s installation, seen from a moving car on the highway (August 2021) Credit: Sarit Kattan Gribetz.

The impulse to process the pandemic through art was not only directed at recognizing the important work of essential workers but also at preserving the strange present for the future. At the end of 2020, the Museum of London in the United Kingdom and the Museum of Dreams in Ontario, Canada, released a public call at the end of 2020 for people to send them their “Covid-19 dreams” for preservation, one of many archival projects aimed at capturing and cataloging the experience of living during uncertain and frightening times. Whereas in Einstein’s Dreams Lightman prompts readers to imagine alternative temporalities, the Covid-19 dream project asked people to preserve their unconscious imaginings in a sort of time capsule, so that they might be accessed in the future. Collecting dreams in a communal and collaborative context is an innovative idea, especially for a museum. But this particular project is also suggestive of the cultural depiction of pandemic time as an altered reality, in which, as many magazine and media outlets have reported, people are dreaming more powerfully than before – and as this time of upheaval itself feels like a dream (or a nightmare). Such dream-collection projects suggest a mingling of dream and awake time, as on the one hand dream time becomes more real, and on the other hand pandemic life for many people feels unreal. The exhibition also evokes a quote from Psalm 126:1 about the exiles of Zion returning to their

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homeland. According to this biblical passage, they are “like dreamers,” barely able to fathom their new reality as they live through crisis and resolution. The Museum of London’s project was but one of many concurrent efforts around the world to document the ephemera and the individual experiences of this awful pandemic as it happened in “real time” (a term that gained popularity in the second half of the twentieth century). Libraries, archives, museums, universities, and other cultural organizations around the world issued calls for submissions for their archiving projects (Breger 2020). Some of these efforts stemmed from disappointment with a perceived relative lack of documentation of the pandemic of 1918, and lessons that should have been learned from the previous century; archivists seized the Covid-19 moment to redress this perceived past oversight and make it right this time. As projects of preservation, these archives are not only past-oriented but also future-oriented, making past experiences accessible for an imagined future in which they will be useful and desired. Consider, for example, how Harvard University framed its archiving project: “Years from now, historians, future students and scholars, doctors and scientists, public policy and health experts, Harvard administrators, and others will want to understand and learn about how our community reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic, and how we were able to respond, both at Harvard and, with others, in helping to support the broader world” (Harvard University Libraries 2021). The Library of Congress began collecting photographs of pandemic life in the United States in collaboration with the photo-sharing site Flickr, labeling their efforts “‘rapid response’ collecting” (Maloney 2020). The University of Connecticut’s “Pandemic Journaling Project” encouraged ordinary people to journal about their experiences in these “unprecedented times,” advertising that joining the journaling project “will only take as long as you want to spend – as little as 15 minutes a week.” Each week, participants received an email or text message with a link to a few questions about the pandemic’s effects on their lives; they could write, record, or send photos in response, which are saved in the project’s archive, building a history of the pandemic as it unfolded. In New York, the first epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and Fordham University’s Bronx African American History Project both began collecting first-person narratives about the pandemic only a few weeks after the pandemic began. Perhaps, like the United States Federal Government’s initial name for investments in vaccine development, “Operation Warp Speed,” there was a desire to leave the current time in the past as quickly as possible, creating history in the present tense. History typically begins its work of defining a corpus or archive and examining it only once some significant amount of time has passed (despite the fact that the first uses of the term “historia” in ancient Greek refer to the activity of

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“inquiring into” or “examining” both the present and the past, and do not limit the practice of history to the past). Perhaps treating the current experience of pandemic restrictions, fears, illness, and death as a historical archival project allowed participants some distance from the experiences and an opportunity to process them. It also gave people something to do with their time. Rather than dwelling or holding onto the trauma, which is unwanted and unresolved, making it history may have provided a modicum of control and autonomy in the form of curation and collection during a time of danger and limitation. It became a way of spending time, coping with these times, and preserving the diverse experiences of this time. The pandemic impacted different groups of people in diverse ways. But people were not the only ones affected by the pandemic’s realities and restrictions. Within days of city-wide lockdowns, newspaper headlines began reporting that, as cars and pedestrians no longer occupied city streets, local wildlife began emerging (BBC News 2021). New Yorkers heard the chirping of birds; dolphins swam in the Bosphorus in Istanbul; wild boars crossed formerly busy streets in Haifa; and cougars wandered around Santiago. For a few months, there was hope that, by humans slowing down and ceasing activity, time could be reversed, and with it, the detrimental effects of climate change. The Covid-19 pandemic encouraged idealistic notions of reversing climate change through the cessation of human mobility and fossil fuel consumption on a massive scale. Crisis time, as a time of heightened experience, offers a chance to reflect on life before the crisis with some distance and to consider more critically and optimistically what might follow it. This reflectiveness about the past and future was also true during World War II, when author Dorothy L. Sayers (1947) described how the culture of consumption and waste had characterized British society, while the time of war re-valued work and time through a lens of conservation and scarcity. Her descriptions of the wasteful economy of consumption resonate deeply today: Can you remember – it is already getting difficult to remember – what things were like before the war? The stockings we bought cheap and threw away to save the trouble of mending? The cars we scrapped every year to keep up with the latest fashion in engine design and streamlining? . . . The empty bottles that even the dustman scorned to collect, because the manufacturers found it cheaper to make new ones than to clean the old? The mountains of empty tins that nobody found it worthwhile to salvage, rusting and stinking on the refuse dumps? The food that was burnt or buried because it did not pay to distribute it? . . . The scattered hairpins and smashed crockery, the cheap knickknacks of steel and wood and rubber and glass and tin that we bought to fill in an odd half hour at Woolworth’s and forgot as soon as we had bought them? The advertisements imploring and exhorting and cajoling and menacing and bullying us to glut ourselves with things we did not want, in the name of snobbery and idleness and sex appeal? . . . Do you realize how we have had to alter our

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whole scale of values, now that we are no longer being urged to consume but to conserve? (Sayers 1947: 48–49).

Sayers concludes her reflection as follows: “Sooner or later the moment will come when we have to make a decision about this. At the moment, we are not making it – don’t let us flatter ourselves that we are. It is being made for us. And don’t let us imagine that a wartime economy has stopped waste. It has not. It has only transferred it elsewhere” (Sayers 1947: 50). For Sayers, the time of war was a time of suspension: it did not so much change attitudes towards consumption and conservation but presented an opportunity for reevaluation of values. The challenge, she suggests, presents itself after war, when life returns to a new, if different, normal. Does one return to the habits and values of the pre-war period, or choose new directions? Sayers warns her contemporaries not to wish for a return to prewar times: “I am also frightened by the phrase ‘after the war’ – it is so often pronounced in a tone that suggests: ‘after the war, we want to relax, and go back, and live as we did before’” (Sayers 1947: 51). She suggests, instead, that we ought to recognize war-time as inherently a time of crisis and suspension of what seems natural and normal, and to re-start on better footing thereafter. Sayers sees in wartime an opportunity to gain distance from the controlling ideology of consumption and growth, and to embrace the value of conservation and value. Sayers urges her readers not to abandon these new insights and values when the crisis time is over but to move into a new time, changed. During the Covid-19 pandemic, many people likewise expressed wishes for a return to time before the pandemic, even as they acknowledged that certain changes that the pandemic precipitated, if adopted long-term, would benefit the environment and society and ensure a more certain future. An unreflective return to pre-pandemic consumption, on the other hand, would be perilous for conservation and climate change. The momentary pause in travel or commerce will not suffice. The associated gains made in lower carbon dioxide emissions will prove temporary if they are not followed by permanent, sustainably lowered energy emissions or will be eclipsed by competing commitments, such as capitalism and growth, spurring pre-pandemic levels of production and travel. The challenge, climate scientists argue, is to take seriously the urgency of climate change to create long-term habits informed by pandemic time for a post-pandemic future. The fear of returning to a “before” time without critically examining the shortcomings of the past and committing to permanent changes aimed at improving the present and future echoes the fears of Vanda Ortega Witoto, the healthcare worker in Brazil quoted above, who described the inadequate availability of health care in her region before Covid, and fears that the pandemic will not

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radically alter that unsustainable reality. In both cases, returning to the “before” time is hazardous. Covid-19 presented the entire world with a temporal reckoning on multiple fronts. The pandemic simultaneously sped up time, slowed down time, made time stand still, introduced a temporal rupture, and resulted in temporal traumas that will continue to reverberate long into the future. It demanded – and it continues to demand – critical engagement with the past and creative imagination about the near and distant future, even as so many people struggle to survive in and process the present. It has required temporal flexibility and spontaneity, an unfathomable blend of extreme planning and utter extemporaneous improvisation. It highlighted how each society, community, and individual was impacted by different temporal implications and inequalities. It redefined what it means to be alive “now.” This chapter’s reflections on time and the impact of the current moment on our perceptions of time has set the scene for the following chapter, which explores some of the many ways in which all sorts of times are culturally constructed, historically contingent, and socially differentiated, a fact that was just as true, if perhaps less widely recognized, before the pandemic as it is now that the pandemic has brought the relativity and constructedness of time into such clear and stark focus.

Bibliography Annear, Steve. “A Fitting Symbol For These Strange Times.” The Boston Globe, November 21, 2020. Barnett, Jo Ellen. Time’s Pendulum: From Sundials to Atomic Clocks, the Fascinating History of Timekeeping and How Our Discoveries Changed the World. Chestnut Hill: Harvest Books, 1999. BBC News. “Coronavirus: Wild animals enjoy freedom of a quieter world.” April 28, 2020. Accessed February 10, 2021. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-52459487#comments. Breger, Sarah. “Archiving COVID-19 As it Happens.” Moment Magazine, Center for Creative Change, July 12, 2020. Accessed February 18, 2021. https://momentmag.com/archiving-covid-19-as-ithappens/. Bronx African American History Project. “BRONX COVID-19 Oral History Project.” 2020. https://www. thebronxcovid19oralhistoryproject.com. Clinton Cargill et al., eds. “In Harm’s Way: Fighting the Summer Surge.” New York Times, August 1, 2020. Accessed February 3, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/coronavi rus-health-care-workers.html. Drooker, Eric. “Grand Central Terminal.” Cover image. The New Yorker, March, 20, 2020. Elias, Norbert. An Essay on Time. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, (1984) 2007. Greenberger, Alex. “Artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles Pays Homage to Front-Line Workers in New Powerful Coronavirus Piece.” ARTnews, September 8, 2020. Accessed February 3, 2021.

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https://www.artnews.com/art-news/artists/mierle-laderman-ukeles-thanks-workerscoronavirus–1234570124/. Gribetz, Sarit Kattan, and Lynn Kaye. “The Temporal Turn in Ancient Judaism and Jewish Studies.” Currents in Biblical Research 17.3 (2019): 332–395. Grober, Eli. “Here’s How Time Works Now.” McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, May 12, 2020. Accessed February 3, 2021. https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/heres-how-time-works-now. Harvard University Libraries. “COVID-19 Community Archiving Project.” Harvard University Archives. 2021. https://covid19.archives.harvard.edu. Ker, James. “Drinking from the Water Clock: Time and Speech in Imperial Rome.” Arethusa 42 (2009): 279–302. Landes, David S. Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Lightman, Alan P. Einstein’s Dreams. 1st Vintage Contemporaries ed. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 2004. Maloney, Wendi. “How Will We Remember COVID-19?” Library of Congress Blog, The Library of Congress, June 24, 2020. Accessed February 3, 2021. https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2020/06/how-willwe-remember-covid–19/. Museum of London. “Museum of London to collect COVID dreams.” November 26, 2020. https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/news-room/press-releases/museum-london-collect-covid -dreams. National Public Radio. “The Pandemic Time Warp.” Short Wave. Transcript. May 18, 2020. Accessed February 3, 2021. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/857247844. Plautus and Wolfgang de Melo. Stichus. Three-Dollar Day. Truculentus. The Tale of a Traveling-Bag. Fragments. Plautus Volume V, Loeb Classical Library 328. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. Radiolab. “Relative Genius.” Radiolab. WNYC Studios. June 28, 2019. Sayers, Dorothy L. Creed or Chaos? And Other Essays in Popular Theology. London: Methuen, 1947. Smith, Zadie. Intimations: Six Essays. New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2020. Tauer, Kristen. “Artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles Has a Message for Public Service Workers.” WWD, September 15, 2020. Accessed January 6, 2021. https://wwd.com/eye/lifestyle/artist-mierleladerman-ukeles-for-forever-public-service-workers-mta-times-square-queensmuseum–1234581916/. Ukeles, Mierle Laderman. “For ⟶ forever . . .” Video Installation. New York, 2020. University of Connecticut. “The Pandemic Journaling Project.” Accessed August 30, 2021. https://pan demic-journaling-project.chip.uconn.edu/# Wajcman, Judy. Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. “YIVO Launches New Archival Initiative to Gather Stories of Jewish Life during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” April 8, 2020. https://www.yivo.org/Story-Release. Press release. Zerubavel, Eviatar. Patterns of Time in Hospital Life: A Sociological Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Zerubavel, Eviatar. Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

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2 What Does it Mean that Time is Culturally Constructed, Historically Contingent, and Socially Differentiated? Reflecting on coronavirus and climate change highlights how much about time we took for granted, which then so radically changed in a short span of time. In the first half of this chapter, we demonstrate the ways in which many aspects of time have always been culturally constructed and historically contingent – in the distant past and in the present. We begin with chronology, calendars, and clocks. We then turn to examples of biological time, including menstruation and pregnancy, before examining the idea of punctuality – that is, the idea of being “on time.” In all of these cases, disparate as they are, we demonstrate the ways in which each dimension of time, even those seemingly “natural,” “biological,” or “universal,” are culturally constructed and historically contingent. In the second half of this chapter, we turn to instances that provide especially clear examples of the social differentiation of time. Characterizing time as culturally, historically specific, and socially differentiated – as opposed to natural, universal, or absolute – might stem, disciplinarily, from a humanistic impulse. But appreciating the multiplicity of time is essential to any individual study of time, whether in the arts, sciences, or humanities. In literary criticism, “narratology,” a structural analysis of narrative, defined many different perspectives that are possible within a novel. Each perspective may have a different time, including the time of events in the plot, the temporal perspective of the narrator, the time it takes a reader to read the narrative, and the possibilities for a novelist to connect such disparate times through their stylistic choices. In Russian Formalism, a movement in early twentieth-century literary criticism, scholars distinguished between “fabula” and “syuzhet,” in which the fabula describes the chronological order of plot events, while syuzhet describes the order in which such events are presented in a literary work. This distinction allows readers to attend to the representation of plot events as an intentional construction, as well as to see the creative possibilities that a novelist creates in the gaps, digressions, and unusual orders constituting the syuzhet. A similar idea undergirds ancient rabbinic biblical interpretation, in which the phrases “‘al haseder” (in order) and “miqra mesoras” (transposed) identify unusual word order in biblical sentences, which affect semantic interpretation. The expression “there is no earlier and later in the Torah” explains the Hebrew Bible’s non-chronological narrative progression, in which events that transpired https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110690774-003

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chronologically earlier are mentioned in the text only after events that occurred chronologically later. Each temporal anomaly in the text, whether the ordering of words or events, is viewed as a deliberate literary decision used to highlight certain themes and values. Interpreters of Homer in late antiquity developed some similar approaches to textual interpretation; they grouped together examples of words and events they deemed out of order under a category they called “hyperbaton” (Paz 2014: 278–279). The Qur’an, too, is not ordered according to the chronology of the narrative but rather according to the length of each sura, such that when one reads the Qur’an one jumps around temporally in the life of the Prophet. That is not to say, however, that chronology is absent from the composition of the Qur’an or from the ways in which it is read and interpreted. Each sura is characterized by its place of revelation; the Meccan and Medinan suras thus acquire a chronological relationship to one another, such that the time of revelation is an essential component of the reading of the text even as it is not its ordering principle. Beyond literary perspectives that assume temporal multiplicity, however, why might it be beneficial to attend to time as culturally, historically, and socially specific? Everyone who works within a particular academic discipline, or lives within a specific culture, makes certain assumptions about time that are barely visible because, as with so many other dimensions of life, they are taken for granted. Zerubavel demonstrates in Taken for Granted: The Remarkable Power of the Unremarkable (2019) that it is especially difficult to recognize the “unmarked” aspects of life within any given culture or community, sub-culture, academic discipline, or daily life. Zerubavel notes that in the English language the cultural norm is unmarked linguistically, while the deviation from the norm is usually marked. This observation allows Zerubavel to clearly demonstrate what is taken for granted. For instance, the English expression “male nurse” exists while “female nurse” does not, because today nurses are generally assumed to be female; the gender of female nurses is left unmarked in the word “nurse.” Recognizing what is unmarked in a language sensitizes us to often invisible cultural assumptions. The same is true in the study of time. To gain perspective outside of one’s immediate life experiences or intellectual interests, it is necessary to consider time from alternative perspectives, and to study the ways in which one’s conceptions of time are themselves products of historical, cultural, and social circumstance. Doing so not only teaches us to think about time in different ways; more fundamentally, it makes it possible for us to recognize our own disciplinary or cultural assumptions about time, which are so often rendered invisible, and in turn to understand that they too are culturally specific and historically conditioned.

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Time is Culturally Constructed and Historically Contingent Chronologies, Calendars, and Clocks We begin our examination of the contingency of time with timekeeping methods and technologies, which are often taken for granted. Chronology, from the Greek words “chronos” (time) and “logia” (science), is the arrangement of events or dates in the order in which they occur. Societies, empires, and nations use chronological systems to express values and consolidate identities through dating events. Chronology assumes that time is a readily available concept, in which events progress from one to the next in a single correct order. Yet different societies have years of varying lengths that begin at distinct dates; even societies that use the same system of years, however, can choose to begin counting their years at different starting points. In other words, there is no single, standard world chronology, and notions of how to reckon years, and the layers of meaning attached to those years, have differed from place to place. The Roman Empire, for example, used the imagined date of the mythical founding of the city of Rome (dated to April 21, 753 BCE) as one starting point for chronological purposes (they employed other chronological schemes as well). The Major Armenian Era, which originated in the sixth century CE, began on July 11, 552 CE and relied on a mobile calendar (in which year lengths were not fixed), while the Minor Armenian Era, an innovation of the eleventh century, based itself on a fixed calendar, even as the date for the start of the year changed several times and new fixed calendars, also identified as Minor Eras, were introduced. Debates about whether the Julian calendar, and eventually the Gregorian calendar, each with their own chronological systems, should be adopted unfolded throughout the medieval and early modern periods (Tumanian 1974). In the early medieval period, European Christians used Jesus’ assumed date of birth (anno domini, “the year of our Lord”) as the start of a new chronological system. Usually attributed to the eighth-century English monk Bede, that chronological scale remains in use today in many parts of the world (Nothaft 2012). Around the same time, Jewish texts adopted a chronological system that began at the supposed creation of the world (Carlebach 2011: 89). Though some earlier rabbinic works, including Seder Olam, already demonstrated interest in chronology, they do not rely on creation as their main chronological anchor. Seder Olam, for instance, reckons the years between the creation of “first Adam” and the flood in Genesis, but “first Adam” does not recur as a regular chronological touchpoint for subsequent events in Jewish history, and the composition does not propound an overall, general

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chronology (Milikowsky 2014: 4–5). Similarly, Islamic sources in the medieval period and thereafter used Mohammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina – the hijra era – as a Muslim chronological system, alongside other chronological and historiographic tools such as sequential lists of caliphs, regnal years, or chains of transmission (“isnad”) (Donner 2021). These Jewish and Islamic chronological systems remain in use today, too, such that the Christian year 2021 corresponds to the years 5781–5782 in the standard Jewish calendar and 1442–1443 in the standard Islamic calendar. Some chronological schemes are anchored in revolutionary moments. Such calendars are, in Walter Benjamin’s words, “historical time-lapse cameras.” The start of each new year, as well as all of the holidays in the new calendar, recall the revolution to those who use the calendar and mark its times. The revolution’s time reappears in subsequent years as images in a series of snapshots. “Calendars do not measure time as clocks do; they are monuments of a historical consciousness,” Benjamin argued (Benjamin 2019: 206). After the French Revolution, for example, France began calculating years from the day when the Republic had been declared, sharply distinguishing the new republic from the prior culture (this chronology was abandoned a few years after its development) (Zerubavel 1977). During World War II, Japan revived an ancient chronological system that began with the founding of the Empire of Japan two thousand six hundred years earlier, connecting a modern political order with an illustrious past (Ruoff 2010). More recently, Cesare Emiliani proposed the adoption of the Holocene calendar, which adds 10,000 years to the current Christian calendar, such that the year 2021 CE would be 12021 HE. Adding 10,000 years reorients the chronological system away from the birth of Christ towards the start of the geological epoch titled the “Holocene,” which marks the Neolithic Revolution when humans transitioned from hunter-gatherers to agricultural settlements, and thus a more universal referent than the current Christian one. It also highlights the longer history of humanity, and seeks to change the timescale with which we typically operate. It is quite clear that chronologies – how we date events and count years – are historically and culturally embedded, rather than natural parts of the world. But the idea of counting years progressively, from a single starting point, and moving forward in time year after year, is itself neither an objective nor a natural practice, but rather a culturally constructed tradition. Some chronological systems coordinate and synchronize important events (e.g., reigns of kings, periods of drought, onsets of wars) with one another without imagining them solely by the number of years that have elapsed from a single defining point in time. Ancient Near Eastern and Classical Greek sources, including Mesopotamian king lists and biblical texts, use forms of relative dating, re-counting years with each new ruler, flood, or other significant event. A Sumerian King List, for example, begins by listing the kingship

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of Alulim as lasting 28,800 years, after which Alalgar ruled for 36,000 years, and so on, matching events to the periods of each king. The first chapter of the biblical book of Jeremiah notes a prophecy that was delivered to Jeremiah during “the days of King Josiah son of Amon of Judah, in the thirteenth year of his reign, and throughout the days of King Jehoiakim son of Josiah of Judah, and until the end of the eleventh year of King Zedekiah son of Josiah of Judah” (JPS). Even in contexts in which absolute chronologies existed, other, more relative, ways of counting time were also employed. One widespread method of Roman chronology, for instance, used the rule of Roman consuls rather than numbered years (Feeney 2007). Early Islamic chronology used various relative chronological systems before the hijra system was widely adopted (Donner 2021). In other words, there was not always nor exclusively a notion of “universal” time or “abstract” chronology. Paul Kosmin identifies the Seleucid empire, which ruled much of the Near East during the Hellenistic period, as the origin of the notion of counting years of an empire abstractly, rather than in relation to the beginning and end of a monarch’s reign (Kosmin 2018). While, as Kosmin points out, it is difficult in the current age to imagine not counting years from a particular starting point, such as the year of Jesus of Nazareth’s birth, “this Seleucid Era was the world’s first continuous tally of counted years and the unheralded model for all subsequent era systems, including the Common Era” (Kosmin 2018: 22). The notion of a starting point for the Seleucid Empire was itself a historical fiction, tidying what had been a messy historical process in order to produce a “Year One” in retrospect, as is so often the case with such chronological systems. Projecting unwavering dominance and political stability (precisely at a time of instability), this new way of counting years was not affected by changing monarchs (Kosmin 2018: 23–26). In turn, Kosmin argues, minority or subjugated groups within the empire created counter-times that imagined their own origins and projected time’s end, obliquely constituting a rebellion against the empire’s claim of continuous time (Kosmin 2018: 1, 7–8). Though today the Seleucid era is no longer used as a point for reckoning years, the idea of picking a momentous event in the past and counting years abstractly from that point of time indefinitely forward was a temporal revolution borne out of particular geographical, political, and cultural circumstances, and remains, according to Kosmin, a temporal legacy of the Seleucid Empire. Like chronologies, calendars, too, are cultural products. They divide an expanse of time into discrete years, and they often subdivide years further into months and days. Calendars are often based on astronomical observations or calculations of the movement of one or more of the heavenly bodies – the earth’s rotation around the sun and the subsequent seasons and/or the waxing and waning

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of the moon onto a series of months. Solar calendars chart years based on the seasons (and the earth’s rotation around the sun) and lunar calendars mark the passage of some number of lunar cycles, while luni-solar calendars combine aspects of both. Calendars are not, however, simply schedules of such astronomical phenomena, given that the astronomical data does not fit seamlessly together and must be creatively mapped onto conceptions of years, months, and days. Any of these calendars must also determine when each year begins (which, as we saw above, can be a significant cultural or religious moment), the length of months, the number of months in a year, and whether there are intercalary days or months (commonly referred to as “leap” days or months) to manage the fact that the earth’s path around the sun does not equal a round number of days. Each of these factors is culturally constructed, while also molding the culture of those who use the calendar. Moreover, calendars do not only consist of a series of undifferentiated days and months; they also contain individual days or periods of religious, civic, financial, and legal significance. Among religious traditions, calendars may be holding vessels for fast days, feast days, and other days of agricultural, mythological, or historical importance or obligation. In rabbinic Judaism, for example, the calendar year contains a series of fasts that memorialize the events leading up to destructions of the two Jerusalem temples; these days are scattered throughout the year, but are bound together by a single narrative (and, in turn, this narrative also lends unity to the calendrical year). The Hebrew Bible institutes a series of holy days of pilgrimage (Passover, Feast of Weeks, Feast of Booths, Eighth Day of Assembly), each of which mark the changing seasons and inflection points for successful planting and harvests. These were later imbued with particular mythico-historical significance as well (e.g., exodus from Egypt, revelation at Sinai). There is also a set of Jewish holy days related to sin, repentance, and renewal, commonly known as The Days of Awe. All of these holy days are layered on the seven-day week, in which the Sabbath’s character as a holy day of rest each week pushes aside the demands of any other holy day that may coincide with it, with the exception of the annual Day of Atonement. The calendar of saints in some Christian communities is another example of marking the year by events of significance. From the fourth century CE, the deaths of acclaimed members of the church were recognized by public and private devotions, and while the Western and Eastern Churches developed differently, both groups created calendars of feast days related to saints (Roy 2011: 456). Each date on the calendar is associated with a different saint, such that one may either refer to a particular day by its calendrical date (e.g., day and month) or its saint name; some people celebrate both their birthday and the day of the saint after whom they have been named. Calendars of saints complement existing Christian liturgical calendars

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that mark days of significance in the narrative of Jesus of Nazareth, including Jesus’ birth (Christmas), crucifixion (Good Friday), resurrection (Easter), and so on (Senn 2011: 77). The contemporary Chinese religious year consists of different types of significant days – pan-Chinese observances, local cults marking birthdays of deities, and official state sacrifices – synchronized together into an annual cycle (Thompson 2005: 1640). The new year is marked with sacrifices to gods and ancestors, family gatherings and meals, distributions of money to youngsters, socialization, and the pasting of spring scrolls and red papers on gateposts and elsewhere. In the fourth month, Buddha’s birthday is marked with a ceremony that involves washing the Buddha, burning incense, and chanting scriptures (Thompson 2005: 1642). In the Chinese calendar, “practically every day of the year is designated as the birthday of one or more of the deities. The most famous case is the transformation of the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara (Chin., Guanshiyin) into the most popular deity of all, the compassionate mother-figure, Guanyin, whose birthday is celebrated on the nineteenth day of the second month” (Thompson 2005: 1643–1644). In addition, state festivals are also observed. For each practitioner, the year thus merges different narratives onto a single cycle. Narratives that span the annual cycle are embedded into the calendars of other religions, cultures, and nations as well. Each series of significant days has its own internal progression and also overlaps with other important times over the course of a calendar year, highlighting the fact that the most prominent aspect of an annual calendar may not be its days and months but the embedded stories that appear in the overall structure of the year and give meaning to time. Multiple calendars together cultivate the rhythms of calendrical time. In a heterogeneous society, individual and communal time is not determined by a single calendar, and communities may differentiate themselves from the broader public through deliberately organizing their times according to different calendars. But even in far more homogenous societies, there is rarely a single calendar. The United States, for example, uses a civil calendar, which begins on the 1st of January; a tax calendar with the significant date for individuals of the 15th of April to file tax returns with the government; many organizations’ fiscal calendars begin on the 1st of July; and academic calendars are determined by each school district and private school separately, beginning in late summer or early fall and ending in late spring or early summer. Some types of workers have their own busy and quiet times as well. In the U.S., congregational rabbis must gear up for the demanding month of the high holy days in the fall, and accountants may have a busy tax preparation season January through March. Election workers push through a significant workload leading into early November, workers in distribution centers pick up extra shifts nearing Christmas, and those who work in

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agriculture mark the time for raising animals, planting crops and harvesting – and if they are itinerant workers, they may follow harvests and labor opportunities around the country or continent all year long. In addition, many people often also follow a religious or cultural calendar, which dictates when they celebrate holidays, saint’s days, fast days, Ramadan, Lent, Lunar New Year, and so on. In other countries and regions of the world, the interplay of different calendars functions in unique ways. Individual and communal time is constructed through the particular combinations of calendars used and festivals marked in any given historical and cultural context. Just as the year, as a collection of months, often interacts with either solar or lunar cycles but is not limited in its character to those phenomena, the day-night unit is also both an astronomical unit of time, based as it is on the sun’s rising and setting, and also a humanly-constructed unit of time. People decide if the day begins at sunrise, at sunset, at midnight, or at some other point in time. They also determine how to address the changing length of days, more pronounced in some regions of the world than others – whether to extend daytime activities into dark hours, or to introduce a rest time in the hottest part of the day. Technological and economic factors affect such decisions, including the availability of artificial illumination, the rhythm of the moon’s illumination, the ability to remain cool in hot temperatures, or warm in the cold, and so on. The notion of a day or a night relies on far more than the sun. While calendars divide annual time into months and days in relation to the sun and/or moon, the unit of a week or other durations measured in regular intervals of days bears no necessary relationship to those referents, and has varied historically. The seven-day week, for example, originated among ancient Jewish communities in the Near East as well as among circles of astronomers in Hellenistic Egypt. Among Jewish communities, weeks were punctuated by the Sabbath, connecting practitioners to sacred narratives about the divine creation of the world, which was completed over the course of six work days and a seventh day during which God rested (Zerubavel 1985). Egyptians used decades, periods of ten days. Roman time was, for many centuries, divided into nundial cycles, which consisted of eight days (nine days in the inclusive counting of that period) that were punctuated by market days rather than a day of rest, before the seven-day week was formally adopted by the empire in the fourth century CE. Mesoamerican calendars of the Maya, Aztec and Mixtec peoples comprised successive spans of 260 days, divided into thirteen parts, each of which were twenty days long. These temporal intervals did not correspond to solar or lunar patterns (Zuidema 2005: 1360). None of these divisions of time is natural, though people may experience them as such, taking such temporal rhythms for granted when they become integral to the way in which a society is organized and how it functions.

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Hours, too, have a history, and like the unit of the week, they are much more dependent on human definition than one might instinctively assume. Originating in ancient Egypt, used in parts of the Hellenistic Greek world, later adopted in the Roman Empire, and from there spreading far beyond, hours divided the day and night into twelve equal units of time. But hours were by no means the only way of dividing daily time. Ancient Mesopotamian sources, for example, divide the day and night into 14 parts, each called a beru (Steele 2020); rabbinic and Roman sources discuss nighttime watches that split the night into three or four segments, possibly related to military or priestly shifts. Seasonal hours (which expand and contract depending on the total light in a day and sometimes referred to as astronomical hours), gave way to standard-length hours with the spread of mechanical clock technologies in many parts of the world. Standard hours, in which one hour represents the same duration (e.g., 60 minutes) regardless of the season, are ubiquitous now but were far rarer in antiquity (Kalman 2019). Even in societies that employed standard hours and precise mechanical clocks, however, time was not always standardized and synchronized – that is, it was not precisely “11 o’clock” at the same time everywhere, not even among neighbors in the same place let alone those in adjacent towns or cities, nor was there an agreed-upon mechanism to coordinate schedules among those further away from one another. (In this way, seasonal hours more easily lend themselves to temporal synchronization than standard hours, as seasonal hours are based on the position of the sun’s path from east to west; standard hours, in contrast, do not depend on the sun, and so variability among different clock users can be far more substantial than those who use the position of the sun or sundials to determine the hour.) The lack of temporal synchronization did not necessarily pose problems, for approximate local synchronization worked well enough for most occasions. The calculus changed when technological innovations in the late nineteenth century meant that far-flung places became newly connected to one another through shorter timespans, as faster modes of communication and transportation, including the telegraph, railway, and steamboat, were invented and then became widespread. For trains to run on a schedule, there needed to be a shared clock, so that everyone who wished to use the trains would know when to be ready to board at the station. While the standardization and synchronization of hourly time is often attributed to industrialization and specifically to the railroad, the need to coordinate the timing of waterways and sea travel at ports and canals also played an important role in the adoption of a uniform mean time across vast distances, for instance putting Cairo, Alexandria, Port Said, and the Suez Canal on the same schedule (Stolz 2018: 214). Military strategy, economic endeavors, and globalization all factored into international efforts to standardize time in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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Adopting a shared time (or a “uniform” or “universal” time, as it was often called in this period) was sometimes a controversial matter, as local populations sought to retain autonomy over their own timekeeping, for both practical and political reasons. The process toward standardized time was therefore messy, nonlinear, and gradual. These dynamics were especially complex in colonized territories; as Vanessa Ogle argues, some of those in regions such as British India and Bombay, under British colonial rule, opposed standardization as a form of anticolonial resistance against the European institutions pushing for its adoption (e.g., why operate according to European time when you can use Bombay time?), while those in other places, for example the Ottoman Levant and Beirut, which was under the specter of European influence but still part of the Ottoman Empire, more readily embraced it as an opportunity to mimic, collaborate with, or aspire towards European time (Ogle 2013). When the creation of “a single meridian on which to base a worldwide system of hour-wide time zones” was discussed, for example, at the 1884 Prime Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C., and eventually time zones and mean times (Greenwich Mean Time / Coordinated Universal Time) were implemented worldwide, some nations resisted the imposition of time from colonial powers, and retained alternative times instead of or alongside standardized time (Ogle 2015: 3). Still today, Daylights Savings evokes strong emotions. There is a short period of time each year, usually one week long, when Israel has already moved its clock while Palestinians do not, such that residents of Jerusalem and the West Bank use different hours depending on where they live and with which community they affiliate – crossing the street from East to West Jerusalem on such a day entails moving one’s clock and adjusting one’s schedule by an hour. Other efforts to standardize global time in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example by developing a world calendar, did not succeed, highlighting that standard time, too, was anything but inevitable, let alone natural. It was not just modern attempts to standardize hours and dates for the world that defined daily timekeeping as a site for tussles over whose conception of organizing time is, or ought to be, primary. Clocks have been and continue to be a site for individuals and groups to negotiate their relative social standing. In wearable forms, clocks (e.g., pocket and wrist watches) also construct gender and social standing, as we will discuss later on. In ancient Rome, emperor Augustus showcased his technological sophistication, elite status, and imperial power by stamping his correspondences not only with the date but also with the hour, thereby demonstrating mastery over smaller increments of time. Other cultural elites drew upon their access to sundials and other timekeeping instruments to position themselves as superior professionals. The second-century CE physician Galen, for example, frequently evokes sundials in his treatises to demonstrate that he worked at the cutting edge of the medical profession, explaining how fevers were best treated when

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they were tracked on an hourly basis (Miller 2018: 113). In the ancient Greco-Roman context of Augustus and Galen, the status reflected in sundial technology meant that possessing and displaying one in a courtyard or public forum was not only a tool for timekeeping but also a demonstration of one’s wealth, expertise, and status. Augustus, given an obelisk from Egypt, erected it in the Campus Martius, a testament to Rome’s victory over Egypt captured in part by placing an Egyptian symbol of hourly timekeeping at the center of the Roman capitol. In later periods, clocks and watches also made coveted diplomatic gifts among those in different geographical regions. In the sixteenth century, European ambassadors made gifts of mechanical clocks to members of Ottoman courts, and often also sent clockmakers skilled in operating and maintaining these clocks, a diplomatic gesture meant to draw technological and temporal connections between the two distant regions (Stolz 2018: 124). In the same century, Jesuits offered clocks as gifts to Japanese rulers and other influential figures, often in gratitude for permission to establish Christian missions in the region; these gifts in turn impacted Japanese clock technology and hourly timekeeping (Frumer 2018: 39). Even today in the U.S. and Europe, clocks, watches, and other timepieces function as status symbols, as advertisements for Rolex, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet and other luxury watch brands attest. Consider, for example, Patek Philippe’s 2017–2018 “Generations” campaign, the slogan of which was “You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation,” run alongside photos of watch-wearing parents looking adoringly at their young children. Such messaging emphasizes the role of luxury timepieces as symbols of wealth and vehicles of intergenerational social advantage. Alexis McCrossen’s research (2013) demonstrates that investing watches with intergenerational significance in the United States dates back to the middle or late nineteenth century (63). But purchasing watches is not exclusively limited to wealthy classes. In the midtwentieth century, gold watches were often given to employees by their employers upon retirement (Kittrels 2017), an expression of gratitude for a career of hard work and a wish for a smooth transition to the next phase of life. The social significance of clocks extends to their use to count down to significant events, cultivating excitement, celebration, fear, or dread. The countdown to New Year’s Eve in a variety of countries is one such example. In Times Square in New York, for instance, a giant “time ball” lit with thousands of bulbs drops on a track, and a party ensues at midnight. But countdown clocks can also warn of harmful futures, encouraging publics to reform their behaviors before it is too late. The Doomsday Clock, created in 1947 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, counts the diminishing seconds towards global catastrophes, including nuclear risk and climate change. The closer the clock approaches midnight, the closer humanity is to facing a catastrophe it created for itself. Unlike a conventional clock, however, the Doomsday Clock can both add and subtract time from its display,

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such that it can move the count away from midnight. The purpose of the clock is not only to keep track of time remaining but also to motivate people to change their behaviors in order to gain more time on the clock. The Bulletin’s website shows historical images of the Doomsday Clock. In 2015, there were 3 minutes left until midnight; in 2017, only two and a half minutes left; in 2018, two minutes. In its “2021 Doomsday Clock Statement,” addressed to “leaders and citizens of the world,” the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists declared: “This is your COVID wake-up call: It is 100 seconds to midnight.” The pandemic, they argued, highlights how unprepared the world is to face additional existential threats, such as nuclear weapons, climate change, and additional pandemics and wars. In a similar spirit, the Climate Change countdown clock in Union Square, Manhattan, projects a rapidly decreasing amount of time in the form of a digital clock, instructing viewers that the time left to prevent climate catastrophe is slipping away (Machemer 2020). To conclude, the timekeeping function of clocks, calendars, and chronologies and their relative accuracy in determining eras, years, months, weeks, hours, and minutes were but some of the purposes that such technologies of time served. They were also used to cultivate personal or transnational relationships, build social capital among peers, and display wealth and domination to the broader community. Discussions about the standardization of time or the adoption of GMT, for instance, are about who gets to control the calculation and use of time as much as they are about the mathematical mechanics or practical challenges of hourly synchronization. The determination of the hour, or the year, or the century, is never only a technical matter – it reflects and asserts whose conception of time matters. Despite their reliance on natural phenomena such the observation of the sun and stars’ path across the sky, calendars and hours are always culturally constructed because there are many ways of interpreting such phenomena.

Biological Time Biological times, too, are anchored in natural, often bodily, rhythms, and yet these are similarly refracted culturally and historically. For example, in her sociological work, Johanna Foster (1996) examines the differing ways in which the temporality of menstruation has been construed – in her words, “how social groups actually draw lines around and mentally partition these complex biological processes into discrete temporal units” (523). “The menstrual cycle,” Foster argues, is not simply a matter of biological time. It is a “social invention,” “neither an individual interpretation nor a universal measure, but a social process of temporal differentiation” (525), the result of a particular “culture’s intersubjective notions of how to carve up this

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inherently unstructured phenomenon” (523). Foster writes: “Although science is relatively certain about what sorts of biological changes take place in women’s bodies periodically, it is not at all certain how to structure ‘menstrual’ time” (524). On the biological level, a process unfolds in which ovarian and pituitary hormones rise, causing follicles in the ovaries to grow and eventually mature into an ovum, which then makes its way into a Fallopian tube. As an unfertilized egg enters the uterus, the uterine wall membrane forms; when fertilization does not occur, this membrane lining detaches and is shed via the vagina. Dividing this biological process into discrete units, conceptualizing the temporality of the whole process, and imagining its duration are all overlaid upon the biological process. First, the process has been divided into as few as two and as many as eight discrete stages, even though there is considerable variation regarding when each stage begins and ends, how long each stage lasts, and whether there can be any overlap between them. For example, the “premenstrual stage” and the “postovulatory stage” may be variously defined, as could their start and end times. Second, the process need not be conceptualized only as a cycle. The term menstrual “cycle” itself evokes “a spinning wheel traveling along the road of a woman’s fertile life” (524), and focuses on the process’s recurring aspects, rather than change and difference between experiences of menstrual bleeding and associated physical states (524, 529). Foster explains that additional alternative conceptions exist, for example in cases in which menstruation is divided into alternating temporal units: discrete temporal periods of marked (periods of menstruation) and unmarked (periods without menstruation) times; or “a double-extraordinary beat, marked by the sacred moments when the egg is released from the ovary but marked again when the egg and lining exit” (525); or a swinging pendulum with two equal but opposite extremes; or a wheel with wedges; or a linear chain of discontinuous events in which one point in time follows another. Thirdly, the span of days between menstrual periods varies, affected by a range of factors, and so the idea of menstruation as a monthly occurrence is not to be taken for granted. Furthermore, considering menstruation a monthly cycle is itself connected to other societal timekeeping mechanisms. It largely depends on the historical regnancy of both the lunar cycle and the seven-day week, rather than solely the biological event of menstruation, which is far more variable from body to body (Foster 1996; Zerubavel 1981). Thus, the social conceptualization of biological processes, not solely the biological processes themselves, constitute “menstrual time.” The temporality of pregnancy, too, ought not to be taken as simply biological. In Greco-Roman antiquity, various figures (e.g., Hippocrates, Aristotle, Galen, Oribasius) suggested that pregnancies lasted different durations, counted in months and days, of somewhere between 270 to 204 days for full-term pregnancies (Tsoucalas and Sgantzos 2017). While full-term gestation was assumed to be nine

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months, gestations that lasted seven- or eight- months, as their duration was conceived, were considered types of pre-term births with serious implications for infant survival (surprisingly, in the Greek context babies born in the seventh month of gestation were assumed to have a chance of surviving, whereas babies born in the eighth were not considered viable and expected to die) (Hanson 1987). Likewise, pregnancies that lasted as long as ten months or extended across eleven calendar months carried with them particular concerns and connotations. In contemporary Western medicine, pregnancies are counted in weeks rather than months. Babies are considered preterm if they are born before week 37. Those born preterm are also further categorized into extremely preterm babies, who are born alive before 28 weeks, and very preterm babies, born between 28 and 32 weeks (WHO 2018). The question of when pregnancy begins is not a simple one to answer, either. Hippocrates wondered whether women should calculate their pregnancies from the day of their last menstrual cycle or the date of conception; in contemporary Western medicine, women count forty weeks starting with the first day on which their last period of menstruation began. Certain Sunni Islamic legal traditions (Hanafi, Maliki, Hanbali, and Shafi’i) advance positions that allow, in certain cases, for a longer period of gestation, such that babies are considered to have been conceived several years before birth, and sometimes as long as five or seven years. This doctrine of the “sleeping baby in the mother’s womb” – the idea that a baby falls asleep in its mother’s womb for some number of months or years before continuing to grow and eventually being born – operated in various biological, socio-legal, and metaphysical contexts, including abortion, miscarriages, contested parentage, and inheritance disputes (Larson 2012). Notions of the “sleeping baby in the mother’s womb” offer an alternative timeframe for gestation that unsettles assumptions that the duration of pregnancy, much like the temporality of menstruation, is merely a biological process rather than a cultural construction mapped onto bodily processes. The idea of a multi-year pregnancy exists, for instance, in modern Morocco, though the legal doctrine was formally banished there in the 1950s (Larson 2012). It was recently evoked in a court of law in Nigeria to defend a woman, Amina Lawal, who had been accused of adultery and had given birth to a daughter whom the prosecution sought to use to prove her guilt (Eltantawi 2017: 167–170). Bodily time encompasses far more than menstruation and pregnancy, of course. It includes topics such as aging and circadian rhythms, which are themselves tied to temporal processes such as body temperature, hunger, and sleep cycles, and that further manifest themselves in experiences such as seasonal depression and jet lag. Consider, for example, the ways in which people with different circadian rhythm lengths and bodily preferences fare in contemporary work

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environments, which are usually far more regimented than the variability of bodily time. Many American school days begin too early for teenage bodies, according to a recent study, which found that natural waking times for adolescents were a few hours later in the morning than for typical adults. Shifting school schedules later in the day would improve student achievement (Dunster et al. 2018). But even adult circadian rhythms represent diverse preferences; those who prefer to wake up early are sometimes called “larks” or “morning people,” while those who thrive by staying up later are named “owls” or “night people” (Roenneberg 2012). Some of the essays in this book address these topics more fully.

