Enduring Time

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 Also Available from Bloomsbury

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 Enduring Time

By Lisa Baraitser

Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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 Bloomsbury Academic
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© Lisa Baraitser, 2017

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 To Simon
For Endurance and Care

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vi
 Contents

Acknowledgements viii
List of Images x
Introduction 1

1 Staying 23
2 Maintaining 47
3 Repeating 69
4 Delaying 93
5 Enduring 115
6 Recalling 139
7 Remaining 159
8 Ending 179

Bibliography 189
Index 213

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 Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the kindness, time, and precious thoughts that Denise Riley,
Jackie Sumell, Barbara Loftus and Mierle Laderman Ukeles gave me, whose work
is the subject of this book.
I am grateful to both Birkbeck, University of London, and the Independent
Social Research Foundation, both rare institutions that still preserve the odd
idea that we need time to think and write. Two periods of research leave, funded
by each, enabled me to do just that.
Colleagues at Birkbeck, in particular Sasha Roseneil who mentored me
through the first stage of this project, and Miriam Zukas who was there
throughout, provided crucial support. Gail Lewis has been both generous and
thoughtful in her institutional role, and combined with final pep talks from
Leticia Sabsay, Laura Salisbury, Rachel Thomson and Imogen Tyler, allowed the
project to finally come to an end. Thanks also to Yasmeen Narayan, Lynne Segal,
Margarita Palacios and Amber Jacobs for many psychosocial conversations.
Special thanks to Liza Thompson at Bloomsbury for her tireless energy, editorial
support and belief in this project, and to Stella Sandford for close reading, and
the careful attention that philosophers can bring to those of us who come to
philosophy as willing amateurs. I am grateful to Judith Butler, for her kindness
and support, her ongoing attachment to a psychoanalytic sensibility, and for her
exemplary capacity to think things through.
I have been immensely lucky to have had a chance to speak to many friends,
colleagues and students about this project along its way. My gratitude, in no
particular order, goes to Melissa Midgen, Shaul Bar-Haim, Gill Partington,
Michelle Bastian, Sigal Spigel, Jane Haugh, Will Brook, Katie Gentile, Noreen
Giffney, Daniel Pick, Raluca Soreanu, Jess Edwards, Derek Hook, Samuel Bibby,
Stephen Frosh and Oliver Decker. Thanks also to Michael, Marion, Paula,
Alexandra, Joel and Saul Baraitser. They have been most patient!
Thanks to the organizers, panellists and audience members of the following
events where I spoke about the work as this project developed: The Fabric: Social
Reproduction, Women’s History and Art, University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh
College of Art, Social Science as Communication, ISRF, University of Edinburgh,
Unpunctual Encounters/Bottom Natures, CGP Gallery, London, Modernism’s

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 Acknowledgements ix

Chronic Conditions, University of Exeter, Time Tricking, Association for Social

Anthropologists Conference, University of Exeter, Visualizing From Memory,
University of East London, European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism
Studies Conference, University of Helsinki, Austerity Futures Conference,
Goldsmiths, University of London, Psychoanalysis and History Seminar, Institute
of Historical Research, University of London, Motherhood in post–1968
Literature, Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing, Institute
of Modern Languages Research, University of London, Temporal Bindings,
The(e)ories: Advanced Seminars for Queer Research, Critical Temporalities
Workshop, Temporal Belongings, University of Manchester, Non-Reproduction:
Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics Conference, Birkbeck, University of London.
I am especially grateful to Belinda Mandelbaum and her students for an
invitation to teach a five-day lecture series at the University of São Paulo, Brazil,
which allowed me to speak the project out loud, in its early form, and gave me
courage to continue.
Earlier versions of some chapters have appeared in journal article form.
Chapter  1 appeared as ‘Baraitser, L., Transdisciplinarity as a Psychosocial
Concept’, Special Issue, Transdisciplinary Problematics, eds, Peter Osborne,
Stella Sandford, Eric Alliez, Theory, Culture & Society 32: 207–231, 2015. Reprinted
by permission of SAGE Publications. Chapter 2 appeared as ‘Touching Time:
Maintenance, Endurance, Care’, in Psychosocial Imaginaries, ed., Stephen Frosh,
Palgrave, 2015. Chapter  4 appeared as ‘Baraitser, L., Collecting Time’, New
Formations., 79: 8–25, 2013. Reprinted by permission of Lawrence and Wishart.
I am grateful to the many colleagues who commented on earlier drafts of these
pieces of writing.
 List of Images

1 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation, 1978–1980. City-wide

performance with 8,500 NYC sanitation workers. Courtesy Ronald
Feldman Fine Arts, New York. 60
2 Richard Billingham, Untitled, 1994. Colour photograph mounted
on aluminium, 75 × 50 cm. Private collection, courtesy Anthony
Reynolds Gallery, London. 62
3 Richard Billingham, Untitled, 1995. Colour photograph mounted
on aluminium. Copyright the artist, courtesy Anthony Reynolds
Gallery, London. 66
4 Herman Wallace, 2006. Courtesy of Anne Harkness. 122
5 Herman’s Letter 2003. Courtesy of jackie sumell. 128
6 CAD drawing front of house, 2006. Courtesy of Dan Hatch Studios. 129
7 CAD drawing Herman’s pool. Courtesy of Dan Hatch Studios. 132
8 Barbara Loftus, Stamp (30.5 × 30.5 cm., oil on canvas, 2004).
Copyright the artist, reproduced with kind permission. 140
9 Barbara Loftus, Hildegard under table I (91.5 × 122 cm., oil on
canvas, 2004). Copyright the artist, reproduced with kind permission. 142
10 Works by Arthur ‘Bispo’ do Rosário, Venice Biennale, 2013.
Copyright SunOfErat/Wikicommons. 172
11 Works by Arthur ‘Bispo’ do Rosário, 30th Biennale, São Paulo, Brazil.
Photograph: Leo Eloy. Copyright Leo Eloy / Fundação Bienal de
São Paulo, reproduced with kind permission. 173
12 Works by Arthur ‘Bispo’ do Rosário, 30th Biennale, São Paulo, Brazil.
Photograph: Leo Eloy. Copyright Leo Eloy / Fundação Bienal de
São Paulo, reproduced with kind permission. 174
13 Works by Arthur ‘Bispo’ do Rosário, 30th Biennale, São Paulo, Brazil.
Photograph: Leo Eloy. Copyright Leo Eloy / Fundação Bienal de
São Paulo, reproduced with kind permission. 176

Cover Art: Reproduced with kind permission of the Raqs Media Collective.

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 Introduction

Time’s suspension

In Time Lived, Without its Flow the poet and philosopher Denise Riley describes
the sudden arresting of time that followed the death of her adult son:

A sudden death, for the one left behind, does such violence to the experienced
‘flow’ of time that it stops, and then slowly wells up into a large pool. Instead of
the old line of forward time, now something like a globe holds you. You live
inside a great circle with no rim.
Riley 2012, 10

The new time Riley found herself living was neither stopped time nor
deadened time, but something like time’s ‘suspension’. Time conceived of as a
viscous fluid takes on a different form, no longer a line with direction or purpose
but a pool, the welling up of present time that will not pass and has no rim.
Suspended time allows the seeping of the materiality of time into consciousness.
It pools, like a great pocket of blood, that both holds and suspends time as
motion.
If time can be lived without its flow, then what can this suspended form of
time tell us about how we are currently living time? And if living such time
without its flow has something to do with persistent attachments we maintain
with others, including those who are dead, then what might suspended time tell
us about care, and our capacities to go on caring when time has pooled?
Over the time it has taken me to write this book I’ve developed a series of
short-hands to respond to the question ‘what are you working on’. It is a question
that implies a project, as Simon Bayly tells us, that recognizes the ‘futural meaning’
that work brings us, even as it staves off that future time that is the end of the
project (2013). ‘I’m working on things that take too long’, I reply, quietly meaning
the writing of this book and more overtly meaning practices of care that go on
and on – looking after the dead through practices of grief; mothering; keeping

1
2 Enduring Time

safe political ideas that no longer have efficacy in the now in the belief that one
day they may be useful; the ‘useless’ open-ended practice of psychoanalysis; all
sorts of ‘maintenance’ work that props up the lives of others and the social
institutions that support them. ‘I’m working on the feeling of always running out
of time, of feeling rushed yet impeded at the same time’, I go on, trying to get
hold of the stop-startness of everything I do. ‘I’m working on what it’s like to
wait, and go on waiting, and whether watchful waiting has anything to do with
gender, and with care’. The answers seemed to generate a momentary glimmer of
recognition – ‘oh yes, I’ve never got enough time’, which then gave way to ‘but
anyway, the world is running out of time’. After this exchange of banalities that
would move almost seamlessly from the quotidian experience of time slipping
through our fingers, to the pending end of the world brought about by the
ravages of global capitalism and the realities of climate disaster, the glimmer
would fade and the idea of working on the question of time and its relation to
care took on a distinctly unappealing veneer. It seemed to repel people, especially
my own stasis, and inability to bring the project to a conclusion. ‘You’re not still
working on that book on time’?
This, then, is an unfinishable book about time’s suspension – modes of waiting,
staying, delaying, enduring, persisting, repeating, maintaining, preserving and
remaining – that produce felt experiences of time not passing. These are affectively
dull or obdurate temporalities. They have none of the allure of the time of
rupture, epochal shift, or change. They involve social practices that are mostly
arduous, boring, and mundane, or simply unbearable. Yet, in staying attentive to
time not passing I have been pushed to think more carefully about the concept
of ‘care’, especially how we might attempt to take care of time when it seems to
pool, dammed up by a foreclosed future that no longer brings the promise of the
now and an historical past saturated with unrepresentable trauma. Although
often common and ordinary – Riley points out that millions of people worldwide
outlive their children, living through the death of someone they relate to as their
child, whatever their age (Riley and Baraitser 2015) – we might view such
quotidian experiences as exceptional both in their capacity to tip us into
experiences of temporal suspension, and through their invocation of temporal
imaginaries that have a tangential relation to those that characterize ‘the capitalist
everyday’, thereby stilling, even if they don’t manage to disrupt, modes of
production based on utility or exchange. Tracking the survival and quality of
these affectively dull yet persistent temporalities within what Elizabeth Povinelli
describes as ‘the seams of capitalism’ has turned out to be the project of this book
(2011). Staying, maintaining, repeating, delaying, enduring, waiting, recalling
 Introduction 3

and remaining are forms of time’s suspension that tell us something about care
in what Žižek rather alarmingly calls ‘the end times’ (2010), or what Eric Cazdyn
describes as ‘the new chronic’, the ‘dull soreness of a meantime with no end’
(2012, 13).
Kimberly Hutchings, in her account of the role of unacknowledged narratives
of time in theories of world politics, attunes us to the patterns of categorization
that structure the temporality of social life (2008). She points to the coexistence
in most cultural formations of constructions of both everyday and exceptional
time. In European cultures these map on to the distinction between the Greek
terms chronos, the time we can measure associated with the inevitable shared
framing events of birth and death, and kairos, the transformational action of
time that interrupts chronos with the new or unexpected. The generalization of
clock time that began with wage labour and modern market relations in the
sixteenth century brought a conceptualization of time as neutral, constant and
measurable. Subsequent theories of thermodynamics in physics, and evolution
in biology, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries developed accounts of
time as infinite, linear, unidirectional and irreversible. And yet, Hutchings argues,
in modern Europe alongside chronotic time there have always been temporal
traces that rely on a ‘keirotic tension’ with infinite linear time. These include
categories such as beginning, ending, novelty, repetition, stasis and change.
Theories of world history that conceptualize time as static, for instance, or as
repetitively regressing after periods of progress into periods of decline, interrupt
narratives of time as neutral or undifferentiated flow, and remain at work,
Hutchings argues, in contemporary interpretations of world politics. And yet,
she warns:

If the ‘our’ is to have any meaning in the normative judgment of ‘our times’ in the
world-political present, then explanation and normative judgment of ‘our times’
has to become sensitive to a multiplicity of times and temporalities.
Hutchings 2008, 157

Those working with a chronobiopolitical framework would be unsurprised

by the need for sensitivity to a multiplicity of times and temporalities. European
time operates through the enforcement of a particular conception of time that
then comes to mediate forms of relating to, and representing, the world (Vázquez
2009). Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Silvia Federici
have all argued in different ways that coloniality and modernity are constitutive
of one another other, modernity emerging not simply through industrialization
and the separation of the European worker from their means of subsistence but
4 Enduring Time

specifically through slavery, colonization and the control of women, originating,

for Mignolo, in 1492 with the conquest of the Americas (2005), and for Federici
through the violent destruction of the power of women through their
extermination as ‘witches’ in the same early modern period (2004). Roland
Vázquez has subsequently argued that the conquest of the Americas that situates
Europe as the centre of the world in its own imaginary, does so through a
particular politics of time; one that affirms the west as the present, and the
present as the only legitimate site of reality. Modernity, he argues, produces an
amnesic surface where reality and the present coincide, negating the possibility
of relations between the self and the (non-European) other who is by definition
‘behind’ the times. In contrast relational temporalities drawn from indigenous
philosophies, Vázquez argues, ‘decolonize’ modern time through their radical
critique of the confinement of experience in the empty present (2009). They
allow for a multiplicity of times that are not reducible to spatial representation,
circumventing the argument that the ‘indigenous’ are somehow ‘prior’ to
modernity, as Johannes Fabian famously articulated (1983).1
Hutchings’ response to her own call to become sensitive to a multiplicity of
times and temporalities is to understand world-political time as immanent, a
multitude of non-linear plural becomings that could then be said to constitute
the ‘our’ of ‘our times’. Yet such appeals surely rely on an implicit model of time-
as-movement, even when they seek to interrupt the idea of movement in a
linear or predictable direction. My suggestion is that we engage instead with
‘unbecoming’ time – time that is lived as radically immoveable, experiences
of time that are not just slow, sluggish, or even interminable in the sense of
Heidegger’s account of boredom, but are radically suspended, ‘a great circle with
no rim’. To live this time may turn out to be a question of ethics, inserted within
a question of ontology – the arduous temporal practice of maintaining ongoing
relations with others and the world which I will come to name as care.
Theoretically this relationship between ethics and ontology is aligned with
Christina Sharpe’s account of time in her lyrical work, In the Wake: On Blackness
and Being (2016a). The wake is a term that holds together the path behind a ship,
keeping watch with the dead, and the process of coming to consciousness in the
sense of wakefulness. The ship, the dead, and consciousness coalesce in her work
around what Saidiya Hartman calls ‘the afterlife of slavery’ (2007) and its relation
to Black life in the diaspora:

1
See Browne 2014 for a discussion of the distinction Fabian makes between synchronicity,
contemporaneity and coevalness.
 Introduction 5

Living in the wake on a global level means living the disastrous time and
effects of continued marked migrations, Mediterranean and Caribbean disasters,
trans-American and -African migration, structural adjustment imposed by the
International Monetary Fund that continues imperialisms/colonialisms, and
more.
Sharpe 2016a, 15

The task, as she sees it, for Black thought, and for thinking itself, is to remain
in the wake, to occupy the ‘infinitive’ grammar of being ‘in’ the wake in order to
both inhabit and rupture it. This, for Sharpe, is a mode of care that attends to the
afterlife of the past as it refuses to pass. ‘Care’ understood through the figure of
the wake becomes itself a problem for thinking, and she maintains that both
‘thinking and care need to stay in the wake’. Just as queer thought has advocated
staying ‘in’ non-developmental time rather than passing through it, as a way
to disrupt what Elizabeth Freeman refers to as chromonormative developmental
time (2010), and feminist thought has long advocated a theoretical engagement
with the repetitive laborious time of social reproduction rather than its simple
repudiation, so what Sharpe calls ‘Black non/being in the world’ is what calls
thought to re-think itself as a mode of care. These are all theoretical articulations
of what I’m calling ‘unbecoming time’; time that pools without a rim. The project
of this book is to think about the varied conditions of time’s suspension in an
attempt to understand how to continue when time has stopped. Veering away
from rupture and disruption, it attempts to stay close to the experience of going
on, with, and in time that will not unfold.

Time without qualities

This is not a timely book, or perhaps no longer a timely book. The fact that the
concepts of time and care that I am working with already feel ‘old’ says something
about the ways in which any notion of a ‘new’ twenty-first century ‘time crisis’
has itself become so quickly commonplace, or indeed perhaps misplaced.2 As
Judy Wajcman puts it in the opening to Pressed for Time, ‘There is a widespread
perception that life these days is faster than it used to be. We hear constant
laments that we live too fast, that time is scarce, that the pace of life is spiralling

2
See Roitman’s Anti-Crisis (2013) for a deconstruction of the analytical work of the concept of
crisis and how it functions as a narrative device to raise certain political questions and foreclose
others.
6 Enduring Time

out of control’ (2015, 1). Yet the notion of ‘time crisis’ arises at a particular
historical juncture and is the product of a shift in temporal experience that the
German historian Reinhardt Koselleck located in the fifteenth century in his
analysis of modern progressive time, in which the idea of progress itself is built
on a radical break or rupture between experience (the past) and expectation (the
yet to come) (2002, 2004). Modern time renders the past old and obsolete in
order for the new to emerge, precisely through its radical separation from the
past disparaged as past. Progress is the replacement of the old with the new,
leaving modern European time as a kind of suspension between what is rendered
as a dead past, and a progressive future that holds all the promise of betterment
in a generation always beyond our own. In the time of European modernity
what is new is produced at the cost of what was once new and now made old.3
And yet anachronism – what is ‘against’ time, what stubbornly remains within
the present as the no-longer-new, the out-of-date, the obdurate idea, practice, or
thought – nevertheless holds out something ‘productive’ even as it undoes the
very idea of productivity in terms of commodity, market, utility, labour, exchange.
It is not so much about simply counting the many costs of progressive time,
although this is a vital thing to do,4 but about noticing that modern time itself
contains within it obdurate strands of the anachronistic; of slowed, stilled or
stuck time.5
Movement, in other words, has always been the key to ‘modern time’. European
modernity is traditionally characterized by the shock, exhilaration and anxiety
produced by speed and travel in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the
contraction of an expansive time and space and the ‘future shock’ brought about
by technological developments and rapid rates of social change that gave rise to
the various aesthetic modernist movements in Europe and the parts of the world

3
Peter Osborne, in his seminal book, The Politics of Time (1995), worked through the semantic and
conceptual difficulties of speaking about modernity and postmodernity, for instance, as distinctive
historical periods. Despite ‘modernity’ specifically signalling a period of ‘new time consciousness’
that inaugurates a series of breaks or ruptures in the development of societies, this narrative itself
presumes an homogenous continuum of historical time, ‘across which comparative judgements
about social development may be made in abstraction from all qualitative temporal differences’
(Osborne 1995, 1). ‘Modernity’ then becomes fixed as a discrete historical period within its own
temporal scheme, and left stranded in the past. The replacement of ‘modernity’ with ‘the
contemporary’ fails to help matters, just as the shift from modernity to postmodernity ended up in
a semantic paradox. If the ‘modern’, Osborne argued, in its primary sense, is simply that ‘pertaining
to the present and recent times’, or ‘originating in the current age or period’, then ‘postmodernity’
was the name for a ‘new’ modernity, a kind of conceptual paradox that threw both terms into crisis.
4
See for example the ‘post-growth economy’ literature that counts the economic, social, political and
individual costs of the principle of perpetual economic growth. Examples include Banerjee 2003,
2008, Bauman 2012, Bjerg 2016, Carson 2000, D’Alisa et al. 2015, Daly 1996, Gorz 2012, Jackson
2009, and Johnsen et al. 2017.
5
See Koepnick 2014 and Salisbury 2008, 2017 on ‘slow modernism’.
 Introduction 7

it colonized.6 In the first decades of the twenty-first century, however, we are

learning painfully to attune ourselves to the contradictions of both experiences
of immediacy and the rapid acceleration in social life, on the one hand,7 and the
simultaneous slow violences of contemporary capitalism on the other.8 These
slow violences entail the ‘becoming uninhabitable’ of the globe for life systems
including our own; the now permanent and irreversible loss of biodiversity,
concerns about ‘deep time’ violence brought about through the prolonged yet
delayed uncertain effects of nuclear waste; the injustices of wage slavery and new
forms of debt bondage that are not only designed to be ‘managed’ life-long but to
be inherited across generations; the temporally elongated control of subjugated
populations including the permanent ‘warehousing’ of Black, Indigenous,
migrant, queer and trans people and others who are imagined as major social
problems in prisons around the world; and new and brutal forms of exclusion
from public institutions that work to sustain life projects that lead to the now
chronic deterioration of the mental and physical health of particular embodied
subjects.9 These violences play out differentially, exacerbating existing inequalities
of gender, ‘race’, sexuality, disability and age, but also what will become the
inequalities between generations. Some of these violences are felt immediately
and others are so slow they will not be noticed countless generations after they
were instigated, producing a prolonged or chronic violence well into the ‘deep
future’.10 Yet we appear to be holding our breath, waiting, not for a pending
catastrophic ‘event’ in the sense that Fredric Jameson suggested characterized
post-modern time (1996), but for a diffuse catastrophe that has already happened
to unpredictably play itself out. As Nicholas Stern, author of the 2006
Stern Review on the economics of climate change asks simply, as the title of
his recent book, ‘Why are we waiting’? (2015). And yet it is precisely the
temporality raised by this question – the quality of the time in which we ask
‘why are we waiting’ – that may come to describe time consciousness in the
twenty-first century. This caesura has duration. We differentially live it, are living
in it, enduring it.
It is now clear that there has been a return to the question of time, not
just philosophically, but socially, politically, ecologically, psychosocially, even
geographically, and that this may have something to do with millennial anxieties

6
See Kern 2003, Koepnick 2014, Sheppard 2000.
7
See Rosa 2013, Rosa and Scheurman 2009, Virilio 1977, 1999, 2010.
8
See Nixon 2011 for an account of slow violence in relation to the environmentalism of the poor.
9
See Berlant 2011, Davis 2016, Graeber 2011, Puar 2009.
10
See Nixon 2011 and Rose, van Dooren and Chrulew, 2017.
8 Enduring Time

and a tendency towards apocalyptic visions at certain historical junctures. Sarah

Sharma identifies many of the preoccupations with time in social theory as a form
of ‘speed theory’ in that it raises a set of questions that have largely focused on the
impact of technologies built for acceleration and faster-moving capital on the
democratic fate of a sped-up globe (2014).11 Yet alongside speed theory we have
seen the emergence of a different kind of articulation of the vicissitudes of time in
the early twenty-first century, overshadowed by a collapse in twentieth-century
modernity’s belief in progress and mastery over the future, that has given way to
a sense that the future is now imagined or at least routinely narrated as uncertain,
unpredictable, and for some simply ‘cancelled’ or foreclosed.12 For instance, in
After the Future the Marxist theorist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi writes:

[B]orn with punk, the 1970s and ’80s 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, 24

It is the psychological perception, then, of the future as development that has

shifted. It has become emptied of its affective qualities such as hope, anticipation,
longing, or the promise of satisfaction or betterment. The future will come, for
sure, but it will bring no fulfilment of the promises of the now.
In a sense the cancellation of the future has prompted a reciprocal analysis
of the present as stuck, perpetually present and unable to change, leading to
suggestions that we are now living within the ‘tyranny of real time’ (Virilio 1999),
the ‘continuous present’ (Harvey 2010), or indeed a ‘contracted’ present (Lübbe
2009). In The Seeds of Time, Fredric Jameson situated postmodernity as a condition

11
For examples of what Sharma calls ‘speed theory’ see Armitage and Roberts 2003, Bauman 2012,
Crary 2013, Duffy 2009, Gleick 1999, Harvey 1989, Hassan 2003, Hassan and Purser 2007, Lübbe
2009, Rosa 2003, 2013, Rosa and Scheuerman 2009, Tomlinson 2007, Virilio 1977.
12
See Agamben 1998, Amin 2013, Berardi 2011, Virilio 2005, Žižek 2010.
 Introduction 9

in which ‘time consists in an eternal present and, much further away, an inevitable
catastrophe, these two moments showing up distinctly on the registering apparatus
without overlapping or transitional states’ (1996, 70–71). We may argue that ‘the
contraction of the present’ is the collapsing of this sense of the ‘much further
away’ of the catastrophe, and the conceptual separation of these two temporal
moments. This contraction is in part the outcome of a shift from the strict linear
time of the Fordist production line governed by the factory clock, to the post-
Fordist obsession with productivity, creativity, and above all a flexible work-force,
giving rise to a present in which all time – work, social, leisure, family, ‘quality’, or
unemployed time – is penetrated or ‘qualified’ by the logic of work (Cederström
and Fleming 2012). Ivor Southwood, for instance, has described experiences of
the present in globalized network societies as a form of ‘non-stop inertia’, based on
his experience of years of precarious zero-hours contract work in the UK (2011).
Non-stop inertia 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’ (11). Non-stop inertia, then, is the
temporality of downward mobility under conditions of economic austerity;
the search for diminishing viable accommodation, healthcare and welfare; the
temporality of the disabled and the under or unemployed who are kept
permanently busy being assessed for dwindling benefits, or working in low-paid
jobs that maintain steady states of poverty; and work that maintains and services
debt that is designed not to be repayable in the lifetime of the individuals
concerned (Adkins 2012). In this temporal imaginary the present is experienced
as time that is both relentlessly driven and yet refuses to flow. Socially necessary
labour time is not simply crystallized within the commodity, but in post-Fordist
economies where labour is more immaterial and social, time itself, and not just
money, goods, people and information, becomes one of capitalism’s ‘flows’, and
hence is also constantly destroyed, the immanent destruction of capital being as
integral to capitalism’s mechanism as the creation and circulation of value.
And yet, as Stephen Wright argues in his essay on ‘time without qualities’
we urgently need an analysis of ‘public time’ that moves away from the
individualized injunctions to spend ‘quality time’, and produces a more collective
response to what is perceived to be the ‘crisis’ of the present, eviscerated as it is of
both memory and forgetting (2009). ‘Might one not think of public time’, he asks
‘as carving out breathing spots, intervals, transitory breaches in the very core of
collective existence, time slots still unfettered by moral or political discipline?’
(129). Wright’s interest is in cracks in otherwise seamless time. If time now
10 Enduring Time

has various capitalized qualities then what is a time without qualities? What is a
time that is ‘available’, ‘an undisciplined time, a public time whose ideological and
moral density is tolerably low’ (130)? These intervals would constitute the
equivalent to the strange in-between spatial zones in and around cities – derelict
sites, empty parking lots, those bedraggled non-spaces before the city peters out.
Wright wants to know what the temporal equivalence might be to these ‘vague
terrains’, what vague time might feel like, a time between public and private time
that remains indistinct. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s insistence that the sphere
of democracy is always under construction, an interval, that is, between legal and
social identity, then that sphere is also temporal, and the sort of public time
Wright refers to as ‘without qualities’, unqualified and unquantified, is the very
condition of the possibility of democracy, of a sharing of public life (130). We
might then say that what we need is to understand how we come to share time;
an issue of generationality, of lateral as well as vertical relations, and of the
propping up of institutions and practices that make such relations viable.
Enduring Time seeks to respond to the question of how we come to share time.
This means the question of ‘whose time’ haunts the work without ever being fully
resolved. My ‘archive’ is cultural, rather than historical, and constitutes an odd
assemblage of objects that seem to have nothing in common. We will encounter
the work of an artist and political prisoner kept in solitary confinement for 42
years in North America; a British poet whose child has died; an Italian feminist
activist who undergoes a psychoanalysis whilst collecting political testimonies of
the political upheavals of 1968 in the wilderness years of the 1980s; an artist
incarcerated in Brazil for 50 years in an institution for the mentally insane who
makes over 800 artworks with bits of detritus; a feminist performance artist who
spends an entire lifetime paying attention to the disposal of waste in a city by one
social group on behalf of everyone else; a British photographer who graphically
documents his family’s acute poverty in the West Midlands through the 1990s; a
painter who works with her mother’s long forgotten traumatic memories of the
pre-war Nazi period in Germany. I’m no longer sure how these works and their
makers found their way to me, or me to them. The process by which we notice
and choose one thing over another is always conditioned by a process of
repression within the archive and within ourselves as researchers, and failures of
resuscitation of what cannot come to light.13 This failure can be worked with,
worked through, but cannot be overcome. Collectively, however, this eclectic

13
See Derrida 1995 and Hartman 2007 for discussions about memory and forgetting in relation to the
archive.
 Introduction 11

archive draws attention to the question ‘whose time’ even as it fails to answer it
sufficiently, to the quality of the time of endurance, and the question of collectivity
itself. My suggestion is that if the ‘our’ of ‘our times’ can be tentatively constituted,
it is not just through loss, as Judith Butler would rightly posit (2004) but also
through paying myopic attention to the ways that ‘we’, as a heterogeneous
community of those ‘who have nothing in common’, to borrow Alphonso Lingis’
phrase (1994), or as ‘communities of the unalike’ to borrow Yasmin Gunaratnam’s
(2013), nevertheless at times, share time.

Unbecoming time

Why give primacy to duration over difference, endurance and persistence over
transgression, the slowness of chronic time over rupture? What might it mean to
deliberately try to think about staying, inertia, lack of the flow of time, lack of
obvious forms of action or psychosocial change, precisely as a way to understand
care, and for care to specifically and paradoxically be understood as itself a mode
of change that requires time not passing?
Two distinct ways of understanding processes of social change that have come
to saturate the humanities and social sciences coalesce around Alain Badiou’s
post-Marxist notion of the event, and those that remain wedded to a Deleuzian
concept of becoming. I do not intend here to give a full account of these
philosophical perspectives, but I want to draw attention to the kinds of idioms or
spatio-temporal forms that they rely on. Badiou’s ‘event’ is paradigmatic of a way
of theorizing change through rupture. It involves the appearance of something
new in a situation that requires the ongoing arduous fidelity to that new situation
in order for that event to signify at the level of historical time. Although Badiou
is concerned to articulate the double temporality of the truth of the event – both
its eternal and historical dimensions – truth remains immanent if it does not
erupt in such a way as to produce historical time. What Badiou calls ‘inconsistent
multiplicities’ in a situation, are strictly undecidable in the moment of the event,
and are only apprehended through what comes to be, brought about by a
supplement to that situation, that supplement being the event itself (2001, 25).
The event compels us to move from ordinary multiple-being to a new way of
being, and on the way to enter into the composing of a subject. Fidelity is thinking
the situation ‘according to’ the event, remaining faithful to the situation as if the
event had occurred, even if we cannot yet be sure, prompting new ways of being
and acting in the situation which bring about concrete changes and hence
12 Enduring Time

historical time. The truth, in other words, is not external to the situation but
both immanent, and simultaneously ‘a break in a situation’: a paradoxical
‘immanent break’ in the situation itself (42). A truth produced by the eventual
supplement of a situation therefore requires a double temporality – an ongoing
process of fidelity and a simultaneous break with whatever language and
knowledge went before. In this sense Badiou employs both the tropes of
persistence and breach, on-go and rupture, although inverting them, so that the
breach does not occur strictly ‘in historical time’, given that there can only be a
history of the eternal, the eternal proceeding from the event. As Meillassoux puts
it, the central paradox of Badiou’s thesis is that ‘there is only a history of truths
insofar as all truth is strictly eternal and impossible to reduce to any relativism’
(2011, 1).
Where Badiou’s tropes are the duality of eternal truths brought about through
the rupture of the event, theories of vitality and becoming that draw on Spinoza,
Bergson and Deleuze posit a pure ontology of motion. From this perspective
being is ‘life’ which is in constant movement, and stasis is simply the antithesis
of life. Bergson’s time, for instance, is a quality immanent in consciousness, a
force. Matter and time cannot be clearly distinguished as matter is always in
motion. The universe is composed of ‘dynamic matter’, understood as duration
made manifest. Because matter is always in motion, time is relationally defined
as the measure of the movement of an object (Grosz 1995, 93), even as Bergson
will insist that duration is mobile, heterogeneous, indistinct, incomplete. Drawing
on this philosophical tradition, Rosi Braidotti maintains that ‘post-finitude’
is infinite change, manifest as relational flows of capital, organic processes,
the human and inhuman, technologies, infrastructures, historically formed
and open ended assemblages that call for an ethics of response to the ‘now’
in order to create more just and open futures, and sustainable becomings (2013).
As a constant process of reassemblage and disassemblage between animal,
human, organic, technical, digital, capitalist and viral, the post-human emerges
from this work as a temporal form that names the constant process of ‘life’.
Even the related articulation of ‘plasticity’ that has surfaced in Catherine
Malabou’s work could be read as a way to understand movement as the
ultimate being of all that is: everything is in the process of transforming and
being transformed, giving and receiving form (2005).14 Whilst this does not
do away with the necessity of fixed entities,15 – being can only ever be in process

14
Her later work supplements plasticity as giving and receiving form, with a notion of destructive
plasticity, a negation without reserve. See Malabou 2012.
 Introduction 13

of change through particular entities transforming one another – yet all entities
are plastic.
What does suspended time offer to notions of change as strung out between
the rupture of event and constant becoming? It is not that I am against rupture
or constant motion as ways to understand change. In previous work I have been
particularly concerned to notice the ways that constant interruption, for instance,
can open onto new ways of being and relating in the world (Baraitser, 2009). I
doubt I could possibly sustain a position in which I too did not agree that all
matter is in motion, that stasis is incompatible with life, or that change does not
require some kind of break with the already-existing in order for something new
to emerge. But I do not think these ways of conceptualizing change help us very
much as we live ‘the new chronic’. To pay arduous attention to what has changed
in a situation is absolutely the right thing to do, but when one’s lived experience
is that nothing at all is changing, when ‘something like a globe holds you’ then we
might say we are living in the time of waiting for the event. Similarly, I do not
believe that anyone lives a philosophy of becoming. Philosophies of becoming
are enlivening, intoxicating even, at the level of theory. But they are oddly both
too molecular and too molar to function as an explanation of the quotidian,
which is where I would contend psychosocial life is lived. I rarely feel like a
teaming flux of vibrant matter, even if I can see that this is what I am. I feel slow,
and stuck, and depressed quite a lot of the time. We may not experience ourselves
as flows and ebbs and intensities. We are mediums for these things, for sure, but
the affective experience of living in chronic time is not one, I would suggest, of
becoming.
I am seeking, then, to supplement these two perspectives by staying close to
lived experiences of time that appear neither eventful nor vital, and whose
‘multiplicity’ is overwhelmed by their singularity – the obdurate situation of
poverty that does not change, of incarceration with no end, of the dead who will
not return, of the slow circularity of time on the psychoanalytic couch. My aim
is simply to point towards those quiet rather uneventful processes of psychosocial
stasis that seem to produce change through someone’s capacity to paradoxically
remain faithful (to use Badiou’s term) to the non-event, the not-yet-happening,
indeed to what Badiou would call the situation that is not yet supplemented by
the event. I am drawn to temporal tropes that are linked together by an apparent
lack of dynamism or movement: waiting, staying, delaying, enduring, persisting,
repeating, maintaining, preserving and remaining, in an attempt not so much to

15
The category ‘woman’, still holds, Malabou argues, in Changing Difference, 2011.
14 Enduring Time

find respite from the acceleration of life in digital global capitalism, but to
investigate the potential for transcending the immanence of our own historical
moment in precisely the places that it looks simply impossible to happen, and to
understand this transcendence in terms of something I’m calling ‘care’.

Care

What is the relation between care, time and thinking? What does it mean to try
to think about the relation between care and time in a period in which the
present appears to have contracted? Care is often assumed to be a value, a
practice that takes the form of an affective engagement with others, a
choreography of historical material conditions and institutional arrangements
that enable the process of caring for, and caring about each other and the world.
In Joan Tronto’s early work with Berenice Fisher, she saw care as:

a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and

repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes
our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave
in a complex, life-sustaining web.
Tronto 1993, 103

For Tronto, caring reaches out beyond the limits of the relational self to
include forms of action not limited to human action, but a broad spectrum of
ongoing culturally constrained practices and dispositions that have to do with
maintaining, continuing or repairing the world. Yet Elizabeth Povinelli writes
that ‘to care for others is to make a claim; it is to make a small theoretical gesture’
(2011: 160), complicating the idea that care flows out from the carer to the cared-
for, and raising the question of ‘theory’ or thinking as itself a form of care. And
earlier I noted Christina Sharpe’s comment:

‘I want to think “care” as a problem for thought [. . .] thinking needs care (“all
thought is Black thought”) and thinking and care need to stay in the wake’.
Sharpe 2016a, 5

Care, then, is inextricably bound up with histories of the antithesis to care, or

failures of care, that bring on ways of thinking that we also need to take care of.
These may involve the temporal practice of staying alongside others and ideas
when care has failed; waiting, staying, delaying, enduring, returning, as the
temporal forms that care takes. Care as a ‘small theoretical gesture’ suggests that
 Introduction 15

to care involves some idea of a good life, and how such a good life comes into
being, even as such an idea is now ‘frayed’ at best, and that care will fall short of
its materialization.16 Yet to maintain contact with that frayed idea may itself
come to be understood retroactively as a form of careful attention, even when
that small theoretical gesture seems absurd in the temporality of the now.
Drawing on the environmentalist Maria Puig’s recent work (2010, 2012), Thom
van Dooren states:

Time and again I have witnessed how care for some individuals and species
translates into suffering and death for others, the ‘violent-care’ of conservation:
predators and competitors are culled, expendable animals provide food or
enrichment for the endangered, the list goes on. Beyond conservation worlds,
caring is often similarly fraught. In short, care is grounded in all of the
“inescapable troubles of interdependent existences,” and can offer no guarantee
of a “smooth harmonious world.”
van Dooren 2014a, 292

‘Violent-care’ reminds us that from a psychoanalytic perspective care has its

antecedents in the ways we have managed our own aggression towards what
psychoanalysis calls our ‘internal objects’ and their relations, that results in guilt
and a desire to repair what we imagine we have damaged. Care emerges in
psychic life out of the management not only of the dilemmas of love and hate,
but a more basic nameless dread, that in its turn requires containment by another
who can react without retaliation to the dread that temporarily comes to reside
in that other, through a process Wilfred Bion calls ‘reverie’ (1962). This notion
that care has something to do with the shared management of vulnerable states,
the ‘inescapable troubles of interdependent existences’ and intolerable and
destructive states of mind, coupled with our reliance on both the practices and
good will of others, might constitute a psychosocial reading of the ethics of care.
But such a psychosocial perspective would also view care through its ties to guilt,
destructiveness and a core fear for survival, the survival both of ourselves and of
others, that is reliant on the specific circumstances in which anyone is able to
offer care to another. The time of reparation, we could say, is the time of the
ongoing shared management of these states.
In other words, by shared, I mean to move away from the idea that we develop
the capacity to care only out of a drive for the preservation of the ego, and for our
own individual survival. As Judith Butler has reminded us in her engagement

16
See Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011) for an account of the fraying of the promises of the post-war
settlement.
16 Enduring Time

with Melanie Klein, we have to continue to deal with the problem of

destructiveness as we move from drive theory to an account of relationality.
Destructiveness in a relational theory is not simply separated from love. Love
itself is always already ambivalent, being experienced as distinct from
destructiveness at the very point that one can recognize that the two have come
together, when we come to understand, that is, that care entails understanding
failures of care. In other words, if, in what Klein calls the depressive position, we
can acknowledge we have in fantasy hated and destroyed what we also love and
depend on, then we might also be able to recognize that we might want to
preserve, repair and care for that very same thing. As Butler puts it:

it is a matter of recognizing that dependency fundamentally defines us: it is

something I never quite outgrow, no matter how old and how individuated I
may seem. And it isn’t that you and I are the same: rather, it is that we invariably
lean towards and on each other, and it is impossible to think about either of us
without the other.
Butler 2014, 33

The ‘inescapable troubles of interdependent existences’, have, of course, also been

a central concern for feminist care ethics. Initially using the mother–child encounter
as a model for a particular kind of ethical work that was not purely governed by
autonomy, independence and justice, mothering was seen as a paradigmatic type of
caring relation, one that involved empathic understanding, interdependence,
flexibility, relatedness, receptivity, responsiveness, attentive and preservative love,
nurturance and training.17 These types of qualities were valorized by early theorists
as a way of elevating maternal work to the status of ethical work, and in addition,
opening up a debate about care and justice in the social and political sphere. ‘Care’
became a trope used to both soften up moral philosophy with its traditional concerns
with justice, and to indicate new modes of social and political transformation.18 Yet
this early work gave way to further attempts to move beyond the binary, care versus
justice, with its connotations of public versus private and masculine versus feminine.
Here care broke from associations with the mother–child model and instead was
understood to structure all human relationships. The earlier reliance on the mother–
child relation as a model for care was seen as universalist, normative, and reduced
concern with the ethics of justice and of social equality.19

17
See Baraitser 2008, Crittenden 2001, Gilligan 1982, Noddings 1984, Ruddick 1989, Tronto 1993,
2003 and Ungerson 1983 for a fuller discussion of the ethics of care.
18
See Hollway 2006, Sevenhuijsen 1998 and Tronto 1993 and further work on the gendered politics
of care by Esquivel 2014, Lynch 2007, Rummery and Fine 2012 and Wheelock 2001.
19
Roseneil 2004, Sevenhuijsen 1998 and Williams 2001.
 Introduction 17

Yet care ethics never seems to fully shake off its entanglement with the
feminine. There has been a return to the figure of the mother, for instance, in
Adriana Cavarero’s notion that care has something to do with posture – an
ethical inclination towards another. Where ‘horrorism’ is Cavarero’s term for a
form of violence that offends the human condition at an ontological, rather than
simply a sociopolitical level, then this ontology must be thought of as one of
‘vulnerability’, whereby we are given over to each other in terms of exposure to
both care and harm (2009). This alternative between care and harm is the
‘generative nucleus’ of horror, a nucleus that contains the core vulnerability of
human life. Horrorism is the infliction of harm precisely where care is most
needed, revealing both the helplessness and what Cavarero calls the ‘dignity’ of
human being. In her recent work on ‘inclination’ she extends this reading of care
through a critique of the upright autoaffective male subject of European
philosophy, calling for an alternative figuration of the ‘inclined’ self (2016). Using
the mother–child relation as a figuration for the inclined self, she understands
care as a dilemma provoked by the utterly dependent other, in which the ‘mother’
chooses to give or receive care.
I didn’t begin this project with a theory of care. Instead I began with an
eclectic archive that seemed to speak to experiences of stuck or suspended time.
But working through them forced the question of care to the surface. And to
think about care, is to think with psychoanalysis, Black thought, and feminist
and queer thought about the way that to care for others makes a claim, a small
theoretical gesture, that may turn out to be the gesture that gives time.

Psychoanalytic time

Time spent on the psychoanalytic couch is perhaps a pre-eminent example of a

‘waste’ of time in capitalist terms, a class-bound anachronistic practice long past
its sell by date, one that cannot be speeded up, cannot be ‘justified’ and constitutes
a dwelling in an indeterminate persistent situation that can be experienced as
interminable. Sianne Ngai’s concept of ‘stuplimity’, as a description of a
simultaneous state of overwhelming excitement and stultifying boredom
emanating from the same object, seems to capture the affective experience of
living in psychoanalytic time (2007). My wager, however, in Enduring Time, is
that the practice of psychoanalysis – the long, ongoing, relentless, ‘wasteful’
working through of unconscious conflict, or working out of unconscious object
relations, under the conditions of the transference – may be oddly suggestive for
18 Enduring Time

attempts to think about social change as occurring in or through a form of

chronic time.
Adrian Johnston opens Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the
Drive, his thesis on the multiplicity of the Freudian drive, with the statement that
‘psychoanalysis is fundamentally a philosophical insight into the subject’s
relationships with temporality’ (2005, xxix). This seems both right, and to cut
both ways; whilst psychoanalysis does offer a philosophical discourse on the
relations between subject and temporality, one that may hold open the possibility
of reconfiguring the subject’s relationship to its own temporality, it also has its
own chronic relations to the modern subject. We might view psychoanalysis
itself as one of modernism’s chronic conditions; a form of knowledge that
co-emerges at the turn of the last century with empire and the late colonial
state, and the decolonization movements and independence struggles of the
modern period that is from its inception on the verge of dying, and yet chronically
persists. The psychoanalytic subject, ‘that figment of European high modernism’
is constitutively a colonial creature (Anderson et  al. 2011, 1). But more than
this, as Anderson et  al. have argued, the universalized, seemingly generic
psychoanalysable subject no longer requires the specific psychoanalytic
scaffolding that once buttressed it, but has emerged as a ‘globalized subject’ which
they trace through the history of psychoanalysis’ own internationalist desires. In
relation to the rise of the psy-discourses throughout the last century, the hidden
chronicity and persistence of psychoanalysis lies not so much in its survival as a
rarefied mode of treatment, but in the production and promotion of a certain
kind of generic universal self, a self, structured by its inner wildness, its
‘destabilizing colonial tropics’ (2011, 3). This wildness, psychoanalysis posits, is
lodged deep in our interiority, and returns to haunt and shape the European
imaginary, and representations of the ‘tropics’ themselves.
Whilst tenacious, ‘colonizing’ and internationalist, the notion of psychoanalysis
as an ongoingly dying profession, as one of the chronic illnesses of modernity,
threads its way through contemporary psychoanalytic discussions that talk
anxiously of the real dangers to the psychoanalytic profession posed by the
demands for a narrow definition of evidence-based medicine, the promotion of
short-term treatments such as cognitive behavioural therapy, and the general
casual dismissal of depth psychology and ‘unsubstantiated’ notions of unconscious
processes, infantile sexuality and fantasy within a wider mental health field.20

20
See Bornstein 2001, Dufresne 2004, Mills 2002, Startey 1985, Shorter 1998 and Stepansky 2009, for
accounts of the demise of psychoanalysis.
 Introduction 19

Through the figure of melancholia, psychoanalysis has its own internal way of
understanding the attachment that modernity may retain to psychoanalysis, as one
of its objects that it refuses to let go of, mourn the loss of, and move on from. Again,
this links psychoanalysis back to the conditions of its emergence in the modern
era, an idea that is central to Ranjana Khanna’s work that seeks to understand the
relation between psychoanalysis, post-coloniality and modes of criticality (2006,
2011). Putting together the interwar themes of loss and massive population
displacement, she notes the shift between the melancholia of Freud’s 1917 paper, in
which melancholia is distinguished from mourning, and that of the 1923 paper,
‘The Ego and the Id’, in which melancholia becomes the very condition of the
formation of the ego (2011). The critical agency that is precipitated in melancholia
‘proper’, that accompanies an unknowable and unmournable loss, is a self-critical
agency, Khanna argues, without recourse to authenticity, nativism or originality, an
agency that remains ‘in relation to an unknown and perpetual alterity’ (2011, 257).
The super-ego of the later 1923 paper, in contrast, is a regulatory mechanism
through which conscience ‘violently imposes itself on the ego’ (257). For Khanna,
the critical agency of melancholia proper allows us to theorize the colony, for
instance, without a discourse of a romanticized pre-colonial ‘nature’ or ‘culture’
destroyed by the colonizing power. This discourse would evoke a lost utopia that
mires post-colonial studies in a temporal romanticism, harking after a ‘prehistory’
that itself borders on a racist discourse. Instead, the loss is of an alternative future:

The loss is rather a political loss [. . .] the extraordinary hope of decolonization

akin to the modernist utopian drive in relation to internationalism and the force
of the sense of futurity encapsulated within that idea of hope.
Khanna 2011, 256

The loss is not of identity then, but of a longed for ideal, such as decolonization
or internationalism, resulting in self-berating, and a ‘diseased’ critical agency that
Khanna maintains is crucial for post-colonial studies.
The same, we could say, for psychoanalysis itself. In relation to its lost ideal of
clinical ‘usefulness’ and ‘validity’ in contemporary culture, we could say its
internal, self-berating, diseased critical agency is paradoxically what keeps it
chronically alive. Psychoanalysis survives as both colonial legacy and post-
colonial critique, as Anderson et al. suggest, but also as an anachronistic hope for
a form of recovery from an illness never quite articulated, never fully known,
and maintained through psychoanalysis’ own internal critique. We could say
that psychoanalysis is both chronic illness and chronic cure. It is within this
understanding of psychoanalysis that I follow its thread throughout this book.
20 Enduring Time

Enduring time

Enduring Time is a series of essays, short stories perhaps, on the temporal tropes
of staying, maintaining, repeating, waiting, delaying, preserving, enduring and
recalling. Rather than weaving a sustained argument I’ve tried to approach
suspended time through a number of ‘situations’ – a poet’s child dies, a painter
has coffee with her 80-year-old mother, a photographer takes pictures of his
family, an historian undergoes psychoanalysis, an artist straps a camera to her
wrist and sends images of her life over 24 hours to a political prisoner who has
lived in solitary confinement for 30 years, a man who is incarcerated in a mental
institution for 50 years makes piles of sculptures. It is not so much that these
situations are ‘unpacked’ but rather that they are read with, and alongside,
psychoanalytic, feminist, queer and post-colonial theories that are themselves
underpinned by a quiet affinity to ideas of time that fails to unfold. Some of these
situations produce art works that might be collected under the terms ‘social art’,
‘social practice’ or ‘socially engaged art’.21 Other works may be better situated
within more traditional definitions of sculpture, painting, photography or ‘art
brut’. And some of the situations I work with do not produce ‘art’, but a text, for
instance that hovers between anecdote, sociology, history and philosophy, or that
elusive form, the literary essay. I would prefer to gather these works, and the
theories I bring around them, under the rubric of ‘psychosocial practices’.
Although not subsumed by their content, they point us towards forms of
maternal grief-work; protest practices of ‘sitting-in’ or inter-generational ‘waiting’
as a politics of change; the never ending work of the world’s sanitation workers
and ‘useless’ attempts to disaggregate human waste into nameable substances;
the recording of the ongoing ‘dead’ time of living in acute poverty; the impulse to
create utopian projects over a period of time that turns out to have been an
entire lifetime; and persistent attachments to anachronistic ideals and theoretical
projects, and to ‘out-datedness’ itself. These psychosocial practices sit in a rather
uncomfortable relation to one another – drawn from different historical and
geopolitical contexts, roughly arranged, unable to flow into one another they
seem like rather obdurate objects refusing to get along. And yet each holds some
articulation of suspended temporality that I think speaks to our contemporary
predicament – a predicament that involves both time and care.

