Thesis Research Master Cultural Analysis
Thesis advisor & first reader: Dr. Niall Martin
Second reader:
Le temps
Le temps
Le temps
Le temps
d’après
23/05/17 -
EST
15:18:43
or the
le temps d’après … [has] multiple resonances
… it can be, at once, the ‘time after’ and ‘time
according to’: time divided, then time
belonging to and the time that no longer
belongs to or the time to which someone or
something no longer belongs. Time as
property, but also as that which can never be
the possession of someone.
Mein Flügel ist zum Schwung bereit,
ich kehrte gern zurück,
denn blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit,
ich hätte wenig Glück
– Gerhard Scholem, “Gruss vom Angelus”
There is a painting by Klee called Angelus
Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks
as though he were about to distance himself
from something which he is staring at. His
eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open
and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of
History must look just so. His face is turned
towards the past. Where we see the
appearance of a chain of events, he sees one
single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles
rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his
feet. He would like to pause for a moment so
fair [verweilen], to awaken the dead and to
piece together what has been smashed. But a
storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught
itself up in his wings and is so strong that the
Angel can no longer close them. The storm
drives him irresistibly into the future, to which
his back is turned, while the rubble-heap
before him grows sky-high. That which we call
progress, is this storm.
[Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of
History 257-258]
… all political concepts, images, words and
t e r m s h av e a p o l e m i c a l m e a n i n g …
Terminological questions become thereby
highly political. A word or expression can
simultaneously be a reflex, signal, password,
and weapon in a hostile confrontation.
Introductions, or John-the-revelations
We constantly speak of our contemporary moment, our contemporaneity, and it seems to only signify ‘newness’, or ‘up-to-date-ness’. But how long can this contemporaneity, going on since the end of — end of what exactly ? — continue? And what does the contemporary imply? What assumptions does it entail? Or in short, what kind of work does the seemingly innocent, innocuous concept of the contemporary do on its own already, before and especially when we speak of it? What are the political, historical-temporal and fundamentally ontological implications of this concept from and for which we all speak? What does it mean to be contemporary, to be now-and-not-now?
This thesis lets the concept of the contemporary work with and thru Ben Lerner’s trifecta, his triptych of 10.04 where this work coalesces his poem The Dark Threw Patches Down Upon
Me Also, a novel and a short story called The Golden Vanity into the book — not novel — of 10.04. In this aesthetically temporal genre journey, the contemporary encounters global warming,
narrative, hyperobjects, history, crisis, critique and political agency.
I very specifically consider my methodology to be one of an inverted ekphrasis, where the objecta della arte isn’t described but it describes. Where it isn’t worked upon, but it works. Where it does not deliver utterances, but speaks for itself.
Speaking for the contemporary first thru the effects of global warming, this thesis follows the syntactic chain, the garden path of its object. Combining the fictionality of Lerner’s work with the non-fictionality of his The Hatred for Poetry it brings 10.04 into collision with the works of Whitman, Agamben and Benjamin as appearing in the book itself and the theory of Rancière, Mouffe, Osborne, Kosseleck Ghosh and Schmitt to funnel an exegesis of the contemporary. Thru the contemporary it follows the tangents of Greek tragedy, eschatology, and teleology thru history, wherein the relation ofthe concept of history is implicated in the concept of the contemporary.
As this narrative of the contemporary unfolds, wefollow the implications that flow from this history of the contemporary through notions and concepts of crisis, political agency, and community as as encountered in 10.04.
The topic’s importance lies beholden in the fact that we are dealing, in these sticky-icky concepts, with a priori political ontologies of our contemporaneity and our understanding, or possibility of political signification.
This thesis simultaneously performs anaesthetic of ‘time travel’, spawned from as a direct answer to Lerner’s questions regarding the virtuality-actuality debate as to the potential of art [Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry]. Speaking into the gap between theory and aesthetics that I recognised to be haunting the pages of 10.04, the verse of The Dark Threw Patches Down Upon
Me Also, and the blank, white rims of theory I had to read, I attempted to “time travel”. Meaning
a traversal, a wandering, a vacillation between the temporalities of theory and aesthetics. A being neither. Of genres, of modalities, of poetics, and of, finally, when it encounters the reader, reading.
Simultaneously, this thesis is a time-travel between my ‘private’ time and labour time , of performed and unperformed, unpaid and paid temporalities of word-count and non-counted, of actuality and virtuality.I hope to have the reader re-appropriate oneself too, That he or she may not fall in the gap and faults of genre, and realise this meandering, too, can be political. That even the vertigo ofthis falling, this process, is more powerful than either the collision or the gravity that pulled one in either direction. That the time of the political can be aestheticised, and like politics, is political, and like aesthetics, is aesthetical, and that in these burgeoning realizations, agency can be rediscovered, re-appropriated, found again, renewed, born and a different temporality carved out.
I. Tides of time
—
prodromes, symptoms and syndromes
If there is a material, technological, and industrial pollution, which exposes weather to conceivable risks, then there is also a second pollution, invisible, which puts time in danger, a cultural pollution that we have inflicted on long-term thoughts, those guardians of the Earth, of humanity, and of things themselves. If we don’t struggle against the second, we will lose the fight against the first.
[Serres, The Natural Contract 31]
I.i. Stories long and short
Lerner’s 10:04 is a story about the repeated attempt to write a story. The narrator, the lyrical miraged-I of Ben Lerner, known, eponymously as Ben, wishes to expand “The Golden Vanity”, “a story of mine that had appeared in The New Yorker” [Lerner, 10:04 4] but instead uncoils, a narrative around the repeated attempts at an “earnest if indefinite proposal” for this expansion. It becomes a performative novel — “… all I had to do was promise to turn it into a novel” [ibid. 4: my emphasis], — only vocalising ruminations on what the novel could be about: “I’ll project myself into several futures simultaneously …” [Lerner, 10:04 4]. Paradoxically and meta-fictionally this attempt at, this performance of or at a novel – – turns into an illocutionary act [Culler, Fortunes 506] and spawns, groundhog-day-ishly, the genus of that self-same short story — “The Golden Vanity” — a poem — “The dark threw patches down on me also” – and becomes something more or / and less than a novel — i.e. literature instead of a novel, or a
poem, or a short-story.— where it hoovers, lingers, buoys. For where its textual projection into
poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them” [ibid. 194]. It is therefore that I will call 10:04 a book, and not a novel, throughout this essay.
