‘NO TIME’

C O N T E M P O R A N E IT Y B ETW EEN
TIME PRESSURE A N D PROCRASTIN ATIO N1

Alexei Penzin

‘No Time’

I g o t no tim e fo r h ittin g m y grooves, no tim e

N o tim e f o r m a kin g m y m oves, no tim e
N o tim e and n o th in ’ to lose
I g o t no tim e fo r h ittin ’ th e b ooze, no tim e
L e ts g o man, hm m m , I g o t no tim e
I g o t no no no no no no no tim e, no tim e

-J .J . Cale

D ID G O D ‘ H A N G O U T ’ ?

Recalling St. Augustine’s beautiful and sincerely touching admission - ‘Provided 1. This essay is p a rtly based
on the lectu re ‘W hat Is
that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know ’ Con tem poran eity?’ It was
(Confessions XI. xiv (17))2 - we would agree that it is not easy to talk about what delivered at the sum m er
sch ool o f the Institute of
time is. The passage’s school-anthology fame, however, masks the richness, intel­ C on tem porary A r t, M oscow ,
lectual gaiety, and radicalism of the philosophical reflections framing it. in 2011. The essay also
p a rtly draw s on a version
As has been noted by many writers over the centuries, there are a number of o f this sam e lectu re, deliv­
paradoxes in Book XI of the Confessions, which considers the issue of time. The ered as part o f the project
P ed a g ogica l P oem , in 2012
central question posed there is how time is connected with the creation. How in M oscow .
2. A ll quotations o f this w ork
do we conceive what was ‘before’ the creation? Why didn’t God create ‘before’? have been taken fro m Saint
Theology’s standard response is that before time and the creation there was an A ugustine, Confessions,
trans. H enry C h adw ick
endless eternity (of which our human present, our ‘now ’, is a pale reflection), (London: O x fo rd U niversity
while the act of creation is G od ’s incomprehensible emergence from eternity. Press, 1998).
3. In a recent study, the
Human curiosity is not so easily fazed. ‘What was God doing before he made Italian ph ilosoph er G iorgio
heaven and earth?’ we might ask. Augustine himself emphasizes that he would A gam ben attached decisive
im p ortan ce to G o d ’s alleged
rather not laugh off the question, as certain theologians had done before him. ‘ in operativ ity’ in C hristian
theology, b oth ‘ b e fo r e ’ the
(‘He was preparing hells for people who inquire into profundities.’) He ‘boldly’ creation and ‘ a fte r’ h is tory ’s
(his own word) declares: ‘Before God made heaven and earth, he was not making alleged end. S ee G iorgio
A g am ben, T h e K in gd om and
anything’ (XI. xii (14)). This does not imply, however, that God passed the time in G lo r y (Stanford: Stan ford
some kind of inactivity.3 U niversity Press, 2011).
A u gu stin e’s pa ra d o xica l
But how was it that G od did nothing before the creation without at the same response is h ardly unique,
time being idle? To simplify his subsequent arguments, Augustine basically but th e o lo g y ’s authoritative
answ er to this p rob lem is
replies, ‘Because God had no tim e!’ Eternity, after all, is not just an infinity of that the statem ent ‘ G od did
moments of time. It is the radical absence of time, the absence of succession, of n oth in g’ contains no hidden
im p lication o f G o d ’s in op er-
‘before’ and ‘after’, of past and future.4 God did nothing because he literally had ativity. A u gustine spares no
e ffo rt to elim inate this very
no time for creating. Or rather, he had not yet created time: ‘There was therefore p ossibility.

