Psychosocial Imaginaries

Perspectives on Temporality, Subjectivities and Activism

Stephen Frosh

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137388186
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Movimientos en psicología

Psychosocial studies challenges the traditions of psychology and sociology from a genuinely transdisciplinary perspective. The book reflects this agenda in its varied theoretical and empirical strands, producing a newly contextualised and restless body of understanding of how 'psychic' and 'social' processes intertwine.

1

Touching Time: Maintenance, Endurance, Care

Lisa Baraitser

Introduction

This chapter is about forms of hidden time: the disavowed durational activities behind every person, situation or phenomenon, behind every institution, and art object, and behind the maintenance of everyday life. It is about touching or grasping time through noticing when it has gone into hiding. It takes up an old feminist theme about the relation between time, gender, race, class and care, by examining practices of maintenance. By maintenance I am referring to durational practices that keep ‘things’ going: objects, selves, systems, hopes, ideals, networks, communities, relationships, institutions. These durational practices are forms of labour that maintain the material conditions of ourselves and others, maintain connections between people, people and things, things and things, people and places, and social and public institutions, along with the anachronistic ideals that often underpin them, and that constitute the systems of sustenance and renewal that support ‘life’.¹ Maintenance is in part generated by conditions of vulnerability that we all share, and in part by the excesses and internal logics of capitalist cultures that make maintenance so necessary (whilst at the same time utterly devaluing practices of maintenance by generating products, for instance, specifically designed to break down without the possibility of being mended).² As Carole Pateman argued in The Sexual Contract back in 1988, it is structural to both patriarchy and capitalism that the labour of maintenance remains hidden. My argument here is that what is hidden is not just the labour of maintenance, but the time embedded within this labour, and hence the qualities of this time. It returns, in other words, to an earlier Marxist feminist question about how to value ‘socially necessary labour time’ that is precisely not embedded in the production of commodities and services, and that doesn’t appear to unfold or function in the same ways.³ I argue that noticing the qualities of this time matters, not just to how we understand this contemporary phase of capitalism and the social relations it produces, but to how we understand time. There is a relation, in other words, between our current distinctive temporal imaginaries, and patterns of managing vulnerability and dependency through systems of maintenance. My argument is that maintenance systems are distinct from productive systems in that they rely on, and to some degree produce different temporal arrangements and temporal orderings that intervene in the dominant temporal imaginaries of our times.

What are these dominant temporal imaginaries of our time? In a sense, we could say that time has itself become anachronistic within the frenetic time of late capitalism where we only ever run out of time, and seem unable to grasp the time that we have. Giorgio Agamben has written about the possibilities of grasping the time that we have as specific to a messianic temporality – between the time of the coming of the Messiah, and the end of time; between the beginning of the end times announced by the Messiah’s arrival, and the end of time itself, is another time which is the time that time takes to come to an end (Agamben, 2005). This is an interstitial time that is neither the then, the now, nor the yet to come, and remains heterogeneous to historical time. This is the time in which time reveals itself in such a way that we can grasp or have it. Indeed, for Agamben, this is the only time we can be said to ‘have’, and that doesn’t run through our fingers. We could say that our present difficulties have something to do with this failure to grasp, or touch time, the disappearance of messianic time within the time of history, or heterogeneous time within the time of capital.

Indeed, various analyses of time in this current phase of capitalism have shown how the future has become foreclosed, the present is increasingly experienced as the stuck time of perpetual crisis, and the past is characterized as purely melancholic, caught up in narratives of trauma that cannot be relinquished or worked through. For instance, the idea or fantasy of a progressive future that underpinned modernist and postmodernist social imaginaries has given way to the notion that the future is over. In After the Future, the Marxist theorist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi writes:

[B]orn with punk, the 1970s and 1980s witnessed the beginning of the slow cancellation of the future. Now those bizarre predictions have become true. The idea that the future has disappeared is of course rather whimsical, as while I write these lines the future is not stopping to unfold. ... But when I say ‘future’ I am not referring to the direction of time. I am thinking, rather, of the psychological perception, which emerged in the cultural situation of progressive modernity, the cultural expectations that were fabricated during the long period of modern civilization, reaching a peak in the years after the Second World War. Those expectations were shaped in the conceptual frameworks of an ever progressing development ... . We do not believe in the future in the same way. Of course, we know that a time after the present is going to come, but we don’t expect that this time will fulfill the promises of the present. (Berardi, 2011, p.24)

The future is emptied of its affective qualities such as hope, anticipation, longing, or the promise of satisfaction or betterment. The future will come, but it will bring no fulfilment of the promises of the now. In this sense, the cancellation of the future returns us to a perpetual present characterized by crisis; seemingly never-ending violent conflict, climate chaos, resource scarcity, economic instability, and vast social inequalities that appear permanent or terminal, leading to some suggesting that we are now living within the ‘end times’ (Žižek, 2010), or within the ‘tyranny of real time’ (Virilio, 1999, p.87) or the ‘continuous present’ (Harvey, 2010). Here the post-Fordist obsession with speed, productivity, creativity and flexibility, gives rise to a present in which all time – work, social, leisure, family, ‘quality’ or unemployed time – is penetrated or ‘qualified’ by the logic of capital which has no end other than its own self-perpetuation, which in its turn functions to disavow the fact of its immanent self-destruction.⁴ Productivity and creativity do not unfold onto better times, but are looped back into a stagnated now. Ivor Southwood has described experiences of the present in globalized network societies as a form of ‘non-stop inertia’ (Southwood, 2011), based on his experience of years of precarious zero-hours contract work in the UK. This is the result of the now permanent precariousness and mobility of populations that are dependent on market-driven technology that must constantly update itself, leading to a population revving up with nowhere to go. ‘The result is a kind of frenetic inactivity’ (Southwood, 2011, p.11). Non-stop inertia, then, is the temporality of downward mobility, the search for diminishing viable accommodation, healthcare and welfare, the temporality of the under- or unemployed who are kept permanently busy looking for non-existent jobs, or working in low-paid jobs that maintain steady states of poverty (Adkins, 2012). In this temporal imaginary the present is experienced as time that is both relentless and refuses to flow.

Against this horizon of a foreclosed future and a stuck present, we might also notice the ways that a melancholic attachment to trauma, another form of stuck time, has become a dominant temporal imaginary of the past. We could say that the ongoing predominance of individualized trauma stories as major narratives through which to organize and experience our lives (and discourses of ‘triggering’ and ‘safe space’ that accompany them⁵) function to bind trauma closer and closer as an organization of the past that allows for some modicum of meaning and significance to be articulated in stuck times, a bulwark against the too-much-ness of the present, and the horizon of a foreclosed future. To be able to claim that ‘something happened’ that has reverberations in the present, even when those reverberations are debilitating and frightening, can act to locate an affective source of meaning that somehow lies ‘beyond’ the repetitive non-stop inertia of living in the end times.

These temporal imaginaries are of course not totalizing, and part of the desire to uncover hidden temporalities is to reveal the diverse and contradictory ways that time is lived and experienced, the multiple relations between time and capital that structure social formations and power relations, and the many different relations to time that give rise to alternative ways of living. In queer studies, for instance, we have seen a focus on disrupting the normative unfolding of developmental time, both across a life span, and across historical time itself, so that asynchrony (the felt experience of disjointed time), non-reproductive time, and marginalized time schemes that don’t conform to dominant patterns of living are seen to reveal and produce a range of hidden erotic, intimate and relational experiences, linking queer studies of time with broader debates on affect, sensation and embodiment (e.g. Halberstam, 2005; Dinshaw et al. 2007; Freeman, 2010; McCallum and Tuhkanen, 2011), and on the production of national sentiment and sexual citizenship (Luciano, 2007). In postcolonial scholarship we have seen melancholia not simply referencing the time of trauma but the name for a decolonizing strategy in which the refusal to mourn and move on from historical injustice emerges as a major temporal organizing practice (Khanna, 2006). In feminist scholarship we have seen a return to an engagement with the relation between temporality and community (e.g. Federici, 2010; Bastian, 2011) to think about the timescales of collective practices such as mothering and other forms of domestic and care labour that were prominent in feminist debates of the late 1970s. And we have seen the reappearance of former aesthetics of activism and resistance such as massing, sitting, lying down, dying-in, camping, and other ways of occupying public space that stage performances of ‘waiting’ for political change, in which enduring time works against rather than for capital (Baraitser, 2013a; Bayly, 2015).