Punctuality A prime example of the cultural construction and significance of time is the notion of punctuality. Punctuality itself is a temporal expression, an embodiment of a relationship to time, which places subjects in relation to times. To be “on time” – that is, to be punctual – is an entirely relative idea, because it depends on whose time is meant and what time you are “on time” for. In her study of timekeeping in modern Japan, Yulia Frumer (2018: 37–38) explains: “punctuality and synchronicity are relative terms . . . To be punctual is to abide by a range of temporal approximations determined by existing social norms. Even in our modern society with our atomic clocks we always resort to approximations – how late must one be in order to be considered late? One millisecond? Three seconds? Thirty? Three minutes? Or maybe fifteen? The answer depends on the situation, not on the units of measurement.” Temporal accuracy relies on clocks that have become ever more precise. For the past over half century, the “atomic clock” has been the standard for accuracy, necessary for tasks such as space navigation. Atomic clocks replaced quartz crystal clocks, which, after about an hour, become inaccurate by a billionth of a second. Such timekeeping inaccuracy would make it impossible, for example, to know a spacecraft’s location precisely to a meter, and therefore a more precise clock was needed. Atomic clocks define the international time standard using signals from hundreds of cesium atoms. They are more accurate than quartz crystal clocks because they measure a second by the frequency of a jolt of energy needed to “make electrons jump” in a cesium atom (Samuelson 2019). Yet there is now the possibility of greater accuracy with atoms that operate at a higher frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum: the optical frequency using strontium atoms, rather than the microwave frequency of cesium clocks. If perfected, these clocks could, for example, make geo-positioning systems more accurate (Johnston 2019). Punctuality is an ever-moving target, determined by technology and circumstance.

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Recently, during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, professional, educational and social lives of many adults and children migrated to virtual platforms such as Zoom, shifting again what it meant to be “on time.” This was not a universal experience, but one that is close to the lives of the authors of this chapter. Many of the work meetings that we used to attend prior to the pandemic began within the first five minutes of the official start time; the opening minutes of meetings had usually been regarded as flexible time for participants to arrive, greet one another, and settle down. Walking into a room at “the right time” meant that one was punctual – one did not need to be “ready for business” by that time. In Zoom meetings, however, the start time of a meeting changed; because participants attended through screens that often projected a digital clock in their display, being punctual to a meeting meant logging on within 60 seconds of the meeting start time, before the clock could identify that the start-time of the meeting had passed. If someone arrived for a meeting scheduled, for example, for 9:00 am at 9:02 am, an apology was often offered for “being late.” In a physical work environment in which people consult different clocks, a minute of “lateness” is an interval that might have been disregarded, but in a virtual context with synchronized internet clocks, a minute is considered a duration worth minding. Hybrid events present a challenge of temporal synchronization, in which virtual and inperson times needs to both be accommodated. As technology has developed, clock time has been able to be ever more precise. That does not mean, though, that being “on-time” is simply matching the time on a hyper-accurate clock. Punctuality, like clocks and calendars, is culturally constructed and historically contingent. It follows that notions of punctuality relate to cultural and historical factors. Punctuality is also connected with pace of life. Robert Levine’s A Geography of Time (1998) begins with a scene featuring the North American author, who realized, as a visiting professor in Brazil, that his idea of punctuality (beginning and ending class at the times listed in the course catalogue) did not match his students’ notions of punctuality (arriving to class a half hour or so after the time listed in the course catalogue, and staying as late as needed). Levine, a social psychologist, thus embarked on a study about how geography affects pace of life, that is, life’s “tempo,” identifying five factors that contribute to “the establishment of tempo norms” (8). His research revealed that “people are prone to move faster in places with vital economies, a high degree of industrialization, larger populations, cooler climates, and a cultural orientation toward individualism” (9). The analysis Levine conducted revealed the large degree to which something as seemingly natural as the speed at which a person crosses a street or when they show up to an appointment is culturally constructed, determined by factors such as population size and average temperatures. It also highlights the interrelationship between notions of time and place.

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Pace of life and punctuality are determined in (large) part by communal circumstances, which explains why residents of New York walk faster than those in Los Angeles. Not everyone in a single city or community, however, conceives or enacts time identically, because time is constructed by many intersecting factors. Sociologists Paul Felix Lazarsfeld, Marie Jahoda, and Hans Zeisel conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Marienthal, an Austrian city that had, in the early 1930s, suffered high rates of unemployment, at about 50% (Jahoda et al. 1971). These researchers were interested in documenting the effects of unemployment on daily life. They discovered (and noted somewhat critically) that having too much time with nothing to do led to a general slowing down of life, including how quickly people walked down the village’s main street and how many times they stopped along the way. Marienthal’s unemployed men lingered at street corners, “drift[ing] gradually out of an ordered existence into one that is undisciplined and empty” (Jahoda 1971: 66). They also observed gendered trends: women walked at a quicker speed than men, and they stopped less frequently (we will return to other gendered dimensions of time later in this chapter as well). The researchers realized that the women’s pace of life was faster than that of the men because they were still busy at home, and therefore they had “considerably less time on their hands” (67). Jahoda observes: Time in Marienthal has a dual nature: it is different for men and women. For the [unemployed] men, the division of the days into hours has long since lost all meaning. Of one hundred men, eighty-eight were not wearing a watch and only thirty-one of these had a watch at home. Getting up, the midday meal, going to bed, are the only remaining points of reference. In between, time elapses without anyone really knowing what has taken place (67–68). The term ‘unemployed’ applies in the strict sense only to the men, for the women are merely unpaid, not really unemployed. They have the household to run, which fully occupies their day. Their work has a definite purpose, with numerous fixed tasks, functions, and duties that make for regularity (74).

This study reminds us that pace of life is not static, even as it is conditioned, as Levine’s research demonstrates, by factors such as climate and population size. It is also dependent on what occupies the time of residents, their social status, their employment situation, their gendered responsibilities, and other biological, physical, cultural, economic, political, and historical factors. Punctuality’s contingency on societal, communal, and individual contexts became clear during one of Sarit’s class meetings, in which she asked her students to each share what punctuality meant to them. As students took their turn, the full gamut of responses was offered. For some students, being punctual entailed showing up before the time of an event or meeting. One student shared her

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grandfather’s philosophy, that “if you aren’t two minutes early, you’re late.” For others, being on time meant arriving at the precise time listed on an invitation or a calendar. But for about half the class, being punctual was far less tied to the exactness of a clock hand. One student explained that her entire group of friends was always over an hour late to everything, but among them, she was the most punctual. Another student questioned the entire notion of punctuality, explaining that as long as she arrives to where she is heading, it did not matter when precisely she arrived. She shared that she had been late to class that day because she saw an acquaintance on the way and stopped to say hello. When a student asked her why she had done so, knowing she would miss the opening minutes of class, she explained that the value of stopping to acknowledge a friend was more important to her – but that she hadn’t given the time much thought at all. These students each inhabited the same space (a classroom at Fordham University’s Rose Hill campus in the borough of the Bronx in New York City), the same historical time (the fall of 2018), and the same general context (an undergraduate course at a private Jesuit university). And yet a simple question elicited as many answers as students. Nonetheless, certain trends emerged. Students from religious, racial, and ethnic minorities explained that their families or communities often had alternative senses of punctuality, whether it was “Jewish time,” “Dominican time,” “CPT,” “African Standard Time,” or “Gay Standard Time.” While each of these times contains its own nuances, whether it means generally a bit “late,” an hour late, several hours late, or late for certain things, they are each an expression of identity, and often also of resistance to dominant norms, through time. Several students – including those from families that always arrived at an event at the called-for time and those from families they described as “always being late” – associated punctually with being organized, responsible, and respectful. “Having it together,” as one student articulated it. Such associations between punctuality and organization or responsibility, far from being natural or obvious, however, are themselves deeply rooted in histories of imperialism, colonialism, racism, and other forms of domination, in which temporality – punctuality, conceptions of history, periodization, notions of laziness and industriousness – played a central role in constructions of people and communities and their relationship to one another. One simply needs to recall associations by settlers or anthropologists of Indigenous people or African people with backwardness or timelessness, and in turn with temporal flexibility or an inability to keep proper time, to understand that judgments about timeliness have a fraught history (see e.g., Fabian 1983; Cooper 2016). Not only are notions of punctuality culturally constructed and historically contingent; values about and associations with punctuality are similarly dependent on culture and history.

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Fordham students, along with Sarit, discovered through explorations of their own religious, racial, and ethnic notions of punctuality, that cultivating temporalities of lateness is not borne of an inability to tell time or stick to a schedule, but rather serves a way of challenging ascendant conceptions of time, by pushing back against them, ignoring them, or undermining them. On Barak (2013) similarly explores one particular manifestation of this history of punctuality in colonial Egypt. Barak begins his book with an anecdote in which an Egyptian vendor in Cairo distinguished between “five minutes American time” (by which he meant five minutes that each consists of 60 seconds) and “five minutes Egyptian time” (which would have lasted far longer, and did not indicate a precise duration). Barak details the history of this relationship to time, arguing that Egyptian temporal flexibility emerged as a “countertempo” to European ideas about European and Middle Eastern time. As Barak explains: “Egyptian time” appears indeed to be substandard, both lax and primordial. Westerners and Egyptians alike have tended (and still tend) to embrace culturalist and essentialist explanations for a seemingly unwavering aversion to regularity and punctuality and a proclivity for slowness. Such temporal dispositions, ascribed to religion, tradition, climate, or character, are sharply contrasted with the “modern” time of new technologies of transportation and communication. But this elastic sense of temporality, supposed to characterize the colonial and postcolonial worlds from time immemorial, was in fact a nineteenth-century creation, one that was every bit as technological and modern as its Western counterpart . . . In Egypt, these newly introduced means of transportation and communication [the steamer, railway, telegraph, tramway, and telephone] did not drive social synchronization and standardized timekeeping, as social scientists conventionally argue. Rather, they promoted what I call “countertempos” predicated on discomfort with the time of the clock and a disdain for dehumanizing European standards of efficiency, linearity, and punctuality (Barak 2013: 2–5).

When Europeans claimed speed, innovation, and punctuality, Egyptians embraced slowness, the past, and “belatedness,” claiming them proudly as Egyptian temporalities, preferable and superior to European ones (Barak 2013: 4). Along similar lines, Achille Mbembe notes that “As an age, the postcolony encloses multiple durées made up of discontinuities, reversals, inertias, and swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate one another, and envelop one another” (Mbembe 2001: 84, cited in Edelstein, et al. 2021: 17). As we will see further below, there are many ways in which groups and individuals use conceptions of time to push back against dominant cultural trends or political circumstances. In addition to the politics of punctuality and the notion of “counter-tempos,” we also propose the idea of “temporal code-switching.” Code-switching entails alternating between two or more languages, dialects, or accents, often in the course of a single conversation or encounter, or changing the way one speaks to accommodate particular contextual expectations. The notion of “temporal code-switching,” then,

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is the alternation between two or more modes of temporality – temporal languages – depending on circumstances. A person may be diligent about arriving to work meetings on time because, in that temporal landscape, punctuality is valued, expected, and rewarded (and lateness punished, materially or otherwise). That same person might receive a wedding invitation and know that they need not adhere to the time listed on the invitation as firmly and arrive a couple hours after the called-for time, also being punctual in that temporal landscape. But temporal code-switching might also function on a linguistic level. A New Yorker who says “give me a minute” suggests that she needs a short amount of time, whereas someone from Philadelphia who says the same phrase means that she needs a long amount of time, and that her interlocutor needs to have patience. Punctuality can also be gendered. As described above, Marienthal’s women walked more quickly and kept a tighter schedule than the village’s men, because the women were busy with housework while many of the men had no work at all. More often, though, punctuality has been gendered male, while temporal flexibility – being late – has, in various cultures, been gendered female and constructed as a feminine quality, frequently connected to laziness. Barak (2014: 16–17) observes this phenomenon in nineteenth-century Egypt, during which “women paradoxically reinforced masculine temporality in several important, if concealed ways. Notably, they were the ones who made it possible for their husbands and sons . . . to lead a scheduled life, while at the same time taking much of the blame for disruptions in these new modern routines.” Cartoons and jokes published in periodicals constructed women not only as being perpetually late but also to blame for their husbands missing the train or otherwise being delayed for important business, often because they kept their husbands from leaving the house on time as they occupied themselves with stereotypically feminine activities such as applying makeup or accessorizing themselves (Barak 2014: 19). Punctuality has long been viewed as both Western and masculine in other realms as well, for example in military contexts. But the association extends much further, too, and is not limited to modernity. In rabbinic texts composed in ancient Palestine between 200–600 C.E, a Jewish sage, Rabbi Yose, contrasts both the ability of Jewish women to accurately estimate the hour of the day, and their motivation to act with alacrity, with the dispositions and temporal estimation abilities of rabbinic judges to do the same. The rabbi is quoted observing that women are “lazy” and so laws governing when they should clear the home of prohibited food before Passover should include more of a temporal cushion than rules aimed at Jewish male judges. In other words, the text posits that women are likely to be late because they are lazy, but does not apply the same suspicion to rabbinic judges (Kaye 2018: 66). The gendered dimensions of punctuality or lateness, in the ancient

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as well as the modern examples, are tied in one way or another with the same notions of difference and domination discussed above. Chronologies, calendars, clocks, and other timekeeping technologies, temporal mappings of biological processes, and conceptions of punctuality are more than simple symbols for time or discrete examples of the ways in which time is ubiquitous, touching every aspect of life in multiple ways. These various forms of conceptualizing, organizing, and telling time – from the technical aspects of observing the sun to the conceptual framing of punctuality – are all intertwined with one another as they are borne out of social relations and group identities, and may function as mechanisms of social control or persuasion. Of course, they are all subject to historical contingency and cultural pressures. These temporal facets, moreover, reflect and engage social difference, as our next section examines further.

Time’s Social Differentiation Time is not only culturally constructed and historically contingent, but also stratified and differentiated along social, economic, racial, and other lines, as the discussion of chronologies, standard clock time, and punctuality above already began addressing. Returning for a moment to two formative temporal conditions of our time, coronavirus and climate change, it is notable that each is, at first glance, a seemingly universal, natural disaster and disease that indiscriminately affects all of the earth’s inhabitants. Yet upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that these two ongoing crises affected people differently: coronavirus and climate change are both threats everywhere, but they disproportionately endanger poor and marginalized human populations, globally and within individual states. Social, economic, racial, or ethnic inequalities play large differentiating roles (one can also compare human life expectancy rates among different communities and countries to see how such inequities are not limited to coronavirus and climate change, and the importance of recognizing the devastating cost of “time” being socially differentiated). Rich people, communities, and nations disproportionately contribute to climate change through greater consumption, and yet they are also typically those least impacted – and impacted later – by the devastating consequences of climate change. Thus, they have the luxury of time to tackle energy emissions that those in poorer communities and countries do not, and many thus view climate change less urgently. Likewise, those with more economic, social, and racial privilege (here we use categories relevant to the U.S. context, which can be adjusted to other societies’

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social differentiations as appropriate) often have access to greater medical care and, due to the history of inequality, face fewer preexisting conditions and comorbidities that make the coronavirus so deadly – and they were thus able to weather the coronavirus pandemic more easily than others. They were more likely, in the U.S., to hold jobs that can be completed remotely, and to have access to financial resources necessary for childcare, eldercare, grocery deliveries, and other services that facilitated life under lockdown. In contrast, poor people, many of whose work was deemed “essential” and so excluded from stay-at-home orders, often had no choice but to venture to workspaces and to other people’s homes, even when it was dangerous. They could not “wait out” the pandemic in vacation homes until the development of a vaccine, for example. Global vaccine distribution highlights in particular the temporal inequality of the coronavirus, as wealthy countries were able to secure large doses of the vaccine far earlier than countries with fewer financial resources, despite COVAX (an international consortium), the WHO, and UNICEF securing vaccines for poorer countries. Later, wealthy countries offered citizens booster shots while lessresourced countries continued to struggle to obtain first and second doses. Put bluntly, the pandemic of the wealthy will have been less severe and shorter than the pandemic of the poor; at a certain point, some countries with vaster resources (or particular regions and populations within countries) shifted to living in a “post-pandemic” era (or post-pandemic-crisis) while others with fewer resources remained in the depths of pandemic time, even as the pandemic’s time has been anything but linear, given the ongoing ebb and flow of variants, epicenters, and peaks. There are countless other examples of this phenomenon, both historical and contemporary, in which time is socially differentiated, and we offer a few additional examples here, each of which illustrates a way in which time can reinforce or undermine broader social structures. Take, for example, the social differentiation of time that is apparent when members of different social groups in a heterogeneous society have greater or less amounts of the time of public attention when the community gathers, whether in person or through media. JJJJJerome Ellis, who describes himself as a stuttering, Afro-Caribbean composer, poet, and performer, explored such race-based and disability-related differences in a public spoken-word performance. In 2019, Ellis had been invited to perform a piece within a ten-hour festival of poetry and music at the annual St. Mark’s Poetry Project in New York on New Year’s Day. The structure of the event gives each performer only two to three minutes for their piece, to allow each performer an equal amount of time on stage and to make time for the many participants; the short timing of each act (2–3 minutes), coupled with the hours-long marathon compilation of acts (totaling 10 hours), is one of the event’s defining aspects. This time-frame, however, proved challenging for Ellis, whose

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stutter means that the time it takes him to speak can vary greatly. Giving everyone the same amount of time to perform and being strict about enforcing such timelimits is designed to promote fairness and equity, and yet these rules proved unfair to those who cannot control the time it takes them to recite a poem. Ellis explains his dilemma as follows: When I was first invited to participate in this magnificent event, I was struck by the 2minute time limit, which later became a 2-to-3-minute time limit. And I understood intuitively that the purpose of this time limit was to create as non-hierarchical a space as possible. But in removing one hierarchy the time limit introduces another. A time limit assumes all people have relatively equal access to time through their speech, which is not true. Stuttering is very unpredictable. I can rehearse something as many times as I want, but I don’t actually know how long it will take to say anything until I have to say it (Cole 2020).

Rather than shrink from the inhospitable format, Ellis accepted the invitation to participate, creating and performing a piece that enacted and critiqued what he describes as the problem of “temporal accessibility when it comes to disabled speech.” His performance included long pauses, his flow of words interspersed with clicking, sibilant sounds, breathing sounds, and repeats. He began with the fact that Brazilian cell phone companies are legally mandated to discount their phone plans for people with “disturbances in the time and fluency of speech,” meaning that they could not charge the same “per minute” to all customers, because some people simply need more time to communicate because of particular challenges. Ellis concluded with a quotation from Black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé W. Crenshaw: “treating different things the same way may generate as much inequality as treating the same things in different ways.” Sean Cole produced a segment of This American Life, titled “Time Bandit” (2020), about Ellis’s performance. At St. Mark’s Church, Ellis’s recitation took about five minutes; Cole, who watched the performance, recalled that the audience was spellbound for the entirety of Ellis’ performance. Ellis recounted that when he rehearsed his piece, the shortest amount of time that it took him to recite the text he had composed was two and a half minutes. Ellis noted that it was important to him to write something that someone who did not stutter could recite within the allotted time limit, so that he was simultaneously following and likely also breaking the organization’s time rule with his performance. In the interview, Ellis shared that, during middle school, he was a fan of jazz music, admiring the genre’s “refusal to adhere to the length of a pop song,” while many of his friends listened to styles of music with typically shorter songs. A jazz album might only have four tracks, he noted, because the tracks could be nine minutes long. Ellis identified his performance in New York with the “racialized element” in the length of jazz compositions, which he describes as “a Black

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resistance against certain structures of time. Like, ‘no, this track is eleven minutes long, if you don’t want to listen to it, don’t listen to it, but . . . what we are trying to achieve in this music is different in some way than what a three-minute song is trying to achieve.’” Ellis’ performance enacted several aspects of socially differentiated time. Different people do not have the same access to time and attention, for many reasons, including race and speech disabilities. Ellis reflects: “as a Black person I am also thinking about how time, and access to time, is racially inflected. There are many moments in the world when a person of color is just not given as much time to speak.” Another example of such a phenomenon comes to mind. When Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris debated Vice President Mike Pence in October 2020, Pence kept interrupting her during her allotted speaking time, no doubt enabled in part by the racial and gendered dynamics to which Ellis refers. Harris, however, came ready to defend her time. When Pence tried to interrupt her, Harris’ reply – “I’m speaking,” which she repeated at least six times during the debate – represented not only her insistence that she be heard, but also that she be given the time that was rightfully hers to be heard. (Susan Page, the moderator, reminded Pence at numerous moments that his “time is up” and reminded Harris the same once as well.) At a certain point in the debate after Pence had exceeded his time limit, Harris was explicit: “I would like equal time.” Harris’ demand for time recalls U.S. Congresswoman Maxine Waters’ 2017 encounter with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin during a House Financial Services Committee hearing, in which Mnuchin tried stalling his answer to a question she asked. At first, when Mnuchin began by complimenting Waters, she was quick to rebut: “I don’t want to take my time up with how great I am . . . I don’t want to waste my time on me.” Waters then used a procedural phrase – “Reclaiming my time” – a total of 16 instances over the course of a short few minutes to make it clear that she was seeking concise, precise answers to her questions. When Mnuchin complained that Waters had interrupted him, Waters explained: “when you’re on my time, I can reclaim it . . . So I’m reclaiming my time . . . .” Then, turning to the chairman of the committee, she requested: “Would you please explain the rules, and do not take that away from my time.” The chairman assured Waters that she would be given her allotted time. As Christine Emba (2017) wrote in the Washington Post about the incident, “In a year studded with absurd examples of men interrupting their female colleagues, a dignified woman’s firm insistence on being heard and getting straight to business was a welcome and empowering surprise . . . And for many women and people of color, the phrase ‘reclaiming my time’ felt particularly poignant, with the idea of reclamation specifically speaking to both the present and the past. Society has been wasting not only their time but also their

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voices, agency and potential – for years.” Harris demanding equal time during the vice-presidential debate and Waters reclaiming her time during the congressional hearing were rhetorical and political maneuvers as well as acts of racial and gendered resistance, just as Ellis’ long pauses and five-minute performance on stage at St. Mark’s was a poetic act of reclaiming his equal time as a Black person with disabled speech. The social differentiation of time also means that in a population with socioeconomic hierarchies, distinct groups may be expected to use their days and nights differently. Often, a dominant class uses the labor time of people in lower economic positions to enrich their own experiences of daily life. Xenophon, author of Oeconomicus, a fourth-century BCE Greek guide to household management later translated into Latin by the Roman author Cicero and popular during the European Renaissance, describes a Greek nobleman, Ischomachus, as a model of successful farm management. James Ker (2023: 128) observes that Ischomachus regards the daily time of enslaved members of his household as part of his own daily time, available to deploy to make his own “multitasking” successful. When asked how he accomplished so much in a single day, Ischomachus explains that he can perform multiple tasks at the same time by forcing an enslaved person to do some things while he does others: “But if there is nothing necessary in the city, my slave leads my horse to the farm, while I use my journey to the farm as a walk – perhaps better, Socrates, than if I had walked around in the colonnade” (Ker 2023: 128). Ischomachus details how he can simultaneously enjoy a walk and have his horse brought to the farm – at the very same time – because while he walks, the man whom he has enslaved brings his horse. The landowner’s time, from Ischomachus’ perspective, includes not only his own time but also the time of other people over whom he exercises social control (slavery might be defined as a system in which certain people exert almost total control over the time as well as the bodies and relationships of other people). In his own account, Ischomachus’ leisure time and his physical health come at the temporal expense of others. Barak (2014) presents a similar example in his study of daily schedules in colonial Egypt. Rigid daily schedules had become, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a way of announcing one’s seriousness and diligence as an effendi, a person of high social standing. Publicizing one’s schedule, which became a popular practice, was regarded as an opportunity to announce one’s social location. It is in this context that Mustafa Kamil, who would later become an Egyptian nationalist leader, publicized his daily schedule, which began at 6:00 am when he woke up, prayed, ate breakfast, and exercised. Unlike Ischomachus, Kamil does not boast that what enables him to devote his day to reading, writing, legal business, napping, visiting friends and relatives, socializing, and dining frequently is the labor of

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other people – his account obscures this fact even as his schedule relied on it. But Barak, in his analysis of Kamil’s writings, points out that someone must have prepared Kamil’s meals and taken care of other daily necessities in order to facilitate Kamil’s rigid schedule and allow him to spend his time in the particular ways that he does. Barak muses that if Kamil drank coffee (a popular beverage at the time, especially for those of Kamil’s social class) with milk (a European tradition adopted by many in the effendi class in Egypt), then “the plot thickens: the mere suggestion of fresh milk traveling daily from a water buffalo in the countryside to Kamil’s cup evokes various other nonhomogenized mornings that start much earlier than 6:00 AM” (Barak 2014: 17–18). For Kamil to be able to wake up and drink his coffee, someone else – likely someone from a lower social class – needed to wake up much earlier to procure and deliver the milk. The schedule also omits others, including the women in his household whose time and labor supplemented and made possible Kamil’s daily schedule: “Kamil’s eventful morning seems to have necessitated the presence of domestic subordinates to prepare and serve the breakfast that had to be promptly consumed between prayer and exercise or to attend to the different sets of clothing for indoor and outdoor activity” (Barak 2014: 18). While Kamil dressed and prayed, the typical Egyptian middle-class housewife, according to Barak’s analysis, prepared breakfast and cleaned the house, and then not long after returned to cook lunch, aided as well by servants with long working hours. In this telling, a poor worker woke up very early to deliver milk and then a woman prepared breakfast to facilitate a privileged, upper-class man enjoying such a beverage with breakfast and boasting about it in the local paper (a newspaper that itself was presumably directed at other such men), as an example of how efficiently he used his time and how ordered his day was. Social judgments about different types of work can associate some people with labor that sustains themselves and others (preparing food, cleaning, building, and so on), while allowing other people the opportunity to devote their time to activities such as reading, writing, philosophical inquiry, supervising their properties or the work of others, and governance. The latter group gains another privilege in this process: they can boast about how they use their time in meaningful ways and towards important ends, not always realizing that doing so is only possible because it is supported by the less-valued work of others. Moreover, framing the former as mundane and the latter as meaningful is itself a value judgment that elevates some forms of work over others, rather than reflecting the actual meaningfulness of diverse forms of work, whether it involves care-giving, construction, or contemplation. Indeed, philosopher Hannah Arendt (1998 [1958]) critiqued this very oversimplification of types of lifestyles that divides people into two categories, those who labor and those who live the life of the mind. Historically, philosophers have

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often separated society into less-valued people who do work to sustain human life every day, and the glorified people who pursue politics, contemplation, and philosophy. Arendt notes, however, that philosophers had not properly attended to the different aspects of working life, nor to the value of such work – not only practically but also philosophically. Contrary to such opinions, Arendt argued that the continual, ever-necessary (and never-ending) tasks that sustain life, such as cooking, which she called “labor,” as well as efforts that come to a definitive conclusion, such as building tables or cities, which she terms “work,” are both intrinsically valuable – and moreover that there is the potential for satisfaction and joy in each. Neither “labor” nor “work” is drudgery, and neither should be seen as obstacles to be overcome nor services provided to “free up” time for a philosophical or political life. “Labor” connects people with the real, immediate necessities of life, and this gives meaning to everyday life. In her analysis, Arendt contends that the philosophical division of life into the contemplative and the active resulted in inadequate understandings of the different value of distinct types of work, and thus the careless devaluing of people who do many of those types of work. Nonetheless, despite Arendt’s observations and calls to the contrary, the menial and repetitive labor associated with people in lower ranks of society continue to be generally undervalued. The time in a person’s laboring day that amounts to valued work to society, and the people whose working time is financially compensated, is often understood in relation to a worker’s gender or race, or hierarchically differentiated by other factors, as Arlene Daniels pointed out in her 1987 article “Invisible Work.” Daniels, a sociologist, identifies “the notion of work as something set apart from the rest of life” as “a peculiarly modern and Western idea” (1987: 403). One defining feature of how work is defined in such contexts is that “it is something for which we get paid” (1987: 403). Daniels argues that many activities, such as domestic labor, child rearing, care work, community service, and volunteering, are rendered “invisible” by being undervalued and uncompensated. Though Daniels does not frame the issue of invisible labor primarily as a matter of time, it can be helpful to do so: invisible work is about certain people laboring without wage, usually but not only in the domestic private sphere, so that other people, usually those more privileged, have more time to do visible work that is compensated, recognized, and socially valued, often in the public realm. Daniels notes that cleaning up after or caring for others – what Ukeles calls “maintenance” and what Arendt labels “labor” – is likely to be repetitive, constructed as boring, and seems never-ending (1987: 406). Undercompensated labor also contributes to undervaluing the time of some, to the advantage of others. For example, drawing upon our discussion about pandemic time above, we note that “essential” workers are often poorly paid even when they must work

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long in-person hours in the midst of a dangerous pandemic (“overworked and underpaid”). Melinda Gates has termed inequalities in how people spend their time, the type of work for which they are compensated, and how highly people are compensated for their time as “time poverty,” a societal problem that exacerbates racial, gendered, and other inequalities, perpetuating intergenerational injustice (Salyer 2016). The societal devaluing of “maintenance” is, in Daniels’ construction, a problem for both the individual stay-at-home parent and the entire workforce of sanitation workers, though such different groups may not always find solidarity. The determination of hourly wages, debates about minimum wage, and policies about maximum weekly work hours and overtime pay constitute sites of social struggle in the past and present, to assert the value of work that often has less social capital, even as it produces greater financial capital for the leaders of industry. This history of hourly wages also directly impacted other dimensions of time; for example, caps to weekly working hours in twentieth-century America eventually led not only to the idea of overtime pay but also to a five-day workweek and a two-day weekend, a weekly structure that is as influential as it is relatively recent. Another labor management practice called “temporal arbitrage,” a term coined by Shehzad Nadeem (2011) in his study of outsourcing in India, exploits time zone gaps between workers in different markets (Poster 2016: 102–103), and also contributes to the erosion of labor compensation. Winifred R. Poster (2016) elaborates on Nadeem’s ideas, explaining that “international outsourcing extends the workday,” because workers in, for example, India, can work during the day while it is night in the United States, “producing results overnight” and offering “continuous live service” (102). “With the proliferation of the workforce in rotating shifts, the labor process can operate nonstop” (102) in order for a company to provide live customer service or online banking. International competition for lower-paid jobs can depress worker compensation, including how many and which hours a worker has to work, how many jobs they may need, and what hours may be left for things besides work. One’s access to alternatives to work, such as recreational or leisure time with family or voluntary associations, is also closely bound up with social difference. In his examination of ancient Roman concepts of work and leisure, J.P. Toner (1995) reflected on the parallels and differences between his own, late-twentiethcentury context and that of the city of Rome. He concluded that “our experience of the phenomena of leisure and work has been tied to our increased temporal stratification and industrialization . . . We have merely parceled off leisure and work as separate areas of time as a prelude to measuring their efficiency and productivity” (32). In a recent work of political science, Julie L. Rose (2017) suggests

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that unequal access to “free time” is not only a result of uneven distributions of wealth and disparities in income. She argues that rather than viewing “free time” as a personal preference or mandating “leisure time” dedicated to rest, “free time” ought to be considered a resource, such as money, and a right to which everyone is entitled in order to pursue their own chosen ends beyond meeting their basic needs such as food and shelter. Were this to be the case, everyone could decide for themselves how to use their non-work hours in ways that are meaningful to them, such as to promote significant social causes. Each of these examples highlights a way in which time is socially differentiated, in addition to being culturally constructed and historically contingent. The social differentiation of time – whether across differences of class, economic status, ethnicity, race, gender, ability, or an intersection of these – means that different groups and individuals within a broader population have different access to time, experience time differently, and have their time valued differently.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, (1958) 2018. Barak, On. On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Barak, On. “Times of Tamaddun: Gender, Urbanity, and Temporality in Colonial Egypt.” In Women and the City, Women in the City: A Gendered Perspective on Ottoman Urban History, edited by Nazan Maksudyan, 15–35. Jackson, TN: Berghahn Books, 2014. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Frankfurt am Main: Surhkamp Verlag. English Translation, New York: Mariner Books, (1955) 2019. Carlebach, Elisheva. Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. Cole, Sean. “Made to Be Broken. This American Life. Episode 713 Act One: Time Bandit.” WBEZ Chicago. August 7, 2020. Cooper, Brittney. “The Racial Politics of Time.” TED Talk. 2016. Accessed July 15, 2021. https://www. ted.com/talks/brittney_cooper_the_racial_politics_of_time?language=en. Daniels, Arlene. “Invisible Work.” Social Problems 34.5 (1987): 403–415. Donner, Fred M. Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing. Berlin: Gerlach Press, (1998) 2021. Dunster, Gideon P., Liciano de la Iglesia, Miriam Ben-Hamo, Claire Nave, Jason G. Fleischer, Satchidananda Panda, and Horacio O. de la Iglesia. “Sleepmore in Seattle: Later School Start Times are Associated with More Sleep and Better Performance in High School Students.” Science Advances 4.12 (2018). Accessed July 13, 2021. https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/ 12/eaau6200. Edelstein, Dan, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley. Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. Ellis, Jerome. https://www.jjjerome.com/. Accessed February 1, 2021.

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Eltantawi, Sarah. Shari‘ah on Trial: Northern Nigeria’s Islamic Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017. Emba, Christine. “‘Reclaiming my time’ is bigger than Maxine Waters.” The Washington Post, August 1, 2017. Accessed February 18, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/ 2017/08/01/reclaiming-my-time-is-bigger-than-maxine-waters/. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Feeney, Denis. Caesar’s Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Foster, Johanna. “Menstrual Time: The Sociocognitive Mapping of ‘The Menstrual Cycle.” Sociological Forum 11.3 (1996): 523–547. Frumer, Yulia. Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Hanson, Ann Ellis. “The Eight Months’ Child and the Etiquette of Birth: ‘Obsit Omen!’” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 61.4 (1987): 589–602. Jahoda, Marie, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and Hans Zeisel. Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Community. London: Routledge, 1971. Johnston, Hamish. “New Optical Timekeeper is 10 Times More Reliable than Caesium Atomic Clocks.” Physics World. October 22, 2019. Accessed June 1, 2021. https://physicsworld.com/a/new-opticaltimekeeper-is-ten-times-more-reliable-than-caesium-atomic-clocks/ Kalman, David Zvi. “Unequal Hours: The Jewish Reception of Timekeeping Technology from the Bible to the Twentieth Century.” Ph.D. diss., Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2019. Kaye, Lynn. Time in the Babylonian Talmud: Natural and Imagined Times in Jewish Law and Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Ker, James. The Ordered Day: Quotidian Time and Forms of Life in Ancient Rome. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023. Kittrels, Alonzo. “Back in the Day: Time has Passed on the Gold Watch Retirement Gift.” The Philadelphia Tribune. July 29, 2017. https://www.phillytrib.com/lifestyle/back-in-the-day-time-haspassed-on-the-gold-watch-retirement-gift/article_5e853ac1-aa1a-5f2b-9bd2-f3b09dd9cd34.html Kosmin, Paul J. Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. Larson, Satyel K. “Bearing Knowledge: Law, Reproduction and the Female Body in Modern Morocco, 1912–Present.” Ph.D. diss, University of California, Berkeley, 2012. Levine, Robert. A Geography of Time: The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist. New York: Basic Books, 1998. Machemer, Theresa. “Clock in New York Counts Down the Time Remaining to Avert Climate Change.” Smithsonian Magazine, September 22, 2020. Accessed May 25, 2021. https://www.smithsonian mag.com/smart-news/clock-new-york-counts-down-time-remaining-avert-climatedisaster–180975881. McCrossen, Alexis. Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Milikowsky, Chaim. Seder Olam: Commentary and Introduction. 2 vols. Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 2014. Miller, Kassandra Jackson. “From Critical Days to Critical Hours: Galenic Refinements of Hippocratic Models.” Tapa 148.1 (2018): 111–138. Nadeem, Shehzad. Dead Ringers: How Outsourcing is Changing the Way Indians Understand Themselves. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

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Nothaft, Philipp. Dating the Passion: The Life of Jesus and the Emergence of Scientific Chronology (200– 1600). Leiden: Brill, 2012. Ogle, Vanessa. “Whose Time Is It? The Pluralization of Time and the Global Condition, 1870s–1940s.” American Historical Review 118.5 (2013): 1376–1402. Ogle, Vanessa. The Global Transformation of Time, 1871–1950. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. Paz, Yakir. “From Scribes to Scholars: Rabbinic Exegesis in Light of the Homeric Commentaries.” Phd diss., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2014. Poster, Winifred R. “The Virtual Receptionist with a Human Touch: Opposing Pressures of Digital Automation and Outsourcing in Interactive Services.” In Invisible Labor: Hidden Work in the Contemporary World, edited by Marion Crain, Winifred R. Poster, and Miriam A. Cherry, 87–112. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016. Roenneberg, Till. Internal Time: Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag, and Why You’re So Tired. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. Rose, Julie L. Free Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Roy, Neil J. “Saints.” In The Cambridge Dictionary of Christian Theology, edited by Ian A. McFarland, et al., 455–457. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Ruoff, Kenneth J. Imperial Japan at Its Zenith: The Wartime Celebration of the Empire’s 2,600th Anniversary. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. Salyer, Kirsten. “Melinda Gates Offers a Solution to Time Poverty.” Time, February 3, 2016. Accessed October 15, 2022. https://time.com/4233689/bill-and-melinda-gates-annual-letter–2016/ Samuelson, Arielle. “What is an Atomic Clock?” NASA.gov, June 19, 2019. Accessed May 25, 2021. www. nasa.gov/feature/jpl/what-is-an-atomic-clock. Senn, Frank C. “Liturgical Calendar.” In The Cambridge Dictionary of Christian Theology, edited by Ian A. McFarland, et al., 77–78. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Steele, John M. “Short Time in Mesopotamia.” In Down to the Hour: Short Time in the Ancient Mediterranean and the Near East, edited by Kassandra Miller and Sarah Symons, 90–124. Leiden: Brill, 2020. Stolz, Daniel. The Lighthouse and the Observatory: Islam, Science, and Empire in Late Ottoman Egypt. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Sumerian King List. The ETCSL Project. Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, 2003. Accessed October 15, 2022. https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.2.1.1# Thompson, Laurence G. “Chinese Religious Year.” In Encyclopedia of Religion, edited by Lindsay Jones, 2nd ed., vol. 3, Macmillan Reference USA. Gale eBooks, 2005. Accessed November 9, 2021. http://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3424500557/GVRL?u=prin77918&sid=bookmarkGVRL&xid=0ab389af. Toner, J. P. Leisure and Ancient Rome. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. Tsoucalas, Gregory and Markos Sgantzos. “Calculating Pregnancy’s Duration in Ancient Greece: Gestational, or Fetal Age?” Obstetrics & Gynecology International Journal 6.3 (2017): 00209. Tumanian, Benik, E. “Measurement of Time in Ancient and Medieval Armenia.” Journal for the History of Astronomy 5 (1974): 91–98. Ukeles, Mierle Laderman. “Touch Sanitation.” Performance. Ronald Feldman Gallery. 1979–1980. Accessed February 7, 2021. https://www.wikiart.org/en/mierle-laderman-ukeles/touchsanitation–1980. United States House Committee on Financial Services. “Waters Grills Mnuchin about Trump Administration’s Financial Ties to Russia, Mnuchin Filibusters.” July 27, 2017. https://financialservices.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=400727.

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World Health Organization. “Preterm Birth.” 19 February, 2018. https://www.who.int/news-room/ fact-sheets/detail/preterm-birth. Zarracina, Javier, Karina Zaiets, and Carlie Procell. “How Biden and Trump compared in the final presidential debate.” USA Today. October 23, 2020. Accessed February 23, 2021. https://www. usatoday.com/in-depth/news/2020/10/23/last-night-trump-biden-debate-recap-interruptionsspeaking-time/3733474001/. Zerubavel, Eviatar. “The French Republican Calendar: A Case Study in the Sociology of Time.” American Sociological Review 42 (1977): 868–877. Zerubavel, Eviatar. Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Zerubavel, Eviatar. The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1985. Zerubavel, Eviatar. Taken for Granted: The Remarkable Power of the Unremarkable. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. Zuidema, R. Tom. “Calendars: South American Calendars.” In Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed., vol. 3, edited by Lindsay Jones. 1360–1365. Macmillan Reference USA, 2005.