It is this narratorial aspect [narratif] of this projection on a meta-level, narrative as
adjective, narrativus where as in a book, the story only perfunctorily borrows its narrativity, its
being suited to narration, from the realist fiction and the flâneur tradition. It turns into a story of a novel; the promissory perlocutionary act of this book being a novel that doesn’t make landfall and this not making landfall becomes and always is the story; a book about the poetics of
narrative [Culler, Narrative 83]. What strikes me about this poetics, is how the plot and
narrative are both for the narrator as well as the meta-author finally narrated and narrativised, 1
bookended, by Hurricane Irene and Hurricane Sandy. What is compelling is that the events of the storms narrativise the narrative, landmarking the making of the plot and yet haunt it in never arriving . More than merely un-narratable events, a clash of narrative’s is offered. ; politics of time and temporality, allowing the making landfall of another politics of time serendipitously while actually symptomising differing and incompatible relations to History. This is where our 2
thesis makes landfall.
Seemingly fortuitously 10:04’s protagonist is also named ‘Ben’ [Lerner, 10:04 210], is an established poet who
1
has published both poetry and one novel to critical acclaim — like Lerner himself — and receives “a ‘strong six figure’ advance” for the expansion of the short story – The Golden Vanity – Ben Lerner wrote in The New Yorker. The book not only incorporates the short story as its part II in the book, verbatim, but also includes portions of the poem The Dark Threw Patches Down On Me Also copied word for word.
Like Morton does for Nature, I do too for History; to capitalise the word in order to dehistoricise it, in order to
2
“separate or remove from history; to deprive of historical context” ‘History’ itself and ‘denature’ [Morton,
I.ii. Irenes and Sandys
Lerner seems to make an argument which has been made by Amitav Ghosh [2016] in his book “The Great Derangement”, as an assertion that this poetics can test. For Ghosh argues it is specifically climate change’s uncanny prodromes or symptomatic, such as Irene and Sandy, , which literature fails to recognize due to the narrativity of “serious fiction” since “the 3
modern novel” [Ghosh 29, 37]. He contends that literature’s predominantly realist narratives have developed a disinclination and inability to accommodate not only the “improbable … exceptional … ” [ibid. 37, 37] and “the unheard-of … instances of exception” [Ghosh 17, 26] — which hurricanes, deluges, volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis seem to be — but also the improbable continuity and temporality, a different narrative of the real, a different history it offers in its syndrome: a narrative not of but by the climate crisis at large.
Whereas the first would ruin the credibility of narrative in the eyes of the gold standard of literature, bearing the name of deux ex machina, the second would not only regale the narrative in question to the outhouses of literature, “science fiction and fantasy” [Ghosh 66] but simply flounder, since explaining climate change would require “… the Borgesian task of reproducing the world in its entirety” [ibid 37]. Hence, it is only in a “limited-time horizon … that the novel becomes narratable” [61] and which it can narrate. Therefore, “[t]he longue durée” that forms the prerequisite of telling of such events as the carbon-dioxide timeline of the world simply is “not the territory of the novel” [Ghosh 59] according to Ghosh.
This state of representational exemption creates instances of exception, of exemptionality. Lerner, although avowing these assertions, does so strikingly by performing and experimenting with these contentions in a realist narrative. Probing the fallout of this full frontal, he brings global warming’s events and narrative in collision with the narrative of his flâneuresque exploits which bear witness to the clashing politics.
Attributed to the Anthropocene, the naming of the hurricanes both speaks for and against the Anthropocene,
3
affirming its reality as well as how it passes on the torch of agency to hyperobjects [Morton 2013] such as climate change, following the previous Holocene.
I swear to you
i wrote a swivelling aesthetic of
modal instability, or i as i would have said so long ago
son of man! mon semblable, mon frère, mon père.
But people only wanna talk about carbon emissions now
Stop talking, tell me of the sled,
of the again and again, of the
snow, not so long ago, of this
thing called April, so cruel, the
cruelest, yet distant, yet
somewhere closed
underneath ellipses where we
will breathe democratic closure,
vanishing moments …
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like that time when Fyodor said god / was dead and his wife had to shutHoldein up can you tell that story still or is it gone, with
the wind
like mommy when she went to get
We first encounter this contrapuntal in an ekphrastic exposé of both storms, in which this rhetorical exercise involutes into a Möbius ring and narration, until we finally see it’s the hurricanes themselves that have become the rhetorical exercise and device of the book.
I.iii. A stormchaser's methods
I mention ekphrasis because of its semantics and its etymology tying into this project and this thesis. The word originally derives from the Greek ek- [ἐκ-] and phrásis [φράσις] meaning “out” and “speak” respectively and ekphrázein [ἐκφράζειν] is “to proclaim or call an inanimate object by name”. This ekphrastic reading of storms is also chosen due to the tension encapsulated in the practice resonating with Ghosh' contention, encapsulating a tension between an ‘inanimate object’ speaking or being offered a voice versus it forcing us to voice it or us forcing a voice upon it. Allowing the address would , anthropocenically, deny non-human agency, and smooth its narrative overand out. Speaking out, being an intransitive verb, allows no room for the object. Being forced to an address in being addressed, would conversely indicate non-human agency. Although, the ekphrasis of an object would allow for a certain degree of control, where and when the ‘object’ does pipe up, starts spouting off, vociferating, and unmooring. 4
Putting ekphrasis, in these terms allows a granting and a having-of agency both ways, a managing of the agency of course resonating pace Ghosh’s assertion that representing the agency-narrative cognate and hence seeing the climate crisis is problematic. Agency and the authority vested in dictating the official narrative conflate in ekphrasis then, in Lerner's 10.04, in his ekphrasis and even on the level of this thesis, revolving as we shall see, around the same issue; whose politics dictate the political — who decides what community is, who utters the plot A similar tension is palpable in the agentification of the hurricanes, inanimately affective, in that they receive a
4
proper name, their utterance becoming an enunciation bearing an affectionately personal and uncanny familiarity, speaking as if a family member,Ike hasn’t made landfall yet. Conversely, this could also be read as the anthropomorphisation of hurricanes and yet another exacerbation of the Anthropocene, where we name them like we name our pets. And as some might know anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool, plays family, ‘my little doggy’,
of the common and the un-common? Who and which narrative achieves constellation. Whose 5
becomes an agent, an ill-fated star?
