Raqs Media Collective - Plankton in the Sea

8/12/2019 Raqs Media Collective - Plankton in the Sea

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Raqs Media Collective

Planktons inthe Sea: A FewQuestionsRegarding theQualities ofTime

To ask a human being to account for time is notvery different from asking a floating fragment ofplankton to account for the ocean. How does theplankton bank the ocean?

What is time?What is the time?The time is of your choosing.The time is not of your choosing.The time is out of joint.

The time has come.The time needs changing.The time has gone.The time has come and gone.The time has flown.The time is not convenient.The time is at hand.The time has been spent well.The time has been wasted.The time is awkward.The time is ripe.The time has passed so swiftly.

The time is now.What is the time?We say Òmy time,Ó Òyour time,Ó but how do

we tie these models of personhood, of being (me,you, us) to the medium within which all thesemeÕs and youÕs and usÕs all swim in? Heideggersays, ÒBeing and time determine each otherreciprocally, but in such a manner that neithercan the former Ð Being Ð be addressed assomething temporal nor can the latter Ð time Ðbe addressed as a being.Ó 1

In Confessions , St. Augustine begins hisdiscourse on time by confessing, ÒWhat then istime? Provided that no one asks me, I know. If Iwant to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know.Ó 2

In our effort to account for time, we will confessto our confusions. Recent research in the neuroscience of howour brain processes time seems to indicate thatthere are several clocks, in fact several kinds ofclocks running in our brain. A recent article byBurkhard Bilger in the New Yorker onneuroscientist David M. Eagleman explains,

Eagleman borrows a conceit from ItaloCalvinoÕs ÒInvisible Cities.Ó [sic ] The brain,he writes, is like Kublai Khan, the greatMongol emperor of the thirteenth century.It sits enthroned in its skull, Òencased indarkness and silence,Ó at a lofty removefrom brute reality. Messengers stream infrom every corner of the sensory kingdom,bringing word of distant sights, sounds, andsmells. Their reports arrive at differentrates, often long out of date, yet the detailsare all stitched together into a seamlesschronology. The difference is that Kublai

Khan was piecing together the past. Thebrain is describing the present Ð

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Mask excavated in Mycene, 12th cent BC.

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processing reams of disjointed data on thefly, editing everything down to aninstantaneous now. How does it manageit? 3

Bilger continues by detailing the context fromwhich EaglemanÕs work emerges:

Just how many clocks we contain still isnÕt

clear. É The circadian clock, which tracksthe cycle of day and night, lurks in thesuprachiasmatic nucleus, in thehypothalamus. The cerebellum, whichgoverns muscle movements, may controltiming on the order of a few seconds orminutes. The basal ganglia and variousparts of the cortex have all been nominatedas timekeepers, though thereÕs somedisagreement on the details. The standardmodel, proposed by the late Columbiapsychologist John Gibbon in the nineteen-

seventies, holds that the brain hasÒpacemakerÓ neurons that release steadypulses of neurotransmitters. More recently,at Duke, the neuroscientist Warren Meckhas suggested that timing is governed bygroups of neurons that oscillate at differentfrequencies. At U.C.L.A., Dean Buonomanobelieves that areas throughout the brainfunction as clocks, their tissue ticking withneural networks that change in predictablepatterns. ÒImagine a skyscraper at night,Óhe told me. ÒSome people on the top floorwork till midnight, while some on the lowerfloors may go to bed early. If you studiedthe patterns long enough, you could tell thetime just by looking at which lights are on.Ó

Time isnÕt like the other senses, Eaglemansays. Sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearingare relatively easy to isolate in the brain.They have discrete functions that rarelyoverlap: itÕs hard to describe the taste of asound, the color of a smell, or the scent of afeeling. É But a sense of time is threadedthrough everything we perceive. ItÕs there inthe length of a song, the persistence of ascent, the flash of a light bulb. ÒThereÕsalways an impulse toward phrenology inneuroscience Ð toward saying, ÔHere is thespot where itÕs happening,ÕÒ Eagleman toldme. ÓBut the interesting thing about theperception of time is that there is no spot.ItÕs a distributed property. ItÕs metasensory;it rides on top of all the others.Ó 4

In the Wake of Storms

It is not at all surprising that we are all thinkingquite seriously about the actual possibility of

thinking of time-based and spatially-locatedforms of exchange today. Whenever capitalismlicks its wounds, looses confidence Ð as it isdoing today Ð dormant economic imaginariescome into view. 5 Economists start talking topoets, artists, and lay people Ð those they areotherwise often keen to dismiss as madmen orignoramuses.

