Queer and Deleuzian Temporalities

Toward a Living Present

Rachel Loewen Walker

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350184367
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Teoria critica

Rachel Loewen Walker's original study of Deleuze's theory of temporality advances a concept of the living present as a critical juncture through which novel meanings and activisms take flight in relation to new feminist materialisms, queer theory, Indigenous studies, and studies of climate.
Drawing on literature, philosophy, popular culture, and community research, Loewen Walker unsettles the fierce linearity of our stories, particularly as they uphold fixed systems of gender, sexuality, and identity. Treading new ground for Deleuzian studies, this book focuses on the non-linearity of the living present to show that everything is within rather than outside of time. Through this critical re-evaluation, which takes in climate change, queer and trans politics, and Indigenous sovereignty, Queer and Deleuzian Temporalities "thickens" the present moment. By opening up multiple pasts and multiple futures we are invited to act with a deepened level of accountability to all possible timelines.

1 Telling Time: From Deleuze to Heraclitus and from Queer Theory to Indigenous Ways of Knowing

We inhabit time as fish live in water. Our being is being in time. Its solemn music nurtures us, opens the world to us, troubles us, frightens and lulls us. The universe unfolds into the future, dragged by time, and exists according to the order of time.

—Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time

As I complete this manuscript in March of 2021, the entire world has been in the grip of the Covid-19 pandemic. If ever there was an event that brought us face to face with the irregularity of time, it is the global speeds and slows of a powerful virus. In some ways the last year has been dreadfully slow, time all but stopped in my hometown of Saskatoon, SK, for the months of April and June, 2020 when restaurants, schools, and businesses closed down. Streets felt eerie without traffic, grocery stores were desolate with their empty shelves and parking lots. In other ways, time has flown by as the signifiers that mark and stretch time (summer festivals and events, the movements of leaving the house at scheduled times) have dissolved for some, amplified for others. Days and weeks run together in a strangely anticipatory climate as we have pushed “pause” on so many parts of our lives, while still living in a world that is moving faster than ever around us.

With her characteristic precision in both philosophical and political climates, Claire Colebrook’s “Fast Violence, Revolutionary Violence: Black Lives Matter and the 2020 Pandemic” snaps back at the timelines of the Covid-19 pandemic. She demonstrates their implication in racisms, sexisms, and other modes of “slow violence” as it is enacted through systematic discriminations and exclusions that occur “gradually and out of sight.”¹ As it applies to the pandemic, Colebrook explains how in the United States, the virus’s higher prevalence rates within non-white communities play out alongside increased border and immigration controls. Effectively, the pandemic operates to give speed to many slow violences that have been here all along.

Not unlike the reach of the 2017 women’s marches, alongside an amplification of Tarana Burke’s 2006 hashtag #metoo, the Black Lives Matter movement was reignited by the slowest eight minutes and forty-five seconds many had ever witnessed in the devastating and merciless murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. In each of these cases, particular “events” represented tipping points for public outcry. Floyd’s murder was a tipping point for Black Lives Matter, while Trump’s inauguration ceremony tipped the scales of a misogynistic and destructive election campaign, spilling into a global women’s march movement that is estimated to have included 673 marches of more than 7 million people. Each event contracts, that is, recalls and relives, centuries of slow violence against racialized communities, against women and feminized people, ensuring that we are in the thick of these histories; the power of their lineages still hurt and haunt us as we work to build futures of freedom and justice. As other chapters in this book will describe, time cannot be extracted from the lived bodies and environments upon which it is inscribed. Bodies that have breasts, testes, and those that have both. Bodies that are tall and white, nonbinary and brown. Bodies that use wheelchairs to move and bodies that use technological devices to hear. The intersectional subjectivities that make up each unique “human” are entangled with our memories, our hopes for the future, our understanding of ourselves.

So what is time? Is it the measurable period of an action or event? Is it relative to the observer? Is it entirely an illusion—merely a childhood security blanket that we cling to in order to avoid the chaos of timelessness—or is it a grand clock that moves us ever-forward, never backward. In any formation, time is utterly fascinating and endlessly complex, having captivated writers, thinkers, scientists, and creators for centuries. There has been a lot of querying about time going on as of late, whether regarding our obsessive time management in an age of more and more complicated notions of productivity, explorations into the speed of change and its impact on knowledge production, or as a central piece in the call for Indigenous sovereignty.² In the face of the contemporary breadth and span of such queries, some have stated that we are in a “temporal turn,” but I am not sure this is accurate. The entire corpus of Western philosophy betrays a fascination with time, whether that fascination is with metaphysical or concrete time, and so it seems as though time’s turn has been here all along.

Taking up some of these twists and turns, this chapter tells time through a variety of frames—classical physics, quantum physics, ancient philosophy, queer theory, and Indigenous philosophy—by asking the following questions: What is time? What does it do for us? This chapter sets the stage for many of the chapters to come in its exploration of a variety of ways of talking about and theorizing time but, more importantly, it demonstrates that our theorizations of time are themselves part of the very timelines through which we are shaped and understood. A caveat here is the absolute struggle I experienced in telling these stories outside of a linear frame. We are all intoxicated by causal narratives, and I am just as susceptible to the lure of a happy ending as anyone. Instead, my strategy has been to read out of step, to layer stories in new ways, and to bring divergent histories into conversation with one another through unique enactments.

Is Time Absolute or Is It Relative?