21
For a range of debates on social art, social practice, socially engaged art, collaborative art, and social
works see the following: Bishop 2012, Holmes 2009, Jackson 2011, Kester 2004, 2011, 2013, Léger
2013, Thompson 2012.
 Introduction 21

Where I do approach works that situate themselves as artworks, they may

have a relation to the political, but not necessarily in an overt sense, and none of
them hail themselves as ‘political art’. Nor are they works that specifically
foreground duration, in the sense of durational art, or art that takes time as its
subject, of which there are many famous examples.22 They mostly take place
outside the gallery, and are certainly ‘social works’ in the sense that Shannon
Jackson outlines where sites of aesthetic and social provocations coincide (2011),
but not all of them take on this intersection with the social at the level of social
systems, for instance, such as the environment, or labour, or public infrastructures.
Instead, what draws me to them is an odd quality of excessiveness that pervades
them. When Mierle Laderman Ukeles elects to shake the hands of eight thousand
five hundred sanitation workers and personally thank them for keeping New
York City clean, she could have stopped at four thousand, content with making
the gesture in order to make her point. When Jackie Sumell contacts Herman
Wallace with the suggestion of drawing up plans for a house that he could
imagine from his solitary cell, she could have created a collaborative artwork,
and moved on to other things. Instead she spent 14 years in correspondence with
Wallace, visiting him in prison, phoning him when allowed, designing and
redesigning, so that The House that Herman Built is a project without end, even
though Wallace has now passed away. When Arthur ‘Bispo’ do Rosário was
incarcerated in a mental institution in Rio, he could have made a handful of
artworks out of found materials, but instead he amassed almost 1,000 pieces,
each meticulously stitched, wrapped, patched or sewn together, so that his room
became impossible to move around in. And yet, each of these projects, despite
their publicness, their excessive qualities, is also deeply private. Each had to find
a way to painfully bring something private out into the public, not so much to
reveal it, but perhaps to ‘disclose’ it: a disclosure of a kind of private knowledge
through its ordinary and everyday encounter with things, ideas, people and
social structures that condition the intelligibility of the world. This private
knowledge, in other words, is never purely private, but always already public
through practical day-to-day encounters that we can call sociality.

22
I’m thinking here of the seminal durational work of Chris Burden who spent five days in a locker
in Five-Day Locker Piece (1971), and lived for 22 days in a bed in an art gallery in Bed Piece (1972);
Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance 1980–1981 (Time Clock Piece), in which for 12 months he
punched a time clock every hour, and Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–1984 (Rope Piece), in
which Hsieh and Linda Montano spent a year tied to each other by an eight-foot rope; The House
with the Ocean View (2003) in which Marina Abramović lived silently for 12 days without food or
entertainment on a stage entirely open to the audience; and the work of Roman Opalka who began
painting the numbers one to infinity in 1965 and reached 5.5 million in 2004.
22 Enduring Time

This is perhaps best made visible by an anecdote about a trip to IKEA , that
bastion of melamine that contains collective classed fantasies around European
ideals of cleanliness, efficiency, style and functionality. Areas of IKEA are set up
like domestic rooms, and in a very public manner we collectively troop through
the rooms, inhabiting what are designed to be intimate private spaces. We watch
each other lying on beds, bouncing on cushions, looking at ourselves in bathroom
mirrors. On one of many visits to IKEA across a lifetime of provisioning, I came
across a day-bed that looked rather like a psychoanalytic couch in a room
designated as a ‘lounge’. One after another, members of the public saw the couch
and recognized it as a site for the production of memory and desire; they lay on
it and joked about telling childhood secrets, they tried it out for size, they knew
what it was and accepted its presence in a public space, despite couch-based
therapy being an activity that has fallen into total dereliction as a form of mental
health treatment in the public sphere. This overt acceptance of the excessiveness
of psychoanalysis as a part of social and cultural life, seems to speak to the way
that psychoanalysis keeps something alive, even though hardly anyone practices
it, anymore, in its traditional form. What appears so individual, myopic and self-
driven, turns out to be reliant on a whole host of what we can think of as
‘unnecessary’ or excessive social relations that constitute a kind of ‘web’ that
allows the work of psychoanalysis to take place. And psychoanalysis points us to
the ways that the ‘unnecessary’ or the excessive dimensions of social relations –
the permanence of grief that belies the permanence of attachment, for instance
– are what prop up the world.
 1

Staying

Trans-

1. A prefix occurring in loanwords from Latin (transcend; transfix); on this

model used with the meanings “across,” “beyond,” “through,” “changing
thoroughly,” “transverse,” in combination with elements of any origin:
transisthmian; trans-Siberian; transempirical; transvalue.
2. Chemistry. A prefix denoting a geometric isomer having a pair of
identical atoms or groups on the opposite sides of two atoms linked by a
double bond. Compare cis-.
3. Astronomy. A prefix denoting something farther from the sun (than a
given planet): trans-Martian; trans-Neptunian.

Origin:

< Latin, combining form of trāns (adv. and preposition) across, beyond, through.
Collins English Dictionary 2009

Occasionally, political events occur that deliberately re-introduce an old rather

than a new set of terms back into public speech. Although this is often a strategy
of the Right, one example might be the campaign that Jeremy Corbyn, the
veteran British Labour backbencher, ran for the Labour leadership in 2015,
which was bound up with what we could view as an embarrassingly out-of-date
lexicon. Terms like ‘rent regulation’, the ‘re-nationalization of the railways’, the
‘scrapping of Trident’ were the backdrop of the political discourse of the 1980s,
as the Left attempted to respond to the onslaught of Margaret Thatcher’s
government’s dismantling of a whole stratum of state institutions, legal frameworks
and apparatuses that were seen as hampering the market. The reintroduction of
this ‘old’ lexicon in the 2015 campaign was striking not only at the level of
content, but precisely because it was anachronistic. In their radical outdatedness,
to literally speak these words in public space became a political gesture. This was

23
24 Enduring Time

not so much the call of nostalgia, or a bid to go back to the ‘glory days’ of social
democracy, but a temporal drag that gave efficacy to those who had gone on
‘going on’ about what mattered to them all through the New Labour years. It was
not simply that the campaign voiced the concerns of ‘old’ labour, in relation to
‘new labour’. Rather, through a deliberate and perhaps strategic embracing of the
‘old’ in old labour, what was communicated was the refusal to see the ‘new’ as
necessarily better. An attachment to certain clusters of words put the campaign
completely at odds with the politics of the future as by definition ‘the new’,
making an intervention into public discourse at the level of temporality. A
small window opened up in which it was no longer completely laughable to
think that government intervention into the private housing rental market, the
renationalization of core areas of social provision, or nuclear disarmament,
might be a good idea.
We could see what happened as a form of ‘counter-memory’. In Nietzsche,
Genealogy, and History (1977) Foucault talks about counter-memory as a use
of history that paradoxically ‘severs its connection to memory’, therefore
transforming history into a totally different form of time:

The historical sense gives rise to three uses that oppose and correspond to the
three Platonic modalities of history. The first is parodic, directed against reality,
and opposes the theme of history as reminiscence or recognition; the second is
dissociative, directed against identity, and opposes history given as continuity or
representative of a tradition; the third is sacrificial, directed against truth and
opposes history as knowledge. They imply a use of history that severs its
connection to memory, its metaphysical and anthropological model, and
constructs a countermemory – a transformation of history into a totally different
form of time.
Foucault 1977, 160

Whilst counter-memory might look like the negation of history as knowledge,

memory or truth, for Foucault it is a specific historical sense, one that opposes
historical practices in particular ways, and in doing so allows new practices to
emerge. Donald Bouchard describes how, through vigilant repetitions – a refusal
of the new that paradoxically brings on the new – counter-memory becomes an
‘action that recognizes itself in words’, opening the opportunity
to question ‘the value of our values’ (1977). Foucault’s counter-memory is a
speech-act that turns in on history as established knowledge, memory and
truth, signalling an individual’s resistance against official versions of historical
continuity. The important thing becomes who remembers, the context of
 Staying 25

memory, and what the memory opposes, producing memory formations that
run counter to the official histories of governments, mainstream mass media and
the society of the spectacle. Counter memories ‘record the singularity of events
outside of any monotonous finality’ breaking up historical continuity (Foucault
1977, 144). Their purpose is to ‘cultivate the details and accidents that accompany
every beginning’ describing ‘the endlessly repeated play of dominations’ (150).
Later, in Society Must Be Defended, Foucault shifted from counter-memory to a
notion of counter-history – a practice that reveals that:

[. . .] the light – famous dazzling effect of power – [. . .] is in fact a divisive light

that illuminates one side of the social body but leaves the other in shadow or
casts it into darkness.
Foucault 2004, 70

In other words, as we see an increase in cultural memory narratives, we see a

decrease in historical consciousness. The Turkish sociologist Meltem Ahıska
argues counter-memory is a practice that questions traditions of memory and
attends to the voids and gaps in narratives (2006). If memory is a construction,
counter-memory is an alternative political construction, a montage of facts,
objects, dreams, expectations, shadows and spectres.
In this chapter I want to approach what happens to certain ideas and terms
when they ‘stay’ within disciplinary formations, and through their staying power
come to suggest an elongated present that has effects on that discipline’s capacity
to speak itself. By tracking ideas, terms and concepts that endure through the
retroactive work of embracing their anachronistic status and calling the new
into question, a practice of counter-memory is enacted within the disciplinary
formation itself, and a different way of approaching the ‘new’ emerges. ‘Staying’,
as a temporal practice, allows us to remain proximal to anachronistic or outdated
ideas. I am going to use the formation of ‘psychosocial studies’, a putatively ‘new’
field of study in the UK intellectual context as my test case, and the key notion
of ‘psychic reality’ as a case study for a retroactive mode of intellectual work,
pursuing the notion of ‘temporal drag’, and what drags a discipline back to out-
of-date debates or concepts, despite its desire to be free of them. My argument is
that the central tenets, concepts and questions for psychosocial studies emerge
out of a re-appropriation of what have become anachronistic or ‘useless’ concepts
in other fields – ‘society’ for instance, within the discipline of sociology, or ‘the
unconscious’ within psychology, or ‘hysteria’ even, for the field of psychoanalytic
studies, all of which are routinely referred to as outmoded, superseded or simply
medically discredited. By tracing the connections between different ways of
26 Enduring Time

thinking about psychic and social relations that are the objects of this discipline’s
study, we might confront the ways in which we cannot rid ourselves of concepts
and terms that do not come to full effect until after the event of their emergence
through a kind of delayed action reminiscent of the psychoanalytic term
‘après-coup’.1
What is ‘psychosocial studies’? In a foreword to a book entitled Psychosocial
Imaginaries, Judith Butler writes that the history of the relation between psychic
and social life has involved attempts to think how one domain shapes the other,
how hopes for psychic change are, at times, configured through the idea that it
will occur through changing social structures, or conversely that changing social
structures will lead to psychic transformations. Instead, she asks:

But what if the relationship between the two terms cannot rely on a causal or
narrative sequence? Even if we for the moment treat them as distinct spheres, it
may be that they are spheres that always impinge upon, and overlap with, one
another, without exactly collapsing into one another. And the analysis of their
relation is one that tracks forms and effects of permeability, impingement,
resonance, phantasmatic excess, the covert or implicit operations of psychic
investments in the organization of social life, the way that organization falters or
fails by virtue of the psychic forces it cannot fully organize, the psychic registers
in which social forms of power take hold?
Butler 2015, viii

This tracking of the implicit operations of psychic investments in the

organization of social life, and the ways that organization falters by virtue of the
psychic forces it cannot fully contain, is precisely the work that psychosocial
studies claims as its core purpose, constituting itself as a ‘non-disciplinary space’
that calls for a constant acknowledgement of the mutually co-constitutive
spheres of psychic and social life. Yet to describe an emerging discipline as non-
disciplinary, and to imagine this non-disciplinarity as a ‘space’ is itself a sleight of
hand, a slippage that is perhaps motivated by a politics of resisting enclosures,
borders, edges and limits, and the ossification of thinking that has come to
characterize powerful mainstream debates in the ‘master’ disciplines of
psychology and sociology, that tend to maintain a distinction between
psychological and social life even as they may seek to investigate their relation.
Whilst there is always a question as to whether the institutionalization of such an
emergent ‘non-discipline’ blunts the political edge of the terrain from which it

1
Freud’s term, Nachträglichkeit, is translated variously as deferred action, retroaction, après-coup
and afterwardsness.
 Staying 27

emerges, the appeal to the non-disciplinary is perhaps an attempt to side with

the marginal, fluid and nomadic practice of thinking across (or even hovering
above), rather than between, pre-existing disciplines. It might even be an appeal
to the perpetual motion of critique itself, a commitment to unsettle as soon as
one settles, to deliberately look for the place where a field meets its breaking
points and therefore faces its contingencies, and to reflexively reposition oneself
wherever a new liminal space opens up.
However, I am not sure this will really do. Whether we like it or not, the
‘psychosocial’ is weighed down by debates that have taken place in a host of
disciplines in both their normative and emancipatory forms, that do anchor this
discipline somewhere even if we are not quite sure where that somewhere is. I
am not convinced that psychosocial studies can escape so easily the genealogies
of the relation between psychic reality and social antagonisms that it seeks to
understand in its appeal to the nomadism of the non-disciplinary, and that do
continue to be debated within traditional disciplinary domains. Rather than the
non-disciplinary, we could instead think of psychosocial studies as a kind of
temporal ‘transdisciplinary’ practice, a test case perhaps for thinking about how
disciplinary practices might operate not just through their permeability or
impingement on one another, but through the temporal pressure they put on one
another. Rather than viewing psychosocial studies as interdisciplinary in the
sense of creating a new dialogue, say, between queer studies and affect studies
(i.e. transdisciplinary in the sense of the production of categories that move
across both disciplines and yet remain distinct from them), instead psychosocial
studies is an opportunity for anachronistic concepts – ones that have come to be
sensed as ‘embarrassments’ in contemporary theory – to be reanimated, and
where old and new ideas speak to one another contemporaneously in generative
ways.
In what follows I look in more detail at how ‘trans-’ can operate as a temporal
phenomenon. I then follow what might have happened to a key ‘embarrassment’
in psychoanalytic theory: the notion of psychic reality. I suggest, with Michel
Serres, that this idea, which was ‘of its time’, is now ‘out of its time’, and thereby
‘wrong’ in that double sense that the contemporary suggests. However, psychic
reality resurfaces in a strand of Judith Butler’s early work, through a particular
contiguity, or ‘folding’ that she performs between Freud and Foucault, which
allows the former gains of the concept to become active again. I use Butler’s
reworking of psychic reality as simply an example of a kind of ‘psychosocial
study’ that I hope can act as a general condition, a ‘case’ of the temporal
transdisciplinarity of ‘Psychosocial Studies’. In doing so, a conceptualization of
28 Enduring Time

the temporality of ‘staying’ can be grasped. Freud’s original concept of psychic

reality opened the question of how a disturbing or traumatic external event at
the centre of psychic life gets reconsidered as a form of fantasy-taken-as-real.
Butler’s elaboration of the psychic life of power draws Freud into an uneasy but
creative tension with Foucault to understand the very production of a distinction
between psychic and social domains. Rather than psychic reality being seen to
have been surpassed, in what I am calling Butler’s ‘psychosocial’ reading it finds
a way to ‘stay’, becoming available again, not to describe a mode of fantasy, but as
an account of the very potential for the malleability of norms, and hence for
social change. As we shift from a discussion of reality to one of power, or in other
terms, from a distinction between the ‘Law’, to more socially mutable ‘norms’, so
paradoxically a key area of psychoanalytic thought that has fallen into disrepair
becomes available retroactively, gathered into this new psychosocial disciplinary
domain.

Trans-

One particular question that hovers over psychosocial studies is whether it is a

branch of psychoanalytic studies, in which psychoanalysis operates as its ‘master’
discourse. I certainly think a cartography of psychosocial studies would include
a loosely termed ‘psychoanalytic-Marxist’ tradition that might include the work
of early critical theorists such as Wilhelm Reich, Theodor Adorno, Max
Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and Eric Fromm, as well as the developments of
Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Cornelius Castoriadis and Alain
Badiou. Certainly psychosocial studies might retrospectively read these authors
as engaged with the wholesale deconstruction of a priori categories such as
‘individual’, ‘society’ or ‘collective’, where the radical decentring of the subject in
psychoanalysis could be aligned with various accounts of the tensions between
power and resistance in a bid to understand better the failure of social change. If
we were to trace other psychoanalytic-social theories that might ‘govern’
psychosocial studies, we may turn to the long feminist psychoanalytic trajectory
of which the work of Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Juliet Mitchell, Nancy
Chodorow, Jessica Benjamin and Jacqueline Rose are examples; the engagements
between psychoanalysis and philosophy exemplified in the work of Jacques
Derrida; and the history of engagements between psychoanalysis and post-
colonial theory that often takes the work of Frantz Fanon as its starting point
and then develops in the texts of Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Ranjana Khanna,
 Staying 29

Derek Hook, Gail Lewis, and Hortense Spillers to name a few. Or again, we could
approach the question of the place of psychoanalysis in psychosocial studies
through tracing the ways that key psychoanalytic concepts such as melancholia,
fantasy, desire, guilt and identification have been taken up and reworked in
relation to concepts such as identity, subjectivity and ethics.
However, there are elements of the field that do not work with a psychoanalytic
frame at all, or actively reject a version of Freudianism, and yet might still be
rendered ‘psychosocial’ in the particular ways that they draw on phenomenology,
symbolic interactionism and especially discursive theory for accounts of
subjectivity that have been taken up in a dialogue with critical psychology.2
These elements would include the particularly influential theories of affect and
emotion aligned with the work of Deleuze and Guattari and developed by Brian
Massumi, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Elizabeth Grosz, Rosi Braidotti and Sara
Ahmed, or the cultural theory of Lauren Berlant with her keen eye for the ways
intimate life operates in public spheres, where affect is released from the kind of
subject that possesses interiority, and suggests a ‘psychic’ life turned inside out,
exteriorized, a surface exemplified as a ‘body without organs’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1977). We could also include in this trajectory a renewed interest in the
category of ‘experience’ through the work of A.N. Whitehead, and we could add
to this cartography the possibilities for psychosocial readings of recent work on
materiality, objects, ecology, vibrancy and virtuality. These are broadly
perspectives that trouble distinctions between subjects and objects, either
drawing our attention to the social lives of human and non-human actors, or
insisting that ‘things’ do not precede their interaction with one another, but
emerge through particular inter- (or in Karen Barad’s words, intra-) actions
(2007). By shifting attention to assemblage and dispersal,3 psychosocial studies
becomes not just the study of the relation between the psychoanalytic decentred
self and the possibilities for social and political change, but how the material-
discursive phenomena that we cluster under ‘psyche’ and those under ‘social’
indeed come to permeate, impinge and resonate with one another.
This already places us in some kind of intensive interdisciplinary domain
which begs the question as to whether psychosocial studies might be better
described as a set of trans-disciplinary practices that allow movement across
different traditions of thought without having to fully belong anywhere. A
distinction can certainly be made between inter, multi and trans-disciplinarity,

2
See, for instance, Hook 2011, Parker 2002, 2007, Stenner 2008.
3
See, for instance, Middleton and Brown 2005, Stephenson and Papadopoulos 2006.
30 Enduring Time

whereby inter and multi disciplinary practices would include those in which
specific knowledges, concepts and methods are maintained, and a certain cross-
fertilization is sought so as to better elucidate a given phenomenon or problem
(Sandford 2015). The ‘trans’ describes something else, suggesting there are
practices, objects, methods, concepts and knowledges that do not firmly belong
within one disciplinary field or another, but move amongst them, somehow
beyond the reach of disciplinarity. Unlike the prefix ‘inter-’, which retains a
certain claustrophobia, signalling the situation of betweenness or amongness,
trans- seems to gesture towards the great outdoors. We could say that a certain
fantasy of freedom accompanies whatever the prefix trans- attaches itself to,
suggesting that a transdisciplinary concept, text, practice or method might be
free to roam, inserting itself within an otherwise homogenous field, much like
the genetic meaning of the term ‘transformation’. Despite trans- being used in
chemistry to describe a radical separation (in the definition above, the two atoms
linked by a double bond hold the pair of identical atoms in opposition, so that
their relationship is one constituted by a distance across an atomic terrain),
trans- may better evoke that other chemical example, the free radical. Here an
atom has an open electronic shell, making free radicals chemically promiscuous
with others, and also with themselves, highly reactive, transformational. The
bonds are suggestively described by chemists as ‘dangling’, somehow available for
polymerization as they move. So, as a concept departs from one disciplinary
domain and inserts itself in another, it may both underscore the distinction
between those domains, whilst at the same time, through its anomalous presence,
bring about some kind of change or re-formation.
The idea that the psychosocial may operate as a transdisciplinary practice is
certainly appealing, especially if trans- has something to do with a kind of
freedom of movement that allows untethered concepts, texts, ideas, objects,
practices or methods to cross disciplinary domains, with possibilities for
transformation that accompany the anomalous when it pops up in the realm of
the Same. However, I have also suggested that such movement may not be as
untethered as we wish, and that we are never free of the history of both normative
and emancipatory elements of field formation. This shifts our attention to how
transdisciplinary practices may operate in relation to time – how they sediment
over time, how they themselves operate as temporal entities, and how we may
trace the ways they come, over time, to appear as knowledge without recourse to
disciplinary traditions, that by definition do not apply. By thinking about
transdisciplinarity not just in spatial but in temporal terms, we can begin to
think about how concepts or methods may only become apparent, or useful, or
 Staying 31

indeed reach the limit of their usefulness, when they are taken up at particular
historical junctures, or when other concepts also become available, allowing
them to perform their transformational work.
To think about the case of the psychosocial is to echo Lauren Berlant’s
understanding of case as genre (2007). For Berlant, the case is something that
takes shape in many different professional scenes and life scenarios –
psychoanalysis and law, of course, but also in the academy, in aesthetic forms like
documentary films, detective stories and fictional autobiography, and what she
calls ‘life scenes’ like chat shows or blogs. For Berlant, the case represents a
particular way in which the singular is folded into the general, in which
singularity and its relation to generality are managed, and most importantly
judged. Indeed, in all these genres, what matters is the idiom of judgment: cases
for Berlant are ‘problem-events that have animated some kind of judgment’
(2007, 665). The case of psychosocial studies for instance, may animate a
judgment on how transdisciplinary practices work across and through temporal
folding, as well as a more internal judgment that is constantly at work, that
has to do with assessing the usefulness of concepts, texts, critical operations
and research practices that have been otherwise rendered useless, or simply
wrong in contemporary disciplinary spaces. If psychosocial studies is a critical
transdisciplinary practice, then its critique is not so much about what the
disciplines of psychology and sociology ‘lack’, and that psychosocial studies
‘fills’, but in part to do with the deliberate reappraisal of what is no longer seen
as efficacious. This is not to suggest that this is the only way that psychosocial
studies proceeds. Psychosocial researchers do, of course, produce new and
hybrid concepts all the time, suggest new ways of approaching a range of
social problems, and develop new and innovative research methodologies
that are making a major contribution to qualitative research in the social
sciences.4 But I would contend that even these new developments require a
constant process of judgment about former, now obsolete texts, concepts, and
objects within the field, a process that we cannot escape by easy reference to
‘trans’.
Is it not simply an embarrassment, however, to even talk about the ‘psyche’, or
the ‘subject’ now that many have suggested that we dispense with objects and
subjects altogether, and embrace the notion that what we have is ‘various
materialities constantly engaged in a network of relations’, a ‘sticky web of

4
See for instance Hollway and Jefferson 2013, Roseneil 2012.
32 Enduring Time

connections’ as Jane Bennett puts it, an ecology rather than a psychosocial field
(2004, 354)? In Time Binds, Elizabeth Freeman develops this notion of the
embarrassment of former political positions or attachments to certain ideas.
Punning on the drag of time past, drag as gendered performance, and the drag
as a big bore, she reminds us of the ‘bind’ that lesbians committed to feminism,
for instance, find themselves in, in the wake of the transformations that queer
studies brought to feminist theory in the early 1990s:

[. . .] the lesbian feminist seems cast as the big drag. Even to entertain lesbian
feminist ideas seems to somehow inexorably hearken back to essentialised
bodies, normative visions of women’s sexuality, and single-issue identity politics
that exclude people of colour, the working class, and the transgendered.
Freeman 2010, 62

And yet many of the political interventions made by those who identified as
‘lesbian feminists’ speak to the now in interesting and important ways. In a
similar vein, Kathi Weekes, Stella Sandford and Mandy Merck have all contributed
important recent work that reappraises Marxist feminist thought from the 1970s,
(another embarrassment, let’s face it), to contemporary debates about post-work,
changing gendered patterns of labour, and what is emerging as a ‘feminist’
commons (Weekes 2011, Merck and Sandford 2010).

The baker’s dough

How, then, might we understand the ways that earlier, and in some senses
obsolete ideas and concepts become contemporary, how they might make
trouble in the form of an embarrassment, and how might they address the
particular kinds of social concerns about which psychosocial studies might want
to speak? Michel Serres, in his work across culture, science and philosophy has,
perhaps more than anyone, proposed a transdisciplinary approach to
understanding knowledge, critique, time and space. One of Serres’ favoured
figurations, for instance, is Hermes – literally translated as ‘transport’, the figure
who traverses, ‘exports and imports’ (Serres and Latour 1995, 66) in the name of
invention. Neither interdisciplinarity nor multidisciplinarity quite captures what
Serres proposes through the figure of Hermes. In his well-known series of
conversations with Bruno Latour he states:

Have you noticed the popularity among scientists of the word interface –
which supposes that the junction between two sciences or two concepts
 Staying 33

is perfectly under control, or seamless, and poses no problems? On the

contrary, I believe that these spaces between are more complicated than
one thinks. This is why I have compared them to the Northwest Passage
[in Hermès V. Le Passage du Nord-Ouest], with shores, islands, and fractal ice
floes.
Serres and Latour 1995, 70

Serres talks of the ‘field of comparativism,’ as not so much a moving

between established disciplinary areas of thought (say, the sciences and the
humanities), but the creation of such a passage, which is closer to what we are
exploring here as transdisciplinary in its transformational potential. Though
the metaphor is spatial and rests on Serres’ interest in topology,5 he develops
a related notion of time that is centrally concerned with the relationship
between contemporaneity and superseded or outmoded modes of thought.
This he elaborates through various figurations; the baker kneading dough
and the crumpling and folding of a handkerchief, drawing out the ways that
temporal folding produces contiguities, proximities and confluences of
thought, much like the ways apparently widely separated points on a handkerchief
may be drawn together into adjacency (Serres 1991; Serres and Latour 1995,
60–61). Serres therefore invites us to understand time as chaotic but in a
precise sense:

Time does not always flow according to a line [. . .] nor according to a plan but,
rather, according to an extraordinarily complex mixture, as though it reflected
stopping points, ruptures, deep wells, chimneys of thunderous acceleration,
rendings, gaps – all sown at random at least in a visible disorder.
Serres and Latour 1995, 57

Time does not flow as much as ‘percolates’ (58), moving, that is, in a turbulent
manner. Steven Connor has written that because topology is concerned with
what remains invariant as a result of transformation, ‘it may be thought of
as geometry plus time, geometry given body by motion’ (2004). And one of
the most important of Serres’ applications of topological thought is to thinking
about history. History comes to resemble what chaos theory describes, in
that things that are very close to one another in cultural terms can appear
very distant due to the linear image of historical time. And reciprocally

5
Topology is the mathematical study of continuity and connectivity which describes the special
properties of objects that don’t tear or break, but whose morphology persists under homeomorphic
deformation.
34 Enduring Time

things that seem very close temporally speaking, can turn out to be very far
from one another conceptually. In place of the line of history (something
Serres identifies as inherently violent), he proposes time understood in terms
of dynamic volumes. Time is seen as a river or flame, forking, branching,
slewing, slowing, rolling back on itself. In particular time is a complex volume
that folds over on itself, both creating unexpected contiguities, and folding
time within it. Serres’ discussion of baker’s dough in Rome (1991)
exemplifies this:

The system grows old without letting time escape; it garners age – the new
emblems are caught up and subsumed by old ones; the baker molds memory.
[. . .] Time enters into the dough, a prisoner of its folds, a shadow of its folding
over.
Serres 1991, 81

Dough does not simply transform over time, or within time, but ‘gathers itself
up and releases time’ as Steven Connor puts it (2004). For Serres the notion
of the contemporary captures the doubleness of someone thinking in radically
new ways in their own times, and through that newness, through the ways that
those ideas are ‘out of time’ with their own era, they become available for
‘contemporary’ thought. Serres therefore puts together two issues of concern
here. The first is his deliberate resurrection of dead texts, and the problems with
repudiating the past as bygone and the present as authentic when time is
understood as linear. From a linear perspective, ‘our time’ is always conceived of
as the cutting edge, and in this way, ‘we’ are always right. In doing so, we condemn
what we think of as ‘false’ to being out-of-date or obsolete, belonging to an earlier
time, and thereby expel these ideas, modes of thought, practices, concepts
from the now. Serres argues for a suspension of judgment about what is ‘right’,
and an attention to what remains conserved, sometimes quite close to our
own era, including counting the cultural losses that correspond to the gains of
contemporary scientific discovery. The second has to do with interdisciplinarity.
Serres argues that as science becomes our only mode of contemporary discovery,
so the insights of literature and the humanities more generally become by
definition outmoded, ‘wrong’, along with all their sedimented gains. The
humanities can only then operate according to historicism, dealing with the
remains of the past, whereas the sciences completely cancel out their past,
overturning it with each new advance. In this way the problem of the relation
between different viable disciplines and the problem of time are one and the
same.
 Staying 35

Psychic reality and the psychic life of power

Taking Serres’ notion of temporal folding, can we open up a new discussion

about ‘psychic’ life? I’ve suggested that references to the ‘psyche’ may show up as
a kind of embarrassment in contemporary theory. It goes against the grain of
mainstream psychological discourse where ‘psyche’ gave way some time ago to
‘mental’ and now simply to ‘neuro’, as the brain, albeit conceived of as plastic,
emotional, responsive, porous and in some ways relational, has become the
psychological subject, even more so than the mind, and certainly not the archaic
referent, the psyche. The notion of a psychic life is tinged with something
unsavoury, perhaps a leftover connection with the nineteenth-century interest in
telepathy and the occult, linked historically in Britain to the Society for Psychical
Research that Freud had some connection with, and interest in (Luckhurst 2002,
Frosh 2013).
Not only is it anachronistic to refer to psychic life, but in particular, the notion
of ‘psychic reality’ has pretty much collapsed as a useful category in some
traditions of psychoanalytic thinking. Marion Oliner has suggested that a two-
sided response to ‘reality’ in psychoanalytic thinking has developed over the
decades (2012). On the one hand, psychoanalysis recognizes a group of patients
who have experienced severe trauma, for whom reality has pressed in so
forcefully that they remain passive to the enormity of this experience. Traumatic
experiences, however, require assimilation over time as they prompt a range of
psychic attempts at repair that often include unconscious omnipotence in
relation to survival. Internal conflicts, in other words, are retroactively understood
in relation to a process of psychically assimilating and managing the impact of
trauma. On the other hand, there is another group of patients who are seen to
have ‘failed’ or partial solutions to childhood internal conflict, and who could be
said to be active agents in their suffering. Here concerns with alterity,
intersubjectivity and figurability come to the fore, as a way to understand how
we come to accept that the world has its own independent existence beyond
the machinations of primary narcissism or omnipotence. Oliner argues that
Freud’s original notion of self-preservation was initially enough to understand
why one comes to deal with ‘reality’, but Freud’s own turn towards ‘psychic
reality’ has led, in her view, to an ossification of the dual positions she lays
out, and a stagnation of theoretical developments on how psychoanalysis
conceptualizes the relation between ‘inside and out’. In fact, the American
psychoanalyst Jacob Arlow also noted this ossification, and in 1985 declared
‘psychic reality’ dead:
36 Enduring Time

Let me begin by saying that I consider the term psychic reality anachronic. It
belongs to an earlier period of psychoanalysis. Its continued use in present-day
psychoanalytic conceptualization is unwarranted.
Arlow 1985, 521

For Arlow psychic reality is always a recollection of some kind. It does involve
an originary ‘event’, but this event is always already a complex mixture of fact and
fantasy, memory and perception. How the recollection of such psychic events
emerge in analysis, and what is done with them is entirely based, he claims, on
the orientation of the analyst. Given the multitude of orientations, we end up
with a multitude of psychic realities, rendering the concept, in his view, useless.

Whether one is a classical Freudian analyst, oriented in terms of childhood

traumas of abandonment, loss of love, castration anxiety, oedipal defeat or penis
envy, or a Kleinian tracing out the vicissitudes of the depressive and paranoid
positions, or an object-relations theorist, concentrating on the deleterious effects
of an environment that is not a safe, protective barrier, or a self-psychologist,
searching out the failures of empathic communication and mirroring, or an
attachment theorist eyeing the evidence of an unstable, unreassuring mother
who cannot supply the protective holding environment – each one will orient
himself differently towards the patient’s productions, selectively attending and
responding to those elements that are consonant with his theory of pathogenesis.
Each will find a different psychic reality in keeping with the favoured view of
what process or events they believe caused neurotic illness and character
deformation. Each one will find in his or her patient a different vision of psychic
reality, i.e. a different version of the nature of the unconscious elements in the
patient’s mind. Each will envision psychic reality in keeping with the favoured
theory of pathogenesis. Under the circumstances, therefore, the concept of
psychic reality furnishes no common ground for discourse. It has become an
anachronism.
Arlow 1996, 664

But what might it mean for psychic reality, an absolutely central concept in
psychoanalysis, to have become anachronistic in this way, even within the
discipline where it originated, and what might have happened to it, as it has
migrated beyond the clinical field? This is just the kind of transdisciplinary
concept that psychosocial studies might want to make use of, gesturing as it does,
towards internal mental processes, and a simultaneous engagement with
something excessive to psychic life, rendered here as ‘reality’. The problem, it
appears, is not just one of emphasis – either tracing a core reality within our
fantasy life, or the limitations of psychical operations that give rise to forms of
 Staying 37

psychical reality – but of ‘going astray’ theoretically, a proliferation of directions

that theory has taken that has produced a dissipation of understanding. The
notion that reality itself might be multiple, as Bruno Latour would hold, is not
considered by Arlow. Multiplicity leads to fragmentation leads to anachronism.
Although psychic reality may have been expelled from a particular
Anglophone psychoanalytic scene, this is not uniformly the case. My contention
is that by the time Judith Butler comes to the notion of the psyche in The Psychic
Life of Power (1997), psychic reality had indeed become useless in psychoanalysis,
but is reanimated in critical theory through a particular dialogue Butler sets up
in relation to the work of Foucault. However, in order for Butler to make this
move, there is a certain rendition of psychic reality in the work of both Lacan
and Laplanche that conceptualizes a form reality takes, beyond the dualism of
interiority and externality, which ‘stays’ in psychoanalytic theorizing beyond this
dissipation, and provides the groundwork for Butler’s reading of the relation
between power and psychic life. This involves the conceptualization of psychic
reality as a third term, an idea that we could say remains rather latent in more
mainstream psychoanalytic theory until its later reanimation in psychoanalysis
beyond the clinic.

Freud and the third

To briefly elaborate, psychic reality first appears in Freud’s early paper on

Hysterical Paralyses (1893), where he begins to discuss how the ‘lesion’ that he
believes is associated with hysteria is an alteration of a thought or an idea.6

Considered psychologically, the paralysis of the arm consists in the fact that
the conception of the arm cannot enter into association with the other ideas
constituting the ego of which the subject’s body forms an important part. The
lesion would therefore be the abolition of the associative accessibility of the
conception of the arm. The arm behaves as though it did not exist for the play of
associations.
Freud 1893, 170

The arm has not disappeared from external reality, but in psychic reality it
behaves as though it does not exist, paralysed in terms of its capacities to enter
6
The passage continues: ‘There is no doubt that if the material conditions corresponding to the
conception of the arm are profoundly altered, the conception will also be lost. But I have to show
that it can be inaccessible without being destroyed and without its material substratum (the nervous
tissue of the corresponding region of the cortex) being damaged’. (Freud 1893, 170)
38 Enduring Time

into the play of associations that constitute an embodied ego. Freud develops
this idea in A Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) where he makes an initial
distinction between ‘thought reality’ and ‘external reality’, and in the work on
hysteria with Joseph Breuer in 1895, before he famously (and infamously)
abandoned his ‘seduction theory’ in 1897 in favour of a theory of unconscious
infantile fantasy. Hysteria, in this early work, was understood to arise in relation
to painful or traumatic ‘real’ events, the memories of which were repressed,
turned away from the conscious mind, and yet dynamically active in creating
disturbances elsewhere. Hysterical symptoms formed when this repression
broke down, the symptom acting as an alternative solution to keeping these
memories from consciousness. By 1906, by way of The Interpretation of Dreams
in 1900, Freud had revised his position on the nature of the events that cause the
production of hysterical symptoms, shifting the emphasis from what we could
call the materiality of sexual trauma to the psychic realm of fantasy and
unconscious wish, whereby memories are not the result of an event simply
inflicted from the outside, but as Lawrence Friedman has evocatively put it, are
‘structured by preference’ (1995, 26). Freud however, resisted a simple distinction
in which the internal world now triumphed over the external, offering a shifting
dynamic interaction between memory, perception, fantasy and the pressure of
the drive or wish in a field that could involve material trauma (he never repudiated
the existence of sexual trauma in many of his patients), but now decentralized in
relation to unconscious fantasy. As Laplanche and Pontalis put it:

It is right to emphasis at this point, however, that the expression ‘psychical reality’
itself is not simply synonymous with ‘internal world’, ‘psychological domain’, etc.
If taken in the most basic sense that it has for Freud, this expression denotes a
nucleus within that domain which is heterogeneous and resistant and which is
alone in being truly ‘real’ as compared with the majority of psychical phenomena.
Laplanche and Pontalis 1988, 315

That nucleus that is truly ‘real’ is the precursor for what Lacan would go on to
name the Real, the aspect of the wish that remains impossible, resistant,
heterogeneous to unconscious thought, extending Freud’s claim that ‘there are
no indications of reality in the unconscious’ (1897). At the same time, however,
Freud saw the unconscious as subsuming all areas of mental life, so that
consciousness was simply a small part of this wider ‘psychical reality’, claiming
paradoxically:

The unconscious is the true psychical reality; in its innermost nature it is as

much unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is as incompletely
 Staying 39

presented by the data of consciousness as is the external world by the

communications of our sense organs.
Freud 1900, 613

If both internal and external worlds remain partial in our apprehension of

them, then there is some aspect of mental and social life that remains distinct
from both material reality and what Laplanche and Pontalis call ‘pure psychology’,
‘extimate’ as Lacan would say. The particular move that Freud makes in relation
to hysteria as he shifts from the aetiology of sexual trauma to that of fantasy is
that hysterical individuals treat the fantasy, which is born of a repressed wish, as
if it were real. A fantasy, once consciously understood as fantasy has none of the
dynamic repressive force of a fantasy thought to be reality, which, though not
identical with delusion, induces a range of unconscious psychical effects related
to the original wish, such as guilt, envy, anxiety and identification. In other words,
Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory was not simply about replacing
real events with fantasies, but about embedding the difficulty with accepting a
distinction between reality and fantasy as a core struggle in neurotic psychic life.
In deluded states, if we follow Lacan, there is no such struggle, as the symbolic
law that allows a distinction between reality and fantasy to be maintained is
foreclosed, so that there is little awareness that fantasy and reality have not
coincided. What has been internally abolished ‘returns from without’ and can
only appear in the Real, as the entire area of symbolic functioning has been
foreclosed. In hysteria, the patient knows the difference between fantasy and
reality, but nevertheless treats fantasy as if it were real. Its reality describes the
effects of being taken as real – the fantasy’s capacity to produce the ‘real’ psychic
processes of guilt, envy, identification and so on.
Where Lacan follows Freud in talking about an impossible Real – traumatic,
unrepresentable, irreducible – Jean Laplanche goes in a different direction. For
Laplanche, psychic reality is a particular instance in Freud’s thought in which the
vector that usually moves from internality outwards is radically reversed. Although
psychoanalysis makes what he describes as ‘ridiculous efforts to reconstruct the
outside, objectivity, on the basis of the inside’ in such a way as to be worthy of the
great idealist philosophies, there is a germ of a break with this Ptolemaic, self-
centred position in Freud’s own writing (Laplanche, 1995). This shows up at
various moments in Freud’s work – in seduction and transference, the superego,
persecution and delusion – that bring out the ways an irreducible otherness gives
rise to psychic life. The most important discovery of psychoanalysis for Laplanche
is the presence of the ‘other thing in me, and of the link between the other thing
40 Enduring Time

and the other person’ (633). In focusing on the link, Laplanche provides an account
of psychic reality as a third term that resists being co-opted as either a version of
internality or externality, and puts their relation as the condition for their
emergence – something on which Butler later builds. For Laplanche, ‘“psychic
reality” is not created by me; it is invasive. In this domain of the sexual, there is too
much reality at the beginning’ (680). As Laplanche indicates, the link between the
other thing and the other person takes the form of a message that is transmitted
between adult and infant in early life that is unconsciously sexual in its intent on
the part of the adult, and comes too early in psychic development for the child to
decode. The link therefore takes the form of a seduction, and not simply a
seduction fantasy on the part of the child. Freud, Laplanche tells us, makes an
enormous effort to manufacture the primal scene from just two ingredients –
perceptual reality on the one hand, and the child’s fantasy on the other. But the
reality that is not material but also not purely subjective has to do with the adult
proffering of the scene, a kind of unconscious intent on the part of the adults, an
offering, indeed a seduction, through an invitation to look, to witness, to receive a
message, regardless of what actually takes place. Laplanche therefore triangulates
the primal scene not simply in the child’s mind, but in the reality of the adult’s
enigmatic message which is aimed at the child at precisely the same time the adult
is caught up in the sexual relations with a third. The message says something like
‘I am showing you – or letting you see – something which, by definition, you
cannot understand, and in which you cannot take part’ (666).
The notion of psychic reality as a third reality, irreducible not only in the sense
of the Lacanian Real, but in the sense that Laplanche offers us, of something sexual
and yet completely impossible to decode that invades us from the other, provides a
bridge in Butler’s work between Freud and Foucault. A message, after all, is always
social, not a form of telepathy where by an adult psychic state is passed to a child.
Put in another way, projective identification (the process by which aspects of our
internal object relations are split off, in phantasy, and attributed to external objects)
can only occur if projection finds an object in the social world; that is, a subject.
Crucially, Laplanche’s rendition of psychic reality opens the way for psychic reality
to be understood to change the social norm, and not just the other way round.

The ‘soul’ and the psyche

I want therefore to turn to Judith Butler’s early account of psychic reality in The
Psychic Life of Power (1997). In what we could claim as a foundational text for
psychosocial studies, Butler creates a ‘new passage’ out of her reading of Freud
 Staying 41

and Foucault, to offer us a story of the tenuous, always strained, but productive
relation between psychic and social spheres. This productivity is not just about
what may be produced as excessive to these categories, but the process by which
the border between internality and externality is itself produced and maintained.
Butler deliberately holds on to a notion of the psyche – a category neither
identical with the subject nor with Foucault’s ‘soul’ (1975) – as some kind of
gesturing towards interiority that is at the same time utterly predicated on the
sociality of its production. Through her reading of Freud and Foucault together,
I suggest she offers us a way of circumventing the ‘embarrassment’ of the
conjunction ‘psychic reality’, and enacts a temporal fold, in the sense that Serres
intends, that allows Freud’s term to become available in a contemporary scene as
a theoretical resource, through her reading of melancholia alongside an analytics
of power. In this sense Butler’s work is exemplary of a temporal transdisciplinary
practice in a psychosocial register. What I offer here is a brief reminder of
the work Butler does in The Psychic Life of Power to highlight a particular usage
of the terms ‘psyche’ and ‘social’ that allows us to access a psychoanalytic concept
of psychic reality in contemporary ways.
From a position that is concordant with both Foucault and Lacan, Butler
begins with a notion of the subject as a placeholder, created through linguistic
operations or discourses that predate us, and that we did not choose, and yet on
which we are dependent for our intelligibility and agency. However, discourse
understood in a Foucaultian sense of ‘dispositif ’ doesn’t free us from the problem
of attachment, or desire for subjection.7 Once power is no longer thought of as
simply pressing down on the subject from the outside, but as productive of the
subject, then at best we will have an ambiguous relation to power that is both
desiring and resistant at once. For Butler this means we must account for our
desire for subjection, i.e. for its psychic form. Moving away from the subject
caught in a nexus of external power, whose response to that power emanates
from somewhere ‘within’, Butler addresses the problem of how that ‘within’
comes into operation in relation to power. If she learns from Foucault that she
cannot posit a subject on whom power operates if power enunciates the subject,
so she is reliant on a figure or trope of ‘turning’ rather than resisting, for

7
Foucault states in the 1977 ‘The Confession of the Flesh’ interview, ‘What I’m trying to pick out with
this term is, firstly, a thoroughly heterogenous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions,
architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements,
philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions–in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such
are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be
established between these elements.’ 194
42 Enduring Time

understanding how power inaugurates the subject. ‘Trope’, the use of figurative
language, itself both means, and operates as, a kind of turning, so this becomes a
perfect vehicle for Butler in that she can pick up on how the trope of turning is
itself a kind of ‘turn on turning’, or a turn that turns in on itself – we could say, a
fold. Where an Althusserian account of interpellation demonstrates how the
subject is produced through the address of state authority and suggests that
conscience is already in operation with the regulatory norm, Butler highlights
how it is the formation of the psychic operation (the turn of turning) that needs
to be accounted for. Butler therefore attempts to work the groove between Freud
and Foucault – Freud because he deals with a precarious subjectivity that is
carved out of internalized attachments to what we have lost and yet remain
dependent on, and Foucault because he provides a productive account of power.
Butler’s key question concerns process, and indeed temporality, in the form of
repetition or iteration, is central to her theorizing. How, she wants to know, do
social norms become internalized, not just once, but again and again over time,
if we have done away with a simple distinction between social norm and interior
life? Her answer is that it is the process of internalization that allows that
distinction. As internalization (the taking in of the norm) works its ambivalent
process, the norm itself takes on different forms as psychic rather than social
phenomena. Through Foucault we know that norms, as internalized social
regulatory forces, almost totally take over internal life, so much so that the ‘soul’
for Foucault becomes a social rather than interior category. However, Butler
argues that ‘being psychic, the norm does not merely reinstate social power, it
becomes formative and vulnerable in highly specific ways’ (1997, 21). By
vulnerable, she is suggesting ‘mutable’, and hence what she offers us is a way to
think not just about resistance to the norm, but the process of producing changes
in conditions of intelligibility. As she reminds us, ‘to thwart the injunction to
produce a docile body is not the same as dismantling the injunction or changing
the terms of subject constitution’ (88). Undermining is one thing, and
rearticulating the symbolic terms by which subjects are constituted is another.
In order to understand our passionate attachment to the disciplinary regimes
that both produce and totalize the subject, Butler mines psychoanalysis for a
response to the ontological question of ‘who’ is there to make attachments prior
to subjectivation, that could lead to subject formation. Here she looks to Freud’s
account of how the ego paradoxically comes into being through melancholic
processes, through identification with lost objects and lost attachments. It is
unnecessary to rehearse Freud’s concept of melancholia fully here. What I want
to highlight is how, in Butler’s hands, melancholia becomes a way of
 Staying 43

understanding the institution of a distinction between social and psychic life,

and that the boundary that, in her terms ‘distributes’ the terrain between the two,
is dependent on mutable social norms. This is a crucial point for psychosocial
studies as Butler offers a way of articulating a social psyche that builds on
Laplanche’s insistence on the constitution of psychic life through an encounter
with alterity, but a socially constituted alterity, and therefore one that changes as
it becomes psychic.
Briefly, from Freud’s 1917 account of melancholia, a bond is formed between
subject and object followed by a withdrawal of the object. The subject, instead of
letting go of its attachments to the lost object, and loving a new object, withdraws
the libidinal energy that had been caught up in the original attachment into the
ego, where it cannot find anywhere to go. This state produces an identification of
the ego with the abandoned object: ‘I’ am, like you, a lost and abandoned object.
The loss of the object, however, also creates a split in the ego, caught in a dynamic
interaction between ego-criticism (a condemning agency) and an ego modified
by identification. By the time we get to ‘The Ego and the Id’ (1923) Freud states:
‘The character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and that
it contains the history of those object choices’ (29). Melancholia becomes the
generalized condition in which the lost object of an originary attachment is
taken ‘in’ to an ego that is simultaneously built up and formed through that very
process. The ego is precipitated then by loss, ‘sheltering’, as Butler puts it, the
memory trace of that lost love. This also means that prior to ego formation there
is some kind of originary traumatic encounter with an other that entails both
identification and aggression, and which cannot be given up. The ego is instituted
through taking in the remains of that loss and its affects. The ‘turn’ that constitutes
psychic life contains both a change in direction, and a change in affect – from
object to ego, and from love to hate – as the object-taken-in is berated and
sadistically attacked by a condemning agency, as well as loved. The failure of the
ego to fully take itself as its own love object, as it does in primary narcissism,
creates a sliver of a gap between subject and object, and in doing so internal and
external worlds are instituted.
Crucially for Butler, and I would argue for psychosocial studies:
[. . .] if the melancholic turn is the mechanism by which the distinction between
internal and external worlds is instituted, then melancholia initiates a variable
boundary between the psychic and the social, a boundary, [. . .] that distributes
and regulates the psychic sphere in relation to prevailing norms of social
regulation.
Butler 1997, 171, emphasis added
44 Enduring Time

Butler’s argument is that as the ego is modified through identification with

lost objects, so a whole range of social ideals, silences, repressions and prohibitions
are also taken in. In other words, what is denoted in psychoanalysis as simply
‘object’ is actually an already configured social world, an other who is already
regulated, governed and formed by norms. The berating agency is not simply
internal. When the melancholic states ‘I have lost nothing’, this is not just as a
psychic bolstering against loss, but a statement that reveals the social forms of
power that regulate what losses can and cannot not be acknowledged or grieved,
as much of Butler’s later work elaborates. ‘Conscience’ is an internal violence
turned in on the self, but it originates not just in the drive, but in the violence of
social norms that regulate the lost object.
Finally, the counter-point to the psychic form that the violence of social
norms takes, is the political promise that can be understood as part of the
melancholic’s ‘plaint’. Many theorists have commented on the ‘spirit of revolt’ that
Freud writes about in the melancholic, as they attempt to break the bond that
they also want to sustain.8 Butler understands melancholia not as an individual
pathology, but as a condition produced and reproduced through systematic
cultural and social exclusions from dominant norms that provide recognition.
The condition of melancholia, that is also the generalized condition of ego
formation, institutes a boundary that produces and regulates a separation of
psychic and social spheres, and in becoming ‘psychic’, social norms can in their
turn be regulated and (re)produced. Whilst the ego cannot escape the
incorporation of the violence of non-recognition, at the same time it is in revolt,
seeking to break the bond on which its formation depends. Hence, for Butler, we
‘work through’ social regulation all the while we are constrained by it.
Returning now to Michel Serres, we can recall that a system can grow old
without letting time escape, and through a process of temporal folding or
kneading, unexpected contiguities and proximities can be made and remade.
Serres is particularly concerned with the fate of ‘dead’ texts or ideas, and how
quickly they are relegated as ‘obsolete’. He urges us to pay attention to what has
remained conserved, close to our own era, and deliberately suspends judgment
on the insights from previous eras, proposing a kind of waiting until their
usefulness can resurface again through their contiguity to other, more ostensibly
‘contemporary’ texts and ideas. This suspension of judgement is also a suspension
of time, a refusal of the new to be only orientated towards the future, and equally
a refusal to simply ‘resurrect’ the past. Kneading traps time, in that the proximity