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3 Time in Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Perspective This book argues not only that time is culturally constructed, historically contingent, and socially differentiated, but also that time is disciplinarily specific. Disciplines in modern scholarly contexts operate similarly to other types of social groups. Therefore, in addition to asking how language, historical context, and world cultures impact measurements, organizations, and conceptions of time, much can also be gained by asking within which knowledge community or communities – that is, within which discipline(s) or field(s) of study – we theorize about time. The disciplinary diversity of the essays in Part II of this book demonstrates just how fruitful such inquiry can be. Disciplines have their own histories and cultural contexts, emerging and developing in particular eras and geographical locations (Cohen & Lloyd 2014; Arti 2014: 74–109; McElreavy et al. 2021). Ranging from the natural sciences to literature, history, and art, disciplines operate in modern universities, scholarly associations, and publishing houses. There are rules about what kinds of knowledge belong within each discipline. These guidelines are taught formally in classrooms; performed through acculturation in the social engagements of scholarly conferences and presentations; and enforced through processes of peer review and publication. Given the social dependence of time concepts, it stands to reason that disciplines, like other social units, construct their own uses and definitions of time. In some disciplines, time may be a given, a metric by which to generate other meaningful measures, such as velocity and acceleration. In such studies, the definition of time is not the question, but without a predictable, given definition of time (such as counting small increments of duration at regular intervals, or accounting for extremely long durations by reference to standards other than clocks), it would be impossible for research to proceed. In some fields, particular assumptions about time (e.g., its linear progression or distinctions between past, present, and future) drive inquiry even when a single unit or definition of time is not assumed or given. In still other fields and disciplines, however, what time is or how it ought to be conceived or theorized, is the central question, and time’s variability may be of particular interest and the subject of direct study and speculation. Oftentimes, disciplines and fields encompass some combination of these ways of engaging with time in different contexts. This variety of

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disciplinary engagements with time is itself worthy of note in conversations about time across disciplines. That time and temporal conceptions are disciplinarily specific does not mean that each discipline has a single conception of time, nor that disciplinary conceptions of time remain static. Each discipline develops diverse constellations of ideas about what time is, how it functions, and how it is most productively studied, and those notions change as disciplines expand, engage with different data, or reassess basic assumptions. Moreover, fields of study are never entirely isolated from one another. The history of academic disciplines suggests that knowledge and modes of inquiry are cultivated socially and communally, and that paradigm shifts in one or more disciplines can – and do – revolutionize methods or foundational principles in other disciplines, both adjacent and further afield. This is certainly the case with conceptions of time. Not only do scholars in different disciplines study and conceive of time in multiple ways; disciplinary temporal paradigms often shape, wittingly or not, the evolving temporal paradigms of other disciplines. Because of the history of academic disciplines, the sociology of knowledge, and the ways in which disciplinary trends so often mutually inform one another, it is also the case that certain overarching temporal conceptions underpin basic disciplinary principles across the sciences, arts, and humanities. Many modern academic disciplines, as will become clearer in our discussion below, are predicated on and advance particular notions of temporal linearity; distinctions between past, present, and future; and temporal progress, especially human progress from past to future. These temporal assumptions sometimes also inform ideas built upon them, including hierarchical notions of the superiority of the present over the past, or associating certain groups of people with historical advancement and others with the primitive past, timelessness, or laziness. But even when they don’t, their ubiquity can mask the fact that there are or can be other ways of thinking about or employing time even within particular academic disciplines. Challenging linearity or progress and subverting distinctions between past, present, and future – that is, thinking about time in ways that challenge disciplinary orthodoxies – likewise characterize other modes of disciplinary thinking, often those that attempt to offer alternatives to dominant disciplinary perspectives. Disciplinary constructions of time do not simply serve as additional examples of how time is historically contingent, culturally constructed, and socially differentiated. Focusing on disciplinary construction of time allows us to make two further arguments. On the one hand, there is much to be gained from thinking about time through the lens of more than a single discipline. Doing so de-naturalizes temporal assumptions and adds texture and complexity to understanding time. On the other hand, studying disciplinary constructions of time across multiple

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disciplines lays bare some of the dominant structures of time that have constituted thinking across disciplines in the past centuries and decades, none of which are inevitable simply because they are ubiquitous. These two insights might seem contradictory at first, the former celebrating multi-disciplinary inquiry as pushing us to think creatively about time, and the latter pointing out that even multidisciplinary study can often itself obscure alternative temporal conceptions. This tension, however, is precisely what is needed in order to foster thinking both across disciplines and also beyond them in generative ways. As a multi-voiced multidisciplinary collection about time, this book engages directly with the history of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research. One of the defining moments in the modern history of disciplinary boundaries and interdisciplinary scholarship centered on a debate about time and whether time appears to differ among people and between places. In 1922, after Einstein won acclaim for his special theory of relativity, the French Society of Philosophy invited him to Paris to present his ideas. Henri Bergson, one of the towering figures in philosophy of his generation and a future Nobel laureate in literature (1927), attended Einstein’s talk. During his lecture, Einstein argued that there was only one definition of time, which was to be found in physics, and that such a definition was necessarily objective. Any fictional or philosophical time, which differed from the notion of time that Einstein had discovered in his scientific theories, presented a challenge. While Einstein promoted cross-disciplinary definitions of time over the course of his long career, Einstein was, according to Jimena Canales (2015), more rigid in his thinking during this period of his research. Following the heated exchange between the two men, Bergson published a book, Duration and Simultaneity (1965 [1922]), in response to Einstein’s definitions of time, especially those found in the later general theory of relativity. Bergson not only criticized Einstein’s scientific arguments; he also argued more generally that Einstein’s theory of time was insufficient. The time measurable by a clock, so central to Einstein’s experiments, is not all there is to time. Bergson insisted that a crucial dimension of time is lost when it is measured. Successive generations of twentieth-century philosophers remembered the Einstein-Bergson debate, which transpired in person in 1922 but persisted in print thereafter, continuing to discuss whether time was better addressed from the perspective of “objective” experimental facts or from the perspective of perception and internal consciousness of time. With regard to this debate, Einstein and Bergson became symbols of divergent approaches to time, and perhaps also to the challenges of speaking about time across disciplines. This is the case even though the invitation to Einstein from the French Society of Philosophy was not unusual; Henri Poincaré, a renowned physicist, was a member of the society and France had a reputation, according to Canales, for “collaboration between scientists and philosophers” (74).

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Nonetheless, this debate between a philosopher and a physicist about the meaning of simultaneity, time dilation, and relativity, became an important moment in the history of studying time across disciplinary divides. Until recently, scholars have largely followed the trajectory of allowing disciplines to define time (and other concepts) from within their own frameworks, with a few notable exceptions of those who try to bridge disciplinary divides (e.g., Dolev 2007). Yet what we learn from Einstein and Bergson’s intellectual disagreements about time is not the futility of engaging seriously across disciplines to understand time, but rather the necessity of engaging. While debate allows each side to sharpen the definition of its own concepts through productive comparison with and challenges from the other side, it is not the only possible mode of engagement. Rather than establishing the correctness or superiority of a particular discipline’s formulation of time, we suggest that today’s approaches of multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary conversations should be aimed at discovering unexpected connections between disciplines, questioning assumptions, and prompting new questions and directions for research. Such interdisciplinary conversations about time are both productive and necessary for fuller, richer, more nuanced, and accurate conceptualizations of time in all its multifariousness. Understanding how time functions and how it is conceived in different disciplines and cultures is important. This approach does not mean that disciplines ought to abandon their norms or revise their methods, nor even that common ground should be created. We contend, rather, that learning about and understanding different disciplinary and cultural perspectives about time enriches how each discipline is able to envision time according to its own disciplinary norms and methods. Cross-disciplinary dialogues can become potential stumbling blocks when they are conceived as competition over the same intellectual territory. But they can also open conversations about what each disciplinary perspective might add to a broader conversation framed by generosity and curiosity. That is precisely one of the goals of this book: not to stage a debate between two or more positions or disciplines, but rather to open the space for a multivocal conversation by expanding the range of ideas and fostering a context in which creative connections between disparate concepts and complexity of thought are celebrated. What we learn about time from such inquiry is no doubt messier and less determinate. But sitting with the complexity and diversity of the “who,” “how,” and “why” of time allows us to forge new directions and pathways in the study of time across disciplines.

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The second half of the book, titled “Part II: Time Across Disciplines,” constitutes a collection of nine essays, each written by an expert in a different discipline. Each essay introduces a single discipline through an example of a time concept, showcasing the methods by which different disciplines express or inquire into time. In this chapter, we introduce a few additional disciplinary approaches to time not discussed in the essays that follow, further highlighting how generative the study of time across disciplines can be. This section is thus an overture to the second half of this book, which points the way to the next frontier: studying further and in more depth diverse cultural and disciplinary constructions of time. In this chapter, we chose a number of fields of study not explored in the subsequent essays for their unique temporal concepts: geology, plant ecology, history, and fashion. Each of these disciplines engages distinct spans of time and places different protagonists at the center of time measurement. Some of these constructions of time, while humanly delineated, barely register human processes. Others engage with the timing of human activity, but as part of an interconnected structure in which humans take part but are not central. And yet others focus on human activity and production, but nonetheless mark different time scales, centering different kinds of people, values, and ideologies. In our discussion of these disciplines, we engage with an additional field, queer studies, which touches a variety of disciplines with critiques of what is considered normal or typical. Queer studies offers fresh, sometimes subversive, ways to construct the temporal relation of events, and the connection between past, future and present – what Carolyn Dinshaw terms “touching across time” (2019) – and so we find it especially helpful to weave some insights from queer studies into various discussions as they become most relevant, returning to the topic more fully at the end of this chapter.

Geology Our first discipline-based construction of time concerns the earth. Geologic time covers very long periods, in which a few thousand years is considered a short amount of time, and in which the existence of human life is nearly unmarked against the span of the earth’s time. Geologists study the time reflected in rock sediment and fossils, the compression of stones and animal remains marking layers of change. They use their own time scale, which stretches billions of years, with increments of millions, thousands, and hundreds of years. (By way of comparison: while geological time appears expansive in relation to human time spans, it is relatively short when compared with disciplines, such as astrophysics,

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devoted to studying the origins of the universe, which operate on yet larger scales of many more billions of years.) Through such long timescales, geologists can explain how land masses developed, the reasons for erosions of certain coasts, and the emergence of new islands. Moreover, the very idea that the current state of the earth holds information about the past evokes the marks of time passing on other bodies, including humans, such as scars from past traumas or wrinkles in the skin. Long-past events are memorialized in stones, for example, in this description of sea pebbles made of sedimentary rock: “The subtle rhythms of the seas, rivers and winds . . . lay these sediments down. Over time, the sediments build up into layers, each made of slightly different minerals or grains of slightly different sizes or shapes . . . Each is a record of the event that initially deposited the sediment: perhaps a springtime snowmelt, the passing of a storm, the slow migration of a river across the landscape” (Iselin and Carruthers 2006: 64). Scholars have long recognized the contribution that the development of the modern field of geology made to changing notions of time, and in particular to recognizing the slowness of change, the age of the earth, and the timescales used to conceive the past. Stephen Jay Gould (1987) explains in his study of geologic time that for hundreds – even thousands – of years, the earth was considered, by many, to be young. The analysis of rock formations in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, led to the discovery that the earth evolved slowly, and moreover that rock formations and other geologic evidence contain the story of a deep past. The discovery of “deep time,” Gould argues, not only changed conceptions of the age of the earth but also humans’ relationship to it: “What could be more comforting, what more convenient for human domination, than the traditional concept of a young earth, ruled by human will within days of its origin. How threatening, by contrast, the notion of an almost incomprehensible immensity, with human habitation restricted to a millimicrosecond at the very end!” (2). Gould draws attention to the relationship between the portrayal of time in geology as a field, and the intellectual and social worlds of human scientists at various historical periods. A number of basic temporal principles underlie geological work. The first is that change can be observed in our existing world; through observing geological formations in the present, we can, quite literally, see the past and make some sense of it. As Marcia Bjornerud (2018) writes, “rocks are not nouns but verbs – visible evidence of processes: a volcanic eruption, the accretion of a coral reef, the growth of a mountain belt. Everywhere one looks, rocks bear witness to events that unfolded over long stretches of time” (2009). This principle of “seeing past changes,” along with notions of the slowness of change and deep time, were revolutionary in their day, and deeply unsettling theologically and culturally.

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Steno’s principles of superposition, original horizontality, and lateral continuity establish how scientists interpret the history of the earth in layers of ground. Superposition suggests that in an area in which sedimentary rock layers have not been disturbed, the bottom rock represents the oldest layer, while the top rock represents the youngest layer, and that the sequence from bottom to top is chronological. Layers of sedimentary rocks thus represent an accumulation of one type of time. Original horizontality argues that all things being equal, sediment is deposited horizontally because of superimposition and gravity. That is not to say that layers of sediment always appear horizontally, however. Geologists explain that sometimes ruptures in layers of sediment occur, such that an older layer of rock might appear, in some cases, above younger layers of rock. In addition, geological phenomena such as erupting volcanoes and shifting plates also cause lower layers to be pushed up and settle above later layers. In such cross-cutting, geologists conclude that that which cuts is younger than that which has been cut, such that igneous intrusions or faults are younger than the rocks they intrude or displace. While the principle of original horizontality builds upon the idea of linear progressions of time, it also acknowledges disruptions to linearity in the resurfacing of older historical layers into the more recent past. This seemingly technical principle (the general idea of temporal linearity that nonetheless accounts for the eruption of older layers into more recent periods) is illuminating when placed into cross-disciplinary context, for example in contemporary conversations in the field of history, which has grappled with the ways in which the significance of past events resurfaces in later periods, revising both the ways in which we understand past historical events and also the way we conceive of the historical present through the memory of those events. Geologists also account for gaps in the geological record, sometimes termed a “hiatus,” which can extend to a million years. This idea, too, has applicability to the study of history; while extant evidence contains material from the past and can allow us to “see” the past in some ways, the historical record is always also incomplete and contains unconformities. Historians discuss “silences” in the archives, for instance. Such absences do not indicate that that period of time did not occur or was devoid of meaning, but rather that the material has eroded, been lost, or not deposited. These are but a few of the ways in which historical discussions – including about methodologies of historical study – can be enriched in dialogue with geology. New ideas about the age of the earth and slow change over long spans of time have revolutionized disciplinary thinking far beyond geology. Quite soon after these revolutions in geology, discussions about the earth’s time were extended to biological species and to human language. The field of evolutionary biology, for example, adapted the temporality of modern geology and mapped it

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onto the development of species, which was likewise predicated on the idea of slow change over long spans of time, and the ability to “see” the past in present bodies of evidence. In his autobiography, Charles Darwin (1908 [1887]) acknowledges his engagement with the geological discourse of his day and the impact that studying and observing geological phenomena during his sea voyage (1831–1836) had on the development of his ideas in the biological sciences: The voyage of the Beagle has been by far the most important event in my life and has determined my whole career . . . The investigation of the geology of all the places visited was far more important, as reasoning here comes into play. On first examining a new district nothing can appear more hopeless than the chaos of rocks; but by recording the stratification and nature of the rocks and fossils at many points, always reasoning and predicting what will be found elsewhere, light soon begins to dawn on the district, and the structure of the whole becomes more or less intelligible (27).

Darwin continues by explaining that, while on the journey, he was reading the first volume of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, which he “studied attentively,” noting the influence of geological time on his thinking. The recognition of deep time and discoveries about the slowness of the earth’s changes in geology affected philology and linguistics as well. These disciplines transferred processes of deep time from geology, and notions of slow change over time from evolutionary biology, into conceptions of human language development. The nineteenth-century German philologist Max Müller directly engaged with (even as he criticized) Darwin’s theories of language (Olender 2009: 87–88). Similar trajectories can be traced in the fields of pre-historic archaeology and paleoanthropology, both disciplines similarly interested in prehistory and the origins of human social life. Geology’s temporal influence on the disciplines of evolutionary biology, philology, archaeology, and paleoanthropology is an example of the ways in which conceptions of time in different disciplines affect one another. When a notion gains overwhelming prevalence among scholars, though, it may hinder contrary concepts from gaining traction, or prevent the recognition of the limitations of the newly accepted wisdom. For example, the unidirectionality of evolution and progress, in species as in language, limited the ways in which time and history could be conceived, privileging progressive, linear, and irreversible notions of time over alternatives. The legacy of these temporal paradigms is now at the center of contemporary scholarly discussions about imagining alternative notions of time that are not beholden to linear notions of progress, to which we return below. Geology as a field continues to offer significant time concepts and representations, which are significant for scientists as well as others in more distant fields. Here we focus on two further elements: the representation of the multiplicity and

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locality of time in geologic charts, and the notion of a new era for the earth, called the Anthropocene, derived from geologic research. Today, one of the ways that geologists visualize time is through chronostratigraphic charts, which divide the entirety of the earth’s existence into eras. The International Chronostratigraphic Chart, for example, aligns eons, eras, periods, epochs, ages, and numerical ages into side-by-side columns in a chronologically-organized chart that may be viewed as a history of the earth. Other charts provide this information while adding even more detail. For instance, the Global Chronostratigraphic Correlation Table maps the different periodization schemes onto the paleomagnetic record (the strength and direction of the earth’s magnetic field, which has changed over time), the oceanic drilling record, the Antarctic ice drilling record, and other categories. All the charts, however, provide visual depictions of a number of important aspects related to geological time. For example, geological periods are presented linearly from past to present; the chart connects the distant past with the present; geological time is periodized into discrete units and subunits that do not overlap; different colors are used to emphasize continuities and changes in the earth’s atmosphere, fossil records, and so on. Each of these chronostratigraphic tables also combines relative and absolute time. On the one hand, these charts list eons, eras, periods, epochs, and ages in parallel columns to show how they relate to one another (e.g., which epochs make up each period, which periods comprise each era), and also to demonstrate their relative dating (i.e., to show the succession of each eon, era, period, and so on). On the other hand, these charts also provide information about absolute time by listing the numerical age of each time period, thereby dating the earth and its layers. Bjornerud (2018) writes of the geological timescale: Little by little, over more than two centuries, the local stories told by rocks in all parts of the world have been stitched together into a great tapestry – the geologic timescale. This “map” of Deep Time represents one of the great intellectual achievements of humanity, arduously constructed by stratigraphers, paleontologists, geochemists, and geochronologists from many cultures and faiths. It is still a work in progress to which details are constantly being added and finer and finer calibrations being made. So far, no one in more than 200 years has found an anachronistic rock or fossil – as biologist J.B.S. Haldane reputedly said, “a Precambrian rabbit” – that would represent a fatal internal inconsistency in the logic of the timescale (9).

These charts indicate the diversity of factors and data comprising geologic time, and the importance of multiple periodization schemes considered together, for the pursuit of geologic research. As we indicated above, geological time is not only concerned with the earth’s past. In recent years, stratigraphers have also debated the question of whether the earth remains in the epoch of the Holocene, or whether it has now entered a new era, which some have named the Anthropocene (Kolbert 2011). The term

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Anthropocene originated with Paul Crutzen, a chemist who argued in Nature (2002) that human impact on the earth – through, for example, farming and agricultural practices, deforestation, population growth, changes in the composition of the atmosphere, and ocean acidification – has fundamentally changed the earth and marked a decisive geological shift (another geologist, Antonio Stoppani, made a similar argument in the 1870s, calling the epoch “Anthropozoic,” but his idea was largely dismissed when he proposed it). According to Crutzen, this new epoch is marked by human impact on the earth. Though the geological record does not yet reflect these developments, current ocean acidification levels are so high that soon corals will not be able to produce reefs, which would lead to a “reef gap” in the future geological record; reef gaps are often used by geologists to mark periods of mass extinction (Kolbert 2011). The term “Anthropocene” was eventually adopted by many geologists and other researchers of climate change, as well as by humanists engaged in conversations about the changing climate. In his essay titled “Anthropocene Time” (2018), Dipesh Chakrabarty notes that “the Anthropocene debate . . . entails a constant conceptual traffic between Earth history and world history. There is widespread recognition now that we are passing through a unique phase of human history when, for the first time ever, we consciously connect events that happen on vast, geological scales – such as changes to the whole climate system of the planet – with what we might do in the everyday lives of individuals, collectivities, institutions, and nations (such as burning fossil fuels)” (6). Chakrabarty highlights the ways in which geological and historical times collide. Recognizing the significance of current changes when viewed by future scientists in retrospect, reflects some geologists’ flexible temporal perspectives. Finally, the rapid pace of the changing geological timescapes is a central feature of the Anthropocene, too. As the editors of Timescales: Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities (2020) write, East Antarctica’s Totten glacier . . . was formed at the boundary between the Eocene and Oligocene epochs some 34 million years ago. In fall 2016, it was reported that this large source of Antarctic ice had detached from the bedrock, melted from the bottom of ocean waters warming increasingly rapidly since the launch of the profoundly human experiment: the Great Acceleration. This alarming occurrence made visible a massive temporal collision: the fast melt of ice formed over long millennia. The literally unsettling implications of this human-nature imbrication also stretch far into the future as sea level rise displaces human and other populations along coastlines. Ongoing events such as ice melt, akin to ocean acidification and species loss, are at once fast and slow, short and long, human and more (vii–viii).

Contemporary geological debates about whether it is possible to mark a new epoch such as the Anthropocene, absent the usual standards of changes in sedimentary rock (for example in the emergence or disappearance of a certain type of organism), or clarity about whether that epoch should begin thousands of years ago with

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changing agricultural practices or just a few hundred years ago with industrialization, reminds us that geological time is ever evolving, even as it is ostensibly grounded in rock. Like other times, it is culturally constructed and dependent on the discipline’s disagreements and consensus.

Dendrology and Ecology Similar to the study of geology, the field of dendrology, devoted to the study of trees, uses elements of the natural world as dating devices, and considers time scales – the lifespan of trees – that outlast human lifetimes. Through disciplinespecific methods, dendrology and plant science constitute their own forms of time. Dendochronologists, for instance, regard trees as “giant recording devices that contain information about past climate, civilizations, ecosystems, and even galactic events” over a span of up to thousands of years (Robbins 2019). Counting tree rings is widely known to indicate how many years a tree has lived. But contemporary tree ring research also offers insights into the history of precipitation and temperature, catastrophic environmental events, and human responses to climate variation. Without the meticulous dating work of dendochronologists, studies of climate change over the past half century would not have had access to precise and reliable historical data. Dendrologists recognize that each individual tree contains knowledge about the past, of both the earth and its many inhabitants. Forests, too, are timekeepers. The time of forests is not unitary nor measured in a single scale; rather, forests exemplify the multiplicity of times in a single place. As Robin Wall Kimmerer, plant ecologist and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, writes, forest time reflects the diverse lives of plants and animals, and crucially, their interconnections, which emerge in the space of the forest: Time as objective reality has never made much sense to me. It’s what happens that matters. How can minutes and years, devices of our own creation, mean the same things to gnats and cedars? Two hundred years is young for the trees whose tops this morning are hung with mist. It’s an eyeblink of time for the river and nothing at all for the rocks. The rocks and river and these very same trees are likely to be here in another two hundred years, if we take good care. As for me, and that chipmunk, and the clouds of gnats milling in the shaft of sunlight – we will have moved on (Kimmerer 2013: 296).

Different beings that inhabit a forest occupy diverse time scales based on their longevity. But time in the forest is also expressed in the pace of raindrops in a storm, the rate at which pine needles drop to the ground, and the changing colors of leaves

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throughout the seasons. Kimmerer muses that the plurality of times in the forest means that there are either many types of time, or, perhaps, no time. She writes: Listening to rain, time disappears. If time is measured by the period between events, alder drip time is different from maple drip. This forest is textured with different kinds of time, as the surface of the pool is dimpled with different kinds of rain. Fir needles fall with the high-frequency hiss of rain, branches fall with the bloink of big drops, and trees fall with a rare but thunderous thud. Rare, unless you measure time like a river. And if we think of it as simply time, as if it were one thing, as if we understood it. Maybe there is no such thing as time; there are only moments, each with its own story (Kimmerer 2013: 299–300).

Forests, in other words, are spaces that challenge us to consider the relativity and multiplicity of time in the world more generally. Throughout her two books, Kimmerer explores the times of different types of plants and trees (grasses, nuts, moss), relationships between plants and trees, and the interaction of humans and the environment, all within the context of forests. The production of nuts, for example, manifests its own temporal rhythm, because it takes years of energy conservation and communication among trees to facilitate the production of massive amounts of fruits by all of the trees in a vast area, ensuring new seedlings from nuts that escape predators. The coordination of trees for massive periodic fruiting is an example of periodization that is not projected by human society, but by what we might call plant “society.” Kimmerer also notes that different fruits cultivate different times for predators: berries are made to be consumed quickly by animals, while nuts are taken away and carefully opened in more private and protected spaces, because they take more time than is safe for a squirrel to eat under the potential eye of an avian predator. Some fruits are kept for lean seasons by humans and other animals, while others are enjoyed immediately (Kimmerer 2013: 14–19). Foods, in other words, are integrally related to time: it takes time for a fruit or nut to grow and ripen, and it likewise takes time for it to be consumed, and this temporality is an important dimension of the time of forests, trees, and animals. In old growth forests, trees share information and nutrients with one another; these processes highlight how intergenerational communication and transmission is not limited to humans but an integral part of the health of the earth itself. This process of communication also represents another aspect of forestbased temporality, as the end of the lifetime of one tree means the ceding of nutrients to others, and, in turn, their continued thriving. Forest ecologist Suzanne Simard notes, for example, that current, unsustainable logging practices, which cut down older trees in diverse forests and replace them with evenly spaced seedlings of one tree type, mean that new forests are “more vulnerable to disease and climatic stress” than trees in old growth forests. That is because trees and fungi in

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old growth forests have developed networks called mycorrhizas in the soil, and individual seedlings cannot survive as well as those that exist in networks. Dying trees also produce more carbon, and pass it along to other trees in the vicinity. Moreover, Simard shows that individual species of trees, for example the Douglas fir and the paper birch, collaborate as they grow alongside one another, compensating for their respective heights and foliage and the resulting differential access to light at different growth stages by sharing carbon with the other (Jabr 2020; Simard 2021; Simard et al. 1997). On the smaller end of the plant scale are mosses, which occupy and construct a different timescale from the large trees towering above the ground. They do not compete with trees for sun energy; rather, they draw their heat from the ground and their moisture from the layer of air that flows above the ground, at different heights depending on the rocks and terrain of the forest or other contexts. This “boundary layer” governs when the moss grows and when it lies dormant. Without moisture, for example, in the dry summer, moss neither grows nor dies. During droughts, mosses can lie in a static state for forty years, and when moisture becomes available in the boundary layer, they begin to grow again (Kimmerer 2003: 35). Thus mosses, while small, live with intermittency and progression; their times are marked by their growth, and their significant longevity is possible by virtue of their ability to “wait” out challenging conditions. There is also the time of land management, of which both botany and agriculture are a part, that weaves together generations of humans and the lifecycles of grasses and propagation. The sweetgrass plant, for example, has its own lifespan, but its cultivation by humans layers another span of life and existence upon it: “Sweetgrass is best planted not by seed, but by putting roots directly in the ground. Thus the plant is passed from hand to earth to hand across years and generations” (Kimmerer 2013: 1). Kimmerer argues that humans can learn many lessons from the forest, for example about communal interconnectedness and shared responsibility in the care and cultivation of the natural world. These are some of the many ways in which plant scientists allow us to understand the multiple forms of time coexisting within forests and expressed by trees, which are unavailable in other disciplines, and unlock long-term understandings of climate change and the life of forests through studying the signs of age in trees and other temporal dimensions of plants and mosses.

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History From the times of forests, inter-species communication, and human-environmental time-making, we turn to what may be one of the most human-centered disciplinary approaches to time: that of history. Yet even within a discipline devoted to human understandings of the past, there has been a variety of different approaches to what time is in relation to history, and what historians can contribute to our understandings of time. Rather than reduce time to a simple progression, historians have emphasized multiple layers of time, expanded short periods, taken long views, emphasized the experience of time, and sought to disrupt universal notions of time (Hunt 2008; Green and Troup 2016). Certain historians also charted narratives of the development of time concepts, often culminating in arguments about how European modernity, industrialization, secularization and time concepts are bound up with one another, or alternatively, are more continuous with earlier Christian medieval phenomena than perhaps some might have thought (Le Goff 1980). Others sought to identify concepts of time that do not necessarily align with contemporary assumptions (Stern 2007). Here we highlight some of the many temporal approaches that historians have generated as they pursue their scholarly work, offering nonhistorians valuable reflections about time. As will become clear throughout our discussion, the time of rocks and trees, so central in the disciplines of geology and ecology, also inform temporal concepts in the study of history. Historian Fernand Braudel’s concept of historical time often features in surveys of modern historiography (1979, 2009). Not taking historical time for granted and proposing, instead, that history consists of at least three different, concurrent timescales, Braudel redefined the temporal boundaries of historical inquiry. He argued for the importance of consciously articulating the interactions of longer and shorter time spans to understand history. In his writings, Braudel defined the longest time scale as geographic time. This idea referred to the geographic time of the Mediterranean Sea, and the deserts and mountains surrounding the water. Geographic time is similar to geologic time, in that it recognizes the long period of the formation of geographic features and their slow processes of change. Looking beyond geographic time, Braudel identified a second historical temporal structure, shorter than geographic time but still involving hundreds of years: the duration of civilizations and empires. These long-term social structures often last centuries, and within those periods Braudel identified patterns or trends. Finally, Braudel noted the history of events and people. Yet this third form of history, which many people associate most readily with historical time, appeared to Braudel to be most shallow. Only with a longer perspective, which Braudel termed the longue durée (the long term), involving geographic and civilizational time, could one properly appreciate the depth of historical change. Braudel’s approach also

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sought to differentiate “momentary pressures” from longer-lasting processes (Braudel 2009: 182). Braudel’s long-term has been described by others as “a temporality that contains all temporalities,” making room for multiplicity while creating a unified whole (Ali 2021: 283). Geraldine Heng (2015) sees in the longue durée an opportunity to resist historical linearity and embrace multiple temporalities, including recognition that the past and present are more related to one another than typical historical inquiry often grants: “do not see historical time as linear progression from premodernity to modernity fissured by a break, but instead view history as offering repetitions with change . . . or historical time as oscillating between ruptures and reinscriptions and embedding multiple temporalities within each historical moment” (360). “A reissuing of the medieval past in a long temporal vision that admits the interplay of the past with the present,” writes Heng, “only recalibrates the urgencies for the present with greater precision” (362). Going further than Braudel’s longue durée, which remained limited to the region of the Mediterranean, Heng proposes the adoption of “global temporalities,” according to which historical inquiry ought not only embrace deep time but also an expansive geographical scope, which necessarily encompasses diverse timelines and histories that can stand alongside one another and also interact with one another. For instance, as Heng notes, there can be multiple industrial “revolutions” in different parts of the world at various times. When we recognize that China’s industrial revolution took place several hundreds of years before that in Western Europe, we can also fathom that “China’s precocious modernities within premodernity also guide an understanding of the plurality of time – of temporalities that are enfolded and coextant within a single historical moment – that helps to make intelligible not only premodern worlds but also societies today around the globe, which can seem modern, postmodern, and premodern all at once” (362–363). Spatially or geographically expanding the subject of historical study, Heng demonstrates, shifts understandings of temporality just as much as does adopting deep time and the longue durée. “The question of scale in history,” which now applies to both time and space, continues to generate lively discussions in the field of history (Aslanian et al. 2013). In the 1970s and 1980s, some historians pushed back against conceiving of historical time in terms of long eras, as Braudel and others had articulated, suggesting that studying a short sliver of time can be equally illuminating for understanding the past. They created what has been termed “microhistory,” which, resonant with Braudel’s longue durée but taking a different temporal approach, emphasized the experiences of a wide variety of people (not exclusively recognized political figures, but rather those who might have otherwise been overlooked), and incorporated their experiences of social change into the study of history. While geological time

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emphasized long temporal views and Braudel analyzed large-scale social processes, proponents of microhistory, including Natalie Zemon Davis (1975, 1983) and Carlo Ginzburg (1976), argued for studying the experiences of individuals or small groups of people within marginalized communities, defining history as “a multifaceted flow with many individual centers,” rather than a “grand narrative” (Iggers 2005: 103). Ginzburg (1976), along with other scholars, argued that marginal figures, small-scale social practices, and short-lived phenomena are crucial to understanding the past, and should not be lost among the long eras essential for other forms of social history. Though microhistory itself had its own regional traditions and has evolved in the decades since it was first proposed (Trivellato 2015), it remains based on the premise that historical time must include close analysis of particular objects, linguistic terms, practices, and people, particularly if they differ from the main themes and trends of that period, or in the case of objects and terms, as their meaning changes over time. Historical insight, in this view, can be teased from comparatively brief flashes of past times, rather than exclusively from long, largescale processes. Historians have expanded notions of time in their disciplines to include layers of long time spans as well as the power of recovering history from smallscale events and the brief lives of marginal figures. A few historians have also made lived experience, the experiences of time by different people, and the definition of time for historians, a specific focus of their research. These theorists, many of whom worked in the second half of the twentieth century, offer insights into ideas of time, which resonate for non-historians as well. For example, Marc Bloch, a twentieth-century historian-turned-French partisan, who was murdered by the Nazis in 1941, made historical time part of his explicit project. He identified the distinctiveness of historical time with its focus on human experience. Whereas time as an abstraction may be divided and measured for a variety of purposes in other disciplines, in the discipline of history, time is a “concrete and living reality with an irreversible onward rush” (Bloch 1953: 27). Bloch also observed a paradox in historical concepts of time: on the one hand, time is often regarded as an uninterrupted continuum, and, on the other hand, the practice of history is often conceived as “the study of change” (Bloch 1953: 23). When historians study “two consecutive periods” of time, it is worth asking to what extent the continuities between the events of these periods, which derive from their successive placement in the “flow of time,” are more significant than “the differences born out of the same flow” (Bloch 1953: 28–29). While Bloch characterized historical time by human experiences of irreversible change, he also emphasized the importance of discontinuities, questioning the association between a beginning point in any given historical study, and proof of causation, or “origins” of a phenomenon (Bloch 1953: 30–35). This too is a temporal insight: that which comes before is not necessarily the key to

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the significance of what comes after. Bloch’s bird’s eye view of time can perhaps be considered a historian’s time, rather than historical time. It does not speak to notions of time and history in any one culture, but is an effort that a historian makes to define the practice and pillars of the discipline. Bloch saw this approach as necessary to understanding his own temporal assumptions, so that he could define the work of a historian with integrity. Reinhart Koselleck, a historian of concepts, also probed “experienced” time for the field of history. Koselleck (2004: 1) insisted that chronology and historical time were distinct, if related: “Precise dating is only a prerequisite, and does not determine the content of what might be called ‘historical time.’” Koselleck urged readers not to expect a single idea of historical time but instead to identify “many forms of time superimposed one upon the other” (Koselleck 2004: 2). He further observed that the past and present coexist in physical realities, such as in the marks of aging on a human body and in the many coexisting forms of transport, all invented at different times but eventually operating simultaneously (today, for instance, we use trains, cars, airplanes, bicycles, skateboard, and scooters, each of which contains its own history and was invented at a different moment in the past). The past is not completely gone, and furthermore, the present will eventually be the past, a “future past,” a term from the title of the English translation of Koselleck’s book, Futures Past. Koselleck’s meditation on historical time mingled different periods, transcending a more restrictive idea of linear, irreversible historical time. Walter Benjamin, a mid-twentieth-century literary theorist and philosopher, also offered a perspective that disrupts the presumption that history makes sense of the past with a form of time that is unidirectional, in which only earlier events can affect later ones. Benjamin’s writings on history identified the connection between the present time’s concerns and the events of the past. History, wrote Benjamin, pulls past time out of its “continuum” or sequence of events, and fills the past with “now time.” “Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably,” he argued (Benjamin 2019: 198, 205). Furthermore, writing history disrupts the order of the past, prioritizing matters that resonate during the time of the historian. Throughout his reflections, Benjamin uses arresting words to narrate this disruption, describing the process of studying and writing history as “blasting” or “exploding” the continuum of the past (Benjamin 2019: 206). Benjamin also criticized historians who idealized human progress. Writing in 1940, he had a clear vantage point on the degradation of human behavior and ideals represented by Nazi ideology and policy in Europe. If we consider graphic depictions of the historical past, we find that there has been an important diversity of images that illustrators use to depict how time

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links events to one another. Some of these images reinforce a notion of progress and irreversible change, while others emphasize recurrences or confluences. One familiar representation of historical time is a timeline, an organizing technology and a visual representation in which events are organized in linear succession one following the other. A timeline emphasizes particular temporal assumptions of linear, irreversible progress, queueing up significant events by their date, highlighting the relative temporal “distance” between them, and often insinuating causality or association. For instance, if one event takes place shortly before another, a timeline can suggest, even implicitly, an association between them, while causal connections are deemed impossible when they run “backwards” on the timeline. But even timelines function in diverse ways. Sometimes a timeline offers perspectives on multiple unconnected historical events that are geographically disparate but noteworthy to consider together because they happen in chronological proximity; time, in such timelines, facilitates the consideration of events that occur in different corners of the globe on a single line on a page. Likewise, events separated by great chronological gaps such that no single person could have lived through all of them can become part of a single concept of history when they are placed on a single timeline. Rosenberg and Grafton (2010), in a book dedicated to the history of the timeline, demonstrate that the timeline is itself a relatively recent way of depicting historical time. Lines and linearity are not exclusively features of modernity, nor should they be put in opposition to images of past time of non-Western cultures (Ingold 2015, 2016). Nonetheless, prior to timelines, images of streams, mythical animals, the human body or body parts such as hands, wheels or circles or spirals, pyramids, graphs, tables, and scrolls all serve to connect past times together with the present and sometimes future, including apocalyptic or eschatological futures. Tree imagery is also a recurring image for the historical past, which while not a line, nonetheless argues for particular relationships between events, with some as primary and fundamental (“radical” from the roots), while others as derivative. Indeed, evolutionary biology, philology, and family generations, for example, have drawn upon images of trees, including tree roots, trunks, branches, and leaves, to symbolize the evolution of language, genetics, or lineage over long spans of time. Already in 1863, August Schleicher presented an “Indo-European Stammbaum” (language tree) in Die Darwinische Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft, in which the relationships between languages are mapped onto what looks like an abstract tree, with all of its branches leading to a single linguistic source. Engaging with Darwin’s theories of biology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ernst Haeckel’s drawings of the “Tree of Life” (which depicts the evolutionary relationship between plants, organisms, and animals), “Tree of Mammals,” “Paleontological Tree of Vertebrates,” and “Tree of Humanity” each map different types of species

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onto a single tree, the trunk representing shared origins and the higher branches representing later evolution (the trees are often presented upside down, with the trunk on top and the branches and leaves hanging down). Many of these nineteenth and early twentieth century visualizations and the hierarchies that underpin them were racist, highlighting the troubling ways in which temporal notions of human progress in this period – and still today – constructed notions of group identity, superiority, and inferiority. Chakrabarty, in his book Provincializing Europe (2000), criticizes “historicism,” a view of time and history in which Western historical milestones are standard stages of development, and peoples whose lands were colonized by European powers are less advanced, or “delayed” in relation to industrialization, “capitalism, modernity, and the Enlightenment” (7). Such forms of historical time imagine a single line of progress, in which the “non-West” trails behind; such views of history justified the political subjugation of such people, who were presented as “behind.” In response, Charkabarty argued that anticolonial demands for self-rule required “‘now’ as a temporal horizon of action” (8). Dueling political claims are thus fought on the temporal plane: “The modern, European idea of history . . . came to nonEuropean peoples in the nineteenth century as somebody’s way of saying ‘not yet’ to somebody else” (8). Instead, Chakrabarty proposed recognizing concurrent cultural and economic developments across cultures, rather than relegating nonEuropean forms of politics, for example, to being “prepolitical” (11). In articulating his claims, Chakrabarty called for a move away from “a single and secular historical time that envelops other kinds of time” (16), towards embracing multiple trajectories of “global” understandings of history. This could include a critical evaluation of periodization, which David Blackbourn has labeled “the horologe of time” (2012), to highlight the arbitrariness of historical-temporal constructs such as “antiquity” or “modernity” that nonetheless condition how we understand and interpret the historical past (Schmidt et al. 2016; Steinberg 2019). Urvashi Chakravarty and Ayanna Thompson (2021), for example, explore the “racial politics of periodization,” in which “the ‘concept’ of race . . . is itself contingent on modes of disciplinary periodization” (vi), reinforcing the enormous power that periodization can have on historical understanding – and also the potential that rethinking periodization and temporality holds for the study of history. Anthropologist Johannes Fabian’s argument in Time and the Other (2014) adds an important consideration for how a concept of historical time can support or defy rhetoric of cultural subjugation. Fabian noticed that when anthropologists studied different cultures’ theories of time, they neglected to examine critically the temporal relations between cultures. Fabian posited that the practice of fieldwork introduced a consistent contradiction into anthropological research. On the one hand, live research interactions between scholars and their informants mean

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that the anthropologist is obviously temporally co-existent or “coeval” with their cultural “Others.” Anthropological writing about other cultures, on the other hand, distanced the anthropologists’ subjects into the past, keeping “anthropology’s Other in another Time” (2014: 148). As anthropologists began recognizing the flaw of nineteenth-century social evolutionism – the theory that societies progressed along the same markers of development – scholars introduced the idea of cultural relativism (Fabian 2014: 39–41). But, unfortunately, this resulted in a method of studying time in anthropology that made it harder to see and resolve the intercultural use of time-frames to justify and explain cultural oppression. Instead, studying the so-called “‘Theories of Time’ held by various cultures” removed time from “the study of relations between cultures” (Fabian 2014: 41). This meant that despite apparent interest in different time theories among distinct cultures, anthropological writing could still preserve an understanding of the Other as primitive, living in the past. Each in their own way, these scholars suggest that a single notion of historical time, even of a single region, misses too many relevant experiences. What is crucial, argued Paul Ricoeur, is not reducing multiple human social temporal intuitions to a single kind of time, “a non-interpreted, non-symbolized universal time” (Ricoeur 1977: 20). Rather, Ricoeur suggested that “The only conceivable universality is in the opening of each culture to all the others, exchanges between them as equals, each acting on and being acted upon by every other” (20). This intercultural perspective has important resonances in an individual’s capacity to experience multiple temporalities. Dinshaw dramatizes how a person may experience an “everlasting now” of a mystical experience while also being subject to “progressive everyday chronology” (Dinshaw 2011: 109). She concludes, based on her historical analysis, that “there is nothing intrinsically positive about the experience, or indeed the condition, of multiple temporalities . . . Nonetheless, the recognition of multiplicity and the break with discipline are themselves exhilarating” (123). Breaking the frame of a single concept of time is energizing, though an individual’s experience of multiple temporalities may bring fatigue (119). However, it is a condition of human experience to be subject to many overlapping temporalities, and therefore it makes sense to try to research time with reference to many perspectives together. Scholars have noted that some communities develop ways of engaging with past time that do not involve strictly historical modes or temporalities, whether through storytelling, myths, rituals, festivals, or monuments. Ashis Nandy (1995) begins an essay titled “History’s Forgotten Doubles” by provocatively noting that “However odd this might sound to readers of a collection on world history, millions of people still live outside ‘history.’ They do have theories of the past; they do believe that the past is important and shapes the present and the future, but they also recognize, confront, and live with a past different from that constructed by historians

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and historical consciousness” (44). Some, including historians, engage with the past by suppressing elements of history. For cultures who approach the past differently from historical analysis, Nandy writes, “it is often important not to remember the past, objectively, clearly, in its entirety” (47) so that the stories can serve important moral functions. Whereas Nandy focuses on forgetting as a legitimate mode of engagement with past time, even if it stands at odds with modern conceptions of history, the Jewish historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, in his 1982 book Zakhor (the Hebrew word for “remember”), presents memory and remembering as an alternative temporal stance with relation to the past. Communal memory, according to Yerushalmi, so often entails reenacting the past through exegesis, liturgy, and ritual, rather than more narrowly defined historical consciousness, allowing the past to permeate the present “as an accordion” even in the absence of history. As the social anthropologist Paul Connerton (2008, 2011) notes, historical narrative, cultural memory, embodied practices, and modes of forgetting are often inextricable, helping us to integrate Nandy’s focus on forgetting and Yerushalmi’s insistence on memory as part of shared historical processes (ix). Historians’ notions of time are far more complex and diverse than the temporality assumed by a timeline. Historical time encompasses more than a static look at the past from a stable present and is not limited to a single narrative of progress by which all cultures are measured, with some necessarily being portrayed as slower or less advanced. Notions of time developed in the discipline of history permeated and informed other fields of study, and other theoretical fields such as queer studies, inform new approaches to time in history.

