Revolutionary and liturgical time
Revolutionary time and cyclical, liturgical time are two modes of experiencing time which coexist, layered on top of one another. By "revolutionary time" I do not mean a revolutionary situation in the strict political or social sense; I mean mainly the apparent condensation of time which accompanies a quickening or intensification of events. This sensibility is reflected in the quote from Lenin I've seen all over Facebook since the Occupy movement took off: "There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen." While the present moment is not a revolutionary situation or even a pre-revolutionary one, what we have been experiencing is a revolutionary condensation of time in this sense (if, of course, it is not a manic delusion).
By "liturgical time" I do not mean a specific religious content, but the sense that a quickening or slowing of events is part of a greater cycle; in this sense Lent is the melancholic, depressive moment which precedes Pentecost as the manic moment which precedes what is bluntly called, in a term that could benefit from being translated so frankly into a secular context, "normal time." Liturgical time in this sense is a very common secular approach to time, reflected partially in the pendulum notion of history - even moreso in the notion that "things are finally getting back to normal."
The notion of "linear time" is basically a fallacy, though it's an instructive one to some degree. The notion of history as a steady accretion of progress or as an even series of events is not one I've heard anyone defend in all my time in the academy or in intellectual circles outside it. It may reflect a common sense present to some degree in progressivist notions of US history, manifest in old-school history textbooks. More than this it is a misapplied bugaboo used to dismiss Marxian and Hegelian understandings of history, though of course positivistic, mechanical versions of Marxism did not help much. Still, anyone with a basic understanding of dialectics ought to be puzzled when anyone claims there is anything linear about it. There are genuine debates between a Marxist and, for example, a Foucaultian idea of history. Foucault highlights the emergence of elements which have been suppressed, elided, or rendered subterranean, aspects of history which might be overlooked in basic, schematic (Fichtean, thesis-antithesis-synthesis) dialectics. One could imagine a dialectics which would take up such suppressed elements, but such a dialectics would probably have to abandon the chimera of prediction.
To imagine it spatially, revolutionary time is shaped like a spring or a helix rather than a line or a circle. A spring looks like a circle, seen from above. Revolutionary time thus incorporates the "truth" (in the Hegelian sense) of cyclical time, while the truth of linear time is the sense that the compression of the spring implies a vectorial impetus, a claim that of course is hotly contested.
The moments when revolutionary time asserts itself are a rush of blood to the skin; the moments when liturgical time seems to return to the fore more of a fading of what seemed to be the real. In such moments we doubt what we saw and ascribe it all to manic frenzy. Nothing happened, we say, the world continues pretty much as it always has. Such a common-sense statement isn't very interesting for its truth claim, but it is interesting as evidence of a moment in which liturgical time struggles to reassert itself and, for the moment, succeeds.
I remember the hot fall of 2009. It felt like revolutionary time as well, for those of us involved, even for those of us who never thought it was anywhere close to a pre-revolutionary moment. One story of the end of fall 2009 would be that liturgical time won in the most banal of senses: Thanksgiving, finals, Christmas, and the calendar won, and the sense that something was happening dispersed like teargas.
There's nothing we can do about such a thing; a sense of time is something you can look back and see operating, not something you can legislate, unless heaven and earth have already shifted on their axes. Still, it is hard to feel the fading without trying to overturn the sundial.
More significant in the end, of course, is the residual tension left in the coils, which may have been dissipated partially or entirely or may, for objective reasons, have been intensified.
By "liturgical time" I do not mean a specific religious content, but the sense that a quickening or slowing of events is part of a greater cycle; in this sense Lent is the melancholic, depressive moment which precedes Pentecost as the manic moment which precedes what is bluntly called, in a term that could benefit from being translated so frankly into a secular context, "normal time." Liturgical time in this sense is a very common secular approach to time, reflected partially in the pendulum notion of history - even moreso in the notion that "things are finally getting back to normal."
The notion of "linear time" is basically a fallacy, though it's an instructive one to some degree. The notion of history as a steady accretion of progress or as an even series of events is not one I've heard anyone defend in all my time in the academy or in intellectual circles outside it. It may reflect a common sense present to some degree in progressivist notions of US history, manifest in old-school history textbooks. More than this it is a misapplied bugaboo used to dismiss Marxian and Hegelian understandings of history, though of course positivistic, mechanical versions of Marxism did not help much. Still, anyone with a basic understanding of dialectics ought to be puzzled when anyone claims there is anything linear about it. There are genuine debates between a Marxist and, for example, a Foucaultian idea of history. Foucault highlights the emergence of elements which have been suppressed, elided, or rendered subterranean, aspects of history which might be overlooked in basic, schematic (Fichtean, thesis-antithesis-synthesis) dialectics. One could imagine a dialectics which would take up such suppressed elements, but such a dialectics would probably have to abandon the chimera of prediction.
To imagine it spatially, revolutionary time is shaped like a spring or a helix rather than a line or a circle. A spring looks like a circle, seen from above. Revolutionary time thus incorporates the "truth" (in the Hegelian sense) of cyclical time, while the truth of linear time is the sense that the compression of the spring implies a vectorial impetus, a claim that of course is hotly contested.
The moments when revolutionary time asserts itself are a rush of blood to the skin; the moments when liturgical time seems to return to the fore more of a fading of what seemed to be the real. In such moments we doubt what we saw and ascribe it all to manic frenzy. Nothing happened, we say, the world continues pretty much as it always has. Such a common-sense statement isn't very interesting for its truth claim, but it is interesting as evidence of a moment in which liturgical time struggles to reassert itself and, for the moment, succeeds.
I remember the hot fall of 2009. It felt like revolutionary time as well, for those of us involved, even for those of us who never thought it was anywhere close to a pre-revolutionary moment. One story of the end of fall 2009 would be that liturgical time won in the most banal of senses: Thanksgiving, finals, Christmas, and the calendar won, and the sense that something was happening dispersed like teargas.
There's nothing we can do about such a thing; a sense of time is something you can look back and see operating, not something you can legislate, unless heaven and earth have already shifted on their axes. Still, it is hard to feel the fading without trying to overturn the sundial.
More significant in the end, of course, is the residual tension left in the coils, which may have been dissipated partially or entirely or may, for objective reasons, have been intensified.