8
See Khanna 2006 and Kristeva 2000 as examples.
 Staying 45

of one fold of the dough with another utterly transforms the dough through its
engagement, if you like, with its own history. The idea that a Foucaultian
perspective on power and the norm can surface within a psychoanalytic account
of the psyche positions these concepts as transdisciplinary. However, the story I
have told here has not just identified and traced key transdisciplinary concepts
that are active in the field of psychosocial studies, but has shown how psychosocial
studies proceeds by gathering up ‘dead’ or outmoded concepts and reading them
with and through others to produce the ‘contemporary’. In doing so, both are
transformed. It is this process of mutual transformation that is at the heart of
Judith Butler’s account of the psychic life of power. Butler’s account of psychic
reality could therefore be read as indicative of a form of temporal practice that I
am calling a psychosocial practice, although she may not, herself, name it as
such. Psychic reality, that Freud first articulates in 1893, is pronounced dead in
1985, but remains active, especially in its triangulation by Laplanche and his
insistence on the relationship between the other thing in me, and the other
beyond me. It reappears ‘beyond’ clinical psychoanalysis through the folding or
kneading Butler performs of Freud’s concept of melancholia and Foucault’s of
productive power, that produces a psychosocial account of a variable boundary
that both instigates and regulates psychic and social spheres. Through this
process we see how the norm comes to have ‘gotten in’, and how the psyche in its
turn can affect some leverage on socially produced norms and regulatory
practices of governance. Psychic reality, as neither simply reality, nor simply
internality, is reworked through the redoubling of effects as the two spheres are
constituted, so that power, subjection and our attachments to our subjection
produce one another. This political reading of psychic reality is then available to
be ‘offered back’ to the clinical sphere, so that the violence of social norms, and
their mutability can form part of our understanding of the emergence of the
subject in the clinic. Counter-memory – the transformation of history into a
totally different form of time through the practice of vigilant repetitions – is the
linguistic or discursive form that Serres’ articulates as dynamic volume, or the
retention of time within the dough: ‘Time enters into the dough, a prisoner of its
folds, a shadow of its folding over’. Whilst time may not be experienced as
‘unfolding’ currently in a colloquial sense, might we say, more accurately, that it
is ‘folding over’?
46
 2

Maintaining

Maintain

1. : to keep in an existing state (as of repair, efficiency, or validity): preserve

from failure or decline <maintain machinery>
2. : to sustain against opposition or danger : uphold and defend <maintain
a position>
3. : to continue or persevere in : carry on, keep up <couldn’t maintain his
composure>
4. a : to support or provide for <has a family to maintain> b : sustain
<enough food to maintain life>
5. : to affirm in or as if in argument : assert <maintained that the earth is
flat>
Merriam-Webster Dictionary 2005

When time is caught in the fold, it is in danger of becoming hidden. Kneading,

after all, like other forms of non-mechanized repetitive labour, was always a time
consuming and physically arduous business, whether performed by artisans, or
by women as part of the daily round of domestic labour. It takes time to fold
time. Accelerated technologically driven capitalist societies that are ultimately
organized around the urgency of seeking new markets and profits require new
mechanisms for managing the outcomes of speeding up time. But, as Sarah
Sharma has shown (2014), these new mechanisms play out unevenly across
bodies and spaces. The politics of time and space ushered in by globalized
capitalism is not simply about speed, but involves power relations as they emerge
in time, and have to do with the interrelated, relational and entangled ways that
one person’s time is used in the service of another’s. Coining the term ‘power-
chronography’ (in a nod towards Doreen Massey’s ‘power-geometry’ that sought
to complicate Fredric Jameson and David Harvey’s original accounts of time-
space compression by paying attention to specific bodies, spaces and the power

47
48 Enduring Time

differentials between them), Sharma shows how capital invests in certain

temporalities, and not others:

Capital caters to the clock that meters the life and lifestyle of some of its workers
and consumers. The others are left to recalibrate themselves to serve the
dominant temporality.
Sharma 2014, 139

Sharma offers a ‘micropolitics of temporal coordination and social control’ that

occurs through the differences between multiple embodied temporalities;
frequent business travellers, for instance, who hail taxis to speed up their journeys
are reliant on the hidden delayed waiting time and night-time working of those
taxi drivers; hotels that are specifically set up to help support the constant
movement of jet-lagged frequent flyers are serviced by those whose temporality
is minutely controlled and micromanaged by their employers; slow food
producers employ workers who must operate at a radically different pace from
the slow food they cook and the lifestyle they promote.
Sharma’s work chimes with a substantial sociological and anthropological
literature that highlights that where time once played a part in the differential
management of populations by separating those whose time was ‘precious’ (wage
earners, the educated classes, the able-bodied) from those whose time could be
squandered or had little value (the working classes, Bourdieu’s ‘unemployed’
with too much time on their hands, ‘delinquent’ adolescents, the bored middle-
class housewife whose children had ‘flown the nest’, the disabled, elderly or sick),
now time is a commodity that no-one has enough of, and yet power still operates
to structure and condition different populations’ lack of time. The busy ‘work’ the
unemployed do for their benefits in post-industrial nations does not necessarily
translate into meaningful or paid work. Both the precarization and feminization
of labour has meant that women increasingly work a double shift, especially
those in ‘care chains’ who care for the children of middle-class women in the
global north but continue to parent their own children in the global south via
social media. And those on zero hours contracts work continuously but only to
economically stand still.1 The time poverty of a woman in full-time employment,

1
Adam 1994, 1995, Nowotny 1994 and Zerubavel 1981 have contributed major work on the social
analysis of time. See Baldock 2000, Parreñas 2005, Williams 2010, Madianou 2012, Madianou and
Miller 2011, and Yeates 2009, 2012 for work on global care chains. See Folbre 2014, Folbre and
Bittman 2004, Gershuny 2003, Harkness 2008, Jacobs and Gerson 2004, Kilkey and Perrons 2010,
Sulivan 2000, 2004, Wacjman and Bitman 2000, Wheelock 2001 for extensive work on gender,
domestic labour, care and life/work balance. See Adkins 2012 for an account of ‘unemployed time’
in neoliberal conditions, and Bastian (2013) for work on the question of ‘shared time’.
 Maintaining 49

with a home and children, is radically different from the time poverty of a
woman in externally enforced flexible labour who must be available at all hours
of the day, regardless of her other caring responsibilities, and yet we can say they
are both time-starved. In other words, there is a heterogeneous and uneven
response to speeded up time, heavily conditioned by the geopolitical terrain one
is attempting to live or work in, by the shapes and forms of our bodies, and how
those bodies may or may not be recognized at the level of the State, or the global
transnational employer. Everything does not simply get faster even though
everybody appears to run out of time. What proliferates is a multiplicity of
contradictory temporalities, although few of them escape the relentless push
towards the accumulation of profit.
Hidden forms of time, then, have a relation to the trapped time of disavowed
durational activities that sustain people, situations, phenomena, institutions
and art objects, and thereby underpin the maintenance of everyday life. 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’.2
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 maintenance
practices by generating products, for instance, specifically designed to break
down without the possibility of being mended.3 As Carole Pateman argued in
The Sexual Contract in 1988, it is structural to both patriarchy and capitalism
that the labour of maintenance remains hidden.
What is hidden, however, is not just labour but the time embedded within this
labour, and hence the qualities of this time. It returns us, 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 does not appear to unfold or function in the same ways.4
Noticing the qualities of this time matters, not just to how we understand this
2
I am not making a distinction here between living systems and inanimate objects, but using instead
a spread notion of the liveliness of ‘things’, both animate and inanimate in order to understand who
and what maintains them.
3
See Graham and Thrift 2007, for a discussion of the maintenance of products designed to break.
4
See for example Costa 1975 and Cox and Federici 1976.
50 Enduring Time

contemporary phase of capitalism and the social relations it produces, but to

how we understand time. There is a relation between our current distinctive
temporal imaginaries, and patterns of managing vulnerability and dependency
through systems of maintenance. Maintenance systems, in other words, are
distinct from productive systems, in that they rely on, and to some degree
produce, different temporal arrangements and temporal orderings that intervene
in dominant temporal imaginaries.
My aim here, however, is not simply to revalorize hidden temporalities
through their capacities to disrupt the dominant temporal imaginaries of our
times, but to try to notice the qualities of time that has nevertheless become
suspended. Suspended time is heterogeneous to the totally ‘qualified time’ of
permanent work in which time and its qualities are sold back to us in the form
of ‘quality time’ (Cederström and Fleming 2012). Work time, as Sharma shows us,
is animated by the obscured temporalities embedded in the labour of maintenance
that appear at first glance to also be without qualities, in that this time can feel
stuck, immovable, interminable, and yet is time that allows 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 begin to understand what it might
mean to ‘grasp time’. If time is used to organize bodies towards maximum
profitability, as Elizabeth Freeman (2010) has argued, then an analytics of such
organization, as well charting the ways that bodies resist, or as Lauren Berlant
would put it ‘desist’, being chrononormatively organized, is pressing (2011). But
more than this, we need to understand the relation between bodies that desist, or
refuse to ‘progress’, 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,
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 but through its suspension allows the renewal
of everyday life. It maintains our relation with time itself, time we may be able to
imagine, at least, that we can grasp and or have.

Wearing out

Through the notion of desisting bodies, the cultural theorist Lauren Berlant
analyses practices such as overeating, attachments to ‘bad’ relationships, and our
ongoing commitments to defunct political processes as neither simply acts of
 Maintaining 51

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’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 in
capitalist societies, is so far apart, that these acts that suspend the self are actually
forms of self care (2011).
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’ (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 food, for instance, holds out the
promise of satisfaction, in overeating it is also ‘cruel’ in the way it wears out
already worn out bodies (115). The time of overeating then becomes both
intensely present and constantly evasive. Given that food is a key site for self-
expression and nourishment, overeating interrupts the project of the self, creates
a pause in agency, produces one of these elongated intervals, or non-times, in
which nothing in particular seems to be happening, which is not identical to
simply ‘survival’ because there is something pleasurable and expressive going on
when we overeat, and quite often something communal too. But it cannot be
thought of as what leads to flourishing:

In this scene some activity toward reproducing life is not identical to making it
or oneself better, or to a response to the structural conditions of a collective
failure to thrive, but to making a less bad experience.
Berlant 2011, 117

Time, then, is not a backdrop to the push-pull of cruel optimism. Suspending

the project of the self means suspending time as flow and living permanently
within the time of the impasse.
This notion that Berlant proposes, that certain practices of survival in late
liberalism require living in a stretch of time that tethers us to an object that both
can and can’t provide us with satisfaction, may lead us to ask certain philosophical
52 Enduring Time

questions about the nature and quality of this time, and its relation to time as
development, progress, departure and arrival. We need to understand both how
we experience time phenomenologically, in the impasse of self-suspension, and
the implications of suspended time for foreclosed time, stuck time and
melancholic or traumatic time. My question then is how might we prise open
this impasse, and understand both its qualities and its possibilities. Where
Berlant is concerned to track our repeated attempts to stay close to a fraying
fantasy of a better life through the suspension of agency, I am concerned here to
better understand how suspended agency relates to suspended time, and how
suspended time is a form of heterogeneous time that doesn’t so much interrupt
historical time, but reveals its qualities through its own peculiar lack of qualities.
The impasse, thought of in this way, can therefore make a bridge back to a history
of feminist thought and practice that has always been concerned with lives ‘on
hold’, and with making a less bad experience for ourselves and others. And more
than this – with maintaining that the time bound up in maintenance is integral
to time’s ability to ‘progress’.

Maintenance time

The notion of maintenance appears to contain two temporal forms. In part

maintenance is about trying to keep something going – keeping things
functioning or in a steady state, allowing what already exists to continue or
persevere, to carry on being. Maintenance is not the time of generation or
production, or the eruption of the new. It is not revolutionary time, but the
lateral time of ‘on-go’ that tries to sustain an elongated present. We maintain
machinery, a position, our lives and the lives of others, our composure, our
precarious mental states; maintenance is a bulwark against the time of entropy,
and the propensity of all living systems to decay and eventually die. Maintenance
requires an attachment to now-time that is not so much the time of the
Benjaminian flash (Benjamin 1940), but of the slow burn of one moment looking
much like the next.
Secondly, to maintain is also to keep buoyant; to maintain one’s mood could
be described as buoying oneself up, keeping oneself or someone else afloat
during difficult times. Maintaining that the Earth is round when it looks flat is
about upholding an idea, defending, and affirming it when it is challenged or
attacked, raising its profile when it has slipped off the agenda. To maintain is to
underpin, or prop up from below, to hold up when something or someone is
 Maintaining 53

flagging. The time of maintenance lies therefore at the intersection between the
lateral axis of stumbling blindly on, and the vertical axis of holding up, orientating
us towards a future, even when that future is uncertain, or may not be our own.
Whilst there is an inherent conservative, and even backwards impulse within
maintenance practices, there are also temporal modes of maintenance that reach
towards the future even as they attempt to keep things the same as they ever
were. It is here we can glimpse the double action of maintenance as a material
practice of sustaining people, things and connections, and the name for a
paradoxical ongoing relation or attachment to the promise of time.
Maintenance, then, is the temporal dimension of care – the disavowed
durational activity that gives the lie to being as conatus, Spinoza’s supposedly
innate inclination for a thing to go on being, or to somehow enhance itself.
Maintenance deals with states of dependency, with vulnerable states in which we
are reliant on both the practices and good will of other people, beings and things
to survive and thrive, vulnerabilities that emerge at different points in our
individual histories, as well as emerging differently in relation to histories of
oppression and resistance, and histories of power and agency. As the artist
Park McArthur reveals in her work, her reliance on a collective of people
to care for her as a disabled individual involves a temporal orchestration
governed by patterns of the day (McArthur 2012, Horisaki-Christens et  al.,
2013). Carried and Held, for instance, follows the format of a series of museum
wall labels made up of text punctuated by emoticons that lists all the people who
have carried and held the artist’s body (McArthur 2012). Whilst McArthur
makes visible the affective, political and physical relationships of those in her
informal care collective, she also reveals the time of care embedded in this
network that includes people, institutions and sources of financial support that
have enabled her to survive and work. She shows how she is propped up, day in
and day out, and enabled to keep going through the time of care I am calling
maintenance.
Furthermore, as Gail Lewis has described in her writings on motherhood,
desire and imperialism, the vulnerabilities of an infant who needs care, and
whose demands to be propped up and kept going call forth an ethical response,
have to be thought through in relation to those of a carer who may be containing
not just her infant’s projections, but the affective dimensions of multiple social
projections including racialized hatred and socially ostracized desire (2009).
To care is never simply a matter of labour or simply a matter of the
wish to repair the world. To care is to deal in an ongoing and durational
way with affective states that may include the racialized, gendered and imperially
54 Enduring Time

imbued ambivalence that seeps into the ways we maintain the lives of
others.5 Care is an arduous temporal practice that entails the maintenance of
relations with ourselves and others through histories of oppression that return
in the present again and again.6
In what follows, I want to create a connection between ‘maintenance time’ and
‘the time that we have’ through an analysis of two bodies of artwork. The first is
the seminal work of the feminist performance and social artist Mierle Laderman
Ukeles. Since the late 1970s Ukeles has called herself a ‘maintenance artist’,
seeking, amongst other things, to raise the profile of waste and those, such as the
City of New York sanitation workers, who work on behalf of city dwellers to
process and manage the waste they endlessly produce. In linking feminist
concerns with making visible the ongoing work performed by women in the
daily domestic round of care, with broader agendas around those who do
society’s ‘dirty work’, as well as the now anachronistic belief in the central role of
public institutions in the management of the social fabric, Ukeles’ life-long
project proposes a renewed relation to time through championing the stuck time
of maintenance.
The second body of artwork is the photographer, Richard Billingham’s, first
artist’s book Ray’s a Laugh (1996), which graphically portrays Billingham’s
parents and brother living in acute poverty in their home in Cradley Heath in
the West Midlands during the mid-1990s. These photographs caused a stir when
they were displayed and published, for their graphic depiction of what people
read as the ‘squalor’ of the conditions Billingham’s family were living in,
prompting accusations of sensationalism. Here I offer a reading of Billingham’s
photographs within the framework of maintaining familial connections through
the act of picturing time. My aim is to think these projects of endurance and
suspension as attempts to grasp the time that we have.

Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969

In 1969 Mierle Laderman Ukeles wrote a manifesto. She was pregnant with her
first child, and had been told by her tutor at art school that now she could no
longer be an artist. Prior to this she had been making artwork that involved

5
See also Gunaratnam 2013.
6
See Coote et al. 2013, Gill 2009, Hale et al. 2013, Honore 2004, O’Neil 2014, Schulte 2014 and Vostal
2014.
 Maintaining 55

wrapping and stuffing objects, but had become fed up with how the objects
seemed to need constant care and ‘schlepping around’, as she put it (2006).
She tried for a while to make massive inflatable air-filled objects instead,
with the intention of being able to fold them up at the end of an exhibition and
put them in her back pocket in order to deliberately circumvent this need for
objects to be cared for. However, she found that the process of making the
inflatables required a heavy reliance on the industrial processes of a heat-sealing
factory, upsetting her desire for an autonomous and portable artwork.
They also leaked. Her attempt, in other words, to uncouple herself from the
artworks, and to free herself of the material and ideological systems that
governed their, and her own, reproduction, had failed. Once she became
pregnant issues of freedom and autonomy became even more pressing, caught
in that classic tension between her desires to be with her children and to
continue to produce work. She then had what she described as ‘an epiphany’;
she realized that instead of trying to hide the maintenance work she was
involved in, so that she and the artwork could appear free and autonomous,
she would make maintenance work itself into art (Jackson 2011, Ukeles and
Baraitser 2015).
The manifesto was called Manifesto for Maintenance Art  1969! Proposal
for an exhibition ‘CARE’ (Ukeles 1969). Manifestos are wonderful literary
genres. They are often written in times of political rather than personal crisis
or change. Direct, polemical, critical, pragmatic, they orientate towards
action and producing changes in the present arrangement of things, ‘a genre
intent on changing the world rather than just interpreting it’ (Puchner 2005,
297). Ukeles’ maintenance manifesto, however, was not simply a call to
overturning patriarchal structures that kept women and their domestic
labour in the home and out of public life. Instead it critiques our very
understanding of action and change. It represents an attempt to think
through the temporal practices of maintenance that underpin revolutionary
change. Parenting, and maintenance in general, as the art critic Shannon
Jackson has written, became the formal problem that Ukeles was seeking
to address:

Maintenance is a structure that exposed the disavowed durational activity

behind a static object as well as the materialist activity that supported
‘dematerialized’ creativity, a realization that called the bluff of the art
experimentation of the era.
Jackson 2011, 88
56 Enduring Time

In the opening section of the manifesto, entitled ‘IDEAS ’, Ukeles takes up

Freud’s distinction in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) between the death
and life instinct. Death, Ukeles associates with separation, individuality,
liberation, the avant-garde, the capacity to do one’s own thing, to follow one’s
own path to death. The death drive, in other words, for Ukeles, is the marker of
an autonomous life free of dependencies, and crucially free of others. Of the life
instinct, on the other hand, she writes ‘unification; the eternal return; the/
perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species; survival/ systems and
operations; equilibrium’ (1969). Out of this distinction Ukeles outlines two basic
systems: those of development and maintenance. Development is linked to ‘pure
individual creation; the new; change/ progress; advance; excitement; flight or
fleeing’ (1969). Maintenance, on the other hand is the practice that underpins
development: ‘keep the dust off the pure individual/ creation; preserve the new;
sustain the change; protect progress; defend and prolong the advance/ renew the
excitement; repeat the flight’ (1969). Development, in other words, is utterly
dependent on practices of preservation, prolongation, repetition, protection and
sustenance, which we can summarize with the term ‘dusting,’ echoing earlier
feminist debates about reproduction and domestic labour that Simone de
Beauvoir had begun and Hannah Arendt had taken up (Veltman 2010). Where
development systems include room for change, maintenance systems are ‘dire’, as
Ukeles writes, with little room for alteration: ‘C: Maintenance is a drag; it takes all
the fucking time (lit.)’ (1969).
Having laid out these two systems, Ukeles changes the direction of the drives
– she deliberately realigns radicality not with the assertion of autonomous
personhood, change and disruption, but with the habits of maintenance and care
on which such autonomy is dependent. She asks not just for the recognition of
the labour of maintenance, but for the efficacy of what she calls ‘maintenance art’,
reversing the logic of the development/ maintenance system. In realizing that as
an artist the one thing she gets to do is to define for herself what art is, she
declares maintenance a viable form of art, making an intervention into the
dichotomy between life and death. In other words, first she reverses the order so
that life/maintenance is ‘dire’ rather than lively, and death/art is progress and
liberation rather than deadliness, and then she flips the order, declaring
maintenance a form of art. In doing this maintenance (cooking, cleaning,
washing, dusting, keeping the home fires burning) becomes a vehicle for
revealing all the hidden ‘life work’ that goes on, on behalf of others, without re-
marginalizing it, but without linking it to the time of progress. Instead Ukeles
opens up the temporality of female labour to an association with liveliness
 Maintaining 57

through endurance, or reanimating the seemingly dead time of repetition and

meaningless labour without associating it with development. This she then links
to the male and female service workers who make up most of the workers of the
world (whom she comes to name later as ‘sustainability workers’), as well as the
ailing social institutions, such as sanitation departments, arts funders and NGO s
that support maintenance work. Any art that claims to be autonomous is in fact
‘infected by strains of maintenance ideas, maintenance activities, and
maintenance materials.’ Maintenance art on the other hand ‘zero(s) in/on pure
maintenance, exhibit it as contemporary art, and/ yield, by utter opposition,
clarity of issues’ (Ukeles 1969). As Patricia C. Phillips states,

[T]he idea that people are diminished by recurring, repetitious work is a prevalent
and often unquestioned one. In ‘Manifesto for Maintenance Art’ Ukeles proposed
instead that enormous potential for creativity lay in the willingness to accept and
understand the broad social, political, and aesthetic implications of maintaining.’
Phillips 1995, 171

It is worth contrasting Ukeles’ manifesto to Marinetti’s infamous 1909 Futurist

Manifesto, a homage to speed, the car, and what he saw as the purifying potentials
of war and violence. In a famous passage in which he describes a minor accident
he had a year previously in which he swerved his car into a ditch to avoid two
cyclists, Marinetti describes how he emerges reborn:

‘O maternal ditch, half full of muddy water! A factory gutter! I savored a mouthful
of strengthening muck which recalled the black teat of my Sudanese nurse!’
Marinetti 1909, n.p.

Typically hyperbolic, and in part a satirical over-identification with the ‘new

man’ of modernity, the appearance of the black maternal other in this defining
modernist text nevertheless alerts us to an arch relation to revolutionary change
that allows us to read Ukeles’ 1969 text as a direct rebuttal of the unacknowledged
‘muddy’ substrata of the speed of progress. The thrust of Ukeles’ work was
precisely to reverse the figuration of the othered, raced, classed, maternal-
feminine as simply a ditch offering up sustenance to the revolutionary moment
of Marinetti’s epiphany, and to engage in a non-ironic, almost naïve way with
questions of maintenance. Ukeles’ manifesto asks:

The sourball
of every revolution: after the revolution, who’s going
to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?’
Ukeles 1969, n.p.
58 Enduring Time

For Ukeles there was a relation she took seriously between the world’s ‘othered’
workers, the degraded object world and the degraded social systems and
institutions designed to manage social waste.

Touch Sanitation (1977–1984)

As well as being one of the first artists to perform female domestic labour in
the gallery, Ukeles staged a series of washing and cleaning performances
during the 1970s. These included washing the steps of the Wadsworth
Atheneum (Washing, Tracks, Maintenance: Outside, 1973), and cleaning
museum vitrines as a way to reveal the cleaning staff ’s daily hidden maintenance
of art (Transfer: The Maintenance of the Art Object, 1973). Then in 1977
Ukeles persuaded the New York City’s Department of Sanitation to let
her be their self-appointed unpaid artist-in-residence.7 Examining the
relationship between those who live in a community and those who serve it,
she wore away at the boundary between traditional art and routine life and
created a durational project, Touch Sanitation (1977–1984) that included
numerous artworks, performances and showings over a seven-year period. She
started off creating a cartography of the city, a map of its boroughs and
community districts. She then drew ten circles to match up with the schedule
of the shifts that the maintenance crew worked. Between 1977 and 1984 she
walked the ten full circuits, meeting all the sanitation workers in the entire
city, at every site, from rubbish collection, to landfill, to headquarters. This
entailed spending 8 hours of the 16-hour shift with the then all-male work force,
each circuit taking 11 months to complete. During a performance entitled
Handshake Ritual, which she undertook between 1978–1979, she shook hands
personally with 8,500 sanitation workers, thanking each of them individually
for keeping New York City alive.
Handshake Ritual was a temporal project, a kind of ‘falling in step’ as Phillips
has put it, with an entire workforce. By following the rubbish and those who
maintained the city’s cleanliness, Phillips has argued that Ukeles tracked the
flows of information, materials, desires, social relations and interpersonal
resonances of a vital public domain (1995). This entailed adopting and accepting
the rhythms and routines of an established workplace, with its polychromatic

7
She remains in this unpaid position today, some 40 years later.
 Maintaining 59

communications. In a letter that Ukeles wrote to the Department of Sanitation,

concerning Handshake Ritual, she states:

I’ve talked a lot about ‘hands’ to ‘handle’ waste, ‘handling’ the pressures and
difficulties of the job, and finally – about ‘shaking, shaking, shaking hands.’ This
is an artwork about hand-energy. What you are expert at, what you do every day.
The touch, the hand of the artist and the hand of the sanman. I want to make a
chain of hands [. . .] A hand-chain to hold up the whole City.
Ukeles quoted in Phillips 1995, 183

Ukeles would sit every day on the kerb with her colleagues to eat lunch, as
many restaurants wouldn’t serve sanitation workers, designating them as ‘dirty’
or ‘smelly’, to be put outside with the rubbish. As one ‘sanman’ told her, ‘it’s like I
AM the garbage or the garbage is my fault’ (2006). So she did a name-cleaning
project in which sanitation workers listed the worst names that they had ever
been called by members of the public. She then wrote them on the two-storey-
high glass windows of a building on a prominent New York street, and invited
190 guests representing all sectors of society to wash the names off whilst the
sanitation workers watched their fellow citizens cleanse the bad names.
Numerous showings of other collaborative performances with the sanitary
workers emerged from the project that changed the material conditions of
their working lives – their shift times, the quality of their changing rooms and
toilet facilities. Through what Shannon Jackson has named as ‘public acts of
transference’ Ukeles challenged the public disavowal of rubbish, asking us to
take back our relationship with our own waste.
There are many ways Ukeles’ work could now be seen as anachronistic.
Municipal sanitation departments in most major cities in the global north have
been taken over, or their services outsourced, to vast multinational corporations
whose slow violence far outweighs that of the ailing social institutions that
Ukeles was seeking to investigate and prop up. We could even see her attachment
to a socialist agenda championing the daily lives of ‘workers’ as an echo of Soviet
art in the post-revolutionary period, and her work sits contextually within longer
histories of durational art practices that stage time and its relation to capital in
much more direct and overt ways.8 And yet, what Ukeles’ work reveals is
something about the quality of time in the impasse. Scrubbed clean of irony,
photographs and video footage show her throwing herself at the city in a totally

8
See, for instance, Chris Burden, Five-Day Locker Piece (1971) and Bed Piece (1972); Tehching Hsieh
One Year Performance 1980–1981 (Time Clock Piece), and Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–
1984 (Rope Piece), and Marina Abramović, The House with the Ocean View (2003).
60 Enduring Time

1 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation, 1978–1980. City-wide performance with

8,500 NYC sanitation workers.

serious, engaged, rigorous and earnest way; at work in the dead time of repetitious
labour, cleaning, dusting, washing, shaking hands. Her aim is not simply to
show up the relation between art and capital, or between domestic labour and
the public sphere, but to actually help to maintain the city with her own hands,
to re-suture relations between degraded things (rubbish), the people who
produce them (city dwellers), and those who handle them (sanitation workers).
This means living in the impasse in order to reveal its qualities. The assumption
that maintenance time is a literal waste of time is challenged by her tracking
of waste and turning it, and those who handle it, back into discrete objects
who command respect and recognition. This changes the time of public life
by her constant reminder that public and domestic maintenance work are
connected.
More fundamentally it reveals the temporality of lives that are neither simply
about survival, nor aimed at event, but are rather ‘without project’, as Simon
Bayly has described in his work on the relation between art, work and ‘the project’;
lives involved in labour that cannot be discretely parcelled up into the ‘project
time’ that now organizes most industrialized and immaterial labour (2013).
Bayly maps out a contemporary distinction between those who are, are not, or at
least ought to be working, and those who are working ‘on’ something, those with
 Maintaining 61

‘projects’ whose undertakings cast a long shadow into a future ‘that is both ‘open’
and urgently prescribed’ (161). The project, he argues:

[. . .] is suffused with a peculiar temporality that has come to shape the dominant
contemporary image of the future. This is an image of a fateful openness, full of
the libidinal possibility of what is ‘to come’ but which also invites and fends off
a depressive and deadly rapture – in other words, a form of the Freudian death
drive.
Bayly 2013, 162

To be ‘without project’, then, is to live in a form of time that does not define
itself in relation to a projection into an open libidinal future. Time emerges from
Ukeles’ work as the one thing we share – the potential, that is, for a life without
project, a way of being in time that is not about going anywhere, and is not about
going nowhere, but is perpetually concerned with what is produced, collected,
transported and buried, like the rubbish, 365 days a year. Instead of trying to get
away from such a life – to transform care work, revolutionize it, outsource it, shift
it elsewhere, or share it out – she dwells in and with it, showing us it is no longer
dire, but productive in keeping all productive systems going. There is no way to
reveal this time other than to live it, to provide what she calls ‘attentive reverence
for each mote of dust’ (2002, n.p.). Discussing her recent work at Fresh Kills on
Staten Island, once the largest landfill site in the world, she describes a process of
disaggregating rubbish or ‘mush’ into the distinct objects that once came together
to make it:

So that’s why, in this 50-year-old social sculpture we have all produced, of four
mountains made from 150 million cubic yards of the un-differentiated, un-
named, no-value garbage, whose every iota of material identity has been
banished, the memorial, graveyard – or whatever it is – needs to be created out
of an utterly opposite kind of social contract. The shattered taboo that enabled
this unholy shotgun marriage needs to be restored; a chasm-change in attitude
is required, one of very deliberate differentiating, of naming, of attentive
reverence for each mote of dust from each lost individual. Thus remembered,
this must become a place that returns identity to, not strips identity from, each
perished person.
Ukeles 2002, n.p.

The lives that Ukeles reveals in Touch Sanitation are not lives that exist outside
of structures of power, violence or capital, but her work provides a corrective
to seeing that the only way of engaging with such structures is through the
lens of agency, resilience, resistance or the unfolding of the event in relation to
62 Enduring Time

the object. Time in Ukeles’ work is chronic, stuck and repetitive, but it is the
time of maintenance that ‘infects’ everyone, and which is ultimately the time we
share.

Ray’s a Laugh

Ray’s a Laugh is a set of images by the English photographer Richard Billingham

depicting his family in their home in Cradley Heath, in the West Midlands.
Published in 1996 as a book of photographs, and later exhibited all over the
world, the images became iconic, both of a moment in British art history, and for
their depiction of shocking levels of poverty in Britain in the 1990s.9 Billingham
had started photographing his father Ray when he was still a teenager living
alone with Ray after his mother Liz temporarily moved out. Ray had been made
redundant before Liz left – they were conned into selling their terraced house,
and moved into a tiny council flat where Ray began drinking heavily. Billingham
has recounted how Ray did not leave the flat for 18 months during this period

2 Richard Billingham, Untitled, 1994. Colour photograph mounted on aluminium,

75 × 50 cm.

9
Billingham’s work was included in the original ‘Sensation’ exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts
in 1997.
 Maintaining 63

and barely left his room. He had no structure to his life – day and night were an
indistinct pattern of waking, drinking, sleeping, waking and drinking again for
months at a time (Billingham 2013). Billingham has described his early work as
a response to what he has called the tragedy of his father’s situation, and an
attempt to instil some order into the chaos of their lives. These early photographs,
however, were not intended as photographs but as source material for paintings.
Billingham had developed an interest in the quiet shadowy figures depicted in
the interiors of Edwardian homes that one finds in the paintings of Walter
Sickert and members of the Camden Town Group. He had initially intended to
use the photographs to paint his father in the interior space of the room in the
flat that he had withdrawn into.
Later Ray moved to Liz’s flat in a nearby block in the same town, and his
brother Jason, who had been in care in his early adolescence came back to live
with the family, re-constituting a ‘family home’. During this period Billingham
left to study fine art at Sunderland University, and when his degree was over he
returned to Cradley Heath and worked in a local supermarket, continuing to
photograph his family. The images collected in Ray’s a Laugh therefore span a
six-year period, from Billingham’s adolescence through his art school days, and
his return home. They include images of his father, mother and brother, the
interior of the flat, their cats and dogs and possessions. They depict his family
eating, fighting, sitting, making a jigsaw puzzle, drinking, smoking, sleeping,
laughing, hugging and staring into space. There are animals in many of the
pictures, and the series is punctuated by a number of images of birds in branches
that gesture towards a natural world beyond the flat.
The area of the West Midlands where Billingham grew up is known as the
‘Black Country’, due to the black soot produced by intensive coal mining and
the iron and steel industries that dominated the area during the nineteenth
century. However, coal mining was in terminal decline by the end of the 1960s
and the neoliberal economic policies brought in by the Thatcher government
led to the near total closure of the steel industry and its associated factories
in the 1980s. By the 1990s areas like Cradley Heath saw phenomenal levels of
unemployment and poverty, and were amongst the most economically deprived
areas in the UK . A common response to Billingham’s photographs has been to
question whether the exposure of the family’s conditions of economic deprivation
was a form of voyeurism, sensationalizing working-class lives, even if they
were his own. Billingham, although acknowledging that the family he grew up in
was ‘dirt poor’ (Perkin 2007), has written of his desire to simply take beautiful
photographs:
64 Enduring Time

I guess I’ve always tried to make a good picture, a beautiful picture that’s all. I
mean I didn’t notice all the stains on the walls or anything, I was just trying to
make a picture of something. [. . .] It’s not my intention to shock, to offend,
sensationalize, be political or whatever, only to make work that is as spiritually
meaningful as I can make it – in all these photographs I never bothered with
things like the negatives. Some of them got marked and scratched. I just used the
cheapest film and took them to be processed at the cheapest place. I was just
trying to make order out of chaos.
Billingham 2001, n.p.

Speaking back to the classed assumptions underlying the critique he has

stated:

Neither I nor they (my parents and brother) are shocked by the directness of the
photographs in Ray’s a Laugh because we’re all well-enough acquainted with
having to live with poverty. After all, there are millions of other people in Britain
living similarly.
Billingham, quoted in Tarantino 2000, 87

Along with the photo book, Billingham made a number of video installation
pieces, and a 50-minute work produced with Adam Curtis for British television
entitled Fishtank, in which we spend time with members of his family, smoking,
playing video games, feeding the fish, swatting flies, drinking and arguing
(Billingham and Curtis 1998). The art critic Adrian Searle has described Fishtank
as ‘a book of hours’, marked not by religious offices but by the cycles of Ray’s
alcoholism and the family’s responses to it (1999). What we watch is the family
going through what appear to be unchanging cycles of fighting, silence,
absorption into activities, tenderness, fighting again and stretches of persistent
boredom in which time appears suspended, lived as endurance, a form of waiting
without end, without project.
There are numerous ways to respond to the photographs in Ray’s a Laugh –
their extraordinary formal qualities; the way Billingham draws the viewer’s eye
towards the material textures, colours and patterns that cut across the drabness of
stained walls and worn out furniture; the framing of people within the spaces of
home; the ways ambivalent relationships of dependency and care emerge between
people, things and animals; the struggle he invites the viewer to make, to move
beyond the revulsion of the vomit-stained broken toilet and engage with the figure
collapsed by its side. More than anything, however, Billingham invites us to
maintain our eye contact, to stay in contact with the images, to live with him within
the time-space of the flat in Cradley Heath. Of Fishtank he has written:
 Maintaining 65

The best footage was when I’d been just looking and not really thinking (trance-
like) so that the camcorder was more an extension of the eye. Also, I did choose to
hold on things – a head, a mouth, the sky [. . .] – for long periods, in order to build
up emotional tension. The relationships that came out in the film, between my
father, mother, brother or me are inherent to looking through my eye in those ways.
Billingham 2002, n.p.

Billingham, then, suggests a link between maintaining eye contact over time, and
the emergence of relationships; relationships that are, after all, a product of the
strange randomness of being thrown together in a constellation we call ‘family’. The
images in Ray’s a Laugh and the long close-up sequences in Fishtank, ‘picture’ the
kind of persistent, obdurate time that I am concerned with here; time ‘without
project’, that I have called elsewhere ‘mush time’, that is the time of family life (2013).
Furthermore, in many of the images in Ray’s a Laugh, despite the ‘snapshot’ aesthetic,
and the elements of chance and spontaneity in their making, we are invited into a
sustained meditation on interiority; both the inner ‘trapped’ space of people living
on top of one another in conditions of poverty, and the inner life that we all veer
towards and away from, that includes a struggle to live in and with time. Many of
the photographs depict Ray and Liz in moments that hover between contemplation
and a kind of blankness, in which interiority is itself lived as endurance. It is this
picturing of the time of inner life that circumvents a crass reading of the photographs
as simply ‘about poverty’, or about the dead time of living without hope or future.
Michael Tarantino writes of Billingham’s work:

For Proust, an image cannot be separated from its temporal co-ordinates. And it
is the notion of a particular moment in time that gives Billingham’s photographs
[. . .] their sense of the uncanny. We can share in the moment as it unfolds in
space [. . .] we are witnesses to each scene or shot. But we can never fully partake
of the image in time. That would mean that we possessed all of the answers. And
only the photographer has those. He remembers what we merely see.
Tarantino 2000, n.p.

Ray’s a Laugh reveals an attempt to maintain contact with both interior and
familial relations, through this gap between memory (that only the photographer
possesses) and image (which we can all partake in). Artist books function precisely
through modes of delay, as literal books of hours. The photographs cannot be
absorbed in one go, as our eye cannot flick between them in the way it can across
a gallery wall – we must take time to turn the page and in doing so, one image is
lost and replaced by another. A book is serial in this sense. For the images to work
together the viewer needs to hold the memory of one image in mind as we absorb
66 Enduring Time

the next, building a layered dense picture of the subject matter through the capacity
to hold images in mind over time and imaginatively associating them to one
another. Artist books are visual equivalents to narrative that also needs the medium
of time (of an unfolding future and a receding past) to function. Time lived as flow,
as a series of connections, in other words, is reinserted back into the stuck and
relentless presentness of family life through Billingham’s framing in the form of a
photo book. The images literally hold the family together, like a family album, and
put his family into relation with himself and one another through the act of
memory – here is the time Jason threw the cat, here is the time Liz did the puzzle
in her patterned dress, or Liz and Ray had a cuddle, or Ray was drunk again, or Liz
put her feet up on the sofa and stared at the TV. Making a family album is the kind
of thing that parents sometimes do for children to chart their growth and
development, and enable them to hold onto memories of earlier times. Albums
bind people into the temporal patterns of family life, patterns Elizabeth Freeman
describes as ‘choreographed displays of simultaneity [that] effect a latitudinal,
extensive set of belonging to one another’ (2010, 28). Where Freeman highlights
generational time that evolves around family rituals such as praying together or
eating together, events that might be recorded in family albums, here the photo
book stands in for a missing family album created by Billingham in response to the
tragedy of his family’s life. What it contains is images of their capacities to maintain
an inner life out of what others may see as detritus, whilst simultaneously
functioning formally to maintain a connection to ‘family time’.

3 Richard Billingham, Untitled, 1995. Colour photograph mounted on aluminium.

 Maintaining 67

Time and the project

I began this chapter with the assertion that noticing the qualities of time
embedded in maintenance matters, not just to how we understand this
contemporary phase of capitalism and the social relations it produces, but to
how we understand time. If maintenance systems are distinct from productive
systems that rely on them, they may produce different temporal arrangements
and temporal orderings that intervene in the dominant temporal imaginaries
of our times. I further suggested that it is this paradoxical notion of renewal
through maintenance (itself a form of stuck time) that allows us to begin to
understand what it may mean to ‘grasp time’.
In different ways, the work of Ukeles and Billingham speak to this paradox.
Both artists have spent years living in and through the experiences they are
documenting, and for both, time that is repetitious or refuses to unfold becomes
the subject of their work. Rather than thinking of this work as simply durational,
we might describe it more accurately as a ‘life work’ in the sense that Adrian
Heathfield describes:

A lifework might be defined as art that involves the subjection of a life to a

projected, sustained, and all consuming creative practice, where the body of the
artist and their lived experience becomes a formative content inseparable from
the artwork. Lifeworks often involve extended durations in order to mark and
incorporate lived change, processes of accrual, aging, personal and material
transformation: they trace the singularity of a bios in movement. [. . .] Such
artworks are oriented towards an insistent regeneration of fugitive affects that
for some time evade the existent forms of capture by capital and its social and
cultural agencies. As a kind of non-utilitarian labour, they reflect a relentless
mortal quest to make, be with and share “surplus values of life as values in
themselves.” At stake here is the making and disclosure of new potentials of
being, or what Kathleen Stewart has called “the kinds of agency that might or
might not add up to something with some kind of intensity or duration.”
Heathfield 2009, 14

What is distinct is that both Ukeles and Billingham insist on attending to the
suspension of the time of the ‘project of the self ’ that Berlant discusses, deeply
immersing themselves in lives without project as a potential response to the
conditions of the now. Ukeles offers us a model, through maintenance art, of
attending to the absolute singularity of beings and things, whilst at the same time
understanding how that singularity is constantly propped up by networks of
other singular beings and things and institutions and ideas, on whom we are all
68 Enduring Time

dependent. Maintenance is the time of noticing ‘each mote of dust’, as Billingham

also instinctively knows, as he frames his father’s face staring back at him, or a
squashed fly on the wall of his home. Their work allows us to attend to the
qualities of a kind of suspended temporality that is not the time of the event, and
is neither the time of progress and development. It shares with our current
temporal imaginaries a sense of thick or viscous time, but maintenance time also
points us towards the time involved in maintaining connections with one
another, and hence with time that we share; whether that is the shared endeavour
of keeping a city alive, or of keeping family connections intact through the
suspended time of looking and picturing. I suggested at the beginning that what
maintenance does is keep us attached to time itself, in that it recognizes that
‘betterment’ is not a time in the future, but the time we labour within the ‘now’,
in its repetitious, bleak, and at times ugly forms. To grasp the time of maintenance
is to take the time that doesn’t slip through our fingers as ‘our time’, the time that
we have.
 3

Repeating

We have borne and bred and washed and taught perhaps to the age of six or
seven years, the one thousand six hundred and twenty-three million human
beings who are, according to statistics, at present in existence, and that,
allowing that some had help, takes time.
Woolf 1993, 101

Through my involvement in the women’s movement I realized that the

reproduction of human beings is the foundation of every economic and
political system, and that the immense amount of paid and unpaid domestic
work done by women in the home is what keeps the world moving.
Federici 2012, 2

For in giving all one’s time, one gives all or the all, if all one gives is in time
and one gives all one’s time.
Derrida 1992, 1

Ukeles opened up the temporality of traditionally conceived ‘female labour’ –

washing, cooking, cleaning, sewing, raising children and other forms of care
work – to an association with liveliness through endurance, a kind of dedicated,
non-ironic and persistent re-animation of the seemingly ‘dead time’ of
maintenance work, without associating it with the time of development.
Valorizing maintenance was precisely about not raising it to the level of ‘work’ or
‘labour’, with its assumptions of wage, productivity, market and value, but the
opposite – keeping a focus on the kind of strange, ongoing, elongated timeframes
that enable ‘keeping going’, and ‘keeping afloat’, that make visible an intimate
relation between time and care. To maintain, became, in Ukeles’ practice, a way
to reconstitute the borders between things that had otherwise been relegated as
rubbish (both objects and the people who handle such objects), and a way to
offer back names, and a singularity, to these people and things. To maintain,

69
70 Enduring Time

though repetitive, time consuming, and in some ways arduous, boring and
tedious, was also what constituted social relations through processes of touching,
in Touch Sanitation, and naming and making ‘things’ distinct, in Fresh Kills.
Through turning undifferentiated mushed up rubbish back into what might
approximate recognizable and nameable objects (though without necessarily
being able to reverse their status as overlooked, discarded, abandoned), Ukeles
demonstrated how both objects and time can become common and shareable
again.
But what is the time of repetition? And what is its relation to reproduction?
And what might we now mean by ‘maternal time’? Where the last chapter
was concerned with the repetitions of maintenance labour, particularly cleaning
up the city and our relations to rubbish, it was also concerned with the
tenuous processes of maintaining familial relations across and between
generations. This has something to do with the reproduction of temporality;
of a generation, that is, beyond our own, and the relation between repetition,
gender and engendering time. Although the figures in Virginia Woolf ’s quote
now seem quaint (did the world really only hold one thousand six hundred and
twenty-three million human beings barely one hundred years ago?), her
comment returns us to a longstanding struggle within feminist theory, a
theoretical provocation that occurs when reproduction and repetition are
brought into proximity with one another. The coupling and decoupling of
‘reproduction’ with the temporal trope of repetition, filters, for instance, through
the early work of both Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt, and their
concerns to differentiate the ‘meaningless’, non-productive, repetitive and
therefore ‘futile’ securing of survival that is traditionally associated with a
conglomerate of maternal, domestic and ‘female’ labour, from the productive,
inventive and generative sphere of ‘work’ that constitutes the public sphere,
and hence the possibility of ‘politics’ in Arendt’s terms (1958). The similarities
between de Beauvoir and Arendt’s concepts of labour are not always obvious.
However, Andrea Veltman has argued that for both writers, a justification for
living requires going beyond the simple maintenance of life, and for a life
to be meaningful it needs to either produce something durable, or through
creative activity, express the self (2006, 2008, 2010). De Beauvoir certainly
recognizes that without labour, life cannot continue. But labouring simply to
preserve life cannot provide a reason to live. Activities of immanence, as opposed
to those of constructive transcendent activity, are futile, and it is the combination
of necessity and futility involved in reproductive labour that renders it an
absurdity:
 Repeating 71

Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does
is maintain itself, then living is only not dying, and human existence becomes
indistinguishable from an absurd vegetation.
de Beauvoir 1948, 83

For de Beauvoir it is the fact that household labour leads to nothing durable
that prompts her to conclude that though the tasks of cleaning, cooking
and raising children are necessary, they are ‘only means, not true ends’ (1949,
473). Where de Beauvoir works on a notion of immanence in which labour
that merely sustains life can be distinguished from transcendent activity,
Arendt distinguishes ‘work’ that produces durable artefacts, from ‘labour’
that leaves nothing behind. According to Veltman, Arendt’s concept of labour
is wider than de Beauvoir’s, taking in ‘biological life, fertility, privacy,
wealth, consumption and enslavement’ (2010, 61) although she does not
explicitly acknowledge that much of what she discusses relates to the racialized
or female body, and we could say the traditionally female and raced domains
of private space, with its cyclical processes of consumption and production.
Arendt writes:

It is indeed the mark of all laboring that it leaves nothing behind, that the result
of its effort is almost as quickly consumed as the effort is spent. And yet this
effort, despite its futility, is born of a great urgency and motivated by a more
powerful drive than anything else, because life itself depends upon it.
Arendt 1958, 87

Work, on the other hand, in contrast to labour, produces durable artefacts

and shapes the structure of the world. It is the accumulation of fabricated things
that allows work to transcend the repetitive processes of natural life. Whilst
de Beauvoir emphases the potential for self-realization and liberation within
work, she shares with Arendt a basic distinction between the repetitious and
consumptive processes in sustaining biological life and the creation of something
durable over and above these natural processes. For Arendt it is the repetition of
this labouring, and the fact that it leads to nothing of any permanence that
renders it futile. A dichotomy opens up, then, with the temporality of repetition
on the one side, and the ‘permanence’ of what goes beyond mere existence
through transcendent activity, on the other.
As well as repetition being opposed to permanence, an additional tension
here, that also shows up in the Marxist and socialist feminist analyses of the
oppression of women in patriarchy that occurred in the 1970s, is the tendency to
72 Enduring Time

collapse the specific work of mothering with the more general labour of
social reproduction.1 Where the concept of ‘social reproduction’ has been
expanded beyond the home to incorporate a much broader array of activities,
from the world’s subsistence farming that is still largely performed by women, to
the self-reproduction of communities, community-based structures and
communities of care (Federici 2012), we tend to lose sight of the specificities
of maternal care and hence maternal time when it is collapsed in this way
into the category of social reproduction (Sandford 2011). Contemporary time
starvation is particular to those who perform maternal care-work, whether
they are middle-class mothers working the double shift in relation to an
increasingly feminized workplace, or working-class mothers who have
always managed the complex temporalities of working whilst raising children.2
Indeed, Catherine Malabou goes so far as to propose a minimal concept for
‘woman’ as:

[. . .] an ineffaceable “remains” in which “woman” refers to a subject overexposed

to a specific type of violence. This violence can be defined fundamentally as a
dual constraint or schizoid pressure: the pressure of work in society and at home.
Malabou 2011, 93–94

Whilst this definition remains troublingly austere, and does not distinguish
maternal care-work from other forms of work in the home, the focus on the
violence of the dual pressures on a woman’s time is in keeping with many
attempts to understand how the time of the double shift, specifically child-
rearing combined with paid employment, plays out for women and for capital.
Despite the classed figure of the ‘chav mum’ whom Imogen Tyler has argued is
supposed to have abundant time to mother, and who evokes a kind of gendered
class envy in their time-starved, harried and anxious middle-class counterparts
(2013), women who mother are overall working more than their male
counterparts, and have less ‘pure’ free time, whilst also performing most public
‘care work’ such as nursing and teaching, beyond the home.3 Their bodies, in
other words, endure the constant elongated ‘now time’ of permanent work more

1
See for example Benston 1969, Costa and James 1973, Cox and Federici 1976, Federici 1999,
Morton 1971.
2
See for instance Bianchi 2000, Bittman 2005, Bryson 2007, Craig 2006, Everingham 1994, 2002,
Folbre 1986, 2014, Folbre and Bittman 2004, Harkness 2008, Kan et al. 2011, Kilkey and Perrons
2010, Perrons 2017, Sullivan 1997, 2000, 2004, Wheelock 2001.
3
75% of local government workers are women; 1 in 8 of all jobs done by women are in local
government; 77% of NHS workers are women; 80% of adult social care workers are women; 82%
of education workers are women (Fawcett Society 2012).
 Repeating 73

than others, meaning that maternal time is now in danger of becoming totally
subsumed by work-time, that is, completely ‘qualified’ time.
It is now well established that in most countries in the global north, and
Anglophone countries in the global south, whilst women’s paid work outside the
home has increased in the last four decades, men’s contribution to care work has
not kept pace, so that where care work is ‘delegated’ it is largely passed from
middle-class women to other women, rather than men, formerly to working-
class women, and increasingly to women from the global south whose care work
in their own homes is then taken up by extended family members, and also
maintained by transnational mothers via social media.4 Some studies have
shown that men’s share in total domestic work and care for family members
increased by only twelve per cent over a twenty year period in the US , Australia
and some European countries, such as France, where it represents an increase of
just ten minutes per day, whilst ‘parenting work’ – in the strict sense of activities
directly devoted to children and excluding leisure time shared with children –
remains a highly feminized preserve.5 Overall, whilst hours of domestic work
performed by householders themselves have fallen, the amount of time devoted
to caring has not. One of the stumbling blocks is that time is not infinitely
malleable or exchangeable between uses or between people, when it comes to
care. Christine Everingham’s Australian-based study showed that whilst the time
available to both men and women decreased when they had children, only
women, and especially mothers of young children experienced a deterioration in
its quality, so that their ‘free time’ became fragmented, and could only be found
in ‘short bursts’ (2002, 338). The picture, then, that emerges from the sociological
literature is that women’s care work is ‘constant, repetitive and unrelenting’ and
that their ‘free time’ is full of interruption, and multitasking (Wajcman 2008).
Even to make such free time, Everingham argues, mothers have to spend time
planning, anticipating, setting things up, getting things done ahead of time, and,
as many have documented, mothers remain disproportionally involved in the
production of communal activities, support networks and other activities that
may appear as ‘leisure’, but in fact can be thought of as part of maintaining the
supportive structures in which mothering can remain viable, and require a
certain kind of ‘work-time’ to make happen.6 Maternal time in late liberalism has

4
See Baldock 2000, Madianou and Miller 2011, Madianou 2012, Parreñas 2005, Williams 2010,
Yeates 2009, 2012.
5
See Gershuny 2003, Harkness 2008, Jacobs and Gerson, 2004, Kan et al. 2011, Kilkey and Perrons
2010, Sullivan 2000, 2004 and Wajcman and Bittman 2000.
6
See Mattingly and Bianchi 2003 for further research on gender and ‘free time’ and Gilles 2007 for a
discussion of the labour of maintaining supportive structures by marginalized mothers.
74 Enduring Time

much in common, then, with ‘dead man working’ (Cederström and Fleming
2012) and the permanent work-time of ‘non-stop inertia’ (Southwood 2011).
Beyond the sociological analysis of mothers’ time, the question remains,
however, as to whether there is something distinct about maternal time qua
time; whether the time involved in this particular relation of care can tell us
something about time itself. Whilst wanting to disaggregate maternal time from
the time of other forms of labour, we might approach this question paradoxically
from the uncomfortable conjunction, ‘maternal labour’ that, as Stella Sandford
has elaborated, pushes the limits of our understanding of both terms (2011). In
noting that a Marxist analysis of labour both excludes an adequate analysis of
the type of work we might identify as the raising and caring for children, and
also shares little with a non-Marxist feminist theory of motherhood and the
maternal more broadly, Sandford asks a series of pertinent questions about the
tensions that arise when ‘maternity’ and ‘labour’ are made proximal:

How can the concept of the maternal circulate alongside the category of labour
as anything other than an abjected, psychologistic and therefore idealist
theoretical deviance? What possible relation can the concept of the maternal
have to that of labour given the absence of a shared theoretical context? What
category of labour can bear the association with the maternal in the phrase
‘maternal labour’ without swallowing it up? What is the specificity of ‘maternal
labour’? And what would an adequate understanding of ‘maternal labour’ mean
for our understanding of labour and the maternal themselves?
Sandford 2011, n.p.