Fashion Fashion, the fourth discipline explored in this chapter, presents material representations of the passage of time. In the catalogue of a 2020 exhibition about time and fashion held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Theodore Martin (2020) explains: “Think of them [clothes], first, as a kind of grammar of dates, a syntax of periodization: flapper dress means ‘1920s’; miniskirt means ‘1960s.’ In this way, clothes contribute to our sense of history as a succession of individually styled epochs” (xxvii). The evolution of dress types, as this particular exhibition proposed, functions as a type of a timeline to depict the linear progression of time from past to present, from era to era. But the discipline of fashion design, within the creative arts, also has diverse temporal perspectives, as do the other disciplines surveyed above. Fashion and

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clothing can, for instance, provide an opportunity for several time periods to interact in one garment, whether through combining different identifying styles from different eras in a single article of clothing, using antique fabric in a new dress, or incorporating references to past fashion in a particular design element. Benjamin noted fashion’s historical affinity when he wrote that “Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past” (Benjamin 2019: 205–106). Judith Levy Barent Cohen’s wedding dress represents one striking example of time-traversing fashion, as Laura Leibman (2021) recently demonstrated. The gown, worn when Judith Levy Barent Cohen married Moses Montefiore in June 1812 in the Bevis Marks Synagogue in London, England, was made of Chinese silk in a pattern that had been popular a few generations earlier: her dress was either made of old fabric (maybe from her own mother’s wedding dress) or deliberately made to look old, and the style incorporated antiquated aesthetics, perhaps a way of signaling her ties to generational wealth and aristocracy. The dress itself was eventually turned into a Torah mantel used at the Ramsgate Synagogue, which Barent Cohen founded with her husband in 1833, providing new life to the garment and enshrining her presence as a benefactor into a sacred space of worship (Liebman 2021). Other wedding dresses of that era were often re-tailored throughout a woman’s life, updating the gowns to align with contemporary fashion trends, fulfill new social contexts, and accommodate changing body shapes. Wearing clothing or jewelry from a past era, whether in life or on stage, allows the wearer and those viewing them to embody a different time, or to connect with previous generations. Purchasing or making clothing with new styles for an upcoming season may prompt excitement about the future. One unique temporal element in fashion, however, is the emphasis on staying current, or “in vogue.” This impulse, it could be argued, expands on the symbolism of wearable clocks, which emerged in the seventeenth century to adorn men, and arm or wristwatches for women. By the early twentieth century, wristwatches had taken over in the U.S. In 1935, for example, 85% of the watches made in American factories were wristwatches (McCrossen 2013: 181). Wearable timepieces unite the themes of time and fashion, facilitating wearers’ ability to access the current time. As Bolton (2020) explains, fashion prompts observers to consider the passage of time and encourage consumers to stay current – to be fashionable, not to trespass into the unfashionable (which means, in such contexts, “untimely”). Martin writes: “Fashion, in this sense, is like a broken clock. It seems to tell only one time: now” (xxviii). “Now” for whom, though? Fashion does not tell universal time, and it is not only the passage of eras upon which fashion depends. While not highlighted by the exhibition catalogue, fashion also reflects culture, place, economic status,

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body shape, colorism, gender construction, place on social hierarchies, and interconnected identities: in fact, all sorts of cultural differences. Fashion is implicated in cultural appropriation, colonial attitudes and practices, “racial plagiarism” (the practice of copying racial and Indigenous styles), and also multiple forms of creative resistance and innovation outside of the narrative of fashion’s time portrayed in typical histories (Pham 2017; Gaugele and Titon 2019). Flattening fashion’s relationship to time (defined by progressively changing styles for certain women, created by a select group of designers, elevating a Eurocentric notion of beauty), suggests that fashion is a neutral barometer of the era. But it is not – it never is. High fashion, while it may mark the passage of time and social mores for some, is a narrow indicator of time, inhabiting and communicating within an exclusive culture and consumed by a small group of people. Focusing on women’s fashion, moreover, reinforces patriarchal notions of femininity and the male gaze; the notion of a woman’s skirt length marking time also objectifies women’s bodies, literally using the amount of leg revealed as a technology of time. Including other traditions of fashion would tell a different story of time, with different heroes, social mores, demands on clothing, ideas of beauty and function, and, most pertinently, different temporalities of fashion. As we argue in this book, time never stands apart from forms of culture, and overlooking those elements expressed in typical Eurocentric narratives of fashion allows forms of domination involved in high fashion to pass without comment. Fashion’s obsession with the “now” of a certain segment of people nonetheless provides the field with an opportunity to consider time in a new way. The response of the fashion industry to the coronavirus pandemic, for instance, served as a critique of the ephemerality of fashion and ushered in a call for greater permanence and sustainability in the industry. In August 2020, the New York Times ran a story titled “Sweatpants Forever,” which narrated the fashion industry’s seeming demise both before and in the midst of the pandemic. Irina Aleksander describes how the high fashion industry used to produce two collections a year, previewing fall fashions in spring and spring fashions in fall. There was a deliberate delay between previews and sales to allow time to introduce the designs at live shows, and then receive orders and produce the clothes in time for buyers to wear them in season. When collections became viewable on the internet in the early 2000s, customers wanted quicker access to new designs, and fashion houses added more collections per year – four, even six – to supply the fashion consumers’ desires for the new, immediately. Aleksander argues that the acceleration of runway shows and production eliminated a sense of seasons for clothes. The addition of mid-season collections yielded odd creations that had no “right time” to wear them – open-toed boots, for example, that could neither be worn in winter nor in summer. Fashion designers could not keep up with the new pace and the glut of production outstripped demand

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as designers struggled to find something different to add to a garment and stores marked down new designs almost as soon as they appeared on the racks. While designers had already struggled to find success in this new fashion timescape before the pandemic, Covid-19 dramatically changed both demand and production. The new sweatpants fashion trend, argued Aleksander, was a permanent alternative to the constantly changing trends of previous seasons, and a comfortable option for those staying home. Almost a year later, fashion journalists began discussing the possibility of another “Roaring Twenties,” in which glitter, sparkles, and optimistic, exuberant fashion, similar to the 1920s, signaled hope for a better future after a devastating pandemic. Perhaps unsurprisingly, an article published just a month after Aleksander’s piece announced “Sweatpants Are Not Forever” (Friedman 2020). Fashion, then, can suggest multiple temporalities: the impulse to stay current and define what “now” looks like; the use of evolving garment styles to signal changing historical periods or circumstances; the intersection of clothing and aging; and the subversion of temporal norms through fashion choices.

Queer Studies What alternatives exist to a linear progression of history expressed in a timeline or in a series of dresses from across several decades? As we have already demonstrated in Dinshaw’s historical writing, queer studies offers important insights for the study of time, further deepening the repertoire of the temporal lenses we use to understand the world in all of its complexity. In her book Getting Medieval (1999), Dinshaw writes that queer history can be understood as an affective desire for “touching across time,” by which she means the touching of periods and events and the generative thought that emerges from such encounters of touch, both physical and figurative. The past is itself constituted only in the present, and the present affects the ways in which we understand, remember, and memorialize the past – and also how we imagine different futures. Thus, there is both forward and backward looking in historical study, as well as productive joining of non-adjacent periods for inquiry. Such queer notions of time disrupt a purely progressive notion of history and causation. Queer approaches to time, or queer time, can include a compressed time scale focused on the depth of the present rather than plans for ensuring the future. One idea that unites forms of queer time is the subversion or denial of dominant temporal expectations, such as “a middle-class logic of reproductive temporality,” which unites financial goals of saving and planning for future children, ensuring generational inheritance through childbearing, and evaluating the “success” of adulthood by the

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extent to which a person abandons “unruly” aspects of adolescence (Halberstam 2005: 4; Halberstam 2011). This reproductive temporality, argues Jack Halberstam, “pathologizes modes of living that show little or no concern for longevity” (2011: 4). What is promoted instead is family time, influencing daily schedules “governed by an imagined set of children’s needs”; a time of inheritance, which focusses on intergenerational wealth (another benefit that is accrued disparately relative to race and class in the United States); and the combination of these temporalities and reproductive biological temporalities, gathered into a structure that claims to ensure national stability (Halberstam 2005: 5). Such insights are often also borne from personal experiences. As Thomas Page McBee (2021) recently wrote about trans time: Trans time isn’t linear. Beyond the shared experience of birth and death, many of us live in loops that double back on themselves: A second birth, a second death, two puberties, a collapsing of space-time that becomes, eventually, a kind of integration . . . cut off from our history and traumatized both collectively and personally, [trans people] live in a space without the constrictions and narrative benefits of neat arcs of time. Our time is circular, organic, associative. Sometimes we return to the beginning and find that not much has changed . . . being trans taught me long ago that progress isn’t so much a straight line as a relentless drumbeat, a fire inside, an instinct that is clearer than the static blaring wildly in the background . . .

This reflection highlights how life itself, often conceived as a linear progression from birth through childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and eventually death can be experienced differently in different bodies. This recalls our discussion of the constructed dimension of biological time in Chapter 2. The concept that bodily and economic circumstances in the present lay the foundation for, give an indication of, and even control the possibilities of future circumstances, may be comforting to some. But that attitude also closes off imagined futures which do not relate to the present, stopping the visualization of and action to bring about the cessation and replacement of current social relationships and political structures. Here lies another opportunity for different approaches to human history to expand our notions of time. Kara Keeling’s analysis of Black-authored speculative fiction argues that it is possible to avoid ceding control of the future to present circumstances (2019). Human time may consist of progression, but the directions of that progression are open, if the present is not treated as decisive. Keeling thus delineates a different approach to subverting dominant ideas of history. Reading Octavia Butler’s novel, Parable of the Sower (1993), Keeling notes that when the protagonist of Butler’s novel names change as the only truth, it reveals the fact that resistance to change, chance and impermanence “holds in place a spatiotemporal logic that is hostile to the queerness in time,” that is, to the truth that futures are not foreclosed, predictable and

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controllable (Keeling 2019: 17). The queerness which Keeling identifies disrupting the “quotidian violence that secures the existing organization of things” is a different, non-progressive and unpredictable notion of time. Keeling argues for the importance of opacity as the way to conceive the future, so that there can be Black futures that overcome the futures anticipated by current power structures. Opacity is a necessary obstacle to sight, which allows Black futures to “[blossom] in spite of what presently seems destined to be the future” (Keeling 2019: 36). Keeling draws attention to the fact that predictability and controlling potential outcomes are features of successful capitalism, but they have cultural drawbacks when promoted as values (Keeling 2019: 19). Geographer David Harvey acknowledges, as Keeling does, the material and practical ways that alternative futures are thwarted by current conditions. “Struggle as we might to create flexible landscapes and institutions, the fixity of structures tends to increase with time making the conditions of change more rather than less sclerotic . . . Free-flowing processes become instantiated in structures, in institutional, social, cultural and physical realities that acquire relative permanence, fixity, and immovability” (Harvey 2000: 185; see also Harvey 1990). As we observed in our discussion of geologic and evolutionary times, a focus on progression and linearity can limit the consideration of vital alternatives, and it is difficult to escape the sense that current structures, institutions, landscapes and cultural limitations predict and control future possibilities. Re-thinking a shape of time can be helpful, as can engaging with speculative fiction and breaking assumptions through exposure to the multiplicity of time possibilities, as is the project of this book. Challenges to progressive notions of time, with irreversible chains of causality, are not limited to historians or scholars of queer studies; they have been explored in many other fields, highlighting yet another realm in which conversation across disciplines might be especially generative. They underpin trauma studies, for example, in which the boundaries between past and present are blurred and the past haunts the present; processes of mourning, which are usually non-linear and circuitous; and experiences of memory loss, for example in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, in which the relationship of the present to the past similarly challenges assumptions of progress and decline (Sacks 1973; El Hag and Kapogiannis 2016). Focusing on history, geology, plant sciences, fashion, and queer studies are a few of many fields we could have showcased to highlight how notions of time are, in part, disciplinarily informed; the essays in Part II of this book engage time in a variety of disciplines in more depth. That time is disciplinarily specific means there is no time that is universally understood by all peoples and represented uniformly in all academic disciplines. Different disciplines and industries, like different cultures, offer us new perspectives about what time is and can do. Diverse sets of

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images, concepts, metaphors, and other vessels of thought foster different conceptions of time. Depending on the culture and language in which a person’s ideas develop, they might think about time in certain ways and find it harder to imagine time in other ways. The study of disciplinary diversity brings us back to this book’s main argument: that it is productive and interesting to ask who makes time, how they make it, and why, rather than what time “is” in a single and stable way. We contend that it is more enlightening to view time through a prismatic multi-disciplinary lens than with a single disciplinary language. It is not necessary for one of the disciplines to give way to another or for one to dominate or be proven correct. It is ideal, in our view, to view them in conversation, mutually enriching and complicating one another – and ultimately inspiring us to think as creatively and complexly as possible about time.

Bibliography Aleksander, Irina. “Sweatpants Forever.” New York Times, August 6, 2020. Accessed February 18, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/06/magazine/fashion-sweatpants.html. Ali, Mohammed S. “Marking Time and Writing Histories.” History and Theory 60.2 (2021): 271–291. Arti. “Development of Education as a Discipline: An Analytical Study.” PhD diss., University of Lucknow, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10603/70652. Aslanian, Sebouh David, Joyce E. Chaplin, Ann McGrath, and Kristin Mann. “How Size Matters: The Question of Scale in History.” American Historical Review 118.5 (2013): 1431–1472. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Frankfurt am Main: Surhkamp Verlag. English Translation, New York: Mariner Books, (1955) 2019. Bergson, Henri, Leon Jacobson, and Herbert Dingle. Duration and Simultaneity: With Reference to Einstein’s Theory. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, (1922) 1965. Bjornerud, Marcia. Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Blackbourn, David. “‘The Horologe of Time’: Periodization in History.” PMLA 127.2 (2012): 301–307. Bloch, Marc. The Historian’s Craft. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953. Bolton, Andrew. “Sixty Minutes of Fashion.” In About Time: Fashion and Duration, edited by Andrew Bolton, Jan Giler Reeder, Jessica Regan, Amanda Garfinkel, x–xvii. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2020. Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. Braudel, Fernand. “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée.” Trans. Immanuel Wallerstein. Review 32.2 (2009): 171–203. Butler, Octavia E. The Parable of the Sower. New York: Warner Books. 1993. Canales, Jimena. The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson and the Debate that Changed our Understanding of Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.

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Hunt, Lynn. Measuring Time, Making History: Natalie Zemon Davis Annual Lecture Series at Central European University. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008. Iggers, George G. Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2005. Ingold, Tim. The Life of Lines. Abington and New York: Routledge, 2015. Ingold, Tim. Lines: A Brief History. Abington and New York: Routledge, 2016. Iselin, Josie and Margaret W. Carruthers. Beach Stones. New York: Harry N. Abrams Books, 2006. Jabr, Ferris. “The Social Life of Forests.” New York Times, December 6, 2020. Accessed July 15, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/02/magazine/tree-communication-mycorrhiza. html. Keeling, Kara. Queer Times, Black Futures. New York: New York University Press, 2019. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. First ed., Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2003. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013. Kolbert, Elizabeth. “Enter the Anthropocene – Age of Man.” National Geographic 219 (2011): 60–85. Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Le Goff, Jacques. Time, Work & Culture in the Middle Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Leibman, Laura Arnold. “Jewish Ceremonial Art: Continuing the Conversation.” Lecture delivered April 13, 2001. Accessed July 15, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= dLDZrhrBNxE&t=1s. Lyell, Georges. Principles of Geology. London: Penguin, 1998. Martin, Theodore. “On Time.” In About Time: Fashion and Duration, edited by Andrew Bolton, Jan Giler Reeder, Jessica Regan, Amanda Garfinkel, xvii–xxxi. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2020. McBee, Thomas Page. “What I Saw in My First 10 Years on Testosterone.” New York Times, June 25, 2021. Accessed July 15, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/opinion/transgendertransition-testosterone.html. McCrossen, Alexis. Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. McElreavy, Christine, Victoria Tobin, Taylor Martin, Mickayla Bea Damon, Nicole Crate, Andrew Godinez, and Kayleigh Bennett. “The History of the Academy and the Disciplines.” In Interdisciplinary Studies: A Connected Learning Approach, edited by Robin DeRosa Pressbooks: Rebus Press, 2021. Accessed February 18, 2021. https://press.rebus.community/idsconnect/chap ter/the-history-of-the-academy-and-the-disciplines/. Nandy, Ashis. “History’s Forgotten Double.” History and Theory 34.2 (1995): 44–66. Olender, Maurice. The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pham, Minh-Ha T. “Racial Plagiarism and Fashion.” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 4.3 (2017): 67–80. Ricoeur, Paul. “Introduction.” In Time and the Philosophies: At the Crossroads of Cultures, edited by Honorat Aguessy, 13–32. Paris: UNESCO, 1977. Robbins, Jim. “Chronicles of the Rings: What Trees Tell Us.” The New York Times, April 30, 2019. Accessed February 18, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/science/tree-rings-climate. html.

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Part II: Time Across Disciplines: Selected Essays

Sarit Kattan Gribetz and Lynn Kaye

Introduction to Part II Part II of this book, “Time Across Disciplines,” brings together a multidisciplinary group of scholars, each of whom has chosen to share a single, accessible idea related to time from their discipline, field, or area of study. Together, they represent diverse understandings of time from different realms of human experience and scientific inquiry. One lesson we learned through this interdisciplinary and intercultural project was just how much we, as two researchers in the humanities, took for granted about how to produce and disseminate knowledge. In our own research, we usually analyze various textual and material sources (ancient texts, archaeological remains, and so on), using particular methodologies (e.g., close reading, textual criticism, historical contextualization). We read the existing scholarly literature and consider broader theoretical dimensions related to them. And then we produce articles and books in which we share new insights. When we entered interdisciplinary conversations to write this book, we realized, in very practical ways, that other scholars produce and share knowledge quite differently. Books and footnoted essays are not everyone’s primary modes of communication; in many cases, poster presentations, graphs, and co-authored journal articles convey research to scholarly and lay audiences, whereas for others art installations, films, and performances are the primary modes through which to develop new ideas. Moreover, in some areas of study, the question of “time” itself is only relevant around the edges of a particular scientist’s interest, rather than the topic of inquiry itself, as it often is for scholars of literature or religion. By curating this collection of essays, we necessarily imposed stylistic uniformity where there is actual diversity of thought, method, and form. Creating a shared context for conversations about time, as this book does, constricts the possibilities of expression both into a single language (English) and a shared format (a written book). We hope that the book’s goal – for readers to experience the ever-shifting concepts of time that arise from the combination of many views – justifies this imposition. The title we originally floated, “Metaphors of Time,” proved problematic, for as soon as we invited contributors, we discovered just how culturally constructed and disciplinary specific the idea of metaphor was. Scientists objected: “metaphor” was not the operative category in many of their disciplines. They suggested alternatives, including “images of time,” “conceptualizations of time,” or “structures of time.” But scientists were not the only ones to critique this narrow framework. Adélékè Adéẹˋ kọ,ˊ in his lecture at the “Metaphors of Time” conference in 2018, explained https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110690774-005

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that in the Yorùbá language, “proverbs of time,” literally, “long-winded comparisons,” more accurately describe discourses of time than do “metaphors.” The framework of metaphors, he argued, renders the inquiry into time unnecessarily English-centered. And further, why choose “metaphor” rather than “synecdoche” or “metonymy?” Take, for example, the Yorùbá proverb “Time is not straight like a street.” In this statement, argued Adéẹˋ kọˊ, time moves, or rolls; it cannot be captured and is not iterative. There is no place (street) and no direction (straight) for time. In short, “you cannot tether time.” Adéẹˋ kọˊ outlined the literary and conceptual possibilities enabled by this proverb: possibilities of straightening time, the hierarchies of before and after, and the contingency of all things temporal. It turned out that “metaphor” itself was just one example of a cultural or disciplinary presumption about time and ways of expressing knowledge, and discussing its limitations led to the productive realization of just how diverse conceptualizations of time can be when we expand the vistas of knowledge production beyond one discipline, culture, or language. We therefore retitled the book Time: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, to emphasize the central goal of this work: promoting dialogue about time among those who work in different disciplines in order to understand time from diverse perspectives, rather than attempting to define and confine it. This collection of essays is not only multidisciplinary but deliberately also intercultural. Disciplines themselves are products of a specific history, as we explored in the first half of this book, and part of what it means to think interculturally is to question some of the unity we find even in cross-disciplinary ideas about time. It should not come as a surprise, for instance, that literary and philosophical notions of time in the Western academy share certain assumptions. Nor is it an accident that geology, evolutionary biology, philology, and archaeology are based upon similar notions of time, as they are genealogically related, products of shared intellectual trends and overlapping academic communities dating as early as the seventeenth century, built upon shared structures of thought and networks of knowledge. Part of the contribution of the essays in Part II of this book, therefore, is to add diversity of thought to disciplinarily thinking by bringing into the conversation notions of time from different cultures and from multiple historical periods. And yet, while each essay focuses on a single idea, concept, metaphor, or idiom related to time, we intentionally do not reduce a discipline’s or culture’s way of thinking about time to that one example. Instead, each author highlights one way that time can be conceived in the discipline in which they work or the culture that they study. The essays in Part II of this book offer numerous points of contact and divergence for cross-disciplinary speculation about time. For example, we encounter two distinct perspectives on embodied time – that is, the ways in which physical bodies tell and mark time. In the first essay, Megan Meuti brings us into the world of an entomologist, in which the smallest insects contain internal clocks

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that are remarkably similar to the clocks in our own human bodies. Despite the genetic divergence between humans and insects, the same proteins and genes allow almost all living organisms, including plants, to operate according to circadian rhythms. These internal clocks allow our bodies to react to patterns of day and night, even if we are not exposed to light and dark; these circadian rhythms are also sensitive to seasonal change, for they pick up on changing day- and night-lengths over time. Time as it is experienced within a person’s body is studied from a different yet complementary perspective in Hannah Kosstrin’s essay, which examines embodied temporality within the field of dance studies. Through a detailed analysis of Trisha Brown’s dance Locus, Kosstrin describes how parcels of time are measured within a dancer’s body. The timing of the dance, however, is not synchronized with external stimuli such as music, but rather determined by the weight of a limb, which grows heavier the longer it is suspended. As a consequence, the time of each movement within the dance depends on the specific dancer’s own body dimensions. Whereas circadian rhythms repeat in shorter and longer cycles of days and seasons, time can also be conceived linearly, in a variety of ways. Johanna Sellman’s essay, devoted to analyzing a novel about waiting in line, complicates the notion that linearity necessarily implies progress, for in this novel, the queue in which the protagonist waits leads to a gate that does not open. Sellman points out that while “linear” time is usually conceived as a progression of events towards a stated goal or destination, Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue, the dystopian novel at the center of Sellman’s study, presents a line made of people whose positions never change. They remain in line, waiting for help, until the very end of the narrative (or until their deaths). The contrast between a surprisingly static linear time with the dynamic cyclical form of time in Meuti’s essay echoes in Sellman’s observation that this novel presents time as “cyclical or stalled.” Because the gate never opens for people to enter, historical time and an anticipated future are both challenged and ultimately erased. Stalling, critiqued as it is in The Queue, is exactly what is advocated by Andréa Grottoli, whose concluding essay details the rapid effects of climate change and ocean acidification on the world’s coral reefs, and the urgent need to slow the climate’s warming. We began this book’s introduction with an opening description of the contrast between exceptionally colorful landscapes of healthy coral reefs and the muted tones of bleached dying coral, one of many results of climate change. Grottoli’s message to readers is at once scientific and practical: slowing the rate of climate change will save these diverse, rich ecosystems and species.

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In contrast to the stalled queue or efforts to stall climate change stand the instantaneous and accelerating forms of communication that Michael Jäckel examines in his essay on modern media’s constructions of time. As Jäckel explains, instantaneous communication technologies and continuous “news” burst the boundaries between night and day so that, on the one hand, news is constantly produced, while on the other hand there is no time to read all the news or make sense more generally of such vast flows of information. There is no single line of acceleration or growth, but rather an expanding picture with no edges, diverting attention in too many directions, depressing even speculation about the future in lieu of focus on the uncontainable present. Other essays offer several differing ways of conceiving the past. Marti Chaatsmith and Christine Ballengee Morris, scholars of art education and American Indian Studies, describe an engaged present, in which ancestors have presence, rather than a conception of the past that is gone and a future yet to come. Chaatsmith and Ballengee Morris explore these ideas about time through telling the story of Hopewell ceremonial earthworks, constructed thousands of years ago in the Ohio valley and still present in the Ohio landscape. Through structures that enable the precise observation of the alignment of astronomical bodies on 18-year long lunar cycles, these enormous earthworks unite not only the skies and the earth but also successive generations, through the burial of relatives and valuable objects and rituals performed in them. Today, those same structures bring together ancestors and living people when individuals and communities spend time at these earthworks and teach about them. The presence of the past is also addressed by Katherine Elkins in her essay on Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, in which the past is lost in a jumble of indistinguishable habitual events until something physical in the present reawakens a particular moment in one’s own past. Proust’s novel, in Elkin’s view, attempts to “research” how to tell a story involving the past, which is neither a strung-together set of individual moments nor a jumble of lost sensations. The key for the narrator is material sensations and stimuli, such as an evocative taste or smell, that contains the affective power to recover a lost past. The focus on a single person’s own memories of their lost past offers opportunities for the story to resonate with readers on an individual level, in contrast with the communal and ancestral pasts present in engagements with the Hopewell sites. While Elkins explores how Proust theorizes the ability of written narratives to evoke individual memories, Michal Raizen’s essay turns to the media of film and music to ask similar questions about the mechanisms through which memory and the passage of time are narrated visually and aurally. Through a musicallyinformed analysis of Elia Suleiman’s 2009 film The Time That Remains, Raizen demonstrates how sounds and musical traditions can chart the layering of life

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stages through a recurring tune, heard differently, over advancing technologies (gramophone, radio, television, cassette, stereo), in different stages of one man’s life spread over several decades between the 1940s and 1980s, a concept Raizen coins the “temporalities of sound.” The sound of a familiar tune is a different sensual recovery of a person’s past than that described in Elkin’s essay: in the film, the same tune played on different devices recurs throughout the narrative, gaining significance as it recurs, while in Proust’s novel different catalysts appear for the narrator to recover different elements of his past. Finally, Melissa Curley’s essay, in the field of religious studies, addresses conceptions of time in Buddhist traditions of Hotai, or “Cloth Bag.” The essay begins with a set of rituals from different corners of the world that each address the past from within a “temporal regime” in which the past is not gone and dead, but rather in which pieces of past, present, and future cohere in a single moment. In a poem about one incarnation of the perfect teacher, the Buddha, there are two temporal regimes, one in which past events are fixed at a particular distance from the past, and another in which the future unexpectedly appears in the present, in the person of the Buddha figure, who is anticipated eras into the future. The present remains the focus, as there is no actualization for a Buddha without living in the present with ordinary people and the regular sufferings of life. These are just a few of the connections and divergences that might be found when the essays that follow are read in dialogue. Themes of presence and the present; future and past; acceleration, deceleration, and immediacy; reversible versus unstoppable change; linearity, cyclicality, and progress; and the relationship between time and the material world (in the form of human or astronomical bodies, structures and systems, the universe and its ecosystems, and technologies of communication) are some of the different facets of temporality available to us through multidisciplinary explorations about time. There are many cultural artifacts and disciplines far beyond the confines of this modest and necessarily limited collection in which time is similarly not measured in lengths or duration at all, but in the potential of a moment, the possibility of simultaneous events, or the depth of experience that a dream or a memory might hold. We hope that, as you read further, you will join this initial conversation about time across disciplines and cultures, and contribute your own observations and insights to the conversation.

Megan Meuti

4 Circadian and Seasonal Clocks in Insects and Other Organisms I was eleven years old when my mother, who had always supported my interest in science, took me to see “Microcosmos: Le people de l’herbe” at the movie theater. I quickly fell in love with the beautiful cinematography of insects and other small invertebrates following their daily routines: eating, mating, avoiding other predators, and navigating the perils that thunderstorms pose to creatures so small that they can be trapped in a single raindrop. What I most I vividly remember, however, was the opening narration, the only words spoken in the entire film: “A meadow in early morning, somewhere on Earth. Hidden here is a world as vast as our own, where the weeds are like impenetrable jungles, the stones are mountains, and even the smallest pond becomes an ocean. Time passes differently here: an hour is like a day, a day is like a season, and the passing of a season is a lifetime” (emphasis added). I was intrigued by this observation and now, as a scientist, I spend my days and seasons thinking about how insects experience and measure time. I am not sure whether my decision to devote my career to studying insect time-keeping was a result of “Microcosmos” or simply because I, like most people I know, thought that time measurement in insects would be very different from the way we humans keep time. The temptation to think that insects experience time differently from humans stems from two common conceptions: first, insects are very different from humans, and second, their lives are so short and ephemeral. It was not until my senior year of college that I learned that the way that insects measure daily time is nearly identical to our own. This daily timekeeping system is known as the circadian clock. In both humans and insects, and indeed in nearly all other animals, including sponges (Müller et al. 2014), anemones (Leach and Reitzel 2019), roundworms (Hagesawa et al. 2005), slugs (Blumenthal et al. 2001), fish (Idda et al. 2012), birds (Helfer et al. 2006), and mice (Takahashi 2015), the circadian clock governs almost all daily processes: resting, waking, eating, and mating. Moreover, it was early research done on the lowly fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, that uncovered the molecular basis of the circadian clock in all creatures – including humans (Konopka and Benzer 1971). Depending on your age and the quality of your high school biology education, you may or may not have learned that the DNA, which resides in the nucleus of every cell of your body, contains the instructions to make every protein in your body. But while DNA gets most of the attention, it is really the proteins that do all https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110690774-006

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of the work. Some proteins make up physical structures in your body, such as hair, nails, and muscles. Other proteins break down molecules, including carbohydrates, fats, and other proteins. Additional proteins take these simpler components and turn them into the specific structures that our cells need to function and communicate with one another. The process of taking the information from DNA and turning it into proteins requires two steps. The first is transcription, a mechanism in which the information encoded in Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) is “transcribed” into Ribonucleic Acid (RNA). This step is termed “transcription” because the language or chemical structure of the molecules are highly similar, both containing different nucleic acids, that they are simply “transcribed” from one kind of chemical alphabet to another. The second step is translation, in which the information encoded on the RNA is “translated” into a sequence of very different chemical structures called amino acids, which are the independent components that make up proteins. To help biologists easily distinguish which “language” is being used, the names of genes (DNA) and their messenger RNAs (mRNA) are written in italics (e.g., the white gene), whereas the proteins are written in all capital letters (e.g., the WHITE protein). One of the delights and frustrations of being a biologist is discovering how even the most basic activities that the most seemingly simple organisms perform are actually devilishly complex. For example, how does a fruit fly know when to be active and when to rest? Observation tells us that they are generally active during the daytime, and generally less active at night. Scientists deduced from this observation that light (usually sunlight) has something to do with this process. Early scientists also observed, however, that if you take fruit flies that are usually exposed to periods of light (day) and periods of darkness (night) and then move them to an environment of constant darkness, they will still show predictable and daily changes in their activity. That is to say that the presence or absence of light cannot fully explain a fruit fly’s cycles of rest and waking. So what else contributes to a fruit fly’s temporal rhythms and how are they able to anticipate daily changes in light and dark even when they are no longer exposed to light? Researchers hypothesized that there was likely a genetic basis for this behavior, and to uncover it they did what any good researcher would do at the time: they subjected the fruit flies to high doses of radiation and toxic chemicals in hopes that it would cause a mutation that would physically alter the structure of the DNA and thereby the protein that it encoded. If they were lucky, they would, by random chance, mutate the right genes in the right way and create flies that would no longer be able to tell time. By some great miracle, this strategy worked! Konopka and Benzer (1971) identified one gene that, when mutated or changed at one specific position, caused fruit flies to become completely arrhythmic; they

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displayed no predictable changes in their daily activity rhythms. When this same gene was changed in another location, it caused flies that were exposed to constant darkness to display an increase between their normal peaks of activity so they were much longer than normal 24 hours; that is, this mutation lengthened the daily circadian period, and hence the authors aptly named the gene period. Later, other researchers (Sehgal et al. 1994) identified another gene, which they named timeless, that, when mutated, prevented fruit flies from being able to measure time at all, regardless of exposure to light. Through several more mutation assays, scientists identified several additional genes within the circadian clock. Other types of experiments then uncovered how the clock proteins interacted with one another. In this way, gradually, it became clear how and why fruit flies were able to respond so consistently to the lights turning on every morning and turning off every evening. Better yet, scientists also learned how circadian clocks work even in the absence of light, providing insects with the internal mechanism to actually anticipate expected changes in day and night so that they could become active when the lights would have turned on and begin resting when the lights would have turned off – even when they were maintained in constant darkness (see reviews by Schotland and Sehgal 2001 and Peschel and Helfrich-Förster 2011 for an overview of the Drosophila circadian clock). Thanks to much of this pioneering research in Drosophila melanogaster, we now know that a circadian clock is composed of interlocking negative feedback loops that rely on the precise transcription and translation of their components (Figure 1). Proteins that increase the synthesis of other RNAs are called “transcriptional activators.” Within the circadian clock, two proteins, aptly named CLOCK and CYCLE, act as transcriptional activators and increase the rate of transcription of other clock genes including period and timeless (Allada et al. 1998; Rutila et al. 1998). Levels of period and timeless mRNA slowly accumulate throughout the day (Hardin et al. 1990; Seghal et al. 1995), and are eventually translated into their proteins which reach their highest levels during the night (Hunter-Ensor et al. 1996; Zeng et al. 1996). During the night the PERIOD and TIMELESS proteins move into the nucleus where they act to stop CLOCK and CYCLE, thereby suppressing their own transcription and completing the core negative feedback loop of the clock (Darlington et al. 1998). Another clock protein, CRYPTOCHROME1, degrades TIMELESS in the presence of light (Ceriani et al. 1999). This is significant because PERIOD cannot enter the nucleus without TIMELESS. Therefore, once TIMELESS is degraded, CLOCK and CYCLE are left uninhibited and once again increase the transcription of period and timeless and allow the mRNAs of these genes to accumulate throughout the day.

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Figure 1: Model of the circadian clock in insects. The circadian transcription factors CLOCK (CLK) and CYCLE (CYC) increase the levels of period (per), timeless (tim) and cryptochrome2 (cry2) mRNA (gray arrow), which are later translated into proteins (gray shapes) that inhibit the activity of CLK and CYC, thereby suppressing their transcription and completing the core negative feedback loop of the clock. Light signals help to reset and entrain the clock by allowing the CRYPTOCHROME1 protein to degrade TIM.

More scientific research has revealed the structure of the circadian clocks in other organisms. To date, the genome (entire DNA sequence) of every animal that has been sequenced contains most, if not all, of the circadian clock genes clock, cycle, period, timeless, and cryptochrome1 (Dunlap and Loros 2017). Perhaps more interesting still, the structure of each clock gene and protein is highly similar even among diverse animals; although it has been over 600 million years since insects and humans last shared a common ancestor, 29% of the amino acids in the PERIOD protein in D. melanogaster are the same as the PERIOD protein in you. This immediately suggests both that the circadian clock evolved early in animals (indeed, many of the simplest animals, such as sponges and jellyfish, have these same circadian clock genes), and also that circadian clock genes are vital. The sequence of other less important genes/proteins change over time, and if they are not essential, may be lost or mutated beyond recognition. Contrary to the opening quote of “Microcosmos,” we now have scientific evidence that both insects and humans measure a day using the same biological mechanism. Although the sequences of individual clock genes are highly similar among organisms, the overall structure of the circadian clock can vary because some genes might be missing in certain organisms. For example, honey bees lack the timeless gene (Rubin et al. 2006), while the red flour beetle does not have the cryptochrome 1 gene (Yuan et al. 2007). If the clock is so important, how could this be? Although it seems initially perplexing, the fact that redundancy is built into the clock, where several proteins have similar roles, explains how some animals could lose one gene and still maintain their ability to tell time. Interestingly, fruit flies, the model organism on which our understanding of the circadian clock was

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built, have also lost a clock gene. And in 2008, Zhu and colleagues found that monarch butterflies contain a different gene, cryptochrome2, that is highly similar to a gene within the circadian clock of mammals, including humans. Unlike the CRYPTOCHROME1 protein, which is activated by light and degrades other proteins, CRYPTOCHROME2 is a potent inhibitor of CLOCK and CYCLE activity, acting more like PERIOD and TIMELESS. Also, CRYPTOCHROME2 is not activated by light nor does it degrade any proteins. To date, the cryptochrome2 gene has been found in nearly all other insects, including mosquitoes (Yuan et al. 2007; Meuti et al. 2015). This means that in some ways, the circadian clock in mosquitoes is more structurally similar to the clock in mammals than it is to fruit flies, even though mosquitoes and fruit flies are much more closely related. Even single-celled organisms such as cyanobacteria as well as multi-cellular organisms like plants have circadian clocks that play vital roles in their development and biology (Kondo et al. 1994; Harmer et al. 2000). These organisms use the energy of the sun to produce their own food through the process of photosynthesis, and therefore benefit immensely from their ability to predict and track daily changes in daylight. The structure of the circadian clock in single-celled organisms is much simpler than that in multi-cellular plants (Harmer et al. 2000), and both are different from circadian clocks within animals (Dunlap and Loros 2017). While the individual genes and proteins within the plant circadian clock differ from those in animals, the overall structure of the clock is similar, consisting of interlocking feedback loops to precisely regulate the transcription and translation of individual clock proteins. Both the animal and plant circadian clocks also contain photosensitive proteins that bind to and degrade other clock proteins in the presence of light (for a detailed explanation of the plant circadian clock, see Hsu et al. 2014). Although we have a fairly thorough understanding of the structure of the circadian clock in plants, insects, and other animals and how the clock allows them to reliably predict and measure daily time, it has been much harder to pin down how animals are able to respond to seasonal changes in their environment. Once again, there is ample evidence that organisms are able to tell seasonal time. During the dry season in tropical environments, many animals, including insects, add additional waxes to the outside of their body to conserve water, and many enter a dormant state (Denlinger 1986). Dormancies are also prevalent in the temperate environment, and typically animals enter this state to survive the prolonged absence of food and low temperatures that are characteristic of winter (Tauber et al. 1986). Other animals, such as birds, fish, some large mammals and even insects, migrate to more hospitable locations prior to the onset of harsh conditions in their original habitat (Shaw 2016). In mammals, overwintering dormancies are called either “hibernation” or “torpor,” but in insects and other arthropods these dormant states are known as “diapause.” Many of the physiological changes

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associated with both hibernation and diapause are similar across groups. For example, hibernating mammals, diapausing insects, and migrating birds all change the composition of their outer surface or cuticle to conserve water, increase their fat content, and upregulate proteins that help them combat stresses (Lyman 2013; Tauber et al. 1986). Also, in each of these cases, the dormancies/migratory stages are triggered by changes in hormone levels. However, precisely how the hormonal changes are induced remains unclear. Even though seasonal timekeeping among insects, birds, and mammals applies to the solar year (the alternation between summer and winter each year), it is the overall length of the day that allows these organisms to tell seasonal time. That is because overwintering dormancies and long-distance migrations are generally triggered by short day lengths that occur during the late summer and early fall in temperate environments. Mammals and birds are long-lived, and hence they will experience many winters throughout their lives. For them, it is not only the isolated length of each day but also the change in daylengths from long to short that allows them to accurately predict winter’s arrival (Lyman 2013). This is especially handy as there are two days each year that have the exact same amount of light and darkness, the only exception being the summer and winter solstices. Therefore, if a bird or mammal relied on a single, absolute daylength to initiate seasonal responses, they might misinterpret a short day in the spring as a signal that it was fall and then either migrate or hibernate in the summer, which would be disastrous. Thus, being able to track whether daylength is increasing or decreasing is crucial for seasonal timekeeping in birds and mammals. For insects, which are much shorter-lived, this is less of a problem because they usually survive for less than a year. For many of them, prolonged exposure to a single short daylength (e.g., 8 hours) throughout their lifetime is enough to induce overwintering responses. Still other insects that are univoltine, having a single generation per year, do not rely on daylength at all, but instead enter an obligatory diapause at a pre-determined point in their development that always occurs at the same time of year (Danks 1987). Although we know that diverse temperate organisms use daylength to accurately predict and prepare for winter’s arrival, it is less clear how animals measure daylength. The German botanist Erwin Bünning first proposed that as most organisms have sophisticated circadian clocks that allow them to distinguish light from dark, perhaps organisms use these same circadian clocks to measure daylength (1936). There is good support for this in plants where the circadian transcription factor CONSTANS directly regulates the expression of the gene flowering time to induce plants to produce flowers when they are exposed to long-day, summer-like conditions (see reviews by Putteril1 et al. 2010; Shim and Imaizumi 2015).