The need-based systems that emerge in the

aftermath of periodic crashes or in the wake ofwar and catastrophes are small conceptualwindows on the realization of some of ourdesires of what a collective life based onmutuality, generosity, reciprocity, and trust mightbe. As capitalism eats away at the planetÕsresources, and spends more on destroyinghuman life than it does on sustaining it, the linesbetween having no choice and desiringsomething different may begin to blur.

After-work TimeAs work-time becomes a less hallowed objectiveand criterion of living, as it becomes moreinsecure and unpredictable, incomprehensibleand exhausting with inchoate repetition, thevalue of after-work and non-work time canreassert itself as the site of inventiveness offorms of life and mutuality. A wide spectrum ofnineteenth-century thinkers imagined thisexperience of duration as the site of what lifecould aspire to become. Their vision waseclipsed by their twentieth-century epigoneswho ran amok over our imagination of duration

with their frenzied worship of work-time andtheir paranoiac policing of time. How can we

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speak in the language of exchange without usingthe vocabulary of measure? How can the span oftime that covers the length of a service could beevaluated and divided into exchangeable units? The offerings and requests that are part ofsuch project could be read both as amelancholic-ironic take on not being able to holdon to precious moments of life or as an incipientcoming-into-view of an enormous spectrum of

specific inventions that human beings can makefor one another when the imperatives of work,security, achievement, and hierarchy are held inabeyance. It will be a challenge to enact andthink through what this can mean for us today. Atpresent, this enormous spectrum, like our KublaiKhan-brains, lives enclosed in silence anddarkness. One could say that in a world wherethe division and hierarchy of labor functions asthe dominant measure of life, we inevitably endup arranging various capacities and gifts asunequal but equivalent. But when we are not

brought into a relationship of equivalence vis-ˆ-vis one another and mediated by abstract laborpower, but instead invoke and discover eachother through acts, desires, gestures, requests,and offers that activate propensities towardsnew possibilities of intercourse that lie outsidework-time, we are faced with an interestingenigma.

Perishables and ImperishablesThe time of human life is a finite, perishablething. Which is why two quantities, X and Y ofperishable human time, can be brought into arelationship of fungibility only by means of athird thing, Z, that we agree upon as beingimperishable, at least in comparison to humanlife. For thousands of years, this Z wascondensed into units of precious metals,especially gold, which were treated as valuableprecisely because their durability and theirapparent imperishability made them appear asthings that lived outside of time.

In India, a currency note declares, ÒIpromise to pay the bearer the sum of X rupees.ÓThese rupees reflect the value of a certain sum ofgold, which because of its imperishability issomething that will be of the same quality, sayten years from now, as it is today, so that aÒpromiseÓ made to pay the bearer may beredeemable in the future.

It is important to hold on to this notion ofuniqueness and finitude, because lurking behindthis calculation is the fact that if we view timefrom the point of view of the individual then thetruths that each of us lives only once (hence eachmoment is unique) and that death is inevitable(hence, one day, our time will end) make time

itself the most scarce commodity we have. Thatis why we buy time, save time, and hoard time.

The irony is, we buy time with the time we take todo the things that fetch us the value againstwhich we purchase time. We make time to buytime to sell time to buy time to make time. Andkey to all of this is the imperishability of gold.Even now, the fascination that ancient gold hasover us has something to do with the fact that agold ornament that is five thousand years oldseems, somehow, as good as new. Its promise to

pay its bearer the sum of its worth in weight isnot diminished over time.