For Sandford, the problem hinges on the issue of indifference. Marx identifies
a shift in the category of labour in capitalist modernity in which individuals can
transfer from one form of labour to another, as a matter of ‘indifference’. Although
transferable labour power can be thought of in its general terms as applying to
all human beings in all epochs, Sandford teases out of Marx that, as an abstract
category, labour ‘is valid for all epochs but it only arises as valid for all epochs
under the specific conditions of capitalism in which it is realized in a general
form’ (Marx quoted in Sandford 2011, n.p.). And yet maternal labour, as distinct
from other forms of domestic labour – cooking, cleaning, household maintenance,
support work and what Kemp has called ‘status production’ (1994) – is precisely
not a matter of indifference to the individual who labours. Unlike cleaning, for
instance, the ‘labour’ of maternity is ‘affective, invested, intersubjective’ (Sandford
2011, n.p.), and retains an ethical dimension that is distinct. Here the maternal
body signifies as a permanently labouring body, but one that remains deeply
 Repeating 75

attached to its labouring, whose labouring is a matter of attachment to that

labour, as well as providing the general conditions, we could say, for attachment
(the infant’s psychic struggle to become connected to the world) to take place.
We could say the time of repetition under the condition that is maternity
becomes the time of mattering, as opposed to the ‘meaningless’ time of
reproduction: the time, that is, in which repetition may come to matter. This time
can be felt as obdurate, distinctively uncertain in its outcome, both intensive and
‘empty’, and tethered by the pace of the development of another, figured within
the maternal relation as a ‘child’.
Whilst the debates of the 1970s on social reproduction (in which maternal
labour was bundled) gave way in later decades to discussions about maternal
desire, maternal ambivalence and the paradoxes of maternal subjectivity, as well
as the disaggregation of the category of ‘woman’ to take in a nexus of interlocking
conditions for recognition and agency including sexuality, ‘race’, class, disability
and age, a central tension around how to conceptualize maternal time has
therefore ossified around the relation between repetition and reproduction. This
is best exemplified in Julia Kristeva’s influential essay ‘Women’s Time’ (1981) in
which she offered an analysis of gendered time. At one pole was masculine
time, the time of ‘project, teleology, linear and prospective unfolding; time as
departure, progression, and arrival – in other words, the time of history’ (17). On
the other was both cyclical time (the time of menstruation, pregnancy and the
repetitive patterned cycles of life), and what she called ‘monumental’ or eternal
time (the time of the reproduction of the species, and the genetic chain) that
Kristeva argued were both accessed through the feminine:

[. . .] female subjectivity would seem to provide a specific measure that essentially

retains repetition and eternity from among the multiple modalities of time
known through the history of civilizations. On the one hand, there are cycles,
gestation, the eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm which conforms to that
of nature and imposes a temporality whose stereotyping may shock, but whose
regularity and unison with what is experienced as extrasubjective time, cosmic
time, occasion vertiginous visions and unnameable jouissance. On the other
hand, and perhaps as a consequence, there is the massive presence of a
monumental temporality, without cleavage or escape, which has so little to do
with linear time (which passes) that the very word “temporality” hardly fits.
Kristeva 1981, 16

Where women had traditionally been associated with space rather than time
(she quotes Joyce as referring to ‘Father’s time, mother’s species’, 15) Kristeva’s
76 Enduring Time

analysis showed how time accessed through the feminine – the repetitive time of
nature and the impossible species-driven time of eternity – lay outside of the
social configuration of time as space (departure, progression, arrival) and
remained heretical to masculine time, or ‘herethical’, to draw on her later
neologism. Trapped in the realm of ‘unnameable jouissance’ women’s time
remains threatening, unarticulated and excluded from symbolic representation.
The particularities of that threat are in the maternal associations that cling to
femininity (Baraitser 2009), leading to the repudiation of the maternal in some
feminist literature as both a biologistic and romanticized attachment to the
rhythms of nature, and, to return to Sandford’s words, ‘an abjected, psychologistic
and therefore idealist theoretical deviance’ (2011, n.p.)
What is missing then, is not so much the need to free women’s time from its
associations with monumental and cyclical time, but an adequate account of
maternal time. If, as I argued above, maternal time is the time of repetition that
comes to matter, then its articulation would need to tie together the time it takes
to become attached to one another through repetitive, obdurate, mundane
practices of maternal care, that is not fully encompassed by either teleological,
developmental, cyclical or monumental time, whilst at the same time signifying
‘otherwise’ to the dichotomy between repetition and permanence, work and
labour.

The non-reproductive

In earlier work I have tried to take seriously the question of what or who is
precipitated, not when female subjects are defined by their peculiar talents for
becoming two, but instead when we come to live in close proximity to a rapidly
changing other, an unfolding other, whose demands are ruthless, an ‘open
structure’ to use the late Sara Ruddick’s words, whose acts are ‘irregular,
unpredictable, often mysterious’ (1980, 352).7 These qualities – irregularity,
unpredictability, ruthlessness and the capacity to relentlessly interrupt our
going-on-ness and make demands from a position of profound vulnerability –
structure what I am calling ‘a child’ as a specifically unknowable other, a relation
to whom poses questions about ethics, identity and subjectivity. Understanding
the maternal subject as precipitated by a willing relation to such an enigmatic
other allows ‘the maternal’ to emerge as an open theoretical question about the

7
See Baraitser 2009.
 Repeating 77

structural and generative dimensions of human relations, politics and ethics.

Such ethical and political dimensions may include the capacity to respond to the
alterity of the ‘child’ against the grain of dominant social norms and discourses
that are aimed so relentlessly at mothers.8 As Sophie Jones has put it, in her
discussion about the notion of the ‘non-reproductive’:

a feminist politics of (non)-reproduction recognizes all the ways in which child-

rearing might entail a refusal to reproduce the dominant order. Let’s think, then,
about reproduction as non-reproduction: the way having children exposes the
absurdity and irrationality of our ways of working, bringing new people into the
world who might want to change things. Let’s think, at the same time, about non-
reproduction as reproduction: about relations of care and affinity that flourish
outside, or in defiance, of the nuclear family.
Jones et al. 2014, n.p.

Here ‘reproduction’ is uncoupled from social reproduction understood as the

production of the next generation of consumers and precarious workers, and
encompasses ‘non-reproduction’, understood as both a form of refusal, a spanner
in the capitalist machine, and as a form of reproduction itself. This articulation
cuts across the tendency to see non-reproduction as only a form of refusal,
especially the refusal of futurity that embraces the Freudian death drive as an
articulation of ‘queer’, prominent in Lee Edelman’s oft-cited polemic, No Future
(2004). As we shall see below, Edelman’s notion of non-reproduction is not the
kind of broad political concept that Jones elucidates, that includes non-normative
child-rearing within it, but the deliberate refusal of a child-focused social sphere
that aligns futurity with reproduction through the figure of the child. Aligning
queer with the death drive has not been the only way, however, of articulating
queer temporality. Alongside Edelman’s influential account, a whole battery of
temporal tropes in queer theory has emerged to help us think through the
temporality of non-normative, non-developmental and non-reproductive time,
from notions of ‘familial arrhythmia’, and ‘erotohistoriography’, in Elizabeth
Freeman’s work (2010, 2011), in which she provides alternative accounts to
heterochromonormative lives, through to J. Jack Halberstam’s notion of queer
time in relation to transgender and subcultural ways of being (2005). So, on the
one hand there has been a call in queer theory to embrace the repetitive
circularity of the death drive in the name of ‘non-reproduction’, and on the other,

8
See extensive work by Imogen Tyler 2000, 2001, 2009a, 2009b, 2011b, 2013, Tyler and Baraitser
2013, as well as Garrett, Jensen and Voela 2016, Gilles 2007, Jensen 2012, 2016, and numerous
papers in the online open access journal Studies in the Maternal (www.mamsie.org).
78 Enduring Time

a call to notice the myriad ways that we deviate from chromonormative

development through alternative temporal orchestrations.
However, to bring ‘the maternal’ into proximity with the non-reproductive
(rather than simply bringing the ‘reproductive’ and non-reproductive together,
as Jones does) makes particular forms of trouble. What happens to time when we
reintroduce the idea of motherhood or the maternal into discussions of non-
reproduction? Does non-reproduction, as a social signifier, always carry the
burden of ‘stilling’ time, against reproduction as productive of time itself, in the
form of a future generation and hence a future at all? Does non-reproductive
time necessarily ‘queer’ reproductive and teleological time? If so, what are the
reciprocal implications for maternal time? Is reproduction, and the maternal
more broadly, still routinely evoked as the normative shadow of the deliberately
‘stilled’ or ‘stalled’ time of the non-reproductive, caught between the temporal
rhythms of birth, regeneration and death, and the dead ‘progressive’ narratives of
departure and arrival? Can we use maternal time, deliberately embraced as
repetitive time, as a way to rethink queer and the time of the death drive? If
maternal time is understood purely as the time of futurity – the time, if you like
that is ‘banked’ by maternal care, invested in the future and carried forwards by
the child – is it damned by association with ‘chromonormativity’, setting up an
opposition between maternal and queer time and producing the maternal-
feminine as a normative category? If, on the other hand, maternal time maintains
a relation to repetition, with its associations with the cyclical or eternal, or with
meaningless reproduction rather than productive work, does it not re-suture
maternal time to notions of both the ‘body clock’ and the ‘timelessness’ of
repetition in the figure of the death drive, associations that feminism has
historically been keen to break with? If maternal labour is ‘affective, invested,
intersubjective’ then what kind of time does this give rise to? To return to my
earlier question, what is the time of mattering?
Here I’m going to take up the idea of repetition as something that is not just
linked to the death drive, but is linked in fact to reproduction, but not necessarily
the repetitive ‘meaningless’ reproduction of bare life. Firstly, I want to think
about the argument Lee Edelman puts forward in No Future, when he pits
developmental time (time that unfolds in relation to an ever receding yet hopeful
future, figured as the child), against queer time, figured as the death drive. My
sense is that a crisis in the fantasy of the future displaces the dichotomy between
the future and the death drive that is central to Edelman’s polemic. Instead, I
argue for bringing repetition and reproduction into relation with one another,
in the name of queering maternity (i.e. uncoupling it from its normative
 Repeating 79

associations), but without aligning it with the death drive. In order to move
beyond the deadlock of maternity-futurity-reproduction we need an account of
the ways that maternal time is indeed repetitive, stuck and unfolding, and
therefore, in temporal terms, not really ‘on the side of the children’ either, if being
on the side of the children is to keep time with normative development, and yet
distinct from the temporality of meaningless repetition. Repetitive labour, after
all, is relationally and indeed communally produced, as Silvia Federici has
reminded us (2013). Instead I want to push for maternal time as the ‘time of
mattering’ that takes place through the suspended ‘non-developmental’ time that
we glimpse in Denise Riley’s powerful work, Time Lived, Without its Flow (2012)
in which it is precisely time’s suspension that attests to the ongoing relation
between a mother and child, paradoxically accessed through the death of that
child. In my discussion of Riley’s work, I argue for an account of maternal time
that shares with queer time a dynamic chronicity, alive to the potentials of not
moving on, whilst at the same time maintaining its link with the ethical principle
of one’s own future being bound up with the future of another. This articulation
then allows us to theorize ‘suspended time’ in the feminine, but without aligning
the time of the feminine with the cyclicality of ‘women’s time’ or with the
drudgery of domestic labour. Instead, the suspended time of allowing one life to
unfurl in relation to another makes visible the time of mattering, embedded in
maternity, that I argue remains radically queer.

No Future

Let’s take up Edelman’s polemical text, No Future (2004), then, as he provides a

point of departure for a turn in queer theory, and also in disability studies, that
rightly queries the relation between subjectivity and futurity. Edelman’s concern
is a theoretical one – what happens not so much to queer lives but to a queer
principle (the principle of constant refusal of all forms of normative identity) in
psychic and social life under the regime of a social order that co-opts the figure
of the child to secure a fantasy of social reproduction. In No Future Edelman
argues that contemporary communal, public and social relations are organized
through the absolute primacy of heteronormativity, so much so that the future
can only be thought of in relation to the developmental sequence of a normative
timeline – from birth, to sexual maturation, to heterosexual coupling, to the
conception and birth of a child. Queer resistance to such an order then shows up
specifically as resistance in opposition to this figure of the child who holds the
80 Enduring Time

heteronormative Symbolic realm in place. Rather than acceding to the dualism

that this produces by contesting this ‘othered’ position in order to gain access to
the social domain, Edelman proposes a deliberate identification with those who
are ‘not fighting for the children’ (3), whereby queerness remains a radical form
of non-identity, attaining its ethical value through an acceptance of its status as
the ‘outside’ and ‘beyond’ of the social order’s political symptoms, a refusal which
he names as the death drive.
I want to note here, the connections between Edelman’s articulation of queer,
and a feminist theoretical trajectory most clearly exemplified in the work of
Luce Irigaray, that, at least in what is often situated as the early and middle
phases of her work, has attempted to account for the non-subject of the
maternal-feminine in order to rethink sexual difference. For Irigaray, the
maternal-feminine is the name she gives to an excessive aspect of the symbolic
that cannot be articulated within it, and can only take form through a strategic
mimesis (1985a). The symbolic, as a cultural site that registers subjectivity
through the unitary mono-masculine subject, can only count one, plus one, plus
one, and therefore cannot by definition accommodate the principle of multiplicity
and indeterminate morphology which comes to be named as the ‘maternal-
feminine’ (1985b).9 Queer theories absorb this principle of multiplicity and the
necessarily indeterminate nature of gendered and sexed subjectivity as a broader
concept than can be captured by the maternal-feminine. The polemical move
that Edelman makes in No Future is to name queer as a refusal ‘of every
substantialization of identity, which is always oppositionally defined’ (4). The
implications for temporality are clear: queer refuses, by extension, the notion of
history as ‘linear narrative (the poor man’s teleology) in which meaning succeeds
in revealing itself – as itself – through time’ (4). It is this refusal of linear narrative
as the ground for establishing meaning, and the unfolding of time in normative
patterns of progression, that is primarily at stake in No Future.
Over and over, Edelman says ‘no’ through a paradoxical acceptance and
embracing of the negativity assigned to queer, and over and over, the ‘no’, which
takes the form of an embrace, a ‘yes’, is directed at the temporal category of the
future understood in linear developmental terms. In saying no to the future,
Edelman also refuses to pin down and neutralize negativity, that ‘pulsive force’ as
he puts it, that would trap queer as a determinate position, a stable and positive
form. Instead, ‘nothing, and certainly not what we call the “good,” can ever have
any assurance at all in the order of the Symbolic’ (4). The temporality of this

9
See also Irigaray 1991, 1993a and 1993b.
 Repeating 81

refusal (the no that is posed to the category of ‘the future’) is therefore not just
that of repetition, as in the cyclical repetitive return of the repressed, but that of
the constant. There can be no letting up of the no. The no is the ongoing,
unrelenting negativity that echoes the law of the Symbolic’s ‘foundational act, its
self-constituting negation’ (5). Whilst signification, which operates through the
deferral of meaning, does require a projection forwards, a relationship we could
say with the future, at the same time this future orientation is constantly undercut
by the death drive, which is also a function of the symbolic, and provides a
negative force against even the possibilities of deferral. The death drive, from
Edelman’s Lacanian reading has this particular quality of excess. Queer, Edelman
argues, can expose the constancy, the inescapability, of access to jouissance in the
social order itself, ‘even if that order can access its constant access to jouissance
only in the process of abjecting that constancy of access onto the queer’ (5). If the
death drive is the undoing of civil society, queer is a refusal to collude with the
notion that such a drive can be denied.
Two issues arise from Edelman’s conjoining then of ‘no’ with ‘future’. The first
is that for this negative embrace of the undoing of civil society to hold, the
distinction between the death drive, and the fantasy of an unfolding future – the
hopeful and deferred horizon that the child is meant to signify – needs to also
hold. However, I argued earlier that the hopeful and deferred horizon of the
future may itself be in some sort of ‘crisis’, producing, amongst other things, new
articulations of futurity that deviate from reproductive futurity. The issue of
survival, for instance, or the uncertainty of persisting as a species (or more
precisely, in the language of those who work in this field, the persisting of the
relationality of ‘multispecies assemblages’ (van Dooren et al. 2016)), has become
a central preoccupation that filters across many different disciplinary and
interdisciplinary debates, from Timothy Morton’s discussions of our struggles to
think about deep future time, and to acknowledge that human beings and the
world itself are always already ending, to discussions about the anthropocene, and
the sixth global mass extinction (2007, 2010, 2016). Survival, in these ecologically
inflected discussions, is not just an issue of persistence in the sense of things
continuing to persist in their species-being over short or longer periods of linear
time, but includes an appreciation and exploration of the heterogeneous
temporalities involved in persistence, and its ontological counterpart, extinction.
Whilst overall we are seeing a decline in biodiversity driven by climate change,
there is, perhaps counter-intuitively, some interest in also tracking the
potentialities of extinction – the emergence of new species precipitated by the
extinction of others, transforming ecosystems, even though, as Audra Mitchell
82 Enduring Time

notes, differences in degree and differences in kind get confused in these

arguments (2015, 2016). In a parallel, more culturally focused scene, there
are concerns about the survival and extinction of indigenous cultures,
communities, languages and ways of life, that play out alongside biotic species
decimation, in which the heterogeneous temporalities of processes of persisting
and ceasing to persist altogether are seen not just as a tragedy, but as containing
within them some potentialities for the creation of new hybrid multispecies
communities (Sodikoff 2012), or at least an increased sense of responsibility
for what is lost in extinction. For instance, Thom van Dooren writes in
Flight Ways:

I am interested in how rethinking albatrosses as beings that emerge from and

live and die within dense webs of overlapping temporalities and inheritances
remakes our understanding of the immensity of what is lost in extinction, while
drawing us into new and deeper responsibilities.
van Dooren 2014b, 34

Van Dooren is drawing out the ‘dull’ non-evental temporalities of extinctions

that occur over time, and therefore the ways that extinction is tied to generations
before and generations not to come, as well as to the very idea of the ‘generative’.
Extinction has the potential, van Dooren argues, through its effects on human
species, to draw out new and deeper responsibilities, potentialities of care that
might lead, one might hope, to the protection of other species on the edge of
extinction.
From a social perspective, concerns have emerged that link survival to
conditions of austerity brought about by neoliberal policies that are related to
these wider discussions of inter-species survival. Here the discussion has centred
more on social projects of survival and, in particular, the persistence of fantasies,
concepts or material practices that sustain the affect of hope. Sarah Amsler, for
instance, in The Education of Radical Democracy (2015), argues that many
species, including our own, are living in intolerable and increasingly uninhabitable
conditions brought about by the degradation of the social values of life and
justice, and by more and more brutal forms of economic and social violence. The
world’s majority are fighting for survival, the right to exist, the possibility of
living in common with others, for equitable distribution of resources and
recognition, dignity and self-determination (2015). In essence, increasingly
financialized and militarized neoliberal capitalism leads to a crisis of hope.10

10
See Bauman 2004 and Zournazi 2003 for further discussions of the politics of hope.
 Repeating 83

What is crucial to the idea of a crisis of hope is that, as Amsler argues, it is not
that there appears to be no systemic turn away from capitalism as an organizing
principle of society, but that this system infuses a ‘whole ontology’ – a fundamental
way of being – that represses or eliminates conditions of possibility for imagining
how we might create other ways of being at all (Amsler 2015, Kompridis 2006,
120). Yet she, like Berlant, is concerned with tracking the ways hope persists,
even when it may do so through ostensibly self-destructive turnings in on
ourselves; overeating, the attachment to ideas of family, emancipatory politics.
Returning to Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, the contemporary west may be living
through the cultural collapse of one of the most important mythologies of
capitalist modernity – the linking of ‘the future’ with expansion and growth
(2011). As we saw earlier, Berardi claims that the commonly held notion of a
progressive future which reached its peak in the second half of the twentieth
century, has been replaced by a generalized condition of acceptance of ‘no future’.
Berardi’s advice, however, differs from Edelman’s: he suggests we ‘harmonize
with exhaustion’, strategically accepting the end of the fantasy of the future
understood as development, growth, expansion and accumulation. This would
undercut the embrace of the death drive that Edelman advocates, which aims at
the internal undoing of the fantasy sutured by the child. From Berardi’s
perspective, this fantasy quietly died towards the end of the twentieth century.
In addition, whilst Berardi characterizes our times as a kind of post-future,
there may be other fantasmatic operations at work in relation to the future that
do not necessarily recognize its figuration in terms of a child but can manage to
hold open a different kind of generativity. To return to Simon Bayly’s work on the
temporality of the project, he draws on Boris Groys to argue that unlike work, the
imaginary space of the project (what we are working on) is one that binds itself
to a projected future that is intended to transform for the better, in some small
way, the totality of the world, even when that world appears beyond repair. While
it may seem utterly insignificant on a wider scale, a project, Bayly argues, always
takes on the whole world, which is both its medium and its measure:

Although in some ways the project opens up a heterogenous time whose passage
may be pleasurably uncertain and unpredictable, it is nevertheless orientated to
a determinate future – even if that determination is nothing more than the
arbitrary termination of the project itself. So, working on the project, I live and
work in and for the future, not as something merely open and unspecified but
literally as a projection which either will or will not turn out to be the particular
version of the future to which the project has dedicated itself.
Bayly 2013, 165
84 Enduring Time

So, in this sense, the project comes to be a unit of finite time that is lived
within the already closed horizon of the future, fending off the collapse of other
forms of temporality – cyclical temporalities, or an open enlightenment future
of intergenerational transmission and betterment. My point here is simply that
as the ways we imagine futures shifts, our temporal imaginaries may no longer
be structured by that ‘poor man’s teleology’ that relies in the figure of the child
for its production, calling into question the Edelman’s defence of queer as a
deliberately recalcitrant refusal to fight for the future.
Secondly, in relation to this shift in how we might imagine a future, we need to
reconfigure the temporality of the death drive and its relation to repetition. Edelman’s
death drive, drawing on Lacan’s reading of Freud, takes the form of a constant
pressure in psychic and social life, and has the temporal structure of a permanently
thwarted relation to das Ding – Lacan’s articulation of an originary source of painful
pleasure, usually proximal in some ways to the elusive qualities of the maternal body.
Because the death drive is ‘beyond’ the pleasure principle, it marks out a different
temporal order from that of the repetitions of the ego’s attempts at binding libido. In
Edelman’s reading, this is return with no movement, and with no difference, a
repetition that must create a constant distance between the subject and das Ding.
Lacan states: ‘There is nothing so dreadful as dreaming that we are condemned to
live repeatedly (à répétition)’ (quoted in Johnston 2014, 205). What is death-like
about this articulation of the death drive, if you like, is simply the ongoingness of the
drive itself and the way it never lets up. Unlike the small amount of jouissance that
one can actually partake in, and that occurs through a relation to the objet petit a
(the substitute object for das Ding) which suggests a more conventional notion of
repetition, the death drive, as Edelman elucidates it, is the terrifying too-much-ness
of access to jouissance. Slavoj Žižek, writing in the same vein, describes the death
drive in terms of ‘the undead’, this insistence ‘beneath death’ that is behind the
compulsion to repeat that Freud was trying to understand. The death drive has
nothing to do with a thrust towards destruction or self-destruction but is:

[. . .] a name for the “undead” eternal life itself, for the horrible fate of being
caught in the endless repetitive cycle of wandering around in guilt and pain. The
paradox of the Freudian “death drive” is therefore that it is Freud’s name for its
very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis, for an
uncanny excess of life, for an “undead” urge which persists beyond the (biological)
cycle of life and death [. . .] Drive is not an infinite longing for the Thing which
gets fixated onto a partial object – “drive” is this fixation itself in which resides
the “death” dimension of every drive.
Žižek 2006, 62
 Repeating 85

However, as Adrian Johnston has drawn out, drives do not operate according
to one monolithic temporality (2005). Johnston homes in on the tension in
Freud’s work between his developmental account of the drive in Three Essays on
the Theory of Sexuality (1905), in which the drive is articulated as maturing over
time, moving through various changes to zones and objects, and the idea in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), that the death drive is a constant, timeless,
repetitive feature of psychic life. He writes:

On the one hand the drives are shaped according to the telos of a developmental
progression; on the other hand the drives remain fundamentally unaffected by
chronological changes in the evolution of the libidinal economy.
Johnston 2005, 228

Johnston finds a resolution to this tension by reanimating the Freud of

Instincts and Their Vicissitudes (1915). In distinguishing between the drive’s
source, pressure, aim and object, Johnston maintains that Freud’s drives,
including the death drive, are simultaneously temporal and timeless, oscillating
between ‘the ‘too much’ of sublimation and the ‘not enough’ of instinctual
renunciation’ (2005, 229). For Johnston, the drives are themselves internally split
along two axes that take each view of time into account: an axis of iteration
(which accounts for the constancy of the death drive), and an axis of alteration
(which accounts for the capacity for the drive to change object and aim). This
split multiple drive plays out in the psyche as the difference between what
jouissance aims at (the Lacanian thing that is always already lost) and what it
obtains (the objet petit a, the substitute object which is obtained but never
quite satisfies). The drive is not simply the static distance between the subject
and das Ding, and operates according to the temporality of afterwardsness, or
Nachträglichkeit. Freud talks about an inherent urge in organic life to restore an
earlier state of things, a time before existing out of which existence emerges,
meaning the death drive contains within it a kind of backwards movement, as
well as no movement (1920). We could say that Edelman’s death drive remains
wedded to only one pole of the drive’s temporality, that of iteration, without
acknowledging that the death drive also operates along an axis of alteration, in
which the principle of development, if you, like survives. Crucially for what we
are discussing here, the valorization of one axis over the other relegates
development to the nether side of queer, and with it the time of maternity, of
staying alongside the development of another.
Furthermore, the peculiarity of the death drive is both captured and
constrained by Freud’s attempt, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, to build a
86 Enduring Time

‘materialist and atheist cosmogony’ as Teresa de Lauretis (2010, 75) has put it, in
which the life of an organism (including the organism that is the human) is
figured as an ongoing deviation that seeks to maintain its existence by resisting
any path to death that does not conform to its own particular limits and
conditions for self-preservation. Freud states that these conditions:
[. . .] are component instincts whose function it is to assure that the organism
shall follow its own path to death, and to ward off any possible ways of returning
to inorganic existence other than those which are immanent in the organism
itself [. . .] what we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in
its own fashion.
Freud 1920, 311

Here again we find the notion of the utterly singular that is brought about
through the elongated temporality of repetition; the repetition of repetition that
brings about the specific. In a speculation about the origins of organic life Freud
writes:
For a long time, perhaps, living substance was thus being constantly created
afresh and easily dying, till decisive external influences altered in such a way as
to oblige the still surviving substance to diverge ever more widely from its
original course of life and to make ever more complicated détours before
reaching its aim of death.
Freud 1920, 311

This divergence is a life. As Johnston puts it ‘we could succinctly encapsulate

repetition as an intra-temporal resistance to time itself, a negation of time
transpiring within time’ (2014, 215). What we have to contend with, however, is
that this negation of time within time also has duration; the time it takes to live
a life. A negation is not the same as timelessness. It can be thought of rather as a
way that time turns in on itself. As Judith Butler expresses it, ‘repetition is a vain
effort to stay, or indeed, to reverse time: Such repetition reveals a rancour against
the present which feeds upon itself ’ (Butler quoted in Johnston 2014, 215).
We could conclude that Edelman takes the temporality of the death drive as
a turning away from developmental time, rather than the death drive as
encompassing both the time of development and the time of constancy, both
of which operate through repetition understood as an intra-temporal resistance
to time.
If the death drive includes, rather than negates, developmental time, how does
this play out for those who have elected to arrange their temporality in relation
to the developmental time of the other? Rita Felski reminds us that ‘repetition is
 Repeating 87

linked to the everyday, and the everyday to woman. For feminists, this connection
can be a problem or a source of strength’ (2011, 25). Just as repetition structures
psychic life in the double sense of the death drive, it filters through the everyday
as a temporal trope that has specific resonance for women. Returning to
Sandford’s account of the conjunction ‘maternal labour’ she sees the contradiction
in the category as a reflection of a contradiction in reality: ‘between the demands
of capitalist production, according to which all aspects of existence must
accommodate themselves to the form of the market, and the aspects – or
remnants, as Adorno might say – of the subject’s resistance to this’ (2011, n.p.).
The contradiction between the capitalist subject and the maternal subject is a
lived contradiction, Sandford suggests, negotiated on a daily basis by individuals
involved in forms of labour that they are not indifferent to, an example, that is, of
many diverse forms of relational and collective work that the market requires,
and in some small ways may not completely infiltrate. Maternity, in its failure to
be indifferent to the specificity of its labour, implies a return, time and again, to
a scene that matters, a kind of repetition, that is, that is not quite captured by the
death drive as excessive access to jouissance, nor to the death drive as a deviation
towards a unique form of death, but might, after all have something to do with
generativity. The return to a scene that matters is not a kind of flowing time
(anyone who has spent time with small children will know this), and is not the
stultifying time of indifferent labour, but living in a suspended time, which is the
time it takes for mattering to take place.

Time Lived, Without its Flow

Poet, writer, historian, philosopher, critical theorist, Denise Riley opens Time
Lived, Without its Flow, with the following statement:

I’ll not be writing about death, but about an altered condition of life. The
experience that not only preoccupied but occupied me was of living in suddenly
arrested time: that acute sensation of being cut off from any temporal flow
that can grip you after the sudden death of your child. And a child, it seems, of
any age.
Riley 2012, 7

Time Lived, Without its Flow is a response to the sudden and unexpected
death of Riley’s adult son. It is a response that Riley could only begin after a two-
and-a-half-year period in which she found that the desire, and perhaps the
88 Enduring Time

capacity, to write, had abandoned her. To write requires time’s flow, especially a
sense of living in a present that can give way to a future, yet it was precisely this
lack of flow that she encountered after her son’s death. She describes living in
‘crystalline time’, which was really not time as such, but its radical suspension:

Five months after:

Apparently almost half a year has gone by since J. disappeared, and it
could be five minutes, or half a century, I don’t know which. There is so very
little movement. At first I had to lie down flat for an hour each afternoon,
because of the bodily draining and being crushed as if by a leaden sheet, but by
now I don’t need to lie down. This slight physical change is my only intimation
of time.
Riley 2012, 16

Later she writes:

No tenses any more. Among the recent labels here is ‘time dilation’ referring
to our temporal perception’s elasticity, its capacity to be baggy. Are there any
neurological accounts of this feeling of completely arrested time? It feels as if
some palpable cerebral alteration has taken place. As if, to make the obvious joke,
your temporal lobes have been flooded, and are now your a-temporal lobes.
Riley 2012, 24

Yet what Riley identifies as a rather common experience of outliving a child,

and the ‘seemingly a-temporal life’ that it gives rise to, she found barely articulated
in any literatures that she searched, redoubling her sense that to write within this
state of suspended time is an impossibility:

Inside their senses of arrested time millions must live today, and have lived. The
death of their children, perhaps in wars or through natural disasters, is apt to
induce a profound dislocation in the experienced time of those left alive. They
are thrown into ‘timeless time’. Yet despite the fact that such human losses occur
constantly, the ensuing state of a-temporality seems largely to escape from
recorded notice.
Riley 2012, 49

This psycho-corporeal perception of time’s suspension, that ‘profound

dislocation in the experienced time of those left alive’ she found to be missing
from the philosophical canon, from the academic literature on bereavement, and
even from the literary output of Proust and other literary modernists so
otherwise engaged with questions of temporal experience. Here and there she
found an odd phrase in a novel, an allusion to living in time that no longer flows,
 Repeating 89

and only in the rare literary instance of Emily Dickinson did she find a precise
articulation of ‘time lived without its consequence’:
The thought behind I strove to join
Unto the thought before,
But sequence raveled out of sound
Like balls upon a floor.

‘Sequence raveled out of sound’ indeed. One note no longer implies another’s
coming. You watch the water cascading from the tap to splash into the basin.
Yet noting small events and their effects doesn’t revive your former impression
of moving inside time.
Riley 2012, 34

Riley’s intimation then is that this absence of description is closely bound up

with the assault on description that time’s arrest performs. Instead, we grasp too
readily at the notion of trauma, as a way to articulate the stilling of time that an
experience beyond our control can exact. Yet Riley distances herself from a
psychoanalytic discourse of trauma, and from the framework of mourning and
melancholia in which the relinquishing of a lost object is the ultimate end-point
of the work of mourning, and the persistent attachment to the lost object is
pathologized as incomplete grief-work. Instead she is concerned with what it
means for time to stop and time to flow, and for another kind of stopped time, the
lively and prolonged time of the dead, to occupy lived time. She talks of living in
a completely immobile crystalline time as ‘rather captivating’ (Riley and Baraitser
2016), neither the time of mourning or of melancholia, but the time of time’s
suspension, the ‘life’ of dead time, which is something else again.

All this entanglement with your dead child, though, becomes evident in thought
only as you look back. At the time, you’re naturally and easily inside several states.
Or inside two lives. For if timelessness is the time of your dead, then you will go
with them into their timelessness. Here you can live mundanely, indeed brightly.
Riley 2012, 39–40

‘Time stopped’, in other words, is an inadequate metaphor for the prolonged,

arrested and oddly lively time that sets in after the death of a child. Although we can
technically say that the time of the dead is timeless, in that the dead cannot return,
and hence time as movement or change is somehow foreclosed by the ongoing
deadness of the dead, one’s engagement with a dead child, she maintains, is in fact
vivid, not the dead time, for instance, of depression. In other words, one continues to
be involved on a day-to-day basis in an energetic and carnal way with the dead child:
90 Enduring Time

What do the dead give us? A grip on the present instant in which we’re now
relentlessly inserted. Not in a contemplative sense, but vigorously. A carnal
sensation. If to be dead is to exist outside of earthly time, then this tough-minded
energetic living in the present is also the life of the dead. My new ability to live
in the present is a joining-in of that timelessness of being dead. Or the nearest I
can get to it.
Riley 2012, 23

Instead it is one’s relation to everyday life that goes through a dramatic shift,
one in which time can no longer unfold predictably or reliably. A crisis has
occurred in the reliability that the future will unfold. In one sense, time is
completely suspended, crystalline, a time in which nothing flows because
nothing can be expected, whilst at another it continues as a form of daily
engagement, or saturation with suspended time:

You are time. You are saturated with it, rather than standing apart from it as a
previously completed being who was free to move in it.
Riley 2012, 59

What is revealed in Riley’s poetic exploration of this extraordinary state is a

way of being outside of time’s motion, within non-developmental time, that is,
but without being outside of time:

The surprise of my own sense of time having stopped was that it wasn’t as
disorientating as it sounds. It wasn’t unpleasant or distressing at all. Something
had certainly and rightly changed, but the compensation for that change was
that everything possessed a great immediacy and sharpness.
Riley and Baraitser 2016, n.p.

What can the a-temporality of a relation with a dead child tell us about
maternal time, about repetition and reproduction, and about the time of
mattering, that we have been pursuing here? In keeping with Sandford’s
desire to think about the particularity of maternal labour, of what happens
to the maternal when it comes into a relation with ‘labour’, Riley also tries
to get at what might be particular about losing a child, and why this loss may
feel so different from other, no less important, no less profound losses. She
writes:

Perhaps what’s specific is this: that with the death of your child, your own time
may be especially prone to disturbance, because the lost life had, so to speak,
previously unfurled itself inside your own life.
Riley 2012, 43
 Repeating 91

If you had once sensed the time of your child as quietly uncoiling inside your
own, then when that child is cut away by its death, your doubled inner time is
also ‘untimely ripped’. Yours, and the child’s.
Riley 2012, 44

Riley’s account gets to the nub of maternal time. Paradoxically through the
death of her child we are able to retroactively understand the time of the
unfolding of one life in relation to another; the kind of stilled time that is neither
developmental, nor meaninglessly repetitive, but a kind of mutual unfurling or
uncoiling, images then of time circling outwards, out of a spiral but not caught
within its repetitive cycle. The time it takes for unfurling to happen, that we catch
retroactively through what happens to time when a child dies, is the time that
time takes for one life to come to matter to another.
If there is ever to be any movement again that moving will not be ‘on’. It will be
‘with’. With the carried-again child.
Riley 2012, 35

Furthermore, in unhooking maternal time from development, Riley allows us

to grasp an aspect of maternal subjectivity that is not premised on the open
future of the child, but the way motherhood requires a certain acceptance of
what refuses development, what resists time, an intra-temporal resistance to
time that allows us to realign maternal time with both the death drive, and a
queer principle of veering away from the norm. Though I would not want to
suggest that relations with a dead child are identical to relations with a living
child, this parallel register is one in which the maternal subject bears the
suspension of time, a kind of impossible waiting which is the time the child’s
futurity requires of her. If one could write in these circumstances, then perhaps
such writing would encode the time of maternal waiting as a certain kind of
ethical labour. From this perspective, the conjunction ‘maternal time’ might then
be understood as simply the time of the unfolding of one life in relation to
another life, where that unfolding exposes the tender points of impingement and
care, of agreements and refusals, and of the precarity of affecting and being
affected by one another. After all, one might engage in practices of child-rearing
that one hopes will not reproduce the dominant order, only to find that the other,
in this case ‘the child’, will make what they will with the care that is offered, may
desire to be recognized by the dominant order just as the unfolding of a maternal
life desires its opposite. Perhaps the maternal relation, and hence maternal time,
suggests simply a willingness on the part of one to stay alongside another
regardless of the outcome.
92 Enduring Time

He is not dead to me.

Riley 2012, 36

And later she writes:

Half bitten away by the child’s disappearance, your time is nevertheless

augmented – for the time of the dead is, from now on, contained within your
own.
Riley 2012, 73

The non-, then, of non-reproduction is not the same as the No of No Future.

The non-, in relation to the no-longer living adult child who has unfolded in
relation to one’s own time opens this crystalline time, time that is lived but does
not flow. This is not the death drive, only thought of as constant excessive time
that deviates from life, and neither is it the unfolding of a linear future, but
something else that I want to hold onto as a way to articulate the temporality of
(non)reproduction. We might call it a maternal death drive. Or perhaps, more
simply, maternal time shares with queer time a dynamic chronicity, alive to the
potentials of not moving on, whilst at the same time maintaining its link with the
ethical principle of one’s own future being bound up with the future of another.
This articulation allows us to theorize ‘suspended time’ as a relation to, and
condition of the maternal, but without aligning the time of maternity with the
cyclicality of ‘women’s time’ or with the permanent work of contemporary
motherhood. It allows us to uncouple maternal time from chronoheteronormative
time and align it, instead, with queer time in the sense of being radically outside
of the time of normative development. Instead the suspended time of allowing
one life to unfurl in relation to another makes visible the time of mattering,
embedded in maternity, a very ‘queer’ time indeed.
 4

Delaying

Delay

a. The action of delaying; the putting off or deferring of action, etc.;

procrastination, loitering; waiting, lingering.
b. The fact of being delayed or kept waiting for a time; hindrance to progress.

Oxford English Dictionary

To delay is to make something slow or late, to postpone or defer, to linger and

loiter, to dither and procrastinate. Yet to delay, at least in English, is also to detain,
to hold up, to retard or keep back. To defer or postpone is futural; the possibility
of deferral is precisely premised on the yet-to-come. This is central, for instance,
to Derrida’s critique of phenomenology, and his later writings on ethics, where
he develops the idea that experience is only when it is deferred. Existence is
structured through the messianic, through the wholly ‘other’ yet to come, just as
hospitality, justice and mourning retain their ethical potential through the
necessity of their postponement (1992, 1994, 1995). For Derrida, politics, and in
particular democracy, functions through this delayed temporality (1997).
Democracy, as a-venir, is what allows politics to remain open to revision, to resist
the closure of ideology. In other words, politics, for Derrida, is a form of
temporality.
But in what ways might temporality be a form of politics? How might delay
operate as a political strategy, an embodied form of political action or political
thinking? How might delay open up the time in which psycho-political
attachments can be formed and maintained? Jay Lampert, in his dialectical
theory of staggered time that brings delay and simultaneity into relation with
one another, points out that in the French notion of delay, there is a distinction
between waiting or intervals (dans un délai), and excessive slowness, or being
behind the times (retard, attardé), the latter being closer to the German
Nachträglichkeit which suggests an event dragging behind (2012, 13). Being ‘in

93
94 Enduring Time

the delay’ as a form of waiting is linked therefore to the temporal drag of the past,
as it infects and anticipates the future. Lampert writes:

[. . .] the anxiety of delay holds the future hostage to the present momentum
originating in the past. Delay installs the future in the past, brings the past into
the present and endows each future with more futures [. . .] delay ties past,
present, and future into a single web in a way befitting the speciousness of their
independence.
Lampert 2012, 14

If there is an agony in delay that is distinct from that of simply waiting, it is

the awareness of the relatedness between past and future, the speciousness of
their independence, meaning that the present is never ‘free time’, freed, that is,
from its obligations to the future based on its experience that is always already
past. The present, in this sense, is always inter-generational, between two times.
Yet, delay in the sense of detain, or more specifically the law’s power to detain,
has the potential to incarcerate the futurity of delay, or at least to delay it for an
entire lifetime, indefinitely delaying resistance to that law. Delay, we could say, is
an element of the strategic relation that is power, as, for instance, Foucault
describes resistance (2001,1560), just as it is also the ground for the ethics of
hospitality. In On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance Howard Caygill builds a
philosophy of the resistant subject, distinct from the ‘revolting’ subject, on the
grounds that resistance, as a condition of both power and defiance, has remained
intangible and resistant to philosophical critique:

The resistant subject does not enjoy freedom; on the contrary, the resistant
subject finds itself in a predicament that does not admit the luxury of possibility.
[. . .] Resistant subjectivities deviate from the modern, revolutionary adventure
of the pursuit of freedom through autonomy inaugurated by Rousseau and Kant
[. . .]. Resistance is closer to the pre-modern doctrine of the virtues than to the
modern value of freedom: it responds to an implacable demand for justice with
actions characterized by fortitude or the ability to sustain courage over a long
period of time without any certainty of outcome, along with prudence in the
choice and deployment of limited means.
Caygill 2013, 97

Resistance, which we might read as the material embodiment of Derrida’s

politics of the undecidable, must be a permanent state, a kind of ongoing delay of
the closure of the future that opens onto the time of ethics, even as resistance
may postpone a consideration of the desired endpoints of emancipation,
freedom or revolution. Through an engagement with Ghandi, Passolini, Genet,
 Delaying 95

the Zapatistas, and what he collectively calls ‘The Women of Greenham Common’,
Caygill tracks how resistance emerges as a mode of living, and a continual
affirmation of defiance, through various forms of non-action. For Caygill, the
‘strength’ of the ‘resistant subject’ that takes up Gandhian Satyagraha, for instance,
‘comes from the courage produced by being vowed to death’ (114). ‘Resistant
subjectivity’, he writes, ‘is in a sense already dead’ (98), a ‘posthumous subjectivity’
(98), as it involves a commitment that entails accepting one’s potential death at
the hands of the enemy, which frees the subject from the possibility of being
terrorized into submission.
I have been tracing, however, suspended temporalities that are framed not so
much through an encounter with the horizon of death (whether Heidegger’s
being-towards-death, or the ‘already dead’ of resistance), but through the horizon
of ‘birth’ in an Arendtian sense, the horizon of ‘new beginnings’, albeit those
paradoxically brought on by practices of endurance, repetition, maintenance
and staying. In The Human Condition, Arendt states that ‘natality and not
mortality, may be the central category of political thought’ (1958, 9). Politics, for
Arendt is the capacity to speak and act in the public sphere, proceeding from a
situation in which people who are ‘equals’ come together to discuss and debate
their differences, without aim, and without knowing what the outcome of such
debate will be. As before, Arendt’s concept of the public sphere is problematically
confined and shadowed by what she relegates to the private realm of ‘labour’. Yet
she is a rare philosopher in the sense that she marks out the political as, by
definition, always a new beginning, and therefore linked with an originary
beginning – that of birth itself. Birth, in the history of European philosophy and
Judeo-Christian religious thought, has tended to operate as a blind spot, stripped
of its associations with the female body, with life flowing in a direct line from
god to ‘man’. Following Augustine, Arendt argues that ‘beginning’ in a
philosophical sense is unique to human beings, and the beginning that birth
inaugurates is the foundational fact of all thought, politics and action. Without
the potentially transformational category of natality, there can be no freedom,
no revolution, no emancipation, and no human future. ‘Birth’ emerges, then, as
an ontological category in Arendt’s work as a way to articulate how ‘beginning’ is
itself brought into being, suggesting a natal politics that revolves around the
possibilities of the again-and-again of the present, rather than a politics of the
a-venir.1 The task, then, might be to think about the relation between delay and
the political from the perspective of birth rather than death. The elongated time

1
See Tyler and Baraitser 2013 for an extension of this argument.
96 Enduring Time

of delay, which is also the time of resistance to the law’s power to detain, is the
time of sustaining the capacity to begin again.
In this chapter I expand the time-frame of both waiting and delaying as
modes of doing politics, through a story about intergenerational waiting, the
delay that occurs between and across generations who enact the elongated time
of beginning again, as itself a form of political action. The backdrop to this story
are two predominant examples of elongated intergenerational delay, understood
in its Arendtian form, that have haunted the political landscape in the last
50 years – (post)apartheid South Africa, and the ongoing delay of a just solution
for the Palestinians in relation to the State of Israel. In a piece entitled ‘Indefinite
Delay: On (Post)Apartheid Temporality’, Derek Hook outlines a variety of forms
of temporal delay that compose what he calls ‘the time signatures of (post)
apartheid South Africa’, as a way of trying to understand the relation between
generations of ‘waiting’ for political change during the apartheid era (for both
the dominated and the dominators in the South African context), and the long
drawn out period of political transformation since the formal ‘end’ of apartheid,
characterized by what many regard as the glacial pace of institutional
transformation and political change (2015). In Hook’s view the (post)apartheid
period has a distinctive temporality:

It is a time in which accelerations, apparent ‘slow-downs’ and reversals of history

co-exist alongside anxious periods of stasis, repetition, nostalgia and retroaction.
True as this may be, it is hard to avoid a predominant motif – that of delay,
whether this delay is to be understood along the lines of repetition, nostalgic
fixity, anxious/fearful waiting, or the time of guilt and posited retribution.
Hook 2015, 66–67

Drawing on Fanon (1967) and Mbembe’s (2008) analyses of the relation

between time and domination, as well as Vincent Crapanzano’s classic 1985
study, Waiting: The Whites of South Africa, Hook argues that paradoxes and
distortions of temporality can tell us something about the underlying
psychosocial paradoxes of the social field. Drawing out of Mbembe’s work a
notion of suspended historical consciousness that occurs when victims of white
supremacy are unable to ‘project themselves forward in time’ (Hook 2013, 29),
one such mode of temporal delay is the endless cycles of repetitions that occur
in relation to a foreclosed futural sense, in which ‘temporality lived as stasis starts
to make a revised future impossible’ (50). In conditions in which the lack of
structural change suspends time, and with it hope for political change, the future
can only be seen, according to Mbembe (2008), in terms of a recapitulation of
 Delaying 97

the past, which Hook then names, after Fanon, as ‘petrification’, a way of
understanding the (post)apartheid condition as itself a form of petrified time.
Where, as Hook notes, earlier articulations in the writings of Robert Sobukwe,
Steve Biko and other prominent figures in the Black Consciousness movement
drew on a notion of historical change as ‘only a matter of time’, a practice of
sitting it out against an horizon of affective anticipation, Crapanzano’s study in
the mid-1980s of the effects of domination on those who dominate, revealed the
temporality of waiting for ‘something, anything, to happen’, as a form of anxious
delay imbued with a permanent state of agitation and unease. For the white
population, it was a matter of time’s refusal to develop or unfold, of living in the
closed and brutal impasse that apartheid had systematically created, in which
the fantasy of the good life was precisely felt to be permanently under threat and
affectively unattainable. Such contradictory temporal modes, where time both
produces and suspends change, Hook argues, may remain, bleeding into the next
generation, as it struggles to shift the structural conditions that would keep open
a hopeful futurity. It manifests as a form of petrification, one of the many painful
psychosocial effects of the (post)apartheid era.
Petrification, however, as a political strategy, rather than a description of a
fraught psychosocial field, may also be a way of approaching the time signatures
of Palestinian resistance that now spans more than half a century, a mode of
‘waiting’ for justice across four generations.2 Lynne Segal has spoken of the
struggle to resist despair when too much time goes by between the desire for
justice and its arrival (2015). She draws on John Berger’s powerful summary of
his impressions on visiting Palestine in 2005, in which he noted an ‘undefeated
despair’, rather than an undefeated hope, amongst the Palestinians he met.
Existence, or simply the on-go of survival becomes itself a form of resistance, an
insistence that ‘we are still here’ (2006). As Raja Shehadeh states in Occupation
Diaries, Palestinians ‘have no intention of going anywhere’, their politics is one of
staying (2012, 204). The stance of undefeated despair that Berger notes, works,
however, through the daily, sometimes mundane, sometimes small, but always
brave acts of resistance. A 50-year-old man he meets tells him:

Prison for us is a sort of education, a strange sort of university [. . .] Certain

conditions have improved over the last forty years – improved thanks to us and

2
I do not mean to imply that waiting is the only form of resistance that the Palestinian population
has taken up in relation to the conflict. See, for instance a range of work including Ben Ze’ve 2014,
Bucaille 2004, Hasso 2005, Halaka 2016, Holt 2014, Jayyussi 2007, Joronen 2017, Kassem 2011, Salih
and Richter-Devroe, 2014, Tariki 2006, for both political and cultural histories of each generation
of Palestinians, and their different strategies.
98 Enduring Time

our hunger-strikes. The most I did was twenty days. We won a quarter of an hour
more exercise time each day. In the long-sentence prisons they used to mask the
windows so there was no sunshine in the cells. We won back some sunshine.
Berger 2006, 28

Twenty days of self-starvation for 15 minutes of exercise time. The political

prisoner takes himself to the edge of his time in order to win back temporality –
time that can be felt to pass, that remains attached to the cyclical time of day and
night, as opposed to the impasse of time in the cell with no light. Undefeated
despair renders time as force, resistance, endurance, survival, sunshine.
These reflections are a starting point for a story I’m going to tell, through
Luisa Passerini’s classic work, Autobiography of a Generation (1996),3 about the
‘afterwards’ time of a particular period of political fervent and turmoil – that of
19684 – to draw out an account of intergenerational delay as a mode of doing
politics. Certain political scenes seem to only gain their potency ‘after the event’,
that is, after a temporal delay, which allows later political scenes to retroactively
make sense of earlier scenes of political action, both in their generative and
traumatic dimensions. In particular, what concerns me is how a certain scene, or
scenario, a gesture or idiom, those small and everyday mundane acts of
‘beginning’ are taken up or translated intergenerationally, and in doing so
become available as a form of politics through the reverberations they establish
with an earlier scene. If politics is a new beginning, as Arendt claims, then a
politics of delay might entail not simply sitting it out, but passing on the potential
for new beginnings, even as that new beginning may have faltered in its original
form, and may falter again as it arises retroactively in the generation that comes
after. The return to the aesthetics of the peace camp, for instance, during the
pro-democracy uprisings that stretched from North Africa and the Middle
East to the squares of Madrid and Athens in 2011, and the Occupy movement
for social and economic justice that these uprisings inspired in the years after,
drew on a history of encampment as a mode of protest that evoked particular
intergenerational scenes that were instantly recognizable as belonging to the
activist histories of protest camps, occupations and sit-ins in numerous
geopolitical locations during 1968, as well as being highly specific to the locations

3
Autobiography of a Generation was first published in Italian as Autoritratto Di Gruppo, in 1988. The
term ‘generation’ appears in the 1996 English translation by Erdberg for Wesleyan University Press,
as it is clear that Passerini is not simply describing a ‘group’, but a generational group who embarked
on the political struggles of the 1960s and 1970s in Italy. It is the notion of generation drawn out by
Erdberg’s English translation that I focus on here.
4
I am referring to ‘1968’ in its broad sense, to cover the period of worldwide militant foment from
1966 to 1975.
 Delaying 99

of their contemporary manifestations.5 And yet ‘1968’ both changed and did not
change the world and was imbued with both generative and traumatic elements
that have remained active in its ‘time afterwards’. I return therefore, not to the
events of 1968 themselves, but to a later account of those events, through a
reading of Passerini’s text that details the Italian experience of 1968 and its
aftermath.
Autobiography of a Generation juxtaposes two narrative lines that alternate
throughout: the story of 1968 told through a variety of retrospective personal
testimonies that Passerini collects in the mid-1980s (the ‘winter years’, as
Félix Guattari once referred to them (2009)), and the story of Passerini’s
own psychoanalysis that takes place during the same period and charts the
reverberations of key events in her early childhood in the 1940s and 1950s. As
we read Autobiography of a Generation again in the ‘now’, we therefore read back
through three post-war generations, each later scene making possible a rendering
of the earlier one. Passerini, that is, attempts to apprehend the political events of
1968 through the personal narratives of those looking back on a political scene
from a second political scene located in the 1980s, the first of which can only be
understood retroactively through the work of giving political testimony. Thus,
I want to explore how we might read ‘1968’ as a symptom, produced in part to
ward off the anxiety of a generation, and the testimonials as ‘generative’ in their
capacity to enable a retrospective attachment to be made to the scenes of ’68.
This anxiety comes to be understood later as having been traumatic, in the
context of a second later political scene, in which that generation had to come to
terms with a partial collapse in the ideological underpinnings of the political left
and the subsequent backlash against post-’68 thinking. In working through this
anxious attachment to the first political scene, the relation between the personal
and political that was so forcefully posed by second-wave feminism at the time,
and forms a central and enduring part of post-1968 political thinking, comes
into a new and different focus. By juxtaposing political testimony with her own
contemporaneous psychoanalytic treatment, Passerini attempts the rocky road
towards apprehending a core traumatic kernel that coagulates around the death
of her mother when she was six, the news of which was withheld from her for
some months. Rather than calling for an understanding, as Carol Hanisch first
put it, that ‘personal problems are political problems’ (1970) we can read
Autobiography of a Generation as suggesting that it is political testimony (the

5
For a brief history of peaceful protest and uprising in the context of the Arab Spring see
Azoulay 2011 and Khalidi 2011.
100 Enduring Time

retrospective narrativizing of collective action that at the time aimed at creating

new political possibilities repressed by the dominant order), which entails the
capacity to situate oneself within a ‘generation’, that is required for a personal and
psychological narrative to emerge at all. Without being able to identify oneself as
having belonged to a generation, the story that constitutes a psychoanalysis
remains unanchored in a kind of floating temporal frame, one that recognizes
family structure, but is un-tethered by the lateral temporal relations that bind it
into a shared political era. This mirrors some of psychoanalysis’ own struggles to
acknowledge the fundamental role of lateral or sibling relations, and the maternal
laws that organize these relations, in the structuring of psychic space, in addition
to the ‘vertical’ relations between adults and infants, as Juliet Mitchell has so
assiduously pointed out (2003). My aim is to account for the temporality of such
lateral relations in political rather than familial terms; to think about these co-
affective encounters that are born out of collective action, thus continuing a
feminist tradition of refusing to separate the scene of the political from that of
psychic life – a new articulation, that is of ‘the personal is political’. I want to
think generation (the collective time-frame of the political) with generation
(that Bracha Ettinger calls the ‘matrixial’ substrata of psychic life (2006)).