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Whether and how the circadian clock is involved in seasonal responses in animals, however, remains elusive. This mechanism is less understood today in part because Drosophila melanogaster, the organism upon which most of our understanding of molecular and circadian biology is built, lacks robust seasonal responses (Tartar et al. 2001). Also, fruit flies that have a non-functional mutation in the period gene, and are thus completely arrhythmic, mount a modest overwintering dormancy when they are exposed to short days (Saunders et al. 1989), suggesting that perhaps the circadian clock is not involved in seasonal responses in insects after all. But earlier experiments in both mammals and insects demonstrated that seasonal responses could be abolished in animals exposed to a long night and short days that were offered at non-24 hour intervals. For example, exposing flesh flies and golden hamsters to 8 hours of light and 16 hours of darkness (a 24-hour light:dark cycle) induced hibernation/diapause, while exposure to 8 hours of light and 24 hours of darkness (a 36 hour light:dark cycle) resulted in animals that did not have a seasonal response (Saunders 1973; Elliot 1972). This suggests that the circadian clock is indeed involved in measuring day (or perhaps more accurately, night) length. Additionally, because animals have circadian clocks in multiple tissues, it is difficult to know which clocks are involved in generating seasonal responses. Like us, the central circadian clock in insects is located within their brains. But also like us, insects have other circadian clocks in their guts, fat bodies (the insect equivalent of a liver) and reproductive tissues. These so-called peripheral clocks allow insects to regulate metabolism, genes associated with immunity, and reproductive events, so that they all occur at the correct time of day (Giebultowicz 2001). However, as seasonal responses also involve changes in metabolism, immunity, and reproduction, it is unclear whether the central circadian clock in the brain, peripheral clocks in another tissues, or both are driving these responses. Distinguishing the role of the central clock from peripheral clocks will undoubtedly be challenging, but most researchers believe that the central clock likely plays a more important role in programming seasonal responses for two reasons. First, the central clock in the animal brain receives light input and is the master regulator; the peripheral clocks “entrain” or cycle in response to signals produced by the central clock (Giebultowicz 2001). Second, circadian clock cells in the brain are directly connected to other regions of the brain and glands that produce hormones that are known to regulate seasonal responses (reviewed by Meuti and Denlinger 2013). Indeed, researchers have shown that destroying a subset of the circadian clock cells in the brains of blow flies left the flies alive, but prevented them from accurately distinguishing long and short days (Shiga and Numata 2009). This provides compelling evidence that the central “brain clock” likely regulates seasonal responses, at least in blow flies. However, peripheral clocks might

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also play an important supporting role in generating seasonal responses, which will hopefully be better explored in the future. In addition to determining which clock/clocks are most important in generating seasonal responses, it is also challenging to establish whether the clock as a whole or whether individual genes within the clock allow animals to tell seasonal time (Emerson et al. 2009). For example, does the entire circadian clock need to function in order to stimulate the cells in the brain, gut, or other tissues to produce a molecular signal that initiates the seasonal response? Or could one particular clock protein act pleiotropically, outside of its role in the clock, and directly produce seasonal changes in hormone levels, fat content, or behavior? We simply do not know. In spite of all of these uncertainties, I am confident that we will one day understand how all organisms convert intangible environmental signals, like daylength, into complex physiological and behavioral responses that allow them to survive in unfavorable environments. This is in large part because of the incredible molecular tools that scientists now have at their disposal. To date, the entire genomes of over 400 insect species have been sequenced (Li et al. 2019), making it easy to conduct experiments on their circadian clock genes. Additionally, because of improvements in gene sequencing and protein biochemistry, we are also able to use a technique called ChIP-seq (Chromatin Immunoprecipitation followed by deep Sequencing) to identify all of the genes that a transcription factor regulates (see Park 2009 for details). By applying this technology to insects, we could then determine whether circadian transcription factors like CLOCK and CYCLE also regulate genes outside of the clock and therefore might be responsible for generating seasonal changes. And perhaps best of all, genome-editing technologies such as CRISPR/Cas9 allow us to precisely alter the sequences of individual genes (Doudna and Charpentier 2014). This is a huge improvement to bombarding insects with hazardous chemicals or X-rays and hoping that the right mutation will occur within your lifetime as poor Konopka and Benzer (1971) did. Therefore, using genome editing technology in insects other than fruit flies will allow us to determine whether knocking out circadian clock genes affects their ability to tell both daily and seasonal time. I strongly suspect that it will. Being a pragmatic scientist who relies on federal and state agencies to pay for my research, one might then wonder why I want to use my time and your taxdollars to determine the precise mechanism by which a variety of insects measure daily and seasonal changes in daylength. This is a totally reasonable question, but I hope that I have convinced you that although daily and seasonal time measurement is complicated, it is also fascinating and worth studying to satisfy our own intellectual curiosity. But rather than being a completely academic pursuit, I also believe that fully understanding how insects measure time could

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provide some important opportunities for us to better support the insects on which we depend, like honey bees and monarch butterflies, and to more carefully target insects that demolish our crops and transmit deadly diseases. Although we do not often think about it, our insect problems are seasonal, and if temperate pests were to enter their overwintering dormancy in the spring or summer, instead of the fall or winter, that would be their demise and our great benefit. I hope and believe that we can do that by figuring out how insects tell daily and seasonal time, and then devising a way to trick them into thinking that it’s a different season. Therefore, I think that there is great practical utility in uncovering the complete pathway, from photoperiod perception to the manifestation of complex seasonal phenotypes. Perhaps in doing so, we might be able to determine how insects truly experience the passing of their days, seasons, and lifetimes.

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Peschel, Nicolai, and Charlotte Helfrich-Förster. “Setting the Clock – By Nature: Circadian Rhythm in the Fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster.” FEBS letters 585.10 (2011): 1435–1442. Putterill, Joanna, Christine Stockum, and Guy Warman. “Photoperiodic Flowering in the Long-day Plant Arabidopsis thaliana.” In Photoperiodism: The Biological Calendar, edited by Randy J. Nelson, David L. Denlinger, and David E. Somers, 9–37. Cary: Oxford University Press, 2010. Rubin, Elad B., Yair Shemesh, Mira Cohen, Sharona Elgavish, Hugh M. Robertson, and Guy Bloch. “Molecular and Phylogenetic Analyses Reveal Mammalian-like Clockwork in the Honey Bee (Apis mellifera) and Shed New Light on the Molecular Evolution of the Circadian Clock.” Genome Research 16.11 (2006): 1352–1365. Rutila, Joan E., Vipin Suri, Myai Le, W. Venus So, Michael Rosbash, and Jeffrey C. Hall. “CYCLE is a Second bHLH-PAS Clock Protein Essential for Circadian Rhythmicity and Transcription of Drosophila Period and Timeless.” Cell 93.5 (1998): 805–814. Saunders, D. S. “The Photoperiodic Clock in the Flesh-fly, Sarcophaga argyrostoma.” Journal of Insect Physiology 19.10 (1973): 1941–1954. Schotland, Peter, and Amita Sehgal. “Molecular Control of Drosophila Circadian Rhythms.” In Insect Timing: Circadian Rhythmicity to Seasonality, edited by D. L. Denlinger, J.M. Giebultowicz, and D.S. Saunders, 15–30. Amsterdam and New York: Elsevier Science BV, 2001. Sehgal, Amita, Jeffrey L. Price, Bernice Man, and Michael W. Young. “Loss of Circadian Behavioral Rhythms and per RNA Oscillations in the Drosophila Mutant timeless.” Science 263.5153 (1994): 1603–1606. Sehgal, Amita, Adrian Rothenfluh-Hilfiker, Melissa Hunter-Ensor, Yifeng Chen, Michael P. Myers, and Michael W. Young. “Rhythmic Expression of Timeless: A Basis for Promoting Circadian Cycles in Period Gene Autoregulation.” Science 270.523 (1995): 808–810. Shaw, Allison K. 2016. “Drivers of Animal Migration and Implications in Changing Environments.” Evolutionary Ecology 30.6 (1995): 991–1007. Shiga, Sakiko, and Hideharu Numata. “Roles of PER Immunoreactive Neurons in Circadian Rhythms and Photoperiodism in the Blow Fly, Protophormia terraenovae.” Journal of Experimental Biology 212.6 (2009): 867–877. Saunders, David S., Vincent C. Henrich, and Lawrence I. Gilbert. “Induction of Diapause in Drosophila melanogaster: Photoperiodic Regulation and the Impact of Arrhythmic Clock Mutations on Time Measurement.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 86.10 (1989): 3748–3752. Shim, Jae Sung, and Takato Imaizumi. “Circadian Clock and Photoperiodic Response in Arabidopsis: From Seasonal Flowering to Redox Homeostasis.” Biochemistry 54.2 (2015): 157–170. Takahashi, Joseph S. “Molecular Components of the Circadian Clock in Mammals.” Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism 17 (2015): 6–11. Tauber, Maurice J., Catherine A. Tauber, and Shinzō Masaki. Seasonal Adaptations of Insects. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Tatar, Marc, Susan A. Chien, and Nicholas Kiefer Priest. “Negligible Senescence During Reproductive Dormancy in Drosophila melanogaster.” The American Naturalist 158.3 (2001): 248–258. Yuan, Quan, Danielle Metterville, Adriana D. Briscoe, and Steven M. Reppert. “Insect Cryptochromes: Gene Duplication and Loss Define Diverse Ways to Construct Insect Circadian Clocks.” Molecular Biology and Evolution 24.4 (2007): 948–955. Zeng, Hongkui, Zuwei Qian, Michael P. Myers, and Michael Rosbash. “A Light-Entrainment Mechanism for the Drosophila Circadian Clock.” Nature 380.6570 (1996): 129–135. Zhu, Haisun, Ivo Sauman, Quan Yuan, Amy Casselman, Myai Emery-Le, Patrick Emery, and Steven M. Reppert. “Cryptochromes Define a Novel Circadian Clock Mechanism in Monarch Butterflies That May Underlie Sun Compass Navigation.” PLoS Biology 6.1 (2008).

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5 The Queue as Dystopia What happens when a queue does not move in the way that we expect it to, that is, as a linear progression toward an arrival? This chapter focuses on the way that the queue functions as a metaphor of dystopian time in Egyptian novelist Basma Abdel Aziz’s 2013 novel al-Tabur (The Queue). In the novel, the main character Yahya has been shot in an anti-government protest. When he visits the hospital he is told that he must receive special permission from an entity known as “the Gate” to remove the bullet. However, the Gate, a locus of power that has appeared in recent memory, remains closed. As crowds form in front of it as each individual waits their turn, the queue begins to take over both the city and the minds of those who remain in it. In what follows, I situate Abdel Aziz’s novel within the concerns of post-2011 dystopian Arabic fiction and argue that its exploration of the disappearance of both history and an imagined future is intimately linked to a broader re-assessment of historical time. Basma Abdel Aziz, the author of The Queue, is a psychiatrist and writer. She worked in the General Secretariat for Mental Health in Egypt’s Ministry of Health and at the Nadeem Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture from 2002 until it was closed by Egyptian authorities in 2017. She is the author of two short story collections, several studies on the effects of torture, and an award-winning 2009 book titled Temptations of Absolute Power. The Queue is her first of three novels. Abdel Aziz began writing The Queue in 2012 after returning to Egypt following a period of time in France. Recalling the scene in Cairo that inspired the novel, she relates, While walking down a main street, I came across a long queue of people waiting in front of a closed governmental building. The Gate to the building would certainly open shortly, I thought to myself; after all, it was nearly midday. Two hours later I walked back the way I came, only to find the same people standing exactly where they had been. They hadn’t moved. There were more of them now, yet the Gate was still closed. Some sat on the ground, some leaned against cars parked by the sidewalk, and some had retreated under the shade of nearby trees, seeking shelter from the heat. I didn’t know what they were waiting for, and I didn’t understand why they didn’t leave. Noon had turned into afternoon, yet nothing had changed.1

In relating this scene, she recalls wondering what these people from different social classes had in common. What was it that made them remain by the building?  http://forbookssake.net/2016/06/09/basma-abdel-aziz-writing-queue/. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110690774-007

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The Queue is one of a number of post-2011 Egyptian novels that portray dystopian worlds set in the near or distant future. These, in turn, are part of a wave of speculative fiction in Arabic that, although not new, has become more pronounced following the 2011 uprisings and the conflicts and transformations that have taken place in their wake. There are parallels between the flourishing of genres such as future writing, horror, science fiction, and dystopian writing on one hand, and the horizons of possibility – long thought impossible – created by the rapid succession of events in 2011, the removal of autocratic presidents, and the ensuing conflicts and collapse of optimism. As a speculative genre, dystopian fiction can both imagine worlds that are parallel yet distinct from our own and render a totalizing world out of the dystopian fragments of the present. In these circumstances, future writing and speculative fiction, genres that grapple with time, create spaces for thinking and questioning assumptions about history, including notions of progression, linearity, and causal effects. They open up other possible ways of perceiving both the present moment and the way it unfolds into the future.

Cognitive Estrangement and Contemporary Arabic Future Writing It is perhaps not surprising that on a global scale we are seeing renewed attention to non-realist fiction. The large-scale challenges that we face, such as climate change, mass displacement, and the questions associated with the rise of artificial intelligence require both an orientation toward the future and an acceptance that dominant understandings of the human and state sovereignty may need to shift in order to meet them. Future writing allows us to confront the possibility of such shifts, reexamine the present, and imagine the variable outcomes of current struggles and processes. Furthermore, it invites reflection on the process of getting from a present “here” to a future “here” and the way that events unfold in time. Recent Arabic future writing has emphasized themes such as authoritarianism, social divides, “War on Terror” conflicts, and futures that take landmark historical moments such as the 1948 Nakba or the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a starting point. Like much future writing, these themes point to an effort to imagine the present differently. In this regard, literary critic Darko Suvin’s theorization of science fiction in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre is useful to the kinds of speculative genres that have been emerging in Arabic literature in the post-Arab spring moment. Suvin takes a broad view of the genre, arguing that it is a genre of “cognitive estrangement,” where science stands in for cognition and fiction signifies estrangement. He suggests that this approach to the

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imaginative in literature becomes more prevalent in times of rapid flux and change. He writes: Science fiction differs from fantasy because it is “simultaneously perceived as not impossible within the cognitive (cosmological and anthropological) norms of the author’s epoch. Basically, science fiction is a developed oxymoron, a realistic irreality, with humanized nonhumans, this-worldly Other Worlds, and so forth. Which means that it is—potentially—the space of potent estrangement, validated by the pathos and prestige of the basic cognitive norms of our times (Suvin 1979: viii).

This way of thinking about science fiction as a space that allows the possible and impossible to intersect and coexist makes it an intensification of the idea of fiction, which like other art forms, is itself a form of estrangement. Such cognition and estrangement allow us to imagine other parallel worlds while we also reflect on our present realities. Arabic speculative fictions have been flourishing within recent contexts of rapid social and political change. While speculative genres as a whole are sometimes presented as recent developments in Arabic fiction, it is important to recall that not only are the supernatural and the speculative regular presences in Medieval and pre-modern Arabic literature, but that this literature has also provided inspiration for modern and contemporary writers of world speculative fictions. The animal fables in Kalila wa Dimna, the magic and fantasy worlds of The 1,001 Nights, and the twelfth century thought experiment or philosophical novel Hayy Ibn Yaqzan are a few prominent examples. Some have argued that the recent resurgence of speculative fictions in Arabic represents not an anomaly, but rather a “return of the repressed,” that is modes of writing that are now breaking through the hegemony of realist writing that aligned with the imperatives of colonial and postcolonial thought. In this view speculative writings connect to an older literary heritage. Others emphasize the inability of realist narratives to adequately capture the violence and brutality of recent conflicts (e.g., Bahoora 2015: 188). Nevertheless, despite the importance of these continuities, the more recent flourishing of speculative genres is also very much anchored in the anxieties and concerns of the post-Arab spring setting. Examples include Emirati writer Noura al-Noman’s successful young adult science fiction trilogy Ajwān which features multiple worlds and human species. The main character is a hyper empath who fights a terrorist insurgency and is also able to tap into the social marginalization and pain that underlies the conflict. Another is Ahmed Saadawi’s 2013 novel Frankenstein in Baghdad, which won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (The Arabic Booker Prize). In the novel, a creature (“Shismu,” or “Whatsitsname”) is created from the body parts of people who have died in various explosions in Baghdad, a

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rife metaphor for a nation torn about and stitched back together with many different historical memories and belongings. One of the prominent types of speculative fictions that have emerged, especially in Egypt, is future writing that takes present social and economic divides and the possibility of violence (even in revolutionary contests) to create dystopias as starting points. Examples include young adult author Ahmad Khalid Tawfiq’s 2008 novel Utopia, which some see as the first dystopian Arabic novel. In the novel, the rich have created a separate community and protect themselves against the destitute with the help of American marines. A similar line of inquiry is found in Otared by Mohamed Rabie, a novel that was shortlisted for the 2016 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Moving between the years 2011 and 2025, the novel depicts two violent worlds. In the future, Cairo is a divided city, with battles raging between a corrupt resistance and a foreign militia. Similarly, Mahmoud Hosny’s 2018 novel Kharā’iṭ Yūnus (The Maps of Younes) explores a city where a ruling class has relocated to an island at some distance from the city that they govern. A mysterious mist arrives, robbing those affected by it of their language and memories. Comma Press, a publisher based in London, has spearheaded an effort to solicit and distribute future fiction by Arab writers. Indeed, the involvement of U.S.- and Europe-based presses, critics, and translators in promoting and circulating Arabic dystopian fiction has raised questions about how the prioritization of narratives that highlight oppressive social and political structures might be reinforcing stereotypes about the Arab world (Mounzer 2019). While there may be a truth to this assertion in how dystopian novels are read and circulated internationally, future writing (which is often, but not always, dystopian) in Arabic as has offered a fertile ground for re-imagining the world and understandings of time and how our grand narratives unfold at a crucial historical juncture, just as it has in other languages. For their + 100 collections Comma Press has solicited and assembled short stories by writers from the same country to reflect on life 100 years following a national trauma. Their first collection, the 2016 Iraq + 100, features short stories by ten different Iraqi writers who each created a story about a different Iraqi city set one hundred years following the US-led invasion. Finland-based Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim both edited and contributed to the collection. In his foreword, he lays out some guiding principles in soliciting the stories: Writing about the future would give them space to breathe outside of the narrow confines of today’s reality [. . .] an opportunity to understand ourselves, our hopes, and fears by breaking the shackles of time. It’s as if you’re dreaming about the destiny of man! (Blasim 2016: v).

Writing about the future, he suggests, gives us space to think outside of the constraints and political impasses of the present moment. Though many stories in the collection imagine dystopian or stalemated futures, Blasim’s contribution, “The

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Gardens of Babylon,” imagines a prosperous future Babylon as a center for virtual reality and gaming where the current conflict is remembered as a blip in the country’s history. Palestine + 100 (2019), which imagines Palestinian futures 100 years after the 1948 Nakba, or “disaster” that was the displacement of Palestinians following the establishment of the state of Israel, is also guided by an imperative to imagine different futures following a national trauma. The call for submissions suggested to possible contributors that while future writing is sometimes optimistic, science fiction is often more effective when it offers negative, even shocking, ways to reflect on the present and the future. The guiding framework offered in the call suggests that writing may entail imagining the future as a logical progression from the present, a writing that “acts as a stark warning about how bad things might get if they carry on the way they are going.” The press continues, “This is an opportunity, therefore, to explore the possible further desolation of Palestine’s future, what future crimes, perversions of the truth, and extremities may yet beset Palestine’s people – if things carry on the way as they are.”2 Palestine + 100 was published in the summer of 2019. In her foreword the editor of the volume, Palestinian writer and translator Basma Ghalayini, speculates on why future writing has not featured very prominently in Palestinian literature. One reason, she suggests, is the critical importance of remembering the past in post-Nakba Palestinian fiction, and another is that Palestinian fiction has not, in general, embraced the binaries of good and evil that often characterize science fiction. However, she suggests, the importance of absence in Palestinian writing can offer a conceptual starting point for speculative writing and furthermore, as she notes, “Absence, and the feelings of isolation and detachment that come with it, are easy to magnify in a context of galloping, future technology” (Al-Ghalayini 2019: xi). In the featured stories, for instance, characters are haunted by the absent past and loved ones who have passed away. In one story, Israelis are visited by Palestinian ghosts. Also, the absence of reality as we know it is explored in several stories on virtual reality. In one story, “Digital Nation” by Emad El-Din Aysha Palestinian hackers create a thriving Palestinian nation through online games, a vision so detailed and vivid it could pass for reality—and for that reason deemed threatening. In “N” by Majd Kayyal, advanced virtual reality technology makes it possible for Palestinians and Israelis to live in parallel worlds in the same space. Still, in the story, the (im)mobility that Palestinians experience today remains since not everybody is authorized to travel between the worlds.

 Comma Press website.

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The two + 100 collections emerge from distinct national histories and literatures. War and its legacies shape the themes in the Iraqi collection whereas displacement, division, and modes of creating a homeland that are ultimately fragmented and incomplete are central to the Palestinian collection. As Blasim’s reflected in his foreword future writing can create spaces for conceiving the future through breaks with present social and political dynamics, through radical transformations of what we are used to. However, most stories in the collections reflect on how the pain and dysfunctional aspects of the present might continually be repeated and entrenched, further cementing current dynamics and impasses. Of course, the speculative element in future writing draws its energy from the way that it does both, that is, how it is both about the present and a way of defamiliarizing it. It allows us to see it differently and think about what could happen when current practices shape the way we move into the future and see the future through multiple uncharted possibilities.

Linear Time in the Queue Though lines and queues can take a number of shapes, they often evoke an image or idea of linear time. There is a beginning point and an endpoint and a gradual progression between them; from realizing that you need to wait, there is a period of waiting that involves progression and finally an arrival that signals the end of waiting. However, waiting doesn’t always end in arrival. In The Queue, the dystopian quality of waiting derives from the combination of the form of the queue, which mimics this linear conception of time and waiting, on the one hand, and the perpetual non-arrival, on the other. For Yahya and the many other people standing in the queue, the stakes are high, with their very lives hinging on the immobile queue beginning to move forward. Queuing and a winding postcolonial bureaucracy have been subject to both satirical and pensive literary and cinematic stagings in Egypt, though they have often taken forms that are different from The Queue’s dystopia. The 1992 comedy al-Irhab wa al-Kebab (Terrorism and Kebab), for example, features an everyman character played by Adel Imam who goes to the iconic Mugamma building in Cairo to ask for simple school transfer for his children. After seemingly endless waiting and futile but comedic attempts to get the attention of his country’s bureaucracy, he ends up in scuffle with one of the many distracted civil servants and is mistaken for a terrorist. In the 1992 novel Dhāt (Zaat) by Sonallah Ibrahim, the protagonist of the novel naively goes to a government office to lodge a complaint about a sticker that changed the original expiration date on a jar of Kalamata olives. Instead of an explanation or correction she encounters a Kafkaesque

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bureaucracy. In contrast, in The Queue the queue is no longer about satirizing dysfunctional elements of a state apparatus that does not live up to its promises. There is no interface with civil servants at all, nor comedic interludes. In its place, we find a reflection on diffuse yet pervasive power and a sense of foreboding and perpetual deferment.

The Queue The Queue is set in an unspecified future and in an unnamed city that bears close resemblance to post-revolution Cairo. The main character of the novel Yahya (the name signifies “he lives”) has been shot in a protest, a failed revolution that is officially referred to as “The Disgraceful Events.” Tarek, his doctor, does not remove the bullet that is lodged in Yahya’s body because he does not have official permission to do so. However, Tarek follows Yahya’s health and activities by reading his surveillance file. The bullet in his body contradicts the official version of the events, which insists that no bullets were fired at the protesters but rather, that the protestors injured themselves in a random purposeless frenzy. To request permission to remove the bullet, Yahya joins those who have formed a queue outside the Gate. More and more people join the queue in order to seek various kinds of permissions and approvals that might sustain lives and livelihoods. Many of those who stand in the queue have left their jobs, their families, and their friends to stand in the line. Society transforms into a waiting room and the queue becomes a society onto itself with hierarchies, services, and rumors, even a sort of civic space, which is eventually closed down when people find out that their conversations are being monitored by their cellphones and informants in the queue. Yahya and his close friends from university seek out ways to resist, but are subject to the pull of the queue, to torture, and to various forms of non-movement through space and time. Gradually the queue starts taking over the city, filling the streets, even forcing the mini buses to drive on the sidewalks. The events unfold as Yahya bleeds and deteriorates. Like many of Abdel Aziz’s books (fiction and non-fiction), The Queue is an exploration of unaccountable power. The Gate is visible to the population and it makes pronouncements and official declarations. However, it does not open nor respond to the population’s needs and requests. Rather than a gate that might open and respond to the needs of the population gathering in front of it, it serves as a wall that forecloses anything but unidirectional communication. The all-seeing (the 2016 English translation of the novel prominently features a stylized pharaonic eye on its cover), centralized yet diffuse power of the Gate shapes the narrative structure of

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the novel as well. Each section begins with an official document from Yahya’s file and is then followed by a narrative about Yahya and his community, placing the two forms of documenting in stark contrast. One of the central dystopian qualities of time in the novel is the way history is remembered and retold. On one level, there is the Orwellian naming; the official newspaper, a mouthpiece for the Gate, is called The Truth, the polling agency is named The Center for Freedom and Righteousness, and so on. Unlike the memories of individual characters, the official version of the past in the novel is vague and allegorical. History in the novel seems to begin with a revolution referred to as “The First Storm.” This is when “the leader” relinquished his power and the Gate appeared. After the appearance of the Gate the protests dubbed “disgraceful events” take place. It is not clear if these events are cyclical (for example, there could be several disgraceful events and a resetting of the official narrative). Time, in the universe of the novel, could be either cyclical or stalled. For readers, the departure from linear time is one of the more disturbing elements of the novel. With the erasure of history, or official time, the time markers in the characters’ individual experience of life begin to fall away as well. For example, in a part of the novel where Yehya strolls around the city with his close friend Nagy, the narration turns to the way that predictable time markers have ceased to structure life in the city. No one knew when rush hour was anymore; there were no set working hours, no schedules or routines. Students left school at all sorts of times. Daily rumors determined when employees headed home, and many people had chosen to abandon their work completely and camp out at the Gate, hoping they might be able to take care of their paperwork that had been delayed there (Abdel Aziz 2016: 30–31).

The sense of limbo that is created by the absence of time markers contributes to a sense of stalemate. The question of why we acquiesce is inextricably linked to this hope for movement or linearity even when things are at a standstill. As the queue forms a sort of society a resistance movement known as the “Riffraff” emerges, urging people to join their cause. However, they are unable to offer an alternative to the Gate and the people prefer to refrain from abandoning their hopes in the queue and the Gate. Nagy likens the queue to a magnet: He, too, had been affected – he knew it in his heart. Otherwise, he would still [have] his rebellious streak, and would have told everyone in the queue to advance, promising them that if everyone took just a single step, that single step alone could destroy the Gate’s walls and shake off this stagnation. But the queue’s magnet held him captive [. . .] he notes: “Everything ground to a halt” (Abdel Aziz 2016: 91).

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In one of the more disturbing sections of the novel, Yahya’s girlfriend Amany is tortured after being caught trying to retrieve the disappeared file that documents Yahya’s injury. The torture that she endures is based on sensory deprivation, an intensification of the dystopia being created in the outside world. Her sacrifice leaves her transformed as the torture has broken her experience of self as a being located in time and space. She couldn’t put together a rational thought anymore, or come up with any possibilities, not the way she’d always been able to. It felt as though time had paused, and dropped her into a well of madness (Abdel Aziz 2016: 153).

It is the bullet in Yahya’s deteriorating body that seems to offer the time marker that the setting and the queue denies. As the various characters come to experience the disappearance of both a sense of history and time, Yahya’s declining health and the encroachment of death offers a version of time that is dissonant with their surroundings. The bullet in the body is real. It is what prevents the complete erasure of the past and what continues to drive the characters toward the future. At the same time, the bullet may be lethal and thus end Yahya’s time on earth. In the last section of the novel, Yahya’s actions disappear from the file. Tarek, the doctor who has followed Yahya through the official reports and developed a sense of commonality with him, is not sure if he is dead or alive. Here, his name, Yahya, “he lives,” points both to the possibility of life or perhaps a resurrection that is not necessarily tied to Yahya’s physical survival. In the end, Tarek is stirred out of his passivity. He decides to seek out Yahya in person and, if he can find him, perform illicit surgery to remove the bullet. The last sentence of the novel is “He rose,” Qam, a verb which in Arabic as in English carries the meaning of resurrection. Qam, a simple verb stating an action taking place in time, offers a counterpoint to the limbo of time in the novel. The end is, of course, ambiguous. We are left with a sense that time in the novel’s world might continue in a kind of circularity in which Disgraceful Events continue to happen, only to be erased. Another possibility is a movement toward something different, a collective step forward that could de-magnetize the queue and those who have joined it.

Conclusion Speculative fictions can offer powerful ways of reframing the present, including the identities and concepts that we take for granted. This unsettling includes the concept of time, which, though inescapable, is notoriously difficult to theorize or pin down as a lived reality. We see at least two major approaches to imagining the future in these narratives. On the one hand, much contemporary Arabic future

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writing stages fictionalized and often intensified versions of current social and ideological divides, conflicts, or past national traumas. On the other hand, many literary narratives use future writing as an opportunity to image the future as radically different from the present. These two trends often overlap in the same narrative. Future writing, thus, both creates spaces for imagining what an intensification or a further miring in present realities and processes could look like and creates space for imagining a world that is very different from our own, thus unsettling assumptions and reminding us of the constructed and historically-situated nature of our own reality. Post-2011, the growth in future-oriented fiction and dystopian writing in Egypt has taken place against a whiplash-like political backdrop. The many people who were ready (have long been ready) to imagine and build a future radically different from Mubarak’s Egypt but were confronted with the Islamist – Military binary they were hoping to escape, have any number of ideas about how the present can unfold into the future. In some ways, the future writing that is flourishing in Egypt offers us reminders that their versions are yet to be told and tried. Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue offers powerful and often terrifying metaphors of waiting, the disappearance of time, and of a kind of state power that steals history from its people. However, like many other narratives, it also draws attention to a contemporary dynamic and invites deep reflection on future steps forward. What will Tarek do after he rises?

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Mounzer, Lina. “Why Arab Authors are Really Writing About the End of the World.” Middle East Eye. 2009. Accessed September 10, 2019. https://www.middleeasteye.net/discover/apocalypse-nowdystopia-why-arab-authors-are-really-writing-about-end-world-egypt. Al-Nouman, Noura. Ajwān: Qiṣṣa min al-Khayāl al-ʻIlmī. [Ajwan: A Science Fiction Story]. Giza: Dār Nahḍat Miṣr, 2012. Rabie, Mohamed. Ūtārid. Cairo: Dār al-Tanwīr wa-l-Nashr, 2017. Rabie, Mohamed. Otared. Trans. Robin Moger. Cairo: Hoopoe, 2016. Saadawi, Ahmed. Frānkinshtayn fī Baghdād. Beirut: Manshūrāt al-Jamāl, 2013. Saadawi, Ahmed. Frankenstein in Baghdad. Trans. Jonathan Wright. New York: Penguin Books, 2018. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Tawfiq, Ahmad Khalid. Yūtūbīya. Doha: Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing, 2010. Tawfiq, Ahmad Khalid. Utopia. Trans. Chip Rossetti. Doha: Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing, 2011. El Toukhy, Nael. Nisā’ al-Karantīna: Riwāya. Cairo: Dār al-Mirīt, 2013. El Toukhy, Nael. Women of Karantina. Trans. Robin Moger. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2014.

Hannah Kosstrin

6 Temporal Tactility in Trisha Brown’s Locus (1975) Shift shift, soft slide. Dip pour, upside down. A knee lifts; a foot places; a torso tilts forward as a leg residually lifts in the body’s line of weight. Performers Trisha Brown, Elizabeth Garren, Judith Ragir, and Mona Sulzman carve movements through the cubes in space they imagine themselves moving within in Brown’s dance Locus (1975). In a 1977 film, they softly traverse the wood floor of a white-walled dance studio at Mills College in California (Kertess 2004). Wearing white leotards and white drawstring pants, with no musical accompaniment, the performers unhurriedly execute movement phrases in a matter-of-fact manner. The only sounds are the dancers’ footfalls, which irregularly punctuate the gentle buzz of the film’s ambient noise with dull thuds when they land jumps. At one point, after lying on their backs and allowing their knees to fall to the side, the performers prop themselves up on their elbows and focus their gaze into the upper corner of the room. Standing again, one dancer lifts her knee at a right angle. Her ankle reaches toward the floor; there is a pause here. The dancers’ crystallite, varied facings turn their bodies into fractures of light falling through a prism as they gently but specifically place their body parts in space. The variations in the performers’ supple movement qualities might appear improvised, but Brown set the dance phrases from a defined score. Since Locus is performed in silence, the dancers rely on their kinesthesia—their sensate body knowledge—to move together in space and time. How they transfer their weight from one body part to another determines the length of time it takes them to perform the movements. In this way, Locus is an example of defining temporality through kinesthesia. This chapter explains how dance defines time through the body. Defining Locus in temporal terms centers the body to determine how time passes. I use two definitions of temporality to assess Locus: 1) the factor of time that defines sudden and sustained movement qualities according to the movement analysis of dance theorist Rudolf Laban; and 2) how time can be perceived to cycle conceptually, including circular understandings of navigating past, present, and future. I argue that Locus parses units of time through the way dancers execute movement tasks, based on their particular, individual physical qualities that determine how long movements take. First, I will provide some definitions and background information for how I use Brown’s Locus to determine time through the body. By “determine time through the body,” I mean when the verification of how long something takes relies on the biomechanics of doing it. The do-er understands https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110690774-008

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the properties of that temporality through the kinesthetic sensation of how long it takes to execute. The performance genre I use to demonstrate this idea is contemporary concert dance, a theatrical dance lineage coming out of the Euro-American genres of modern dance and postmodern dance in the twentieth century. These performers often dance barefoot as they utilize spiraling torsos and an active relationship with gravity. Choreographers like Brown make dances through experimenting with movement vocabularies. Their innovations introduce diverse ways of experiencing temporality kinesthetically. Trisha Brown (1936–2017) was a white American choreographer affiliated with the avant-garde Judson Dance Theater in New York in the 1960s, a group that defined a historical genre sometimes referred to as early postmodern dance. In 1970, she founded the Trisha Brown Dance Company. Brown led her generation by developing choreographic compositional modes focused on task-based and mathematical structures. In her dances based on task structures, she used equipment pieces like harnesses to send performers walking across gallery walls or down the side of a building. When composing with mathematical structures, she assembled accumulative dances by repeating parts of small gestural phrases. Between the mid-1970s and 1980s, Brown was filmed in rehearsal improvising spurts of movement and then the dancers in her company, who watched, reproduced those movements over and over until they transferred her capricious in-themoment choices into set choreographic material (Blackwood 2005). Locus marks Brown’s career change from composing dances from task structures and the mechanics of apparatus to making dances built from full-bodied movement explorations in a stage space. Locus is an object through which to explore temporal tactility, which is understanding time through embodied actions (on how kinesthetic or embodied actions determine understandings of or relationships to time, see Hillewaert 2016; Edwards 2012; Yamamoto and Kitazawa 2016). By generating her dances through her own compositional explorations, the timing of Brown’s movement phrases became idiosyncratic to her own kinesiology, how her particular body, with its particular dimensions, strengths, and characteristics, moved. Brown was tall. Her long limbs took the time they needed to complete a movement, for the action to go the length of her limb, that a person with shorter limbs took less time to complete. This physicality in action determines temporal tactility in dance.

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Structures for Defining Time through the Body The academic discipline of dance studies pursues how dancing bodies produce cultural meaning. I draw on dance studies models of movement-based analysis to support defining temporal tactility. I first thought about indexing time through the body when I took a master class with Tamara Riewe, a dancer in Trisha Brown’s company, in 2012. I learned quickly that if the timing wasn’t right, the movement wasn’t right. Riewe taught a section of Brown’s dance Foray Forêt (1990), which contains a flat hinging motion of the arm that successively, but slowly, swings the body open from its front surface. I had to get the suspension, then fall, just right in order for the timing to be correct. The weight of that movement determined the time it took to do. If I did not complete the weight shift, I finished the movement too early. This is one way that I am able to identify the temporal tactility of Brown’s work, through my own “kinesthetic seeing” interaction with it. Kinesthetic seeing is an event wherein people can identify familiar somatic elements in their own bodies as they see them enacted in someone else’s (Kosstrin 2020). Because I have practiced Brown’s movement technique, when I see others perform it, I see it with my eyes and empathetically feel it in my muscles at the same time. As a result, I feel the performers’ falls of weight and suspensions of momentum. Years before I took Riewe’s master class, I studied Brown’s movement practice with former company member Abigail Yager, who at times used the image of a flour bag dropping from a cut string to explain falls of weight in the body’s limbs. When I watch Locus, I recognize Brown’s characteristic movement combinations and I remember her logic of how timing and relationships between dancers are determined through the kinesthetic sense, that is, through the body. Through training with Brown, the dancers developed a shared inner rhythm that kept them together in time because they performed Locus without music that would otherwise externally provide a metered beat. The way that I define the elements of weight, time, and space when analyzing dance performances is based in the Laban systems of movement analysis. This framework, developed in early-twentieth-century German expressive dance and resonant across twentieth- and twenty-first-century theatrical dance contexts, works through a system of definitions for movement dynamics as they are identified into categories, called “motion factors,” of space, weight, time, and flow. Like many dance scholars, I use Laban-based vocabulary to analyze dances. In the Laban framework, “time” relates to movement qualities of performing in a sustained or sudden manner, instead of evoking clock time. Laban analyst Vera Maletic defined sustained time as a sense of “ongoingness” and sudden time as “resisting the duration of time” passing (Maletic 2005: 18). “Weight” is based in the relationship of the body’s center of weight with gravity. The center of weight

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is imagined to live in the pelvis. The body can have a strong relationship with weight that pushes against gravity, or a light relationship with weight that lifts away from gravity. The center of weight can move with mobility (the pelvis thrusts out of alignment with the shoulders, creating dynamic precarity) or stability (the pelvis remains aligned with the shoulders, even if it moves polyrhythmically, creating stable shapes and postures). In terms of space, a performer can have a direct relationship to space like a person walking with purpose, or an indirect relationship to space like having a proprioceptive sense of everything around you; space also includes identifying where people are in a performance space. Some motion factors pair up. For example, light weight, sustained time, and indirect space can combine into a floating sensation, like a helium-filled balloon set free. The fourth motion factor is flow, which identifies how movement courses through the body’s musculature in a bound or free manner. I employ the Laban definition of weight as a theoretical concept located in the body to explain temporality in Locus. For Brown’s work, I define the experience of time passing in Laban terms of weight. This means that a performer needs to complete the fall of the weight for one movement before moving on to the next while paying keen attention to how time feels in relation to how long this biomechanical process takes to complete. Garren and Ragir are Brown’s height, but Sulzman is about a head shorter, with a more compact torso and shorter limbs. Since she is smaller than the others, Sulzman adjusts her phrasing to determine how long the weight shifts take in her body. The movements take longer across Brown’s long limbs than they do across Sulzman’s shorter ones. In order to stay aligned in time with the group in the first part of Locus, Sulzman engages bound flow in her muscles to lengthen the time it takes movements to traverse the length of her limbs so that she matches Brown’s timing. Brown performs with a freely flowing ease, as if her arms drip from her shoulders. Brown looks effortless but Sulzman looks effortful. Brown’s billowing quality as she lands gives a sense of time as determined by the fall of her body’s weight, as opposed to Sulzman’s more compact physicality even when airborne. In the latter half of the dance, the performers execute permutations of the movement phrases without doing the same thing at the same time. Here Sulzman’s timing is faster than the others’ but she performs with more ease, as the weight shifts course more quickly through her compact frame compared to the others’ long-limbed delays. In this way, the performers experience the passage of time as it expands through their sinews. This kinesthetic process of temporal tactility determines the movements’ temporality.

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Engaging Time, Space, and Histories in Locus Scholars mostly associate Locus with space (Rosenberg 2017; Graham 2016; Sulzman 1978). Indeed, the word “locus” means “place,” “locality,” or more specifically, “the set of all points whose location is determined by stated conditions” (Merriam-Webster 1989: 432). This essay is the first temporal analysis of the dance that shows the interconnectedness of time and space therein. Brown built the dance through a score based on standing in an imagined cube in space. The dance became the “set of all points” determined by the conditions generated by the score and the cube. Cultural historian Amanda Jane Graham argues that Locus, and its cube, are products of Brown’s reaction to the architectural characteristics of her shared-dwelling loft apartment and studio space at 541 Broadway in New York City, where the dance premiered in 1975 (Graham 2016: 32). Moreover, choreographers in Brown’s 1960s–1970s New York avant-garde milieu routinely appropriated East and South Asian practices relating to time and space. Locus reflects that trend. Artists’ engagements with butoh, t’ai chi, yoga, and the I-Ching (Book of Changes) introduced spatio-temporal structural engagements with time passing into Locus that, in relation to more speedy Euro-American conceptions of time (especially in New York), felt comparatively expansive (e.g., Candelario 2016; Hamera 1990; Novack 1990; Graham 2016: 41). Asian presences contributed to a sense of ongoingness in Locus. Brown produced this temporality I identify as “ongoingness” through her way of building dances. She relied on somatic intelligence, wherein the body’s kinesthesia thinks as much as the brain’s cerebral reasoning. An imagined cube that encircles the dancers governs the somatics—physical awareness—in Locus. Inspired by Laban theory, Brown based her cube on how the reach of the body’s limbs define the space in which the body acts, what the Laban vocabulary defines as “kinesphere,” but she reworked Laban’s spherical kinesphere to spatially function within the cube’s squared points (Rosenberg 2017: 161; Graham 2016: 36). Laban movement analysis includes movement combinations of space, weight, and time characteristics of floating, gliding, flicking, dabbing, slashing, punching, pressing, and wringing that are defined by performing movements with these qualities to hit the cube’s corners from within; movement analysts refer to these movement combinations as the “effort cube” (Maletic 2005: 37–45). Moving through this Laban “effort” cube activates the points that Brown identified at the cube’s planar intersections to direct her individual movements that became Locus’s movement phrases. In other words, Brown directed her individual movements to follow the lines and angles through the cube to connect the points to one another. As a dance historian, I use the tools of identifying the motion factors of space, weight, and time for distinguishing a dance’s components in order to analyze that dance.

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Brown’s cube for Locus thus became a combined temporal-spatial-kinesthetic generator for demonstrating how her body moves within particular limits. In this way, the cube determined the dance’s embodied logic. Brown constructed intersecting planes in the cube, and assigned a number, from one through twenty-six, to each point where the planes and edges of the cube intersect; she labeled the center with the number twenty-seven. Brown assigned each of the twenty-six intersecting numbers a letter of the English alphabet, and she assigned spaces between words the number 27. For each letter she made a movement that touched the corresponding number-point in the cube. Locus contains material that Brown built on her own by going through the points in the cube. Yet, the movement retains the whimsical quality from her other ways of working that relied on dancers capturing her improvisations. To make Locus’s main movement phrase, Brown used the following autobiographical statement: “TRISHA BROWN WAS BORN IN ABERDEEN WASHINGTON IN 1936 SHE RECEIVED HER BA IN DANCE FROM MILLS COLLEGE AND LATER TAUGHT THERE SHE HAS ALSO TAUGHT AT REED COLLEGE IN PORTLAND” (Sulzman 1978: 119). This run-on sentence became the script for part of the dance, such that each dancer went through the bodily positions of each letter in the sequence. Brown’s physical task of directing her body to go to the T, then the R, then the I, the S, and all the way through this statement, generated the phrase material for Locus and produced choreographic variation (Banes 1987: 86). Even though Brown produced movements from this score that we might call abstract or non-narrative because they are not mimetic, the movement phrase has linear time at its core because it is built on this trajectory of Brown’s life: birth, college degree, teaching career. In this way, Brown’s biography generated the cube’s points in space, which in turn formally defined the movement phrase material for Locus. Choreographers with biographical and cultural backgrounds different from Brown’s have deconstructed Locus in calls for social action. The resulting dances produce a kinesthetic temporality with a dimensional blood memory in addition to defining how time feels through the body in the moment (Welsh-Asante 2001: 147–149). A formalist dance made from autobiographical material, Locus is culturally situated within Euro-American compositional practices of abstraction associated with whiteness and white privilege (See Manning 2004). Forty-plus years on, Locus’s legacy within postmodern dance lineage reinscribes this context among conversations about transmission in person-to-person embodied-oral histories of passing down dance practices through chronological time. Black choreographer Christopher-Rasheem McMillan challenges one aspect of this restaging practice with his piece Black Lōkəs (2017). He explains it as “a work that focused on the black body but uses postmodern structures of whiteness to make blackness visible”

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(McMillan 2018: 12). McMillan learned Locus from Brown company members, and reworked the Locus cube by replacing Brown’s alphabet-determined points in space with biographical information for the victims of police violence against people of color as the points in space (McMillan 2018: 12). Black Lōkəs reworks early postmodern dance’s abstraction, engaging postmodernist estrangement to measure temporality in units of people’s lives to spur social action. The private spaces of Brown’s loft become public spaces of police brutality. Re-working established dances helps us consider elements anew that were invisibilized (overwritten by dominant cultural forces) in a dance’s first renderings (Gottschild 1998: 1–2). These ways of experiencing time as unfolding or measured in people’s lived experiences introduces affective aspects of how time feels when watching Locus.

