time

//"For an anarchist, the past is always better than the present, but the future is always better than the past."//

— Jerry Zaslove

Linear, cyclic or spiral

One important source of the ideas of time that i'm trying to articulate here is the work of Ursula K. Le Guin.

In the introduction to

In her early novel //Rocannon's World,// Le Guin coined the term 'ansible' for a miraculous device that makes instantaneous communication across interstellar distances possible, a device resulting from the theoretical work of Shevek, the protagonist of her later novel //The Dispossessed.//

"...a pattern — line, zigzag, spiral, hopscotch, trajectory—which has what the circle in its perfection does not have: direction."

sequency and simultaneity The "general temporal theory" that Le Guin's anarchist character Shevek develops, and the objections that are raised to his ideas by the other characters, provide guidance toward an understanding of time that is not merely consistent with but positively emblematic of the liberatory vision / project of anarchism.

Simultaneity is dismissed (not merely categorized) as 'mysticism' by the tough-minded anarchists of Annares, and Shevek is pressured to drop his work on it. His senior [ position title?] at the Physics Institute, Sabul, an adversarial and status-anxious [parasite?], tells Shevek to focus on the more respectable sequency physics — until Shevek completes his first, highly original, work on simultaneity and, in order to get it published, agrees to share the credit with Sabul.

Shevek's revolutionary general temporal theory achieves the integration, or reconciliation, of the complementary opposites of simultaneity and sequency. The transcendence of both linearity and cyclicality (or circularity) implies a spiral.

Zaslove's characterization of an anarchist relationship to history can also be interpreted as a spiral: down and back, through memory, from the present to the past; then up and over, through imagination, from the past to the future.

futurity: Collis emphasizes the relation of archivality to time, writing that "anarcho-scholastic" work entails "anarchiving futurity for continuity's sake" (22), which is to say resisting the enclosure of the future: preserving the possibility of continuation. This (arguably paradoxical) emancipatory, anarchic engagement with archivality is paradigmatic of the complex, open-ended, spiral / helical, anarchist conception of time that i believe follows from both Zaslove and Shevek (Le Guin).

"the" anarchist movement? Like bell hooks, i would at least drop the "the" (she refers, in Feminism is for Everybody, to "feminist movement" which is much more dynamic...) But i would be tempted to go further with my transformation, to also drop the "v" and pluralize: to speak of anarchist //**moments**//.

Leroy Little Bear "A Concept of Native Title" **usufruct** (property) linear vs. circular (?) time (learned of his work through Thomas King's ___ Massey Lectures, //The Truth About Stories//)

Woodcock "Tyranny of the Clock" Arcade Fire: //"They heard me singing and they told me to stop / quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock."// (Sprawl II, The Suburbs)

Hawking's //Brief History of Time// bp Nichol's homage to Hawking bpNichol's "R.I.P. (Remains in Process) everything remains in process; additional pun: human remains in the process of decomposition — the playful humour is especially bittersweet given Nichol's very untimely demise.

echo: Stephen Collis' Anarcho-scholasticism: "when product is returned to process" !!!!

mortality development relationships emergent understanding(s) / wisdom


 * time in the natural and social sciences**

analysing change over time synchronic and diachronic

Ray Kurzweil and Spiritual Machines and The Singularity (technology)

"time lag" and birth cohort "Birth cohorts ... as sociocultural milieus ... [are] exposed to different sociocultural norms" during their respective epochs. Konrath //et al.// explain: "...the time-lag method... separates the effects of birth cohort from age by analyzing samples of people of the same age at different points in time."

Konrath, //et al.// 2011 in //Personality and Social Psychology Review// 15(2) http://psr.sagepub.com/content/15/2/180.full.pdf+html Empathy and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) see more at civility

Robert Paul Wolff - "Narrative Time" (article from philosophy journal)

Crispin Sartwell //End of Story// critique of narrative (?)

Narrative Therapy and anarchism, feminism and Foucault (Stephen Madigan)

in culture

time travel

Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris (2011)

alternate timelines / realities:

Mike Cahill's Another Earth (2011)

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly past." — Douglas Adams

see also: paradox