Seeing through time

Yes, I'm still on the same topic.

Ahead of my last post I was listening to a BBC show about Henri Bergson and his ideas about time. Bergson lived in France and Britain during a period of great excitement about time and experiences of it. He distinguished between clock time and experienced time, and argued that the latter was "real" time, much to the consternation of contemporary physicists like Einstein.

I've been thinking about this concept of "Everywhen" and spiral or circular time as opposed to the modern European diasporic concept of linear time. Specifically, how it relates to what I wrote about a couple of days ago about maintenance and care. Twenty-first capitalist culture is often thought of as being obsessed with the future, but thinking about how we experience time and act in accordance, I don't think that's actaully true. The culture I live in is obsessed with the present and, to some extent, the past (but only insofar as it can be used to strengthen pre-existing views about the present). Consider what I was writing about the Australian petroleum producers on Thursday: arguing that with 45 years' experience you can be trusted to store carbon dioxide underground indefinitely reveals a lack of engagement with both the past (centuries of examples of hubris leading to industrial disasters) and the future (the catastrophic impact of a mistake or unexpected incident on unborn generations to come). Despite all the talk of futurism, we live in an extremely presentist culture — what John Patrick Leary has called "temporal narcissism".

Taking a queue from Sandtalk, I thought it might be easier to understand this if I sketched it out:

=> Spiral time versus "The Arrow of Time"

In spiral time, one experiences multiple "times" in the same instant. In a linear time worldview, there is only the present (although Bergson would argue there is only the past). But what does this have to do with maintenance?

If in every moment I am connected to both the past and the future, maintenance and care are in service of the present moment, and future moments, but also in service of the past. More than that, it is the past — and the future. I'm from a settler culture, so rather than trying to pretent I'm understanding this from an Indigenous perspective let's consider something simple like an "old" house — perhaps one that several generations of the same family have lived in over many decades. When I clean out the chimney, or repair the cornices in a bedroom, or strip back and re-polish the original floorboards, I am connected to those who lived in the house before me (who walked those floors, and slept in that bedroom), and also to future generations (who will be able to live in the house in future because I have maintained it in a habitable condition). If, on the other hand, I conceive of my house in a linear time worldview, I'm more likely to do the bare minimum of maintenance, bring in some rented furniture for a photo shoot, and sell the house while the real estate market is hot. Since I am living "in the moment" I, and the house I'm living in, have no connection to the past or the future. I have no need to maintain those temporal connections, and therefore no need to maintain my home beyond its mere utilitarian services to me personally.

Those nineteenth century North Europeans realy fucked us up hey.

=> Bergson and Time | John Patrick Leary and Weasel Words of 21st Century Capitalism