Temporal Measuring in Locus Dancers “feel” time in Locus by understanding how long movements take to perform within the physical capacities of their own bodies. Audience members experience different kinesthetic sensations when watching dance than performers do in performing it, though both experience time through the body (Foster 2011). Temporal tactility taps into kinesthetic knowledges to know when a movement is complete by discerning sensations of muscular shifts. In this way, time is about how movements register in the body, which does not necessarily match clock time: it is about how I visually-kinesthetically feel time unfolding through the pacing, the weight, and the in-between spaces of dance practices. There are even more ways that dancers “feel” time that expose the importance of bodily sensations for defining and understanding time. The three I will discuss are affect, units, and ordering tools for quantifying temporally tactile sensations. Affect is how things feel, in emotions and in kinesthesia. Affect drives an understanding of time through corporeality. People feel time through their bodily experiences of their emotions. More broadly, our environment disciplines our emotions, which in turn metastasize through our physicality. Dance theorist Harmony Bench terms this phenomenon “affective temporalities” (Bench 2016). Bench argues that television competition dance shows like So You Think You Can Dance and dance video games like Dance Dance Revolution produced an American corporeality as a state of ever-readiness in response to the War on Terror between 2001 and 2011. These high-octane televisual media disciplined viewers’ and participants’ bodies into a local-temporal martial physicality regulated by emotional states of neurotic precarity or paranoid alertness. The resulting affective states manifested in people’s bodies through distinct paces and rhythms (Bench 2016: 158).

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Conversely, Locus’ gently buoyant movement qualities elucidate different emotional responses in viewers due to their divergent historical context and lessened adrenaline in audience participation compared to early-twenty-first-century televisual media. Considering how emotionally-driven physicality determines time helps explain temporal tactility. The relationship between temporality and movement dynamics can be tricky to parse in Locus to ascertain temporal tactility. The fourteen-minute dance maintains calmly consistent pacing, with small, sometimes partially hidden, punctuating bursts, revealing its influences from Eastern and Western movement lineages. Arguably, these temporal changes mark shifts between sustained and sudden time. As the piece begins, the four performers are closely scattered, like dice hastily spilled out of a cup. In the first section they perform the same movements at the same time while facing different directions, which creates the optical illusion of the prism I mentioned earlier. They shoot one arm in front of their foreheads, striking with a force driven from their backs. They shift their weight once, twice; a quicklytwisting waist leads into a slicing dip of the torso. After a loosely-weighted jump the dancers balance on one leg, tipped over like dunking plastic birds in a watertub. Their arms brush out over a leg, then scoop up pockets of air. The dancers sink into a squat, pushing their knees forward as they slowly lower like a steady elevator. They easily pass through handstands lofting their legs over their heads, then rotate this inverted shape into backward turns. Another handstand becomes a tilt; heads drop, and the joints follow in gentle collapse. In a moment visually striking for its brief stillness, the dancers all face the same direction, but not for long. The dance continues as the performers slip in and out of canon, doing the same movement phrase starting at different times, like singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” in a round. They perform billowy dives onto their hands and rebound as they slide their weight through their joints. They jump; they reach; they catch; they hug the space. Locus generates a world with its own rules, wherein the weighted falls of movement from one body part and point in space to another determine its temporality. Until, that is, a voice from off camera declares “Stop,” jolting Locus back into the present moment. The dancers pause, leaving a sense of ongoingness in their completion, newly drawing attention to time as units. This movement description shows how completing muscular shifts of weight delineates time into individual packages. Following this line of inquiry, Locus parses time into distinct units like atomic philosophy. Active between the fifth and third centuries BCE and influencing Western scientific thought, Greek atomic philosophers conceived time as existing in discrete, indivisible units, like beads on a necklace (Rudavsky 2018; Curd 2011). In Locus, the completion of each movement before moving on to the next generates an entire moment, like atomic individual units of time. In this manner, Locus offers another way to visualize atomic

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philosophical conceptions of time through the body, and reinforces how bodily actions determine conceptions of discrete units of time. Beyond measuring time through kinesthetic understanding packaged as distinct units, temporal tactility can measure time passage through embodiment by ordering bodies in space. Two ordering tools are succession and simultaneity. These concepts can work from an external vantage point to define the relationships between multiple bodies in space, as well as internally to define how people feel movement occurring within the parts of their own bodies. From an external vantage point for ordering bodies in space, succession is people processing one after the other, and simultaneity is people arriving in one place at the same time. Succession and simultaneity can be understood by their duration, or how they unfold over time (Kaye 2018: 37). Temporal tactility also relies on duration: how long it takes a weight shift to complete a movement. Distinguishing succession from simultaneity, Talmudic scholar Lynn Kaye gives as an example the practical experience of how to know who passes through a gate first (succession) as opposed to the impossibility of two people going through the gate at the same time (simultaneity). This example explains how to ascertain a celestial temporal boundary like the division between twilight and nighttime for delineating on what day an event occurs (Kaye 2018: 32–35). Determinations of whether events or people’s actions could be simultaneous or were necessarily successive, like these, had legal bearing on rabbinic rulings in interpreting Talmudic law during the first millennium CE. Kaye’s examples parse details down to a granular level to ascertain if it is possible for events to occur simultaneously or not (Kaye 2018: 40–54). Brown’s choreography demands similar precision for executing subtle weight shifts and exacting relationships with space to determine whether or not performers fulfill a dance’s choreographic rules. Another example of this exactitude is Brown’s signature solo Water Motor (1978) (Kertess 2004). The dance denotes units of time through successive and simultaneous sequencing as well as through weight. An example of internal successive sequencing occurs near the end of the dance, where Brown’s drop of her torso forward must occur after her leg completes its sideways elevation. Internal successive sequencing is movement coursing from one body part to another, whether adjacent, like hip hop dancers locking through joints in their arms to produce a wave from one set of fingertips to the other, or non-adjacent, where two body parts move disconnected from each other; internal simultaneous sequencing means the whole body or multiple body parts move at the same time (Maletic, n.d.; Guest and Curran 2008: 291–310). Succession, not simultaneity, is necessary for Brown’s leg-lift-then-torso-drop moment to work. The suspension in her thigh thickens the way time feels as we wait for her leg to fall. Kinesthetic

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temporality—how people feel the passage of time in their musculature—signals to a performer that it is time to proceed. Movement qualities matter because dances look altered when moments of physicality-reliant timing are different. Brown had a mosquito-like ability to billow when landing, to seemingly go up and down at the same time. When I saw Brown company member Leah Morrison perform Water Motor in 2012, she had shorter limbs than Brown, and did not hang in the air as Brown does, so she landed much faster.1 Neal Beasley, who learned Water Motor for its 2011 revival alongside Morrison, similarly had a more compact quality of midair suspension than Brown’s characteristic billowing. Here, movements’ succession based on a performer’s physicality may not translate from one dancer to another, causing the same dance to look different when multiple people perform it. Yet, the properties of how temporal tactility functions within simultaneous or successive sequencing determine kinesthetic units in Brown’s dances.

Conclusion This chapter has defined strategies for defining time through the body using Trisha Brown’s dance Locus as an example and point of departure for theorizing temporal tactility. Analyzing dances such as Brown’s necessitates embodied reasoning because their logic is kinesthetic. It can therefore be easier to understand Brown’s dances when you perform them, because cerebrally reasoning through how they work only yields part of the story. In this way, temporal tactility demands a level of kinesthetic participation to fully unfold. But, if you do not have access to performing these dances for any number of reasons, tapping into your kinesthetic seeing is one way that you can begin kinesthetically defining the elements of this and other dances. Temporal tactility lives in our kinesthesia, the body knowledge that we carry with us that gives us information about our surroundings. This embodied knowledge deepens the potential for how we experience time and understand our relationships to one another.

 Trisha Brown Dance Company, presented by White Bird, 11–13 October 2012, Newmark Theatre, Portland, Oregon.

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Bibliography Banes, Sally. Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, (1979) 1987. Bench, Harmony. “Affective Temporalities: Dance, Media, and the War on Terror.” In Choreographies of 21st Century Wars, edited by Gay Morris and Jens Richard Giersdorf, 157–180. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Blackwood, Michael, producer. Making Dances: Seven Postmodern Choreographers. New York: Blackwood Productions, (1980) 2005. Kanopy Streaming. https://www.kanopy.com/video/mak ing-dances-7-postmodern-choreographers Candelario, Rosemary. Flowers Cracking Concrete: Eiko & Koma’s Asian/American Choreographies. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2016. Curd, Patricia, ed. A Presocratics Reader: Selected Fragments and Testimonia. Trans. Richard D. McKirahan and Patricia Curd. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2011. Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts. Westport: Praeger, 1998. Edwards, Terra. “Sensing the Rhythms of Everyday Life: Temporal Integration and Tactile Translation in the Seattle Deaf-Blind Community.” Language in Society 41.1 (2012): 29–71. doi: 10.1017/ S004740451100090X Foster, Susan Leigh. Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance. New York: Routledge, 2011. Graham, Amanda Jane. “Space Travel: Trisha Brown’s Locus.” Art Journal 75.2 (2016): 26–45. Guest, Ann Hutchinson and Tina Curran. Your Move: The Language of Dance Approach to the Study of Movement and Dance. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2008. Hamera, Judith. “Silence That Reflects: Butoh, Ma, and a Crosscultural Gaze.” Text and Performance Quarterly 10 (1990): 53–60. Hillewaert, Sarah. “Tactics and Tactility: A Sensory Semiotics of Handshakes in Coastal Kenya.” American Anthropologist 118.1 (2016): 49–66. doi: 10.1111/aman.12517 Kaye, Lynn. Time in the Babylonian Talmud: Natural and Imagined Times in Jewish Law and Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Kertess, Klaus, producer. Trisha Brown: Early Works 1966–1979. Houston: ARTPIX Notebooks. DVD, 2004. Kosstrin, Hannah. “Kinesthetic Seeing: A Model for Practice-in-Research.” In Futures of Dance Studies, edited by Susan Manning, Janice Ross, and Rebecca Schneider, 19–35. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2020. Maletic, Vera. Dance Dynamics: Effort and Phrasing. Columbus: Grade A Notes, 2005. Maletic, Vera. n.d. “Vera Maletic Handout.” n.d. In author’s possession. Manning, Susan. Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. McMillan, Christopher-Rasheem. “Trisha Is My Shepherd; I Shall Not Want . . .” Movement Research Performance Journal 51 (2018): 12. The New Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Springfield: Merriam-Webster, 1989. Novack, Cynthia. Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. Rosenberg, Susan. Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2017.

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Rudavsky, T. M. “Atomistic Conceptions of Time in Medieval and Contemporary Philosophy.” Presentation, Metaphors of Time: An Interdisciplinary Conversation Across the Arts, Humanities, and Sciences. Columbus, OH, 2018. Sulzman, Mona. “Trisha Brown’s Locus: A View from Inside the Cube.” Dance Chronicle 2.2 (1978): 117–130. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1567474 Welsh-Asante, Kariamu. “Commonalities in African Dance: An Aesthetic Foundation.” In Moving History/Dancing Cultures, edited by Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright, 144–151. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, (1985) 2001. Yamamoto, Shinya and Shigeru Kitazawa. “Tactile Temporal Order.” In Scholarpedia of Touch, edited by Tony J. Prescott, Ehud Ahissar, and Eugene M. Izhikevich, 279–292. Paris: Atlantis Press, 2016. doi: 10.2991/978-94-6239-133-8_23.

Katherine Elkins

7 Proust’s Novel Time Modernist novels—written in the early part of the twentieth century—are well known for representing time in new ways (e.g., Kern 2003; Jesse Matz 2001). A famous example is Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which announces its obsession in its very title. Of course, many earlier Romantic writers had already explored time and memory. Some even described experiences similar to Proust’s famous madeleine scene, during which the taste of a cookie affords a sudden and intense recollection of the past.1 So what makes Proust’s great modernist novel so different? Despite surface similarities, Proust’s search for time is quite new. His lost time is connected to the emergence of middle-class leisure time captured in the paintings of the Impressionists a few decades earlier (Matz 2001). The French expression for lost time, “temps perdu,” evokes this sense of “wasted time” better than its English translation. Are such seemingly wasted, non-productive moments of life important? Of what significance are memories of them? And why are such intense emotions attached to these experiences? Many earlier nineteenth-century French literary characters suffered from a melancholic memory that invoked the weight of the past, a phenomenon described as the “mal du siècle” or “disease of the century” (Terdiman 1993; Elkins 2002). Proust’s early twentieth-century protagonist is markedly different in that he experiences a lightness of being. In fact, he readily confesses to a terrible memory. At the start of the novel, the narrator’s2 memories of his childhood summers spent in the village of Combray are few and isolated, and his Aunt Léonie’s house is remembered as vacant, much like a medieval memory palace absent any memories.3 With the taste of the small scalloped madeleine, however, the narrator experiences an intense level of emotion even as he is at a loss to explain why. Part of the mystery of the experience is that this affective state should be tied to the taste of a cookie,

 Proust’s narrator admits as much in the final volume, where he discourses at length on the similarities between his madeleine and parallel moments in Chateaubriand, Nerval, and Baudelaire.  Proust is surprisingly cagey when it comes to naming his protagonist narrator. Here I follow scholarly convention in referring to him simply as “narrator” rather than Marcel. Not only is this faithful to the novel, but it helps to emphasize that the novel is fictional rather than autobiographical.  See Yates 2014 for a description of the medieval art of memory, which involved imagining an architectural space and locating memory clues in various rooms. That the narrator’s memory of the house in Combray is empty seems especially significant given the narrator’s emphasis on a poor memory. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110690774-009

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which at first resuscitates no definite memory. Only after continued efforts does the recollection of Combray return with surprising vividness. More privileged moments like the madeleine follow, but to think of them as simply memories fails to capture their uniqueness.4 The experience of the madeleine affords a complex fusion of past and present, because the present sensation is linked intimately to a previous experience. The narrator describes this as a momentary conflict between a past self and a present self that is both pleasurable and disturbing. Paul Ricoeur, one of Proust’s most astute readers, aptly labels these moments as “discordant concordances” because past and present converge and diverge simultaneously.5 The present and the past are both the same and different, present and lost, affording a sense of (in the narrator’s words) “survival and annihilation.” This is no doubt why Proust remarks that the only true paradise is a paradise lost. Loss and recovery are intertwined. The narrator’s forgetfulness, significantly, is fundamental to this possibility of re-encounter. Only because the narrator had neither seen nor tasted the madeleine since childhood did the experience of it remain isolated and particular. The madeleine never became part of his habitual and repetitive everyday experience. Time regained depends for its very success on the “lostness” of these moments because of (not in spite of) the large gulf that separates the past from the present. Time regained also depends on a blend of imagination and perception. The experience of the madeleine doesn’t provide a simple relationship to the past that is recalled ready-made. Rather, the narrator explains, the madeleine requires an act of creation applied to the present perception. A search for lost time involves a creative act, just as, the narrator stresses, the role of the writer involves translation, not mere transcription. Finding lost time relies on an imaginative, mental process of creation. But it also involves an attunement to the present world, an intense engagement with present sensory experiences like the taste of the madeleine. The Proustian experience of time therefore complicates a clear sense of external and internal. Is the past moment located out there, in the madeleine, or within the self? If it were purely internal, then the search for lost time would take place within memory,

 Deleuze 2003 famously declares that Proust’s novel has nothing to do with memory. While his interpretation of Proust has been critiqued by scholars like Anne Simon, Deleuze was right to suggest that there is something more complex than a simple investigation of memory at work.  Ricoeur 1984 engages in one of the most profound investigations of time in Proust. In particular, his observation of this discordant concordance is entirely apt. Ricoeur adheres to Deleuze’s theory of signs, whereas the approach taken here benefits from the ground-breaking critique of Deleuze in Simon 2018.

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and a quiet room would suffice.6 And yet the narrator’s memory is woefully empty, and any inward mental turn is quite useless without an outward turn towards the world and towards an unknown and uncertain future. A search for lost time thus takes the narrator out into the world, as he attunes himself to finding lost times for the first time. These unique moments of temporal experience are exceedingly rare, however. For the most part, the narrator remembers a past of habitual, repeated events that blend together and make memorial access to any singular event difficult. What makes the opening section of Proust’s long novel so unusual linguistically is the use of the imperfect tense, which underscores this dilemma. The imperfect tense evokes a past in which any particular time is lost amid superimposed memories that all blend together (Shattuck 2011: 266). Unique past moments are for the most part forgotten beneath a wealth of repetitions in which multiple experiences become overlaid and muddled. One of the few exceptions in the opening pages of the novel is the famous drame de coucher or bedtime drama, during which the young narrator awaits his mother’s bedtime kiss. As the narrator lies in bed unable to sleep, maman entertains their visitor, M. Swann, below in the garden. After his departure, the narrator’s parents make an exception to their usual bedtime rule and maman reads to the sleepless narrator. This moment marks the beginning of a narrative that will not conclude until thousands of pages later, when this moment of reading is recollected by a much older narrator. The unhurried properties of the narrative, as it unfolds over thousands of pages before returning to this scene of reading, can help us understand an aspect of the novel that may seem especially puzzling. Why does it continue for so many pages following the resuscitation of the past instantiated by the madeleine? Hasn’t the search for lost time succeeded with the recollection of Combray? And yet, the narrator seems to suggest that time has not been regained until the final volume, which announces success in its very title, “Time Regained.” This temporal structure seems to imply that finding lost time entails more than the rediscovery of a single moment. In Search of Lost Time is also a Kunstlerroman – the story of the formation of an artist – and the search for lost time is key to the narrator’s ability to translate particular, almost poetic, memories into art (Kern 2003). The transformation seems hardly assured, and at stake is the protagonist’s search for material. His difficulty is twofold: how to create a story when so much of his own life is forgotten? And how to write a novel when, by his own admission, he often fails to notice material the

 This inward, mental exploration of memory forms a dominant thread of the Christian theological tradition inherited from thinkers as diverse as Plotinus and Augustine.

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first time he encounters it? These dilemmas are fundamentally tied to his experience of time. When the novel opens, the narrator finds the past only in his dreams, but dreaming is like dipping into the various strata of time in random order as memories from different times succeed each other in pell-mell fashion. His past lacks coherence and continuity, indeed any kind of linearity that would allow the narrator to understand his life as a story. If he cannot understand the story of his own life, how will he become a writer? How will he create a narrative that establishes a sense of time in which past, present, and future succeed each other and yet form more than a succession of discrete, isolated moments? The quest of the narrator to become a writer is thus inextricably tied to this search for a different relationship to time coupled with a search for material. Time and material are connected since a search for lost time takes time and involves material keys – like the madeleine – out in the world. Without present cues like the madeleine, the narrator simply cannot remember his childhood well. A search for the past thus requires a turn to the future, as the novel takes on a quest-like structure. Coupled with this traditional quest structure, however, is a modern emphasis on investigations of the material world. Proust’s search requires research or recherche – clearer in the French title than in our English translation. Proust’s madeleine has become an everyday word, perhaps, because the concrete particulars of the experience matter. This stress on the material nature of temporal experience strongly differentiates Proust from more abstract investigations of time explored by philosophers both before and after him. Time in all its materiality is also foregrounded in the title, since “temps” means both time and weather. It is hardly a stretch to say that the search is also a search for “lost weather.” The narrator is attuned to the uniqueness of each day’s atmospheric conditions, and access to the past often involves the memory of the particular day (Sedgwick 2011). In this sense, Proust continues the explorations of time initiated by Impressionist painters like Monet who, late in his career, took to painting the same scene over and over under different weather conditions. A single haystack cannot be understood without its serial depiction in time. The understanding of an object in time also requires an understanding of its very different material contexts as they unfold. Context is also key to understanding the significance of the madeleine. The narrator describes what follows the recognition of the madeleine using the analogy of Japanese paper balls which, when placed in water, expand into threedimensional objects. And so, the narrator continues, the village of Combray—the very context surrounding the memory of his aunt’s empty house—suddenly expands into three-dimensional space. It is not just a past memory, but an entire three-dimensional contextual space. Understanding lost time as four-dimensional,

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that is 3-dimensional space coupled with the fourth dimension of time, is also part of his novel search. Of course, there are several more experiences that the narrator likens to the madeleine. He calls these involuntary memories, and they are scattered throughout the rest of the novel. Critics have struggled to categorize these experiences, since each one is so unique. Approaches tend to prioritize either an abstract attribute (i.e., they function as “signs” or convey an “extratemporal experience”)7 or a particular instantiation as ideal.8 And yet, like the experience of the madeleine in which past and present are both similar and dissimilar, each involuntary memory seems linked to earlier ones while at the same time emphasizing a new aspect of temporal experience. Together, these will constitute an apprenticeship to time that takes time and is crucial for the narrator to become a writer. A brief analysis can give us a sense of how these various temporal experiences create a series of lessons that together constitute a novel apprenticeship to time. For example, as the narrator, riding in a carriage, approaches a set of three steeples, he notices that they appear differently from a distance than from up close. As the narrator changes position, the steeples continually change relation to each other and to him. One could easily dismiss these shifting perspectives in favor of a birds-eye view that remains unchanging.9 One could, in other words, “subtract” the subjective perspective by noting that the steeples do not in fact change in space and time. And yet, there is something in this experience that seems true for the narrator and not merely subjective, namely, the importance of position and relationships to understanding the world and his place in it. Whereas the madeleine provides a sense of momentary contextual space-time, the steeples offer a different but complementary lesson. Here, the narrator shifts from an experience of the past as a three-dimensional contextual space to a vision of the present as continued relational change. As position in space and time change so do relations between objects and their relation to the self. This same dynamic relational identity will later

 Deleuze, for example, categorizes those which seem more material as lesser or inferior. Ricoeur takes Deleuze’s conclusions as his starting point and stresses the “extratemporal” nature of the experience. Anne Simon’s insight provides a much needed corrective by emphasizing the importance of materiality in Proust. She builds upon Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Proust that explores the interdependence of the material and the immaterial, or what he calls the visible and the invisible.  Proust himself provides some basis for this latter approach, since his narrator affirms that the experience of listening to Vinteuil’s phrase typifies the experience. Beckett 1994 centers on music as the key to the novel.  Joshua Landy provides a brilliant analysis of this passage in the context of a philosophy that rests on perspective. My analysis here is indebted to his insights, but emphasizes relationality over perspectivism as a way to understand the seemingly privileged role of objects in the text.

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be evident in the mobile cast of characters whose identities change as they change relation to each other and to the narrator. To context and relational identity we can add a further lesson, one in which the recent past can be understood in a more cohesive “novel” fashion. As the narrator drives along the coast near Balbec, he sees three trees that appear familiar to him. These trees seem to be trying to communicate with him, as if they were conscious beings.10 He fails to understand their message, but the experience still produces an effect. It transforms his understanding of his recent past into narrative form. It is as though, the narrator explains, he has looked up from a book he has been reading to encounter the present. The recent past is momentarily experienced as already written in book form, he explains. This attunement to the present grounds the narrator’s ability to see the recent past as distanced enough to appear already represented in book form. Here we see the beginning of a separation of past from present that helps the narrative visualize the past in fictional form. These early involuntary memories offer lessons about past and present, but another involuntary memory affords yet a different lesson. The narrator is re-visiting the seaside resort of Balbec after the death of his grandmother. As he bends over to untie his shoes, he suddenly realizes the truth of her death when his body takes on the same position as an earlier moment during their visit together. The result is as though the narrator has been plunged back into the past with his story unfolding from the past moment forward. This experience affords another lesson in narration – in this case, narrating from a past moment with a forward-looking direction. With the three trees, the past had appeared as though already represented; here the past is experienced as though unfolding toward the present. Finally, we might briefly touch on the experience of listening to music, the involuntary memory that Samuel Beckett proclaimed the key to the novel. In the case of listening to the phrase of Proust’s fictional composer, Vinteuil, the narrator experiences something that we might describe as almost pure temporal unfolding: each note succeeds the previous one in a constant flow of emergence and disappearance. It is true that memory, the narrator notes, allows the listener to understand the music as a whole, almost like a transcription, but he emphasizes that, with this translation it is no longer comprehended as music. The true experience of listening to music, Proust writes, is “sine materia,” without materiality, thus giving rise to a sense of time itself without material incarnation.

 Proust’s enchanted world anticipates recent theories of consciousness that hypothesize a kind of panpsychism (Chalmers 1997) or integrated information theory (IIT) (Tononi et al. 2016). This contemporary lens helps make sense of relationality (“integration” following the IIT model) as different from perspectivism.

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This immaterial sense of time is, however, just as with the madeleine, not enough to transform the narrator into a writer. The quest is neither as simple as finding a few material keys like the madeleine or as philosophical as understanding the immaterial experience of time. The long novel is punctuated by moments like these, but the vast majority of the novel’s material is quite different from these momentary insights into the nature of time. Indeed, it’s hard to tell what to make of such a long novel, which takes so much time to read that we are likely to become as forgetful as the narrator when trying to recall past fictional events. Even Proust’s sentences are long enough to allow us to forget the beginning by the time we have arrived at the end. In this sense, the narrative gives rise to the sense of emergence and disappearance at the heart of listening to a phrase of music. Only in the final volume does the narrator announce that he is finally ready to write. But it may not be the novel we have been reading, since nowhere does he say that the novel he will write will be the one we’ve just read. It’s not quite a circular narrative, in other words, since a key part of the narrative until this final moment has been the uncertainty of the future. While the narrator remains uncertain of his future, moreover, Proust the novelist does not. Proust claims to have written the end of the novel at the same time as the beginning, while the middle section continued to grow as Proust edited up until the time of his death, with the final volumes published posthumously. Is the novel really about time regained, or should we imagine that the beginning and end are less important than the middle that continued to expand and was curtailed only by the author’s untimely death? Which is more important, finding lost time and becoming a writer, or wasting time before doing so? If the former, then the key moment in the novel occurs in the first pages with the taste of the madeleine. If the latter, the search for wasted time leads to an attention to the middle – the narrative that makes each of our lives novel even as it is bookended by the shared experience of birth and death. It would be easy to think of the middle section as wasted time, and the narrator laments that he does seem to be wasting a lot of it. He whiles away whole afternoons reading books in the garden, stalking Mme. de Guermantes, attending parties, and engaging in a decidedly unhealthy relationship with his beloved Albertine. Far from a typical hero, Proust’s narrator reminds us of our own ambivalent relationship to wasted time. Are these moments when we immerse ourselves in a good book or spend an evening at a party truly the important moments in life? Or are they wasted as we fail to get on with productive tasks like writing a novel? In the final volume, however, involuntary memories succeed each other in rapid fire. Unlike the madeleine, they are no longer isolated experiences. On the

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one hand, the narrator has the sense that everything has become memorial. Wherever he turns, he finds something that reminds him of a past moment. The past—so barely discernible in the opening pages—can now be encountered everywhere. The narrator seems connected to his surroundings in a tightly woven network. In some ways, these last involuntary memories seem to be the least complex—the past is remembered in ways that lack the lessons of earlier moments. More important, perhaps, is the emotional effect of an understanding of the world as memorial. For the memories induce great anxiety. Now that the past can be uncovered everywhere, will the narrator still have the time to write his great work? This networked sense of the self and world gives rise, rather surprisingly, to a sense of death being close at hand—of a time when memory will give out permanently. Now, time is regained everywhere, but there is still the intimation of loss. Critics have tended to read these involuntary memories as experiences outside time – as being entirely atemporal. But in these last memories we can see that they are instead intimations of timeliness. The final involuntary memory occurs when the narrator takes down a book at random from a nearby shelf. As he starts reading, he remembers his mother reading this very same book on that night so long ago – the scene that opens the novel. This experience of reading brings him his childlike self, who appears at first almost as a stranger to him. In this second instance of reading the same novel from childhood, however, the effect is not a single memory of Combray but an “interminable and trembling chain of memories” that emerge from a “magnetized nib.” We are firmly in the realm of a transition from reading to writing. The narrator no longer remembers isolated involuntary memories but instead imagines a pen from which flows an “interminable chain.” We can now return to the question posed earlier – why does the narrative continue for so many pages after the madeleine? Multiple lessons about time must follow. First, there are lessons about context and relationality, followed by lessons about narrative time and pure temporal flow. But in this final moment of apprenticeship to time, we can see a significant shift from reading to writing. Ricoeur has argued for an implicit human sense of narrative, a kind of prefiguration that we all share.11 But actually, Proust’s search for lost time suggests something quite different – understanding one’s own life as narrative is all too difficult. It takes time.

 Ricoeur argues for a narrative sense that we all share. While this is possible, Proust’s novel represents a search for novel time that is enormously difficult because no single lesson of time suffices. Understanding novel time takes time and particular material experiences to achieve.

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There is one final lesson about time that occurs during the famous final Bal de têtes in which the narrator re-encounters characters, many now aged quite significantly. The narrator struggles to recognize friends, some of whom appear as though disguised for a costume ball with powdered-white hair and faces ravaged by time. The invisibility of time passing is suddenly made visible, written on the faces of the party-goers who are, after all, not in disguise but merely themselves, aged almost – though not quite – beyond recognition. Reading the novel his mother first read him so long ago puts his earlier memories in a “chain” issuing from a pen. This vision of embodied time offers a more complex understanding of time made visible out there. As he gazes at these barely recognizable faces, the narrator explains that he can now see the gaps in time that he had missed, gaps between these aged selves and the selves he once knew as a youth. Narrative sense emerges as an understanding of all the missed moments – truly lost time. This sense of narrative or novel time is perhaps the narrator’s most audacious claim. For how can he see moments he has missed not because he didn’t pay attention but because he was never there? And yet, this is precisely the moment when the narrator concludes that he is finally ready to write. The final, personal, chain of memories coupled with what he describes as time made visible convert the narrator from reader to writer. The experience of time made visible helps to explain another conundrum of the novel. Swann in Love, the first volume of the series, describes events that happen before the narrator is born. The narrator’s memories of Combray give rise to the prequel of Swann’s story, which involves the courtship of Charles Swann and Odette. Much later chronologically, after Swann has been married for quite some time, Swann will come to dinner at the narrator’s house and his presence will preclude the narrator’s goodnight kiss, leading to that drame de coucher recounted in the opening pages. And later still, in the narrator’s childhood, he will befriend their daughter Gilberte in the Champs-Élysées. But Swann and Odette’s love story is a prequel of which the narrator could have no first-hand knowledge. Instead, it seems to be a perfect example of the kind of narrative of “time made visible” that allows the narrator access to events that he has not personally witnessed. The narrator’s own love story, which comes much later, resembles somewhat – although not entirely – the story of Swann. Stories – both in books and in life – form the patterns that connect the narrator’s story to an intricate web of narrative. We can see a similar phenomenon operating in many of the involuntary memories which are, in fact, not as individual as they might seem. When in the final volume the narrator trips over a paving stone as he exits his carriage, for example, he seems to be tripping over Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice and his own trip to Venice at the same time. The lessons of the novel teach the narrator to see time as a network, and this networked element is evident from the very

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first madeleine, if one only knows where to look (for more, see Kristeva 1993; Elkins 2008). Of course, the narrator’s own love story would not bear repeating if it merely followed Swann’s story as perfect repetition, or if the only important aspects of the narrator’s story were those that were similar to Swann’s. The particularity of the narrator’s story is key, and it follows the same contradiction of sameness and difference that characterizes involuntary memories. The narrator’s story would be barely recognizable if it didn’t share some similarity with past stories or future ones like our own. We recognize Proust’s madeleine because we all, presumably, have had our own madeleine moments. But at the same time, the narrator is searching for how to create a work of art in a modern world of such radical and fast-paced change. Will the narrator’s novel still hold interest for a future changed world, he worries? In fact, the gaps in time and partial erasure of the past make possible an entirely different kind of relation to time, one which holds more in keeping with the kind of deep geological time made popular by Charles Lyell in his nineteenth-century Principles of Geology. Proust transposes geological time onto the life of an individual, as even his protagonist’s past lies partially beyond his memory, likes those changes in the earth’s crust that precede the anthropocene. The sense of a deep fissure between past and present is only further deepened by his modern understanding of rapid historical and technological change.12 But these changes make possible a different kind of lost time – a kind of time to be discovered out there in the world. What is more, this sense of time as narrative does not come preformed but must be found. Marion Schmid notes that Proust’s pattern of writing starts as evocations of moments and only later connects them by developing narratives. Only after writing about many isolated ideas, characters, and places does Proust then assemble the “disparate fragments into a coherent sequence” (Schmid 2007: 60). In this sense, the task of the writer requires a long, arduous apprenticeship to time that involves learning how to bridge the gaps and envision moments of the past as though they are unfolding in the present in an interminable chain. This chain connects a single life to a larger pattern of narrative that extends beyond the self and that integrates the unique life in a complex web. The self becomes connected to all kinds of material – both textual and worldly – out there. In the final volume of the novel, Time Regained, Proust’s narrator reflects on the fact that his experience of the madeleine is indeed similar to those described

 Kern 2003 brilliantly describes the changing cultural understanding of time and space in the modernist period with an emphasis on how technological change fuels this conceptual shift.

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by authors like Nerval and Chateaubriand. Initially, the narrator hopes that these moments are proof that he is meant to be a writer because the experiences place him in a literary tradition of august precursors. But he eventually realizes that these moments are not enough, and that a more complex understanding of time must be actively sought. His vision of time is more than that of a poetic instant, but is, rather, a fundamental search for narrative time that takes time and directs him towards the unfolding future and the world out there.

Bibliography Beckett, Samuel. Proust. New York: Grove Press, 1994. Chalmers, David. The Conscious Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Deleuze, Gilles. Proust and Signs. Trans. Richard Howard. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Elkins, Katherine. “Memory and Material Significance: Rethinking Influence.” Modern Language Quarterly 69.4 (2008): 509–531. Elkins, Katherine. “Middling Memories and Dreams of Oblivion: Configurations of a Non-Archival Memory in Baudelaire and Proust.” Discourse 24.3 (2002): 47–66. Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. Kern, Stephen. The Modernist Novel: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Kristeva, Julia. Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature. Trans. Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Lyell, Georges. Principles of Geology. London: Penguin, 1998. Matz, Jesse. Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Matz, Jesse. Modernist Time Ecology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969. Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time. 6 volumes. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. Revised by D.J. Enright. New York: Modern Language Library, 2003. Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984. Ruskin, John. The Stones of Venice. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2003. Schmid, Marion. “Birth and development of A la recherche du temps perdu.” In The Cambridge Companion to Proust, edited by Richard Bales, 58–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Weather in Proust, edited Jonathan Goldberg and Michael Moon. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Shattuck, Roger. Proust’s Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011. Simon, Anne. Proust ou le réel retrouvé. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2018. Terdiman, Richard. Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Tononi, Giulio, et al. “Integrated Information Theory: From Consciousness to it Physical Substrate.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 17 (2016): 450–461. Yates, Frances. The Art of Memory. London: Random House, 2014.

Marti Chaatsmith and Christine Ballengee Morris

8 Time and the Earthworks The people who built these mounds were brilliant. Their genius lies in combining complexity and simplicity simultaneously. Their mathematical and astronomical complexities challenge our mental capacity while simultaneously their simplistic structures evoke a calming, soothing, and in some instances a spiritual effect. These people have for the most part been overlooked, unrecognized, and unappreciated. Today we have an opportunity to change that and it is our responsibility to do so. – Chief Glenna Wallace, Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma.

Several thousand years ago, building earthworks was a central feature of the public architecture of many Indigenous cultures in the world. Earthworks, large-scale shapes built into the earth, are created by deliberately moving large quantities of earth from one location to another and forming structures out of them that last for generations. Time is one key component of the ancient earthworks found in Ohio and many other areas in the United States. This chapter has two parts. The first half of the chapter explores the ways that Indigenous people tracked time through earthen architecture. We explain the design, structures, and construction methods of these earthworks as well as their meaning to their builders and to generations of people who gather(ed) within them, live(d) nearby, or built their own adjacent structures. The second half of the chapter describes a contemporary project, titled “eARThworks Rising,” which illustrates the Ohio Earthworks for school children. Created through collaboration between an American Indian advisory board and a professor of arts education, this project draws on American Indian pedagogic and scientific ideas. It serves as a resource for students at all levels seeking to understand complex cycles of the moon as well as teachers who create units about ideas of time, land, ownership, and sovereignty. The chapter concludes by asking what can be learned from the earthworks and their builders that is helpful to our world today. In this chapter, we use many identity terms such as American Indian, Native American, Native, Indigenous, First Nations, and when appropriate, tribal names. Different geographic areas use different terms, different tribes or Nations use different terms, and we want to be as inclusive as possible. It is helpful to note that all of these terms are used by Native American people.

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Marking Time in Eighteen Year Increments: Earthworks as Ancient Lunar Observatories Two thousand years ago, large-scale earthen architecture was imagined, designed, and constructed by the Indigenous people who resided in the eastern woodlands, in the lands south of the Great Lakes. Archaeologists ascribe these earthworks to the work of the people of the Hopewell Culture. Architects constructed these enormous permanent earthen enclosures in precise geometric shapes and aligned them to the movements of the sun or the moon. Many of the earthworks mark the seasons with features aligned to the sun’s position on the summer or winter solstices at sunrise or sunset. There are also lunar observatories that predict the moon’s journey as it moves across the sky over a period of 18.6-years. These long moon cycles are known as “major lunar standstill cycles” and the positions of the moon can be accurately predicted as they repeat through peoples’ lifetimes. While sun solstices clearly indicate changes in seasons each year, the practical purpose of tracking long lunar cycles is not as easily discernable. Hundreds of earthworks were built in the region, but as far as the extant remains indicate, only two of them were designed to mark the 18.6-year lunar cycle: High Bank Earthworks at the Hopewell National Historical Park, and Octagon Earthworks at the Newark Earthworks (Ancient Ohio Trail 2018). Both of these earthworks were built to mark eight of the key moon rises and moon sets in the lunar standstill cycle (Hively and Horn 1982). These structures indicate that commemorating the major lunar standstill must have been very important to Hopewell society and they thus dedicated significant planning, coordination, and effort to building sacred places that measured time in eighteen year increments. Their function is often referred to as a mystery but it clearly was not a mystery to the people of Hopewell societies (Romain 2010). Major lunar standstill cycles have also been observed and documented in other ancient sites throughout the world, such as Stonehenge in England, Teotihuacan in Mexico, and Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. The major lunar standstill is a complex astronomical cycle involving the physics of the moon’s orbit around the earth and the earth’s orbit around the sun. However, from ground level, people watching the sky noticed the pattern and marked it first with wood poles placed in a circle, called woodhenges. They conveyed this knowledge to others, from generation to generation. This pattern is different from the monthly and annual moon cycle. Each day, the moon rises and sets along the horizon. Every 18.6 years, the moon rises at a point further north than at any other time during the 18.6 year cycle. This pattern takes more than eighteen years to complete, and then repeats.

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Figure 1: Time lapse photo of the Moonrise at the Octagon Earthworks, Newark, OH during the Lunar Standstill, 2007. Credit: Timothy E. Black.

Once people could reliably predict the lunar standstill – probably over many generations – the two Hopewell Earthworks were designed with features that marked the rising moon at the northern-most place on the eastern horizon. Because these two earthworks were built at different latitudes and in different settings, their lunar observatories were designed differently. At the Octagon Earthworks, the moonrise is spectacular, rising over the northern mound at the top of the octagon. At the far side of the circle, directly across from the place where the moon rises over the octagon, there is an “observation mound” where people can stand to watch the moonrise in a sight line that goes through the center of the octagon and circle. All over the Midwest in Hopewell societies, at the culmination of the lunar standstill, people would gather to watch the moonrises. What happened next is not known. In contemporary American Indian cultures, ceremony, celebration and commemoration take place. The earthworks represent a native way of describing the long lunar cycle within a cultural context rather than as an artifact from an extinct culture. The Octagon Mound is a lunar calendar and its cycle takes half a generation. While many people currently live in a minute-by-minute world, the earthworks builders thought about time in cycles of 18+ years.

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Figure 2: Graphic of the eight lunar alignments during the 18.6-year Lunar Standstill cycle, culminating in the Maximum Northern Moonrise. Credit: Ohio Historical Connection.

Earthworks Construction: American Indian Cultural Knowledge Memorialized on the Land There were at least six hundred places containing two or more large earthworks linked together by walkways and landscape features throughout the Ohio Valley (Squier and Davis 1848). Together, the earthworks of this era are called “The Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks” and are on the Tentative List for consideration as World Heritage sites (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Convention, 2018). During the era of their construction, which lasted approximately six hundred years, people created large geometric earthworks attuned to the cosmos. Traditional American Indian values are part of their design; natural geographical features are built into the designs, and their gigantic size reflects the scale of the land around them. The earthworks of the Hopewell culture are unique; their designs and functions represent outstanding human achievements, and they are especially notable for their immense dimensions. The scale of the earthworks suggests large social and ceremonial gatherings taking place within their spaces. The Octagon Earthworks has a combined area encompassing more than a hundred acres. To create these places, Indigenous builders

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Figure 3: The Octagon Earthworks, an open-cornered octagon connected by a walkway to an earthen circle are located in the top left corner of the map. Survey map of the Newark Earthworks. Reproduced from Charles Whittelsey, Ephraim George Squier and Edward Hamilton Davis, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1848).

used large river cane and bark baskets to gather earth and shape it into precise geometry by making uniform earthen embankments up to six feet high supported by twenty-foot wide foundations. The builders then made embankments, which were perfectly straight or beautifully curved for hundreds of yards. Social and ceremonial life occurred within huge earthen squares with rounded corners and crescent-shaped embankments. These embankments are located in and around two unique, open-cornered octagons and circles, and in polygons consisting of circles and squares pushed together, with others in the shape of the letter “D.” Circles were built in various sizes by using a standard unit of measure, some more than a thousand feet in diameter. All of the earthworks had entrances shaped as rounded breaks in the embankments, and many of them faced northeast. There are interesting mathematical regularities between structures within each earthwork, and possibly also between sites (Ancient Ohio Trail 2018). Geometry and geometric shapes were and are important to Earthwork builders because through geometry they were able to align the earth with the constellations,

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the moon, and sun. The circle provided enclosure and is believed to be ongoing, with no beginning and no end. Squares have 4 corners, which matched their need to connect to the cardinal directions, North, South, East, and West. There were no compasses at the time, so knowing cardinal directions was important for traveling.