I.iv. Tempophagy
Because losing agency is losing narrative, is losing time, is losing of and from history. The storm
opening the book is Hurricane Irene, whose eye made landfall in New Jersey on the August 28,
2011. Although the hurricane caused extensive damage, it has been nicknamed the forgotten storm, perhaps by its downgrade from a Category 1to a tropical storm whichdissipated on the 30th of August, and because Hurricane Sandy followed less than a year later.
In Lerner’s 10:04 the focus lies on the rainbands and eyewall of the storm, the anticipation that precedes precipitation, where even the anticipation of the events that the storm could bring, impedes upon the narrative of NYC’s normative plot, which gifts narrative agency to Irene, making her the non-human agent of NYC’s time:
Emerging from the train, I found it was fully night, the air excited by foreboding and something else, something like the feel of a childhood snow day when time was emancipated from institutions, when the snow seems like a technology for defeating time, or like defeated time itself falling from the sky, each glittering ice particle an instant gifted back from your routine. Except now the now the material form of excitation wasn’t ice: the air around Union Square was heavy with water in its gas phase, a tropical humidity that wasn’t native to New York, an ominous medium.
[Lerner, 10:04 18] It is not time which seems, literally, defeated, but it is a time which is faltering. For temporal rhythms are temporal institutions which are narratives,encasing the stories and plots of our days. Temporal -phagy, tempophagy by Irene is so extensively intensive that it is capable of undoing
I say who instead of what since I would not deny agency to non-human agents.
these narratives; un-commodifying commodities, defamiliarizing shopping routines, dislodging goods from abstract labor time, severed from exchange value but in turn gifted back to use value as the city’s denizens prepare for the storm. All of these and other rhythms are emancipated, 6
unmoored and un-berthed by the storm front’s temporal discombobulation as the deluge’s portents slowly embed the city in a temporal medium, a viscous ooze, an aspic which envelops it and dissipates all narratives and narrators into a single medium, a single “agency or means of doing something”:
From a million media … awareness of the storm seeped into the city, entering the architecture and the stout-bodied passerines, inflecting traffic patterns … the city was becoming one organism … Because every conversation you overheard … began to share a theme, it was soon one common conversation you could join, removing the conventional partitions from social space.
[ibid. 17] Two things are occurring at once here: Irene has not only turned from an event occurring in a narrative into a narratorial agent, subjugating human agency to non-human agency of its eyewall. It also grants narrativity, passively or actively, to the community at large. A narrativity which wasn’t being enabled, wasn’t there outside of the crisis. A narrativity which wasn’t being allowed by this time — as well as the community it fosters — which has now been “defeated” [ibid. 18]. Secondly, discombobulation ensues even where NYC and its community is between these two
Although he appreciates the “majesty and murderous stupidity of that organization of time and space and fuel
6
and labour” all of a sudden in a precipitous recognition of a weird sense of admiration for the intricacy that is the commodity, it also pertains to its use value, and not merely its exchange value: “… the alteration was most likely in my vision, because everything remaining on the shelves also struck me as a little changed, a little charged … I held the red plastic container [of instant coffee], one of the last three on the shelf, held it the like the marvel it was” [ibid. 19]. In addition he speaks of “everything …” becoming “a little changed, a little charged” [ibid. 18].
time’s Other, history’s uncover lover / of starlight that dies / a-coming /
on its way as Walter would say
“ill-starred event / of my celestial encampment /
of the time / a once upon a time / story / like no other — a tempo
regardless of its rhythm always the time of that attack / volte /
regardless -face / white men’s angels are still black even when put into
constellations or disasters as Dad would say, smacking Eve and
caressing my head with his other hand the third on the kaleidoscope
aimed at the heavens below
climate change isn’t real
co-laterally we saw collateral damage arriving — Eve and I, together at
last
admittedly black at last
admittedly pandora’s story was sexist after all
at least thank God for those words
at least thank the raindrops for that they started falling and at least
thank the sky thank ruptured, at least thank God we weren’t
moonlighted anymore
narratives,between two times, “… ‘between crises’” [Halpern, Becoming a patient of history]. 7
Lerner showcases this understanding when the narrator and his friend Alex return to the latter’s apartment to weather the time of the storm and looks at “the now no longer entirely familiar photographs on the fridge” [ibid. 20] stating that strangely enough “everything in the photographs was as it had been, only different, as if the image were newly determinate, flickering between temporalities” [ibid. 21]. Moreover, as they wait out the storm watching The
Third Man — the movie’s narrator notices how:
The shadows of the trees bending in the increasing wind outside her window moved over the projected image on the white wall, and became part of the movie, as if keeping time to the zither music; how easily worlds are crossed, I said to myself, and then to Alex, who hushed me – I had a bad habit of talking over what we watched.
