The One Way Weave
It is a philosophical cliche these days to say that something very odd has happened with our conception of time, with the advent of modernity. Speaking as a philosopher, or a sociologist or an anthropologist, it is obvious that something must have happened, to our of understanding of time, the only problem is exactly what…? Perhaps one can do no worse here than to follow Heidgger’s schema (although to misuse it terribly). Heidegger suggests that time is commonly is caught between two rather different understandings. On the one hand, he suggests there is ‘vulgar’ or ordinary time, which is the product of the working day, and the mechanization of labour. Time is divided up as a series of small local presents, with each present being held to be identical to all the rest (a series of nows), and all arranged in an irreducible order. On the other hand, there is what Heidegger characterizes as authentic time, which is capable, through a subtle interplay of past, present and future, of seizing the very irreducible flow of time, as human destiny, a flow within which a life is held and history made. Romantic that he was, Heidegger argued that the second form of time was the natural state of Being itself, and that the first form was a product of modernity. However perhaps in this, Heidegger’s own romanticism blinded him (as it blinded him to Hitler). The idea of a time or rupture and progress, or moment and destiny, or even of points within which history itself is changed, is surely the product of modernity and a world of strange changes it brings, as is that other concept which draws time into a sequence of identical presents.
Be that as it may, Heidegger makes another valid point in his discussion of the second form of time. He suggests that this time is defined by elements of individual Being (time therefore ends with personal death), and yet it oscillates across the world of the historical. Time therefore impels an uncanny link between a world that is at each point purely individual (although it remains pre-personal), and history itself. The choice which Heidegger presents lies between; A time, which in claiming to be universal, immediately demands that it exists across every element in the world (we all share the same vulgar time), as a single global system within which every (valueless) life is mapped out; And a time which starts off as firmly located within an individual process, or life, and yet then oscillates across elements whose provenance lies totally beyond the apparent remit of individuality from whence it started. The former time is then the abstract time of the predicable, and universalizable world, while the second time is the ‘real’ time where an apparently personal process, a life, has sudden, and strange impact on the world beyond it.
Of these two times it is very clear that the former one, is very much a time we all know so very well, in the West at least; for this is the time of modern ‘freedom’ and ‘choice’. Our world is endlessly set into a single mould, or (to jump philosophers slightly) cast in a single ideology. We endlessly claim that a world globalized (where rich communication is the norm) is the same as a globalized world (where global institutions and freedoms are simply accepted), and that anyone who fails to realize it is simply daft. Western ways (making a world which we like, a world of Coke and corrupt democracies, we all know so very well, a world which we, in the west feel comfortable in) is utterly confused with a world where it really is possible (or at least appears to be possible) to communicate with voices (or electric images) of people anywhere and at any time. We therefore (as every good imperialist must) merrily confuse our culture with the power which flows on from our knowledge, and assume that only the wicked or stupid (or morally or ‘racially’ degenerate) do not realize the self evident nature of this somewhat problematic
conjunction.
And yet one needs caution even here. It is of course a mistake to simply accept that what we say we are doing is quite what we are doing. It is very clear that our culture is itself rapidly warping under the pressure of globalization. The warping existing both on the noisy level of ‘cultural traditions’ but also of the far quieter and more insipid level of political reality (although in reality both these levels are often caught up in each other). On the one hand therefore, almost as never before, our popular culture is gripped by fads and crazes which sweep up everyone for a while, and then fizzle out (satellite/cable TV, mobile phones, I-pods, friends-reunited, Doom, Facebook, etc).
These changes need not all be trivial (although the list I have just given perhaps is). Computers (in particular, but modernity in general) clearly constantly alter what a human can do. Our power as to act now is therefore really very different from our power ten years ago, a difference not measured by time, but rather by material change (the oddity of this situation is perhaps expressed in that many of these changes are caught up in games, and gaming or recreation, where we explore in a relaxed manner what we appear to have become). Moreover we expect our powers (other things being equal) to change again in the next ten years. Interestingly enough, given the profundity of the changes, they remain imperceptible on day to day life (we merely notice that we become impatient with old technology); humans are therefore caught up in a slow warping of how they can act, a warping they cannot control, and yet which seeps into almost every dimension of their lives (contacting the family or one’s friends are now very different, and so the friendship and family which are composed through these contacts are likewise different).