p. 312
G e ta B ra te s c u
The G a rd e n w ith S c u lp tu re s ,
1 9 9 3 , te m p e ra , c o lla g e ,
d ra w in g on p a p e r. C o u rte s y
o f th e a rtis t a n d M a ria n Ivan
G a lle ry
no time when you had not made something, because you made time itself’ (XI. xiv
(17)). One of many paradoxes is immediately revealed here. We cannot simply say,
of course, as we would of a human being, that ‘God had no time’, for by definition
he cannot lack anything.
As a modern commentator of Augustine quips, ‘First, in order to be able to
maintain that there was no time before God created the world and to avoid in
that way the idea of G od ’s being idle - just “ hanging out”, as our young folk say,
for endless ages - he needed a concept of timeless eternity.’5 Indeed, otherwise we
would be unable to get around the scandalous notion that G od simply ‘messed
around’ or ‘hung out’, that is, that he had lots of time and wasted it without doing
anything, like, for example, many of our contemporaries who are victims of so-
called procrastination, ample opportunity for which is supplied by the Internet
and social networks.
Again, Augustine offers a paradoxical solution: God had no time, just because
time as such did not exist. But saying there was no time ‘yet’ means assuming a
‘meta-time’ from whose viewpoint we could speak about this: yet another par­
adox. But it is hardly possible to conceive another solution here. We cannot, for
example, say that ‘before’ the creation God was quite busy with ‘something else’
and ‘had no time’ for such an unexpected, avant-garde, and experimental artistic
art as the creation of a ‘total installation’ consisting of time itself, terra firma,
water, plants, beasts, and, finally, human beings. It is hard to imagine being so
colossally busy (a busyness weakly reflected, perhaps, in the busy lives of modern
oil company executives) that it would distract one from the job of creating the
world. The more so because ‘before’ the creation, capitalism clearly did not exist:
it is unlikely that God was a wage worker and thus unable even to dream, like
millions of people today, about something creative beyond the daily grind, much
less the creation of an entire world.
Thus, according to Christian dogma, which is rife with paradox, before the
creation there was nothing except God, and that nothing included time. Aside
from the theological paradoxes and jokes, we should seriously emphasize that
creation and time are bound together in a single node within the ontology of
creatio ex nihilo that Christianity introduces. This ontology certainly also
includes an aesthetic projection and thus remains a common frame for under­
standing the artistic act today as well. Creation requires time. When there is
no time, there is no creation; and, on the contrary, as Augustine never tires of
repeating, ‘To say that God has never done something is to say that there is no
time when he did it. Let them therefore see that without the creation no time can
exist, and let them cease to speak that vanity’ (Confessions XI. x x x (40)).
It is only then that Augustine proceeds to his famous argument about what
time is. He elaborates on the theory of distentio animi, or ‘distention of the soul’.
That is, he for the first time examines subjectivity as a condition of time’s con­
stitution (along with all the modes of this ‘distention’ - memory, intuition, and
anticipation). We are, of course, forced here to omit the extensive and grand phil­
osophical discourse on the problem of time, as developed in this same vein down
into the 20 th century (as exemplified by Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Benjamin,
Levinas, and Derrida, among others).6 Here, it is important to note that the an­
cient theological formula linking time with the creation (if there is no time, there
is no creation either) can be read in the present day as well, including in relation
to its anthropological and aesthetic dimensions, but outside its direct theological
sense, albeit still on its terms.7
 have argued that the idea
o f etern ity that A u gustine
We can thus agree with Augustine that it is not easy to talk about what time em ploys - eternity as tim e’s
absence, as o p p o se d to end­
is. But we can easily (even while taking into account all these theological less tim e - first appeared in
paradoxes) say there is no time. ‘I don’t have time’: this elementary phrase is the E nneads o f Plotinus.
5. R oland J. Teske, P ara d oxes
the operator of the peculiar relationship between time and the subject that we o f Tim e in Saint A u gu stin e