AlchemistÕs GoldNow, the old alchemists dream of making goldand discovering the elixir of life make sense Ðboth are quests for immortality, to make oneÕsclaim on time last longer than ever before. 6

In todayÕs world not even gold can guaranteethe stability of value over time. At the end ofWorld War Two, the Bretton Woods Agreementssaw the worldÕs major currencies abandoning

their reliance on gold reserves as an expressionof their value. Instead, they pegged their value tothe rate at which they exchanged against the USdollar, with the understanding that at least theUS dollar would exchange against gold. 7

However, in 1971, the United States underRichard Nixon abandoned the gold standard. 8

Since then, global financial and monetarysystems have been in a kind of free fall. Thegravity of the gold standard has given way to thefree-floating levitation of the value of differentcurrencies. The US dollar tries to do the job thatgold did for thousands of years: by printingendless copies of itself which are then sent outinto the world as a way of shoring up a systemultimately based on the faith that the worldÕsgovernments have in the idea that the USgovernment will outlast them, just as goldoutlasts other materials.

Never in human history has so much restedon the fortunes of something as fragile as thedestiny of an individual state in the world systemof states. This is what lies behind the value ofyour time, my time, and our time Ð ultimately, thevalue of our life is pegged to the fetish of thefree-falling, free-floating dollar bill. No wonder itsays ÒIn God We TrustÓ; when all else fails, thedivine is the only thing left to turn to.

Time, Workers, and the RepublicThe relationship between the time and effort thatone puts into work, the nature of recompensethat one receives, and the quality of oneÕsparticipation in social life is a triangulatedproblem that seems to have been with us forthousands of years. Since Plato, if not earlier, wehave been accustomed to the idea that those

whose hands are busy all day long cannot havethe ÒtimeÓ and the detachment necessary for an

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Sir Daniel Mackinnon Hamilton's rupee note.

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engagement with social questions. Hence, theymust never be given the authority or the power todecide things, not even for themselves. This issomewhat circular Ð it automatically ensuresthat those who have power allocate themselvesthe freedom to not labor, with the excuse thatthose who labor cannot find the time to think onmatters larger than themselves. In other words,the quality of the time of the thinker and the doer

are seen to be two different things have hithertobeen arranged hierarchically in all societies.What happens when we begin to pay

attention to the seconds and the hours? Weremember them, tell stories about them, makepoems out of tea breaks and songs out of timestolen from laboring. It is the gossip and idlechatter of seconds and hours that makes forsociety. We know what we know about each otherbecause we tell each other the public secrets ofcapital. Stretched end to end, this chatter turnsinto history.

When we are done with accounting for ourexhaustions, we are still left with the question ofhow, for instance, we value a personÕs life Ð thesum total of the value of their time on earth. Thething is, you can gauge the value of a thing onlywhen you know what you miss when you lose it.The problem is, you would not be in a position to judge the worth of your life were you to lose it.And so, to one school of thinking, the worth of alife can only be gauged from what its absencemeans to those who inherit the loss.

Human Life Value: An InsuranceCalculation

How is the insurance industry, with a littlehelp from mortality figures and actuarialtables, able to tell you what you are worth,not to yourself, but to your inheritors?Aclear way to assess oneÕs financial worth isto calculate Òhuman life value.Ó Thisconcept was developed in 1924 by SolomonS. Huebner of the Wharton School ofBusiness. Huebner is considered afounding father of the life insuranceindustry and a dominant force in itsprofessionalization.

Here is how human life value is calculated.First, deduct all personal expenses Ð food,clothes, travel, entertainment, and so on Ðfrom your annual income. Income includessalary, bonus, employee benefits likecompany contributions to pension funds,and income from investments. (It isimportant to make as complete andrealistic an assessment of your income as

possible, so you donÕt end up over-insuring.)What remains of your income after

deducting personal expenses is what yourfamily consumes.