Figure 4: Survey map of the Newark Earthworks in map “No. 4,” as well as surveys of three other earthworks in the area. E. H. Davis, and E. G Squier, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (New York: Bartlett & Welford, 1848). Retrieved from the Library of Congress.

The Indigenous architects carefully selected building sites near essential resources: fresh water springs, salt licks and good quality flint and stone deposits. Most earthworks were built along rivers or ponds, in places that were easily accessible for everyone to visit by canoe. The land in such areas is open, level and not prone to flooding. Builders also incorporated water features into many of the sites. Water holds special meanings across Indigenous cultures, and here, the water features reflect the earth and sky, perhaps a physical manifestation of spiritual or religious beliefs, world views that are yet to be deciphered. Other natural elements were incorporated as well. Flint and stone were used to make tools and jewelry. Food, herbs, and fibrous plants were planted in groupings around the earthworks; plants to eat, plants that could be used to cure illness and heal injury, and plants used to

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make housing, clothing, bedding and baskets, including cherry orchards, milkweed, goosefoot, squash, river cane, beans, sunflowers, black walnuts, raspberries, elderberry, and grapes (Brown 1989). These were permanent sacred places built to regularly accommodate large gatherings and to withstand the elements for generations. The large civilizations that built the earthworks developed complex travel and bartering systems. Many archaeological digs have shown that the earthwork builders created their magnificent works of art from materials gleaned from the ends of their world: copper from the upper Great Lakes, mica from the Carolinas, shells from the Gulf of Mexico, and obsidian, a black volcanic glass, from the Rocky Mountains. Three major sites in present-day Ohio, each consisting of many interrelated earthworks, are of particular interest because they have been preserved and their histories documented: Hopewell National Historical Park, the Newark Earthworks, and Fort Ancient Archaeological Park. Interconnectedness is emphasized between and within these sacred places. Hopewell Culture National Historical Park features giant circles and numerous conical and enormous rectangular burial mounds bordered by huge squares with rounded circles situated miles apart. The four earthworks at the Newark Earthworks are connected by wide walkways linking them together in particular ways, bordered by three-foot earthen walls, and a gigantic octagon connects to an enormous circle by a long embankment. At the hilltop enclosure called Fort Ancient, Indigenous architects built an unbroken earthen wall bordering an eighty-foot high ridge, small directional mounds that signaled entry into the site, and an overlook with a breathtaking view of a valley. Ancient Indigenous people observed the sky, developed ways to observe the astronomical cycles with a permanent structure on the ground, planned and built the earthworks, and then used them in specific ways. Most earthworks builders were scientists, mathematicians, and artists who observed their environment and collected the data for their use and communicated their findings orally and monumentally.

Earthworks as Transgenerational Monuments: Cosmic Permanence and the Hopewell Experience In North America before the arrival of Europeans in the fifteenth century, earthworks were ubiquitous in the eastern one-third of the continent: conical burial mounds, large rectangular burial mounds, effigy mounds in the shape of animals or humans, and geometric earthworks marked large swaths of the landscape. Many cultures, over many thousands of years, had been building some kind of earthen architecture in this region and everyone who came of age in the woodlands knew about them. Newer earthworks and grave (burial) mounds were not

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far from more ancient ones. Indigenous people understood that earthworks were made by humans, perhaps thought of the builders as their ancestors, and either built earthen architecture themselves or knew contemporaries who did. They also participated in the internment of their families, relatives, and neighbors in the burial mounds. Especially during the Hopewell era, people honored their relatives when they died, placing treasured items and gifts from the bereaved alongside them in their earthen graves. Relatives and honored leaders were buried with beautiful items from far locales in enormous quantities: freshwater pearls, sheets of mica from the Carolinas, obsidian spear points from the Rocky Mountains, copper and silver ornaments from the Upper Great Lakes, and large conch shells from the Gulf Coast (Penney 2004). The graves were expected to be undisturbed through eternity. They understood that ceremonial sites and grave mounds were to be protected. This knowledge was passed along from generation to generation, through time, across geographical areas and different cultures from the time after the glaciers retreated (Ohio History Central 2018) when people began living in Ohio, until the 1500s, when waves of European settlers moved into the lands and settlement disrupted and displaced Indigenous societies. The woodlands people believed that everything in their natural world contained sparks of life – water and air, the animals and plants, different kinds of dirt and rocks, the sky and stars. The Earth, the skies, and water were always changing, and by taking these living materials and forming them into precise, meaningful, enormous permanent structures aligned to the temporal cycles around them, communities gathered life forces. Building earthworks, effigy mounds, and grave mounds was an act of creating places of power (Brown 2001). Within Hopewell societies, celestial, environmental, natural, and human cycles, especially those that repeat over and over, were of great interest. Understanding and predicting the long arc of these cycles infused meaning into the collective human experience and their individual lives. The Octagon and High Bank earthworks represent permanence by tracking the long lunar cycle, a regularity that brought order to the uncertainty of individual daily lives. The reality of death and the concept of an afterlife was a primary belief. This was evidenced by the parting gifts people buried with their relatives and tribal members in their passing from life to death, and an essential part of the earthworks experience in the Ohio Valley. It may also have influenced the development of the geometry used in Hopewell era earthworks. While not all of the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks functioned solely as burial sites, clearly cemeteries and mortuary areas were part of the meaning in the designs. Far from being static monuments, fragments of extinct societies, or artifacts from lost cultures, the Hopewell lunar observatories and the places that mark the seasonal changes continue to be a part of the living world – dynamic and transformative. The earthworks are an expression of a worldview we do not fully understand today, but one the

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earthworks builders placed on the land to observe many future standstill cycles. This reliable repetition of lunar and solar transits intersecting with seasonal progressions and human life paths represented knowledge encoded and transmitted across time. Today, the earthen architecture that Hopewell societies built are considered to be sacred places that reveal the human experiences we all share as global citizens.

American Indian Tribes and the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks after European Settlement The earthworks had not been disturbed or destroyed by the people who lived among them for thousands of years. Burial mounds, effigy mounds, and the Hopewell geometric earthworks were still standing when settlers arrived to set up homesteads in the Midwest during the 1700s. Many earthworks remained intact even after all Indian tribes were forced to relocate during the Removal Era of the 1800s. We know this because most of the earthworks and mounds were surveyed, documented, and published in the Smithsonian Institution’s inaugural publication, in which hundreds of earthworks are drawn in detail (Squier and Davis 1848). Once American settlement, farming, and industrialization accelerated apace, however, most of the earthworks were plowed down or destroyed within a period of approximately fifty years (Chaatsmith 2016). There are contemporary tribes who embrace their mound building traditions and legacies. Perhaps they are descendants of the Midwest mound builders, including the Hopewell societies. After European contact, many tribal groups migrated into the Ohio Valley from other areas and stayed for significant amounts of time, up to several generations. Ultimately, these groups were forced to relocate further through the federal policy of Removal (Stockwell 2016). They were the last American Indian people to live among the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, and as such, served as stewards of these places.

eARThworks Rising: Teaching and Learning Indigenous Conceptions of Time Many American Indian tribes relate to time in ways that are different from contemporary Western conceptions of time. Capturing and teaching this alternative

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view of time poses pedagogical challenges. In many Indigenous cultures, the arts (a Western term) are viewed as existing in parallel time, in which the past and future exist in the present. In this conception of time, histories and traditions are simultaneously constant. This is different from traditional approaches that are commonly represented (and taken for granted) in museums and schools in the United States, where reference is made to the past existing only in the past and the future as a time yet to come. Moreover, native arts are created and presented from both a personal and collective identity, as well as in relation to colonial and (post)colonial historical complexities. Parallel time is thus able to bridge the living, the dead, and spiritual elements into a continuous flow that creates and maintains power. It is precisely this power derived from ancestors and ultimately from the gods that the viewer responds to emotionally, spiritually, and physically: Ancestors walk with us. All things that were, are. Everything that will happen is happening.

American Indian aesthetics includes the exploration of traditions, rituals, and transformation of these components as an individual relates to the group or clan (Taylor, Carpenter, Ballengee Morris & Sessions, 2006). Ballengee Morris remembers: I grew up to believe that earthworks connect the earth to the sky and that they are living monuments. My dad encouraged us children to lie near the earthworks and listen for ancestors to talk to us. It took me a long time to understand what he meant. These sites represent integrated ideologies and imagination. We may never know the extent of how these earthworks were built and utilized, but we can imagine. (Ballengee Morris and Staikidis 2017: 137)

Such Indigenous arts, practices, and places are best taught through Indigenous temporal perspectives and epistemologies (Pewewardy 2002). The essence of many Indigenous knowledge systems is a holistic model of education that includes a Native worldview, which perceives nature as in a continual state of flux and has a cyclical view of the natural world that incorporates balance, harmony, and beauty. Native pedagogy is a spiral journey. How we teach and learn are culturally connected. In a ground-breaking project, the interactive website “eARThworks Rising” was created to teach school children from kindergarten through high school about Indigenous astronomical knowledge, the lunar cycle, and the earthworks from an Indigenous perspective. The interactive curriculum, designed by Christine Ballengee Morris and her colleagues, is based on a Native pedagogical format that provides virtual experiences that include the arts, science(s) (both Native and Western), and cultural components through video games and an interactive website (Ballengee

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Figure 5: Procession into the Octagon Earthworks during a public commemoration of the Lunar Standstill in 2005. Photograph by Timothy E. Black, 2005.

Morris and Staikidis 2017: 130–137). Native science and pedagogy are embedded within the site’s games and design and cultivate both formal and informal learning experiences. The website provides a digital version of the earthworks to allow the players to experience them within a video game format. The curriculum, moreover, was designed through a Native-driven collaborative consulting process. An American Indian advisory committee, which drove the content and approach of the project, had a clear educational goal: to teach that for contemporary American Indians, mounds are sacred spaces that relate to their lives today. The advisory committee’s vision was a key to the website’s success as an educational platform. The website uses four big ideas – Earth, Sovereignty, Connections, and Awe – to explore the earthworks as large structures that connect people to the sky. Standing inside the earthworks is awe inspiring. Many such complexes (including, for example, the pyramids in Egypt as well as the Hopewell earthworks), were aligned with the solar and lunar systems to map and measure time, the seasons, and the right time for planting. Therefore, topics in the video game include naming, stories and lore, the process of storytelling, night mapping, constellations, and appreciating the magnitude of the sky and its relationship to the earthworks. Moreover, the earthworks encompass a wide variety of concepts, topics, and disciplines (archaeology, anthropology, cartography, geophysics, astronomy, art history, art education,

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history, geography, geology, etc.) and thus the website uses the earthworks to teach more about them. In the first stage of this project we created a video game prototype named Catch the Moon, specifically about the Octagon Earthworks in Newark, Ohio.1 This video game was designed to help students grasp the concept that the moon has a variable pattern and an observable cycle, and that the Newark Earthworks were built to focus on a particular moment in that cycle. Several physics educators are now using the game because it teaches about the moon’s daily and monthly cycle, demonstrating its northernmost position. In addition to explorations of time through the lunar cycle, another section of the website teaches students space, maps, and the concept of ownership. Sovereignty is the right for each tribe to govern itself. This theme covers traditions, origin stories, languages, and histories (pre- and post-contact) that provide tribal identity and a multilevel sense of sovereignty. The survival of American Indian societies depends upon understanding their connections to their homelands. Sovereignty is related to land. At one time, the earthwork builders had the land. Today, sovereignty is about authority, law, ownership, and interpretation: Who has the right to make the rules and to enforce the rules and cultural protocols, both intellectual and spiritual? The non-Indian ideas of ownership are contrasted to Indigenous ideas of community and use of resources. Students explore how ownership changes the decision-making process. What is ownership? What is law? What is nationhood? What is authority? Conceptions of time, too, are connected to ideas of authority and sovereignty.

Closing Thoughts We would like to end this chapter by acknowledging that if you are reading this book somewhere in the Americas, the land under your feet was the traditional land of capable, intelligent Indigenous people who lived their lives on this land and who built earthworks and other architecture that was so well designed that they stood for thousands of years before farms, cities, and roads were built on top of them. We do not know the names they called themselves, so we use the names of the cultural eras ascribed to their architecture and technology by archaeologists: Fort Ancient, Hopewell, and Adena cultures. The Indigenous people who lived in present-day Ohio before 1840 were the last American Indian stewards of the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks. In 1840, the Indian Removal Act was enforced and all American Indians were forced to leave their homes and land, where many had been living for generations. They traveled to assigned lands in Oklahoma, Michigan, and Kansas.

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These people are known now as the Shawnee, Delaware, Wyandotte, Miami, Ottawa, Kickapoo, and Seneca-Cayuga among many, many others. Today, citizens of these resilient tribes are returning to the Ohio Valley lands, villages, cities, and sacred sites to honor their ancestors, understand who they were, and to share their traditional knowledge of living in the Woodlands. The next moonrise – so important to the Indians of the Hopewell culture – will begin in 2024 and end in 2026, and we can all be there to watch the moon lift into the sky over the northernmost mound at the Octagon Earthworks as we honor the past, the present, and future, represented in permanent geometric earthen monuments.

Bibliography Ballengee Morris, Christine, and Kryssi Staikidis, eds. Transforming Our Practices: Indigenous Arts, Pedagogies, and Philosophies. Reston: National Art Education Association, 2017. Ballengee Morris, Christine. “eARThworks: Native Ways of Knowing in the Digital Age.” In Transforming Our Practices: Indigenous Arts, Pedagogies, and Philosophies, edited by Christine Ballengee Morris and Kryssi Staikidis, 132–137. Reston: National Art Education Association, 2017. Brown, Joseph Epes. Teaching Spirits: Understanding Native American Religious Traditions. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Erichsen-Brown, Charlotte. Medicinal and Other Uses of North American Plants: A Historical Survey with Special Reference to the Eastern Indian Tribes. Mineola: Dover Press, 1989. Chaatsmith, Marti L. “Singing at the Center of the World: The SAI and Ohio Earthworks.” Studies in American Indian Quarterly 37.3 (2013): 181–198. Chaatsmith, Marti L. “Native (Re)Investments in Ohio: Evictions, Earthworks Preservation, and Tribal Stewardship.” In The Newark Earthworks: Enduring Monuments, Contested Meanings, edited by Lindsay Jones and Richard D. Shiels, 215–229. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016. Hively, Ray and Robert Horn. “Geometry and Astronomy in Prehistoric Ohio.” Archaeoastronomy 4 (1982): S1–20. Jones, Lindsay and Richard D. Shiels, eds. The Newark Earthworks: Enduring Monuments, Contested Meanings. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Mankiller, Wilma. Every Day Is a Good Day: Reflections by Contemporary Indigenous Women. Golden: Fulcrum Publishing, 2011. Penney, David W. “The Archaeology of Aesthetics.” In Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South, edited by Richard F. Townsend, 42–55. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Peweardy, Cornel. “Learning Styles of American Indian/Alaska Native Students: A Review of the Literature and Implications for Practice.” Journal of American Indian Education 41.3 (2002): 22–56. Romain, William F. Mysteries of the Hopewell: Astronomers, Geometers, and Magicians of the Eastern Woodlands. Akron: University of Akron Press, 2010. Squier, Ephraim G. and Edwin H. Davis. Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley: Comprising the Results of Extensive Original Surveys and Explorations. Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge vol. 1. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1848.

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Stockwell, Mary. The Other Trail of Tears: The Removal of the Ohio Indians. Yardley: Westholme Publishing, 2016. Sofaer, Anna, R. Weiner, and W. Stone. “Inter-Site Alignments of Prehistoric Shrines in Chaco Canyon to the Major Lunar Standstill.” In The Science of Time 2016: Time in Astronomy & Society, Past, Present and Future, Astrophysics and Space Science Proceedings, edited by E. Arias and L. Combrinck, et al, 79–102. New York: Springer Publishing, 2017. Taylor, Pamela G., B. Stephen Carpenter, Christine Ballengee Morris, and Billie Sessions. Interdisciplinary Approaches to Teaching Art in High School. Reston, VA: NAEA, 2006. Wallace, Glenna J. “Foreword.” In The Newark Earthworks: Enduring Monuments, Contested Meanings, edited by Lindsay Jones and Richard D. Shiels, ix–xi. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016.

Websites “Ancient Ohio Trail.” Accessed December 3, 2018. http://ancientohiotrail.org/ “Archaeology: A Publication of the Archaeological Institute of America.” Accessed December 3, 2018. https://archive.archaeology.org/online/features/hopewell/who_were_hopewell.html “Fort Ancient Archaeological Park.” Accessed December 3, 2018. https://fortancient.org/ Heartland Earthworks Conservancy website. http://www.earthworksconservancy.org/ “Hopewell Culture National Historical Park.” Accessed December 3, 2018. https://www.nps.gov/hocu/ index.htm “Moon Teachings for the Masses at the UMASS Sunwheel and Around the World: The Major Lunar Standstills of 2006 and 2024–25.” University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Accessed December 3, 2018. http://www.umass.edu/sunwheel/pages/moonteaching.html “Newark Earthworks Center Blog.” Accessed December 3, 2018. https://newarkearthworkscenter.blog spot.com/ “Ohio History Central, Ohio History Connection, ‘Ice Age.’” Accessed December 3, 2018. http://ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Ice_Age_Ohio “Ohio History Connection, ‘Newark Earthworks.’” Accessed December 3, 2018. https://www.ohiohis tory.org/visit/museum-and-site-locator/newark-earthworks “United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Convention, ‘Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks.’” Accessed December 3, 2018. http://whc. unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5243/

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9 All the Time There Is: Cloth Sack as a Buddhist Metaphor for Time In an essay titled “Don’t Let Anyone Tell You It Doesn’t Matter!” American Zen teacher Eve Marko discusses three rituals: a Bearing Witness retreat, which brings people to Auschwitz-Birkenau to chant the names of the dead; a ceremony conducted at Standing Rock by Lakota Chief Leonard Crow Dog, where General Wesley Clark led a group of veterans in begging forgiveness for crimes committed against native peoples by the United States military; and a weekly ritual that takes place in a Romanian synagogue abandoned since the Holocaust, conducted for no apparent audience by someone who himself is not Jewish: [he] enters the abandoned synagogue every Friday evening and puts the Sabbath prayer books by every single empty seat. On the Sabbath morning he comes in again and puts prayer shawls by each seat. He comes back on Saturday night, returns the prayer shawls and prayer books, and turns off the lights. He has done that for many years. (Marko 2016)

Each of these rituals attempts to address the past. As a Buddhist, Marko notes, she doesn’t believe in a soul—the dead are dead. And it is logical too, she suggests, to say that the past is past. But, Marko says, rituals like these don’t rely on logic: they “come from somewhere else.” This “somewhere else” is, I want to suggest, not another place but another temporal regime, in which past, present, and future cohere in a single moment. This chapter explores Buddhist understandings of time, focusing especially on Zen Buddhist efforts to imagine this alternate temporal regime, where the past and the future happen in the present. The chapter centers around the image of a monk called “Cloth Sack” who carries all his worldly belongings in a bottomless sack, reading the sack as a figure for the way the present moment serves as a container for the past and future. It closes by circling back to the rituals Marko describes—in a non-linear temporal regime in which past, present, and future happen at the same time, what might such rituals be able to accomplish?

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Buddhist Metaphors of Time as Forward Motion: The River and the Wheel In Buddhism, the problem of time is fundamental. Śākyamuni Buddha, the founder of the tradition, identified impermanence as a basic fact of life: everything that is will, in time, cease to be. Whether you’re a mayfly or a mountain, your days are numbered. And yet, each one of us hopes that we might somehow be an exception to this rule—not the product of an ongoing, ever-changing set of relationships with the beings who surround us, but independent and permanent. Change thus becomes for us a source of suffering, permeating our existence. Liberation from suffering comes when we realize the self’s impermanence: one who can look at the self’s “change-ability, its waning, and ceasing” and see it “as it really is, with perfect insight . . . abandons all sorrow” (Walshe 2013). Given that liberation requires understanding time correctly, it comes as no surprise that Buddhists have cultivated an abundant set of metaphors to help them in this endeavor. The tradition’s two key temporal metaphors conceptualize time in terms of forward motion: the motion of a river and the motion of a wheel. The metaphor of the river is designed to draw our attention to the ephemerality of our own being. Medieval Japanese writer Kamo no Chōmei opens his famous letter on life in reclusion, the Hōjōki, with just this metaphor: On flows the river ceaselessly, nor does its water ever stay the same. The bubbles that float upon its pools now disappear, now form anew, but never endure long. And so it is with people in this world, and with their dwellings (McKinney 2013: 5).

Chōmei is suggesting that from his vantage point as a hermit, worldly people who throw themselves into amassing wealth or fame or power, building great houses and great reputations, look like fools. We act as though we can stand on the shore and watch time go by, untouched. We can’t. As impermanent beings, we are produced by the movement of time. Our lives are like bubbles arising and dispersing as a result of that movement. Time isn’t something we watch pass by: our lives are fleeting moments within the long flow of time. The metaphor of the wheel is designed to make us grapple with the suffering that comes out of clinging to an ephemeral self. This is the metaphor at the heart of the Buddhist understanding of this world as saṃsāra: an aimless cycling from one life to the next. Driven by the craving for permanent existence, when this body dies, the habitual patterns that I refer to as my mind persist, finding another body in which to be reborn; wandering from life to life in this way, I lose what I love again and again as my habitual patterns become more and more entrenched. This world is a prison in which I am trapped precisely because I cling to it, like an

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octopus making its home in the jar used to catch it.1 To become liberated from the prison of saṃsāra—to become a buddha—all I need to do is wake up to my own impermanence and let go.

Waiting for The Future Buddha Waking up turns out to be more easily said than done, however, and particularly so when Śākyamuni Buddha, the ideal teacher, has long since departed this world. In his absence, some Buddhists turn their eyes toward another Buddha, called Maitreya. Every age, it is said, gets one perfect Buddha—a teacher who sees the truth of impermanence, discovers the path out of suffering, and commits to remaining in the world long enough to transmit his wisdom to others. Śākyamuni was the perfect Buddha of the age we are in now. Maitreya is the perfect Buddha of the next age: he will appear in the world at the moment when Śākyamuni’s teaching has been totally abandoned, rediscovering it and ushering in a fresh new world. Maitreya thus symbolizes both a return to the golden age of Śākyamuni and the brightness of the future. East Asian calculations typically put the date of his arrival at approximately 5.6 billion years from now. In the meantime, he bides his time in a kind of heavenly pocket universe called Tuṣita. In this patient waiting, Maitreya is removed from the ordinary operation of time. Time is said to pass differently in Tuṣita, with a day lasting four hundred years and a lifetime four thousand years. Devotion to Maitreya is understood as potentially releasing devotees from the ordinary operation of time as well: visiting Tuṣita in this lifetime (through advanced meditation practice) or being reborn there in the next lifetime (by doing exceptionally virtuous deeds in this life) guarantees liberation from the cycle of rebirth (Sponberg 1988: 102; Miyata 1988: 176). And in some parts of Asia, Buddhist alchemists attempt to extend their own lifespans indefinitely so that they can be ready to meet Maitreya when he arrives in this world (Pranke 2010: 13). We might sense time’s regulated movement becoming complicated here. The river and wheel metaphors both suggest that time moves steadily forward. Just so, the idea of Maitreya as the future Buddha suggests a temporal regime in

 The traditional Japanese method for catching octopus was to lower a pot to the sea floor and leave it there overnight; the octopus would mistake the pot for a safe shelter and crawl inside to sleep, only to be lifted up in the morning and made into a meal. The poet Bashō uses the octopus trap as a metaphor for saṃsāra: Octopus traps—/fleeting dreams/under the summer moon. See Shirane 2002: 184.

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which past, present, and future exist as fixed points on a line—the moment of Maitreya’s arrival can be known in advance but not negotiated. Indeed, even Maitreya is subject to time, with no choice but to wait for his moment to arrive. On the other hand, we are also being told that there are places where a day lasts four hundred years, and people who can live for five billion years. This points to the possibility that the ordinary progress of time might become compressed or elongated around Maitreya. In Zen, the future Buddha causes even more temporal trouble, bending the line of time by showing up in the present.

Hotei: The Future Buddha in the Present In Zen stories, Maitreya manifests as a real person: a tenth-century Chinese Zen monk called Hotei (Ch. Budai). In The Transmission of the Lamp, an eleventhcentury Chinese collection of biographies of eminent monks, Hotei is remembered as a talented fortune-teller, famous for his ability to predict the weather; he did not live in a monastery, choosing instead to live as a full-time mendicant, wandering from place to place. Hotei literally means “Cloth Sack,” a reference both to his belly—he was, the biography says, “so fat that he looked like a bag”— and to the sack he carried with all his belongings inside (Chapin 1933: 49). Popular Zen stories suggest that when serious Buddhists requested that he give them a sermon, he would demand cash payment, but when children asked for toys or candy, he would reach into his bag and give them gifts for free. With his round belly and full bag, Hotei comes to be identified as a fertility god and protector of children in China and Korea; in Japan, he is transformed into one of the seven lucky gods—powers who descend from the heavens at new year to renew or “correct” the world. In this context, Hotei’s cloth sack is imagined as a bottomless cornucopia out of which he draws gifts of food and drink. The identification of Hotei with the task of world-renewal reflects his association with Maitreya, which grows out of a detail found in his biography. According to The Transmission of the Lamp, just before his death, Hotei delivered a spontaneous verse— Maitreya, the true Maitreya, Delivers himself (bunshin) in billions upon billions of forms. From time to time (jiji), he shows himself To the people of the time (jijin), But they don’t notice him at all.

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After Hotei died, people reported seeing him walking about just as he had before. For Buddhist readers, these miraculous visions serve as evidence that his poem was a confession of his own identity: no ordinary recluse, he was an incarnation or “temporal body” of an eternal Maitreya. The poem presents two conflicting temporal regimes. In one—the regime of ordinary people or “people of the time”—any given past or future moment exists at a fixed distance from the present. In the other—the regime of awakened buddhas—the future breaks into the present: Maitreya stops waiting in Tuṣita and shows up here and now. These two regimes, it seems, exist simultaneously. Ordinary people imagine the future as a time that has not happened yet; buddhas understand the future as happening in the present, even if ordinary people don’t— or can’t—recognize it. The poem further suggests that this miraculous event of world-renewal is happening all the time. In the Buddhist context, the expression I have translated above as “from time to time” can mean only once in a very rare while—this is the kind of expression one might use, for example, to describe how often a perfect Buddha comes into the world. An ordinary person might imagine, then, that just as the birth of Śākyamuni was a singular event, the birth of Maitreya too will be a singular event. But the suggestion that Maitreya delivers himself in billions and billions of forms, or divides himself into billions and billions of pieces, does not imply a singular event. On the contrary, it suggests that Maitreya is making himself present in every moment, as Hotei’s own persistent presence beyond the moment of his death seems to confirm. Against an ordinary person’s understanding of the present time as a time without a Buddha then—with Śākyamuni belonging to an irretrievable past and Maitreya to an inaccessible future—Hotei seems to be telling us that the future we are waiting for perpetually renews itself in the present. There are lots of Buddhist stories about holy beings who come to our doors in disguise, to test our understanding of the teachings and perhaps reward us for treating them kindly. Like the narratives we find in other religious traditions of saints and gods appearing in disguise, these Buddhist stories both conjure the feeling of an enchanted world and deliver a moral message about the importance of hospitality. But as a story about the future manifesting in the present, the story of Hotei also resonates with a specific kind of Buddhist philosophical engagement with the notion of time. Some Buddhist thinkers argue that understanding time as a line, moving from the past through the present into the future, is useful in terms of grappling with impermanence, but ultimately incorrect. Instead, they say, we should try to understand past, present, and future as coextensive, meaning that they all happen at once. Where the metaphors of the river and the wheel prompt us to think of the present moment as a single instance contained within

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the broad sweep of time, these thinkers want us to imagine the broad sweep of time as encompassed by the present moment (Raud 2012: 158–159). The present is like a reservoir, or a storehouse, or Hotei’s sack: it holds the past and the future inside itself. The Japanese Zen philosopher Dōgen suggests that we can begin to see time this way by cultivating the eyes of a mountain climber. From the ground, looking up, we can only see one peak at a time. But when we climb a mountain and look out, we see the whole mountain range arrayed before us in a single glance: the principle of distinguishing between yesterday and today is the same thing one realizes at the time when, having gone directly to the mountains, one gazes at the thousands, the myriad of peaks in a range—nothing has gone by. (Cited in Raud 2012: 163)

Through these eyes, we see the present moment as a location in which past and future are gathered together, so that from my standpoint in the present moment, the past and future are always available. This change in metaphor allows me to cultivate a different kind of relationship to time. The metaphors of the river and the wheel encourage an understanding of time as something that happens to me; liberation is stepping outside of time into timelessness. Critics of Buddhism and Buddhist thinkers too have sometimes suggested that this might encourage a kind of passivity with respect to the unfolding of historical time, as though the correct attitude is simply to accept whatever happens. A metaphor like Hotei’s sack, on the other hand, opens the possibility that I have access to the past and future and can act to transform them for the better; liberation here might be understood as pursuing that kind of transformative activity.

Hotei’s Cloth Sack as a Container for Time Hotei’s association with Maitreya and his position as one of Japan’s world-renewing lucky gods invite an understanding of his bottomless sack as containing a complete world or, in temporal terms, a complete cosmic cycle. This image of the sack as a container for time shapes my reading of a modern Japanese Zen story in which Hotei is challenged to explain the “significance” and “actualization” of Zen. To explain Zen’s significance, the story goes, Hotei “plopped his sack down on the ground in silent answer”; to explain its actualization, he “swung the sack over his shoulder and continued on his way” (Senzaki 1940: 30–31).2

 This story is one of a number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Zen stories compiled and transcribed by Nyogen Senzaki and Paul Reps.

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There are two ways we might interpret Hotei’s explanation of the significance of Zen. If you happen to be called “Cloth Sack,” then dropping a cloth sack signals letting go of the self. If the cloth sack contains a cosmic cycle, then dropping it signals letting go of saṃsāra, or the cycle of birth and death. Dropping the sack thus enacts Hotei’s liberation from self and world: he has let go of everything. The “significance” of Zen—the principle at its core—is precisely this kind of liberation from suffering. This is what it is to be a buddha. Here there is no time and nothing ever happens. But Zen Buddhists also assert that Buddhahood itself becomes a trap when we reify it, fancying it as a permanent state that the self can somehow achieve and hold onto. Dōgen tells his disciples that true Buddhahood has to be realized or actualized—genjō, literally “become present”—in the activity of saṃsāra. This means there is no actualization of Zen outside of the ordinary lives of ordinary temporal beings: “When buddhas are truly buddhas they do not necessarily notice that they are buddhas. However, they are actualized buddhas, who go on actualizing Buddha” (Dōgen 2011: 23). When Hotei picks up his sack, he signals his embrace of this world. If the significance of Zen is the liberation of becoming a buddha, then the actualization of Zen is undertaking liberating activity in this world. The sack contains all of saṃsāra and its suffering; shouldering this weight, Hotei takes responsibility for all of it—all of time—as though it belongs to him. He realizes his Buddhahood not in silent retreat from the world but as an ordinary temporal being, “continuing on his way.” Another Zen source gives us a clue about where Hotei is going. In explaining the path to liberation, Zen schools across East Asia make use of a series of illustrations that depict a little ox-herder searching for his lost ox. The ox-herder is the practitioner; the lost ox is his Buddha-nature or awakening. The tenth and final picture depicts the little ox-herder returning to the marketplace in the company of— or sometimes in the form of—Hotei, with “hands extended” or “gift-bestowing hands.” An accompanying verse by the eleventh-century Zen teacher Kakuan reads as follows: With bare chest and feet, you come to the market. Under dirt and ash, your face breaks into a laugh. With no display of magic powers, You make withered trees burst into flower. (Cited in Yamada 2004: 95)

The culmination of Zen practice then is, as the story of Hotei picking up his sack suggests, returning to the world to transmit the gift of liberation to others. Even as he lives with me in this world of suffering, however, Hotei’s laughing face and his ability to make withered trees burst into flower suggest the different temporal regimes in which we operate. For me, time is a weight under which I labor. There

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is always too much or not enough; the past escapes me, the future comes too slowly, and the end comes too quickly. Hotei, by contrast, carries the burden of time lightly. Given access to the broad sweep of time within each present moment, he can turn winter to spring and bring the dead back to life. He is free to reach into his sack and renew the world as he likes. At the same time, the implication of the Ox-Herding Pictures is that given enough time, the little ox-herd—that is, the totally ordinary novice looking at these pictures—joins with Hotei. Maitreya is here not just a future, but my future. From my point of view, an impossibly vast distance on the timeline separates me from Maitreya. But within Hotei’s temporal regime, there is not a hair’s breadth between us. With my first step on the path of practice, I reach into the future and seize upon the promise of becoming awakened; acting toward that promise, the future manifests in my present as each moment of my daily life becomes identical to the world-renewing activity of Maitreya Buddha. No longer passive with respect to history, I make a future for myself, even though—as an ordinary person, operating within linear time—I am not able to see that future with my own eyes. I realize Maitreya Buddha without noticing him at all.

Acting as Though Past, Present, and Future Are Coextensive If I really thought the past and future were contained within the present, then in any given moment, it would be possible for me to change them both: not only could I work to bring about a better future, I could somehow also bring about a better past. One need not deny the reality of the past in order to think about time this way. Philosopher Max Scheler suggests that in the act of repentance, for example, all of us experience the past as changeable. Repenting means that I take a hard look at my own past action—an action that I cannot change—and repudiate it from the bottom of my heart. By repenting, I transform my future: instead of thoughtlessly continuing along the trajectory created by my past action, I turn toward something new. But Scheler argues that I also transform what he calls the meaning and worth of my past—that past action becomes, for me, a turning point toward the good even as in repenting it I recognize the action itself as inalterably, irredeemably bad. Just as my future is not settled until my life is totally over, so too, Scheler says, the meaning and worth of my past is not settled until my life is totally over. Until then, because of the “wonderful fact” that every moment of my life contains the traces of my past and the seeds of my future, “the sense and

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worth of the whole of our life still come, at every moment of our life, within the scope of our freedom of action” (Scheler 1987: 94). I think the rituals Marko describes are recognizable as rituals of repentance. They require the living to look deeply into the past, at a bad action—an act of displacement or violence or murder—and repudiate it, intending that it not happen again. The difference is one of scale: beyond the individual life Scheler has in mind, these rituals ask us to imagine a collective life. Philosopher Alexis Shotwell notes that we intuitively grasp how the past acts of others make themselves present in our lives when we think about things like radiation and environmental toxicity; the same kind of felt commitment to generations yet to be born animates our care for environmental futures (Shotwell 2016; Steineck 2007). The rituals that Marko talks about ask us to take the attitude that just as we understand the environment in terms of shared life, we should understand history in terms of shared time, in which past and future extend farther and wider than I can see, and in which I am called to remember and take responsibility for that past and future as though they were my own. From the Zen point of view, this is what Hotei is doing when he picks up the sack: not resting in the silence of his own private liberation but returning to the world to transform it for the sake of all living beings. I can get this far with intellect, without actually having the eyes of Dōgen’s mountain climber. Marko asks us to go further. Taking the attitude that nothing goes by, she asks us to see that the place where we go to remember an event that happened is also the place in which that event is happening: just as we are alive in this moment, those people we call the dead are alive in this moment. Within a temporal regime in which past, present, and future are coextensive, these little rituals can reach back into the past and transform what is happening. As ordinary human beings, we have to operate within an ordinary temporal regime, which means, I take it, that we can’t witness the working of the rituals—these are acts that have, as Marko puts it, “little visible impact.” But this is an effect, she suggests, of the fact that without the eyes of the mountain climber, “we can’t know the significance of even the smallest action”; still, Marko writes, “I am quite certain now that the small is never small, the past is never past. Each of us can do something.” If each moment gives us access to the broad sweep of time, then each of us can act in the moment as though we have the freedom and responsibility to make a new world.

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Bibliography Chapin, Helen B. “The Ch’an Master Pu-Tai.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 53.1 (1933): 47–52. Dōgen. “Actualizing the Fundamental Point: Genjō Kōan.” In Dōgen’s Genjō Kōan: Three Commentaries, trans. Robert Aitken and Kazuaki Tanahashi, 23–27. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2011. Marko, Eve. “Don’t Let Anyone Tell You It Doesn’t Matter!” December 9, 2016. http://www.evemarko. com/2016/12/09/dont-let-anyone-tell-doesnt-matter/ McKinney, Meredith, trans. Kenkō and Chōmei: Essays in Idleness and Hōjōki. London: Penguin Classics, 2013. Miyata, Noboru. “Types of Maitreya Belief in Japan.” In Maitreya, the Future Buddha, edited by Alan Sponberg and Helen Hardacre, 175–190. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Pranke, Patrick. “On Saints and Wizards: Ideals of Human Perfection and Power in Contemporary Burmese Buddhism.” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 33.1–2 (2010): 453–488. Raud, Rein. “The Existential Moment: Rereading Dōgen’s Theory of Time.” Philosophy East & West 62.2 (2012): 153–173. Scheler, Max. Person and Self-Value: Three Essays. Trans. Manfred S. Frings. Dordrecht: M. Nijhoff, 1987. Senzaki, Nyogen, and Paul Reps. 101 Zen Stories. Philadelphia: David McKay Company, 1940. Shirane, Haruo, ed. Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Shotwell, Alexis. Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Sponberg, Alan. “Wǒnhyo on Maitreya Visualization.” In Maitreya, the Future Buddha, edited by Alan Sponberg and Helen Hardacre, 94–109. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Steineck, Christian. “Time Is Not Fleeting: Thoughts of a Medieval Zen Buddhist.” KronoScope 7.1 (2007): 33–47. Walshe, Maurice O’Connell, trans. “Attadiipaa Sutta: An Island to Oneself” (SN 22.43). Access to Insight (BCBS Edition), November 30, 2013. http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn22/sn22.043. wlsh.html. Yamada, Mumon. Lectures on the Ten Oxherding Pictures. Trans. Victor Sōgen Hori. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004.

Michal Raizen

10 The Temporalities of Sound in Elia Suleiman’s The Time That Remains How do we hear the passage of time? How does sound serve as a marker for both collective histories and individual life cycles? What leads us to perceive certain sounds as nostalgic, and when does sound gesture toward the future? How might we take time out to listen in ways that complicate ideas about belonging to a particular ethnic, religious, or national community? My essay explores these questions in relation to the 2009 film The Time That Remains: Chronicle of a Present Absentee by the Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman. I focus on the medium of film and its use of sound, especially music, to convey particular ideas about time, history, aging, and identity. The Time That Remains is a sweeping cinematic piece that doubles as an homage to the filmmaker’s parents. The film covers a timespan of nearly eighty years and takes as its point of departure the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.1 Suleiman’s artistic signature is the character of E.S., a silent observer played by the filmmaker in his Palestine Trilogy.2 Like his onscreen persona, Suleiman was born in Nazareth, a city that fell within the armistice lines of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. As a result, after the war, Nazareth’s residents were classified as “present absentees” and granted a legal provision for eventual Israeli citizenship.3 In Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel, David Grossman reflects on the “presence of absence,” a phrase commonly used to describe the fraught position of the present absentee from the origin of the designation to the present day: “If in 1948 the Palestinians in Israel were ‘those that are not but actually are,’ they have turned over the years into ‘those who are but actually are not’” (295). Suleiman  Depending on one’s perspective, the 1948 War is known alternately as the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the Israeli War of Independence or al-nakba (the catastrophe) and the beginning of the Palestinian refugee crisis. For the territory itself, we see names ranging from Israel, Palestine, the hyphenated Israel-Palestine, the occupied territories, Judea and Samaria. In other words, there are multiple perspectives on the events that came to pass, and the naming of space and territory is highly contested.  The Palestine Trilogy includes Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996), Divine Intervention (2002), and The Time That Remains (2009). E.S. also appears in Suleiman’s most recent film, It Must Be Heaven (2019).  The category of present absentee was established in 1948 as a means of managing the Palestinian population that remained within the 1948 borders. In terms of demographics, present absentees (internally displaced persons) and their descendants make up about a fifth of the Israeli population. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110690774-012

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maps both an autobiographical and a historical coming of age narrative onto this shift, and in doing so, he links the experience of the present absentees and their descendants to the passage of time. The Time That Remains opens with a scene of E.S., hair streaked grey, returning home after a long exile. Though his figure is blurry and spectral, we can make out his deadpan expression in the rearview mirror as an Israeli driver navigates through a violent storm and loses all sense of direction. Unable to see the road through the deluge, the driver pulls over, looks back at E.S. and asks in a forlorn tone, “What is this place? Where do I go now? How do I get home?”4 The scene fades to black, and we suddenly find ourselves transported to 1948 and the surrender of Nazareth to Israeli forces. Suleiman frames this historical moment as a period piece with vibrant colors and precise attention to the aesthetic of the day. E.S.’s father, Fuad, is portrayed as steadfast in his political resistance, even as the woman he loves departs for Jordan and his friends relinquish their weapons. After being interrogated by Israeli forces, Fuad is beaten unconscious, thrown over a stone embankment, and seemingly left to die. The next scene transports the viewer to the 1960s. A precocious E.S. is being scolded by the school headmaster for calling Americans imperialists. We watch him coming home from school, propping open the front door, depositing a dish of his Aunt Olga’s lentils in the garbage, and giving a complicit nod to his mother, who stands in a perfectly stylized 1960s kitchen. Suleiman’s fastidious attention to historical context and consistent use of repetition continues for the rest of the film as we follow the family through the decades. E.S.’s parents age and slowly decline. E.S. grows into a lanky teenager and is ultimately forced into exile for his political activities.5 When E.S. returns some years later, Fuad is no longer alive and E.S.’s mother lives with her Filipina caretaker who lovingly administers insulin shots and commandeers an off-duty security officer to clean the apartment. E.S. travels to the West Bank city of Ramallah where he observes both the pain and extreme absurdity of life under occupation. In a fantastical scene toward the end of the film, E.S. pole vaults over the West Bank Barrier and finds himself in the back seat of the taxi that had pulled over during the storm of the opening sequence. The driver is slumped over the steering wheel, perhaps overcome by despair or perhaps asleep, and E.S., now in focus, is smoking a cigarette.

 All transcriptions are my own unless otherwise noted.  Suleiman was apprehended by Israeli security forces for his involvement in the 1976 Land-Day protests, a series of strikes and demonstrations in response to the Israeli government’s announcement of a plan to confiscate land for security and settlement purposes. When Suleiman refused to sign a statement acknowledging his affiliation with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, he was given a short window of time to leave the country or face imprisonment.

