diathroughwithclocks

I walk in the snow
I find the image of the city covered in snow fascinating, beautiful, dreamy

Why?

Snow works as a blanket
It covers the overflow of visual information that overwhelms the optical nerves when one walks in the city
And what remains uncovered becomes much more visible on this white screen

Brown little branches that have lost their flowers during winter time
They stick out of the snow.
Now I see them
Now I see their structure
Now I see how they are build

They break in pieces if I don't take care to preserve their form

I collect snow in a jar
I fill the jar with snow

The snow melts in my room
The jar is not full anymore
I decide to bring the snow back to where I collected it

I cannot find the exact spot
The snow kept falling and the landscape changed
I am confused

I pick a location, nevertheless
It must have been somewhere here
Not exactly here
but somewhere close
I put the snow back

In the first chapter of his book ‘Temporalities’, professor Russell West-Pavlov examines the evolution of time-keeping devices in relation to capitalism that led to the establishment of universal time. UTC (universal coordinated time) is in use since 2006 as the global standard of time measurement and coordination. According to West-Pavlov’s analysis global time is interwoven with the concepts of absolute, abstract, disembodied, and homogenized time.

1) absolute: following Isaac Newton’s formulation “Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself and from its own nature, flows uniformly, without regard to anything external” (Newton, 1966, 6, cited in West-Pavlov, 2013, 36). In this sense time is measurable, entirely independent from external parameters, and separated from things, events, and space.

Since clocks play such a formative role in human perception of time, I decided to conduct an experiment that limits the use of time-measuring devices.
I restrained from using a clock for several weeks and recorded my experience through written entries in my online blog.
I followed a practice of automatic writing.

Experiment, here, is understood as a condition or a limitation that I implement on myself. The limitation allows me to distance myself from a learned habit (usage of clocks) and from a device that is present in my environment.
With/through/amid/in-between this distance
I expect the emergence of modes of perceiving time that diverge from normative temporality.

The distance is the precondition to dialogue with the clock.

Questions:

-What emerges when I do not use a clock?
-How will I negotiate the limitation of not using a clock and the existing schedule of the university?
-What will change in the notion of abstract time and in the separation of time and space?

Please scroll below to find what emerges.

devices that measure time conventionally and display time measurements

words signifying temporal relation (grammar, syntax, meaning)

relating time to the environment

scheduled activities

grammatical tempi different than the present

temporal relation with other people

dia-/through/with clocks

please keep scrolling: there are multiple directions

a reflection on the module 'Diffractive Dialogues'

frame: Master's of Performance Practices, 2020-2021

module leader: Mariella Greil

a glimpse into my research box

perceiving time with clocks

2) homogenized: the gradual establishment of global time (since Industrialization) implemented a single standardized network of temporal measurement and coordination. It canceled out modes of perceiving time that depended on locality and specificity of culture. In this way, homogenization reenforced the separation of space and time.

3) disembodied: as the measurement of hours and minutes was displayed on clock faces through the rotation of hands, time and its passing were disjoined from natural analogies (movement of celestial bodies), events and tasks of everyday life.

4) abstract: time-keeping technology moved from mechanical clocks to exceedingly accurate atomic clocks. The strive for accuracy molded an idealistic mathematical concept of time, which depends on calculating the oscillations of infinitely minute particles. In 1967 a second was defined as 9.192.631.770 oscillations of a caesium (133) atom.

Global time is not time itself. It is rather a temporality.

Global time is not time itself.
It is the temporality, the normative temporality.

Global time is intrinsic to the complex and a broad spectrum of cultures, ideologies, and practices that form the Western world. It is presented as the single and true mode of perceiving time and coordinating human action worldwide. Although there are local and individual variations of practicing global time, humans who use a clock and plan their daily activities according to it adhere to some extent to global time.

It is important to linger a bit longer on the relation of perceiving time and time-measuring devices. In normative temporality, time is perceived as an independent entity. If time is “of itself and from its own nature” (Newton, 1966, 6, cited in West-Pavlov, 2013, 36), what a clock does is to objectively measure an a priori existing entity. The clock merely describes, displays, and represents time and its properties. It offers human beings an objective picture of time and it allows them to use it for the organization and coordination of their activities.

After his account of time-keeping technology, West-Pavlov states "[…] global time does not exist except in the phenomenon of its production" (2013, 27), except in the act of measuring it. Whilst disassociated from natural analogies, tasks, events, and space, global time is utterly dependent on the devices that measure it and on the practice of measuring. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben defines apparatus as “literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control or secure the gestures, behaviours, opinions or discourses of living beings” (Agamben, 2009, cited in Manuel, 2017, 57). In this sense clocks (mechanical, digital or atomic) and the act of measuring time are apparatuses that form human perception of time and human temporal practices.

As a person who does not belong to the mathematical scientific community, I cannot understand, I cannot grasp the mathematical figure of 9.192.631.770 oscillations of a caesium (133) atom per second.

I understand temporality as a culturally specific perception of time that encompasses a set of ideologies, habits, devices, values, ordering structures and temporal practices.

If it is global how is it culturally specific?

Parenthesis:
(Newton’s theories have been contested by physicists in the 20th century. Since then, the phenomenon of time in the scientific community is considered very differently. However as shown above, Newton’s ideas are still formative of the phenomenon of global time.)

[...] apparatuses are not mere instruments or devices that can be deployed as neutral probes of the natural world."
(Barad, 2007, 142)

in dialogue with the clock

between analysis and emergence

I collected all entries that I had written during the experiment on a single document.
As I read through them I colored words and phrases according to the following scheme:

My intent was to analyze my writings according to fixed categories and organize them in documents, which would contain one color each.

I quickly realized that one word or phrase can be classified in several of the above categories. For example the phrase 'did not happen' can be light blue, green or salmon pink. However, I made one color choice for each word/phrase.

As I kept reading, the writings proposed to me different forms than the ones I had planned.
In a less poetic phrasing: unexpected (not planned) forms emerged.