Second, see how many years of earning youhave left (your retirement age minus yourpresent age). Project family expenses up toretirement, allowing for reasonableincrements. Subtract any pension benefitsthey would receive if you die. Add non-

recurring expenses, like your childrenÕshigher education, or their marriage. Theshortfall is what you should insure for. Andthird, calculate the present value of theshortfall, allowing for a reasonable rate ofinflation. 9

Here is an example: suppose you earn 300,000euros per year, and have twenty-five years untilretirement. Your total earnings until you retirewould be 20.9 million, after factoring in anannual increment of 10 percent. Say 60 percent

of your income goes towards taxes and personalexpenses. The rest would be family expenses. Atthe end of twenty-five years, then, your totalfamily expenses would be 10.1 million. It isdifficult to predict inflation over long periods, butfollowing the current rate of 6.5 percent, thepresent value of your family expenses overtwenty-five years would work out to 4.2 million.That is your financial worth in relation to yourfamily.

So, if you were to die tomorrow, your familywould have to earn 4.2 million units of currencyover the next twenty-five years in order tocompensate monetarily for your absence. Thisgives you an indication of how much you shouldinsure yourself for. If you divide 4.2 million downto the last minute of all twenty-five years, youget 2.5 units per minute and 150 units per hour.That is the value of your time per minute and perhour over the next twenty-five years, accordingto the insurance industry. This is how the value ofevery minute is calculated backwards from theevent of death.

Ian WalkerÕs Formula for the Value of YourTime

Another way of computing the value of life-timeis made available by Ian Walker, a professor atthe Lancaster School of Business at BirminghamUniversity. Walker has calculated what it meansto value every minute of our time. 10 He even has aformula for it: V=(W((100-t)/100))/C, with ÒVÓbeing the value of time, ÒWÓ the hourly wage rate,ÒtÓ the tax rate, and ÒCÓ the cost of living.

In 2002, when this study was done, itshowed that time had become increasinglyvaluable over the last twenty-five years. This is a

slightly different measure from that of insurance,mortality figures, and actuarial tables. If there

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we had sense of how much the absence of ourtime would cost others, here we get a sense ofhow much our time is worth to us as we live. Thetwo figures can be different, as the secondequation does not include several factors thatthe first one (being more socially embedded)includes. Does this mean that the same unit oftime can be valued differently depending onwhether we look at it from the point of view of

the inevitability of death or, on the other hand,the contingency of life?Walker claimed that his research showed

that if people had an endless supply of money,more than 80 percent would use that money tobuy time. In other words, he argued, most of ususe money to by time. But given that time ismoney, we are back to where we were a littlewhile ago, using time to buy time.

Regardless of whether we arrive at our valueof time from death or from life, we are faced withthe fact that key determinants of the calculation,

wages, and the cost of living are in manyinstances completely out of our control. In adesperate, war-torn country, wages may be low,but the cost of living may be incredibly high. Evenpoorer people may have to ÒbuyÓ themselvesprotection. We know this to be true from the factthat in many cases it is expensive to be poor, andthat the rich are, in many instances, subsidized.These days they call it stimulus.

This leads to even more skewed resultswhen it comes to the quality of time. Thequalitative experience of time spent waiting in along queue for food in a soup kitchen is verydifferent from the experience of time earned by arich patron in a restaurant that takes pride indelivering quick and efficient service. In bothinstances, a hungry person waited for food. Inone case, they felt they exhausted their time inthe wait, and in the other, they felt that they hadearned the time of a good meal. If we are themeal, and our inheritors are the ones waiting toeat us up, then the value of our time can besensed from how they recount their experienceof waiting for us to die.

While on the subject of waiting, and theprice of waiting, we could drift momentarilytowards Howard NemerovÕs poem, ÒWaitingRoomsÓ:

What great genius invented the waitingroom?Every sublime idea no doubt is simple, butSimplicity alone is never enough.A cube sequestered in space and filled withtime,Pure time, refined, distilled, denatured timeWithout qualities, without even dust É

Dust in sunbeam between Venetian blindsWhere a boy and his mother wait É

Eternity!But I am straying from the subject: waitingrooms.

All over the world, in the great terminalsAnd the tiny rooms of disbarredabortionists,For transport, diagnosis, or divorce ÉAlas! Maybe this mighty and terrible theme

Is too much for me. But wait! I have an idea.