[Lerner, 10:04 22; my emphasis] Similarly, Irene has started talking over bourgeoisie reality, beginning with its artefacts and commodities, . Dehumanising time, where “a plot … is an organization
that humanizes time by giving it form” [Kermode qtd. in Culler, Narrative 81; my emphasis] according to Kermode, Irene’s eyewall approach literally creeps up and insinuates itself into the old slots, casting shadows into and through the frame of both the movie and reality. Through the between narratives, it opens up a third. It starts “keeping time to the zither theme” of NYC. This is once again pointed out by the narrator while he watches the second movie — Back To The
Future and listens to Irene:
Halpern, “Becoming a Patient of History: George Oppen’s Domesticity and the Relocation of Politics,” December
7
[I] put on Back to the future …but I played it without sound … I plugged earbuds into the storm radio and put one if my left ear and listened to the weather reports while Marty travelled back to 1955 …
[Lerner, 10:04] As Halpern knows, although one might utter the phrase “‘between crises”, “as one might speak of being between wars … there is never really any such ‘between’ — just the spell of an interregnum when everyone is holding breath, and waiting …” [Halpern, Becoming a patient of
history] interregnum’s — the third option — have to end, even if the state of exceptionality is the
status quo to which one returns, an abridgement of. For there is no such in between, because one narrative will upset the other because of their incompatible time-lines, duplicitous histories, narratives, and worlds. Luft von anderen Planeten to the table of History:
as the eye drew near, what normally felt like the only possible world became one among many, its meaning everywhere up for grabs, however briefly …
I.v. Now I am become Time, destroyer of worlds 8
For although Hurricane Irene is the narratorial agent, it is an event in he dominant timeline, and although it narrativises over the bourgeoisie narrative of a normal August 27th, 2011, the narrative to which it belongs, the time, temporality and the history it speaks for, is global warming. It is merely a prodrome, a protrusion of global warming’s systemic feedback loop and the effusion of accumulated carbon dioxide time and its timeline, its history which is another
history, another historical where it is our narrative which has event-status, is the disaster, in all
its etymological gravity.
Ghosh’s contention was, as we saw before, that the narrativity of the realist novel is simply incapable, in frame and grid, of adequately incorporating the effects of the climate crisis due to the scope and the probability of its relationality. It can only subsume it. I would argue however, with and through Lerner, that it is History, tied into the realist narrative tradition which cannot accommodate the climate’s narrative, its carbon-dioxide induced narration, its side of the story, its Ur - his-story.
It is this second history, or counter history, which literally cannot co-exist with the bourgeoisie, modern narration and fiction of the world since the one rewrites the other, and vice versa, as is evoked by Lerner in his narrator projecting Back to the Future, a movie about rewriting history, whilst playing it without sound as Irene’s rainbands bellow outside the window:
I played it without sound … I plugged earbuds into the storm radio and put one if my left ear and listened to the weather reports while Marty travelled back to 1955 – the year From the quote by Oppenheimer of the 1944 Prabhavananda and Isherwood translation of the Bhagavad Gita, “I
8
am become death, shatterer of worlds” [Morton, Hyperobjects epigraph]. The line which is quoted here is uttered by Krishna to The line quoted is spoken by Krishna, the eighth avatar of Vishnu to Kshatriya prince Arjuna. Oppenheimer mis-translated, not misquoted, the original Hindu scripture since he spoke and read Sanskrit, where a better translation would have been “I am all-powerful Time which destroys all things, and I have come here to slay these men. Even if thou doest not fight, all the warriors facing thee shall die” [Sage Vyasa 11:32] which I mistranslated for lyrical effect, since ‘death’ resonates with ‘shatterer’ and ‘time’ with ‘destroyer’. The “am become” instead of “I have become” is used to a similar effect, although it reminds me of the middle mode still available to verbs in PIE languages. Timothy Morton utilises the concept as a sword of Damocles, showcasing how we have both destroyed the world in a future anterior and the concept of world, felled in one stroke by the same act.
incidentally, nuclear power first lit up a town: Arco, Idaho also home to the first meltdown in 1961 – and then worked his way back to 1985
[Lerner, 10:04 23] Branches scraped against the window, casting their shadows in the 1980s, the 1950s …
[Lerner, 10:04 231] By the time the storm made landfall, Marty was teaching Chuck Berry how to play rock and roll in the past, which meant that, when he got back to the future, white people would have invented, not appropriated that musical form …
[Lerner, 10:04 231] As Back to the Future dubs a different narrative of how things came to be over the actual existent one, an ideological rewrite, climate’s narrative, seeps in through the storm radio by rewriting the community’s past and future into suspended liminality. Oozing out it tells of its plot, dubs over the sound of Back to the Future and drowns out the increasingly fictional clamour of Lerner’s narrator’s actuality, a history supposedly still tied to progress, to teleology, where although they lack “plutonium to power the time-travelling car” it is seeping “into Fukushima’s soil” [ibid. 23].
But global warming is that time-travelling car, branches scraping “in the 1980’s, the 1950’s” [ibid. 231] and beyond. It would have “worked [its] way back to” [ibid. 23] the beginning of the Anthropocene, as far as “1784, when carbon from coal-powered industries began to be deposited worldwide, including in the Arctic, thanks to the invention of the steam engine by James Watt” [Morton, Hyperobjects 4] and rewrite our History into a history from
there. Irene, as global warming’s pied piper, made us go back. Similarly, Lerner’s narrator cryptically concedes “Back to the future was” indeed “ahead of its time” [Lerner, 10:04 23].
This second history is primarily a geological time outside of History, a non-human contrapuntal to the Anthropocene in which humans originated as geological agents but in which global warming split off as its own geological agent. not merely a “coincidence of human history and terrestrial geology” [Morton, Hyperobjects 9], but an usurpation of time, in the conventional sense, is indeed defeated. It is not only because the events of human history align and signify differently on this timeline — and vice versa. More than that, there is no geological historicism, only historical materialism without teleology. A different temporal unit and increment holds sway here. That of carbon dioxide parts, of degrees and feedback loops per million. And although human history, like all narratives, was and remained teleological, global warming’s timeline has a τέλος, a definite ‘end’. 9
It is this point of no return, when the atmosphere reaches its tipping point, past the event-horizon into irreversible positive feedback loops of 400 ppm of CO2, which has given rise to the
term post-Historical and post-History and made us realize our old vainglorious ways. Arguably we have merely returned from the modernity project to its disguised forebear, eschatology and the substantiation of its eschaton. 10
I speak of the post-Historical and post-History, with capital h’s to signify the humanoid ideology and agency tied into futures past and futures that never were, in the light of the non-human, agentified future pasts already present now , whose “futurality is reinscribed into the present … ending the metaphysics of presence” forcing us “to coexist with a strange future, a future ‘without us’” [Morton, Hyperobjects 95]. Drawing more on Lerner’s conception of time than on Timothy Morton’s object-oriented ontology and metaphorisation of the geodetic effect — since mass is required to exercise a gravitational force on space-time; see equation 1 — Morton nevertheless articulates with the necessary gravitas the “future future” of objects, such as global warming, and nuclear waste, which due to their metaphorical ‘futurality’, have a “future …”
History, like all narratives, is ideological.