Generation

How do we understand the term ‘generation’? We think of a generation as

something to do with a collectivity – the entire body of individuals who may not
share the same geopolitical location, but live at roughly the same time, and who
therefore share a temporal period with one another, albeit a period defined by its
public, and hence political and cultural events. We could say a generation simply
shares time. We talk, however, of ‘my’ generation, and therefore it is a collectivity
that needs to be owned, identified with, related to as mine, as yours, as theirs. The
collective that is a generation, in other words, cannot constitute itself without
this act of claiming, in which individuals must sign up to belonging to it –
something we usually think of in terms of group or national identity. But a
generation is not the same as what group theorists refer to as a ‘very large group’
(Volkan 2006). In a generation individuals do not necessarily share a name,
sentiments, belief systems, languages or representations of a shared history that
constitute elements of large-group identity. Indeed, a generation gestures towards
an entity that exceeds a very large group such as a nation, a people, or those who
share political, religious or ethnic affiliations. Although, within this wider notion
 Delaying 101

of generation, we may be able to identify distinct political generations (i.e. groups

of people who share formative social conditions at approximately the same point
in their lives and develop a common interpretive framework shaped by those
historical circumstances), generation also signals towards something less
localized than this. A generation is simply a collective of those who live at the
same time, without necessarily sharing anything else – recalling Alphonso Lingis’
‘community of those who have nothing in common’, in which what is shared by
a community is something like the ‘noise’ of time (1994). A generation is therefore
closer to an historical period that is not yet past – what will come to have been
an historical period when the noise of the present has subsided.
Of course, a generation can also be understood as roughly the 30-year period
in which children grow up and have children of their own. It is the time taken to
regenerate, or to begin anew. My generation, by definition is not my parents’
generation, even though I might live at roughly the same time as my parents. It
is the time of siblings, peers and lateral relations, rather than the vertical relations
of parents and children. To regenerate is to enact a beginning. The term
‘generation’, then, names the intersections between the collective experience of
sharing the noise of time, and the periodicity of regeneration. Generation
engenders a future, and to belong to a generation is to notice, to be touched
by, or become attached to, an historical period that, as you live it, is not yet
history. Both meanings of ‘generation’ include a form of temporal suspension.
Their relation marks the intersection between vertical and horizontal
conceptualizations of time.
How then, might a generation write its autobiography? What Passerini
suggests by her title is that one’s self is already collective by dint of a belonging
that is neither chosen, nor graspable at the time, but comes to have been a
collectively premised self through the retroactive gathering up of testimony.
Passerini collects the narratives of men and women involved in the student
uprisings, largely in Turin in 1968, and into the early 1970s, as the hopes and
aspirations of 1968 begin to shift. She intersperses the political narratives with
an account of her own psychoanalysis that she begins around the same time as
the research process. Completed in September 1987, Autobiography of a
Generation is four-and-a-half years in the making – the book includes an account
of four full calendar years of psychoanalysis, broken down month by month. The
interviews, Passerini tells us, are complete by the end of the first year (we can
deduce this is 1983), and then the manuscript emerges over the subsequent three
years, as the analysis does its work. The production of Autobiography of a
Generation therefore appears to be premised on the work of psychoanalysis, and
102 Enduring Time

at the same time Passerini’s psychoanalysis is premised on the research process,

with her autobiography and the autobiography of a generation emerging as
mutually co-affective.
Passerini is clear that she herself missed the initial student uprisings and
occupation of the University in Turin. She was not in Italy in 1968. She was in
Africa. Missed events are fascinating in their capacity to exert enormous
influence over us. ‘Why talk about something I didn’t share, in what’s supposed
to be an autobiography, albeit a collective autobiography?’ Passerini asks (60).
She immediately, in other words, opens the question of generation – of sharing a
temporal frame without sharing a geopolitical location. My biography and
therefore my autobiography, my self-narration is, she insists, a thoroughly
collective issue, and a political one at that, but I do not have to have been there
in order to remember an event in that autobiography. Furthermore, the events of
1968 marked a distinctive attempt to turn from the individual to the collective,
from the private to the public that has continued to have effects worldwide, and
for generations to come. Reconstructing a particular local instance of these
events that were globally so seminal, regardless of the fact that she herself missed
them, is a way of continuing this influence, and tracking its further development.
It is not important whether she was there or not – this would be only an
individual concern. What really matters is the shift to the collective that the
generation that was politically active in 1968 temporarily produced, but that can
only be ascertained retroactively, through the process of collecting testimony
some years after the events themselves. The generation who lived through 1968,
in other words is the generation through whom the ideal of the collective returns.
I read Passerini as suggesting that it is through the full reckoning with the
meaning of this collectivity, that personal narrative can find its place.

Afterwardsness

This attempt to make sense of something that one knows has occurred, and yet
in some profound way one seems to have missed, is at the core of a psychoanalytic
sensibility in which events come to be significant after an originary event that
has bypassed memory and language. Freud refers to this as ‘historical truth’ – the
indelible trace of experience on the psyche prior to the capacity for the event to
be encoded in a recallable way, a trace that can only be reproduced rather than
remembered, as its original form is lost (1939). We can trace this notion of
historical truth through Freud’s developing concept of Nachträglichkeit that,
 Delaying 103

along with the notion that the unconscious is ‘timeless’, remains the central
organizing temporal concept in Freud’s thinking, a concept that appears in his
writings as early as the Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) and continues to
develop through the footnotes of Ratman (1909) right up until the time of
Freud’s study of Moses (1939). Nachträglichkeit encapsulates the bi-directional
traversal of developmental and synchronic time. The structure is that of two
scenes, separated by a dynamic period of psychosexual development, followed
by the third ‘scene’ of the adult in analysis – the scene of the transference, which
is itself an eruption of the past into the present-tense of the psychoanalytic
encounter. Between the early and later childhood scenes the drive is on the move
developmentally, as we saw earlier, operating, in one of its temporal axes, along a
linear vector in the forward direction of time, so that it is only with the relative
sexual and intellectual maturity that accompanies the second scene, that the first
repressed scene that has given rise to the symptom can be remembered. The
‘action’ of the early scene is delayed until the psyche has the capacity to make
sense of the sexual content in the context of the later scene, giving rise to the
English translation of Nachträglichkeit as ‘delayed action’.6 Although the first
scene is always at some level sexual, it comes too early for the infant to make any
sense of. Sexuality more generally, in the sense of bodily and psychic excitability
of erogenous zones, by definition comes too early, and the sexual knowledge that
helps to retroactively make sense of such excitations comes too late.
Trauma, however, is located in the second scene’s capacity to allow the first scene
to be remembered, and in this sense it is the bringing to light of the first repressed
scene, rather than the factual occurrence of the scene itself, that produces traumatic
effects. The memory occurs in the time of the second scene, either bringing forth,
or creating a representation of the first scene for the first time, thereby working
‘retroactively’. Lacan emphasized the retroactive, or backwards movement between
the two scenes (1953–1954). Somewhere in the interval between not being ready to
deal with sexuality, and being ready to make sense of something that is long past, is
what we call subjectivity, the hiatus being ‘captured’ through the act of speaking,
which, through repetition of the irreducible gap between signified and signifier,
allows us to endlessly reproduce ourselves. For Lacan we are temporal subjects,
through and through. It is in this sense that he can claim that the effect precedes the
cause, the future gives rise to the past, and not the other way around, a statement of
the radical anachrony of subjective experience (1953–1954).

6
Après-coups, deferred action, retroaction and afterwardsness are all related translations of Freud’s
term, Nachträglichkeit, meaning delayed or belated understanding, or the later pathogenic effect, of
earlier traumatic experience.
104 Enduring Time

Laplanche, on the other hand, settles for simply ‘afterwardsness’, rejecting the
idea that causality can operate backwards in time: ‘With psychoanalysis’,
Laplanche states, ‘the cause, however old-fashioned and archaic, has in effect
been reinstated’ (1992a, 432). As we saw earlier, Laplanche emphasizes the
forward vector in which the actuality of the encounter between the immature
infant and the adult’s sexual unconscious comes to have significance later on. It
is not that the future gives rise to the past, but that the future ‘finds its place in the
transference when provoked by the analyst’s enigmatic messages’ (Dahl 2010,
728). Here Laplanche re-orientates us towards the third scene – the scene of
analytic encounter, where the whole problematic of linear time is played out.
Following Freud, Laplanche states:

[. . .] time or temporalization means binding events together to make a line, to

make a discourse in its widest sense. We think of the unconscious as remainders
of messages, remainders of bindings but without binding.
Laplanche 1992b, 26

There is linear time that is produced by binding events together to make

discourse, and another time which is not exactly ‘timeless’, but rather, a collection
of left-over bindings (should we say ‘post-temporal’?), now unbound that
characterizes unconscious time. What instigates both binding and unbinding,
according to Laplanche is the infant’s contact with the enigmatic codes or
signifiers from the adults involved in early care. These signifiers, whilst they
may be conscious, carry an unconscious sexual code, (what he also calls ‘noise’)
that are atemporal. The infant who is as yet unprepared for decoding adult
sexuality, is set the task of psychic translation – attempts to decode, and
therefore to temporalize the enigmatic signifiers which in effect instigates
binding, and we could say instigates psychic time.7 Temporalization, then, is set
in motion by the infant’s urgent need to deal with the atemporal, frozen noise of
maternal and paternal unconscious sexuality. Each generation is brought into
time by attempting to bind the ‘bindings without binding’ of the adults that
preceded them, a dialectical and mutually metamorphosing process. What is
crucial is that Laplanche re-instates the simultaneity of child and adult in
this encounter – although the adult’s unconscious sexual code comes too early
for the infant in the sense of the infant’s sexual maturity, adult and infant also
occupy the same temporal moment, the present-tense of their exchange. To
quote at length:

7
See Gentile 2006 for an object relational account of the emergence of psychic time.
 Delaying 105

The child/adult couple is not to be conceived essentially as the one succeeding

the other but as the one actually finding itself in the presence of the other,
concretely, in the first years of life, from the earliest months. I believe that here
we have the key to the notion of retroactivity: removing it from consideration of
a single individual, where we remain trapped in an opposition that cannot be
overcome, and asking ourselves whether the child is the cause of the adult or
whether the adult freely reinterprets the child; asking ourselves whether
determinism follows the arrow of time or, on the contrary, if it goes in the
opposite direction from the arrow of time. A contrast that cannot be overcome
unless we place the individual in the presence of the other, the child in the
presence of the adult and receiving from him messages that are not raw givens
but material “to be translated.”
Laplanche 2007, 212

What this means is that instead of thinking about afterwardsness in terms

of the trauma of childhood experience in the child-now-adult, Laplanche
gives us the present-tense of the disjuncture of the intergenerational relation
itself as traumatic; a relation that remains active as the structuring element
of temporal life, that becomes available in the transference. In other words,
what is ‘transferred’ from the past is the experience that living in present time,
which is itself a traumatic encounter with what has come before you, is too
much. We come to have an experience of time as discourse, events bound
together into a relation with one another, through an originary encounter
with the unbound time of the generation that came before, that instigates
psychic time.

The time of protest

Not only does Passerini miss two originary events, one political and one personal,
as we will see, but through the political narratives she records, we see the
generation itself in search of its own historical truth. What emerges from
Passerini’s interviews are scenes that are not only full of fervent hope and
triumph, the throwing off of the older generation with its authoritarianism and
its institutions, which it undoubtedly was, but also traumatic scenes imbued, for
many who participated, with confusion, loss, hopelessness, despair and bitterness.
Perhaps this is most poignantly visible in the testimonies, collected in 1983, from
women talking about the gender dynamics of the movement, and the lateral
relations amongst women who were attempting to build a politics of collectivity:
106 Enduring Time

Chiara: The majority of women, even if students, had a minimally active role in
what was going on. The only one who protested and talked was C. and I dreamed
several times that she was drowning and I let her drown, smirking.
Passerini 1996, 98

Maria Teresa Fenoglio: In reality, I was very intimidated. I puffed myself up a lot
– in fact, every once in a while I ask how people remember me and they
remember me as a person who harangued the assemblies very forcefully and
decisively. Inside, I felt very insecure, but I wasn’t aware of it.
Passerini 1996, 98

Simona: Relationships with other women were substantially nonexistent, in the

best of cases, especially with those who ‘counted’ then, who had created their
own political space for themselves. They looked through me, as if I were an
empty space, or they handed me leaflets to mimeograph, as if I were a mimeo
machine, and they made me suffer, I detested some of them.
Passerini 1996, 99

Passerini’s own summary of these testimonies reads:

The adventures of the feminine in our world pass through poverty and loneliness;
they include terrible trials, all the more terrible when accompanied by a political
and productive commitment, when accompanied by the conviction of doing
something right and useful for others.
Passerini 1996, 100

Attempts to manage destructive envy, intimidation and insecurity, and

feelings of invisibility, gave rise to great suffering that could only be located after
the event (‘I wasn’t aware of it’). These painful appraisals of the realities of 1968
for some women remained dormant until the 1980s when Passerini collects her
testimonies, which allows a process of narrativization to begin to take place. As
obscure hidden hurts, they operate like traumatic memory, and the temporal
delay of their resurfacing takes the structure of Nachträglichkeit. Passerini
situates the disintegration of the collective spirit of the student movement after
1968 as the repressed symptom:

On the cultural level 1968 acts as a prism: the rays converge on it and emerge
from it refracted into different colours. What was invisible previously becomes
visible now and at the same time nothing is as it was before [. . .] In the immediate
aftermath disintegration remains the most evident phenomenon: what was
united is divided, separated, reduced to dust.
Passerini 1996, 125
 Delaying 107

One of her participants, Franco-Apra states:

Sixty-eight had been a utopia of organizing a huge collective effort, in which I

personally participated most willingly. Because I was a little disgusted by a way
of coping with the world, a way that later imposed itself as predominant and
almost necessary – aggressive individualism. After ’68 this working hypothesis
was destroyed [. . .]
Passerini 1996, 127

Passerini intimates that the full impact of this disintegration of collectivity

can only be identified as traumatic in the context of the 1980s, a time, after all, in
which neoliberalism as an economic strategy has taken hold in many European
countries, when many of those involved in the Women’s Liberation Movement
and left politics more generally were exhausted and disillusioned. It is through
the process of giving testimony on events some years earlier, that those events
can come to be understood and felt as traumatic. Passerini states:

In these lives that carry the mark of an intense season – today forgotten by most
– the way one carries a secret it is always tempting to reveal, [. . .] memory
alternates between rage and happiness; the choices attempt to come to grips with
this alternation, in order not to shatter the biography a second time, in its own
recollection and in its narration.
Passerini 1996, 154

As one of the interviewed participants says:

I never figured out if ’68 was good or bad. And now I discover myself once more
having the same ideas I had before ’68, about a lot of important things.
Passerini 1996, 152

As 1968 emerges in its traumatic after-effects, Passerini’s own psychoanalysis

is unfolding along similar lines. The opening scenes of the analysis are full of
reminiscences – we get the ‘story’ of Passerini’s early life, the development of
intense and vital friendships after her mother’s early and untimely death when
she was six, her first loves, her engagements with politics, her travels and political
work in Africa, her return to Italy, and her own investments in the events of 1968.
Alongside this life-story is a love-story, both a literal one, and the development
of the transference in her analysis, a kind of love-hate story, we might say, that is
a necessary part of any analysis. In the opening stages of her encounter with her
analyst, vital narrative pathways are formed, allowing the tentative processes of
attachment, idealization, dependency and helplessness to be tolerated. However,
the trauma of her early childhood – the structuring effects of her mother’s death
108 Enduring Time

when she was six, that we could read in relation to an earlier impossible historical
truth, remains untouched, despite other therapeutic gains. A shift, however,
occurs when her analyst, whom she usually experiences as laconic, erudite, witty
and reserved makes, in his own terms, a ‘mistake’. Here is the passage (G is
Passerini’s analyst, X is her lover):

G. says, after having heard some dreams about X: ‘Coming to get you from the
waiting room, I had the perception that the premature loss of your mother has
really left its mark on you’. Well then, my state of orphanhood is so visible.
Throughout the day I continue to do the normal things in my job and my routine.
In bed, alone, at night, all of a sudden it is as if past time were wiped out, more
than forty years. A growing hiccup, an almost asthmatic breathlessness, an
absence that takes my breath away: why did you go away, why aren’t you here,
why did this happen to me? Rancour, hate, terror, I won’t be able to survive.
Instead, I do survive, groping, like a stump, a wounded part. Scenes come back as
vivid as if they were yesterday; the withered roots become painful. A night spent
reliving images of rejection and abandonment. G. feels responsible. ‘One could
have not done it’. ‘That’s true, and yet one had to do it’.
‘Once I wouldn’t have done it’. ‘I realize that it involves a certain risk’. ‘Risk,
yes’. (One technique is to nod in agreement. Another is to repeat the last word,
be an echo. X gets nervous, says that I too do it with him more and more often).
G. emphasizes that he has not acted within a therapeutic strategy. I know that it
is very important to him not to hold himself out as healer, doctor, shaman. But,
I explain to him, for me it’s crucial, for various reasons, that he said that sentence
to me, that he thought that I could deal with it. Because my family, on the other
hand, had not thought so and had hidden from me for a long time the fact that
she was dead.
Passerini 1996, 114–115

What is it that occurs here? At one level Passerini’s analyst, in his intervention
simply says, ‘I can see that you are a child whose mother has died, even in the
middle-aged woman who sits in my waiting room’. He names her loss and its
lasting impact, and in doing so, collapses the 40 years that have passed, allowing
Passerini to make emotional contact with the psychic state of a child whose mother
has died, who has never fully felt the loss, who has never allowed herself to feel
the extent of her rancour, hate and terror at being left alone. In splitting off this
aspect of her psychic life, Passerini has lost touch with the traumatic elements of
that loss that have structured her entire life – her relationships, her politics, her
passionate attachments of all kinds. And yet this reading misses another – that
Passerini’s mother’s death is redoubled by the shock of being told months after
 Delaying 109

the event that she had in fact died. The delay between the actual death, and being
told of her mother’s death is the time that is wiped out by the news of the death,
and is repeated by the therapeutic enactment. It is an absence of time that takes
her breath away. I thought you were here all this time, but actually you were
already dead.
What Passerini’s analyst’s comment does, then, is to notice that at some level
Passerini is still waiting for her mother to come home from hospital. As she
sits in the waiting room, what he sees is just that – a child waiting, rather than
a bereaved child. He stumbles, that is, not on the impact of the loss, but its
absence. The mother is not yet lost in Passerini’s psychic life – she is still alive,
in hospital, and Passerini is still waiting for her to come home. Passerini’s
psychic decision to continue to wait for her mother means that she cannot
fully claim her place within her own generation. She is caught, frozen within her
own mother’s generation, waiting to grow up. In placing herself, through
her own political testimony and the gathering of the testimony of others, within
her own generation, she can take in the analyst’s comment as important. She is
ready, she tells him, to know what a part of her already knows but cannot think
about.
This section of Autobiography of a Generation is recorded as having taken
place in June of the third year of Passerini’s analysis. It is in dialogue with her
own political testimony that grapples with the exhaustion and ideological
struggles of the early 1970s and then the violence on the Italian political left of
the late 1970s. Passerini writes of the period between 1969 and 1973:

[. . .] I remember one meeting, probably in ’72, where someone said ‘are we

always going to take it, why don’t we see if we can’t be better armed, carry with
us not just lemon for the tear-gas, but also something like a Molotov cocktail?’
and the answer of some comrades was ‘It’s okay with me, I’ve got nothing to lose’,
because the disillusionment, the weariness were already immense, we felt more
and more defenseless, disorganized, endangered.
Passerini 1996, 111

Of 1978–1979 she writes:

The terrible years [. . .] I couldn’t raise my own eyes, given all those things that
hadn’t been cleared up, such as the derivation of terrorist violence from our
intellectual and existential milieu. Like many others, I had always assumed that
terrorism couldn’t come from anywhere but the right, that it was Fascist by
definition.
Passerini 1996, 121
110 Enduring Time

By situating her story within the stories of the generation of ’68, her generation,
Passerini can write her story, and the story she writes is not just her political story,
but the story of recognizing a disavowed loss that has structured her political life.
The analysis is the encounter with that loss in the present-tense of the transference.
It is a doubled encounter, as what Passerini recognizes is the very loss of the
present-tense encounter with her mother. What she mourns, in other words, is the
too-muchness of the originary maternal–infant encounter in which the binding
of time is instigated. In the delay – in re-inhabiting the dead time of waiting for
her dead mother to return – she glimpses, retroactively, the ongoing present-tense
of the intergenerational relation that allows her to feel ‘in’ time, or ‘in her time’:
Only now is the complementary nature of my two undertakings evident. If I had
not heard the life stories of the generation of ’68, I would not have been able to
write about myself; these stories have nourished mine, giving it the strength to
get to its feet and to speak. But I couldn’t have borne them, in their alternation of
being too full and too empty, if I had not confronted myself and my history with
the double motion of analysis and the exercise of remembering.
Passerini 1996, 124

Passerini establishes her place retroactively in a generation of politically

passionate, as well as politically troubled subjects, and doing so allows the
psychic work of loss and mourning to take place. It is through the co-affective
political subjectivities that are established in the testimonial work of
Autobiography of a Generation that Passerini can access her own autobiography
– an autobiography that entails acknowledging a profound loss that is also a
remembering of a refusal to accept a severing from the present-tense of the
maternal–infant encounter, even in its too-muchness, as this would entail a
severing from the capacity to bind time. This then loops back to her commitment
to accessing her own political autobiography:
Now I too can be a mother, of myself above all. The mother can be happy and
sparkling, not terrifying, grim, judgemental. Dancing and joking, [. . .] a young
girl in body and spirit despite her age. And thus I can confront the last memories,
reunite myself with the present.
Passerini 1996, 118

The politics of waiting

I have teased out a story, one of many possible stories that could be told through
reading Autobiography of a Generation, that suggests how we might become
attached to the political events of our moment. It reveals the delay involved in
 Delaying 111

noticing that we might be ‘touched’ by the trauma of such events, and the relation
between these events and a psychic substratum that has something to do with
the traumatic fact of sharing time across generations (Laplanche’s insistence on
the traumatic present-tense of adult–child relations), that continues as a
structuring object relation in adult and political life. The story reveals that our
capacities to retroactively situate ourselves generationally, to respond to the
times as ‘my time’, enable an engagement with other processes of working
through histories of trauma, including personal and intergenerational histories,
linking generation, understood as the collective time-frame of the political,
with generation understood as the productiveness of the too-much-ness of the
present tense.
I began, however, by situating this discussion in the context of two political
scenes of ‘petrification’; that of (post)apartheid South Africa, and the ongoing
intergenerational waiting for justice of the Palestinians. I mentioned too, a third
scene, the return to the political ‘camp’ as an aesthetic scene of politics that
re-emerged in a dramatically public way during the events of 2011, and how a
way of doing politics may ‘remain’ in a public imaginary, rather than just in
psychic life. It is here that I think we can see the passing on of the potential of
‘beginning’ that Arendt names as ‘politics’ (1958).
We have recently seen a return to forms of protest that deliberately make
visible different modes of ‘collectivity’, particularly the enactment of ways of
living together, in which ‘the protest camp’ includes temporary dwellings with
semi-permeable boundaries, such as tents and other temporary shelters,
collective and sustainable means to generate food and warmth, areas and
platforms for debate, education, learning and discussion, and areas for recreation,
regeneration and cultural and artistic expression. These forms of protest have
long histories and complex genealogies.8 Rashid Khalidi for instance, has pointed
out that the largely peaceful revolutionary upsurges in Tunisia and Egypt have
their own history of peaceful Arab uprisings that they draw on, and it may well
be that the aesthetics of peace protest that have been mobilized in European and
Arab contexts draw on quite different cultural imaginaries (2011). The point is
not, perhaps, that the events of 2011 that took place in different geopolitical
locations shared the same aesthetics or histories of protest, but that neither are
they completely ‘uncut’ from their own particular histories and aesthetics. The
Camp for Climate Action, which held its first gathering in the UK in 2006, for

8
See Hailey 2009.
112 Enduring Time

instance, has clear links with the aesthetics and politics of the Occupy movement
camps that originated in New York and spread to London, themselves also in
dialogue with pro-democracy camps in Egypt, Madrid and Athens in which the
camp itself demonstrates a mode of potentially sustainable living that both
experiments with and creates new collective imaginaries, generating both
utopian and anachronistic images that serve the function of dislodging what
Jacques Rancière describes as the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Bayly 2017). It
would also be strange to occlude the relation between the Camp for Climate
Action and the women’s camp at Greenham Common, which changed the face
of both the women’s movement and direct-action politics. As Yvonne Marshall,
Sasha Roseneil and Kayt Armstrong have written:

The camps were a testing ground for new forms of active, non-violent disruption
by occupation, practices which were taken up and reinvigorated from the mid–
1990s in anti-road, environmental and climate change actions, and at the
ongoing peace camps of Menwith Hill, Faslane and Aldermaston.
Marshall et al. 2009, 226

The peace camp also draws on histories of other forms of making the body
passive or inert, as a way of embodying non-violent forms of social change. The
anti-sweatshop sit-ins on US campuses in the late 1990s, for instance, evoked a
history of sitting-in, sitting down, and a refusal to physically budge, that drew
their aesthetic potency from the restaurant sit-ins conducted by the Congress of
Racial Equality as early as the 1940s, that were in their turn passed on to
later generations of protestors during the American Civil Rights Movement, so
that the 1960 Greensboro and Nashville sit-ins were already resonant with a
history of non-violent civil disobedience around racialization, segregation and
discrimination. These in their turn fed into strategies used by disability rights
movements, the bed-ins against the Vietnam War that Yoko Ono and John
Lennon made iconic, teach-ins that have challenged the corporatization of
education, work-ins against the erosion of employment rights, and more recently
the re-emergence of ‘die-ins’, in which participants figuratively ‘drop dead’ on
cue, which have been used to raise awareness of prominent acts of police and
extra-judicial killings, which draw on a history of anti-war campaigning, and the
campaign against nuclear weapons from the 1960s through to the 1980s.9
There are, of course, other more troubled aesthetics that run alongside peace
camps that were particularly prominent in the UK in the 1980s. The pivotal and

9
Three thousand people, for instance, performed a mass die-in in the centre of Glasgow in 1983 to
protest the ongoing investment made by the UK government in nuclear missiles.
 Delaying 113

violent clash between striking coal miners in South Yorkshire and the British riot
police has become iconic in terms of protest that takes the form of battle. This
was made especially visible through Jeremy Deller’s art project, The Battle of
Orgreave (Deller and Figgis 2001), which entailed a full-scale re-enactment of
the events at Orgreave and their aftermath, using both historical re-enactors, and
members of the local community, many of whom were ex-miners, and some of
whom were involved in the original violent suppression of miners by the police.
The art project involved returning to, remembering, and literally re-enacting the
‘battle’. To do so Deller had to physically amass a huge number of riot police
helmets, shields and police uniforms, and ‘battle train’ the local extras and
original miners – material, social and artistic practices that retrospectively
revealed the original ‘aesthetics’ of war used by the British police.
For the camp to re-emerge as a form of protest requires, however, noticing a
missed generational beat. Sasha Roseneil writes about her ongoing engagements,
and re-engagements with Greenham over more than two decades:

I was surprised because during all the years I had worked on Greenham, it had
felt like few people were interested, at least amongst the feminist theorists,
historians and sociologists I encountered. Greenham was ‘old hat’ in its association
with ‘woolly hatted womanhood’ its memory tinged with unfashionable notions
of essentialism, maternalism, and un-deconstructed gender identities.
Marshall et al. 2009, 236

Roseneil has sought to challenge this erasure of Greenham from feminist

collective memory, arguing for a reading of Greenham as an early instantiation
of queer feminism (2000). And yet it is perhaps only through a recent return to
Greenham, through the engagement with Common Ground, a multidisciplinary
project made up of archaeologists, artists and women involved in Greenham that
explicitly seeks to investigate the ‘leftovers’ of Greenham from the perspective of
the now, including its material culture, and an appreciation of Greenham as a site
for collective memory, that an intergenerational connection can begin to be
generative.
If Passerini’s text stands as testimony itself to the feminist desire to exceed all
categories – generation, history, memory – through an insistence on the personal,
the body and its traumas, and their place in the scene of politics, then we could
argue that the glimpse of the personal – those all-too-fragile bodies going about
their morning rituals in the varied protest camps during 2011 – revealed both a
time delay, and the possibility for reconnection with something that has
remained, perhaps unnoticed, in public life.
114
 5

Enduring

To experience life, A Tree must live,

To experience fire, A Tree must die.
By Herman Wallace
Sumell and Wallace 2006

The House That Herman Built is an ongoing social art project, a collaboration
between the American activist and artist Jackie Sumell, and the late political
prisoner and Black Panther, Herman Wallace.1 Herman Wallace spent 42 years in
solitary confinement, most of it in a Super-Maximum-Security Unit in the
Louisiana State prison known as ‘Angola’ in the United States. He protested his
innocence throughout. He lived in a 6-foot by 9-foot cell with no human contact
for 23 hours a day, 7 days a week, for those 42 years. He was held in Camp J,
an area of the prison known as the ‘dungeon’. In Sumell’s words ‘it is the place
where prisoners go to suffer’ (Sumell and Wallace 2006, n.p.). Wallace finally
had his conviction overturned and was freed three days before his death from
cancer at the age of 71, on the 4th of October 2013. He had spent more than
half of his life in solitary confinement. The project began as an exchange
between Sumell and Wallace, and over a twelve-year period became an ongoing
project, despite Wallace’s passing, and includes an exhibition of a reproduction
of the cell that housed Wallace that has toured worldwide; a book of the letters
and exchanges between Wallace and Sumell published in 2006; a documentary
film based on the project by Angad Bhalla; and a series of drawings, 3D imagery
and a model based on Wallace’s description of his ideal home which Sumell
would one day like to build in Wallace’s home town of New Orleans. At the
centre of the project is the imagined house – the house that a man who has
lived in a 6-foot by 9-foot cell creates through an intimate friendship with an

1
See http://hermanshouse.org/ for an account of the project.

115
116 Enduring Time

artist, which is at the same time the blueprint for a virtual house that,
through the struggle to get it built, acts as a hub for the wider struggle against
wrongful conviction, and the inhuman conditions of indefinite solitary
confinement.
In the last chapter, we saw how the temporal trope of delay is built into
experiences of political time in which, alongside the temporality of event, a more
elongated time opens up through practices of waiting, and the retroactive
working through of trauma, that could generate the statement ‘I have belonged
to a generation’. In the delay between generations, waiting emerges as a kind
of attachment to the ‘present tense’ of an intergenerational event, an event
that happened in the past, but continues to play out through time, structuring
our internal and political leanings. But there are conditions under which
attachment to the ‘present tense’ is neither choice, nor simply a matter of
remèmoration, but a structural condition of the present. By this I mean we have
to understand Wallace’s barely thinkable ordeal, his 42-year-long torture, as
not only the material condition of the perpetual present, but as a direct result
of what Christina Sharpe has called ‘the endurance of antiblackness in and
outside the contemporary’ (2016a, 14). In order to think about incarcerated time,
we cannot, in other words, approach the form of temporal extension that The
House That Herman Built suggests, without reading it with what Sharpe calls ‘the
wake’: ‘the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved
unfolding’ (14). Sharpe’s extraordinary work, In the Wake: On Blackness and
Being, provides a theoretical guide for this chapter, as I attempt to respond to
Jackie Sumell’s invitation to all of us, to ‘know’ about Wallace’s ordeal.
Writing in 2008 about the possibilities for a new ‘time’ in the face of what he
saw as the impossibility of a genuinely new political landscape, Alain Badiou
stated:

First, I would retain the status of courage as a virtue – that is, not an innate
disposition, but something that constructs itself, and which one constructs, in
practice. Courage, then, is the virtue which manifests itself through endurance
in the impossible. This is not simply a matter of a momentary encounter with the
impossible: that would be heroism, not courage. Heroism has always been
represented not as a virtue but as a posture: as the moment when one turns
to meet the impossible face to face. The virtue of courage constructs itself
through endurance within the impossible; time is its raw material. What takes
courage is to operate in terms of a different durée to that imposed by the law of
the world.
Badiou 2008, n.p.
 Enduring 117

For Badiou what comes to be understood as political courage is a practice

that emerges out of a decision to operate in terms of a different durée to that of
the on-go of the same political order; to decide to live time in and through the
impossibility of political change in the now. It is not so much about simply
waiting, but ‘endurance within the impossible’, enduring the situation, that is, of
nothing changing, which turns time into ‘raw material’, to be dealt with.
Elizabeth Povinelli, however, in Economies of Abandonment (2011), argues
that the impossible is not simply the impossibility of political change in the now,
but the lived, historically contingent, embodied experience of persisting within
zones of social abandonment and vulnerability. Developing Fanon’s notion of
the ‘zone of nonbeing’ that describes the condition of blackness as structurally
non-human (1967, 2), she describes these liminal spaces of persistence and
endurance as the ‘zone of being and not being’ (2011, 21). The paradox of
endurance within the impossible, for Povinelli, opens up through a range of
social practices, from constantly thwarted attempts by Indigenous Australians to
embed traditional, historical and contemporary knowledge back into the
landscape, through to equally thwarted strategies by alternative food movements
in the context of the post-9/11 US securitized state to insert alternative food
production into the monolithic corporate food industry. Both critical theory and
forms of activism invest in the capacity to endure within these spaces of state
and social abandonment, as a way to remain attached to the idea of hope. Zones
of being and nonbeing therefore provide the potential, at least, for the emergence
of a new ethics of life and sociality (128). However, lives within such zones are
lived in such reduced and restricted conditions, that the desire for them to foster
alternative worlds can seem, according to Povinelli, naïve at best and sadistic at
worst (128). What she draws our attention to is that once we understand
‘potentiality’ as itself socially conditioned, and materially distributed, then:

[. . .] we find ourselves in the morally viscous realm of excess, exhaustion, and

endurance, a realm that includes affective, physical, and social conditions that
can depress the brain and immune system, rupture organs as well as bonds with
families and friends, and orient violence inward.
Povinelli 2011, 128

Therefore, if we want to endure, we have to acknowledge that endurance

within zones of social abandonment is not a matter of ‘escape’ through attempts
at the overthrow of capitalism, but instead, a commitment to living in its seams,
living ‘as spaciality, materiality, temporality’ (128). This means a form of
endurance that includes the persistent knowledge that materiality-as-potentiality
118 Enduring Time

is never outside of organizations of power (128), and, drawing on Sharpe, that

materiality-as-potentiality in relation to Black life is never outside of the wake
of the afterlives of the violence and negation enacted by slavery. As Dennis
Childs argues in Slaves of the State (2015), the chattel principle infuses
modern-day practices of incarceration of black individuals in solitary
confinement. Saidiya Hartman describes the afterlife of slavery as ‘skewed life
chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration,
and impoverishment’ (2007, 6).

Solitary

We have been apprehending, at the level of the quotidian, how ‘staying’ with the
affective embarrassment of out-of-date ideas can release their potential through
a form of theoretically folding or kneading time; how ‘maintaining’ time through
repetitive, and in some ways arduous, boring and tedious activities, can constitute
social relations that may allow us to ‘share’ time; how mothering a dead child
produces the oddly lively time of being with the dead that is not ‘outside’ of time,
nor ‘in’ time, but can nevertheless be lived as time without its flow; and how the
temporal delay that produces historical truth binds psychic time to the legacy of
previous generations. But the experience of solitary confinement is registered at
a different level; the level of the ‘raw material’ of time, an oppressive time that
‘alters one’s ontology’, as Jack Abbott, who spent 14 years in solitary confinement,
put it (1981, 67). The radical Black political prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal calls
prison simply a ‘temporal box’ (1996).
Sumell has named solitary as an ‘impossible’ situation (Sumell and Baraitser
2015). It entails living the impossibility of continuing to exist indefinitely, but
without social or physical contact with other people or living creatures, without
access to natural light, landscape, or any other elements of the natural world. It
entails living under conditions of permanent surveillance, yet with no relation,
contact or stimulation. In a regime of low-level constant artificial light that is the
norm, for instance, for solitary individuals in the US Federal Prison System,
there can be no coming and going of the day other than the enforced temporality
of domination imposed by the prison institution: the repetitive time of food
being shoved through a food hatch in the door, of being mandatorily strip
searched every time you leave your cell, being handcuffed or put in leg irons
every time you are taken out into the ‘dog run’, a euphemism for a strip of outside
space surrounded by concrete walls or densely meshed wire fencing, so there is
 Enduring 119

no view beyond, except for a glimpse of the sky, a place to pace up and down
alone before returning in cuffs to a solitary cell (Guenther, 2013). The UN Special
Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or
Punishment defines solitary confinement as ‘the physical and social isolation of
individuals who are confined to their cells for 22 to 24 hours a day’ (Mendez
2014). The physical and psychological consequences of such treatment are clear.
Amnesty International’s 2014 report ‘Entombed: Isolation in the US Federal
Prison System’ states:

There is a significant body of evidence that confining individuals in isolated

conditions, even for relatively short periods of time, can cause serious
psychological and sometimes physiological harm, with symptoms including
anxiety and depression, insomnia, hypertension, extreme paranoia, perceptual
distortions and psychosis. This damaging effect can be immediate and increases
the longer the measure lasts and the more indeterminate it is. Isolation has been
found to have negative effects on individuals with no pre-existing illness and to
be particularly harmful in the case of those who already suffer from mental
illness.
Amnesty International 2014, 31

The report recommends that no-one should be held in prolonged or

indefinite isolation, and yet, whilst it is difficult to obtain accurate figures, the
NGO, Solitary Watch, states that the figures on the US Federal Prison System
suggests ‘there are at least 80,000 prisoners in isolated confinement on any given
day in America’s prisons and jails, including some 25,000 in long-term solitary in
supermax prisons’ (Solitary Watch 2015, n.p.). The US has over 2 million
individuals incarcerated at any one moment in time, the highest per capita rate in
the world.2 Picking up on Mike Davis’ term (1995), Angela Davis has long called
this ‘the prison-industrial-complex’, or the ‘penal-industrial complex’ in order to
highlight both the historical and continued ideological links between the current
US prison system and the institution of slavery, and the fact that black and
indigenous individuals and other ‘non-conforming’ bodies are incarcerated at a
much higher rate than others (2003, 2016). In addition, there is a disproportionate
number of Black, Latino, Queer and Trans inmates held at what is known as
‘supermax’ level, a euphemism for solitary confinement (Arrigo and Bullock 2008,
Stanley and Smith 2011). The institution of prison, from Davis’ perspective,

2
See also the 2002 Human Rights Watch World Report on the spread of ultra-modern ‘super-
maximum’ security prisons from the US to other parts of the world and Davis 2003 for the way this
process relies on and further promotes structures of racism.
120 Enduring Time

‘warehouses’ people who represent major social problems, all over the world,
and not just in the US (2016, 25). The ‘impossibility’ then, of living in solitary
becomes a way to think about the impossibility, and yet reality (the zone of
both being and not being), of other modes of social endurance or ‘social death’,
and the link between military, industrial and prison industries that generate
huge profits from processes of social destruction.3 Drawing on Dennis Child’s
articulation of the relationship between the slave ship hold, the barracoon, the
prison and the prison cargo-hold (2015), Christina Sharpe states,‘US incarceration
rates and carceral logics directly emerging from slavery and into the present
continue to be the signs that make Black bodies matter’ (2016a, 75).
Time in solitary is ‘petrified’, in the sense that we encountered earlier in Derek
Hook’s reading of the (post)apartheid psychosocial field (2013). The resonance
of the term ‘petrified’ comes to us from Fanon, where he talks specifically of the
obscenity of colonialism, slavery and racism as the very production of subjects
accommodated to their degradation, ‘petrified’ in terms of the restricted
possibilities of living within the oppressive environment of the zone of nonbeing
(1967, 61, 73). Petrified time, for Fanon, has a particular relation to Blackness in
the colonial situation and therefore cannot be disaggregated from what Sharpe
calls ‘the afterlife of property’ (2016a, 15). What is unique to Sumell’s artistic
collaboration, however, is the way she simply and effectively disputes the
impossibility of living in the wake. Despite enormous odds, Sumell makes a
lasting, deep and intense friendship over 14 years with a man who has had the
passing of time suspended from his life as an act of punishment. She makes
imaginative space and time in a situation in which he lives indefinitely in a 6-foot
by 9-foot cell with no human contact. And most importantly, as we will see, she
works with the ‘present time’ of incarceration to insert the passing of time into a
situation in which the future itself has been incarcerated. It is not so much that
Sumell opens up the affective horizon of hope (although I have no doubt that the
project also does do this), but that, through her engagement with Wallace’s
adamant refusal to give any ground on his political views and beliefs, she lifts the
temporality of preservation out of that of incarceration. The House That Herman
Built preserves for safe-keeping Wallace’s vision of a better world, a vision that
takes its political power from its distinction with the incarceration of the future
out of which it emerges. In providing a time in the future in which this preserved
time may come to pass, Sumell disrupts the incarceration of Wallace’s time, both
the time of his life, and the time of his political vision. Taking up Badiou’s notion

3
See Cacho 2012, Davis 2003, 2016, Guenther 2013, Mbembe 2001, 2003 and Patterson 1982.
 Enduring 121

of courage, the phenomenological question that Sumell’s work pushes us to ask

is ‘what is it like to live courageous time’, this time that is heterogeneous to durée
imposed by the law of the world. Sumell and Wallace’s collaborative durational
project, however, pushes this even further, not just to ask this phenomenological
question, but the ethical question: ‘what does it mean to decide to know about
those who live impossible time?’ This decision, to know about an unbearable
experience of time, is itself a mode of politics, a form of ethics, and a way of
‘taking care’. It is one thing to know about suffering, and another to know about
elongated enduring suffering without end. Indeed, if courage is something that
one constructs in practice, as Badiou would have it, then endurance within the
impossible might be best thought precisely as a practice of care, if we can extend
care to mean a form of knowing that keeps safe and preserves the truth of the
endurance of human suffering even as one seeks to alleviate it. Like Ukeles,
Billingham and Riley, Sumell develops a practice of care through a mode of
endurance that has to do with deciding to know, and continuing to know, about
unbearable time.

The Angola 3

The history of Herman Wallace, and his two fellow prisoners, Albert Woodfox
and Robert King Wilkerson, who became collectively known as the Angola 3, is
one of profound injustice, and is tragically neither uncommon nor unique. In
1970, at the age of 27, Wallace began a 25-year sentence for armed robbery and
was transferred to Louisiana State Penitentiary. ‘Angola’ was and remains a
systemically violent place. Built on the site of an antebellum slave plantation, the
prison has been repeatedly reported over its history as having poor work and
living conditions, high levels of inmate assaults, the circulation of arms amongst
prisoners, and a notorious sex slavery system. Today, as Marc Léger states, the
complex operates as an 180,000-acre work-camp where three-quarters of its
inmates are African American. In Léger’s terms, they are effectively paid between
4 and 20 cents per hour for their forced labour (2011).
When Wallace arrived in 1970 the prison was still racially segregated. In 1971,
he established the Angola Chapter of the Black Panther Party with Ronald
Ailsworth, Albert Woodfox and Gerald Bryant, after receiving permission from
the Panther central office in Oakland, one of the only prison Panther chapters
that were ever formed. Members of the Angola Chapter fought for changes in the
treatment of all prisoners, but especially highlighting the situation of black
122 Enduring Time

4 Herman Wallace, 2006.

prisoners, and campaigned for an ending to segregation, widespread violence

and rape, through petitioning and organizing hunger strikes. In Wallace’s words:

April/01/2003, page 1 (second audio tour)

In 1971 I became a member of the Black Panther Party for self defense as
a result of systematic discrimination, police brutality, murder, and the
disproportion of African Americans in prison.
Sumell and Wallace 2006, n.p.