YouÕve heard it said, of course, thatanythingMay instantly turn into everythingIn this world secreting figures of itselfForever and everywhere? How wonderfulThat is, how horrible. Wherever you wait,Between anticipation and regret,Between the first desire and the secondIs but the razor of a moment, isNot even time; and neither is motion more,

At sixty miles an hour or six hundred,Than an illusion sent by devils to affordThemselves illusory laughs at our expense(we suffer, but they become happier).

Think how even in heaven where they waitThe Resurrection, even in the gravesOf heaven with the harps, this law applies:One waiting room will get you to the next.Even your room, even your very own,With the old magazines on the end tables,The goldfish in the bowl below the windowWhere the sunbeam falls between Venetianblinds ÉAnd in the downstairs fall there is yourmailbox,One among many gathering paper and dust,A waiting room figure, summing upMuch in a little, the legendary boxWhere hope only remains. You wait andsee. 11

What really happens while we wait? Does ourbody, our consciousness register the passage oftime in a coherent, unified, responsibly sovereignway?

Timecode DriftDonÕt we all experience momentary blackouts,anomalies, premonitions, and short sharp burstsof dŽjˆ vu? And could it be that these snags andglitches and cracks and disturbances occurbecause our mental clocks are a little off-key? It is interesting to consider what happenswhen two bits of digital sound or video are joinedtogether. Essentially, this operation has to rely onthe two bits of data first identified on the basis

of their timecode stamps. A timecode stampappears on images produced when you make a

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Raqs Media Collective, Unusually Adrift From the Shoreline , Site-specific installation at the RŒdhusteateret, Sandnes, Norway, 2008.

photograph with even a basic consumer enddigital camera Ð it provides information includingwhen the photograph was made and the framenumber. In a recent article, Gautam Pemmaraju triesto fathom the strangely anomalous phenomenathat sometimes occur in the video editing roomwhen joining two different bits of footage leadsto unexpected outcomes:

Timecode is essentially a labeling systemfor video, film and audio material whereineach frame has a unique identificationaddress in Hour:Minute:Second:Frameformat. As binary coded media metadata,timecode [ sic ] formats (standardizedSMPTE, EBU) are practical ways to identify,locate, access and then manipulaterecorded audio/visual data. 12

PemmarajuÕs story of footage and data going out

of sync is familiar to anyone who has spent timein an editing suite. He recounts how he went intoan editing suite for postproduction work with livefootage from a music festival, and he soonrealized, Òto his utter dismay,Ó the anguish thatwas in store for him:

A multiplicity of timecode issues Ð drift,break, sync, control track Ð appeared onthe master tapes and I was confronted withthe horror of the loss of automatedsynchronization amongst other devilry. Thisperfidy cannot be overstated Ð theprospect of trying to achieve/repair sync,the flaws of which are in turn mischievouslyasynchronous, begins with the acceptance

of many, many edit hours of painfulremedial work. Someone or somethingfucked up and I had to pay for it. 13

As he watched his material go progressively outof sync, Pemmaraju realized that he wasconfronted with a case of what he callsÒtimecode drift.Ó He explains it as a mysteriousde-syncing that happens in live (or Òas liveÓ) TVproduction, where the inputs of multiplecameras are received simultaneously (andsynchronously by Genlock) and are edited in real

time to one recording source (called the Òon-linemasterÓ). Pemmaraju notes that,

Drift is loss of sync. The clocks driftedapart, or more precisely, the Òmaster clockÓwas not able to consistently enslave itssubordinates. And the drift itself was a

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variable, not a constant. Its value changedover time, bringing up the rather curiousidea of a drifting apart of time over time.Multiple clocks, meant to be synchronouslytethered to one another instead achieve asort of frisson, a momentary excitement orperturbation, unannounced and governedperhaps by an incalculable whimsy as theybreak away from their moorings, leading

then to schismatic clocks and parallel,fractured times.

