Time progresses linearly, marches forward uniformly and universally. Events are unique eruptions that deviate in unprecedented ways from linear accounts of history and time. Or, at least, such definitions reign supreme in the discourses that dominate much of contemporary political analysis and theory.
Yet the Anthropocene, an epoch marked by occurrences originating in myriad and overlapping processes, so aptly (and dangerously) demonstrates that these types of reductive explanations are neither adequate to guide our analyses of what has happened nor our sense of how we should respond to them.
As political theorist William E. Connolly has shown over the course of his corpus, linear time has failed us. Too gradual, linear time is unable to account for the bumpiness of explosive events; too wedded to a progressive account of history, linear time cannot account for the cyclical and folding character of happenings; and too universal, linear time cannot attend to the fragility of particular lives and places in an entangled universe. Even worse than merely an explanatory failure, linear conceptions of time leave us unable to attend, descriptively or prescriptively, to the events that result from intensifying planetary processes and which foster fascist affective tendencies.
How we understand time matters. It matters for the world, for politics, and for the Anthropocene.
While conceptions of time as only linear have helped to create the conditions of Anthropocene, other understandings can provide modes for addressing the harms of this era. One possibility lies with contemporary theoretical physicists, some of whom have thoroughly unwound the solely linear account promulgated scientifically by Newton and defended philosophically by Kant, that kept time for some three centuries. While numerous scholars have worked to develop a post-Kantian conception of time, rarely have they considered the specifically political implications of alternative conceptions of time in the Anthropocene.
However, thinking with the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli might help us to do just this. And if scientific representations regularly determine what seems plausible in political life, then it remains the task of politically attuned thinkers—it remains our task—to work out the implications of these representations for our own experience of politics.
To make the mattering of time—the importance of its becoming material—more legible to political philosophy, this piece explores the work of Carlo Rovelli in his book The Order of Time to investigate the political implications of time’s complexities during the Anthropocene. Taken up as a tool for exploration, a way to consider how different conceptions of time allow for new political possibilities, Rovelli here illustrates how current formations of time are too constrained. Rovelli can help to liberate our notions of time from universality, constancy, and linearity, and so can aid us in reorienting and creating more liberatory politics in this Anthroposcenic era.
PARTICULARITIES OF TIME
So, time matters. Although, it would be more accurate to say times matter, as theoretical physicists argue there is never one single time. Instead, time passes differently in different places and at different speeds.
Time is not a constant. Instead, like cars on a highway, time ‘passes more slowly in some places, more rapidly in others.’ Lower down, closer to the Earth, things slow down. We Earthbound creatures move more slowly than balloons and angels.
But like balloons, and some angels, things fall toward earth. Truly heavenly bodies don’t encounter these problems, but ‘if things fall, it is due to this slowing down of time. Where time passes uniformly, in interplanetary space, things do not fall. They float, without falling.’ Worlds fall not because someone has eaten a forbidden fruit but because the mass of the planetary body slows time itself. And yet, if one still seeks eternity even after the fall, might I suggest continuing to fall? After all, ‘For everything that moves, time passes more slowly.’
Rovelli’s account liberates time. Time gets to fracture and proliferate, no longer bound to a unilocality, since ‘there is no single time for different places’ and there ‘is not even a single time for any particular place.’ Rather than an independent variable, time is specifically associated with the movement of something.
Time also gets to escape entrapments of ‘real time.’ Times are many and myriad, a different one for every single point in space. There is no true time and no truer time. There is no absolutely real time because there is no unity to time. Instead, time ‘has a different rhythm in every different place.’
Time, then, is never constant. It is different here than (or then?) it is over there. Different for things that move quickly than for things that move more slowly. Time need not, ought not, be considered continuous and universal but local and particular and dynamic, connected to specific spaces and speeds rather than separated and independent from the happenings of the universe.
THE NOTHINGNESS OF NOW
Things get truly eerie when we accept that time cannot be bound to a singular direction. Thinking with Rovelli, the notion of the ‘present’ is hackneyed, for ‘the difference between past and future does not exist in the elementary equations of the world.’ The orientation of befores and afters is only ever, and merely, contingent.
In spacetime, “now” means nothing. In classic Anthropocentric style, ‘the idea that a well-defined now exists throughout the universe is an illusion, an illegitimate extrapolation of our own experience.’ The present might seem a temporal notion, but the now is a spatial category. The concept of the present can only ever refer to that which is close and never to anything that is far away. Although there is no universal present, we craft ourselves and our politics in an expanded present, a present which is the ‘set of events that are neither past nor future.’ In other words, the universe might not get a present, but we do. ‘A common present does not exist‘ because the now does not extend throughout the universe. The present, then, is cosy and intimate, a little bubble we share, surrounding just what is proximate to us.
THINGS ARE EVENTS
Everything that time has been divorced from–singularity and direction, independence and the present, continuity and uniformity–does not bar the universe, and all the many things that are a part of it, from being a flowing network of changing events. The absence of a uniform and universal time ‘does not imply a world that is frozen and immobile. On the contrary, it implies a world in which change is ubiquitous.’