Then, in 1972 a prison guard named Brent Miller was stabbed to death and
Wallace, King and Woodfox were convicted for his murder. The men denied
killing the guard. Two separate all-white juries convicted them, and they were
given life sentences. Amnesty International has stated that ‘no physical evidence
links them to the crime’, the testimony of the main eyewitness has been
 Enduring 123

discredited, and there is evidence of bribing witnesses in exchange for favours

and promises of pardon. Miller’s widow also came to believe that the three men
who were convicted of her husband’s killing were innocent.4 Robert King
Wilkerson and Herman Wallace had their convictions overturned and were
released in 2001 and 2013 respectively, having spent 29 years and 42 years
respectively in solitary confinement. Albert Woodfox was finally released on
19 February 2016 at the age of 69, after 43 years in solitary confinement. Federal
judges who have overturned the convictions of all three men numerous times
have cited racial discrimination, misconduct by the prosecution and inadequate
defense in underpinning the repeated cases brought against them.
The House That Herman Built began in 2001, 30 years into Wallace’s ordeal. At
the time Jackie Sumell was an art student at Stanford University on a Fulbright
scholarship, as yet uninvolved with the justice movement around the prison
industrial complex and the politics of locking up and ‘warehousing’ America’s
poor, and its communities of colour. Sumell has described finding herself
studying elective programmes such as ‘Space as an Architectural Form’ but
without having any real connection to what she was studying. After attending a
lecture by Robert King Wilkerson who had just been released, she describes how
her programme began to seem to her an indulgence. Sumell approached King
after the talk, and asked what she could do. He told her simply to ‘write to my
comrades’. As her disillusion with the art world grew she began, in her words to
‘flip the script’, using the privilege of being on a stipend, studying art in a
prestigious institution, to do advocacy work on behalf of those with no access to
justice (Sumell and Baraitser 2015).
And yet this advocacy work, which entailed reaching out to an individual
who himself had been so involved in agitating for change, began with a com-
munication about slowed down, mundane, everyday time. We could say that
Sumell had an artistic sense that what Wallace and Woodfox might need more
than anything else was a ‘picture’ of time passing, and a picture of the world as it
looked now, a world that they had not seen for 30 years, being effectively trapped
in a cage that was also a time capsule. So she taped a camera to her wrist, and took
a picture every hour for 24 hours, recording her daily surroundings, and these
she sent to Wallace and Woodfox with the note ‘To Mr. Woodfox and To Mr.
Wallace – here are 24 hours in my simple life’ (Sumell and Wallace 2006). She
took pictures of the corners of her desk, the dashboard of her car, her view of the

4
See Amnesty International Action for Individuals at https://www.amnesty.org.uk/albert-woodfox-
angola–3-louisiana-usa-solitary and the film In the Land of the Free (2010) directed by Vadim Jean.
124 Enduring Time

computer screen. She reports that on receiving the pictures Wallace marvelled at
the new, yet ordinary complexity of the world, drinking up the detail of everyday
life that had been slowed down and stretched out over a 24-hour period so he
could see it, and contemplate it. With this offer of her time, Sumell opened up a
question as to whether it would be possible to imagine the world of another for
whom time does not pass in the same way (Sumell and Baraitser 2015).
‘Chronophobia’ describes a condition suffered by those in prison, as well as
the elderly, that entails a distinct fear, anxiety or unease about time. Commonly
referred to as ‘prison neurosis’, it remains one of the most common psychiatric
conditions for individuals held in confinement, in which a terror develops in
relation to the duration and immensity of time. Some of the most debilitating
symptoms include delusions, claustrophobia, depression and feelings of panic
and madness.5 At its core, chronophobia is a fear that the present time will never
come to an end. It is the affective experience of the too-much-ness of time, time
that will not pass, will not unfold onto a future of freedom, release or death. Here
the permanence of the suspended time of incarceration, exacerbated in solitary
confinement by enforced non-relationality and sensory deprivation, is felt to be
psychically intolerable. The psychiatrist Stuart Grassian, whose work concerns
the psychological harm caused by conditions of solitary, describes how people
need both external and internal stimulation to live, and without this will end up
agitated, delirious, confusional and potentially in a psychotic state (2006). The
removal of social and sensory stimulation, and its replacement with a kind of
permanent or stuck low-level state of stimulation in which lights are on all day,
the temperature remains the same, and there is no glimpse of the world turning,
means that there is no meaningful stimulation, even if there is perceptual
information. This, coupled with the kinds of overstimulation of prison – offensive
smells, loud and sudden alarming noises – Grassian argues, leads to profound
psychological difficulties. These are intensely frightening experiences, and
without any help managing or alleviating them, individuals come out of solitary
struggling to adjust again to non-solitary conditions within the ‘open’ prison
environment, leading to further punishment, and leading to further time in
solitary. Grassian maintains that once people get into this kind of vicious cycle,
they cannot get out. In this sense, solitary time, even for prisoners who are not
being punished for their political views, has its own deadly circularity, in which
the more time spent in solitary confinement, the more likely that person will be
to spend even more time in solitary confinement.

5
See American Psychiatric Association 2013.
 Enduring 125

Lisa Guenther, in Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives (2013),
charts the development of solitary confinement in the US through three distinct
but interconnected phases. The early US penitentiary system, arising as a
standard technique of punishment by the early nineteenth century, was originally
conceived of as a humanitarian response to the penal customs of English colonial
rule: public humiliation, torture and execution (3). The ‘Great Law of Pennsylvania’
in 1692 put solitary as a central component of a new approach to imprisonment
in which corporal and capital punishment were supposed to give way to
confinement within a cell, with the express aim of promoting a confrontation
between the prisoner and his conscience through being left alone to reflect,
accept and eventually reform his ways. In the mid-eighteenth century, the penal
‘reformist’ Benjamin Rush’s distorted vision was that solitary confinement was
designed to be therapeutic, a way of wiping away the sins of the past through
atonement brought on by prolonged isolation and self-reflection. Yet by the time
Charles Dickens visited the Pennsylvania system in 1842, Guenther writes, the
punishment of solitary and its effects on prisoners truly horrified him, effecting
‘a complete derangement of the nervous system’, as Dickens’ guide put it when
Dickens enquired about the constant trembling of prisoners, their nervous tics,
difficulties making eye contact, talking, cringing and nervousness (19). The black
experience of incarceration, however, during this first wave of the US penitentiary
system, was distinct. Within the plantation, solitary could be meted out at the
whim of a master or overseer. Here solitary was not, Guenther points out, an
experience of failed redemption, but rather ‘one of forced labor, bodily pain,
public humiliation, and isolation to the point of social death’ (39). After the
Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, ‘freed’ black Americans were routinely
criminalized, and subject to new justifications for incarceration and slave labour
as convicts rather than slaves.
From the 1950s to the 1970s, Guenther charts a renewed desire to diagnose
and treat criminal offenders as if their crime were a disease, with behaviour
modification rather than religious redemption as its primary goal. However, by
the 1980s a third wave of solitary confinement had emerged. Any rhetoric of
rehabilitation and spiritual redemption had been removed and the new regime
was underpinned by an implicit and at times explicit aim to control, contain and
incapacitate prisoners (161). It is within this biopolitical regime that the
supermax-level prison cell emerges, with its host of insidious names that
obscure their use as modes of control and punishment: Special Housing Unit
(SHU ), Control Unit (CU ), Special Control Unit (SCU ), Administrative
Segregation Unit (ASU ), Administrative Maximum Facility (Ad-Max), Intensive
126 Enduring Time

Management Unit (IMU ) and even, as Guenther notes, Communication

Management Unit (CMU ) (161). The names given by those confined to these
spaces are ‘dungeons’, ‘hell holes’, ‘death traps’, ‘death houses’, ‘lock down’ or simply
‘the hole’.6
As Sumell says, to live in solitary is an ‘impossible’ situation, one that is simply
not imaginable in any straightforward way from the outside. She can offer
Wallace her 24-hours, but to imagine his experience of time, runs up against the
same problems of the narration of suspended time that Denise Riley points to
when time is suspended through the death of a child. What form of narrative can
emerge from conditions of indefinite and prolonged solitary confinement when
one’s capacity to narrate depends on time passing? As Elaine Scarry explains
in The Body in Pain, pain functions precisely to break down the capacity to
communicate experience in narrative form (1985). Solitary confinement is a
specific and deliberate form of torture, one that threatens to break down the
mind’s ability to imagine life beyond the space-time of the cell, from both within
the cell, and from without. About his many years in solitary confinement, Jack
Abbott wrote:

You sit in solitary confinement stewing in nothingness, not merely your own
nothingness but the nothingness of society, others, the world. The lethargy of
months that add up to years in a cell, alone, entwines itself about every ‘physical’
activity of the living body and strangles it slowly to death, the horrible decay of
truly living death. [. . .] Time descends in your cell like the lid of a coffin in which
you lie and watch it as it slowly closes over you. When you neither move nor
think in your cell, you are awash in pure nothingness.
Abbott 1981, 43

In Herman Wallace’s words:

December/07/2004, page 1
Through out my prison life, I think I’ve managed to endure the worst that could
happen to the human psyche and emotions. George Jackson spoke of this also in
his “Blood In My Eye” book when he said he had developed a “Proudflesh.” He
told a friend to think of her worst experience in life – her worst fear for that split
moment – is what he experiences 24/7.
Sumell and Wallace 2006, n.p.

Wallace is describing endurance within the impossible, time as endurances’

raw material, the extraordinary courageous ‘proudflesh’ that endures the never

6
See ‘Survivors Manual: Survival in Solitary’, written by and for people living in control units. Anon, 2012.
 Enduring 127

ending on and on of the worst experience of one’s life. Whilst Wallace always said
to Sumell that although he was physically in prison, he was never totally in
prison, as part of himself was always free, Robert King Wilkerson stated on his
release: ‘I talk about my 29 years in solitary as if it was the past, but the truth is it
never leaves you. In some ways I am still there’ (2010, n.p.). The refusal of the past
to become past, what Trouillot calls the ‘past that is not past’ (Trouillot 1997 in
Sharpe 2016a), situates King’s experience as part of an ‘ontological negation’ as
Sharpe puts it, of Black life. The past of King’s experience of solitary that will not
pass, is also the past that will not pass of histories of incarceration in solitary
confinement of Black individuals, the incarceration of Black time. Taken together
these statements attest to elongated double time of doing time in solitary: of
the necessity of keeping internal contact with the knowledge that time continues
to pass outside of prison, and the internalization of time that closes over you
like the lid of a coffin, prison time, that never leaves you even in conditions of
relative freedom.

The House That Herman Built

Sumell’s response to the problem of narrating time from within the conditions
of solitary was to propose an imaginative exercise that allowed her to engage
with what it might be like to live in Wallace’s life-world, circumventing the
impasse of attempting to know about a form of time – endurance within the
impossible – that it is impossible to know about. In 2003, two years into their
friendship, Sumell asked Wallace a simple question: ‘what kind of house does a
man who has lived in a 6-foot by 9-foot box for 30 years himself imagine?’ The
question was deceptively simple. It sounds like a question about space, and could
have been answered immediately, and left at that. But instead, over a 14-year
period that entailed hundreds of letters and phone calls, Sumell and Wallace
worked together on plans for Wallace’s imaginary house that became an
elongated temporal project, itself a project of endurance. Wallace writes of the
project:

April/01/2003, page 1 (second audio tour)

Even though she knew I was being held in the Supermax Dungeon at Camp
J, Jackie did not let that stand in her way and immediately contacted me
explaining she wanted to build a house, but wanted to do so from the vision of
the type of house I would like to live in, given the fact of my having lived in a
cage for 30 years at the time of the offer. So Jackie and I set out to build this
128 Enduring Time

house. I outlined the house and gave her the idea of what each room should be
and look like.
Sumell and Wallace 2006, n.p.

Sumell talks of the time delay built into the project – the painstaking practice
of letter writing, and the difficulty of maintaining the flow of conversation
constantly interrupted by the whim of prison authorities delaying or confiscating
letters and denying contact. These temporal delays slow down the relationship,

5 Herman’s Letter 2003.

 Enduring 129

force it into a certain protracted, myopic and stuttering pace. In a letter dated
February 2006, three years into the project, when Wallace had produced some
sketches of his current surroundings, including his cell, and what he could see of
the corridor outside his door including the doors of the row of the other solitary
cells, Wallace writes to Sumell:
February/01/2006, page 1
Now I know you were depending on me for the art work. But I did not let you
down – I tried to surprise you and thought by now you would have had it.
However I’ve been dealing with security concerning that very matter. Everything
was confiscated. Someone in the mailroom made an issue about the drawing.
Inside my cell may have passed, but the drawing of all the buildings around me
is considered a security matter so everything was confiscated. [. . .] So, that idea
is dead issue – sorry.
Sumell and Wallace 2006, n.p.

And yet somehow they went on, for years, designing the house together, down to
every last detail. Sumell describes Wallace’s vision of the house itself as pretty regular,
unsurprising, she thinks, given that Wallace’s sensorium was so constricted. The
video of the CAD drawings shows the exterior view of a rather low, suburban-
looking, triangular roofed house surrounded by gardens and flowers, the kind of
house you might see everywhere or anywhere in the US, again deceptively simple,
plain. A terrace is cut out of the top floor that sits above the glazed doors of the
ground floor, both of which look out towards a garden. From the two-car garage, the
viewer enters the house, passing a storage space with a pantry for dry goods. Then
there is a library, guest rooms, and the dining and conference room, which has a Hall
of Fame with framed pictures of the abolitionists John Brown, Gabriel Prosser,

6 CAD drawing front of house, 2006.

130 Enduring Time

Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey. In the second-floor main bedroom
a huge animal skin lies across the bed, reflected in the mirrored ceiling, and there is
a drinks cabinet to one side with drinks and glasses on display. A fireplace leads to
an underground bunker with first aid, food, and firearms, vestiges, Sumell thinks, of
the impact of Wallace’s incarceration. A black panther is painted at the bottom of the
swimming pool at the back of the house, and there are spaces designed for activists
to meet, stay, discuss and organize. And yet this description misses the incredible
specificity contained in Wallace’s letters as he imagines, and re-imagines his house,
imagining as a way, that is of ‘doing time’. For instance, he writes to Sumell:

February/21/2006, page 1
Let me get right to it. 2-car garage – instead of empty boxes you want to hang
hose pipe on the wall – 2 spare tires in both sides and the cars should be parked
in them. Without the cars no one would figure it’s a garage. – In the pantry, there
should be ONIONS , POTATOS , TOBASCO, various bottles of WINE . The
hobby shop; yes, old typewriters, speakers, all good for viewing. I’m surprised
you remember my skills rigging the radio to transmit. All radios have amplifiers
– all you have to do it tap into it using two sets of headphones. I see you got a pot
of beans under a fire. That is alright. Put a sprinkler in ceiling – you want to bring
in a large refrigerator – what is a kitchen without a refrigerator? Let’s dress the
table with a plate of food by each chair – small basket of hot rolls. Put a skillet
under a fire making shrimp and oyster gravy.
Sumell and Wallace 2006, n.p.

The house does not exist in future time, the yet-to-come. As Sumell says,
Wallace talked of living in the house in the present, in real time, simultaneously
occupying his cell and the house as it evolved through their dialogue. ‘It was not
about the future for him, but the now’ (Sumell and Baraister 2015). In other
words, Sumell and Wallace built a house for him to live in now, even while he
continued to live in his cell, with hot rolls on the table and shrimp and oyster
gravy on the fire. In one way, this imaginative space, through which he could
move, eat, sleep, talk, meet and organize, forced time to pass within the
incarcerated time of his cell.
However, Wallace and Sumell’s project is more than this; it is a social and
political artwork in which the imagined future taken as now, becomes a kind of
agitation in present time, the release of imagined action in the now, as what
brings the future into the present and makes it happen. Wallace’s own ‘walk
through’ of the house reveals its utter reality for him in the present tense as a
place to both live and change the world:
 Enduring 131

April/01/2003, page 3
Between the south-west and southeast base cabinets is a swing door that
leads to our dining/conference room with polished wooden floor. On the
wall shared with the kitchen is our wall of Revolutionary Fame. And off to the
right side of the same wall is a wall for videos. You will notice this room is
elevated by two 6-inch steps to illustrate its importance of that over all other
rooms. We have a 16 chair mahogany conference table with 3 large windows
overlooking the front entrance, our beautiful garden. We have tan curtains
to compliment the painting of the house. If you will notice on the far side of
the west wing flagstone wall is our living room of which is entered by the door
here on the west wing of the porch. It is equipped with blue carpeting and a
violet 7-seat L-shape sofa. Here in the far left corner is a 3-piece entertainment
set covering both the south and west wing walls with a medium size glass
table in the center of the room. This opening leads to our west wing hall also
with blue carpeting. Against the wall we have portraits of Prisoners of War
and those Missing in Action. [. . .] We have a small entertainment room adjacent
to the master bathroom. It consists of a 6’ x 9’ bathtub which is the exact size
of the cell I lived in for 26 years. It has a toilet with black and white tiger
covering, we have silver towel racks. Inside this room travertine stone is
everywhere. In the vanity tops and flooring. A double walk-in closet is also
featured. The master bathroom is connected with the fully paneled bedroom
with Wainscot paneling and private access to the bath. The suite accommodations
also include African statues, African masks and black carpeting and blue light
above the wall mirrors.
Sumell and Wallace 2006, n.p.

The House That Herman Built is a house that could both ‘house’ and preserve
Wallace’s relation to the efficacy of revolutionary politics, keeping it safe for
future generations as a gesture of defiance against its lock down. Burl Cain, the
warden of Angola has repeatedly voiced that Woodfox and Wallace were held in
solitary specifically because they subscribed to ‘Black Pantherism’. In a 2008
deposition, lawyers for Woodfox, for instance, asked Cain, ‘Let’s just for the sake
of argument assume, if you can, that he is not guilty of the murder of Brent
Miller.’ Cain responded:

Okay, I would still keep him in CCR [. . .] I still know that he is still trying to
practice Black Pantherism, and I still would not want him walking around my
prison because he would organize the young new inmates. I would have me all
kind of problems, more than I could stand, and I would have the blacks chasing
after them.
Ridgeway and Casela 2013, par. 10
132 Enduring Time

7 CAD drawing Herman’s pool.

Angela Davis has noted that the Ten-Point Program of the Black Panther
Party (which calls for freedom, full employment, an end to capitalists robbery,
decent housing, education, healthcare, an end to police brutality, to all wars of
aggression and freedom of Black and oppressed people held in prisons),
recapitulates nineteenth-century abolitionist agendas that recognized that
slavery could only be abolished if former slaves could be incorporated into the
institutions of the new and developing democracy (2016, 72).7 As an imprisoned
Black Panther, Wallace embeds in the design of the house the traces of
revolutionary socialist theories, programmes and testaments to the struggles of
the late 1960s and 1970s civil rights movement. Alongside elements of a certain
kind of idea of luxury or opulence, are places to store, preserve or even hoard
things needed for survival; there are overt representations of political figures
involved in the struggle for human and civil rights and an emblematic panther
in the swimming pool; the house has a wooden-framed internal structure that
can be torched if necessary, as Wallace explains to Sumell, and a bunker and an
escape route in the event of reprisal for activist activities. Wallace writes:

February/01/2006, page 3
The house that you and I are constructing, is not just a house from some deep
dark hole in my psyche – it’s a house I believe that is born out of the years of
oppression I’ve endured mixed with and from a much younger and brighter
generation. Everything about this house is built with protection from the past
attacks.
Sumell and Wallace 2006, n.p.
7
See Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, The Black Panthers. Ten Point Programme, 1966.
 Enduring 133

Wallace is not ‘stuck in the past’. Instead, the house is a place where certain
resources from the past can be preserved, along with the historical knowledge of
the dangers of acting on these ideas, and ways to protect oneself if needs be.
Their preservation acts as a provocation for discussion and renewed struggle in
the present. In a letter to Marc Léger, who asked Wallace about the project he
wrote:

The house is actually a people’s house. The building of this house has so far
brought hundreds of people together. It has brought together artists, activists,
designers, rich and poor. It is recognized by students around the world and
recently, Occidental College had forty of its students in New Orleans work on
rebuilding New Orleans and Angola 3 projects. These students set up a tour of
Angola Penitentiary and visited the notorious Camp J and Angola’s death House.
This tour was made possible as a result of the artistic criterion born out of
the unity of art and politics. This brings me back to a part of your interest
when you referred to a ‘reconnection’. There was never a disconnection of
activist and revolutionary art. Within the class struggle, you will always find the
political criterion first and the artistic criterion following. In building my House,
Jackie connects it with 38 years of my being forced to live here in a six-by-eight-
foot cell.
Léger 2013, n.p.

Whilst Herman’s House remains in virtual form, in 2008 Jackie Sumell bought
her own house close enough to Angola to be able to visit Herman and Albert
twice a month. She speaks of her own experience of becoming sick of these visits,
sick of the necessity of visiting those in prison, the invasion of privacy it involves,
and the degradation and humiliation that are built into the visiting process. As
the sheer numbers of people in prison continue to grow in the US (by sevenfold
over four decades) with its disproportionate incarceration of poor people, people
of colour, and queer and trans individuals, so ‘her people’, as Sumell names them,
continue to go to visit and are exhausted by it. So her house is given over to
whatever she can do to prevent others, especially children, from being
incarcerated. Her house in other words, is the vision of Herman’s house – she
offers young people a meal, a space to read a book, a ride to basketball and a
garden programme in the summer. She talks now of the dream of building
Herman’s House as a lifelong project, one that does not have to be done by a
certain time, or perhaps even ever. She quotes Wallace saying, ‘if you steeped in
shit you’ll come up stinking’. Poverty and marginalization means you come up
with everything stacked against you, unaware that other communities even exist.
Sumell’s project, thought in its totality, is an attempt to intervene in, or interrupt
134 Enduring Time

this process at the juncture between art and politics. Albert Woodfox, on his
release in February 2016 has stated: ‘It’s an evil. Solitary confinement is the most
torturous experience a human being can be put through in prison. It’s punishment
without ending’ (Pilkington 2016 par. 34). The grammar is significant – not
punishment without end, but without ending, a durational punishment that, in
not coming to an end, continues in the permanent stasis of ending. To live in the
wake of solitary time is surely endurance within the impossible.
Sumell too, talks about the impact of punishment without ending, and how
this structurally works against any forms of self-reflection, or individual or
community ownership for wrongs committed. Referencing the killing of the
black teenager Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, who was acquitted
of Martin’s murder and manslaughter in 2013, Sumell remarks that within a
system in which punishment is so elongated that it is unthinkable, it becomes
impossible for anyone who has committed a ‘wrong’ to say sorry, or to come to
an understanding that their actions may add up to a terrible and tragic mistake.
This means that there is no chance for the perpetrator to ‘work through’ an
experience that devastates the lives of others, or for there to be any sense of
recovery, either at the level of the individual or the community. The tension here
is between two different forms of ‘holding’ to the same idea. On the one hand, if
indefinite punishment, punishment without ending, is the outer horizon of a
response to crime, the ‘wrong’ itself becomes incarcerated in a part of the mind
and social body, and no working through can take place. On the other hand, The
House That Herman Built is a testament to an adamant refusal to ‘work through’
a political position as itself a form of politics. In Wallace’s words: ‘For 33 years
I’ve been kept in a very small cage because I refuse to renounce my political
views’ (Sumell and Wallace 2006, n.p.).

Unthinkable time

How might we understand Sumell’s decision to know about Wallace’s time? In

describing how the figure of the ‘Ship’ and the ‘Hold’ function in her work as a
way to show how the slave ship lives on in the present, Christina Sharpe states
that the Ship:

[. . .] marks and haunts the present through its recurrence and through the
trans* formations enacted on Black being in the wake of those ships. I move
through a variety of examples from film to text to image and to contemporary
quotidian horrific events that are not seen to be horrific except by those of us in
 Enduring 135

the wake, in the ways that Black people are in the wake. We can all be said to be
in the wake but we are not all in the wake in the same way. Since some are
conferred humanity and for others there is the absolute denial of humanity.
Then in the Hold I’m really thinking about containment, regulation, punishment,
captivity, capture but also the ways in which the Hold cannot and does not hold
even as it remains. That there is something in excess of it.
Sharpe 2016b, n.p.

Wallace and Sumell are not in the wake in the same way. Burt Cain’s racist
statement makes that very clear. Wallace’s ordeal in solitary was on the grounds
of his Blackness, and his Black politics, and it is for this reason that he is denied
humanity through ‘containment, regulation, punishment, captivity, capture’. Yet
Sharpe alludes to something that is in excess of the Hold, that the Hold does not
hold. We can think of this excess as the time of the project. It entails Sumell’s
decision to know about Wallace’s time, and the endurance of Wallace’s political
views that he refuses to renounce, that are brought together in The House That
Herman Built. It is a house, as Wallace says, that despite it being virtual, brings
hundreds of people together, and that speaks to the potential for justice for those
who continue to live on in solitary. Guenther states:

It is impossible to imagine. And yet both the attempt to imagine solitary

confinement and the impossibility of knowing what it is like without having
undergone it – and perhaps even having undergone it – are crucial for resistance.
The act of imagining opens up an elsewhere and an otherwise within our current
situation; it allows us to transpose ourselves into another place and time, another
social position, and another subjectivity.
Guenther 2013, 165

Sumell’s lifework, then, is a practice of care, performed through her capacity

to bear to know about the violence of solitary confinement, especially the
violence it does to a subject’s experience of time, and the work of preservation
within conditions that incarcerate or lock down the future. Preservation always
gestures towards the yet-to-come even if it does so through minute attention to
the object, scene, memory, or affect, in the present. Incarceration is the destruction
of the yet-to-come, through the enforcement of too-present time. Sumell, in
deciding to know what it’s like to live in solitary time in its political dimension
– that is as an experience that both incarcerates the future, and yet preserves
a discourse of Black revolutionary politics that might otherwise be altered by the
noise of time – enacts a practice of taking care of time that we can track in
the detailed blueprint of Herman’s House. Whilst the worldwide touring of the
136 Enduring Time

replica of Wallace’s cell does the political work of raising awareness of the
violence of solitary confinement, the house, with its escape routes, its weaponry,
its Wall of Revolutionary Fame, its wooden frame that can be burnt if necessary
in the moment of escape, preserves Wallace’s lifelong commitment to a particular
mode and analysis of political change, a particular articulation of the violence of
racialization and of class struggle that gains its power through its very longevity
and the ways it functions to keep Wallace alive.
This takes us back to the earlier question: not just the phenomenological
question ‘what is it like to live courageous time’, but the ethical question ‘what
does it mean to decide to know about those who live impossible time?’ If we
think about this question with Freud, we might say that to know something that
is impossible to know requires a form of temporal work, what Freud calls
‘working through’. Working through involves an approach towards truth, a
veering away, and an approach again, in an ongoing attempt to keep proximal to
what is difficult and painful to know about ourselves and others. Working
through is the name for the ‘again and again’ of interpretation of unconscious
motives and desires that we refuse to know about. Sandor Rado compared it to
the labour of mourning. Freud writes, of the patient who comes to be known as
‘Ratman’:

It is never the aim of discussions like these to create convictions. They are only
intended to bring the repressed complexes into consciousness [. . .] and to
facilitate the emergence of fresh material from the unconscious. A sense of
conviction is only attained after the patient has himself worked over the
reclaimed material.
Freud 1909, 181

In other words, no-one can convince us that this work needs to be done.
It is solitary work, even when it is collaborative, when there is someone else
there to facilitate the emergence of fresh material with which to work. The
contents of the unconscious need to be approached again and again, chronically,
often over many years, going over the same material in order to work away at
psychic resistance, the chronic temporality of what Freud calls the ‘passive
inertia’ of psychic life. ‘Conviction’ on behalf of the patient, in the sense of an
acknowledgement of the existence of unconscious motives and desires, emerges
through working over the material in the absence of conviction on behalf of the
analyst. Neither attempt to convince the other, yet their time frames remain
structurally disjunct in that the again and the again of analytic interpretation
that connects the day-to-day material with unconscious content, meets with the
 Enduring 137

chronic time of the patient’s resistance. Waiting as an intensive and insistent

experience of time, is the gap between the analyst’s practice of working through
(the again and again of offering interpretation) and that of the analysand (the
working over the reclaimed material). Though neither Wallace nor Sumell are
each other’s analysts, we could say that the structural disjunction between the
time of indefinite solitary confinement that Wallace occupies over the 12 years
of the project, and the time of relative freedom that Sumell occupies, raises, again
and again, the spectre of a disjunct and impossible knowledge – the knowledge
of the endurance of human suffering – that we can choose to know or not know.
For Sumell the choice is simple, and requires a certain simplicity, a refusal to
make complicated the task of resistance that requires knowing about solitary
time. Yet in the ‘sick and tiredness’ of the degradations of visiting, the interruptions
to communication, and the brutalities of a ‘justice’ system that metes out injustice,
a certain arduous temporal practice of care emerges from their work together,
which is the ongoing struggle to keep knowing about punishment without
ending. This is what Sharpe calls ‘wake work’:

I think of all of this as wake work because wake work takes as ground, as
knowledge, the position of the Black and then says, from this position and from
all of these things that wake means, how then do we struggle for a new world, the
end of the world as it is and for something new? How can we imagine otherwise?
Sharpe 2016b, n.p.
138
 6

Recalling

The central image in Barbara Loftus’ artist’s book Sigismund’s Watch: A Tiny
Catastrophe (2011), is entitled ‘Stamp’. It depicts a woman’s foot in a distinctively
1920s bourgeois stocking and shoe, about to crush a gold pocket watch with
its heel. This is the dramatic highpoint of a sequence of paintings all of which
have the same uncanny, opaque, rather frozen, yet intensely intimate quality
to them. They bring to mind some instances of Paula Rego’s work, in particular
the paintings in the Nursery Rhymes series (1989), with their macabre, yet
dreamlike, drama. The paintings depict a girl under a table covered in a rich
carpet playing with toys; the inner mechanism of a watch, both intact and
broken; a woman’s hand snatching a gold pocket watch from a man; a stairwell
of a nineteenth-century building with the shadowy figure of a woman descending;
four women sitting around a table smoking and playing cards. In the artist’s
book the painting series sits alongside a number of quotations, drawings,
performance notes, sketches, photographs and essays on time and space,
narrative and memory, and German history. They make up a counter-archive
that we could think of as a response to, and a remaking of, the archive Loftus
discovered in her investigations into her family’s history – the Basch-Israel
family – that began in 1996, when Loftus came to Berlin to discover the
city where her mother Hildegard had grown up. The archive minutely details
the theft of the family’s property by the Nazis at the beginning of the Second
World War, and is the subject of another artist’s book, Loftus’ The Bureaucracy
of Terror: An Exhumation (2013), that charts her archival work in Germany.
It culminates with the laying of a commemorative Stolperstein in 2010 in
the pavement outside of 14 Keithstrasse, where the family lived, for Loftus’
grandparents, Sigismund and Herta and her uncle Heinz, and for the two
sisters of Julius van der Wall who were also living in what had become
the cramped conditions of 14 Keithstrasse with 40 other displaced Jews who
had been moved into the building in the months leading up to their deportation
in 1942.

139
140 Enduring Time

8 Barbara Loftus, Stamp (30.5 × 30.5 cm., oil on canvas, 2004).

In order to paint, Loftus sometimes re-stages her mother’s memories, in some

cases literally dramatizing and re-enacting the memory with actors in order to
produce the material she needs for drawing, and then composing the paintings.
She calls these visual conceptualizations, dramatizations and re-enactments,
for which she produces briefing notes for actors that read like mini playscripts,
and which the actors perform in full period costume, which are then photo-
graphed, and Loftus uses as source material for drawings and paintings (Winckler
2012).
What does it mean to attempt to restage one’s mother’s memories? And what
is produced through this restaging that may have a tangential relation to those
memories, but may tell us something about suspended time? And how might we
 Recalling 141

approach this restaging? Loftus tells us that in 1994 ‘my mother in old age broke
her silence about her early life to me’ (2013, 21). At the age of 80, Loftus’ mother
begins for the first time to share memories of her childhood in Germany in the
1920s during the build-up to the Anschluss. I want to try to imaginatively ‘restage’
this encounter as a response to Loftus’ own imaginative restaging of her mother’s
memories. In doing so, I want to try to glimpse, perhaps from the perspective of
my own middling years, the subject of old age – that is the subject who is brought
into being by ageing, and for whom time itself becomes a lost object. I draw
initially on Bergson’s notion of the virtual past and time as force, and then
approach the mother–daughter relation that, through the work of Bracha
Ettinger, we might think of as a different kind of legacy to that which we inherit
through memories that consciously surface of the past. Rather than attempting
some kind of psychohistory however, or to comment on the actual relationship
between Loftus and her mother, I am using the story of their encounter as a
figuration of an interaction between a mother at the end of her life, and her
grown-up daughter, and their attempts at an intergenerational exchange about
the relation between time and memory.
In 1994, Loftus tells us in ‘Disinheritance’, published in The Bureaucracy of
Terror: An Exhumation (2013), a morning coffee with her 80-year-old mother
Hildegard Basch in Loftus’ home released a long-held memory, triggered by
looking at a glass cabinet, a vitrine, containing some nineteenth-century
porcelain. This memory was of the days after Kristallnacht, some time in
November 1938, when the SA (the Sturmabteilung, the original paramilitary
wing of the Nazi Party) came to the family home at 14 Keithstrasse, to confiscate
their valuables, during which they wrapped and took away the porcelain from
the vitrine, as well as the family silver. Hildegard was 23 and soon after was to
come to Britain as a Jewish refugee, hoping to bring her own mother and father
and brother out too. Tragically they became trapped in Germany after the
outbreak of war in 1939, and were murdered in Auschwitz in 1942, leaving
Hildegard alone in London. During the conversations that ensued between
Loftus and her mother Hildegard, other memories emerged; memories of the
interior of 14 Keithstrasse, and earlier memories of Hildegard’s childhood
during the 1920s when the German currency collapsed leading to the years of
hyperinflation, and the humiliation, desperation and despair amongst the
German middle classes, including the kind of Jewish family Hildegard was born
into, as they witnessed the wholesale degradation of both private and public life.
These were the years during which Hildegard’s father Sigismund went bankrupt.
One of the memories that Hildegard offers to her daughter is a scene watched by
142 Enduring Time

Hildegard from beneath a covered table, surrounded by her toys, during which
her mother and father have a bitter row that culminates with Hildegard’s mother
snatching her father’s gold pocket watch in a fury, and crushing it with her heel.
Loftus has herself written beautifully about the double meaning in her work
of the watch and watching/witnessing. The gold pocket watch is a potent symbol
of the time of modernity:

The Gold Pocket Watch – that essentially masculine attribute of the businessman
[. . .] the watch worn next to his heart [. . .] his ticker
The Businessman [. . .]
The man of the World-
Industry and Commerce-
Working in Precision-
Time and Motion-
Time and Money
Loftus 2011, 76

As in Stephen Kern’s classic text on modernist time The Culture of Time and
Space, (1983) the watch becomes a symbol of a fundamental reorientation of

9 Barbara Loftus, Hildegard under table I (91.5 × 122 cm., oil on canvas, 2004).
 Recalling 143

time brought about by the technological innovations of the telephone, wireless

telegraph, X-ray, cinema, bicycle, automobile and airplane; by the cultural and
scientific developments of the stream-of-consciousness novel, the ways of
representing time and movement in Cubism, and the theory of relativity in
physics. On the one hand modernist writers, artists and scientists pursued their
temporal experiments: Proust rejects public time for the erratic and contradictory
time of personal memory; Kafka’s characters experience time as persecutory;
Joyce’s heterogeneous time thickens and layers; Durkheim acknowledges that
cultures have their own ways of understanding, explaining and experiencing
time through festivals, holidays, feasts and rites. On the other, modernist
temporalities remained concerned with the standardization and homogenization
of time, the time of governmentality and the management of ‘life’, the temporality
of the factory line, and attempts to hold onto the certainties of empire and the
promise of a rational approach to economic and social problems that was
the legacy of the Enlightenment. Alongside this classic double temporality
of modernity, Lutz Koepnick, in On Slowness: Towards an Aesthetic of the
Contemporary (2014), has also tracked forms of slowness that resisted
modernism’s quest for newness, with its characterization of nervousness and
distraction as a source of artistic experimentation. In relation to this figuration,
slowness was seen as both anti-aesthetic and anti-progressive. To go slow was to
resist the emancipation of the present from the normative weight of the past.
Showing up in the ‘photodynamism’ works by Anton Guilio Bragaglia, for
instance, Koepnick argues that slow modernism’s ‘primary ambition was to
experience mobility as a force allowing us, not merely to move effectively from A
to B, but to establish unpredictable connections and correspondences, to come
across lateral and nonintentional perceptions, and to engage in categorically
open interactions with nonidentical particulars’ (20). Modernist artists interested
in slow motion were not so interested in bonding the future back to the past, but
in defining mobility as a form of communication and interrelation able to
sharpen the subject’s perception of the present. It is this that Koepnick uses to
open up a notion of an expanded present within modernism. Where Ernst Bloch
coined the terms noncontemporaneity and asynchronicity in the 1930s to refer
to the co-existence of phenomena that belonged to different historical areas or
stages of social development which he saw as dialectical, providing the potential
for transformation between the old and new, utopian and actual, slow modernism,
Koepnick argues, wanted rather to encounter the present as a space of various
possible futures and the durations of multiple pasts, an open meeting ground of
various streams of time (42).
144 Enduring Time

It is therefore important that whilst the watch draws our attention to the new
disorientating time of modernity and the pervasive anxiety about time that was
part of the European cultural moment, Loftus also focuses us on the silent child-
spectator, the one who watches and bears witness to the affective storm of her
parents’ relations, who occupies a slower, watchful time that is not the ‘watch’
time that becomes the symbol around which her parents’ argument is staged. It
is not clear how much of the story the child Hildegard knew (the fact that her
father has gone bankrupt), so what we see in Loftus’ painting, ‘Hildegard under
table’, is the child Hildegard’s attempts to decode her own mother’s fury that
culminates in the violent act of smashing the watch. The temporality of watching
is an alternative undercurrent to the speed and flow of modernity; the slow and
uncomprehending absorption of a scene that won’t fully cohere into meaning, a
dawning awareness that something fundamental has changed, and of the
impossibility of bringing back a childhood state prior to this new knowledge; a
state of harmony between the parents, or indeed the comfortable and assimilated
life prior to hyperinflation. The memory itself, Loftus reports, is a response to a
question she put to Hildegard during the same series of conversations that
took place in 1994, prompted by the first memory that was released by the
encounter with the vitrine: ‘when did you realize your parents were not happily
married?’ (2011, 27). Just as the vitrine allows access to the memories of 1938, so
a question about the slow undercurrents of relationality opens onto a memory
that is structured around a piece of missing information – the memory ties
together the enigma of the parental relation, and the unknown/unknowable
personal tragedy of bankruptcy in the context of national humiliation and
despair.
Loftus refers to her mother’s memory as a ‘primal scene’, and this is correct in
a precise sense (2011, 27). As we’ve seen in relation to Laplanche’s work, a primal
scene involves an attempt to make sense of something that has intruded on
psychic life too early, before the capacity to fully understand it. In Freudian terms
the primal scene is always imbued with violence, leaving the child ‘positively
splintered up by it’ (1918, 43–44). The enigmatic message from adult to child that
Laplanche speaks of – the proffering of the scene itself, the scene being already
triangular, rather than a dyadic interaction that the child witnesses – arrives as
both opaque and overwhelming. Otto Fenichel talks of the ‘overwhelming
unknown’ in relation to the excitement and disturbance stirred up by the primal
fantasies of castration, seduction and parental intercourse (1939, 270). In Loftus’s
primal scene, it is not just the sexual and aggressive quality of the parental
relation that remains enigmatic, however, but the scene is structured around a
 Recalling 145

piece of missing information – how much of the bankruptcy does the child
really know about? Enough to know that the ‘stamp’ on the watch has meaning
beyond the parental couple, an intrusion from the social field that neither parent
can contain. The child-spectator knows that something is happening, and is left
trying to piece together the meaning of affective and visual traces of raised
voices, the watch being snatched from her father’s pocket, her mother’s stamp
with the heel of her shoe. The paintings convey exactly this sense of pervasive
menacing enigma; that something has passed between the parents that the child
cannot yet understand, but understands nevertheless that something has
happened. It has come too early in both psychosexual, and we could say
psychopolitical development.
The primal scene itself is haunted by an even earlier traumatic event that
Freud refers to in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salome as ‘historical truth’ (1897) and
later in Moses and Monotheism (1939), and in ‘Constructions in Analysis’ (1937).
This truth has bypassed not just language or visualization but also memory. This
is linked to Freud’s notion of phylogenesis, and the idea of a truth ‘that brings a
return of the past’ (the murder of the father by the primal horde), rather than a
truth that resides within the past event of individual prehistory. As we saw earlier,
‘historical truth’ is the indelible trace of experience on the psyche prior to the
capacity for memory or language, a trace that can only be reproduced rather than
remembered, as its original form is irretrievably lost. There is a fundamentally
absent referent that is only known through its effects. Lacan extends this emphasis
on the production of the past rather than the remembrance of already encoded
past events, in his separation of two kinds of memory – reminiscence and
remémoration (1953–4) Reminiscence is our everyday experience of memory,
the kinds of memories we can recall and that allow us to form an historical
narrative out of our lives. Through reminiscence we re-live our experiences.
Remémoration is what Lacan calls symbolic memory, the history of the subject
which cannot be simply ‘recalled’ and yet organizes the subject’s very existence.
Both Freud and Lacan gesture towards an early fantasmatic experience (or early
loss, usually linked with the loss of the maternal body) that cannot leave its mark
in terms of positive difference but only as a structure of lack. In Seminar VII ,
Lacan elaborates this lost object as das Ding, the Thing in its ‘dumb reality’ that
cannot be encoded in language, and remains impossible to imagine, unknowable
and beyond symbolization (1959–60). Its representation must be made anew
each time, created rather than recollected as its original form was never encoded
in symbolic terms. This allows Lacan to insist that the process of analysis ‘is less a
matter of remembering than rewriting’ (1953–4, 14), or famously, ‘what matters is
146 Enduring Time

what the analysand reconstructs of his past’ (13). Whilst an analysand may
continually throw up reminiscences – memories from the past that may include
actual early childhood traumas – this only operates at the level of the imaginary.
It is at the point that something cannot be recalled that remémoration or symbolic
memory operates. In ‘Hildegard under table I’, our attention is drawn in two
directions – towards the invisible scene that the child is watching, somewhere
towards the right of the frame, the scene of reminiscence, and the invisible scene
of remémoration behind the carpet that covers the table, the impossibility of
memory being gestured towards precisely as the lacunae of memory are being
encircled.
Early on Freud realized that remembering actual childhood scenes during
an analysis is not enough to shift our symptoms. Identifying our resistances
to remembering, and trying to understand what the resistances mean, is
what moves us on. Jason Jones describes how it is not the childhood wish or
desire or traumatic event itself that can be recalled through processes of
remembering in analysis, but a kind of attitude or approach to the world, we
could say an idiom, in which one might assume that a present-day desire means
one thing and not another, or can be satisfied in one way and not another (2004).
This approach to the world, or idiom, is what is remembered; the signifying
structure, that is, that causes the originary trauma to be ‘not-remembered’ but in
specific and highly individual ways; what Lacan later calls sinthome (1975–6). In
Seminar VII Lacan tells us that the pleasure principle maintains the subject at a
certain distance from das Ding, so that we endlessly circle around it without ever
reaching it, which prevents desire from grinding to a halt (1959–60). The pleasure
principle must remember precisely where psychically that object was lost so it
will not be directly re-found. This spatialization of the unconscious mind,
however, misses the fact that das Ding is not a place, but a time in individual
prehistory, an always-already-lost time that instigates processes of memory and
recall. We might say that memory, which is the lasting trace of excitation, both
indestructible and yet displaceable, always exists in relation to a time before,
Freud’s historical truth, which provides a constant temporal pressure (what
Jones calls syntax) outside of the coming and going of remembering and
forgetting.
We could speculate that for an unknown reason Hildegard speaks to her
daughter in 1994 because the system for throwing up substitutes for the lost
Thing has stopped working, and the insistent constant pressure of the time
before breaks through the process of displacement that allows ordinary memory
to function. And we could read Loftus’ detailed gesture of translation and
 Recalling 147

interpretation of her mother’s memories (her work with actors to recreate

the scene under the table, and her meticulous painterly technique) as a way of
re-establishing not ‘what happened’ so much as precisely this relation between
the time of memory and the time of historical truth. Not only are the paintings
in the series imbued with an uncanny sense of action frozen in time which opens
up the distance between foot and clock, hand and watch, hand and china figure,
mother and father, but a distance is prized open between the events themselves
in their sequential arrangement in the artist’s book as they narrativize through
the temporal lacunae that they stage.
More than this, it would seem likely that Hildegard’s later memory of the
events of 1938, in which the SA arrive to humiliate the family and take away
their precious possessions, functions as a screen memory for the earlier scene in
which the parents’ row circles around an unarticulated humiliation and loss of
not just possessions, but a whole way of life that so many assimilated German
Jews had invested in, in order precisely to ‘pass’ as German and to effectively hide
their Jewish identities and identifications. So we might read the paintings, in
their depictions of bourgeois interiors emptied of their possessions, as gesturing
towards this Jewishness that Hildegard’s memory functions to screen, and that
constitutes the traumatic non-memory at the centre of the paintings’ subjects.
I am suggesting, then, that in her work of translation and interpretation of her
mother’s memory, Loftus stages the process of historical truth, as that is all we
are able to glimpse, and that this has a psychosocial dimension – not just an ever-
present historical memory of an originary murder that Freud insisted haunted
all of us, but of a particular lost Jewish identity that haunts her mother. Like the
analysts’ work of interpretation which can only point at the relation between
memory and its lacunae, so Loftus’ work with her mother’s memory doesn’t fill
in the gaps with the ‘truth’, but points at the relation between memory and the
real, between the child under the table and the terror of her family’s financial and
identificatory free fall.