9
See the Keeling curve.
which “exerts a causal influence on the present, casting its shadow backward through time” [ibid. 120].
[1]
where:
F is the force between the masses;
G is the gravitational constant [6.674×10−11 N · [m/kg]2];
m1 is the first mass;
m2 is the second mass;
r is the distance between the centres of the masses.
Dually, this running out of time, or second history, non-capitalised h only becomes apparent against the totality of the first History, the History of empire. A History which disallows history, as becomes apparent in 10:04 when the penumbra of Hurricane Irene dissipates retroactively when the storm doesn’t make landfall and its future doesn’t either:
the hurricane had been downgraded before it reached landfall …
I got up and walked to the window; it wasn’t even raining hard. The yellow of the streetlamps revealed a familiar scene; a few branches but no trees. I went into the kitchen and drank a glass of water and glanced at the instant coffee on the counter and it was no longer a little different from itself, no longer an emissary from a world to come; there was disappointment in my relief at the failure of the storm …
[Lerner, 10:04 24; my italics] How can a storm fail? Lerner’s narrator surmises Morton’s — and Parikka’s [2017] as well as others — contention, as well as mine, in the storm’s historic failure, which he contends for Hurricane Sandy, occurring a year later, and [book]ending the book:
… we got into bed and projected Back to the Future onto the wall; it could be our tradition for once-in-a-generation weather… when I woke, I walked to the windows … We neer lost power. Another historic storm that had failed to arrive, as though we lived outside of history or were falling out of time.”
[Lerner, 10:04 230] The crisis which had been argued for fails to arrive. Ironically, we move back to the future which doesn’t seem to arrive, back to that almost verbatim repeat of those sentences . establishing the temporal circularity of the non-arrival, similarly and performatively declared to Irene:
I got up and walked to the window; it wasn’t even raining hard. The yellow of the streetlamps revealed a familiar scene; a few branches
like
, people never
know they made history until they’re dead.
“quand tu arriveras, il l’’arriva déjà fait”
she simpered and lisped “no no no no no no no no no no” —- “après moi, le deluge” unheard but not unspoken
the car of history passed the event horizon reddish objects in our mirror lingered may be
closer than they might appear lingering for a long time
like dying stars tend to do
when I woke, I walked to the windows; it was still raining hard, but the yellow of the street lamp revealed a mundane scene; a few branches had fallen, but no trees.”
[ibid. 230] Our backs are to the future, in that this “historic storm” [ibid. 230] its non-arrival would seem to argue that we are “outside of history” and in History, perpetually “falling out of” a “time” [ibid. 230] which keeps attempting to get a foothold in our contemporaneity, but is not included in its collapse because History won’t allow history in. 11
Making landfall or back to the future
Whereas a rewriting, a re-narrativising is ideological, notallowing-for-the-rewrite is too, like arguing against global warming, or re-branding it as climate change. In Irene’s downgrade and non-arrival , its futurality as Morton would say, also does not arrive, and it cannot rewrite History which Lerner finds has political consequences :
… whatever physical intimacy had opened up between us had dissolved with the storm … More than that: it was as though the physical intimacy with Alex , just like the sociability with strangers or the aura around objects, wasn’t just over, but retrospectively erased. Because those moments had been enabled by a future that had never arrived, they
This is reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura and his Theses on the philosophy of history. It becomes
11
more telling where the word ‘aura’ is used in this particular segment of the book — “lending it a certain aura” [Lerner, 10:04 19] — too. As for Lerner’s conception of history: the book is preluded by an epigraph which is a quote of Benjamin quoting his friend Gershom Sholem and by a picture of Angelus Novus early on in the book and the painting by Klee is accompanied by a quote by Benjamin and Lerner comments in the post-script that he found these in Agamben’s The Coming Community. The famous monoprint is of course used for Benjamin’s famous ekphrasis on histiography, Theses on the Philosophy of History.
could not be remembered from this future that, at and as the present, had obtained; they’d faded …
[ibid. 24] Although this theme returns in many of the parables and allegories occurring after the disaster throughout the book, “post-disaster, and still the thing has yet to come” [Halpern, Disaster Suites 79], and yet before it— , it is particularly profound with regard to hurricanes, since these instigated a directly political moment in that they re-arranged the commons and hence community’s terminology. . Global warming’s narrative strangely created a “[concern] … with men in the aggregate” [Ghosh 106], whereas the incumbent narrative, is paradoxically its product, ““individual moral adventure—of the evolving individual in varied and roughly equal battle with a world of circumstance” [ibid. 106].
This is not merely through or due to the narrative of crisis. Although crisis might have been the interruption, its narrativisation as crisis denies the narrative and the crisis of History — it naturalises History once again. this political moment is also due to the fact that it was defeated by its non-arrival, where agency is defined, as we shall see in chapter iii, thru its relation to the programmability of history, This political agency dissipated with the “at and as the present” which continued. For although human agency might be upset from its Anthropocenic seat and subjugated to the non-human, it is still an agency in a Nature-nature master-slave dialectic; it merely might be a dialectic that will end.
The history of global warming is in this sense anti-historical, not the ahistorical but the a-historical in its inversion, its counter-puntal and not a contrapuntal; an anachronism, a falsetto. Stemming from the Greek ἀνά [ana], "against" and χρόνος [khronos], “time" — the Greek
anakchronismos, from anakhronizein, or “referring to the wrong time” — and is “out of
harmony with a specified time”. It is, from the standpoint of the realist narrative – and modernism’s telos for that matter – ana-khronos: against time or better said in terms of the Anthropocene, against our time; post-historical and anti-Historical.
Although there is agency in the loss of agency, there isn’t in its mirage, whose effects are discombobulating, politically and temporally for that matter. For even when Hurricane Sandy does happen it did not occur where the two histories can’t co-exist:
Another historic storm that had failed to arrive, as though we lived outside of history or were falling out of time. Except it had arrived, just not for us … We talked constantly about the urgency of the situation, but were still unable to feel it… the coverage of the storm we kept failing to experience.