recognize as a distinguishing feature of contemporary life. Here we are trans­ (M ilwaukee: M arquette
U niversity Press, 1996), 57.
ported from theology, whose remnants (as many thinkers have noted) still affect 6. The en du rin g relevance of
B o o k X I o f the Confession s
the perception of things, even in formally secularized societies, to the utterly is u n d erscored by the d e­
profane modernity of recent decades. tailed analysis undertaken
by such contem porary
This little essay’s working hypothesis is that the mode of relations between thinkers as Paul R icoeur
contemporary culture production (or ‘creation’ in the language of theology) and (Tim e and N a rra tive, vol.
1, C h icago: U niversity of
time translates into the real economy and social life of those theological para­ C h icago Press, 1990) and
doxes that Augustine had struggled to resolve. Vice versa, this secularization was Eric A llie z (Capital Times:
Tales fro m th e C on quest
made necessary by the transformations of contemporary capitalism itself. o f T im e, M inneapolis:
U niversity o f M innesota
Of course, the linguistic pragmatics of the expression ‘I have no time’ is of a
Press, 1996).
different nature than Augustine’s abstract theological constructions. The phrase 7. Som e contem porary
ph ilo so p h ica l issues and
‘no time’ implies: a) a lack of time to do or make something; b) the contemporary the debates around them
subject’s attitude to time as a resource that one can ‘spend’ or ‘save’; c) in general, v iv id ly re ca ll the paradoxes
o f theology. Thus, Quentin
a current trend whereby large numbers of people are in a state of ‘having no M eillassou x has m ade an
time’, of time pressure. Noting that it has ‘no time’, the contemporary subject does argum ent about scientific
dating o f g e o lo g ica l and
not find itself in a strange ‘eternity’ without time, as the Christian God did before cosm ic events that preceded
the creation. Nevertheless, the proposed parallels provide an opportunity to look the em ergence o f life on
earth and m an him self. If
at this situation from an unexpected angle. w e accept these dates, the
question arises as to w hether
During the rapid transition from late socialism (itself a kind of ‘eternity’ or w e can say that the events
stagnation) to capitalism, this condition has become particularly prominent. A and tim e itself had the same
status ‘b e fo r e ’ m an as after
characteristic feature of post-Soviet everyday life has been its particular tem­ the appearance o f liv in g
porality. ‘I can’t do it, no tim e!’ is a phrase one often hears in the conversations b eings capable o f d etecting
and re co g n izin g them. The
not only of super-busy managers but also people from different sectors of the th eolog ical question thus
culture industry, the art world, and academia. The recollections (idealized, per­ finds its structu ral analogue
here: naturally, con tem po­
haps) of people from the older generation about ‘Soviet times’, when, for exam­ rary speculative thought is
no longer con cern ed w ith
ple, one could devote years to leisurely reading and eccentric research bereft of
the question o f what G od
any external, pragmatic purpose, highlight the emergent contrast. The leisurely, w as doin g b e fo re the c r e ­
ation o f the w orld and man.
contemplative actions of the M oscow conceptualists, the famous ‘trips to the It is, how ever, con cern ed
countryside’ undertaken by the Collective Actions group, were a kind of crystal­ w ith w hat the w orld was
doing - that is, w hat state it
lization of that Soviet temporality. Here is Irina Pivovarova’s vivid testimony of w as in b e fo re it ‘gave b irth ’,
a 1978 action tellingly entitled ‘Operating Time’ (or ‘Duration’), which consisted in a sense, to life and man
him self, as per the scientific
of a group of people watching as artist Andrei Monastyrsky, standing on the edge b e lie f system . See Q uentin
M eillassoux, A fte r Finitude:
of a clearing, pulled a seven-kilometre-long rope: ‘ [B]ut Monastyrsky didn’t stop
A n E ssay on th e N ecessity
pulling the rope: that went on for a very long time. [...] It seemed that an hour o f C o n tin g en cy (New York:
Continuum , 2008).
or two had passed, but he just kept pulling the rope. [...] Time flowed so freely; 8. K o lle k tiv n y e d eistviia.
it was being spent on nothing as it were. At the same time, it was nice to realize P o ez d k i za g o ro d [ C ollective
A ctio n s: Trips to the
just this fact.’8 C ou n trysid e] (M oscow :
Marked by the lack of time, contemporary temporality is hardly a ‘natural’ A d M arginem , 1998), 75-76.