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The return of the taxi closes a loop and suggests that the events depicted in the film, even those that came to pass before his time, are a function of E.S.’s memory or imagination. The Time That Remains closes with E.S. visiting his dying mother in an Israeli hospital. He sits on a bench in the hospital corridor and observes people coming and going. The scene fades to black against a remix of “Stayin’ Alive,” and we are left with the inscription, “To the memory of my mother and father.”6 In the context of Israel-Palestine, sound is just as contested as any other symbolic realm. My essay draws an explicit link between sound and narrative. Those who wield control over their acoustic environment tend to dictate which stories get privileged over others. In some instances, this dynamic yields to subversive practices and deliberate attempts to disrupt dominant soundscapes.7 Film is a distinct medium that lends itself to a simultaneity of sonic cues, visual imagery, and intertextual references. Owing to this simultaneity, the cinematic form offers a unique treatment of a concept that I term “temporalities of sound.” Suleiman chronicles the passage of time by cataloging technologies of sound through the different eras represented in the film: the 1940s and the gramophone, the 1950s and the radio, the 1960s and the television, the 1970s and the cassette, the 1980s and the stereo. He does all this diagetically, meaning that the music and its accompanying technologies have an acoustic source and visual presence within the film. As such, the sounds that Suleiman chooses to foreground do not emanate from outside the frame but rather from the characters’ environment, from within the very texture of the film. The Palestine Trilogy as a whole takes up a difficult question: how do “those who are but actually are not” make their stories heard? Suleiman’s creative answer to this dilemma involves an allegory. My reading of The Time That Remains builds on Hamid Naficy’s discussion of accented cinema, which he describes in the following terms: “Stressing musical and oral accents redirects our attention from the hegemony of the visual and of modernity to the acousticity of exile and the commingling of premodernity and postmodernity in the films” (2001: 25). Though accented films vary widely from one local context to the next, they share a distinctive allegorical function because each

 This remix of “Stayin’ Alive” is by the electronic music duo Y.A.S.  The term soundscape was coined by R. Murray Schafer (1977) as an overarching framework with which to approach the concept of human interaction with an acoustic environment. Broadly conceived, the field of soundscape studies attends to the musical, linguistic, ontological, and psychological dimensions of how sound travels through space and impacts attitudes, ideologies, political aspirations, and aesthetic considerations. The concept of soundscape also encompasses the processes by which these aspects crystallize into cultural norms. The field of Ethnomusicology has yielded numerous studies on the idea of musical sound as a means of exerting dominance or expressing marginalized positions.

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story doubles as a personal narrative and a collective reflection on the exilic or diasporic condition. Most importantly, accented cinema opens the narrative field to multiple perspectives. The Time That Remains indeed places an accent on the “acousticity of exile.” Exile in this context can mean the act of going into exile for fear of political persecution. Or, in the case of the present absentees, the experience of exile does not necessarily hinge on physical displacement. This second understanding of the exilic condition largely refers to the alienation that comes with being an absent presence in Israeli society.8 Finally, exile can be understood allegorically—as the impossibility of returning to a more innocent, more romantic, more heroic time. Suleiman situates both the film’s autobiographical thread and the watershed moments of the Palestinian experience in Israel in relation to the acoustics of Egypt’s cinematic and musical golden age. Specifically, Layla Murad’s song 1947 song “My Heart is My Guide” functions as a sonic motif that marks both autobiographical events and pivotal moments in the history of the present absentee. From the 1940s to the 1960s, Egypt saw the rise of a star system in the motion picture and music industries. Both on the big screen and in the concert hall, musical personalities rose to prominence. Through the powerful radio and television broadcasts out of Cairo, the voices of these musical all-stars were ensconced in the soundscape of the region. Umm Kulthum was renowned for her powerful capacity to project without amplification, her epic performances, and her often-cited ability to bring poetry to the masses. Her iconic Thursday night ḥafla (musical soirée) was broadcast all over the Middle East and became a ritual listening event for a diverse array of communities. Abdelhalim Hafez, a sentimentalist crooner and prototypical “loverboy” persona, relied heavily on the microphone to forge a contentiously intimate rapport with predominantly female audiences. Layla Murad, known affectionately as the “Cinderella of the Egyptian Screen,” made a name for herself as a cinematic icon who starred predominantly in romantic musicals. Her rise to fame coincided with the widespread availability of radios. The latter two artists especially were key figures in a timehonored viewing event across the Middle East: the Friday afternoon Egyptian film. Layla Murad in particular occupies a pivotal role in The Time That Remains. My essay traces her 1947 song “My Heart is My Guide” from one of the film’s early scenes, the July 1948 surrender of Nazareth to Israeli forces, to the scene in which E.S.’s dying father bids farewell to his son who is preparing to go into exile in

 In Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel, David Grossman elaborates on this painful reality: “One may also say, without any risk of grave error, that the Jewish majority in Israel treats all its Palestinian citizens as absent presences. This is how they are conceived, and how they are depicted in the media—as a collective absence, as a group that exists but is faceless and nameless, of uniform traits, most of them negative” (295).

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1982. The daughter of a Jewish cantor and renowned composer, Murad continues to be a contentious figure in terms of cultural ownership. In 1945, she married the Egyptian actor Anwar Wagdi and converted to Islam. When their relationship fell apart, Wagdi started a rumor that, in her divided loyalties, she secretly contributed a large sum of money to Israel. This rumor prompted several Arab nations to boycott Murad’s films and songs. She received a presidential pardon, so to speak, when Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser called on Syria to lift the ban as one of the preconditions for a 1958 unifying pact between Syria and Egypt. The Time That Remains offers a tender restitution of the artist and her Jewish roots by acknowledging the tragedies that befell both Palestinian citizens of Israel and Jews from the Arabic-speaking world in the crosscurrents of Zionism and Arab nationalism. In his article “The Return of Cinderella,” Eyal Sagui Bizawe addresses the genre of the Ramadan musalsal (drama series) and explores a 2009 Syrian production based on the life and musical career of Murad. “These series,” notes Sagui Bizawe, “generally have a somewhat nostalgic character, expressing a longing for days gone by, apparently never to return [. . .] A special place is set aside for the popular cultural heroes who symbolize the golden age of the great Arabic vocalists” (Sagui Bizawe). Though the luminaries of the golden age of Arabic song are no longer physically present, technologies of pre-recorded sound have given their voices afterlives that affect and feed into the ways in which individuals and communities continue to imagine their present lives. The fact that musical legends such as Murad can still inspire a popular television series points to a type of mythology that has coalesced around their artistic personas. The habitual listening or viewing practices associated with each artist suggests a collective and sustained mourning of their loss and a simultaneous celebration of their legacy. The passage of time, moreover, has done little to diminish the aura around these golden age luminaries. They thus constitute a loud and enduring presence of absence that largely transcends ethnic, religious, and national lines.9 By nesting the experience of the present absentee in this cultural phenomenon and doing it through diagetic representations of sound, Suleiman expresses a Palestinian narrative that has struggled to make itself heard in geopolitical terms. How can the experience of the present absentee emerge alongside the dominant narratives of 1948: that of the fledgling Israeli state and its heroes, or that of the

 Umm Kulthum and Abdelhalim Hafez were active proponents of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s PanArabism, but their political orientation did not stop communities or individuals with divergent political views from embracing their art. In Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, editor and contributing author Laudan Nooshin notes that “music is quixotic in its ability to serve both dominant power positions and ideologies and at the same time give voice to those disempowered by them” (30).

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Palestinian refugees and their figures of resistance? Once again, Suleiman’s answer is allegory. By placing a cinematic emphasis on the all-stars of Arabic song, he gives the presence of absence, and by extension the present absentee, its own mythological time, its own golden age, its own heroes. As previously mentioned, the opening scene of The Time That Remains fades to black and segues to a scene that begins with the July 1948 surrender of Nazareth to Israeli forces. Thus begins one of the most idiosyncratic cinematic representations of the Palestinian experience in 1948. Suleiman spares no detail when it comes to costumes, lighting, and setting. Nazareth, awash in light and vibrant color, looks more like a pristine and stylized film set than the site of a political upheaval. Perfectly coiffed and outfitted, a young Fuad (E.S.’s father) has all the melancholic charm of a 1940s cinematic icon. A member of the armed resistance, he is shown assembling and stashing weapons. After leaving a wounded comrade in search of medical aid, he encounters a group of Israeli soldiers who start firing at him. Fuad narrowly escapes and runs to a nearby alley where he watches from behind a corner as Israeli soldiers load a truck with family heirlooms confiscated from a Palestinian home. Among the first objects removed by the soldiers is a gramophone, a nod to the golden age of Egyptian cinema and song. Fuad watches as a soldier places the gramophone on the hood of a jeep, winds up the hand crank, and stands back to curiously take in the strains of Layla Murad’s “My Heart is My Guide.” In typical parodic form, Suleiman pushes the absurdity of the situation to its limit. The soldiers are not only looting to the tune of “My Heart is My Guide,” but their movements are coordinated to the waltz rhythm of the song. A close-up of Fuad reveals him observing in bewilderment. Then, as if lost in the music or his own thoughts, he turns his face and averts his gaze. This scene echoes another, intimately related narrative of traumatic loss—the dispersion of Middle Eastern Jews in the 1940s and 50s. The “Cinderella of the Egyptian Screen” was, after all, an Egyptian Jew, and her legacy was marred by a post-1948 conflation of Jew and Israeli. Although the looting scene is quite short, “My Heart is My Guide” serves as a narrative cue in the film and punctuates the cinematic text by alerting the viewer to a shift in temporality. This first instance of Murad’s song marks the end of an era and significantly coincides with the emergence of the present absentee as both a legal designation and an ontological dilemma. The next appearance of “My Heart is My Guide” within the film is mediated through the cassette tape, a technology that rose to prominence in the 1970s. In this scene, an aged and exhausted Fuad waits in the car while E.S. fetches his medication at the pharmacy. Fuad reaches into the glove compartment, pulls out a cassette tape of “My Heart is My Guide,” and inserts the tape into the player, nodding his head to the music ever so gently while E.S. observes from the pharmacy window. In Making Music in the Arab World, Jihad Racy describes taxi cabs in Beirut of the

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early 1960s pulling over on the side of the road during the first Thursday Umm Kulthum ḥafla for an undisturbed listening. Cassette culture added a dimension of choice to this ritual in the sense that the act of “pulling over” could be achieved at any time. The pharmacy scene in The Time That Remains can be regarded as a moment of “pulling over” and taking time out to listen. On the personal level, this scene functions as a heart-to-heart between the dying Fuad and the absent but very much present Layla Murad. When E.S. returns to the car, he slides quietly into the driver’s seat and watches his father with a look of deep concern. We are left to wonder whether Fuad has fallen asleep or drifted into an alternate state of consciousness. This narrative use of Murad’s song coincides with the moment in which E.S. must go into exile. As such, the scene marks a twofold departure: Fuad’s final departure from his body through death, and E.S.’s departure from the body politic through exile. This analysis has explored “temporalities of sound” in the sense of mythological time, as represented by the golden age luminaries of Arabic song and their enduring presence; the passing of time, as catalogued through technologies of sound over the decades of a single life span; and finally, passing between this world and the hereafter, between homeland and exile. What about the title of the film, “the time that remains?” Does it not reference present and future? In an interview with Sabah Haider, Suleiman connects the concept of “the time that remains” to the very process of filmmaking: “I think by de facto, that the very act of the making of a film, is an act emerging from hope. So questions that surround hopelessness are in contradiction to the actual fact that there is a film. If I was hopeless, I would not have made a film [sic] titled The Time That Remains.” Layla Murad’s celebrated song, “My Heart is My Guide,” punctuates the cinematic text and marks important moments in both the autobiographical thread of the film and the collective history of the present absentee. In both these instances, the song offers a narrative cue, an invitation for the viewer to pause and listen. Such temporality is expansive even within its confines, as no two acts of listening are alike. By situating experience in relation to musical sound, Suleiman has opened the narrative field to its silences and present absences.

Bibliography Asmar, Sami. “Decade Later, Layla Murad Still Unforgettable Artist.” Al-Jadid 11.50 (2005). Sagui Bizawe, Eyal. “The Return of Cinderella.” Haaretz. October 1, 2009. https://www.haaretz.com/ 1.5422248 Grossman, David. Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel. Trans. Haim Watzman. New York: Picador, 2003.

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Haider, Sabah. “‘A Different Kind of Occupation’: An Interview with Elia Suleiman.” The Electronic Intifada (February 1st), 2010. https://electronicintifada.net/content/different-kind-occupationinterview-elia-suleiman/8654 Laudan, Nooshin, ed. Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Racy, Ali Jihad. Making Music in the Arab World: The Culture and Artistry of Ṭarab. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Turning of the World. Rochester: Destiny Books, 1977. Suleiman, Elia. The Time That Remains: Chronicle of a Present Absentee. Paris: The Film, 2009.

Michael Jäckel

11 Media and the Cultivation of Time Contemporary media, perhaps more than any other aspect of culture, is credited or blamed for people’s perception of the acceleration of time. Time has always been a crucial element in the organization of daily life. Media, too, play a central role in organizing daily time. This essay explores several different ways that media has changed human perceptions of time, as well as of space and society. It describes how abundant information and manifold possibilities for engagement through media impacts the way people decide to use their time. It argues that people’s conceptions of time are shaped by media use. Through tracing key moments in the development of media, this chapter explains how changes in the dissemination of information profoundly altered time, the “connective tissue” of society. Media serve to organize time, document time-use, and give time meaning. Daily diaries, for example, utilize the unit of the day as a unit to be recounted and remembered; they also enable reflection upon longer periods of past time for future readers. The idea of a daily newspaper invented the expectation that “there is always something new to tell.” In both of these cases, media technologies have a socializing effect. Mass media, defined as media that reaches “masses” of people, has intensified media dependency and shaped the perception, organization, and narration of time even more profoundly. Media schedules and social media both cultivate daily time and regulate time use. Electronic calendars, memory functions, tracking devices, and virtual gatherings cultivate daily rhythms and log past events. Media dependency results from the continuous and ubiquitous offering of media content. Mass audiences have adjusted to around-the-clock breaking news cycles, edutainment platforms, and entertainment offerings. Because such programs are now continuously available to consumers on their own schedules, they have also “burst” the day-and-night-distinction. Permanent media coverage and constant participation in social media networks can lead to an exhausted society in which its members bemoan their lack of time. Louis Wirth, an observer of the communicating apparatus, concluded that “In mass communication we have unlocked a new social force of as yet incalculable magnitude.” (Wirth 1948: 12) This is no more true than with regard to media’s impact on time.

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Space, Time, and the Flow of Information Let’s begin our story about the relationship between time and media on July 28, 1858, when Cyrus W. Field laid the transatlantic telegraph cable across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. This new technology allowed the first word to travel across an ocean. In his 2003 novel Signal and Noise, John Griesemer narrates a conversation between two engineers who were involved in this process. They reflect on the consequences of this technical wonder: “But I’m talking about our reputations. I cannot but feel we are standing before something enormous, wondrous, something that could transform the age and all who live in it. We could herald something wholly new – the binding of continents, the rapid flow of information. Information is everywhere [. . .]. It’s not just in epistles or books or telegraphs. It’s paintings, it’s formulae, it’s music, it’s the score of a tennis match, the price of stock, the meaning beneath the meaning of sweet nothings whispered in lovers’ ears, it’s thought, it’s concept, it’s feeling, it’s the protoplasm of all culture, it’s anything we experience that isn’t death” (Griesemer 2004: 116). The advent of the telegraph and the transatlantic cable in the nineteenth century changed how distances were understood temporally. Now vast territories were connected in very short time-spans. Ubiquitous information became the “protoplasm of all culture,” to quote the awe-filled engineers. With regard to time and space, opening the flow of unlimited information means – in a broad sense – an opening and widening of experience. The transatlantic telegraph cable removed physical obstacles as well as cultural barriers to social connections. This change in the perception of time due to the possibilities of communicating quickly over great distances is reflected in changing visual representations of locales. When daily lives were limited to their immediate environments and messages from distant regions took a long time to reach local residents, maps of the world were mostly small-scale, limited, selective, and restricted. More all-encompassing maps became more popular once delivering messages to faraway locations in speedy fashion made large distances appear smaller. The growing dissemination of books during the nineteenth century is another prime example of the exponential growth of communication between people across time and space. Small and Vincent argued that the proliferation of books during this period changed cognitive capacities and social interconnectedness, and that, moreover, this proliferation impacted perceptions of the relationship between time and space: “[. . .] every book helps to form a channel of communication between author and reader. The rapid multiplication of volumes which are thereby made available to a correspondingly large number of readers is, in the light of our dissection an increase of communication channels, or a higher nervous organization, in society” (Small and Vincent 1894: 222). Communication through books exemplifies the impact of technology and forms of communication on how people think. When Charles Horton Cooley wrote

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about a “new epoch in communication,” he focused not on the mechanical aspect of the transmission and dissemination of information, but rather on “their operation upon the larger mind” (Cooley 1909, 1962: 80). These scholars identified the effects of burgeoning lines of communication connecting great numbers of people across geographical barriers and cultural difference, to form some kind of group consciousness (“larger mind”), capable of emotional affect (“higher nervous organization”). Terms like “the Twitterverse” might be twenty-first-century examples of such networks. In summary, the advent of new media technologies changes popular perceptions of time, society, and community.

Media’s Impact on Thinking about the Future New media such as the telegraph did not only change the perception of time and space through its dissemination of information and widening of human experience. New media’s ability to shock people also prompts reflection on the future (Baecker 2007). Imagining future media landscapes is another example of the way that forms of communication create new temporal ideas and contribute to changing feelings about the future. These predictions, some eerily accurate and others wildly off-base, present an approach to time that transcends chronology and geographical barriers, as did the telegraph wire. Consider, for example, the uncannily accurate media consumption prognosis for the year 2010, made by Robert Sloss a hundred years earlier, in 1910: “Wherever [the citizen] may currently be located, all he will have to do is set his ‘voice pointer’ to the number he wishes to speak with, and the person called will immediately hear his listening device vibrate or giving off a signal, all the while allowing the called person to choose whether he wants to listen or decline the call” (Sloss 1910, 2010: 36). In contrast, other predictions now seem entirely wrong. In 1943, for example, Thomas J. Watson estimated that in the future there would be a world-wide market for a maximum of only five computers and that people would never find time to watch television because of a large variety of “housing problems” (Hartley 1999: 94). Regardless of their accuracy, the practice of imagining future media technology often serves as a vehicle for envisioning the future more generally. In the twenty-first century, however, the rapid degree of media innovation has cast a shadow of doubt over the general charm of the unknown. In homage to Stanislaw Lem, an author stated that “[. . .] perhaps the present is too full of science fiction; perhaps the rapid succession of innovations, or announcements of what might be possible, have dampened the excitement of excursions into the future” (Rötzer 1996).

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Media Consumption, Decision-Making, and Time The manner in which people live their lives, plan, organize, shop, gather information, orient themselves, communicate ideas with others, structure work processes, travel, coordinate appointments, and sort correspondences has radically changed in the past few decades. The integration of media technology and software-based processes has become routine in many parts of life in many parts of the world. As a result, media consumption no longer just means seeing, hearing, or reading. It also involves, more and more, searching, sorting, deleting, moving, sending, following up – and, of course, participating. A daily schedule has become a media schedule. Already during the era of radio and television, long before the “triumphal march” of the internet and mobile devices, scholars began paying great attention to the phenomenon of simultaneous media use. Nowadays, more than ever, multitasking is a synonym for being involved with a bunch of devices at the same time, all of them geared towards the production of discontinuity. The collection of information and other “consumer goods” from the services industry (for example television, computers, and media platforms) also consumes time. Maintaining and updating devices requires temporal and financial resources. The large variety of services, in turn, leads to an increasingly urgent search for time-saving strategies. Staffan B. Linder (cf. Linder 1970) has intensely discussed people’s desire to spend time productively, observing an extension of efficiency criteria into the world of leisure. Shortly afterwards, Daniel Bell noted that “time has become an important factor in the distribution of tasks, and the people become slaves of timekeeping due to their marginal utility” (Bell 1974: 360). This cost perspective, in which one strives to minimize the time it takes to perform certain tasks, is crucial for a society interconnected by electronic media. David Weinberger predicts a departure from classic principles of order, such as libraries, newspapers, and reference books, and identifies a new power emerging from digital chaos. He argues that “As we invent new principles of organization that make sense in a world of knowledge freed from physical constraints, information doesn’t just want to be free. It wants to be miscellaneous” (Weinberger 2007: 7). Indeed, most reference books and databases available online stand out due to their diversity and broadness – there seems to be a demand for either having or making absolutely everything available. The consequence is a potential increase of the individual’s burden of selection, which, in turn, requires time, expertise, and other resources. Whether this is a transitional phenomenon or a permanent change will most likely be decided by the costs incurred by participants and organizers.

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On the other hand, empirical studies have indicated on several occasions that the permanent conflict between possibilities, time, and money is less dramatic than it seems. This includes the question of whether characteristics of economic choice can be observed in the field of media consumption. Despite the predicted departure of “traditional” media institutions and the expectation of a decline of the “sender-receiver” relationship, such communication remains at the core of day-to-day information distribution and the satisfaction of various entertainment needs. Furthermore, while Bell claimed seven to be the largest number of information bits a single person could process at a time (Bell 1974: 354), this magic number does not match the limits discovered in other areas, for example the “Ten-channels-rule” in the field of television use.1 To expect that audiences continuously make real decisions in their media choices does not seem realistic, nor is it borne out in reality (for empirical data, cf. Jäckel 2011: 377). New channels of communications and new connections – be they an increased frequency of publications on news websites, follow-ups of the many contacts a person has within a variety of social networks nowadays (150 contacts on average), or the permanent stream of consciousness provided by those who tweet – do, in fact, result in ambivalent reactions. A desire for people to express themselves and use information provided by others collides with the skeptical manner in which they scrutinize the services that collect and process that data. The feeling of missing out on some sort of information is almost seamlessly replaced by the feeling of losing track of all the available information and decisions that need to be made. “Knowledge forces decisions and creates situations in which to act” (Beck 1996: 290), and whenever decisions need to be made under consideration of an infinitely large number of knowledge bases and information channels, there always seems to be either an abundance or a shortage of data and information – and the dose never feels “just right.” This dilemma of the “just right” dose of information and its impact on time management is a topic of discussion on a near-daily basis in scholarly and industry debates about the future of media consumption. There are many areas of life impacted by the challenge of finding the right balance of selection and choice in information, as too much information threatens to swamp one’s ability to choose. For example: – Spatially, as media-free zones continue to shrink and become rarer (not only in the sense of “useless time”); – Temporally, through the permanent presence of media that never “sleeps” nor ceases (24-hour media);

 This rule says that the average number of channels being part of the relevant set of a single user is near to ten.

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Content-wise, through an expansion of topics covered and the expectation of subsequent debate of said content; Socially, though the “specialization” of media to target different segments of society (by age, location, profession, and so on) for various purposes (employment, self-help groups, and so on); Functionally, as hybridized media integrates several functions into one product and medium is no longer necessarily linked to a certain type of content, as it once was for television. For instance, a profession of love is no longer exclusively sent in a letter, but can also be transmitted electronically, while a newspaper can be read on a tablet computer (among other options), and so on.

The profusion of media devices and content through space and time has the potential to overwhelm users.

Media, Participation, and Time The idea of media “participation” stands for a broad range of forms of involvement. Media consumers are free either to engage actively with the ongoing stream of media or to be passive observers of it.2 In addition to direct participation, the influence of mass media operates on different levels. The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who served as editor-in-chief of a local newspaper, created an excellent description of the idea of “social force” when he noted that reading daily news is a “realistic morning blessing” (with reference to Löwith 1986: 60). Following a classification developed by Cooley, media participation involves a) expressiveness (that is, the proliferation of thoughts, images, content); b) permanence (publicity in nearly real-time); c) swiftness (the overcoming of space and distance); and d) diffusion (mass communication, including to different target groups). Events with tremendous reach, such as live broadcasts of competitions, concerts, and celebrations, are classified as “high holidays of mass communication” (Dayan and Katz 1996: 1). They foster imagined communities and temporary feelings of being part of a “Gemeinschaft.” Media use also often reflects configurations of familiarity or strangeness, as “the personal experience of individuals is closely bound up with larger-scale aspects of social structure” (Granovetter 1973: 1377).

 The assumption that the interposition of technology makes communication impossible, or that attempts to reinstate communication feel staged, as Luhmann claimed, must be challenged (Die Realität der Massenmedien, p. 11).

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A person’s control of attention is comparable to their engagement in public spaces. Marshall McLuhan (1964) promoted the idea that media are extensions of man leading to new geographies. Joshua Meyrowitz (1985: 5) described media landscapes as a “building without walls,” with the consequence of “the overlapping of many social spheres that were once distinct.” In the early days of research on media effects the investigation of the Columbia School shed light on the coexistence of different reference systems (for a brief summary see Jäckel 2012: 54). The Rovere Study became popular for distinguishing between locals and cosmopolitans. Locals do not care for what is happening outside their local world, while a cosmopolitan “resides in Rovere but live[s] in the Great Society” (Merton 1949, 1968: 447). The possibilities for participating in media have become not only larger but also easier, mainly due to new information and communication technologies. Low-cost participation and selective engagement occur simultaneously. On the internet in particular, the participation threshold can be especially low – one click of the mouse is enough to potentially replace all other forms of protest. As a result, the addressees of this feedback have an even harder time figuring out whether the praise or criticism directed at them must be taken seriously or not. Additionally, the increased demand for receiving information quickly transforms into an increased supply of information, mainly due to the fact that, almost by default, the search for information causes new information to be created. There is a risk of the journey becoming its own destination. There is little room for definitiveness. Ultimately, the new flexibility with which people use media variety has become one of the challenges of the future. Content providers recognize this new “society of options.” They influence the conditions under which the field of traditional mass communication and new broadcast and communication technologies take place. For example, one day everybody debates the legitimacy of a Tagesschau app, then the conversation turns to media library design guidelines or advertising limitations, only to be followed by privacy concerns, and so on.3 Nowadays, media laws are as diverse as the markets they are designed to govern. This diversity paradigm is accelerating the experience of a “time-poor” culture facing a deep gap between options and constraints. Originally the idea of specialization was invented to make choices more efficient. Media diversity, however, has also lead to the cultivation of a permanent strive for productivity. The future will likely yield a phenomenon called “material fatigue,” which refers to both an overload of content and forms of communication. Lutz Hachmeister

 Tagesschau is still the most popular news format on German Television.

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(1999: 44) coined this term in the late 1990s, when he referred to television. New topics and formats are quickly spent, for both communicators and recipients.

Conclusion As we look towards the future of media’s impact on notions of time, the following observations can be made: – There is still a demand for quality time. In light of the current media constellation, high-quality niches (that is, very specialized segments of a market) could therefore be successfully filled. – Scarcity of time cannot be eliminated by an increased supply. Today and in the future, temporal scarcity occurs on many levels, all of which are characterized by significant opportunity structures. – In the turbulent field of topic and opinion changes, there will be a demand for “Oases of Tranquility,” giving “old” media enough potential for survival. – The media system’s “buzz” will continue to increase. The “many voices” will remain present and they will keep the “information overload” alive. Even nowadays, this situation is accepted as the status quo to such a degree that it holds people’s attention without actually making them worry. – In a society constantly demanding participation, scarcity of time and disappointment will, in the long run, have a differentiating effect. While the audience’s judging function has been democratized, it retains a kind of staged feeling to it. – The times of science fiction and futurologists might be over or take different forms moving forward as the pace of innovation has made expeditions into the future less and less interesting or necessary. Some people try to engage in predictions of the future, others actively work towards their visions of the future, while yet others prefer to observe the present or rely on the predictions of others to guide their thinking. What is imperative in all of these cases is that people’s sense of possibility remains alive and well. The German word “Möglichkeitssinn” translates into English as a “sense of possibility,” and it captures a wonder and optimism about the future. The following words reflect on such longing for a future but replace longing for the future with actively working towards such a future: “Whoever has it does not say, for instance: Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that might, could, or ought to happen. If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise. So the sense of

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possibility could be defined outright as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not” (Musil 1930: 16).

Bibliography Baecker, Dirk. Studien zur nächsten Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007. Beck, Ulrich. “Wissen oder Nicht-Wissen? Zwei Perspektiven ‘reflexiver Modernisierung.’” In Reflexive Modernisierung, edited by Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash, 289–315. Frankfurt am Main: Eine Kontroverse, 1996. Bell, Daniel. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. London: Heinemann, 1974. Cooley, Charles Horton. Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, (1909) 1962. Dayan, Daniel, and Elihu Katz. Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. Granovetter, Mark S. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” The American Journal of Sociology 78.6 (1973): 1360–1380. Griesemer, John. Signal and Noise. London: Arrow, 2004. Hachmeister, Lutz. “Was ist modernes Fernsehen?” Die Woche. September 10, 1999. Hartley, Joh. The Uses of Television. New York: Routledge, 1999. Hirsch, Fred. Social Limits to Growth. Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977. Jäckel, Michael. Medienwirkungen. 5th edition. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2011. Jäckel, Michael. Medienwirkungen kompakt. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2012. Linder, Staffan. The Harried Leisure Class. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970. Löwith, Karl. Von Hegel zu Nietzsche. 9th edition. Hamburg: Meiner, 1986. Luhmann, Niklas. Die Realität der Massenmedien. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1996. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. Merton, Robert King. “Patterns of Influence: Local and Cosmopolitan Influentials.” In Social Theory and Social Structure, edited by Robert King Merton, 441–474. Enlarged edition. New York: Free Press, (1949) 1968. Meyrowitz, Joshua. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Musil, Robert. The Man Without Qualities. Boston: Peter L. Stern & Company, 1930. Rötzer, Florian. “Wir stehen am Anfang einer Epoche, vor der mir graut.” 1996. http://www.heise.de/ tp/artikel/2/2048/1.html. Letzter Aufruf am 07.08.2012 Schwartz, Barry. The Paradox of Choice. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Sloss, Robert. “Das drahtlose Jahrhundert.” In Die Welt in 100 Jahren, edited by Arthur Brehmer, 27–48. Hildesheim: Olms, (1910) 2010. Small, Albion Woodbury, and George Edgar Vincent. An Introduction to the Study of Society. New York: American Book Co., 1894. Weinberger, David. Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. New York: Times Books, 2007. Wirth, Louis. “Consensus and Mass Communication.” American Sociological Review 13.1 (1948): 1–15.

Andréa G. Grottoli

12 Coral Reefs and Climate Change: We Are Running Out of Time Time in the study of coral reefs focuses on the rate of change in ocean conditions due to climate change, and the relative resilience of different corals to climate change. Another aspect of time that is relevant is the projected time it would take to mitigate the effects of climate change on coral reefs: short-term strategies to try to ensure survival of some corals, and long-term strategies to mitigate the effects of climate change overall. Time marks processes of change as reversible to mitigate harm to coral reefs, or as irreversible loss of coral species and ecosystem function. This essay argues that action is needed in short and long time-spans to protect existing reefs now and to slow down climate change to prevent many species from disappearing forever. Coral reefs house one third of all marine species yet occupy only 0.2% of the ocean’s surface area. Corals are the foundational species of reefs and build the actual reef structure with their hard skeletons. However, coral reefs have been declining over the past several decades due to local and global threats. The single largest global threat to the long-term persistence of reefs going forward is global climate change, which is causing progressive increases in seawater temperature and acidity. Rising seawater temperature causes corals to bleach, to be more susceptible to disease, and to die. Ocean acidification interferes with coral skeletal growth, reef formation, and reef structure. My research focuses on identifying corals that are more resilient to future ocean conditions with the hope of improving our ability to manage, restore, and protect these critical ecosystems over the coming century. Yet despite these possible short-term strategies for extending the survival of coral reefs, the only longterm solution to ensuring the survival of corals reefs is to reduce local stressors like pollution and over-fishing, and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and minimize global climate change – and we are running out of time.

Value of Coral Reefs Tropical coral reefs are complex ecosystems composed of stony and soft corals, invertebrates, fish, and other vertebrates (Figure 1). Primarily located between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, coral reefs are found along the coastlines of over 100 countries. They are of high economic value to humans as coral reefs provide food for humans, protection from storms and erosion, and support a thriving https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110690774-014

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Figure 1: Healthy Pacific coral reef.

tourism industry through the beaches that reefs supply with sand as well as the fishing, diving, and supporting infrastructure, including hotels, restaurants, taxis and more. Globally, coral reefs are estimated to have an economic value of $9.9 trillion per year (Costanza et al. 2014). In addition, coral reefs are of huge ecological value. They provide food for marine organisms and critical habitat for 25% of the world’s marine species (i.e., habitat for hiding, mating, egg laying, rearing of young, protection from storms, etc.). The biodiversity of coral reefs rivals that of rainforests yet occupies less than 1% of the area in the oceans. Thus, coral reefs are disproportionately important ecosystems for the survival of marine life (www.reefresilience.org). Yet, this vital ecosystem is currently under threat due to climate change. To better understand why climate change is a threat, we need to understand the basics of coral biology. Coral Reef Services and Economic Value – Food for human nutrition and subsistence – Form barriers that protect shorelines – Supply sand to beaches – Support the tourist industry – 850 million people live within 100km – Economic value of $9.9 trillion USD annually Coral Reefs Ecological Value – Food for marine organisms – Critical habitat – Associated with 25% of marine species – Intrinsic value “rainforests of the ocean”

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Coral Biology Coral are animals that contain endosymbiotic algae (i.e., algae that live symbiotically within the coral animal cells) of the family Symbiodiniaceae, secrete a calcium carbonate skeleton below their basal tissue layer, and can live for several hundred years (Figure 2). The animal-algal partnership is a mutually beneficial one. The coral can eat zooplankton and other organic substances from the water column that it captures with its tentacles coated in stinging cells. This nutrient-rich source of food is shared between the animal and algal partners and is the primary source for vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients. In return, the algae give the vast majority of the sugars that it produces through photosynthesis to the animal host, thus supplying the host with up to 100% of its daily metabolic needs. However, this symbiosis is very sensitive to small variations in temperature, which can cause a stress response known as coral bleaching. In addition, the coral skeleton is sensitive to seawater chemistry. A)

B)

C)

Figure 2: Coral Biology. A) An adult Orbicella faveolata coral colony in the Caribbean. B) Close-up of the interconnected coral polyps on the colony surface with tentacles extended. C) Schematic of coral polyp anatomy. Inset showing the endosymbiotic algae Symbiodiniaceae inside the coral animal tissue, which gives coral their color. Photos in A & B by AG Grottoli. Image in C from Encyclopedia Britannica. Inset from www.coralreef.dk.

Coral Bleaching and Ocean Acidification If seawater temperatures increase by 1–2°C (1.8–3.6ºF) for as little as 10 days, the symbiosis between the coral animal and its endosymbiotic algae starts to break down: the coral expels the algae and appears white because the skeleton becomes visible through the clear gelatinous tissue of the animal – hence the term coral bleaching (Figure 3). In the absence of the photosynthetically derived sugar from the algae, the coral begins to starve, becomes more susceptible to disease, and

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Figure 3: A) Healthy Hawaiian reef in 2013 and B) the same reef area fully bleaching in 2014. Photos by Chris Wall.

stops growing skeleton. If normal temperatures resume relatively quickly, many coral can regain their coloration and recover from bleaching. However, if elevated temperatures persist for many weeks or months, the cumulative stress can lead to coral mortality. To put this into context, a mass bleaching event in the northern half of the Great Barrier Reef, Australia in 2015 resulted in 60% of the corals dying within a matter of months (Hughes et al. 2018). However, some corals survived. Even in the case of this catastrophic bleaching event, 40% survived. The physiological traits that allow coral to survive bleaching include high fat reserves that can be drawn on to sustain metabolism while bleached, the capacity to increase feeding on zooplankton to compensate for photosynthetic-sugar losses, the ability to shuffle the species of Symbiodiniaceae algae to more thermally tolerant ones, or some combination of all three (Grottoli et al. 2014; Grottoli et al. 2006; Grottoli et al. 2017). Furthermore, it is suspected that the coral microbiome may play a role in bleaching resilience (Reshef et al. 2006), but exactly which microbes are beneficial or detrimental is only beginning to be uncovered. Unfortunately, mass bleaching events have been increasing in frequency and intensity over time due to increases in baseline seawater temperatures (Eakin et al. 2009). At the current rate of global warming, the tropical surface ocean will warm by 1–4°C (1.8–5.4°F) this century (IPCC 2021). Severe bleaching will be an annual occurrence by 2040 in the absence of adaptation, resulting in a complete loss of corals by 2060 (Kleypas et al. 2021). By some estimates, 80% of all existing corals could be lost within the next few decades due to warming alone (Donner 2009). Increases in seawater temperature are not the only threat to coral reefs. Current increases in atmospheric CO2 not only cause global warming, but also cause ocean acidification (the net dissolution of atmospheric CO2 into the surface ocean leads to increases in acidity). Over this century, ocean acidity is expected to

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increase by 100–150% (IPCC 2021). Ocean acidification interferes with coral skeletal growth in many species and can exacerbate the severity of bleaching (i.e., Anthony et al. 2008; Comeau et al. 2013). The combination of increasing seawater temperatures, mass bleaching events, and ocean acidification could produce the sixth mass extinction (Veron et al. 2009). Despite this bleak outlook, there are coral that demonstrate resilience: they either do not bleach or recover quickly from bleaching, and some maintain calcification under ocean acidification conditions (e.g., McLachlan et al. 2022). These resilient corals may be the key to reef persistence over the next couple of decades. If we can identify what makes some corals resilient under the dual stress of elevated temperature and ocean acidification, and use that to optimize reef management decisions and conservation, we may be able to preserve some coral reefs in the short-term. However, the only long-term strategy for preserving coral reef ecosystems is to significantly reduce local stressors like pollution and over-fishing, reduce CO2 emissions rates, and limit global warming and climate change.

Identifying Coral Resilience Traits To identify which traits underlie coral resilience to the dual stress of elevated temperature and ocean acidification, I conducted an experiment with my team and collaborators at the Reef Systems Coral Farm in New Albany, OH and published the findings in Grottoli et al. (2018). In summary, we measured a suite of physiological traits as well as the microbiome of two species of corals, Acropora millepora and Turbinaria reniformis, after a 24-day exposure to either normal conditions (temperature and acidity conditions similar to tropical ocean conditions today) or future ocean conditions (elevated temperature and acidity conditions similar to those expected towards the end of this century) (Figure 4). This was the first study of its kind. We discovered that the two corals responded very differently to future conditions. A. millepora was susceptible to the dual stress: it harbors the thermally sensitive endosymtiont type C21a (Cladocopium) and was visibly paler indicating bleaching stress. In addition, it suffered decreases in both algal and animal physiology including severe skeletal loss, coupled with a decrease in microbial diversity and shifts in the microbiome to include disease-associated bacteria. On the other hand, T. reniformis was very tolerant of the dual stress: it harbors the thermally tolerant endosymbiont type D1a (Durisdinium) and maintained normal coloration. In addition, it suffered only minimal decreases in algal physiology while maintaining its microbial diversity and community composition. Further evidence that T. reniformis is more resilient is that

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it produced twice as much mucus and contained 25% more energy reserves than A. millepora. These two traits would appear to provide a rich medium for the coral’s microbial community and more reserves for the coral during stress, respectively. Thus, the microbiome changed and microbial diversity decreased in the physiologically sensitive coral with the thermally sensitive endosymbiotic algae but not in the physiologically tolerant coral with the thermally tolerant endosymbiont. These results confirmed that temperature-stress tolerant corals have a more stable microbiome, and demonstrated for the first time that this is also the case under the dual stresses of ocean warming and acidification. Model projections of coral persistence over the next century should therefore consider not just coral host and endosymbiotic algae physiological responses to stress, but the combined responses of the coral host, endosymbiotic algae, and microbiome. Thus, we proposed that coral with a stable microbiome may be more likely to persist in the future and shape the coral species diversity of future reefs. More recent research in my group has revealed that up to 50% of corals in Hawaii may be able to sustain multi-year shifts in temperature and pH expected in the next few decades (McLachlan et al. 2022). This suggests that in the absence of local stressors (i.e., over-fishing, pollution), there is hope that up to 50% of corals might survive for the next few decades, giving us time to 1) minimize greenhouse gas emissions and reduce climate change impacts so that more corals might survive this century and to 2) actively restore reefs with resilient corals to give future reefs the best opportunity for ecosystem persistence.

Figure 4: Photograph of representative corals at the end of the 24-day experiment. Reproduced from Grottoli et al. (2018)

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Coral Reefs Are Running Out of Time. What Can We Do To Protect Them? Results from studies like mine need to be incorporated into evidence-based decision making about coral reef management and conservation. In the short-term, conservation efforts that target corals with resilient traits (i.e., high energy reserves, high heterotrophic capacity, stable microbiome) for reef restoration and protection may have a higher probability of success over the next few decades. Scientifically supported decisions could optimize limited conservation dollars, increase the probability that the restored or conserved reef survives the next couple of decades, and would increase the short-term survival probability of corals. However, even the most resilient corals may not be able to withstand or adapt to temperature and acidity conditions predicted for the end of this century. Ultimately, the only way to protect coral reefs is to slow down the rate of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissions and minimize global climate change. while simultaneously minimizing local stressors like pollution and over-fishing (Knowlton et al 2021). The burning of fossil fuels is the cause for the ever-increasing concentration of the greenhouse gas CO2, which is causing our planet to warm and our oceans to acidify at a rate never before seen on Earth. As individuals, we can be part of the solution by supporting coral research so that the best information is available to policy and decision makers, vote, become more active, and do our part to reduce our personal carbon footprint. Engaging in the political conversation through our actions and vote is the ultimate way to influence legislation needed to regulate fossil fuel emissions and the concentration of atmospheric CO2. Below is a summary of actions each of us can take to reduce CO2 emissions, slow climate change, and save coral reefs before it is too late.

What can we do to protect coral reefs? – Support coral research. This ensures that the best evidence-based tools possible are used to inform coral conservation and management decisions to help optimize the probability of coral survival in the future. This will help corals in the short-term. However, the only long-term solution to saving coral reefs is to slow climate change. – Vote. As individuals, we can dramatically influence laws, policies, and regulation through our vote. Electing legislators at all levels of government who are committed to enacting legislation to reduce CO2 emissions and protect coral reefs is the most effective way for individuals to influence policy. – Activism. This keeps the conversation about coral reefs and climate change in the media and on people’s minds. In a world of competing sound-bites, activism through marches, letter writing to representatives at all levels of government, petition signing, and public speaking helps to keep climate change at the forefront of the public discourse. Some organizations that are particularly active with issues related to climate change and coral reefs include marchfor science.org, An Inconvenient Sequel Pledge and Actions (inconvenientsequel.tumblr.com), National

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Ocean Service (oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/thingsyoucando.html), NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program (coralreef.noaa.gov), and the International Coral Reef Society (https://coralreefs.org/ pledge-4-reefs/). Reduce your carbon footprint. Individual actions to reduce your carbon footprint often seem trivial. Nevertheless, if everyone did them, the actual effect would be large. Plus, these energy saving actions also reduce your monthly expenses. A comprehensive list of individual actions are listed at cotap.org/reduce-carbon-footprint. You can calculate your carbon footprint and identify areas where you can reduce your CO2 emissions at cotap.org/carbon-footprint-calculator.

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