[Lerner, 10:04 230, 231, 232] History, with a capital ‘H’ subtends the flower of empire’s ideology. It is empire’s history, “empire’s temporality” [Halpern, Disaster 81], empire’s time — imperial time — which doesn’t accommodate the experiencing of the storm, and smooths it over disallowing in this move one particularly vital aspect of disaster. Namely, as Halpern points out:
disaster is what we hold in common as a community, despite its not being here for us to share as a site for communion.
[ibid. 82] “[D]isaster” is not merely that which “we hold in common” and fails to become a site of communion. In Lerner’s 10:04, it is disaster which holds us in the commons.
History, with a capital H, being empire’s temporality, is almost, seemingly then, in its horology and chronology — its linear empiricism — utopic in its “postponement of the future” [Benjamin, Kafka 129] and simultaneously dystopic in appearing to stagnate at the “end
of time when history has ceased” [Mihailescu 215] — the utopia of ectopia, empire’s eutopia — in its disallowing of the temporality of global warming to arrive and create the coming community. Poet Rob Halpern makes a strikingly similar and poignant point with regard to this temporality in that he notices in writing about Hurricane Katrina :
I am afraid there’s an all too familiar irony, that occasionally enters the poems, and this unsettles me. A voice seems to take shape around a comfortable air of fatefulness … the irony of direct statement, the swagger of rhetorical effect as if what will have happened
were what is already happening now. Some of the poems thus dispense fatally with the
promising gap between tenses and instead presume the suppression of time’s discontinuities, filling in the fault non-contemporaneity, time’s disjointedness that that
the mind, like ideology, passes over and seals. The performance of smoothness, the
insurance of the present by way of a contracted voice, sometimes sounds like a bad imitation of empire’s temporality, as the tone of time hardens into structure an amplifies what can’t be heard this being the sound of everything deafening rather than readying, toning.”
[Halpern, Disaster Suites 81; italics in original] 12
So although the future anterior is now, transubstantiation is only complete with communion;
what will have been is what is now.
The beginning of 10:04 precipitates a this temporal problematic t , , through an ekphrastic comparative commentary of Jules Bastien-Lepagé Joan of Arc [1879] and Robert “empire’s temporality” [Halpern, Disaster Suites 81] I understand here, allegorically yet also literally, as the time
12
of Plato’s Republic, its temporal genealogical remainder in our temporality. “The management of time in the
Republic” [Robson 300], that “first component of his Republic” where he states that “artisans must be found only in
their workplace because ‘work does not wait’”. As we shall see, empire’s temporality — imperial time — is a time of post-politics, a time of global consensus, a time “that does not wait” in subjugating each and everyone to the formal equality it shares with the post-democracy, as we will discover in our exegetical on the contemporary in the following two chapters.
Zemeckis’ Back to the Future [1985]. The former — see picture 1 — showcases Joan of Arc summoned by three angels to rescue France, where she “appears to stagger toward the viewer, reaching her left arm out” and where her “hand seems to dissolve” [Lerner, 10:04 9]. The second — see picture 2 — is “the photograph Marty carries in Back to the Future … as Marty’s time travelling disrupts the prehistory of his family, he and his siblings begin to fade from the snapshot. Only here it’s a presence, not an absence, that eats away at her hand: she’s being pulled into the future.” [ibid. 9].
The climate crisis engenders similar temporal manipulations, showcasing a relief against which empire’s -- i.e. Western History’s, history's western -- temporality becomes apparent in its ridges and grooves. Where the climate’s narrative directly contradicts the narrative of progress, subjugation and control that the Anthropocenic narrative fosters, it writes out our narrative, our event, by altering the past, much like Marty McFly rewrites the past of our present and therefore newly inaugurates becoming present in a shadow history which narrates an absence of the
present present. Simultaneously, this narrative too abrogates our futural, futurality and future, or
narrative of progress, and our history’s future, due to the presence of the particular future it narrates us toward. Where in the Joanne d’Arc ekphrasis Joanne d’Arc is disappearing, dissolving, due to the presence of the future – the “being pulled into the future” [9] - the climate change’s narrative simultaneously offers a different narrativity for the future anterior it offers, which dissolves our present’s present, like our newly rewritten past also did — a bathetic temporal termination. Bookended by both storms in 10:04, the temporality of climate change bookends our present’s present.
This is the politics of climate change, and this political moment is brought about by climate change’s temporality in its non-arrival and usurpation of our supposed relation to History. Its non-arrival what makes our present more than global warming’s post-historical history, ahistorical. A placeholder, a place-holding time. Our backs are against the walls of the future and past – of future pasts and past futures. It is not then that climate change’s narrative, its narrative of history, is post-historical — it is post-Historical — or ahistorical for that matter, or moulds our contemporary moment into this — it is a-Historical — but rather that it forces us to
History-history pair in its narrative. No longer tied to teleology, to progress, and unable to accompany the non-human usurper. Empire’s temporality only reveals itself more profoundly in a dialectical relation to this negative, this inversion if you will.
Figure 1 - “the presence of the future” [ibid. 10] Figure 2 - “the absence of the future” [ibid. 10]
It is this difference in “tonality” [Halpern, DS 81] of temporality, which also registers a difference of how these two narratives, two temporalities differ in their relation to history, and hence, in their concept of the political, their politics, and the forms of community they allow and suggest. And although such differences might seem slight, they make all the difference:
The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby
sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.
[Walter Benjamin qtd. in Lerner, 10:04 epigraph] 13
Analyzing what this current ahistorical relation to history entails, as well as its after-effects we now turn to the question of what this contemporary relation to history is. We turn to the question of the contemporary. Whycan’t “the Messiah” [ibid. 100] of global warming and its “emissaries” [Lerner, 10:04 23] be heard? What is this “representative logic” [Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics 15] which obfuscates, a priori, our uncanny family members, our Houdini cousins; our Irenes and Sandys? That reduction of the political implications of climate change to ethical matters? Or as Halpern asks, which “tone of time hardens into structure an amplifies what can’t be heard this
being the sound of everything deafening rather than readying, toning” [Halpern, Disaster Suites
81]?