aspect of my generation’s maturation or a trivial consequence of the struggle to

survive in post-Soviet societies. Communicating with friends from other coun­
tries and consequences, you see an amazing, ubiquitous similarity among daily
(and nocturnal) regimens. We are faced with the globalization of time: we are
all engaged in a multitude of parallel projects, and deal with texts that need to
be written by one deadline or another, and a mass of virtual Internet interac­
tions with various rhythms. All this shapes a certain figure of time’s molecular
dispersion, its analytical decomposition into self-contained fragments, as well as
techniques and practices for managing these particles, a form of planning that
has moved from the institutional level to the personal - the calculated organiza­
tion of meetings, the ascetic rejection of non-priority activities, the ‘colonization’
of nighttime, sometimes even giving up sleep, and so on.9
These practices of self-control sometimes seem even more oppressive than
the old power dispositifs, with their spatial and kinetic restrictions. They pro­
voke episodic breakdowns, a desperately joyful upsetting of all plans with their
rational pros and cons, a kind of sacrifice of time, a ‘potlatch’ for which today’s
pragmatic individual pays with an ineradicable sense of guilt. Even the enter­
tainment industry now tries to instill the notion that there is something useful
about each such ‘temporal potlatch’, as exemplified by ‘edutainment’, ‘discovering
new things’, ‘making useful contacts’, and the like. A striking example is the phe­
nomenon of procrastination, which we have already mentioned. Widely discussed
in recent decades, it is the neurotic action of a subject that puts off doing (‘until
later’ or ‘until tom orrow’) its most urgent chores by distracting itself with the
most trivial pursuits. The technical infrastructure of contemporary ‘communica­
tive’ capitalism (Internet, social networks, media) supplies ample opportunity for
this behavioural strategy. Time pressure and procrastination complement each
other: they are different ways of responding to the same fundamental problem.
But does the synchronicity and ubiquity of this new mode of relations
between the subject and time mean that this is in fact our universal contem­
poraneity, including one that should give rise to art? What shifts in the mode of
production have shaped this contemporaneity? If ‘no one has any time’ in our
contemporaneity, how are things done or created despite this?