Additionally it is not just what we do that changes, our language also constantly evolves and shifts to cope with this changing set of circumstances. We then express our profound discomfort with these changes both through vapid and empty appeals to breathlessness (‘our busy lives’); but also through that far darker suspicion of any all too tangible element of change (for example migration). Perhaps the current puerile change in migration rules are really rooted in the discomfort which we feel in our own culture as the world ‘goes global’. We know our culture was not what it was, and look for someone to blame, an old, sad and frankly wicked story…
On the level of society it is very clear, in the West at least, that our political structures are themselves buckling under the pressure of globalization. It is not clear who wields political influence (let alone power) these days – or even if they do so. That is, it is not clear exactly who are the modern politician’s political constituents. Are they their voters? The Media? The world of business? The rich? The poor? Of course the vapid and easy answer is that it is all of these ’fortunate’ individuals, and yet this answer really will not do for two reasons. Firstly, there is clearly nothing stable about the number or nature of ‘the constituents’: To aid business people one needs to know what that business chief needs or wants, and yet that is exactly what is shifting; Likewise to help every different interest group is to act at a certain time and in a certain circumstance, a circumstance that will certainly have changed long before the consequences of that action are felt. Secondly the web of relations between all the differing constituents means that it is simply impossible to aid all of them at once, or even to aid the same individuals (or set of individuals) without also at another level hurting them. One might aid business but then hurt it, or the rich… In short, the modern problem with politics sees politicians not only lose any clear power (beyond that is, to go to war, which is perhaps why they like doing it so very much); but also lose any really clear notion of whom they are acting for (and why). We are seeking then to globalize the system, just when the logic of globalization has severely compromised the very model we are holding up as the norm. There is no doubt a deep poetic justice here. Our system was not the most natural to be globalized after all, and warps and breaks with the best of them, in the face of the globalization which it claims to have created.
However at this point one needs to take care about what is being said. No doubt the advocates of freedom will mutter here about the lack of formal oppression (by which they mean torture) in ‘free societies’. A statement that might be countered by two rather different arguments. On the one hand it is of course the case, that while torture is at least officially illegal in the West, that slow torture of poverty and hunger is still very much the norm in the system created by the West: as Marx (and Engles) noted - slavery comes in many forms, and so even a war against slavery (such as the American Civil War) might not appear as just as all that, if the result is that the same ex-slaves are caught up in the drudgery of poverty wages and starvation, as the necessary corollary of their new enforced freedom.
On the other hand (as every anthropologist, or Marxist knows) one needs to remember that what is being globalized is first and foremost a system of production, and consumption, and only secondly a political system. The case that westernization equals freedom, then rests on the Marxist conjecture that if one changes the material circumstances in which people live (and the jobs they are expected to do), then the political and social processes also change, so as to encourage a certain set of freedoms. Thence it is not by strident arguing, or smug claims to superior rationality or morality, that the West changes the world, but rather through the hard dynamics of power, and the ‘corrosive’ effects of production/consumption. A corrosion that binds us up within it, just as truly as it binds up other cultures, and which we can only hide from by pretending it is not really there.
Thus far this Rant has remained in the orbit of the first type of time: the time of the vulgar assertion of globalization. A time which captures and warps the world. However that second time which for Heidegger was so Authentic, needs not to be simply forgotten. On the contrary this time may yet makes fools of us all, if one is permitted to make one change in Heidegger’s initial schemata. As said above, - it was the case for Heidegger, that it was critical that ‘authentic’ time is caught up in history: That being in time at a certain moment, seizes and makes resonate the historical, in a certain way. The tragi-comedy of this claim written in 1928 by man who subsequently supported Hitler, and thought his moment too had come, is clear to all. History has, and had, a horrid habit of escaping any destiny willed for it by any individual, and does so no matter how great that desire itself was. And the basic point remains however, that there is a kind of eruption in the modern conception of time, a point where what appeared one dimension of one problem, suddenly, and unexpectedly impacts upon the world otherwise, setting off whole new trains and consequence of actions.