One of contemporaneity as we shall see.
Benjamin actually heard the story from Gershom Scholem, and recounted it differently to Ernst Bloch, who
13
reiterated it in Spüren:
A rabbi, a real cabbalist, once said that in order to establish the reign of peace it is not necessary to destroy everything or to begin a completely new world. It is sufficient to displace this cup or this bush or this stone just a little, and thus everything. But this small displacement is so difficult to achieve and its measure is so difficult to find that, with regard to the world, humans are incapable of it and its necessary that the Messiah come.
II. The tempolitics of the contemporary
or how “times have changed”
As already stated in the first chapter, this chapter questions why a narrativisation of history,
differently, is not being allowed, is not accepted, or able, temporally and politically, to make
landfall dually -
Land-fall. The first land discovered after a sea voyage. Thus a good land fall implies the land expected or desired; a bad landfall the reverse.
[Moore, "The New Practical Navigator," London, 1814] Why does this address fail? Why does this narrative fail? Where is the desired history, why do we make it, badly, baldly, boldly, fall? Why do we only sight — discover? — the history which is ‘bad’ land?
Although global warming symptomatically, as purposefully exposéd in Lerner’s 10.04 and hinted at in chapter one, is particularly incisive as the prodrome of this crisis of history — is complicit in its non-arrival is a larger temporally political problem which represents and isrepresented outside of History, transubstantiating it into an ecological crisis within and of History in being incompatible with the history of global warming.
This, however, is merely one of its more profound examples of creating a normalcy out of exceptionality. In this second chapter, we put forward a critique of this temporality, Empire’s temporality — the umpire of history — in or with which global warming does not make history — i.e. is not notably engaged in public events, the timeline of the common. A not making of the
cut, the count of time dually : does not arrive in time, runs out of time. We will addres the politicality of temporality, of history,as such and in particular our Temporality of History.
Once upon a time
‘Once upon a time’ — “that whore in the bordello of historicism” [Benjamin, Theses XVI]— is filled up and fills up with, charges and is charged with the demands of history . It is a conceptual homonym showcasing at once the interlocution between history, narrative and ideology, between a then and a there, a here and a now, or as Halpern states “once upon a time is always
here” [Halpern, Notes 1; my emphasis] and follows with:
Ideology is a narrative practice. Narrative situates us historically in the world. Once
upon a time opens onto this critical scene of telling and distributes an historical here equally thru the space of narration. The scene …is domestic; it frames a world within the world while promising a way to encounter the frame. Narrative is … the vehicle of ideology … charged with the demands of history.
[Halpern, Notes 9-10; emphasis in original]
If one assays the etymology of the words, one quickly happens upon this common denominator in both time, history and narrative. 'Narrative’as a noun derives from the Middle French
narrative and from ‘narrative’ as an adjective. ‘As an adjective it derives from the similar
adjective in Middle French narratif, which stems from the Late Latin narrativus or “suited to narration”. Narration [narracion] means “account, statement, a relating, recounting, narrating, narrative tale," and stems directly from Latin narrationem, the nominative of narratio, "a relating, narrative" and, in the noun of action, from past participle stem of -narrare ”to tell, relate, recount, explain," literally "to make acquainted with," from gnarus "knowing," from the Proto-Indian Europian *gne-ro-, suffixed form of the Sanskrit root of *gno- "to know.”. As Halpern elucidates:
From the Sanskrit root gna, or know, our word narrative derives bound to practice. In Latin, the root meaning appears to have doubled, manifesting an otherwise latent critical difference. There is at once [g]narus: knowing … and narro: to relate or tell. [1] A fault —mine, and ours—runs thru the space between. Fault: deficiency, lack, scarcity; as well as slip, error, mistake. Also, more critically: fault as dislocation or a break in continuity of the strata or vein.
[Halpern, Notes 1: emphasis in original] A similar fault runs through history, is history. Where history stems from history [n.] where it meant a true or false "relation of incidents" in the late 14th century, and springs from the Old French estoire/estorie or "story; chronicle, history” where this doubled, parallel genealogy of story to chronicle, from annals to timeline already becomes apparent. As in Middle English, 14
where it was not differentiated from ‘story’. The sense of "narrative record of past events” was probably only first attested in the late 15c where it was only, tellingly, non-narrativised as "the recorded events of the past" too when it arose as a viable branch of knowledge in epistemology. A similar dialectic can be perceived in the contrapuntal of fiction and non-fiction and in the resonance of auto-fiction one finds between it. A later hyponym of the Latin historia "narrative of past events, account, report, tale, story,” too derives from the Greek historia [ἱστορία] "a learning or knowing by inquiry; an account of one's inquiries, history, record”.
It is finally “narrative”, this narrative of the word history, which finds its origins, its “once upon a time” in historein [ιστορειν] "inquire," from histor- that “wise man, judge,” and finally from the Proto-Indian European root of *wid-tor-, which stems from the root *weid- “to see”, were perception is the first narrativisation of the world. It is here too that we turn to its last cognate, time.
For time similarly is in and of itself a narratorial position, its first — premise — definition already hinting that it carries narrative as an adjectival:
time |tʌɪm|
See for instance the Cronica fiorentina or the Nuovo Cronica.
noun
1 [ mass noun ] the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the
past, present, and future regarded as a whole.
Although its narratorial element is readily apparent in time in its being an operational definition — this most fundamental and basic premise is visible in its nominalisation of past, present and future as a whole in — in its capacity as a quantity component in measurements of change, it is best encapsulated in the fact that it is time’s premise because: time narrates time. Or as Robson states “[t]ime is something narrative dispenses, but time also dispenses narrative.” [Robson 299].Kermode attests this, pointing out: “when we say a ticking clock goes ‘tick-tock’, we give the noise a fictional structure, differentiating between “two physically identical sounds, to make
tick a beginning and tock an end” [Kermode paraphrased in Culler, Narrative 83] and narrating
time with time.