However, my interest here is not only in revealing hidden temporalities for the ways they differ from, and complicate, dominant temporal imaginaries of foreclosure, stuckness and trauma. Rather than looking to valorize disruptive temporalities, I wish to notice how we live in stuck or suspended time, and how we apprehend its qualities and potentialities. This time, akin to Agamben’s time that time takes to come to an end, is heterogeneous to the totally ‘qualified time’ of permanent work.⁶ Work time, in other words, is animated by hidden temporalities embedded in the labour of maintenance, persistence, staying, enduring and waiting that appear at first glance to also be without qualities, stuck and suspended. But these are the times that allow for the renewal of everyday life. It is this paradoxical notion of renewal through maintenance (itself a form of stuck time) that I think allows us to ‘grasp time’. If, as Elizabeth Freeman has argued, time is used to organize bodies towards maximum profitability, a process she names as chrononormativity (Freeman, 2010), then an analytics of such organization, as well charting the ways that bodies desist being chrononormatively organized, becomes pressing. But more than this, we need to think about the relation between bodies that desist, and the kinds of obdurate temporalities that desisting bodies perform. Desisting bodies ask us to think about the slowness of chronic time, rather than the time of rupture; the durational drag of staying alongside others or out-of-date ideas, rather than the time of transgression; the elongated time of incremental change, rather than the time of breakthrough or revolution. Maintenance, in other words, takes the form of suspended time that allows connections with alternative temporal imaginaries to be maintained – it maintains our relation with time itself, time we can grasp and have.

Wearing out

In thinking through desisting bodies, the cultural theorist, Lauren Berlant’s work on ‘cruel optimism’, analyses practices such as overeating, attachments to ‘bad’ relationships, and our ongoing commitments to defunct political processes as neither simply acts of resistance to the wearing out of bodies and hopes for change brought about by neoliberalism, nor simply acts of self-destruction, but what she calls ‘suspension’ of the self as a form of self-maintenance (Berlant, 2011). Berlant’s argument is that the gap between the fantasy of the good life (upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively durable intimacy), and the actual lives we now lead, is so far apart, that these acts that suspend the self are forms of self-care.

Maintenance, however, has something to do with the withdrawal or suspension of time, and not just the suspension of the self. Acts of maintenance are durational and repetitious, they may concern time that seems frozen or unbearable in its refusal to move on, and entail practices of bearing the state of nothing happening, of the inability to bring about tangible or obvious forms of change. Berlant gestures towards this with her notion of ‘impasse’: ‘a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic’ (Berlant, 2011, p.4). We try to get close to the source of sustenance in these intensely present moments of impasse, but the source of sustenance also evades us, making the time of the impasse enigmatic too. Just as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Touching Time: Maintenance, Endurance, Care
• 2  Indefinite Delay: On (Post)Apartheid Temporality
• 3  From Event to Criticality? A Study of Heidegger, Lacan, Benjamin and Derrida
• 4  The Circus of (Male) Ageing: Philip Roth and the Perils of Masculinity
• 5  Re-Thinking Vulnerability and Resilience through a Psychosocial Reading of Shakespeare
• 6  The Demise of the Analogue Mind: Digital Primal Fantasies and the Technologies of Loss-less-nes
• 7  The Vicissitudes of Postcolonial Citizenship and Belonging in Late Liberalism
• 8  Knowing and Not Knowing: Implicatory Denial and Defence Mechanisms in Response to Human Rights Abuses
• 9  What We are Left With: Psychoanalytic Endings
• Index