Pondering on the phantasmagoric nature ofthese interlinked drifts, of time, and perception,leads him on Òto consider paths crossing, orcrossed paths, missed opportunities, andultimately, an eschatological stoppage Ð agrinding halt of time.Ó 14

The Qualia of TimePemmarajuÕs story urges us to consider the

occasional senses of temporal dislocation thatwe all experience from time to time Ð instancesof timecode drift within our consciousness,small insurgencies of slave clocks against atyrannical master clock. Little outbursts of thetime of the id against the timetable of the super-ego? When thinking about the qualities or, to usea more precise term, the qualia of time Ð theineffable, intrinsic, private, directlyapprehensible sense of what happens when weare confronted with duration Ð be it in waiting fora bus, the arms of a lover, the walls of a prison,or by the shores of a sea Ð we realize that everyinstance of the apprehension of timeÕs qualia islayered on the memory of other experiences, thatin some incomprehensible way, the time spent inthe arms of a lover is understood not just inreference to itself, but also in contrast to thetime spent waiting our turn at a ticket counter.And often, at the ticket counter or on theassembly line, waiting while the clock weighsdown on us, we are recalling the intensity andthe comfort of the time spent in the arms of alover. When we trade time, which time are wetrading, which layer of qualia, and how can theseadd up and be accounted for when our ownclocks drift away from each other, from time totime?

D! gen on Time: The Universe in a MomentAll that we have discussed until now points tothe difficulty in finding equivalences betweendifferent experiences of time. We have seen thatthe value of time looks different from the pointsof view of life and death, from the points of viewof the different temporal rhythms we embody,and from the point of view of how the social

world conditions the triangulation of waiting,anticipation, and entitlement. Finally, we know

that our different histories make for differentapprehensions of time.

D! gen, the thirteenth-century initiator of Japanese S ! t! Zen, wrote extensively on thequestion of being and time. Here are a fewfragments gathered from his text, Sh ! b ! genz ! .

We can never measure how long anddistant or how short and pressing 24 hours

is; but, just the same, we call it Ò24 hours.ÓThe leaving and coming of the directionsand traces (of time) are clear, so people donot doubt it. They do not doubt it but thatdoes not mean that they know it.

We can say, for the present, however, thatdoubt is nothing other than time.

Thus there are moments that are made upin the same moment of time and there aremoments of time (plural) in which the same

mind is made up. Practice and realization ofthe truth are also like this. Putting the selfin order we see what it is. The truth thatself is time is like this. We should learn inpractice that because of this truth thewhole earth includes myriad phenomenaand hundreds of things, and eachphenomenon and each thing exists in thewhole Earth.

Such toing and froing is the first step ofpractice. When we arrive on the solidground of the ineffable, there is just onething and just one phenomenon here andnow, irrespective of whether we understandor do not understand things or phenomena.Because there is only this exact moment,all moments of existence-time are thewhole of existence-time, and all existentthings and phenomena are time. The wholeof existence, the whole universe, exists inindividual moments of time. Pause amoment and reflect whether or not any partof the whole of existence or of the wholeuniverse has leaked away from the presentmoment of time. 15

If each second contains the universe, how do wetrade it? How do we loan it, buy it, save it? Howdo we accumulate interest on it? What can we dowith it?

How, then, can my time trade for yours?If my time and your time is the time of the

universe, then how can we trade time for itself?Only if we reorder our orientation vis-ˆ-vis timefrom one unduly governed by our sense of thefinitude of our lifespans to the infinitude of death

itself. This statement may seem surprising tosome, and so might need a little unpacking.

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The Circuit of Debt and Redemption: Lifeand Death Reconsidered

If wealth is controlled time, then, the sedimentthat is formed when duration is put under duressis its currency. The time spent in labor is herebyregained as its coinage, which I guarantee toexchange with the detritus of your time, foreternity. My time for yours, for now, for later, forthe time of our choosing. 16

The one thing that is equally available to all,and that does not perish and can never perish aslong as there is life, is death itself. Our mortalityshould be the gold standard of our lifeÕstransactions with other lives. It is the metal towhich we can peg all our currencies, all ourinstances of giving and taking to each other.Once we die, we can neither give nor receive, andall attempts to evade this fact, whether throughinheritances or estates, are basically arbitraryattempts to pretend that death had in fact notoccurred.