What does this mean for us inhabitants of the universe and, more specifically, us earthlings in the Anthropocene? It means things, discrete beings, do not exist. Instead, ‘they are events, indeed: change, happening. This happening is diffuse, scattered, disorderly. But it is happening; it is not stasis.’ And even those ‘things that are most “thinglike” are nothing more than long events.’
We are though familiar with the problem of naming things (which are actually events). In trying to represent the world, just like Rovelli, we find that the words are too rigid, too static, for the very thing/events they are trying to represent. What we name the ‘“past” and “future” do not have a universal meaning. Instead, they have a meaning that changes between here and there.’ There are peculiarities to particularities. These peculiarities are bound up in space and time. Meanings depend on where, when, and what.
Time impacts objects but objects also impact time. Time and space are modified by matter. The mass of the object ‘slows down time around itself.’ Matter modifies the space and time that surrounds an object. Time is not a stable entity in which things exist or occur. But maybe time works like an atmosphere, surrounding and suffusing events while also affected by them.
ATMOSPHERIC TIME
Perhaps we can consider a model of time as something akin to Giuliana Bruno’s atmosphere, one that is ‘itself a transitory site, an intermediate space—a moving place between internal and external, subjective and objective, private and public.’ Perhaps temporal boundaries are more atmospheric than sequential. Like times, atmospheres are very much of their moment, fleeting, but they also act upon the figures they enclose. Like times, atmospheres are vague, without visible and discrete boundaries. Like times, atmospheres envelope and suffuse, surround and penetrate. Like times, atmospheres are ‘an interrelated field and the intangible yet tangible wave of resonance of a place outside and inside.’
Time and atmospheres are both the thing we are in and the thing interacting with us and being interacted with. They are both able to go around so totally to surround, to go inside, to suffuse. They are powerful and intangible. This atmospheric view of time might help us better understand the interplay of time/space/matter, as time seems to work more like an atmosphere than a line.
What might it mean to think of time as an atmosphere during the Anthropocene, a time when Humans are destroying Earth’s literal atmosphere? What might it mean to think about liberating time when the destruction of the Earth’s atmosphere means we Humans, and other Earthbound creatures, are running out of time?
THINGS FALL APART
The ephemerality of atmospheric times might also help us to theorise political possibilities located within dissolutions. Atmospheres eventually dissipate. Everything returns to dust. And time arrives as a co-designer of creation and dissolution. All things of the universe, ourselves included, are temporary beings made of time. As we impact time, we are being made and falling apart in time. We are beings created through the passage of time just as much as we are beings unmade by time.
Speaking of beings dissolving can easily evoke entropy. Entropy, or the second law of thermodynamics, states that the processes of the universe tend toward disintegration, and as entropy increases, the universe tends to move ‘from a state of organization and differentiation in which distinctions and forms exist, to a state of chaos.’
Yet entropy, Rovelli tells us, ‘is not an arbitrary quantity, nor a subjective one. It is a relative one, like speed.’ He observes, ‘The low initial entropy of the universe might be due to the particular way in which we—the physical system that we are part of—interact with it. We are attuned to a very particular subset of aspects of the universe, and it is this that is oriented in time.’
While definitions of entropy can diverge significantly based on the context in which they emerge, many scholars who incorporate the concept into their work argue that the predominant focus on disorder can be misleading. Entropy, Caitlin DeSilvey, suggests is then better ‘defined as a measure of the multiplicity of potential arrangements of matter within a given system. Systems with a greater range of potential configurations are described as existing in a state of high entropy.’ The higher state of entropy we are attuned to is also a mode of higher potential.
As things fall apart in the Anthropocene, what potentials might be lurking in its dissolutions?
APOCALYPSING AND SALVIFIC TIMES
Taking inspiration from Rovelli, we might consider politics as containing an abundance of temporalities. Yesterday’s utopias furnish today’s disasters, while today’s disasters open space for new and novel worldings. Theorizing Rovelli’s understanding of times with the Anthropocene allows for a conceptualisation of the multiple processes that compose our moment. We inhabit not a single time but rather times—of eroding shorelines and species extinction, abject poverty and wars, plastics piling up and habitats being destroyed. But amidst all these disasters, new worlds flourish in the rubble: mushrooms thriving in decay and ivy-covered brick buildings; oppressive systems dismantled and uprisings revolutionising socioeconomic relations. The rubble provides for possibility in the material needed for new worlds and as the debris the many must exist within to allow for a paradise for the few. The apocalypsing times of today, with the extended, horrible, excruciating and lingering event of many and overlapping apocalypses, is also the promised future, as for so many of us this is also a time in which we can luxuriate in great freedoms and indulgences.
The tempo of the Anthropocene is multiple, plural, and full of opportunities, both dangerous and salvific.
Through Rovelli, we can approach politics with new understandings of time. Not just one that aids our understanding of the nonlinear, overlapping, and intimate nature of time, as Rovelli does, but one that builds upon his observations to provide for new possibilities and new politics during the apocalypse of the Anthropocene.
This article was originally published in OPR’s Issue 11: Time.
Jessica Croteau is a PhD candidate in political theory at Johns Hopkins University