A S O C I E T Y W I T H O U T TIME

Amidst the molecular dispersion of time, the familiar and tragic figure of human
existence’s finitude, which was carefully elaborated in 20th-century philosophy,
appears outmoded, molar, finished, monolithic, and nearly inaccessible to us. The
thought of our limited time nurtured the subject’s melancholy and despair, and
yet human finitude was strangely transformed into a condition of endless cogni­
tive and creative experimentation, into the heroic determination animating many
political actions and practices, and the sense of the significance and authenticity
of our presence in the world. Now, however, the ‘human condition’ has started to
seem even more extreme. Our time is no longer limited: we simply have ‘no time’ !
Saying this is not a rhetorical exaggeration. What is at issue, of course, is not the
apocalyptic feelings characteristic of the last decades, but a specific temporal
mode that organizes our contemporary existence.
This mode of time appears similar to the ‘schizophrenic’ tem porality of
late capitalism that Fredric Jameson described in the ‘ 90s: a ‘series of pure
and unrelated presents in tim e’, bereft of a ‘grammar’ or the phenom enologi­
cal retention of past moments and anticipation of the future.10 But there is an
important difference: Jameson’s description still contained a utopian aspect.
This dissolution of time promised liberation, the undermining of the linear
standards and hierarchies of modernist culture and politics. Now, however, it
is becom ing increasingly clear that every moment, freed from the inner con­
nection of subjectivity, is caught in the net of external regulations and require­ 9. On the ‘c o lon iza tion ’ of
nighttim e, see M urray
ments, the apparatuses of pow er that constantly compete to steal that selfsame M elbin, N ight as F rontier:
moment from us. C olonizin g th e W orld after
D ark (New York:
And scientific forms of objectivity, usually associated with linear and system­ The Free Press, 1987).
atic models, are no longer a salvation. On the contrary, neuroscientists now argue See also my essay, R e x
E xsom n is: S leep and
that the ‘present’ we actually experience and remember is a precisely measurable S u b jectiv ity in C apitalist
and invariable span of physical time, and this beat-like structure organizes all M od ern ity, 100 Notes, 100
Thoughts: D ocu m en ts
human experience (e.g., musical rhythms, the length of lines of poetry, and the Series, No. 097 (Kassel:
H atje Cantz, 2012).
minimum time required for making a decision or uttering a short, meaningful 10. F redric Jameson,
phrase such as ‘no time’). Thus, the German neuroscientist Ernst Poeppel, draw­ P o stm o d ern ism , or T h e
Cultural L o g ic o f L a te
ing on experimental data, claims this beat has a duration of three seconds.11 The C apitalism (Durham: D uke
contemporary German theorist Thomas Metzinger, whose work involves translat­ U niversity Press, 1991), 27.
11. See E rnst Poeppel, ‘W arum
ing the findings of experimental neuroscience into the language of philosophical dauert die G egenw art drei
problems, notes that the three-second beat structure is an operative duration Seku nden’, in F ran kfu rter
A llg em ein e M agazin 83
produced by the brain itself for registering and evaluating threats and external (1999): 10-17.
12. Thom as M etzinger, T he
stimuli, and developing ways of responding to them behaviourally. The beat-like
Ego T unnel: T h e S cien ce of
duration of the ‘now ’ is a virtual ‘tunnel’ or ‘w indow ’. Specially produced by the th e M ind and th e M yth of
th e S elf (New York: Basic
brain’s neural system, it connects us to the world and enables us to act effectively Books), 36-40.
within it, since we are not endowed (as, for example, Heidegger argues) with any 13. A n ton io N egri, ‘The
C on stitution of T im e’, in
original direct connection to it.12 A n ton io N egri, T im e fo r
Recalling Foucault’s idea about the link between techniques of power and R ev o lu tio n (New York:
Continuum , 2003), 21-139.
the accumulation of knowledge, the successes of neuroscience and, for example, 14. ‘R eal subsum ption’ is con­
the development of various ‘time management’ techniques can be seen as nothing trasted w ith an earlier phase
of capitalist developm ent,
other than the iron grip of contemporary biopolitics, endeavouring to effectively ‘fo rm a l subsum ption’, in
w h ich the lives of in divid u ­
manage human multitudes within the atomized temporality of late capitalism. als are them selves ‘outside’
We should hardly restrict ourselves to stating that the observed changes are the of capitalist relations.
15. Characteristically, Negri
consequence of neoliberal capitalism, which has been destroying the old institu­ rejects W alter B en jam in ’s
tions of the welfare state and producing masses of precarious workers, who enter fam ous concept of J etz tzeit
or ‘n o w -tim e ’, u n d erstood as
only into short-term, ‘project-based’ relations with employers. Rather, we should the tim e of a revolutionary
speak not only about the lack of outward security and short duration of the em­ em ergence fro m the ‘em pty’,
routine ch ro n o lo g ica l time
ployment relationship, but also about the growing importance of the subjective of capitalist d aily life and
associated w ith m essianic
dimension of ‘living labour’ under the ‘real subsumption’ (Marx) of society
expectation. For Negri,
to capital, as do Antonio Negri and other Italian autonomist Marxist thinkers.13 n ow -tim e is a reflection of
capitalism ’s ‘separation of
Simplifying Negri’s arguments, we can say that under the ‘real subsumption tim e fro m b e in g ’, the prereq ­
to capital’,14 an individual’s entire time - not only that spent at the factory or uisite of its transform ation
into an abstract d isciplin ary
office - is time in which capital seeks to organize the extraction of surplus value. m easure of labour. See
On the other hand, time itself ceases being an outward and abstract measure N egri, ‘C on stitution of
T im e’, 112-114.
of labour. This is especially true of the culture industry, where production is
impossible to regulate via the days, hours, and minutes spent, for example, at the
workplace, writing a piece of investigative journalism, or conceiving the idea for
an art installation. Since the tendency in contemporary capitalism is for time to
shed its function as a measure of labour value, it is liberated from the objective
disciplinary order. This creates the possibility for another temporality, the ‘con­
stitutive’, ‘collective’, and ‘ecstatic’ time of resistance and antagonism, of human
multitude’s self-development and self-valorization.15
In our contemporaneity, this rare collective and antagonistic dimension, freed
from the imposition of the temporality we have designated as ‘no time’, could
have been experienced only at the new hotspots for challenging public space
that recently sprang up everywhere, from Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Abai
to Tahrir Square. The political problem of this time is its own ‘temporary’ nature:

M ic r o - a r t- g r o u p G o ro d
U s tin o v
A lb u m , 2 0 1 3 , te x tile , m ixed
m e d ia , d im e n s io n s v a ria b le .
C o u r te s y o f th e a rtis ts
there are anthropological limits to sustaining the ecstatic experience of collective
exodus from pre-established disciplinary limitations.16
On the other hand, perhaps, the time of ‘living labour’ does not cease being
subsumed to the discipline of capital, as Negri optimistically assumes. Rather, by
absorbing our time, capitalism’s technical infrastructure itself becomes far more
pervasive. Media theorist Franco Berardi, another Italian autonomist thinker,
claims that time in no way escapes valorization mechanisms; rather, it is decom­
posed into small units and recombined in accordance with the logistics of the new
forms of communicative and information production. In today’s ‘networked’ forms
of labour organization, time is separated from the worker’s subjectivity, dispers­
ing into thousands of anonymous particles that are recombined by information
machines into production chains, which create a common product: ‘Capital no
longer recruits people, but buys packets of time, separated from their inter­
changeable and occasional bearers.’17The ‘general intellect’ (a concept introduced
by Marx in the Grundrisse) of today’s producers is based on microscopic, anony­
mous spans of time spent, for example, on ‘clicks’, an elementary operation in the
information space that is separated from the real time of individuals’ lives and
their physical presence. This is how the devastated contemporary media land­
scape is constructed. It is a place where time is turned into the hyper-fast ‘cyber
time’ of absorption and accumulation, and information machines set traps to
attract our attention and, with them, the microscopic portions of time that in fact
give them the appearance of life and dynamism.
Perhaps the subject’s ambivalent reaction to this new temporality - on the
one hand, adoption of oppressive time pressures, and on the other, the desperate
deferral of tasks ‘for later’ - has been heightened by recent events. The global
economic downturn, which began in 2008 and raised urgent concerns about the
financial sector, loans, debt, and ‘life on credit’, radicalized many of neoliberal
capitalism’s depressing trends. The experience of time as the ‘life of the loan’ is
a condition characteristic of many people today. In his fundamental work on
the anthropology of art and literature, philosopher Valery Podoroga analyzes
the temporality of debt via the biography of Dostoevsky (who famously worked
in conditions of agonizing indebtedness to publishers, with the manuscripts he
promised to deliver them standing as collateral):
It is clear that if you take out loans, and not just occasionally, but constantly,
and your existence depends on how you handle your debts, then naturally you
w ill want to (and you w ill constantly attempt to) manage the term [time] of the
debt. The basic meaning of the ritual of ‘repaying’ a debt as a behavioural m ax­
im is to delay and drag out time, to break it up more and more into separate
fragments, thus generating temporal heterogeneity in the linear sequence of the
term [time] of the loan .18
What is described here is basically the model of ‘life on credit’, which has now
taken on the character of a universal paradigm.
The phenomenon of procrastination should be explained not just via the disori­
entation of the contemporary abulic subject, constantly assaulted by media flows,
but via the situation and economy of that subject’s selfsame existence, which
depends (perhaps not directly in each particular case) on the horizon of debt, on
an almost ontological indebtedness. The model of action for the actual repay­
ment of debts is transferred to the entire realm of human action, even the most
ordinary actions. The Italian philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato has analyzed the 16. However, N egri reflects on
the ‘in stitutionalization’ of
link between the political economy of debt and the subjective experience of time this tem porality. This should
in his recent book: supply it w ith som e stability,
although it is d iffic u lt to
find a clea r answ er to this
[D]ebt appropriates not only the present labour time of wage-earners and of the p roblem in his w ork. See
population in general, it also preempts non-chronological time, each person’s fu­ Peter O sborne, ‘M arx and
the P h ilosophy o f Tim e’,
ture as w ell as the future of society as a w hole. The principal explanation for the
in R adical P h ilosop h y 147
strange sensation of living in a society without time, without possibility, without (January/February 2008): 21.
foreseeable rupture, is debt.19 17. F ran co ‘B ifo ’ B erardi, A fter
th e Fu ture (Oakland, CA:
A K Press, 2011), 69.
The system of universal indebtedness as it were neutralizes time as a source of 18. Valery Podoroga, M im esis.
M aterialy p o an a litich eskoi
change, of everything unforeseen, as a condition of inventing and creating the new. a n tro p o lo g ii literatu ry
[M im esis: M aterials on the
A n a ly tica l A n th ro p o lo g y
o f L itera tu re] (M oscow :
K u l’turnaya revoliutsiia,
2006), 427. A c c o r d in g to
Podoroga, the last things
that D ostoevsk y w ou ld put
in hock in cases of extrem e
need w ere clock s and
w atches - that is, tools for
m easuring the term (time)
of debts.
19. M aurizio Lazzarato, The
M aking o f In d eb ted Man:
A n Essay on th e N eoliberal
C o n d itio n (Los Angeles:
Sem iotext(e), 2012), 46-47.

