Time has nothing to do with the cycles of day and night, the moon’s orbit, or the voyage of the earth around the sun and its seasons. For the birds snatching worms in receding tidal waves, “sequence exists, *rhythm exists, but not time”. Time imposes regularity and precision. It domesticates my body and punishes it towards accumulating deadened labor..t The Roman poet Ennius rejected otium, **leisure unstructured by time, because there “the mind does not know what it wants”..t Medieval monks were subject to rigidly timed discipline, as are factory workers in industrial capitalism. The basis for Taylorist scientific management of factory labor is “the ***time taken to react to a given impression”..tToday, smartphones dictate delivery times, risking couriers’ life and limb. ****Time is an “inescapable beat, restricting and coercing us, mirroring blind authority itself”. It is a reification destroying the real unfolding of the world..t
How can we escape time’s regime? It bounces back from each attempt to reform its pernicious ubiquity. Most revolutionary movements involved, in one form or another, the smashing of clocks. Yet just as significantly, *every new regime emerging from the revolution has put those same clocks back into operation. Today, the memes of **Antiwork reddits revolve around smashing alarm clocks. Yet just as significantly, the memes are timed and by their timing accumulated in comment threads, generating likes and clicks and ‘exposure’. Like every other civilized artifice, time cannot be reformed: it needs to be destroyed. But to ***destroy it, we need a way to articulate, however imperfectly, a vantage point from which we can think against time.
*to me.. can say this about everything.. nothing new to date.. just iterating on same song ness..
As I watch the birds and mosses, listen to the wind and water, and slowly reshape the stone in my lap, I know intuitively that the vantage point opposing time is presence: the marvel of the world unfolding in and through and all around me. If I am to think against time, then, I need to analyze how time comes to reify presence into the present, opposing it to the past and the future on its linear path to accumulation and progress.
7
Everywhere time returns. But this triumph of time is only seemingly complete. For now that I know what is lurking in the center of synaesthetic synthesis, I can think against time by writing against the way that the concept manifests as time.
And so each tree and each blade of grass, and each stone and bird and human being, too, come to be arranged along an axis of repeated instances of their concepts. Each of them becomes interchangeable; trees to units of lumber, humans to units of labor-power. “It makes it a lot easier to turn everything alive into something dead, to turn forests and people into resources and capital, if you believe everything is dead in the first place”..t
Thinking against time is thus writing against the concept which writes linear repetitions of itself into the world. The line of time is the line of conceptual writing. This means that breaking the line of conceptual writing also breaks the line of time, allowing presence to reemerge without time bleeding through.
8
Linear time is imposed in linear record-keeping..t ..Their proximity to the rhythms of the nile’s ebbs and floods and the rhythms of the animals and stars came to be overwritten by the linear progression of kings and dynasties, the accumulation of grain and spoils from warfare, and the progress of building pyramids.
Once writing was forgotten, biological rhythms reigned supreme. Archaeological evidence has been uncovered primarily of so-called geometric pottery, vases and shards painted with rhythmic imagery offering “a flexible, essentializing quality by which a viewer could associate him or herself with an idealized image, a broadly sketched social type”. Social types of the Greek Dark Ages were not without rigidity, of course. But they remained open and adaptable, aligned along the patterns of myths and both narrated and felt in rhythmic ways (the quest, the initiation rite, the genealogy). ..Alienating abstraction has not, to be sure, entirely disappeared in Dark Age Greece. But it lost the iron grip of writing. As Tamarix have pointed out, such ceremonies contain an element of rhythmic cyclicality which is not linear, and an element of deviating freedom which is not ritualistic.
9
All this came about because the Dark Age Greeks knew and wrote rhythms against time. Their pottery is a vivid example of thinking against time by writing against it. On the earliest Dark Age vases, in the twelfth century BC, rhythmic repetitions of wavy lines show a keen sense of cyclicality. But wide open spaces on the vases indicate a sense of freedom keeping these rhythms beyond time. By the tenth century, bands of animals are wrapped around the vases, embedding rhythmic animal motion. The surfaces are fuller now, but remain oriented towards the writing of rhythm against time. The animals are not repetitions nor syntheses, but movements, merging with the patterns enveloping them in unfixed and unstable ways. Freedom is here deeply embedded into the illiterate immediacy of rhythm beyond time..t On animal statues as well, patterns repeat in cycles, indicating not ‘decoration’, but gesturing to the animals’ life-cycles. At the end of the ‘Dark Ages’, in the ninth century, free spaces return to surround the animals roaming free. Now patterns and animals are both intertwined in dream-like sequences, a final grasp of immediacy before time violently returns. These people may not have been free altogether from the yoke of time, as our stone age ancestors may have been. But in their pottery, they gestured towards a break from the linearity of conceptual linearity. Their art can thus show us one of the ways towards the marvel of unfolding beyond time..t
We can take up their example in developing a different way of writing. As linear concepts write linear time into the world, so a simultaneous writing can pave the way for us to think against time.
but today we have means for something other than anti ness..
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
11
4) Writing simultaneity
We too can write in this way, and thus we too can conjure the unfolding of the indifferent, unstable, and indeterminate world beyond time – the world of simultaneity. Thus we can take the linear unfolding of the concept of a tree in (as) time (“a tree consists of roots in the soil, a stem emerging, branches shooting off, and leaves sprouting”) and rewrite it in such a way that the concept loses its sway and the tree’s conjuring on the page is there and not there, and not not-there, like the wind-wolf and the dance of leaves:
12
13
And this we can read continuously: indifferently, unstably, unfixedly..t Each sign is a letter and not a letter and not not a letter; an animal or a plant; a symbol or a gesture. The owls are a letter O or an animal or both or neither, and are the same and not the same, or are both the same and not the same, or are neither the same nor not the same. The fish dominant or close by in the top left is a letter E and is not a letter E but is the same as the fish below it, and is not not a letter nor the fish below it, or is both and neither. Insects, fawns, caterpillars are letters N, E, and U, or are not those letters but form unstable constellations with other letters living as plants, and are entangled or not entangled with waves which are and are not and are not not letters L and which are and are not and are not not gestures to rivers and ponds nearby, marking perhaps where I write them or where you read them. Again weights and shields and tangled strings are letters E and TO and O or are not these but are symbols or are not symbols but are plants, or are all of these in simultaneous unstable movements, rhythmic emergence of conventional legibility, symbolic legibility, living legibility, and again rhythmic disappearance of any or all of the three. The arrows mark the soaring of eagles or the letter I or the ascent of the cormorant resting beside them, or again all of these or none of these or some of these. Letters are there and not there and not not-there,.. t deferring the linear unfolding of concepts, complicating the constitution of syntheses, complicating the reign of time.
be you. 