The subject of old age

Let’s go back to the scene between the mother and daughter in 1994 that I’m
attempting to restage. We know that there is coffee in the daughter’s home, and a
series of long-held memories are released by the sight of a vitrine holding
nineteenth-century porcelain. Should we assume that the vitrine is new, or that
the mother has seen it many times before without the memories being triggered?
148 Enduring Time

Should we assume an unconscious connection between the mother’s untold

story and the daughter’s love of nineteenth-century porcelain in vitrines? The
vitrine, as we know from Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with the Amber Eyes
(2010), will have its own story to tell. But there is another set of questions, beyond
the questions of trauma and survivor guilt, unconscious intergenerational
transmission, and the protective mental acts of denial, about why Hildegard
waits until she is 80 to speak, this lifetime of delay, and why she then speaks, and
why she speaks to her daughter, and whether we can understand anything
through Loftus’ work of a message that is passed between a mother and a
daughter, a connection instigated through the offer of a memory, that circles
around an absence, that comes too late, this late memory, that leaves us wondering
about what else could have been communicated between a mother and a
daughter through a lifetime of delay. What, in other words, is the time of late
memory? Is late memory – memory that surfaces after a life-long pause between
an event and its recall, and is recalled in the end-times of a life, in the phase we
call old age – a distinct form of memory, with a distinct message? Can we think
of this memory as a lively one, for instance, one that in some ways aims at
generation and renewal, rather than death, without being a denial of the end-
times, or its production within the horizon of death?
Lynne Segal’s radical book on ageing, Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of
Ageing (2013), takes the form of feminist archive. This holds in an obvious sense.
Segal gathers up an extraordinary collection of women’s writing, and in particular
feminist writing, about ageing. The book includes discussions of the work of
well-known ‘major’ writers on ageing such as Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing,
Grace Paley, Adrienne Rich and Penelope Lively, as well as a more ‘minoritarian’
literature1 that includes scholars working in what has, until recently, been the
intensely unfashionable area of ageing studies, including Margaret Morganroth
Gullette and Kathleen Woodward, and writers, activists and memoirists such
as Mary Sarton, Joan Nestle, Alix Kates Shulman, Ruth Ray and June Arnold.
Beyond a collection of writing on ageing that puts gender at the forefront,
however, Segal’s archive is political in its intent, functioning more as a form
of Foucaultian counter-memory that I discussed earlier (the transforming
of history into a totally different form of time), than the way we might understand
the retentive and preservative aspects of archive that we could draw out
of Derrida’s understanding of archivation (1995). A feminist archive based on
practices of counter-memory ‘resists assimilation or homologation into

1
See Deleuze and Guattari, 1986 for a discussion of minoritarian literature.
 Recalling 149

dominant ways of representing the self. It includes those who forget to forget
injustice’, as that other feminist archivist, Rosi Braidotti puts it (2011, 27). When
we forget to forget the injustices of old age – both what old age does to us and
what we do to older people – then a feminist archive insists on making visible
such injustices and calls on us to change the ways we think and act.
Perhaps the most profound implications of Segal’s book, however, have to do
with the ways she dislodges dominant ways of representing the self. Segal poses
an implicit question about what happens when we take the subject of old age as
the norm – when we engage a vulnerable, dependent, narcissistic, aggressive,
fragile, desirous, grieving, always-already-ageing subject that we all are, whatever
our age, but which emerges in its distinctiveness in this phase we call ‘old age’ – as
a position from which to try to understand the self and its representations.
Of the many ways that Segal approaches this question, one instantly recognizable
refrain is that of the self precipitated through an ongoing, although at times
tense relationship with former, younger selves that are not always accessible to us
in easy ways:

I wonder how conscious or comprehensible our ability to reclaim those former

selves might be. We are not really in charge of the process: we are no longer those
people we once were, there is real loss and usually something for us to mourn:
and yet, when contexts allow it, the residues of those former selves may not only
be expressed, but can sometimes be seen and affirmed by others. In our minds,
the whole history of our attachments, the shifting sense we have of ourselves
over a lifetime, accompanies the external losses of ageing. The past returns, never
exactly as it was, but also never truly lost.
Segal 2013, 28

The self, constituted through a form of return, is a familiar notion. We came

across it earlier, articulated in Judith Butler’s notion of an ‘ex-static’ subject that
becomes a self through a form of ‘turning’ along an axis that involves the ego and
its objects together with the socially produced, and therefore mutative norms,
that conditions their relation (1997). Here the self can only be said to be that
which returns, and in doing so, both social and psychic worlds can be delineated.
We can trace this account back to Freud’s notion of the self as a place of encounter
with a loss that cannot be fully understood or let go of, making us definitively
vulnerable and dependent on both others and pre-existing disciplinary social
norms for recognition or the very conditions of subjecthood (1923). What Segal
does with her subject of old age, however, is to temporalize this ex-static subject:
here it is the past, figured as lost time, and not simply the lost object, that returns,
150 Enduring Time

never as it was, but also never truly lost. The past – whether our own embodied
memory of ourselves or others, or those attachments and affirmation by others
of former selves that Segal refers to – in old age turns back and is taken in as if it
were a lost object with all the ambivalence that comes along with it. For the old
person, time turns and returns, becoming the self that constitutes and reconfigures
the self.
Perhaps this is what makes it possible, as Segal recounts, for Sybil Clairborne
to ask, as she lies dying of cancer in a hospice with her friend Grace Paley, ‘Grace,
the real question is – how are we to live our lives?’ (2013, 222). Clairborne knows
she is dying. Here the question is therefore not simply an expression of the
defiance of old age, or an insistence that we are only ever orientated toward a
future, however diminishing, even when there are only seconds of life left.
Instead I read it as itself a lost statement (there is no more time in which that
question could be answered; it belongs to a former self, a former time) that
returns to constitute the dying self. What is therefore radical about the subject of
old age proposed in Out of Time is that it temporalizes the self, instituting a
subject for whom time, as the lost object, is constitutive, hence the double
meaning of ‘out of time’ – to run out of time is also to emerge out of time. This
temporalization allows Segal to explore a range of fears and pleasures about
beginnings and endings, the duration and precarity of attachments, the
maintenance of ourselves and others, and practices of care. Through this ageing
subject, for whom time is running out and yet for whom lost time is constitutive,
we can view our more general fears of dying, of the loss of youth and beauty; our
fears of love not coming again, of the loss of power, independence and potency;
fears of vulnerability, shame, foolishness, incapacity. Repetition is never to repeat
what is the same but to alter what is the same through the act of repetition, as
Deleuze tells us in Difference and Repetition (1968). So, for the subject of old age,
the past of course returns – we experience younger psychic states within our
older bodies – but its repetition as the return of the lost object (time itself) also
brings on a certain shift in the way a question is framed. How, indeed, in the face
of diminishing time, with the past piled up behind us, are we to live our lives?
To evoke this question is to evoke a past life in which there is still time to
attempt to answer this question, and simultaneously to show how we continue to
be structured by the same questions that never let us alone. A mother and
daughter have coffee in the daughter’s house, and the sight of a vitrine allows the
mother to remember a scene that acts as a screen memory for another scene that
is structured around an enigmatic absence that has shaped the questions of the
mother’s life. Like Clairborne’s late memory of the question ‘how are we to live
 Recalling 151

our lives?’, so Hildegard’s core question returns to her in the form of lost time,
and is simultaneously offered to Loftus, who reworks her mother’s lost time
through these scenes that re-establish the particular relation between desire and
their objects.
However, it is perhaps not Freud who is potentially helpful here, in
thinking through the implications of late memory, but Henri Bergson. Where
psychoanalytic theory assumes a relationship between time, memory and
trauma, what is emerging here is the way that time acts as a generative resource
for subject formation, if we take the subject of old age as the norm. Bergson, just
three years younger than Freud, and outlasting Freud by two, was a hugely
popular and much lauded philosopher during his lifetime, winning the Nobel
Prize for literature in 1928 and the Legion of Honour in 1930. Yet Bertrand
Russell famously described Bergson’s philosophy as ‘emotive speculation,’
positioning him as a bit of a philosophical quack, resonating with some of the
scepticism that Freud encountered in the early part of his own career (1912).
Bergson’s fame and influence was short lived and by the 1950s Lévi-Strauss
dismissively commented that Bergson’s ontology had reduced everything to a
state of mush in order to bring out its inherent ineffability (Ansell-Pearson
1999). Thanks in part to Gilles Deleuze and a generation of post-Deleuzian
thinkers, Bergson’s central notions of becoming, élan vital, continuous creation,
difference, virtuality and multiplicity, have re-emerged in the latter part of the
last century, galvanized in particular in order to articulate the relation between
time, newness and processes of continual change.
Bergson’s core insight was that processes that produce change emerge
spontaneously, rather than causally, and these can be accessed through a method
of intuition rather than formal analysis. Time, for Bergson, is force, rather than a
container or backdrop to events. Time doesn’t simply pass, or go by, but figures
rather as non-spatial continuous multiplicity. Bergson therefore used the term
‘duration’ as a way to describe a reality that was distinct from a series of passing
perceptual events which would always remain tied to conceptions of space.
Instead, duration is heterogeneous, mobile and indistinct. In Bergson’s early
work, Time and Free Will (1889), his interest in duration was as a phenomenon
of consciousness, as an aspect of human perception. Later, in Matter and Memory
(1896), he came to deal with the relation between human perception and ‘matter’,
coming to a kind of halfway position between idealism and realism, in which
matter breaks its allegiance with objective reality, and is conceptualized as a
collection of ‘images’, ‘more than that which the idealist calls a representation,
but less than that which the realist calls a thing’ (9). Bergson’s question about
152 Enduring Time

whether non-spatial time or duration applies to matter and things as well as

human consciousness, led him to posit that things also endure in their own way,
unaffected by human consciousness, propelled by a vital impulse, which he
called élan vital, which allowed him to theorize human creativity, as well as a
more lively version of the evolution of matter. With matter conceptualized as this
halfway between representation and thing, perception for Bergson also emerges
as a dynamic process, orientated towards action and in a feedback loop with
mind and memory, as well as the thing itself.
It is Bergson’s account of the past that might help us with understanding late
memory. Bergson writes:

There is no perception which is not full of memories. With the immediate and
present data of our senses, we mingle a thousand details of our past experience.
Bergson 1896, 24

Where matter is a set of images somewhere between representation and

thing, memory is a huge reservoir of virtual images, a small number of which
may actually come into perception to aid the work of perception itself. The past
is not so much a storehouse of memory, but works with perception to continuously
augment perceptions with qualities related to past actions. Bergson states that
memory ‘marks out upon matter the design of its eventual actions even before
they are actual’ (12), akin to the workings of Freud’s historical truth that I
discussed above, but no longer located in a place we could call the psyche, and
rather existing somewhere between the virtual past and the apparatus of
perception. Like historical truth, the past is not the present gone by, or a present
that fades and can be recalled as a memory. The past is a process that constantly
supplements perception in the present in such a way as to orientate it towards
action, or interaction with matter:

If it still deserves the name memory, it is not because it conserves bygone images,
but because it prolongs their useful effect into the present moment.
Bergson 1896, 82

One of Bergson’s figurations for the relation between past and present is that
of two spools joined by a tape, but turning in only one direction so that one
spool (the past) necessarily gets bigger as the other (the future) gets smaller.
In old age we accumulate the past, but Bergson’s image is that all of the past
coexists with the present (the whole spool and not just the recent section of tape
that might correspond to what you selectively remember) making the past not a
dimension of time but what Bergson would call the synthesis of all time, of which
 Recalling 153

the present and the future are only dimensions. Although we cannot have the
past back again (the spool simply will not turn the other way), it also doesn’t
‘pass’ as such, as the turning of the spool changes the reservoir of memory all the
time. This virtual archive is an archive of difference, as the Deleuzians would
put it, a non-totalizable multiplicity. For Bergson, therefore, duration is not the
elongation of dead time, or past time over a ‘space’ of a lifetime, but a vital and
ever mobile version of the interaction between past and present, where the
present is reduced to a concentrated point, constantly in flux with a dynamic
virtual past. Here we have a present that is the past, as in the psychoanalytic
notion of the transference, but a past that is the vital and dynamic force of time.
If the subject of old age (figured here as Hildegard) is the subject who is
constituted through a relation not so much to a series of lost objects but to lost
time, then old age would be the fullest encounter with the virtual past, a
generative, creative encounter, as Bergson would put it, that calls on us not to
simply remember traumatic events or former selves within the now ageing body,
but that might even refuse this timeline altogether by thinking about the past as
virtual, that is, as internally differentiated, actualizing itself, with difference as
immanent within time. The subject of old age is exposed to the full intensity of
this virtual past, this dynamic difference.
If the past constantly supplements perceptions in the present, bringing to the
present more than the recall of past images but rather an orientation towards
action, then one reading of our scene – the one with the ageing mother and the
daughter, the coffee and the vitrine and the porcelain – would maintain that
memory is not passively provoked by the vitrine, or the daughter’s question, and
brought back from the past, but is a force that was immanent, always shaping the
present in the long delay, a dynamic force that produces change; a change in the
relations between mother, daughter, coffee, vitrine, memory, that in its turn
produces more changes in the relations between porcelain, stairwell, piano,
archive, memory, and that culminates in the setting of commemoration stones in
the pavement outside of 14 Keithstrasse.

The matrixial

My impulse throughout this book, however, has been to be worry away at

theories of non-totalizable multiplicity, as they tend to obscure experiences of
suspended time in which nothing appears to be changing, as well as marginalizing
the practices of care that allow us to live on in these stuck times. Whilst Bergson’s
154 Enduring Time

virtual past is an aspect of mental life that cannot be lost, in perpetual motion,
even if it is not always perceptually present, I want now to link this to the ways
that Bracha Ettinger, herself a painter, as well as a psychoanalyst and theorist,
thinks about the development of an aspect of psychic life that also cannot be lost,
that she calls the ‘matrixial’, and remains with us throughout our lives through
compassionate encounters, ethical relations and aesthetic experience (2006). The
temporality of the matrixial pertains precisely to the mother–daughter relation.
I want to try to attend to the psychic labour that Loftus does on behalf of her
mother, her practice of taking care of her mother’s memories, that allow or
facilitate her constitution of a subject of late memory.
One of the main stories that psychoanalysis tells itself is that in order to
emerge as selves and to function in the world as autonomous individuals who are
capable of relating to others and accepting a degree of reality, we need to have
tolerated a series of separations, and have accepted a series of losses, both actual
and fantasmatic, which relate in some way to an originary loss of the maternal
body. This has operated as a universal principle in traditional psychoanalytic
theorizing, not something that can be assigned to social convention or norms.
According to this line of thought, without psychic differentiation from the
maternal body, there can be no sociality, language, reproduction, culture and,
perhaps most importantly, no sexual difference. It is with the capacity to accept
that we cannot be or have everything that we supposedly line up along psychically
gendered lines, regardless of our anatomy. Whilst one strand of feminist
theorizing has long challenged the way the feminine, as psychic structure, still
consists of a double lack (the female subject must give up what she does not have,
whereas the male subject must face giving up what he already has in order to
negotiate Oedipus), another strand has challenged the law of castration
itself, questioning its universality, and whether it is the only law at work in the
production of psychosexual difference. Part of this second strand of theorizing
calls for an account of the emergence of subjectivity ‘otherwise’ than a fundamental
separation, without denying that separation may be an integral part of psychic
maturation. If we only operate within a phallic order, we are constantly in danger
of mistaking ‘what is’ for the production of ‘what is’ by a phallic law that instigates
itself as law through its own enunciation. This is the thrust of Judith Butler’s
theorizing of the place of phallic law (the law of castration, the law that insists on
separation from the maternal body) which creates itself as law through a social
process of iteration, as well as creating the originary ‘material’ maternal body that
the male subject must separate from (2004). Thinking ‘otherwise’ to this law does
not do away with the law, the phallus, separation, castration or the speaking
 Recalling 155

subject – it does not return us to the ‘lawlessness’ of the maternal body – but
allows alternative paradigms or ways of thinking to emerge in co-existence with
this law. Whilst Kristeva focused on tracing the semiotic in language – the
remnants of bodily modes of communication between mother and baby and the
ways they erupt into the symbolic – others have articulated different forms of
‘staying with’ aspects of the maternal that co-exist with the law of castration,
rather than substitute for it or oppose it.2
Drawing on this tradition, Ettinger takes as her starting point an analysis of
the two major strands of psychoanalytic theorizing that we can think of under
the rubric of the paternal and maternal positions of experience. On the one
hand, we have the Freudian/Lacanian trajectory that posits the subject as
emerging out of a series of separations, retroactively gathered up as having been
precipitated by birth and culminating with Oedipus, in which the drive-directed
subject is alienated in language, constantly chasing its lost objects – specifically
figured in Lacanian terms as ‘objet a’. On the other, we have a diverse object-
relational tradition that understands the emergence of subjectivity through the
intricate play of emotional life in the actual and fantasmatic early infant/carer
relation, that we find in the work of Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott and
Wilfred Bion. In a similar vein to the feminist theorists Luce Irigaray, Adriana
Cavarero and Rosi Braidotti, Ettinger seeks to move beyond this paternal/
maternal binary altogether, in order to overcome the signification of the feminine
in negative terms. Her project is part of the theoretical field that seeks to think
sexual difference differently – to think feminine difference in positive terms.
To do so, Ettinger attends to the final stage of intrauterine life which she
draws on for the figure she names the ‘matrixial’, a neologism that draws together
the notion of the matrix with that of the maternal. She writes:

The Matrix is modelled upon certain dimensions of the prenatal state which are
culturally foreclosed, occluded or repressed. It corresponds to a feminine dimension
of the symbolic order dealing with asymmetrical, plural, and fragmented subjects,
composed of the known as well as the not-rejected and not-assimilated unknown,
and to unconscious processes of change and transgression in borderlines, limits,
and thresholds of the “I” and the “non-I” emerging in co-existence.
Ettinger 1992, 176–177

By referring to intrauterine life, Ettinger is not positing that we think through

the literal pre-birth experience of an individual, and its effects on psychic life.

2
See for example Kristeva 1986, and the work of Bronfen 1998 and Mitchell 2003.
156 Enduring Time

Instead she is drawing out the potential of a model that has at least two subjective
elements in play:

I am proposing that with the help of the notions of Matrix and metramorphosis,
experiences concerning the prenatal, the intrauterine, gestation and pregnancy
can deconstruct and dissolve the concept of the unitary separate phallic subject
split by the castration mechanism, rejecting its abject, and mourning its m/Other.
However, they do not stand just for presubjectivity, for the pre-phallic or the
pre-Oedipal, but for a transsubjectivity that accompanies the phallic subjectivity
all along its voyage in time and place, even if its sources are in the “pre-”.
Ettinger 2006, 182

What is particular to the late intrauterine period (roughly the last few months
of pregnancy), and why it can function as a model for what Ettinger calls
‘transsubjectivity’, is the emerging relationship between a not-yet infant and a
not-yet mother. Ettinger calls this the ‘matrixial borderspace’, where the emerging
I of the infant in relation to what is not quite yet its non-I, the mother, ‘co-emerge
and co-fade’ in a process she calls ‘borderlinking’ (2006). Intrauterine exchange
between the not-yet infant and the not-yet mother is the space of ‘co-events’: co-
affecting encounters between two partial objects that lay down a primordial
capacity for being together without merger, and being together without
catastrophic separation that is retained as the capacity for ‘transsubjectivity’
in adult life. In this sense, the matrixial is a principle of severality (at least two)
that supplements the phallic processes of separation, and is the basis for ethical
encounter – an encounter that does not destroy or paralyse the other, but allows
the other to be, without colonization, intrusion, or knowing. To complicate
matters slightly, this principle is what Ettinger will then call ‘sexual difference’, in
that it is a form of difference that is inscribed in the feminine (it is specific to
gestation within a maternal body), that is not about establishing ways we are
different from the other, but is difference that is established in a state of ‘wit(h)-
ness’ (another neologism referring to both witnessing and being with). Subjectivity
that is established in a state of ‘wit(h)-ness’ rather than castration is the feminine;
the aspect of being with others that all birthed human subjects carry with them,
and yet distinct from ‘merger’ or ‘symbiosis’. This locates the matrixial as the
condition for sexual difference that refuses, or exceeds binary logic.
Ettinger is clear that although she notionally places the source of the matrixial
in the ‘pre’, it remains active and cannot be lost or given up. To have been gestated
is to have emerged out of a co-affective encounter between the not-yet I and not-
yet non-I. This transsubjective aspect of psychic life cannot be simply removed
 Recalling 157

from the subject through castration or abjection. This means that the matrixial
continues to sustain psychic life ‘all along its voyage in time and place’ and in this
sense it ‘remains’, cutting across the temporality of both development, and
cyclical repetition. The temporality of the matrixial shares something with
Bergson’s duration, a temporality that has no image, in which there is no negation
and therefore no difference that operates through negation. As we have seen,
difference, in duration, operates instead through shifts in quality, intensity and
experience, which is the continual elaboration of the absolutely new. However, if
there were always at least two, if the subject emerges out of co-affective exchange
under the conditions of severality, then subjectivity is the singularization (or
unity) of being with others in such a way that we cannot know or predict, but
underpinned by a shared experience of the continuity or ‘remains’ of severality
from which we cannot be severed. Each encounter continues to be absolutely
new, but what remains, from intrauterine life, is the embodied knowledge of
radical difference.
In her work on what she calls the ‘ready-made mother monster’, which
attempts to augment Freud’s primal scene, Ettinger describes how the infant
meets the maternal subject through its own primary affective compassion (2010).
Compassion allows what she calls ‘primal psychic access to the other’. Compassion
is not a reaction to the other, but an arousal, like anxiety, an affective signal.
Along with primary affective ‘awe’, these states mitigate early experiences of fear,
guilt and shame, which are also charged with anger. Alongside the primal
fantasies of the primal scene, castration and seduction, that we were discussing
earlier, that help us to understand intergeneration difference, loss and desire,
Ettinger adds three new fantasies relating to the mother: the devouring mother,
the not-enough mother and the abandoning mother. These are existential fears.
It is part of the condition of being human, she argues, to be anxious about being
abandoned, invaded and withheld from. What is crucial, in her view, is to
recognize that these are primal fantasies, distinct from narcissistic fantasies, and
from actual abuses that some parents enact on their children. Primal fantasies
have a beneficial regulatory sense-giving function, and they allow the
continuation of access to compassion and awe in adult life. We must be able to
play with them, she suggests, in order to come to terms with reality.
So, returning to our scene between an 80-year-old mother and her daughter,
the scene with the coffee, and the vitrine, and the emergence of what I’ve been
calling ‘late memory’, perhaps we could say that when Hildegard communicates
to her daughter a memory of a ‘primal scene’, two things are set in motion. One
is the mother’s working through of trauma, identity, loss, grief and separation.
158 Enduring Time

The other is a separate primary affective compassion in both mother and

daughter, orientated in different directions, and not necessarily towards each
other, and distinct from their own narcissistic fantasies or processes of abjection.
This propels Loftus into a deep exploration of her mother’s life, her archival
work, and the creation of a body of artwork that Ettinger would argue derives
from the combination of primary compassion, awe and what she coins as
‘fascinance’; an aesthetic transformational and creative gaze in a different register
than Lacan’s ‘fascinum’. These aspects of subjectivity that emerge from a co-
encounter with femininity endure in both psychic and social life, as tendencies
towards the ethical, what Ettinger calls ‘borderlinking’. Loftus, to this degree,
takes care of the late memory of her mother through accessing an aspect of her
own originary emergence that was already a compassionate encounter between
the not-yet I and the not-yet m(other) that may be the gestational remainder of
us all.
 7

Remaining

In one of many predictions of the end of the future, as the global capitalist system
approaches its ‘zero-point’ (Žižek 2010, x), the late cultural critic, Mark Fisher,
alluded to the slow cancellation of the future in Ghosts of My Life (2014). Through
the figuration of ghosting, he charted a series of futures in popular culture and
music since the 1980s that failed to happen, showing up an inertia that he saw
characterizing twenty-first-century cultural production – an undertow of stasis
buried under a frenetic compulsion for the new and for perpetual movement,
echoing Ivor Southwood’s notion of ‘non-stop inertia’ as a chronotope for what
we could call ‘neoliberal’ or ‘late liberal’ time.1 In doing so Fisher outlined a
collapse in a collective capacity to invest in the future simply on the grounds that
it is the future, a collective capacity that once underpinned modernist progressive
narratives of an unfolding, open and limitless future, even where this was
conceived of as a secular account of an endlessly postponed ‘end time’. Fisher
opened his book with the final image of the 1980s British time-travel detective
television series Sapphire and Steel. Despite having travelled through time in
all possible directions, the entire series comes to an end with the main character’s
definitive yet bewildered statement: ‘there is no time here, not any more’. Fisher
mused:

The feeling that time was running out, or had run out, that we had all run out of
time, was linked to a change that I sensed in how we were collectively talking
about the future.
Fisher 2014, 8

Slavoj Žižek links narratives of the ‘end times’ to ‘four riders of the apocalypse’
that are the warning signs of an end brought about by:

1
For a discussion of the periodicity of neoliberalism itself, see Gilbert, 2016. ‘Late Liberalism’ is
Povinelli’s term for ‘the shape that liberal governmentality has taken as it responds to a series of
legitimacy crises in the wake of anti-colonial, new social movements, and new Islamic movements.’
In other words, it is the idea that liberalism has had a late, or belated response to the challenge of
social difference (2011, 24).

159
160 Enduring Time

the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances

within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming
struggles over raw materials, food and water,) and the explosive growth of social
divisions and exclusions.
Žižek 2010, x

In other words, Žižek makes explicit a relationship between catastrophic

futures and the end, not so much of time, but of capitalism. As this particular
hegemonic system of social relations, synonymous with modernity, heads towards
internally driven meltdown, and with no viable alternative ways of imagining
social relations, for Žižek, we are living within the end times in the shadow of the
collapse of capitalism.
What is the time of the ‘end times’? The picture that emerges from these
accounts is one that includes the twin elements of perpetual capitalism on the
one hand, and a frantic inertia, on the other, sutured together by a tenacious,
though frayed fantasy of the promise of the good life, set against a pending
catastrophic future in which capitalism implodes, but the threat of which is
constantly disavowed. The philosopher William Large elaborates this point when
he maps out three futures that emerge within the horizon of capitalism (2009).
The first is the future of the disaster. This is the ‘reality’ of capitalism that will
bring about the destruction of populations and the planet. The second is the
future of progress, the fantasmatic future that capitalism promotes in which the
future of the disaster is endlessly postponed in the name of more of the same,
more capitalism. The third is what Large calls the messianic future, which entails
the transformation of the present by the hidden possibilities in the everyday.
Here Large holds out for the subversion of the temporal logic of capitalism (the
temporality of the first two futures) through the capacity for ‘messianic time’ to
resist the fantasy of the endless future, recognizing the future of the disaster
rather than being seduced by the fantasmatic future of its endless postponement.
Recognition, Large is keen to point out, is not the same as acceptance. Recognizing
the future of the disaster, he argues, interrupts the empty time of progress, and
therefore involves the temporality of indeterminancy, rather than its certainty
(that is, the certainty of progress). Both disaster and messianism come out of a
promise of time, but messianic time demands justice, and is therefore political,
where as eschatological narratives focus on a catastrophe that is characterized
as inevitable, and are therefore still reliant on linear conceptions of time
rather than its interruption. All politics that is open to both justice, and the
time out of joint that makes it possible, Large argues, is messianic. Messianic
time – immanent, indeterminate, heterogeneous – is the present that is full of
virtual possibilities that are not part of the present state of things.
 Remaining 161

We inherit the characterization of the temporality of perpetual capitalism

from Marx, where capitalism is empty mechanical time, the time of the same,
the endless, cyclical, homogenous time of an unchanging future of capitalism
itself (1867). However, the other temporal element in Marxist capital is the
revolutionary disruptive time immanent within historical time, which brings
us towards history proper, conceived of in orthodox Marxism as the end of
capitalism. This twinning of empty cyclical time and revolutionary disruptive
time is itself a particularly modernist figuration, distinct from non-stop inertia,
in that it retains a relation to a future figured as an immanent instantaneous
‘flash’ of change, whether understood in vulgar Marxist terms, or in the more
anti-teleological messianic visions of Walter Benjamin’s Jetztzeit or ‘now-time’
(1940). This ‘weak’ or secular messianism has run through a strand of European
thought since the catastrophes of the two world wars, reaching its climax in
the post-war period as the reality of man-made disaster becomes apparent
within modernist thinking as the horrifying ‘real’ of post-Enlightenment
historical progress (Bayly 2013). In particular, it is brought into play in order
to imagine a future that is not the pseudo-progressive future of capitalism, or
the teleological force of history, but in Benjamin’s terms, a future in which
the history of past oppression pushes for recognition and in doing so, can be
redeemed in non-progressive, non-linear time (1940). For Benjamin, the
catastrophe that matters is always already behind us as we back into the future,
but hidden within the ideology of progress are historical events that ‘flash up’,
heterogeneous to linear time, through which the sparks of different potential
futures are made visible and possible. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin explains
that ‘the dialectical image is an image that emerges suddenly, in a flash’ (1999,
473). The instantaneous temporality of ‘now-time’ disrupts ‘the status quo’
which otherwise ‘threatens to be preserved’ (474). Now-time is Benjamin’s
formulation for a kind of temporal loop within historical time, that appears
itself to have no duration – the time it takes for time to flash up is immediate –
and forms the basis for contemporary articulations of messianic time as
‘indeterminate’.
Whilst a valuable critique of the temporal logic of capitalism, how does such
indeterminacy actually emerge as a practice, and as a mode of sustaining life in
the end times? Is the reality of disaster immanent in capitalism really so hidden,
or does it now function more like Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘purloined letter’, a signifier
that is hidden but on full view, something we fully know whilst simultaneously
disavowing (Poe 1844)? Perhaps we could say that ‘neoliberal time’ is precisely
marked as the demise of the imaginary of Jetztzeit, and its replacement with the
temporality of suspension – that is, the continuous present gives rise to different
162 Enduring Time

temporal practices of suspending the self, suspending hope for change, and
suspending an unfolding future, a kind of withdrawal of time, that is, that
embraces the modes of waiting, staying, delay, endurance and maintenance we
have been tracking?
An orientation towards a foreclosed future begs the question, then, of the
temporality of the ‘end times’ rather than the temporality of the end of time, a
distinction, that is, between messianic and eschatological time. If the future may
no longer be assumed to be open, then beyond a religious framework that gives
figuration to the ‘end of time’, what kind of time are we left with, as we live a
present that cannot promise a future, in which the idea of ‘future’ as ‘promise’
seems to have collapsed? In this chapter I want to return to the question, then, of
how to imagine, characterize and live the time of the ‘end times’. What temporal
futural imaginaries can emerge in relation to an immanently closed horizon of
the ‘time afterwards’? How do we endure in this time? What is its relation to the
trauma of foreclosure, if indeed we can use that term to describe the assault, or
slow violence, on future deep time that may turn out to be the distinctive product
of late capitalism?
In an attempt to answer these questions, I turn first to Giorgio Agamben’s
thesis in The Time That Remains, in which Agamben defines messianic time as
‘the time that time takes to come to an end’ (2005, 67). Messianic time is usually
thought of as the time announced by the coming of the messiah, and gestures
towards another temporal horizon, that of the end of time. However, Agamben
notices something about messianic time that is so obvious it’s oddly easy to miss:
Between the coming of the messiah, and the end of time, is a time that Agamben
claims is truly messianic, a time that itself has duration, and which he believes
allows us to ‘take hold’ of time. For Agamben this interstitial time, which is the
time that time takes to come to an end, is the only real time that we can be said
to have. Between profane, or historical, everyday time that constantly slips
through our fingers (the time we never have enough of, the time we are always
running out of), and the end of time that signals a point at which time ceases to
operate as flux or unfolding, messianic time can be thought of as a suspension of
profane time, akin to what Agamben calls the ‘contraction’ of time within the
horizon of eternal time. Perhaps the figure of time taking time to come to an end
might furnish us with a way to ‘grasp’ the temporality of the end times that is
neither time lived in the shadow of a pending or already unfolding catastrophe,
nor the time of simply waiting for a better future, but a time that is worth
preserving, living in its suspension, for as long as we possibly can. Indeed, what
else can we do, other than try to elongate this time?
 Remaining 163

I read Agamben’s notion that time takes time to come to an end, through two
disparate bodies of work that I think, nevertheless, have a suggestive relation to
one another, and to the notion of the time of the end times. The first is the writings
of the Lebanese author and artist Jalal Toufic, who develops the notion of what he
calls a ‘surpassing disaster’ (2009). Toufic is interested in the ways that cultural
traditions ‘withdraw’ when a major disaster occurs, such as a war, or an equivalent
cultural trauma that radically shatters a culture’s relation to its own tradition. This
withdrawal is paradoxical, according to Toufic, in that it appears in the form of
its opposite – a capacity to survive. Cultural artefacts, for instance, may not have
been destroyed materially – libraries, objects, texts, films, monuments, languages,
practices and places of collective memorialization may all still be intact, and may
look as if they are still available and functioning. And yet, some artists do
something very strange after a surpassing disaster. Despite the appearance that
cultural traditions have survived, they nevertheless go about trying to resurrect
the tradition as if it had withdrawn. In doing so, they draw our attention to the
fact that what Toufic calls simply ‘tradition’ has indeed withdrawn in relation to
the ‘surpassing disaster’, despite appearances otherwise. The temporality of the
surpassing disaster (a time in which tradition withdraws prior to its subsequent
‘resurrection’ by artists who attempt to remake what is already in existence)
therefore shares something of Agamben’s ‘time itself ’, in which we make present a
form of time that can otherwise only be understood as already lost, or yet to come.
For Toufic, this making present is what recreates community, albeit a community
reciprocally defined as those affected by the surpassing disaster. This ‘making
present’ that results in community may be a way to recast the ‘apocalyptic zero-
point’ of the end times in which the future or the past is visioned as a series of
evental disasters or crises. Like a surpassing disaster, we may not know we have
reached various tipping points or withdrawals brought on by the brutalities of
capitalism unless we pay close attention to those who notice that something has
indeed happened, even though we don’t know yet that it has happened.
Although Toufic’s ‘surpassing disaster’ remains immanent, and is only revealed
through the work of artists and others who constantly reveal the traumatic loss
of tradition whilst it appears to have survived, it is nevertheless precipitated by a
monstrous event – a war or ecological disaster on such a scale that all can see and
name it as a disaster, even if it doesn’t appear to have destroyed tradition in an
obvious sense. Toufic therefore works within the horizon of the event. Is it
possible, however, to think about surpassing disasters as happening at the level
of the quotidian? Don’t some surpassing disasters unfold in a more diffuse and
pernicious way than the monumental events of war? Those everyday destructions
164 Enduring Time

of life-worlds that Lauren Berlant writes about as ‘cruel’, even if they are
optimistically embraced as acts of self-preservation, are disasters that may look
minor to those outside of the situations in which they occur: the removal of a
certain social benefit to a group of people who depend on it, a small change in
the mode of assessment of the right to that benefit, the closure of a certain
resource that keeps a community going. These produce what Povinelli calls
‘traditions of dysfunction’ (2011, 47) that can be used to re-marginalize those
already marginalized by structural racism, state neglect and other forms of social
violence, but are produced at the level of the everyday through these small,
almost imperceptible acts of destruction. They constitute the destruction of
affective attachments and practical relationships that allow ‘tradition’, in the
sense of life-world, to survive and endure.
To try to understand the slow surpassing disaster of capitalism that shows up,
and is lived, at the level of the quotidian, I read Toufic alongside the work of the
Brazilian artist Arthur ‘Bispo’ do Rosário, whose meticulously hand embroidered
banners and garments made during a lifetime spent incarcerated in a psychiatric
institution represent an attempt, in his own terms, to gather together and name
the entire world. What Bispo’s arduous stitching together of a dispersed world
that doesn’t appear to be dispersed, suggests, is the very fact of the dispersal or
loosening of affective attachments and social relations that underlie the many
ways in which we appear to be connected to one another. Bispo, then, understands
precisely this dispersal as a surpassing disaster, one that I suggest he responds to
through a material practice long associated as ‘women’s work’: sewing buttons,
embroidering, wrapping, binding and patching. Here, it seems to me, we can take
up the thread that runs through this book, that enduring time is neither simply
about reproductive labour and the time of development, nor the temporalities of
cyclicality, repetition, or monumental time, but about a principle in psychic and
social life of the permanent non-severance of selves, others and institutions from
what sustains them. Bispo, through the material practices of sewing together
material objects that have no obvious relation to one another, that appear not to
have been dispersed, performs a form of endurance that tells us something about
this permanent inability to move beyond our relations to one another.

The Time That Remains

I can now propose a first definition of messianic time: it is the time it takes
for time to come to an end, to accomplish itself. Or, more exactly, the time we need
in order to accomplish, to bring to an end our representation of time. It is
 Remaining 165

neither the time – representable but unthinkable – of chronological time, nor

the instant – equally unthinkable – of its end. Nor is it a segment cut off from
chronological time, a segment that goes from the resurrection up to the end of
time. It is, rather, the operational time that drives chronological time and
transforms it from within; it is the time it takes us to bring time to an end – in
this sense: the time which is left to us.
Agamben 2002, 5, emphasis in original

For Agamben, messianic time is a form of ending, a time between the

announcement of the coming of the ‘end of days’ (in Jewish eschatology) and
their arrival. In an attempt to put right some confusion between messianic
and eschatological time in various readings of Paul’s Letter to the Romans,
Agamben shows how Paul’s messianic time is not the end times, but ‘time that
contracts itself and begins to end’. His reading relies on the rabbinical
interpretations of the description in Genesis of what was to become the
Sabbath: ‘And on the seventh day God completed his work which he had
made; and on the seventh day he rested from all his work’ (quoted in Agamben,
72). How could God both complete his work and rest at the same time? The
early Greek translations of the Bible convert the first ‘seventh’ to read ‘sixth’,
turning the day of rest into a day that is added on to the time of God’s creation
of the earth. The Genesis Rabbah states: ‘Man, who knows not time, moment
and hours, takes something from profane time and adds it to holy time; but
the holy one, blessed be his name, who knows times, moments and hours,
will enter on Saturday only by a breadth’ (quoted in Agamben, 72). For
Agamben this opens up the possibility of messianic time: ‘Saturday – messianic
time – is not another day, homogenous to others; rather it is that innermost
disjointedness within time through one which may – by a hairsbreadth – grasp
time and accomplish it’ (72). As Simon Bayly puts it, ‘Messianic time is
thus not simply a time between two times. Instead it is time that entirely shifts
our experience of time but without apparently adding the power of an extra
time’ (2013, 16).
If this ‘hairsbreadth’ could be said to possess duration in its contraction,
then we need to think of this duration in non-spatial terms, as messianic
time is precisely time that makes an intervention into the linear time of
progress and history which demands a spatial image. However, unlike Benjamin’s
weak messianism that functions through the trope of the flash – a radical,
violent interruption into the flow of profane time that allows the voices
of the oppressed to be heard within the fixed ideology of progress – Agamben’s
166 Enduring Time

reading of Paul is that messianic time has the paradoxical structure of

both a suspension and a persistence of time through a peculiar form of
withdrawal, an elongated interval that neither develops nor unfolds but takes
the form of a shrinking, in which undifferentiated time makes the intervention
of ‘differentiation’ itself into the time of the same. What ‘remains’, in other
words, in the time that remains, indicates both the time that is left over or
remaindered within the present, and the time which we finally have left to
us, and returned to us, rather than the time we constantly run out of.
This approach to time marks out something persistent (that remains) within
historical time that is at once a suspension (what is left over) of historical time.
Agamben therefore interprets messianic time as a ‘paradigm of historical time’
(2002, 3).
Agamben draws out of the Pauline text the way messianic time allows us to
have or grasp the presentness of time precisely because this form of time does
not ‘pass’. It is not a third spatial ‘stretch’ of time between the beginning of the
end and the end itself, but the withdrawal of historical or profane time within
itself, that has a different sense of duration than linear time.

Messianic time is not exterior to chronological time: it is, so to say, a portion

(una porzione) of chronological time, a portion that undergoes a process of
contraction which transforms it entirely.
Agamben 2002, 3

The imaginary of ‘now-time’ as a redemptive ‘flash’ implies a social imaginary

that can contain the image that the messiah has already come, and that in every
instant exists the little door through which the messiah enters, a figuration
Benjamin offered us at the tail end of modernism. Derrida picks up Benjamin’s
now-time and develops a notion of time as ‘messianic without messianism’,
rendering the concept of justice as only functioning through a mode of
postponement, a future that remains heterogeneous and radically other (1994,
59). Agamben’s time-that-time-takes-to-come-to-an-end, however, we could
view as the time which persists through material and affective attachments (what
remains), at the level of the quotidian, mundane and everyday, supported by
practices that I have been elaborating as modes of enduring time – waiting,
staying, persisting, delaying, repeating, preserving, enduring, maintaining – that
in their turn function as practices of care. There is perhaps a modernist utopian
strand, in other words, that attempts to take care of hope (the capacity to imagine
better times) through a kind of withdrawal within the everyday, in relation to
past and future redemptive events that also persists in neoliberal time. Agamben’s
 Remaining 167

notion that a present time that is graspable within profane time offers a figuration
for this withdrawal.

The surpassing disaster

[T]he surpassing disaster leads to the withdrawal not of everything, but of

tradition, and touches not everyone, but a community, with the caveat that this
community is reciprocally defined by it as the community of those affected by it,
and this tradition is defined by it as that which withdraws as a result of the
surpassing disaster.
Toufic 2009, 81

The Lebanese author and artist Jalal Toufic, writing out of the ongoing
experiences of a shattered and war-weary part of the Middle East, describes how,
in specific circumstances, ‘tradition’ withdraws past what he calls a ‘surpassing
disaster’. This evoking of tradition in relation to either culture or art is itself a
form of anachronism. Contemporary artistic practice is currently more likely to
be bound up with novelty or rupture from previous forms, techniques and
subject matter, than with the deliberate cultivation and incorporation of
historical antecedents, or an historical sense. Where artists engage in the
recreation of archaic forms, it is often to demonstrate their absence, rather than
through the desire to re-engage or directly reanimate a tradition in a concrete or
literal way. However, rather than directly delineating the surpassing disaster or
the notion of tradition, Toufic shows how they may both be recognized
symptomatically:

One of the surest ways to detect whether there’s been a surpassing disaster is to
see when some of the most intuitive and sensitive filmmakers and/or writers
and/or thinkers began to feel the need to resurrect what to most others, and
to the filmmaker and/or writer and/or thinker himself or herself as a person or
teacher, i.e., in so far as he or she remains human, all too human, is extant and
available.
Toufic 2009, 29, emphasis added

This form of artistic ‘resurrection’ relates to works, cultural objects, buildings,

historical artefacts, languages and monuments that, far from being literally or
metaphorically ‘lost’, following a major cultural disaster such as a war, are
seemingly accessible, ‘extant and available’. These are the aspects of tradition that
appear to have survived the surpassing disaster: buildings that have not been
168 Enduring Time

destroyed amongst the obvious rubble of those that have; films that are available,
and continue to be watched past the surpassing disaster; books and libraries that
mark the tradition’s apparent survival; artefacts and cultural objects that remain
intact. What is resurrected, however, is not brought back immediately into some
kind of pretence at full presence, as in practices of restoration or revival. Instead
they can only be resurrected through the demonstration that they have indeed
withdrawn – that is, through practices of documenting what doesn’t ostensibly
need to be documented. Toufic’s notion of artistic ‘resurrection’ therefore has
some affinity to the repetitive practices of care that Ukeles employs – a kind of
serious, earnest and arduous going-through-the-motions of putting back in
place things that are not out of place. This may include photographing the
standing buildings, repetitive practices of remaking films or scenes from films
even though the original films exist, documenting and recording the existence
of collections in libraries and museums even though they have survived,
meticulously studying languages that have not been forgotten.
So, for example, Toufic detects symptomatic resurrections of this order, in
echolalic scenes in the works of Murnau, Tarkovsky, Godard and Wenders.
Herzog’s post-war remake of Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), for instance, ‘can be
viewed not so much as a sound and colour version of a silent film, but rather as
an attempt to resurrect Murnau’s film after its withdrawal following a surpassing
disaster, the Nazi period’ (2009, 16). It is not that Murnau’s film literally
disappeared during the Nazi period. Material copies of the film were still
accessible for viewing after the war. But for Toufic, Herzog understood that the
‘tradition’ that Murnau worked out of had indeed withdrawn, and Herzog’s
remake is an attempt to show this:

Herzog’s Nosferatu: a vampire film trying to resurrect an extant film about the
undead, about what simultaneously is and is not there, as is made clear by the
mirror in which the vampire does not appear notwithstanding that he is standing
in front of it; but which, because of the surpassing disaster of the Nazi period, is
itself there and not there for the generation following that surpassing disaster.
Toufic 2009, 16

Toufic is therefore talking about an ‘immaterial’ withdrawal of what comes to

be recognized as ‘tradition’ that accompanies a literal destructive event, but one
that is made visible through an engagement with what in a particular culture has
survived ‘past’ the surpassing disaster. Thus the ‘resurrecting’ artist/thinker
attempts to bring back what, to others, seems all too apparent and obvious, by
somehow evidencing its essential unavailability. We could say tradition is there,
 Remaining 169

but inactive, withdrawn, as if stunned by the disaster; or perhaps more precisely

it is retroactively brought into the category of ‘tradition’ (what comes to be
understood as valuable or important for a culture’s continuation) past the
passing disaster.
Despite the overt religious overtones of the term ‘resurrection’, Toufic is keen
to point out that the ‘artist’ is not a heroic individual on a mission. Instead the
‘artistic’ understanding that one is indeed part of a community that has been
subject to a surpassing disaster, may be simultaneously withdrawn from other
social roles that the artist continues to occupy. What he seems to mean by this is
that it becomes possible, for example, ‘as a person or a teacher’ to still experience
the tradition as available, but at the same time to understand it as withdrawn
from a simultaneously embodied artistic sensibility. In one position of experience
such an individual may unproblematically engage and transmit ‘tradition’ by
conventional means such as teaching, and yet in another they may engage in
problematically attempting to resurrect what is already existent and available in
their own artistic practice. Anyone attempting to resurrect a tradition withdrawn
past a surpassing disaster, is likely to find their efforts regarded by others as
either a failure or as fraudulent, pointing out that the tradition is, of course,
readily available, including what Toufic calls the ‘teacher-identity’ of the artist/
thinker themselves – a kind of uncomfortable splitting of the self into a knowing
and unknowing part in relation to the truth of the surpassing disaster. There is
an oscillation, therefore, between these different positions of experience that
both do and don’t know about one another.
In addition to film, Toufic highlights photographic works, literature and
poetry to which we could add his own image-based work and that of his
colleague and fellow artist Walid Raad whose fictional collective, The Atlas
Group, and its fictional archive, the Atlas Group Archive respond to the disaster
of the Lebanese wars from 1975 to 1991.2 Toufic also multiplies the surpassing
disasters to which these works respond: from the Holocaust, the atomic bombing
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, events occurring in Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine
from the 1980s, through to the explosion of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in
1986. There are also surpassing disasters in which cultural resurrection has
either failed, or was not attempted. Writing of an attempt to photograph war-
damaged buildings that nevertheless survived bombardments in Beirut during

2
The Atlas Group is a project established in 1999 to research and document the contemporary
history of Lebanon. See www.theatlasgroup.org. See, in addition, Raad 2004, Raad and Toufic 2006,
and Toufic 2004.
170 Enduring Time

the 1990s, whose ruins themselves were to be torn down to be replaced by new
development, Toufic asks:

Can photographs of these withdrawn buildings become available without

resurrecting their withdrawn referents? It seems such photographs become
themselves withdrawn. There is going then to be ‘a time of development’ of the
chemically developed photographs taken during the latter stages of the war. The
documentation is for the future not only in the sense that it preserves the present
referent for future generations, but also in that it can function as a preservation
of the referent only in the future, only when the work of resurrection has
countered the withdrawal.
Toufic 2009, 58–59

In Toufic’s withdrawn ‘undeveloped’ images of withdrawn, ruined buildings

that are nevertheless physically present, we have a precise figuration of the rubble
of progress that Benjamin describes as piling up at the feet of the angel of history
in Paul Klee’s famous watercolour Angelus Novus. But crucially, there is no rubble
in Klee’s painting, no visible evidence of disaster or anything else other than the
angel. In Benjamin’s interpretation of the painting, the catastrophic event of the
surpassing disaster is itself withdrawn and no longer available for representation.
Projects that testify to the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster are
thus always ahead of their time in this precise sense, according to Toufic, and
appear to others as stupid or obscure. In fact, they are literally ‘advanced’,
projected out of an excess of sensitivity to the ill-feeling and impossibility of
recognition in the present, and into a time which we could think of as ‘past’ the
future. In this sense, the project Toufic describes operates in the mode of an
anterior posterity: the manifestation of the present withdrawal of the images and
their referents is a tell-tale sign of their future intelligibility for a time when the
work of resurrection has countered the withdrawal.
The ‘time of development’ is then a messianic time, the time that remains
between the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster and its eventual
resurrection, akin to Agamben’s notion of messianic time. It is this time that artists
working past a surpassing disaster make manifest. ‘Resurrection takes (and gives)
time’, as Toufic puts it (2009, 14, emphasis in original). At that point, the past will
actually come to fully ‘be’, finally accruing the meaning that was not afforded to it
in the time of its own present and, in turn, this future will be shown as having
been always inscribed in that present. Everything is already ruined prior to (as
well as past) a surpassing disaster – and the fact of the permanent withdrawal of
this universal ruination from thought is integral to it. It places the specific
 Remaining 171

instances and dynamics of a surpassing disaster against a background of the

universal disaster of modernity. We are therefore possibly talking of an unending
process of documenting what doesn’t ostensibly need to be documented.
Toufic’s examples of surpassing disasters tend towards specific instances of
the destruction of tradition – war and conflict, and human-induced environmental
disaster. However, in an era characterized by narratives of unending disaster, and
strategies for living in permanent states of catastrophe, we have to extend the
materiality of the surpassing disaster beyond the notion of the tangible or visible
event. The diffuse disaster of environmental damage that Rob Nixon charts is
agonizingly slow. It doesn’t take the form of an ‘event’ in the sense of a discrete or
singular occurrence in time, but instead spreads catastrophic change over
hundreds of generations, or thousands of years, so that the nature of the calamity
unfolds so slowly it is difficult to grasp. Similarly, the effects of economic policies
of austerity that have dominated the politics of Europe in the last decade, which
further the effects of inter-generational poverty on populations of already-worn-
out bodies do not register as a ‘disaster’ in an obvious sense, but destroy tradition
through the restriction of basic resources, that give rise to levels of exhaustion
and hopelessness that make the renewal of ‘tradition’ almost impossible. This
diffuse disaster is not so much the hidden yet overexposed ‘reality’ of the disaster
inherent in capitalism, the apocalyptic end point that is constantly disavowed
and yet obvious to everyone, but the particular collapse of the image of an open
future with the associated affect of hope, that appears to have withdrawn. It is this
image of some kind of future, even in its inverted Benjaminian form of backing
into the future, that has been such a potent aspect of modernist traditions.
Following Toufic, we could suggest, then, that one way to test this withdrawal
past a more diffuse surpassing disaster, is to pay close attention to artists who
may have tried to notice this fact, when its presence is at the same time easy to
attest to. These would be artists who have noticed disaster itself as a diffuse event,
something that leads to a dispersal of the elements of the world that would,
under other circumstances, retain some connection with one another, some
relationship that would enable an intact image of a future to emerge.