‘ NO T I M E ’ - B A S E D A R T ?

Previously, m odernity had seemed a fairly clear-cut project: there existed its
dominant ‘western’ model, which claimed that its standards were ubiquitous
and universal. Criticism and political challenges to its claims to universality and
self-evidence developed simultaneously at the same: they revealed its dangerous
proximity to the total domination of alienating capitalist rationality. It was chal­
lenged through appeals to a number of local histories, counter-narratives, and
development models (including those that considered themselves non-capitalist,
i.e., socialist or communist).
We should now speak, rather, of contemporaneity: a certain sequence of
events, or simply a sequence of periods of time, without a well-constructed
shell that would articulate and symbolize it, endow it with meaning, and relate
it to us, that we might call a ‘pure’ present. This present exists as a sequence of
moments and events that we might acknowledge as contemporary but which,
perhaps, we are as yet unable to incorporate into a grand universal project like

Eva K o t ’a tko va
F ro m th e s e rie s N o t h o w
p e o p le m o v e , b u t w h a t
m o v e s th e m , 2 0 1 3 , p h o to ­
g ra p h , d ra w in g , c o lla g e ,
21 x 2 9 x 7 c m . C o u r te s y of
th e a rtis t, M e y e r R ie g g e r,
B e rlin a n d K a rls ru h e , a nd
H u n t K a s tn e r, P ra g u e
modernity or the postmodern. The advent of this other, formal contemporaneity
radically and irreversibly alters the status and value of all those fields (from de­
sign, fashion, and technology to art, politics, and philosophy) that had focused on
it in the old sense of the project, as undertakings oriented towards the future and
the changes it brought. It also provokes dangerous moves on the part of ‘anti-m o­
dernity’: rejections of contemporary forms of art, thought, and political action,
all manner of barbaric anachronisms, and the return of safely forgotten monsters
from previous ages (fascism, obscurantism, and so on).
In his recent essay, ‘Comrades of Time’, Boris Groys discusses the relationship
between art and this contemporaneity, the notion of ‘being contemporary’. He
notes all the philosophical difficulties and subtleties that prevent us from talking
about the contemporary as something happening at the ‘present’ moment. (There
is no need, nevertheless, to resort to deconstruction: Augustine had already com ­
plained of the infinite divisibility and elusiveness of this moment.) Groys turns
the ‘difficulty’ of comprehending the present moment into its ontological de­
scription: the present moment is that which creates difficulties. The present is an
obstacle that generates inertia and tempers the scope of our plans and projects.
Whereas modernist culture looked to the future and sought to overcome (or even
destroy) this obstacle by all means, the moment that followed, after the numerous
political and cultural collapses of the 20th century, has forced us, on the contrary,
to recognize this force and the centrality of the present as a bulwark of inertia
and a suspension of our aspirations. Now ‘the contemporary is actually consti­
tuted by doubt, hesitation, uncertainty, indecision - by the need for prolonged
reflection, for a delay’.20 It is, in fact, doubt and hesitation in pronouncing judge­
ment on the political and cultural projects of the past - the lofty philosophical
analogue of dominant everyday procrastination - that impart a semantic fullness
to our present by not letting radical modernist and avant-garde projects for
transforming society, culture, and humanity slip totally into the past. Modernist
projects invested the accumulated time of their own efforts and difficulties in the