This no doubt feels still all rather abstract. And yet the point is very real to us all (and arguably increasingly so). For this is the deep problem of pollution. ‘Pollution’ of itself does not ‘really’ exist. What exists are chemicals that are either in the wrong place or time or in the wrong form, for the current eco-system to effectively manage, without changing in some drastic way. Pollution is therefore the consequence of a set of processes, which take up and use for a specific end, the molecular and atomic worlds, and then hope at the end of those processes that the elements which allowed those processes to occur, will simply vanish into scotch mist (or smog).
To speak, perhaps like Heidegger, one might say that pollution is the strange consequence of the being of chemicals beyond the humanity, which summoned them forth. Thence it is the strange effect of human history. The strange effect of a world that will not simply vanish into a nice neat past (where everything is over) but rather is destined to hang around (as a ‘having been’) complicating everything. Perhaps (now speaking rather differently from Heidegger) the problem is that the very being of molecules, are defined prior to the domain of action for those particles, and yet are still configured (as its Being is for us) within one set of actions or consequences of its existence. We therefore look to a molecular world to fulfil our desires (although of course this fulfilling is not at all simple, - desires develop in the context of what humans feel they ought to be able to do, that is, under the light of the possibilities offered them in the molecular). Molecules are developed (or thought about) in the context of those desires (even those which they are materially prior to). The Molecule and what we want to do with it, become given in the same thought, and we forget that the molecule summoned up has a life quite independently, a life of its own, which when freed from the circumstances we made for it, it is ‘free’ to live. Here of course one needs care. The Molecule itself has no ‘life’, and yet it will exist as a little hard irreducible factor in the process (and so in relation to the desires) of numerous living organisms. The same molecule will therefore be ‘up stream’ of numerous other processes, warping them or rendering them impossible.
Hence perhaps time is characterized by two interlinked dimensions. Firstly time is now configured around the journeys of molecules (or people) across the world. The problem of pollution (which is after all, surely one of the defining problems of globalization) is a problem of individual (but hidden) journeys. Small ‘additional’ and irreducible elements journey across the globe, journeys that are impossible to simply monitor or follow (and yet will at each point open up the possibility for further change and disruption). The passage of time works odd effects (plastic invades the oceans, or rubber ducks sail across the seas). Secondly, these elements are only easily known in their moments of eruption, that is the moment they change (or suddenly risk changing) everything. It is as the ice shelf melts, or bees die en mass that we realize that everything has gone really rather horribly wrong… We are caught up in the world of odd, hidden and yet strangely unique journeys of imperceptible particles. And yet for all that imperceptibility, it is the nature of these particles to, at certain times and in certain places, effect and disrupt the complex processes in which life (or the climate) occurs, forcing such processes to jar otherwise.
A full investigation of these processes, and how they in turn interlink back into our understanding of capitalism, will be taken up in the next Rant. For now, what matters in this Rant is that odd dualism, which runs so deep in our understanding of the world. On one hand there is a somewhat pious liberal hope that interlinks globalization, with facets of western culture (capitalism) and hopes that other aspects of that culture will also follow on (freedom); and does so in spite or no doubt because of the fact that that freedom is being warped by the very process of being globalized. Thence the time that claims to be universal (or even the end of history) is quietly wrapped up in a strange direction of its own. The alternative take on time, looks to a world of oddly unpredictable journeys, undertaken by elements which we conjure up, and yet which even as that conjuring gives us a power, strangely wobble off, and elude our grasp, creating other parallel acts within the world. Our problem is perhaps that the second take on reality demands that our existence remains profoundly located within the consequence of something else, a something which queries our unique power, even as it renders us powerful, - a situation that humanity bereft of the habit of thinking of the nature of god(s) finds rather difficult to comprehend.