The living present, as outlined in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, tempers all of my own engagements with time, whether philosophical or physical. Bringing philosophy “to life” so to speak, I have lived its thesis daily since first encountering the living present’s fluid movement forward and back. The living present is actually only one of three Deleuzian syntheses of time, each of which serves as a unique contraction of past, present, and future. The second synthesis of time is the pure past (or memory), which operates on the present in order to make the present pass, while the third provides the possibility for the new or an undetermined future through the caesura: the cut between the pure past and a novel future. Discussed at length in Chapter 2, the three syntheses operate simultaneously, all informing the concept of the living present, and illustrating the ways that time is given life through the activities of remembering, storytelling, predicting, and anticipating. Most significantly, the living present demonstrates that there is no time-as-container within which we have experience; rather we are ourselves created and in turn create the world through these temporal processes, through lived experience. Also important is that these processes are passive; meaning that rather than understanding time as a series of selective, agential, or active associations, wherein our conscious selves peel back through the rolodex of memory to pull out the bluest or shiniest card, our memories and predictions are largely unconscious (we may say to our rolodex: “show me a plumber” and it spits out the smells of our childhood basement flooding during a historic rainstorm). Our memories, in this model, are governed as much by our bodies (the fingers that instinctively know how to translate words to keys to screen) and environments (the pink bar of soap that recalls my grandmother’s bathroom sink from thirty years past) as they are by our consciousness.

So upon confessing my bias, I am still set to attend to a much wider landscape of time and few are more famous than Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, published in 1915. Einstein monumentally shifted our understanding of time from that which happens outside of us, or to us, to that which has changing properties, relative to the position or experience of the observer. Einstein’s special theory of relativity demonstrated that, on a grand scale, there is no fixed frame of reference in the universe; there is no house that holds our cosmos together. Instead, everything moves relative to everything else and, in the case of space and time, we cannot even think about space without also thinking about time. Building on this, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity argued that, rather than separate entities, space and time make up one continuum (or a fourth dimension) called space-time. Space-time is best described through a curved or “warped” grid, where any mass or large object will distort space-time by forming a gravity well around the heavy object. Think of a layer of fabric tightly stretched across a room and then imagine placing a bowling ball in the centre of the fabric. As the bowling ball sinks toward the floor it pulls the fabric with it, bending the “space-time” around it. Planetary orbit, then, is the result of the sun bending the fabric of space-time. The Earth travels along this bend, just as the moon travels along the Earth’s bend in the space-time continuum.

Long before Einstein literally curved space and time, Western science believed the closed Universe model developed in Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687). Newton’s world relied on absolute space and absolute time where each was bound to quantifiable, natural laws. This meant that the universe was fixed; it was the house that held our world together. Newton built his science upon the works of Galileo Galilei, and of course Galileo is infamous for his daring critique of scientists and astronomers before him, who for centuries looked up at the heavens and saw the sun and stars move across a static sky that belonged to Earth. Galileo fought for one of the most revolutionary discoveries in the world of science: the discovery that the Earth was not at the centre of the Universe.

For Galileo, the scene looked very different: he saw gravitational movement around Jupiter and other planets, he saw the stillness of the night sky alongside a moving, orbiting Earth. Such a reorientation cost Galileo his freedom, but transformed our concepts of space and time from things relative to our environment to things that are independent from their environment.³ And so, building on Galileo’s work, Newton’s famous claim that “absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equally without relation to anything external” made time into an absolute entity; space became an absolute terrain and both precipitated a scientific system that turned natural philosophy on its head and ushered in our modern understanding of science.⁴ This enabled society to measure, predict, and study both space and time in a much more rigorous manner and, through Newton’s “container” model, both served as receptacles for movement and extension; this means that he supported the spatialization of temporality or the separation of subjectivity and temporality (whether I am seven years old or eighty, whether I perceive it quickly or slowly, time ticks along at a steady rate, because it is outside of me). Such a shift precipitated the invention of that object to which we slavishly submit ourselves for daily guidance and measure: the modern clock.

It is no great proclamation to state that the majority of our Western apparatuses of time-telling limit understanding to an external counting-of-moments. The clock is heralded as one of the most profound inventions of all time, with roots as far back as 2000 BCE. The invention of the pendulum-powered clock took place in 1656 by Christiaan Huygans, but before that there were sundials, water clocks, timesticks, and obelisks to track and measure time’s passing. While the time-telling of the sundial relies on the movement of the sun alongside a carefully crafted spherical scale, the mechanical clock captures time within a self-propelled apparatus. Following its invention, the mechanical clock garnered ownership over the passage of time, and thus began to direct the activities of the day. Today the hands of the clock, now more often a digital screen, have masterful control over our activities. I know that when my alarm goes off at 7:00 am, I have two hours before I have to begin work. I know that when the clock strikes 10:15 that there is no going back to 10 am to quickly catch up on the fifteen minutes I have missed.

Today, elementary school textbooks cite Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity as the “true” account of space and time (space-time)—it having superseded Newton’s substantivalism (and relationalism in its historical form); the mechanical clock, however, has maintained Newton’s absolute universe. We never look at the clock and say, “It’s 1:30 pm, but for my aunt who lives in Lake Louise, which is 5,449 feet above sea level, time ticks faster, so it might be 1:31.”⁵ Rather, the clock remains our North Star and, with it, we perceive time as fixed, constant, and external to us. We are all governed by the force of the clock’s ticking hands and as they move ever-forward we rush, fret, agonize, and plan. But what does it mean to move from a model where time is described in terms of motion to one where motion, movement, and change are described in terms of time?

In the tradition of Western philosophy, this query has often been answered through two unique philosophies of time, namely relationism and substantivalism. Relationism shares a history with Heraclitus, Aristotle, Leibniz, and even Einstein and argues that time is not a thing in itself, but rather emerges from events; there wou...