I begin 2024 by travelling back to 2017 and looking again at some feedback I received from a tutor about my essay on narrative. “The peculiar, not to say weird notion at the heart of your discussion is that discontinuous narrative forms are somehow skewing time” (Belshaw, 2017). This refocus on that essay is not something I have done consciously, but rather, I have found myself returning to it again and again.
From Specualtive (Spectral) Family Album (WIP 2023/4 –) Made by blending my family archive with unknown or missing history and AI technologies.
The 2017 feedback has stayed with me. Is the skewing of time what I was suggesting? Can time be skewed? Was my weird notion totally off-piste? How can it be remotely possible to skew time? What on earth did I mean? What did the people I was reading mean? Consciously or not, I have continued to search for answers. I want, therefore, to hold on to the following passage from Latour’s (1993) We Have Never Been Modern, one of the texts we are looking at in the reading group I am part of:
“Isn’t the modern world marked by the arrow of time? Doesn’t it consume the past? Doesn’t it break definitively with the past? Doesn’t the very cause of the current prostration come precisely from a ‘post’ modern era that would inevitably succeed the preceding one, which, in a series of catastrophic upheavals, itself succeeded the premodern eras? Hasn’t history already ended? By seeking to harbour quasi-objects at the same time as their Constitution, we are obliged to consider the temporal framework of the moderns?” (My italics – *see definition of quasi-objects and a a very brief synopsis of ‘their constitution’ below.) Presuambly, my argument would have benefited from Rovelli’s book on time at that moment, but he had not yet published it in English…
And
“Since we refuse to pass ‘after’ the postmods, we cannot propose to return to a nonmodern world that we have never left, without a modification in the passage of time itself“. (I should consider this with reference to my previous post about Metamodernism, a term which seems a bit too constructed and self-conscious).
Related to this, I have been wondering about the idea of ‘stepping back out of metaphysics’, the overarching ‘constitution’ of the Western mindset. Given the above, is it possible, desirable or remotely useful to try and step back out of metaphysics (Rubinstein, referencing Heideggar, 2020)? My suspicion is no. More useful, perhaps, is to find a way to sit with it, explore it in all its faded and disintegrating glory, forgoing utopian or dystopian fantasies. In any case, it is routinely argued that linear time is dissolved by contemporary media, so attempts to adhere to the forward arrow of time, or an imagined backward step, might remain forever frustrating (regardless of the media we play with/through).
In any event, reading Latour’s (1993) We Have Never Been Modern alongside Flusser’s (2011 [1985]) Into the Universe of the Technical Image and through McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary (2009), all of which discuss the dissolution of linear temporality from various perspectives has been helpful as I continue working on both the collaborative zine, inspired by Flusser’s telematic people and my speculative family album project. Incidentally, I will try to address McGilchrist’s disparaging passage on contemporary art in the next blog. While there is much that will be helpful, he seems not to understand that art taps into prevailing notions, drawing them out, rather than dictating them (although, of course, there is often a feedback loop involved).
But, more crucially, now that Christmas and 2023 are over, I must try to get on with my 2024 projects.
*1. Quasi-objects: Bruno Latour, an anthropologist and philosopher, uses the term “quasi-objects” to refer to entities that are neither purely natural nor purely social. Instead, they are composite objects that have both human and non-human attributes. These quasi-objects are much more social, fabricated, and collective than the ‘hard’ parts of nature, but they are also more real, nonhuman, and objective than shapeless screens on which society projects meaning. They are capable of agency and affect all interactions, serving as nodes that focus the efforts of people and draw them together in particular relations. Latour’s concept of quasi-objects is an important aspect of his actor-network theory, which emphasizes the agency of both human and non-human actors in shaping social interactions and networks. (Provided by PerplexityAI.)
My ongoing work could be described as a study of modern humans as quasi-objects, and how we have rendered ourselves as such, if one were to read it through Latour’s work.
2. “Their constitution’ refers to the moderns’ common sense notions of mind/body dualism, nature/culture separation, lively/unlively distinctions (see Lupton 2020) and a view of the world that grew out of the Enlightenment, including rights of (certain and limited) Man.
Refs:
Belshaw, M. (2017) Feedback for UVC 5. [Blog] UVCSJF. Available at: https://uvcsjf.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/sjfassignment5creativeartstodaytutorreport.pdf [Accessed 24 Mar. 2017]
Field, SJ (2017) ASSIGNMENT 5, UVCSJF. Available at: https://uvcsjf.wordpress.com/category/assignments/assignment-5/ (Accessed: 6 January 2024).
Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern (C. Porter, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
Lupton, D. (2020) Data selves: more-than-human perspectives. Cambridge, UK : Medford, MA: Polity.
McGilchrist, I. (2009). The Master and His Emissary. Yale University Press: New Haven
The Physics and Philosophy of Time – with Carlo Rovelli [YouTube] (2018). The Royal Institution. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6rWqJhDv7M (Accessed: 24 February 2021).
Rovelli, C. (2018). The Order of Time. New York London: Penguin Random House.
Rubinstein, D. (ed.) (2020) Fragmentation of the photographic image in the digital age. New York London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group (Routledge history of photography).