The time that we have

It is not exactly clear when Arthur ‘Bispo’ do Rosário was born, but it appears
to have been in the region of 1909, and he died in 1989 having lived for almost
50 years in Colônia Juliano Moreira ‘mental hospital’ in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil
172 Enduring Time

10 Works by Arthur ‘Bispo’ do Rosário, Venice Biennale, 2013.

(Hidalgo 2009). Black, impoverished, undocumented, a descendent of slaves,

Bispo was diagnosed in 1939 with ‘paranoid schizophrenia’ after having an
experience in which he reported that he had been visited by angels and felt
himself to be Jesus Christ. He was subsequently arrested, incarcerated and lived
largely within the institution for the rest of his adult life. What he did, over those
50 years, was to amass a wide range of everyday ‘throwaway’ objects that he could
access – buttons, bottles, paper, cardboard, threads made from unravelling
hospital blankets and linens, cutlery, old uniforms, rubber boots – which he used
to produce an extraordinary body of artwork. This includes close to 800 pieces
of varied form – sculpture, collage, assemblages, free-standing objects, hanging
objects, and textiles including banners, ceremonial garments and sashes – many
of which are intricately embroidered, patched, stitched or bound with thread.
Prior to his incarceration Bispo had joined the navy in 1925, working as a
signaller, and the sea, ships and boats play a prominent role in the work, as do
household objects, possibly related to his work as a domestic worker in the home
of a family in Botafogo.
In a rare documentary film made about Bispo by the Brazilian psychoanalyst
Hugo Denizart in 1982, a few years before Bispo’s death, he speaks about his
 Remaining 173

11 Works by Arthur ‘Bispo’ do Rosário, 30th Biennale, São Paulo, Brazil. Photograph:
Leo Eloy.

work from his hospital attic room where he lived, which is literally crammed
with artworks. They pile up, piece after piece, but within each piece are further
hoards of everyday objects, embroidered words, buttons, beads, threads and
string. His work prefigures works by artists such as Song Dong, who collected
and displayed over 10,000 everyday objects that his mother had accumulated
over her lifetime – the full complement of her worldly goods gathered in China
over the same period as Bispo was accumulating, stitching and patching the
world in Brazil. Hovering then, between a form of hoarding or gathering, a
process of sorting and positioning, a practice of naming (stitched wording plays
a significant part in the work as a whole), Bispo appears to have wanted to collect
and name the entire world. This is certainly something that he told to a social
worker, Conception Robaina, when she interviewed him just before his death in
1989. He described hearing a voice sometime in 1967 telling him his mission: ‘to
create an archive of the human world’ (Robaina 1988). This he dedicated his life
to literarily and diligently attempting to do.
His most well-known work, the Manto da Anunciação (Annunciation
Garment), is a huge cape, embroidered inside and out with both images and
hundreds of names of places, and adorned with tassels and ropes, which was to
174 Enduring Time

12 Works by Arthur ‘Bispo’ do Rosário, 30th Biennale, São Paulo, Brazil. Photograph:
Leo Eloy.

be used by Bispo on the day of judgement in order to mark the passing of God
on earth. It represents the ingathering of the entire world.
Bispo’s attempt to create an archive of the human world has been largely
interpreted in the light of his messianic mission – to rebuild a dispersed world in
order to reveal it to God on Judgement Day – and has been read as part of a
psychic strategy in which forms of psychic delirium function to stabilize current
social relations, an attempt not just at personal ‘recovery’, as Freud would put it
(1911), but as a form of social cure. From this perspective, a ‘symptom’ is not
simply a psychic solution to an internal conflict, but may be an attempt to
stabilize what Lacanian psychoanalysts and schizoanalysts call ‘the social bond’
or ‘the social link’, an attempt, that is, to articulate and enhance social connections
between people and things in the world (Corpas and Viera 2012).3 It is offered to
the world in the name of renewing social connections that appear to have been
broken, or gone into abeyance. From this perspective Bispo’s work is not simply
representational – a gathering of what is – but could be read as an attempt to

3
For example, Fink’s translation of Lacan’s ‘Encore’ (1998) reads “discourse should be taken as a
social link . . . founded on language.” (17). More generally the elaboration Lacan makes in Seminar
XVII (1968–69) of the four discourses as four possible permutations of social relations can be
thought of as a theory of social bonds or links.
 Remaining 175

generate new material relationships between people, words and things. What
this implies is that the world has already both dispersed and withdrawn, and
needs to be re-sutured and re-socialized, or simply resurrected, in Toufic’s terms,
in order for an image of the future (here, in the figure of the end of time) to
emerge. What I am suggesting, in other words, is that we read Bispo’s enormous
50-year-long durational project as an artistic response to a surpassing disaster
– not just his own personal disaster of his incarceration, but the disaster that he
notices in the withdrawal of tradition brought on by a collapse in a form of social
bond or connectedness, through a lifetime of documenting connections between
things, words and people, that appear not to need to be resurrected, and to many
people must have seemed simply mad.
There is, of course, a substantial debate about art brut, or ‘outsider art’,
where psychosis and artistic production are seen as mutually co-productive.
As above, the breakdown of social bonds or links experienced by a black,
impoverished, undocumented, indigenous man in Brazil throughout the last
century would require a broad and nuanced reading of psychosis precisely as
an attempt to attend to, or repair a broken social bond at personal and social
levels. However, I am less concerned as to whether the term ‘psychotic’ refers
to Bispo or his work, even in the sense of ‘ordinary psychosis’ that can describe
a non-symptomatic psychosis that pertains to psychic structure rather than
its manifestations (Redmond 2014). Instead I suggest that we understand
Bispo’s response to his incarceration as itself a form of artistic practice, both
in terms of his life-long durational project that takes place within an attic of
the institution, and in terms of his embracing of the practices of collecting
and hoarding, sorting and ordering, placing, sewing, embroidering, wrapping
and patching. Like the endless documentation that artists engage in, past a
surpassing disaster, Bispo endlessly ‘patches up’, sews together, and sutures
the world. Toufic alerts us to the fact that although many artists, writers
and thinkers are viewed, or view themselves as ‘avant-garde’, ahead of their
time, ‘when the surpassing disaster happens their works are withdrawn as
a consequence of it, this implying that, unlike the vast majority of living
humans, who are behind their time, artists, writers and thinkers are exactly of
their time’ (2009, 14, emphasis added). Bispo appears to occupy the very time
loop that we have been calling messianic time – appears, that is, to grasp the
time we have, through giving over his entire life to literally ‘repairing’ the social
world, a world that doesn’t appear to have been affected by a surpassing disaster,
but in fact can be seen to have become unavailable through the act of
its resurrection.
176 Enduring Time

13 Works by Arthur ‘Bispo’ do Rosário, 30th Biennale, São Paulo, Brazil. Photograph:
Leo Eloy.

Sewing, stitching, patching, embroidering, binding, weaving. These practices

are traditionally linked to the time-consuming, repetitive, labour intensive work
of social reproduction that I discussed earlier. We saw that female labour, as a
philosophical category, has been debated since de Beauvoir, and various attempts
have been made to disaggregate what de Beauvoir saw as the meaningless and
repetitive work of reproduction from other concepts of ‘work’ that produce,
rather than repetitively reproduce. However, alongside this disaggregation have
been reciprocal attempts to re-valorize domestic labour as labour, and with it
various forms of domestic craft and community-related craftwork, as resources
for linking politics with art-making.4 The key element of such work is that it is
both labour intensive and time consuming, and highlights particular forms of
female sociality – stitching, embroidering, sewing, cutting, and mending, are
performed in many communities by groups of women who spend long hours in
collective work alongside the time-consuming labour of child rearing, and in

4
Early examples from the 1970s include the work of Judy Chicago, Kiki Smith and Joyce Weiland,
and later significant collections of feminist craft-based artwork, such as the landmark 1988
exhibition, ‘The Subversive Stitch; Women and Textiles Today’ in Manchester that followed the
publication of Rozsika Parker’s book, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the
Feminine (1984).
 Remaining 177

doing so, create conditions for communality. As Silvia Federici has argued for
near on 40 years, this reproductive work has always been exploited by capital,
and needs to be replaced by a politics of the commons in which the means of
(re)production are reclaimed, shared and managed collectively. This would
constitute, in Federici’s terms ‘a reproduction of our everyday life’ thought in
terms of a feminist commons (2010).
This artistic practice of gathering and stitching together, that in effect gathers
the time of communality, seems to me to demonstrate some kind of withdrawal
of time that I began with – the ways that managing the commodification of time
under neoliberal conditions may involve modes of waiting and suspending
hope. Bispo seems to embrace this reproductive labour in a political act of
gathering and patching that takes time to show time’s withdrawal. By taking on
practices that take too much time, during a lifetime dedicated to a process of
‘useless’ recovery of the entire world, what is revealed is that the time of a
communal future has indeed withdrawn, and can only be resurrected through
the arduous noticing of its withdrawal through time-consuming practices.
Bispo’s work draws attention to the surpassing disaster of a diminishing
commons that includes the image of a generative future, and works to re-
establish a relationship of communality between people and things. But the
ingathering that his extraordinary cape performs is not of the ‘exiles’ as in the
Judaic tradition, but of all the things that need to be (re)related to one another,
in order to constitute a world that can imagine a future. Toufic’s notion of the
work that artists do to attempt to resurrect tradition after its withdrawal past a
surpassing disaster provides us with an artistic model of activity that does not
aim at producing the new, but through arduous, iterative and repetitive
enactments reveals what has already been lost, and in doing so re-establishes a
relation with present time. Bispo’s stitching up, embroidering over, sewing
together, patching and binding remains an enduring reminder of the world’s
dispersal and the loss of a communal future that urgently needs resurrecting. But
more than this, Bispo’s life-long labour makes present a form of time that
otherwise is only ever lost or yet to come. He allows us to grasp the time that
remains.
178
 8

Ending

At the end of the analysis, it can happen that neither the analyst nor the
patient knows exactly what happened. There’s a story about the analyst Annie
Reich, who once described a very good analysis at a conference. People were
impressed, and said, ‘You should write up this analysis,’ and she said, ‘I’m not
ready to write about it, because I haven’t figured out what happened.’ The
analysis had been finished for several years, and she still hadn’t figured it out.
Malcolm 2004, 161

What happened? The essays in this book have attempted to get hold of a peculiar
form of time – time that becomes suspended and cannot, or will not, flow. I tried
to stay in proximity to some cultural objects that I was drawn to, that I thought
could tell us something, not just about what it might be like to live in this time,
but about the efficacy, or we could say the ethics of attempting to do so. I had a
sense that to decide to remain in this time, to live it consciously, arduously,
routinely, in its quotidian form, might tell us something about a mode of
attachment to ourselves, others and the world, that I have named as ‘care’ – if to
care is to deal in an ongoing and durational way with affective states that may
include the deep social ambivalence that seeps into the ways we maintain the
lives of ourselves and others. What struck me about the objects that I had
amassed – a book by a poet whose son dies, a series of photographs showing a
family living in acute poverty, some images of an artist washing the stairs of an
art-gallery, an account of a psychoanalytic treatment that unfolds during an
attempt to gather testimonies about a time of political upheaval, a collaborative
art project between two activists and artists, one of whom is being held
indefinitely in solitary confinement, some paintings of a woman stamping on a
watch, the embroidered and hand-stitched garments made by a man incarcerated
for 50 years in a mental institution – was that enduring time had a particular
relation to repetition, a temporality classically linked with women’s time, that
was neither simply about reproductive labour and the time of development, nor

179
180 Enduring Time

the temporalities of cyclicality, but about a principle in psychic and social life of
the permanent non-severance of selves, others and institutions from what
sustains them. This permanence seemed to me to offer a way to think about
living in ‘the new chronic’, in the ‘dull soreness of a meantime with no end’
(Cazdyn 2012, 13).
I started with the ‘case’ of the new disciplinary formation of psychosocial
studies, and whether it could be understood as an opportunity for anachronistic
concepts – ones that have come to be sensed as ‘embarrassments’ in contemporary
theory – to be reanimated, and where ‘old’ and ‘new’ ideas could speak to one
another contemporaneously in generative ways. Michel Serres drew our attention
to dead texts or ideas, and how quickly they are relegated as ‘obsolete’. He urged
us to engage a kind of waiting, until the usefulness of such ideas and texts can
resurface again through their contiguity to other, more ostensibly ‘contemporary’
texts and ideas, and I noticed Judith Butler’s capacity to ‘trap time’ in her
conceptualization of psychic reality, that brought this idea that had fallen into
dereliction in psychoanalysis back into circulation. Like the baker’s dough,
concepts were understood to ‘stay’, through the ways that time can fold-over,
rather than unfold over time.
If we could come to care about embarrassing and out-of-date ideas through a
temporal practice of folding, what was the time of caring for other discarded
things – the fate of undifferentiated ‘mush’, and the lives of those whose task it is
to handle it, on behalf of everyone, everyday, as the pattern of their lives? What
was the time of caring about ‘lives without project’, those that are neither about
survival, nor aimed at event, but operate through a different kind of suspended
temporality? In ‘Maintaining’ I sought to understand the suspended time of
managing vulnerability and dependency through systems of maintenance.
Maintenance time is integral to time’s ability to ‘progress’, and 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 dominant temporal imaginaries. Through the paradoxical notion of
renewal through maintenance (itself a form of stuck time) we saw what it might
mean to ‘grasp time’, to have it, and therefore to share it. I read Mierle Laderman
Ukeles’ persistent, non-ironic, dedicated re-animation of the seemingly dead
time of maintenance, and Richard Billingham’s capacity to preserve familial
relations when lives are without project, as potential responses to the conditions
of the now. Through Ukeles’ idea of ‘maintenance art’, our attention was drawn to
the absolute singularity of beings and things, whereby maintenance became the
time of noticing ‘each mote of dust’.
 Ending 181

If maintenance is about a certain form of arduous repetition, then it suggests

that it could be read ‘in the feminine’, given the long association of ‘women’s time’
with modes of cyclicality, on the one hand, and practices of social reproduction,
on the other. In ‘Repeating’ I attempted to move through an impasse in feminist
theorizing about what we might mean by ‘maternal time’. Critiquing Edelman’s
use of the singular temporality of the death drive to render queer ‘those who are
not fighting for the children’, I turned to Adrian Johnston to open up the
multiplicity of the drive, and its twin temporalities of iteration and alteration,
giving rise to a conceptualization of the drive that can contain both developmental
and constant time. This allowed us to glimpse a distinction between ‘queer time’
on the one hand, and the ‘heteronormative time’ of motherhood on the other.
This shift in perspective meant we could re-orientate maternal time towards the
dynamic of chronicity, a time that is alive to the potentials of not moving on,
whilst at the same time maintaining its link with the ethical principle of one’s
own future being bound up with the future of another. This meant suspended
time could be understood as a relation to, and condition of, the maternal, but
without aligning the time of maternity with the cyclicality of ‘women’s time’ or
with the permanent work of contemporary motherhood. Denise Riley’s deep
meditation on what happened to time after the death of her adult son opened a
window onto the quality of this dynamic chronicity, the liveliness of the time of
mothering a dead child.
The idea that suspended time might be animated, full, perhaps too much,
emerged also from a series of reflections on the permanent delay embedded in
intergenerational time, and its relation to the delay that allows us to come to
realise that we have belonged to a generation. Here I was concerned with delay
as a mode of doing politics, and the retroactive way that we can locate a political
moment as having been political after the event, when the repressed trauma of
rupture can be acknowledged. However, through a story about intergenerational
waiting in which a child waits for her dead mother as a way to keep her internally
alive, we understood the permanent waiting that is the condition of
intergenerationality, in which adult sexuality always comes too early for the
infant, and the present-tenseness of this overwhelming encounter remains a
structuring condition of psychic life. This intergenerational delay gives rise to
psychic time, but in the story Luisa Passerini tells about her generation, could
only be apprehended through the work of political testimony, in which
individuals could situate themselves as having belonged to a generation after the
event. This reworked the infamous slogan ‘the personal is political’ so that
the personal did not so much give rise to the political but was precipitated by it.
182 Enduring Time

The delay that occurs between and across generations engenders the elongated
time of beginning again, as itself a form of political action.
‘Enduring’ took the notion of living in crystalline time to its limits. It involved
the choices we make to know, and not know, about enduring within the
impossible situation of indefinite solitary confinement, and the terror of dealing
with ‘raw time’. It charted the decision the artist and activist Jackie Sumell made
to ‘know’ about the impossible situation of solitary, and her response to it, in the
form of the artwork The House That Herman Built. The house allowed Herman
Wallace, a political prisoner, to both live in it, whilst living in his cell, and to
preserve for future generations the idea of a commitment to a form of political
thinking. Certain resources from the past could be preserved, along with the
historical knowledge of the dangers of acting on these ideas, and ways to protect
oneself if need be. I read Sumell’s lifework as an act of care, performed through
her capacity to bear to know about the violence of solitary confinement,
especially the violence it does to a subject’s experience of time, and the work of
preservation within conditions that incarcerate or lock down the future.
Perhaps we are always ‘out of time’. The choice to know about enduring within
the impossible led us to ‘late memory’ and the subject of old age – both the
subject that is old age, and the subject who is precipitated by old age. The artist
Barbara Loftus’ mother, Hildegard Basch, was silent for most of her life about her
experiences of fleeing Germany as a Jewish refugee in 1939, and only late, in
older age, did she begin to talk to her daughter about her memories of her
childhood during the recession in Germany between the wars, the murder of her
parents and brother in Auschwitz, and the loss of their home and all their
belongings. The subject of old age emerged as the subject constituted not only by
a relation to lost objects, as Freud describes, but a relation to lost time, whereby
the past itself becomes constitutive of the self when understood in a Bergsonian
sense, where memory is conceived as a virtual archive. ‘Recalling’ linked the
subjectivity of the ageing mother of Loftus’ work, for whom memory is
constitutive, to the emergence of a daughter, for whom the co-affective traces of
such memory are generative.
Finally, we returned to the question of living in the ‘end times’, and the ways
that temporal imaginaries that foreclose the future as a viable promise of the
present affect how we live the present as the future’s suspension. How can we
take hold of present time under these conditions other than through a
melancholic attachment to the past, or a passive mode of waiting for something,
anything, to change? Agamben offered us a figuration of the present as the
future’s suspension, as the time that time takes to come to an end, a time that has
 Ending 183

duration, and neither runs out, nor flashes up, but ‘remains’ and can be said to be
the only time that we ‘have’. Jalal Toufic’s notion of the surpassing disaster – a
time of the withdrawal of tradition prior to its ‘resurrection’ in which artists
work to remake what is already in existence – seemed to me a more general
condition than he suggests, and its temporality shares something of Agamben’s
‘time itself ’, in which we make present a form of time that can otherwise only be
understood as already lost, or yet to come. For Toufic, this making present is
what recreates community, albeit a community reciprocally defined as those
affected by the surpassing disaster. It was with the surpassing disaster that we
read an extraordinary body of work created by the artist Arthur ‘Bispo’ do
Rosário through practices of finding, collecting and hoarding objects, and
then wrapping, stitching and patching them, along with cloths, banners and
clothes. Bispo’s desire to collect and name the entire world is an artistic gesture
that Toufic describes, but where the surpassing disaster is neither war nor
environmental calamity, but the general loosening of the social bond, the
diminishing of the commons, and commonality between people and things.
All of the cultural objects I found along the way, and that spoke to me,
suggested a way of remaining in suspended time, not just of living in, and
through it, but of living it. I’ve tried throughout to apprehend the way that
remaining is itself a form of care. Perhaps, more precisely, what they suggest is a
form of ‘care without ending’ – that is, maintaining, preserving, waiting, delaying,
staying, recalling, remaining as practices of care that emerge in response to
punishment without ending, political stasis without ending, dependency without
ending, grief without ending, memory without ending, and the permanent
disaster of capitalism without ending. ‘Care without ending’ paradoxically relies
on the capacity to stay in relation to an elongated present, to bear the
embarrassment of anachronism, the dynamic chronicity of the death drive, the
overwhelming effects of the present-tense of intergenerational difference, to
decide to know the unbearable, to grasp time, and in doing so, to take care of
time.

Care

But what happened?

The ‘subversion’ of temporality that Julia Kristeva claims that the modernist
trio, Heidegger, Bergson and Freud, all perform, is characterized in a specific way
in Freud’s work. Temporality is not an expansion of consciousness, as in Bergson,
184 Enduring Time

nor a contraction of consciousness as in Heidegger, but Freud’s articulation

relies, according to Kristeva, on ‘the scandal of the timeless (Zeitlos)’ (2003, 30).
Freud makes a sequential move within his own thought from the time of
consciousness, to the Zeitlos of the pleasure principle, to the Zeitlos of repetition
and the compulsion to repeat, and finally to that of the death drive, the archaic,
indestructible and immortal elements of psychic life. This atemporality proper
to desire and then to death is unique, Kristeva claims, in that it brings to the fore
an unconscious time that is not only not-conscious time, but borders on what
she thinks of as a pre-psychical time that approaches the somatic. In the extreme
it is the time of death. Psychical and biological death is not dead time, in other
words, but has its own time, and it is this that is at the core of its scandalousness,
a ‘matter of a detained temporality, a temporality that does not temporalize, a
breach of a time that does not temporalize’ (31). This unbound time is not strictly
negativity, but breaks with biological time and the time of consciousness, which
Kristeva locates as the scandal produced by the very fact of psychoanalysis, and
a major cause of cultural resistance that it incites.
Furthermore, in the context of the slow linear time of becoming conscious
that occurs in an analysis, Kristeva names three modalities of timelessness that
articulate analytic experience. These are the memory trace, working through,
and the dissolution of the transference. Memory, as we saw in our discussions of
‘remaining’ is a lasting trace of excitation, remaining in unconscious life,
indestructible and yet displaceable. Working through, as we have also seen, deals
with the struggle with resistance and the double-time of interpretation followed
by stagnation, so that the analysand must approach, and approach again, what is
resistant to knowledge in the present. In Kristeva’s words, working through
‘presents itself as a dead time, while in reality there is an acceptance of drives
repressed by the lived experience of the transference’ (36). However, the
dissolution of the transference signals the end of analysis, the time of separation
from the analyst that confronts the subject with the possibility of the analysts’
death, and the analysand’s own susceptibility to dissolution. Living through this,
according to Kristeva, means that what is in reality terminated is in fact
‘interminable’ to the degree that the analysand lives on, with and through the
permanent knowledge of self-dissolution. The dissolution of the transference is
the time of the interminable.
We could say, then, that care without ending is neither the time of memory,
which is the time that remains, nor the time of working through, which is the
time of acceptance, but the interminable time of living on with the knowledge
that one’s time will end. The time, then of ending.
 Ending 185

Ending

I want to end, however, with a different kind of reflection on Freud’s notion of

ending than the one Kristeva draws out. Throughout Enduring Time I’ve tried to
keep an eye on a relation between temporalities of development and those of
repetition in their gendered dimensions. These temporalities play out together,
in parallel, so that their disjunction remains as a permanent inscription of, not
the past, but the overwhelming experience of the present, in the misaligned
relationship between the generations that is also a description, according to
Ettinger, of ‘sexual’ difference. Adrian Johnson’s insight was that the drive is
always already internally differentiated so that the axis of iteration and that of
alteration, both of which operate through the dynamics of repetition, together
produce an intra-temporal resistance to time. We can read this doubled axis
alongside Laplanche’s insistence that the unbinding in the generation that comes
before, instigates binding in the generation that comes after, not sequentially, but
in the present encounter between adult and child. It is this present encounter
that persists or remains as psychic time, neither developing, as such, nor
repeating, but simply remaining as the ‘timeless’ aspect of any capacity for
temporal experience, not exactly ‘dead time’ as Kristeva intimates, but persistently
present time. And in a further feminist refraction, we encountered through
Ettinger’s notion of the matrixial, the remains of the psychic time of the co-
affective co-emergence of the subject and always already feminine other, an
experience of gestation from which we cannot be severed, and that therefore also
remains as a structuring principle in psychic life. Where for Laplanche sexual
difference is the enigma of the sexual unconscious ‘unbindings’ of the adult other
that engenders infantile psychic time, for Ettinger sexual difference is the name
for a principle of mutual accommodation or hospitality, what she calls ‘wi(t)
hness’, whereby the present can remain in psychic life as a less alarming
borderlink, a capacity for transsubjectivity in adult life.
In Analysis Terminable and Interminable, published in 1937 at the end of
Freud’s life, he asks that intractable question ‘At which point, precisely, does
psychoanalytic therapy end?’ This is a question concerning the end of the
peculiar time of analysis, the time analysis takes to come to an end, which is of
course, the time of an analysis. ‘Experience,’ Freud writes, ‘has taught us that
psycho-analytic therapy – the freeing of someone from his neurotic symptoms,
inhibitions and abnormalities of character – is a time-consuming business’
(1937, 216). Well yes, indeed. Freud had learnt many years previously that freeing
oneself of neurotic symptoms cannot be achieved in a flash of insight brought
186 Enduring Time

about by the analysts’ interpretation. It is deeply painful to begin to know that we

have an unconscious life, and that this unconscious life is largely structured
around the insurmountable frustrations that psychoanalysis calls infantile
sexuality. Because we fundamentally don’t want to know what drives us, and
because our symptoms, despite making us suffer, also give us some modicum of
pleasure, they trouble us less than the truth. Working through, as we have seen,
aims at the resistance to becoming aware of the interior workings
of memory and desire, and despite it looking like dead or repetitious time,
there is an acceptance or accommodation of the drive that occurs through the
analysts’ repeated reluctance to convince anyone of anything. Put a different
way, beyond the scene of what can be thought about and interpreted in analysis,
is what Betty Joseph calls the ‘total situation’ (1985); the whole living and moving
organization of early internalized object relations, psychotic anxieties and
defences at the core of psychic conflict, that are largely projected, and therefore
‘lived’ in the analysis through the analysts’ capacity to gauge, and interpret
what is stirred up in themselves, and return as an echo, without memory or
desire. In Analysis Terminable and Interminable, Freud, however, describes
resistance not just in economic, but in temporal terms, as a form of ‘psychical
inertia’ (1937, 241), a kind of passive refusal of developmental time. For much
of an analysis, unconscious time plays out as neither developmental nor
iterative time, but as chronic or inert time. Two temporal modes are at work on
the couch: The ‘living’ transference, as Joseph would put it, which is the
paradoxical time of waiting for psychic change, and the time of psychic inertia
which is the temporality of working through; the slow and arduous process of
not just learning something mildly interesting about yourself, but becoming
yourself.
But what of ending? Freud initially states that the analysis ends simply when
the analyst and the patient cease to meet each other for the analytic session. This
happens when two conditions have been fulfilled: when the patient no longer
suffers from symptoms and has overcome her anxieties and inhibitions; and
when the analyst judges that enough repressed material has been made conscious
so as to not fear the patient falling back into a repetition of the pathological
processes that brought her to analysis. But he worries away further:
The other meaning of the ‘end’ of an analysis is much more ambitious. In this
sense of it, what we are asking is whether the analyst has had such a far-reaching
influence on the patient that no further change could be expected to take place
in him if his analysis were continued. It is as though it were possible by means of
analysis to attain to a level of absolute psychical normality . . . as though, perhaps,
 Ending 187

we had succeeded in resolving every one of the patient’s repressions and in

filling in all the gaps in his memory.
Freud 1937, 218–219

The end is not just the end of the time of analysis (the cessation of meetings),
but the end of the time of neurosis, the time, that is, of cure. If analysis is to have
an end, in the sense of a cure, it is through a process Freud calls a ‘correction’ of
the original process of repression, which can then assist and strengthen the ego.
But, just as Freud proposes this, he backs away. He knows full well, as patients we
only want a partial recovery – we long, that is, for chronic illness. Who could live
with all the gaps in memory filled in? In the end we have to be ‘content’, he states
‘with an incomplete solution’ (230).
This pessimism about the potentials of a treatment finds its fullest expression
towards the end of the paper, when Freud returns to his preoccupations with two
interminable elements of psychic life. One is the death drive. Whilst there is one
force which defends itself from recovery, which is a sense of guilt and need for
punishment localized in the superego that something can be done about, there is
something beyond this, the scandal, the temporality of which is opposed to the
time of consciousness. The other is the repudiation of femininity that Freud saw
as structural in both men and women. It is these two forces, the death drive and
the repudiation of femininity, that remain the ‘bedrock’ against which all analyses
are wrecked. Freud therefore makes a distinction between the force that defends
itself against recovery, which we could call our desires for the chronic, and the
bedrock that simply cannot be shifted, making analysis not just chronic, but
interminable. This is a different sense of the interminable than Kristeva’s allusion
to the interminable facing of one’s own dissolution that goes on after the end of
the analysis. Where the chronic, we could say, suspends time as critical juncture
in a sequential development of the already existing, akin to the suspension of
time that Agamben describes, in the time of the interminable in Freud’s late
articulation, time encounters its own ‘bedrock’ and as sequence, simply collapses.
We might see the end of analysis, then, as the veering from the interminable
back towards chronic time. After all, the transference is never ‘dissolved’. Perhaps,
if we can talk of the constant pressure of the death drive, we can also talk about
the constant pressure of psychic inertia, rethought not as resistance, but as the
kind of non-developmental and non-repetitious time of what remains from the
present-tense encounter between generations, and between the analyst and
analysand; a time that is activated in the transference, but crucially remains
beyond it, not just as a permanent awareness of the possibilities of our own
188 Enduring Time

dissolution, but also the possibilities of our own permanent beginnings, and our
capacities to start anew. This emphasis on natality rather than mortality might be
an articulation of chronic time, time that has the qualities of intensity and
insistence ‘in the feminine’.
Rather than ending with a vision of an alternative temporal imaginary to that
which we are living through, or an appeal to the maintenance of hope to counter
the on-go of time without qualities, my ending, then is to understand chronicity
as itself the only condition for newness, where newness is neither breach, rupture
or flash, but a quiet noticing that something remains, which is the permanent
capacity to begin again.
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212
 Index

Page numbers in bold refer to figures.

1968 98–9, 101–2, 105–10 attachment, permanence of 22

Augustine, St. 95
A Project for a Scientific Psychology Auschwitz 141, 182
(Freud) 38 austerity 82, 171
Abbott, Jack 118, 126 Australia 73
Abu-Jamal, Mumia 118 autobiography 102, 110
Adorno, Theodor 28, 87 Autobiography of a Generation (Passerini)
affect, theories of 29 98–100, 101–2, 105–10, 110–11,
After the Future (Berardi) 8 113
afterwards time 98 autonomy 55, 56
afterwardsness 102–5
Agamben, Giorgio 163, 170, 182–3 Badiou, Alain 11–12, 13, 28, 116–17, 120–1
The Time That Remains 162–3, 164–7 bare life 78
ageing 147–53 Basch, Hildegard 139, 141–2, 144–5,
Ahıska, Meltem 25 146–7, 148, 151, 157–8, 182
Ailsworth, Ronald 121 Battle of Orgreave, The (Deller) 113
alterity, socially constituted 43 Bayly, Simon 1, 60–1, 83, 165
Althusser, Louis 28 becoming 11, 13
Amnesty International 119 beginning 95–6, 98, 101, 188
Amsler, Sarah, The Education of Radical Benjamin, Jessica 28
Democracy 82–3 Benjamin, Walter 161, 165, 170
anachronism 6, 25, 37, 167 Benjaminian flash, the 52
radical outdatedness 23–4 Bennett, Jane 32
Anderson, Warwick 18, 19 Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’ 8, 83
Andreas-Salome, Lou 145 bereavement 87–92
Angelus Novus (Klee) 170 Berger, John 97–8
après-coup 26 Bergson, Henri 12, 141, 151–3, 153–4,
Arendt, Hannah 56, 70–1, 98, 111 183–4
The Human Condition 95–6 Berlant, Lauren 31, 50, 50–2, 83, 164
Arlow, Jacob 35–6 Berlin 139
Armstrong, Kayt 112 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud) 56,
art brut 175 85, 85–6
art works 20–1 Bhabha, Homi 28
artistic Bhalla, Angad 115
practice 167–71, 171–7, 172, 173, 174, Biko, Steve 97
176 Billingham, Richard 67, 68, 121, 180
resurrection 167–71, 171–7, 172, 173, Fishtank 64, 64–5
174, 176, 183 Ray’s a Laugh 54, 62–6, 62, 66
asynchronicity 143 binding 104
Atlas Group, the 169–70 biodiversity 7, 81

213
214 Index

biography 102 Caygill, Howard, On Resistance:

Bion, Wilfred 15 A Philosophy of Defiance
Black Panther Party 121 94–5
Ten-Point Program 132 Cazdyn, Eric 3, 180
Black time 127 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 3–4
Bloch, Ernst 143 change 12–13, 97, 151
body clock 78 chaos theory 33–4
Body in Pain, The (Scarry) 126 children 77, 104–5
borderlinking 156, 158 Childs, Dennis 118, 120
boredom 4 Chodorow, Nancy 28
Bouchard, Donald 24 chromonormativity 78
Bourdieu, Pierre 48 chronic time 187–8
Bragaglia, Anton Guilio 143 chronicity 92, 181
Braidotti, Rosi 12, 149 chronobiopolitical framework 3
brain, the 35 chronophobia 124–5
Bryant, Gerald 121 chronos 3
Burden, Chris 21 chronotic time 3
Bureaucracy of Terror: An Exhumation, circularity 13
The (Loftus) 139, 141–2 Civil Rights Movement 112
Butler, Judith 11, 15–6, 27, 40, 86, 149, 154, Clairborne, Sybil 150
180 climate change 2, 81–2
The Psychic Life of Power 37, clock time 3
40–5 cognitive behavioural therapy 18
Psychosocial Imaginaries 26 collective
action 98–100, 105–7, 111–13
Cain, Burl 131, 135 memory 113
Camden Town Group 63 collectivity 11, 100–1, 105–7, 111
Camp for Climate Action 111–12 coloniality, and modernity 3–4
capitalism colonization 4, 19
digital global 14 communality 177
end times 159–64 comparativism 33
flows 9 Congress of Racial Equality 112
neoliberal 82–3 Connor, Steven 33, 34
perpetual 160–1 conscience 44
politics of time and space 47–8 contemporary, the 45
reality of 160 Corbyn, Jeremy 23
seams of 2 counter-history 25
slow violences 7 counter-memory 24–5, 45, 148–9
social relations of 50, 67 courageous time 121, 136
urgency 47 Cradley Heath 62–6
zero-point 159 Crapanzano, Vincent 96, 97
capitalist everyday, the 2 creation 56
care 2, 5, 14–17, 53–4, 182, 183–4 critical
ethics 16–17 psychology 29
without ending 183, 184 theory 28
case, the 31 crystalline time 87–92, 182
Casela, Jean 131 Cubism 142
Castoriadis, Cornelius 28 cultural
castration 154–5, 157 artefacts 163
Cavarero, Adriana 17 losses 34
 Index 215

memory 25 Edelman, Lee 181

theory 29 No Future 77, 79–87
Culture of Time and Space, The (Kern) Education of Radical Democracy, The
142 (Amsler) 82–3
Curtis, Adam 64 ego 42–4
ego-criticism 43
Dahl, Gerhard 104 Egypt 111
das Ding 84, 85, 146 embarrassment 32
Davis, Angela 119–20, 132 embodied memory 150
Davis, Mike 119 empty present, the 4
de Beauvoir, Simone 56, 70–1, 176 end of days 164–7
de Lauretis, Teresa 86 end times 3, 159–64, 182–3
dead time 69, 89–90, 180, 184, 185, 186 ending 185–8
death 56 endurance and enduring 11, 69, 117–18,
death drive 77, 78, 79–87, 92, 181, 187 121, 127, 137, 179, 182
debt bondage 7 environmental disaster 171
decolonization 19 ethics 29
deconstruction 28 Ettinger, Bracha 100, 141, 154–8, 185
deep time violence 7 European time 3–4
deferred action 103 event, the 11–2
delay 93–100, 116, 128–9, 181–2 Everingham, Christine 73
delayed action 103 everyday, the 87
Deleuze, G. 12, 29, 150, 151 everyday objects 173
Deller, Jeremy, The Battle of Orgreave 113 evolution 3
democracy 10, 93, 132 exclusion 7
Denizart, Hugo 172–3 expectation 6
depression 89 experience 4, 6, 155–8
Derrida, Jacques 28, 93, 94, 166 external reality 38
desire 29 externality 41
desisting bodies 50, 50–2 extinctions 81–2
despair 98
destructiveness, problem of 16 Fabian, Johannes 4
development 8, 56, 85, 91 familial relations 70
developmental time 79–87, 103 family time 62–6
Dickens, Charles 125 Fanon, Franz 28, 96, 97, 117, 120
Dickinson, Emily 89 fantasy 29, 39
die-ins 112 fantasy life 36
disaster, surpassing 163–4, 167–71, 183 fantasy-taken-as-real 28
discourse 41 fascinance 158
dislocation 88 Federici, Silvia 3–4, 79, 177
dispositif 41 Felski, Rita 86–7
domestic labour 55–8, 71, 79, 176–7 female labour 69–76, 176–7
downward mobility 9 feminine, the 75–6
duration 151–3 femininity, repudiation of 187
durational feminist
art 21 psychoanalytic trajectory 28
drag 50 theory 32, 70
practices 49 Fenichel, Otto 144
punishment 134 Fink, Bruce 174
Durkheim, Emil 142 Fisher, Berenice 14
216 Index

Fisher, Mark, Ghosts of My Life Grassian, Stuart 124–5

159 Greenham Common peace camp 112, 113
Fishtank (Billingham) 64, 64–5 Greensboro 112
Flightways (van Dooren) 82 grief, permanence of 22
Foucault, Michel 24–5, 37, 40, 41–2, 94 group identity 100
France 73 Groys, Boris 83
free time 94 Guattari, Félix 29, 99
freedom 30, 55 Guenther, Lisa, Solitary Confinement:
Freeman, Elizabeth 5, 32, 50, 66, 77 Social Death and its Afterlives
Freud, Sigmund 19, 26, 28, 35, 37–40, 41–4, 125–6, 135
45, 84, 102–3, 136, 144, 146, 147, guilt 29
157, 174, 182 Gunaratnam, Yasmin 11
Analysis Terminable and Interminable
185–7 Halberstam, J. Jack 77
Beyond the Pleasure Principle 56, 85, Hall, Stuart 28
85–6 Handshake Ritual (Ukeles) 58
‘Constructions in Analysis’ 145 Hanisch, Carol 99
Instincts and Their Vicissitudes 85 harm 17
The Interpretation of Dreams 38 Hartman, Saidiya 4–5
Moses and Monotheism 145 Harvey, David 47–8
Project for a Scientific Psychology 38, Heathfield, Adrian 67
103 Heidegger, Martin 4, 184
‘The Ego and the Id’ 43 Hermes 32–3
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality Herzog, Werner 168
85 heterochromonormative developmental
Zeitlos 184 time 5
Freudianism 29 heteronormativity 79–87, 181
Friedman, Lawrence 38 hidden temporalities 50
Fromm, Eric 28 Hildegaard Under Table I (Loftus) 143,
futural meaning 1–2 144–5, 146–7
future, the historical
cancellation of 8 consciousness 96
as development 8 time 34, 51–2, 166
end times 159–64 truth 102–3, 145, 147, 152
foreclosed 162 history 24–5, 33–4, 80–1
future shock 6 hoarding 173
Futurist Manifesto 57 Hook, Derek 29, 96, 120
futurity, and subjectivity 79–87 hope 166
hope, crisis of 82–3
gathering 173 Horkheimer, Max 28
gender 70 horrorism 17
generation, definition 100–2 House That Herman Built, The (Wallace and
generational time 105–10, 181–2 Sumell) 115–16, 120–1, 123–4,
genre 31 127–34, 130, 132, 135, 182
Germany 139, 141–2, 147, 182 Hsieh, Tehching 21
ghosting 159 Human Condition, The (Arendt) 95–6
Ghosts of My Life (Fisher) 159 Human Rights Watch World Report 119
globalized network societies 9 Hutchings, Kimberly 3, 4
good life 15, 51 hysteria 25, 37–8
 Index 217

identification 29 Kafka, Franz 142

identity 29, 100 Kairos 3
IKEA 22 keirotic tension 3
imagined action 130 Kemp, Alice A. 74
immanence 71 Kern, Stephen, The Culture of Time and
imprisonment 115–16, 121–7, 122, 136 Space 142
chronophobia 124–5 Khalidi, Rashid 111
security 129 Khanna, Ranjana 19, 28
solitary 118–21, 123–7, 127, 131, 134, King Wilkerson, Robert 121, 123, 127
135, 137, 182 Klee, Paul, Angelus Novus 170
visiting process 133, 137 Klein, Melanie 16
In Slowness: Towards and Aesthetic of the Koepnick, Lutz, In Slowness: Towards and
Contemporary (Koepnick) 142 Aesthetic of the Contemporary
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being 142
(Sharpe) 4–5, 116 Koselleck, Reinhardt 6
inconsistent multiplicities 11 Kristeva, Julia 28, 75–6, 155, 183–4, 185
‘Indefinite Delay: On (Post)Apartheid
Temporality’, Hook 96–7 labour 95
Indigenous Australians 117 domestic 55–8, 71, 79, 176–7
industrialization 3–4 durational practices 49
Instincts and Their Vicissitudes (Freud) 85 female 69–76, 176–7
inter- 29, 30 feminization 48
inter-generational, present, the as 94 flexible 49
intergenerational connection 113 gendered patterns of 32
intergenerational events 116 maternal 74–5, 87, 90
inter-generational waiting 20, 181–2 precarization 48
intergenerationality 181 project time 60–1
internal objects 15 repetitive 79
internality 41 work time 50
internalization 42 labour time 9
internationalism 19 Lacan, Jacques 28, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 84,
interpellation 42 103, 145–6, 146, 155, 158, 174
Interpretation of Dreams, The (Freud) 38 Lampert, Jay 93–4
Irigaray, Luce 28, 80 Laplanche, Jean 37, 38, 39, 39–40, 45,
irregularity 76 104–5, 111, 144, 185
Israel 96 Large, William 160
Late Liberalism 159
Jackson, George 126–7 late memory 147–53, 153–8, 182
Jackson, Shannon 21, 55–6 Latour, Bruno 33, 37
Jameson, Fredric 7, 8–9, 47–8 Law, the 28
Jetztzeit 161–2 Léger, Marc 121–7, 133
Johnston, Adrian 18, 85, 86, 181, 185 Lennon, John 112
Jones, Sophie 77, 78 letters 128–9
Joseph, Betty 186 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 151
jouissance 75–6, 81, 85, 87 Lewis, Gail 29, 53–4
Judgement Day 174 liberalism 51–2
judgment 31 life
suspension of 34, 44–5 instinct 56
justice 16, 160 work 57, 67
218 Index

linear Meillassoux, Quentin 12

narrative, refusal of 80–1 melancholia 19, 29, 42–4, 45
perspective 33–4 memory 139–47, 184
time 104 artist books 65–6
Lingis, Alphonso 11, 101 collective 113
lives without project 62–6, 67–8 cultural 25
Ray’s a Laugh (Billingham) 62–6, 62, 66 embodied 150
Touch Sanitation (Ukeles) 58–62, 60 Foucault on 24–5
living time 1 late 147–53, 153–8, 182
Loftus, Barbara 139–42, 148, 157–8, 182 the matrixial 153–8
The Bureaucracy of Terror: An and old age 147–53
Exhumation 139, 141–2 remembering 146
Hildegaard Under Table I 143, 144–5, remémoration 145, 146–7
146–7 reminiscence 145
Stamp 139, 140 restaging 140–1
loss 108–10 sharing 141–2, 146–7, 148, 157–8
lost time 182 symbolic 145–6
Louisiana State Penitentiary 121–7 time of 142
traumatic 103, 106
McArthur, Park 53 triggering 147–8
maintenance 49–50, 50, 67, 69, 180–1 men, domestic labour 73
art 56–8, 67, 180 Merck, Mandy 32
self 51 messianic
temporal forms 52–3 future 160
temporal practices 55–8 time 160, 162, 164–7, 170
time 51, 52–4, 60, 62, 68 Mignolo, Walter 3–4
Malabou, Catherine 12–13, 72 Miller, Brent 123, 131
Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! miners strike 113
Proposal for an exhibition mission, sense of 173, 174
‘CARE ’ (Ukeles) 55–8 Mitchell, Audra 81–2
manifestos 55 Mitchell, Juliet 28, 100
Manto da Anunciação (Annunciation modern time 6
Garment) (Rosário) 173–4 modernity 6, 6
Marcuse, Herbert 28 and coloniality 3–4
market relations 3 double temporality 142–4
Marshall, Yvonne 112 and psychoanalysis 19
Martin, Trayvon 134 Montano, Linda 21
Marx, Karl 74, 161 monumental time 75–6
Massey, Doreen 47–8 Morton, Timothy 81
maternal Moses and Monotheism (Freud) 145
care-work 72–6 mother–child relation 16–17
death drive 92 mother–daughter relation, the 141, 148,
grief-work 20 150–1
labour 74–5, 87, 90 motherhood 53–4, 92, 181
time 72–6, 78, 79, 91, 181 mourning 136
maternal-feminine, the 80 movement 4, 6, 12–13
matrixial, the 153–8, 185 multispecies assemblages, relationality of
Matter and Memory (Bergson) 151 81
Mbembe, Achille 96–7 mush time 65
 Index 219

Nachträglichkeit 93, 102–3, 106 our time 4, 34

naming 173 Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of
narrating time 127–34 Ageing (Segal) 148–50
narrativization 106 outdatedness, radical 23–4
narrativizing 99 outsider art 175
Nashville 112 overeating 51
natality 95, 188
negation of time 86 pace of life, loss of control 5–6
neoliberal time 161–2, 166 pain 126
neoliberalism 159 Palestinians 96, 97–8, 111
new chronic, the 3 paradoxes 96
New Labour 24 paranoid schizophrenia 172
New York City, Department of Sanitation parenting work 73
58–62, 60 Passerini, Luisa 181–2
newness 188 Autobiography of a Generation 98–100,
Ngai, Sianne 17 101–2, 105–10, 110–11, 113
Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History passive inertia 136
(Foucault) 24–5 past, the 6, 147–53
Nixon, Rob 171 refusal of 127
No Future (Edelman) 77, 79–87 virtual 141, 154
noncontemporaneity 143 Pateman, Carole, The Sexual Contract 49
non- patriarchy 72
developmental time 5, 79, 87–92 Paul, St 165–6
disciplinary space 26–7 Pennsylvania 125
event, the 13 petrification 97, 111–13, 120
recognition, violence of 44 phallic law 154–5
reproductive, the 76–9 Phillips, Patricia C. 57
child death 87–92 phylogenesis 145
non-developmental time 87–92 plasticity 12–13
queer theory 79–87 Poe, Edgar Allen 161
stop inertia 9, 74, 159 political
norms 28, 42, 45 art 21
violence of 44 events 23–4
Nosferatu (film) 168 generations 101
nostalgia 24 time 111–31, 16
now, the 68 politics 93, 95–6, 111, 181–2
now-time 72–3, 161–2, 166 Politics of Time, The (Osborne) 6
Pontalis, J. B. 38, 39
objective reality 151 population management 48
objet a 155 positioning 173
Occupy movement 112 post-
old age 147–53, 182 colonial theory 28–9
Oliner, Marion 35 future 83
On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance, modern time 7
Caygill 94–5 postmodernity 8–9
Ono, Yoko 112 potentiality 117
ontological negation 127 poverty 20, 48–9, 171
Opalka, Roman 21 Povinelli, Elizabeth 2, 14, 117, 164
Osborne, Peter, The Politics of Time 6 power 28, 37, 40–5, 94
220 Index

power-chronography 47–8 Puchner, M, 55

pre-psychical time 184 Puig, Maria 15
present, the punishment, durational 134
contraction of 9 pure psychology 39
crisis of 9
imagined action 130 qualified time 50, 73
as inter-generational 94 quality time 9, 50
stuck 8–9 queer
present tense, attachment to 116 studies 32
presentness 166 theory 77–8, 79–87
Pressed for Time (Wajcman) 5–6 time 77, 78, 79, 79–87, 92, 181
primal scenes 144–5, 157–8 question of time, return to 7–8
prison neurosis 124–5 Quijano, Aníbal 3–4
progress 6, 50, 161, 165–6, 180 quotidian experiences 2
Project for a Scientific Psychology, (Freud)
103 Raad, Walid 169–70
project time 60–1, 67–8, 180 radical suspension 87–92
projective identification 40 Rado, Sandor 136
protest, time of 105–10 Rancière, Jacques 10, 112
protest camps 111–13 Ray’s a Laugh (Billingham) 54, 62–6, 62,
protest practices 20 66
Proust, Marcel 88, 142 Real, the 38, 39, 40
psychic real time 130
differentiation 154 reality
inertia 187 accepting 154
life 29, 35, 181–2 Butler’s account of 40–5
the matrixial 153–8 of capitalism 160
and power 37 external 38
reality 25, 27, 28, 35–7 objective 151
Butler’s account of 40–5 psychic 25, 27, 28, 35–7, 37–40,
Freud and 37–40 40–5
and power 40–5 a third 37–40
as a third reality 37–40 thought 38
time 181–2, 185 Rego, Paula 139
transformations 26 Reich, Wilhelm 28
Psychic Life of Power, The (Butler) 37, relationality 16, 144
40–5 relativity, theory of 142
psychoanalysis 17–9, 22, 25, 29, 35, 36, remémoration 145, 146
39–40, 42, 45, 100, 101–2, 104, reminiscence 145
107–10, 154, 185–7 repetition 42, 70–2, 75, 78, 86, 87, 118, 150,
psychoanalytic time 17–19 176, 179, 181, 184, 186
psychoanalytic-Marxist tradition 28 repetitive labour 79
psychology 25 reproduction 77, 78
psychosexual development 103 and repetition 70
Psychosocial Imaginaries (Butler) 26 reproductive labour 71
psychosocial research methodologies 31
practices 20 resistance 94–5, 186
studies 25, 26–7, 28–9, 31–2, 41, 43, resurrection, artistic 167–71, 171–7, 172,
180 173, 174, 176, 177, 183
 Index 221

retroaction 103 slowness 50, 54, 93, 142–3

reverie 15 Sobukwe, Robert 97
Ridgeway, James 131 social
Riley, Denise 121, 126, 181 abandonment, zones of 117–18
Time Lived, Without its Flow 1, 2, 79, antagonisms 27
87–92 art 20
Robaina, Conception 173 bond, the 174–5
Roitman, Janet 5 change 6–7, 11–14
Rome (Serres) 34 connections 174–5
Rosário, Arthur ‘Bispo’ do 21, 164, 171–7, equality 16
172, 173, 174, 176, 183 social life
Rose, Jacqueline 28 psychic investments 26
Roseneil, Sasha 112, 113 temporality of 3
Ruddick, Sara 76 media 73
Russell, Bertrand 151 practice 20
ruthlessness 76 psyche 43
reproduction 72, 75, 77
Sandford, Stella 32, 74–5, 87, 90 works 21
Satyagraha 95 socially engaged art 20
Scarry, Elaine 126 society 25
scientific discovery 34 Society for Psychical Research 35
seduction theory 38 Society Must Be Defended (Foucault)
Seeds of Time, The (Jameson) 8–9 25
Segal, Lynne 97–8, 148–50 sociology 25
self, the 149–50 solitary confinement 118–21, 123–7, 127,
self- 131, 134, 135, 137, 182
maintenance 51 Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its
narration 102 Afterlives, (Guenther) 125–6,
preservation 35 135
realization 71 Solitary Watch 119
Serres, Michel 27, 32–4, 41, 44–5, 180 Song Dong 173
Sexual Contract, The (Pateman) 49 sorting 173
sexual difference 80, 156, 185 soul 41
sexuality and sexual knowledge 103–5, 181 South Africa 96–7, 111
Sharma, Sarah 8, 47–8, 50 Southwood, Ivor 9, 159
Sharpe, Christina 14, 118, 120, 127, 134–5, speech-acts 24
137 speed 57
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being theory 8
4–5, 116 staggered time 93–4
Shehadeh, Raja 97 Stanford University 123
Sickert, Walter 63 stasis 12, 134
signification 81 staying 25
signifiers 104 Stern, Nicholas 7
simultaneity 66, 93, 104 Stewart, Kathleen 67
slavery 4, 118, 134–5 stimulation, meaningful 124
Slaves of the State (Childs) 118 stream-of- consciousness 142
slow stuplimity 17
movement, the 54 subjection, desire for 41
violence 7, 54 subjectivity 29, 79–87
222 Index

Sumell, Jackie 21, 118, 120, 122, 126, 127, time-consuming practices 177
134–7 timelessness 78, 184
The House That Herman Built 115–16, time’s flow, lack of 87–92
120–1, 123–4, 127–34, 130, 132, time-space compression 47–8
135, 182 time-that-time-takes-to-come-to-an-end
Sunderland University 63 164–7
superego 187 topology 33
surpassing disasters 163–4, 167–71, Touch Sanitation (Ukeles) 58–62, 60,
183 70
suspended time 50, 51–2, 79, 87–92, 126, Toufic, Jalal 163–4, 167–71, 175, 177,
140–1, 179–82 183
suspension, of time 1–5 tradition 167–71, 183
sustainability workers 57 trans- 27, 28–31
Symbolic, the 80–1 transdisciplinarity 27–8, 29–31
symbolic memory 145–6 transdisciplinary practice 27, 29–31, 31,
symbolization 145–6 41, 45
synchronic time 103 transference 17, 39, 59, 103, 104–5, 107–10,
184, 186, 187
Tarantino, Michael 65 transsubjectivity 156
technological innovations 142 trapped
temporal space 65
drag 94 time 49
folding 33–4, 35, 41, 44–5, 47, 180 trauma 89, 103, 105–6, 181
orderings 67 traumatic memory 103, 106
suspension 1–5 Tronto, Joan 14
temporality truth 12, 145, 147, 152
distortions of 96 Tunisia 111
of social life 3 Turin, student uprisings, 1968 102
temporalization 104 Tyler, Imogen 72
testimonial work 110
Thatcher, Margaret 23, 63 Ukeles, Mierle Laderman 21, 54, 67, 69–70,
thermodynamics 3 121, 180
thought reality 38 Handshake Ritual 58–9
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!
(Freud) 85 Proposal for an exhibition
Time and Free Will (Bergson) 151 ‘CARE ’ 55–8
Time Binds (Freeman) 32 name-cleaning project 59
time crisis 5–6 Touch Sanitation 58–62, 60, 70
Time Driven (Johnston) 18 washing and cleaning performances
time lived without its consequence 89 58
Time Lived, Without its Flow (Riley) 1, 2, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and
79, 87–92 other Cruel, Inhuman or
time not passing 1–5 Degrading Treatment or
time poverty 49 Punishment 119
time starvation 72 unbearable time 121
Time That Remains, The (Agamben) unbecoming time 4, 5, 11–14
162–3, 164–7 unbinding 104, 185
time without qualities 10 unbound time 184
time-as-movement 4 unconscious, the 25, 38, 38–9
 Index 223

unemployed, the 48 Wallace, Herman 21, 128

United Kingdom, protest camps 111–12, The House That Herman Built 115–16,
112–13 120–1, 123–4, 127–34, 130, 132,
United States of America 73 135, 182
Civil Rights Movement 112 imprisonment 121–7, 122, 126–7, 134,
Federal Prison System 118, 119 136
incarcaration rate 119, 120 solitary confinement 123–7, 127, 131,
protest camps 112 135, 137
securitized state 117 warehousing 7
solitary confinement 125–6 watching/witnessing 142
unpredictability 76 Weekes, Kathi 32
unthinkable time 134–7 Whitehead, A.N. 29
urgency 47 witches 4
utopian projects 20 women
control of 4
van Dooren, Thom 15, 82 domestic labour 55–8
Vázquez, Roland 4 and the everyday 87
Veltman, Andrea 70–1 maternal care-work 72–6
Vietnam War 112 now time 72–3
violence poverty 48–9
slow 7, 54 Women’s Liberation Movement 107
of social norms 44 women’s time 79, 92, 179–80, 181
of solitary confinement 135 ‘Women’s Time’ (Kristeva) 75–6
violent-care 15 Woodfox, Albert 121, 123–4, 131, 133, 134
virtual past, the 141, 154 Woolf, Virginia 70
viscous time 68 work time 50
Volkan, Vamik D. 100 working through 136, 157–8, 184
world politics 3
wage labour 3 world-political time 4
waiting 7, 93–4, 96, 97–8, 137, 181 Wright, Stephen 9–10
end times 182–3
and loss 108–10 Zeitlos 184
modes of 2 zero-hours contracts 9, 48
politics of 110–13 Zimmerman, George 134
Wajcman, Judy 5–6 Žižek, Slavoj 3, 28, 84, 159, 159–60
wake work 137 zones of being 117
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