The Fate of Public Time: toward a time without qualities

Stephen Wright — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 12:37:13 +0000

Stephen Wright

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For some time now, I’ve been meaning to respond to Lee Weng Choy’s thoughtful posting on the need for “slowing things down.” There is something intuitively urgent about that appeal for calm, which I felt needed to be fleshed out. Has something happened to time, I found myself wondering, or is it just our overwrought egos and zealous scheduling that need to be put on depressants? Then, during the Basekamp discussion, I heard myself improvising something about the becoming-we of n.e.w.s.; arguing somewhat self-evidently that our collective assemblage of enunciation is bound to “change over time.” That it is, but what does it mean to change “over time”? What is “over” time? When is that? The preposition bears reflection, but even if one were to say “in” time, the assertion would still beg the question: can anything change “out” of time? To change and to shift presuppose time; they are time-laden verbs – which, unless I’m mistaken, makes our collective voice an eminently time-fraught phenomenon. Which brought me back to Weng’s insight that if all of us are struggling with finding time, something may have happened to time itself, even as we continue to think of it as a smoothly flowing through phenomenal space and against which changes and shifts could be measured. What about cracks in time? What about a “third time,” a fuzzy, slothful or vacant time, recalcitrant to the tyranny of real time? It’s speculative, but such speculation appears less frivolous when one considers the frictional interfaces between competing experiences of time in our contemporary societies.