Consider the example of two people in tworetirement communities in different parts of theworld, who each decide to give each other apresent Ð a gift of time. The first gives his gift oftime to the second, who then dies and has nochance to reciprocate, and remains indebted tothe person who is still alive. But it gets morecomplicated than this: this first person receivesa gift of time from a third person, who then alsodies, leaving the this person who is still livingwith no way of repaying him either. But before

they died, each person gave and received gifts oftime Ð through the intermediary of the person

who remains alive. So, in fact, all debts havebeen cleared through this triangular relationshipof gift giving. As we make this modelprogressively more complex, we realize that weall stand in a relationship of complex obligationsand reciprocity where no one stands indebted toanyone else because of the way in which debtscancel each other out. And yet, everyone issimultaneously indebted to everyone else. 17

In the second chapter of DerridaÕs GivenTime , entitled ÒThe Madness of EconomicReason,Ó is a remarkable passage on therelationship between gifting and time. Hisanalysis comes from a meditation on theproblem of the relationship between the excessof gifting and the balance of reciprocity asestablished by Marcel Mauss in The Gift .

The gift is not a gift, the gift only gives tothe extent it gives time . The differencebetween a gift and every other operation of

pure and simple exchange is that the giftgives time. There where there is gift, there istime . What it gives, the gift, is time. But thegift of time is also a demand of time. Thething must not be restituted immediately and right away . There must be time, it mustlast, there must be waiting Ð withoutforgetting ( lÕattente Ð sans oubli ). Itdemands time, the thing, but it demands adelimited time, neither an instant nor aninfinite time, but a time determined by aterm, in other words, a rhythm, a cadence.The thing is not in time; it is or it has time,or rather it demands to have, to give, or totake time Ð and time as rhythm, a rhythmthat does not befall a homogenous time butthat structures it originally. 18

This presupposes that we understand our timeon earth as part of a commons, and ourreciprocal actions as the motions of a grandorchestra in which the music continues to beplayed even though players come and go. Thistime actually devolves back to the commonswhen we die. It creates more time for otherpeople. To paraphrase Marx, dead time makesfertile the ground of living time. 19

Aristotle reminds us that, Ò[things] arecontained by time in the same way that thingswhich are in number are contained by numberand things which are in place are contained byplace. É [T]hat to be in time is to be measured bytime.Ó20 It is not the other way around, it isprecisely not to measure our time by the worth of our being . It is time that has us, not we that havetime.

We cannot have time, because in time we

become ourselves and then cease to beourselves. In earlier times, time was seen as the

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property of God, and that is why there wereprohibitions on usury. You could not chargeinterest on a loan because what you were givingto another person was not necessarily moneyalone, but also time. As long as the borrowergave back the principal to you, that was all thatmattered. A demand for a repayment of interestonly made sense if you thought that the time hehad kept the money with himself actually

belonged to someone, and that that someonehappened to be you. To assume this was to layclaim to time as oneÕs fief, to make oneself acompetitor of God. The book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible haspassages on time that continue to be of value toconsider:

A time to cast away stones, and a time togather stones together; a time to embrace,and a time to refrain from embracing;A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to

keep, and a time to cast away;A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time tokeep silence, and a time to speak;A time to love, and a time to hate; a time ofwar, and a time of peace. 21

Even those of us who are not blessed with beliefin the divine can make sense of the fact thatthere is something perverse and arrogant tolaying claim to time as property. The wagesystem miraculously offers entitlement to afraction of time, but takes away entitlement tomost of it, and yet, at the same time, insists thatone should jealously guard the time one has leftfrom theft by others. No wonder that thievesmake excellent policemen and the biggest bankrobbers are those who own and manage banks.

Our time began when we were born, and willend when we die. We have done nothing to earnit, so we cannot pretend that it is ours. How dowe share and exchange that which is not ours?What does it mean to use words like sharing,exchange, and reciprocity in relation tosomething that cannot be owned?

!

This essay originated as a presentation given on May 16, 2011at Staedelschule in Frankfurt on the occasion of the openingof Time/Bank , a project by Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle.