Instead of subscribing to Newtonian time we follow the Kantian-Leibnizian temporal paradigm, for all narratives are ideological in being historical and making historical, as Halpern necessarily reminded us.15
Here Time in the sense of an independent container through which events and existence flows — the Newtonian conception in Newtonian mechanics — is an ideological vehicle, ascribing spacetime-like realness to clearly intellectual structures such as temporal rhythms, providing societal consignation and exclusion in its narratorial capacity, its interrelating of parts, positions and even second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year, et cetera as ontological positions. More than that, its narratorial capacityis the time History runs and ran thru with and
with History, where instead of following a geodesic of time, History performed its own geodetic
effect of ideology unto Time,beginning with that once upon a time, forgettingits uncommonness. See figure 5. Or as Rancière more concisely puts it: “time is the best medium for exclusion” [Rancière, In What Time Do We Live? 1].
Following Kant and Leibniz contention does not imply here for me that I don’t subscribe to the concepts of
15
spacetime and the general and special theory of relativity, grasping spacetime as a unified entity of space and time in which there is a relativity of simultaneity due to kinematic and gravitational time dilation — or contraction for that matter, depending on the reference frame — i.e. time being a independent-dependent quantity component of reality. Also, this is why I take issue with Morton’s reification of metaphorical appropriation of physical fact into literal concept — see Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects.
landfall,
that
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‘making’
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,
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-A temporal commons
This becomes readily apparent when in 10.04, the narrator, a published author and Alex, his recently unemployed friend visit Marclay’s artwork The Clock:
… we waited well under an hour when we were let in. The Clock is a clock …”
[Lerner, 10.04 52] Although Marclay’s clock denotes the time differently it is still a notation of it:
“it’s a twenty-four-hour montage of thousands of scenes from movies and a few fro TV edited together so as to be show in real time; each scene indicates the time with a shot of a timepiece or its mention in dialogue; time in and outside of the film is synchronised …”
[ibid; 52]
On page 53, he synchronisation of a supposed breaching, which ruptures contrapuntal in several of the historical avant-garde movements of time — is telling in and on itself. Immediately significant is the narratorial capacity of temporality for the common in dictating positions, activities and even assuming identities: 16
Interestingly, almost as a nod towards our futures past the narrator states that rather than arriving at 11:27, he
16
“had wanted to arrive by 10.04 to see lightning strike the courthouse clock tower in Back to the Future, allowing Marty to return to 1985 …” [Lerner, 10.04 52] symbolically arriving at a time where there was still a future, and hence a back to the future. Coincidentally, he and his friend did not make this, because “Alex couldn’t get a tram
… as you spend time with the video, you develop a sense of something like the circadian clock of genre … the hour of 05:00 to 06:00 p.m. … was dominated by actors leaving work; around noon you could expect and uptick in westerns, in shootouts … Marclay had formed a supragenre that made visible … when we expect to kill or fall in love or clean ourselves or fuck or check our watch or yawn.
[ibid. 53]17
At 11:27 the narrator states that “the tension of imminent midnight was palpable, the twenty-three and a half hours of film that preceded us building inexorably to that climax” [ibid. 52; my emphasis] and here our story picks up again too, attesting to the seemingly physical reality of time as a medium for ontology.
in the creation of the expectation of a certain narration: “[n]ow the actors in each scene, no matter how incongruous, struck me as united in anticipation of that threshold” [ibid. 52] and indeed dually, for this thesis, before midnight “several consecutive people on the screen were on the phone begging for stays of execution” [ibid. 53]. Similarly, the narrator and his friend are in a
position to wait due to his occupation and her non-occupation and could wait under an hour, waiting for time literally to see this clock, this time .
Although the ekphrasis focusses more extensively on the temporality of art, its actuality versus its virtuality and the distinction in artistic labour time to a pre-arts and crafts mind’s eye theatre, we turn to temporality through this artwork, and specifically, the second definition which doubles into it, temporal matters, better known for secular authority and its Platonic hatred for artists :
temporality |ˌtɛmpəˈralɪti|
…
‘Uptick’ resonates with this, the pun I feel being intentional here.
ii. [usu. temporalities] a secular possession, especially the properties and
revenues of a religious body or a member of the clergy. proposals were put
forward in Parliament for appropriating the temporalities of the clergy.
Temporalities are indeed secular possessions, or the properties and revenues of the body of the commons, and what is commons needs to be spent wisely, distributed, carried, borne and worn, lest we fall out of Time, or as Rancière asseverates, “every description of a ‘state of things’ gives priority to time.” [Rancière, In What Time Do We Live? 1].
The ‘common’ — what is common to the community, what is its commons — is “a state of things” [ibid. 1] or a certain ‘distribution of the sensible’ [Rancière 2017; Rancière 2013; Rancière 2005; Rancière 2004a; Rancière 2004b] or a grid of interrelations between “sense and sense”, between “things that are said to be perceptible and the sense that can be made out of those things” [Rancière 2017: 1] and hence be held in the common as such. This concept by 18
Jacques Rancière pertains to “the necessary junction between aesthetic and political practices” [Rancière 2004b: 12].
In this chapter I focus primarily on the concept as a “distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity” which simultaneously constitutes “[an] apportionment of parts and positions” which “determines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals have a part in this” [ibid. 12; my emphasis] .An occupation in these “a priori forms”, these “primary aesthetics” of “a priori forms” [ibid. 12] and therefore political aesthetics “determine the ability or inability to take charge of what is common to the community” [ibid. 11]. The focus is on the way in which politicality is distributed for a partaking because “a citizen is someone who has a part in the act of governing and being governed” [ibid. 11], has a occupation available and possible, dually, and not singularly, in political subjugation-subjection, or as Rancière puts it:
Although it resonates with a Foucauldian concept such as discourse, Rancière deals with the semes and
18
sememes of sense of everything that is particular of the commons. Although the Foucauldian sayable defining the thinkable and the doable would constitute Rancière’s perceptible or sensible.
“A speaking being, according to Aristotle, is a political being. If a slave understands the language of its rulers, however, he does not ‘possess’ it.”
[ibid. 11]