Raqs Media Collective (Monica Narula, JeebeshBagchi, Shuddhabrata Sengupta) have been variouslydescribed as artists, curators, editors, and catalysts ofcultural processes. Their work, which has beenexhibited widely in major international spaces andevents, locates them along the intersections ofcontemporary art, historical inquiry, philosophicalspeculation, research and theory Ð often taking theform of installations, online and offline media objects,performances and encounters. They live and work inDelhi, partly based at Sarai, Centre for the Study of

Developing Societies, an initiative they co-founded in2000. They are members of the editorial collective ofthe Sarai Reader series, and have curated "The Rest ofNow" and co-curated "Scenarios" for Manifesta 7.

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1Martin Heidegger, On Being andTime , trans. Joan Stambaugh(Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 2002), 3.

2Saint Augustine, Confessions ,trans. Henry Chadwick (NewYork: Oxford University Press,1991), 230.

3Burkhard Bilger, ÒThe

Possibilian: What a Brush withDeath Taught David Eaglemanabout the Mysteries of Time andthe Brain,Ó New Yorker , April 25,2011, 57.

4Ibid., 57Ð58.

5For a history of the idea ofalternatives to currency, seeThomas H. Greco, Jr., The End of Money and the Future of Civilization (White RiverJunction, VT: Chelsea GreenPublishing, 2009).

6For more on alchemy, gold,money, and immortality, seeHans Christoph Binswanger,Money and Magic: A Critique of the Modern Economy in the Lightof GoetheÕs Faust (Chicago:University of Chicago Press,1994).

7For an interesting history of thefortunes of the US dollar as aunit of international exchangesee Barry Eichengreen,Exorbitant Privilege: The Riseand Fall of the Dollar and theFuture of the InternationalMonetary System (New York:Oxford University Press, 2011).

8For a useful overview of theabandonment of the goldstandard during Richard NixonÕspresidency see Allan J.Masutow, NixonÕs Economy:Booms, Busts, Dollars and Votes(Lawrence: University Press ofKansas, 1998), 149Ð82.

9Fromhttp://119.82.71.56/printarticle.aspx?85951. See also S.S.Heubner, The Economics of LifeInsurance: Human Life Values ÐTheir Financial Organization,

Management and Liquidation(Leap Systems Inc./Appleton,Century, Crofts, 1996).

10ÒTime is Money, ProfessorProves,Ó CNN, May 29, 2002,http://articles.cnn.com/2002 -05-29/tech/time.money_1_pence-formula-average-cost?_s=PM:TECH. See also, Nick Drainey,ÒA Formula for Efficient Living,ÓThe Scotsman , May 29, 2002,http://news.scotsman.com/news/A-formula-for-efficient-living.2330929.jp.

11Howard Nemerov, ÒWaiting

Rooms,Ó in The Collected Poemsof Howard Nemerov (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press,1977), 459Ð60.

12Gautam Pemmaraju,ÒMisbehaving Clocks: A PrimaryPathology of TimecodeTroubles.Ó Seehttp://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2011/05/misbehaving-clocks-a-primary-pathology-of-timecode-troubles.htm l.

13

Ibid. 14Ibid.

15Master D ! genÕs Sh ! b ! genz ! :Book 1 , trans. Gudo Nishijimaand Chodo Cross (BookSurgePublishing, 2006), 91Ð93.

16From a note that accompaniedour contribution to AntonVidokle and Julieta ArandaÕsinauguration of Time/Bank .

17For a wealth of ideas on gifts,debt, and reciprocity, seeBronis "aw Malinowski, The Argonauts of the Western Pacific(Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press,1984); Marcel Mauss, The Gift:Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies ,trans. W. D. Halls (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000); GeorgesBataille, The Accursed Share:Consumption (Volume 1)(Brooklyn: Zone Books, 1991);Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debtand the Shadow Side of Wealth(Toronto: House of Anansi Press,2008).

18Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1.Counterfeit Money (Chicago:University of Chicago Press,1994), 41.

19The reference here is to MarxÕsdiscussion of dead labor andliving labor in Marx, Capital ,Volume 1 (New York: PenguinClassics, 1992), 283Ð93.

20Aristotle, The Physics (New York:Oxford University Press, 1999),110.

21Ecclesiastes 3:5Ð8.

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Documents

Raqs Media Collective - Plankton in the Sea