future. Such investment is now becoming impossible - and time really is lost and
wasted in indecision.
According to Groys, this condition is reflected in so-called time-based art,
which actually stages this non-accumulable time of our efforts that generates no
end result or product. Such art models numerous routine and repetitive processes
that result in nothing and can be interrupted at any moment. As Groys argues,
the paradigm of time-based art, focused on the present, also sets the limits to our
political action in a contemporaneity defined in this way. Thus, the Occupy move­
ment, which unfolded as a series of takeovers of public spaces that are occupied
temporarily and sometimes randomly, is time-based in nature.21
Sketched in this way, the prospect of contemporaneity is attractive, clear, and
even comfortable, but it certainly suffers from a peculiar form of idealism, sepa­
rating the logic of our temporality, as well as its modes of art and politics, from
the transformation of society and mode of production, which were discussed
above. As if some quasi-theological subject had constructed the discourse of
contemporaneity. As if after the days of the creation (of history, politics, art, etc.),
this autonomous and transcendental subject had decided to rest peacefully and
undertake a contemplative ‘review’ of its previous projects and deeds.
However, if we consider not just a particular genre in contemporary art but
the art system as a whole, we find a much more materialistic tendency, rife with
internal conflicts, a weird ‘no time’-based art defined by the general character
20. B oris G roys, ‘C om rades of
T im e’, in e -flu x 11 (12/2009),
w w w .e -flu x .co m /jo u rn a l/
com ra d es-of-tim e. It is
interesting to relate this
observation about tim e to
the space w here w e find
ourselves, the ‘p o s t-S o v ie t’
space. The trend o f skepti­
cism tow ard s the 20th cen ­
tu ry ’s p o litic a l and cultu ra l
projects has perhaps reached
its clim a x w ith in this
space. H owever, as w ith any
radical doubt, this space,
despite the qu ite pessim istic
atm osphere pre v a ilin g in it,
obv iou sly has great poten tial
fo r ph ilo so p h ica l thought, as
w ell as the artistic rein ter­
pretation o f this past.
21. In this sense, G ro y s’s
approach is ‘ m e ta -p olitica l’,
to use the term p rop osed
b y Jacques R anciere as a
critica l designation for
approaches that regard
the p o litic a l realm as
derivative, secon dary to
som e m ore fu n dam en tal re­
ality. See Jacques Ranciere,
D isa g reem en t: P o litics and
P h ilosoph y (M inneapolis:
U niversity o f M innesota
Press, 1999), 61-95. In this
case, the aesthetical is a
kind o f ‘b a se ’, a m odel for
con crete p o litic a l action.
of contemporary capitalism’s temporality, as we have briefly sketched it. This
character - hypermobility, short-term projects, a need for rapid response, a
dependence on electronic media and communication, the ubiquitous rejection of
long-term, in-depth research of intellectual contexts and history - is expressed
most consistently in this art. An entire new ‘chronopolitics’ of artistic labour has
emerged in which discussing a w ork’s conditions of production and attempting
to improve them have becom e ever harder given constant time pressures and
multiple parallel projects.22
Thus, there are two levels of contemporaneity’s redefinition, the logical and
the empirical. One has to do with Hamlet-like indecision, lofty contemplation,
and the revision of past deeds and accomplishments; the other, with time pres­
sure, procrastination, and entrapment by the dispositifs of debt and control. The
relationship between those levels of contemporaneity’s redefinition is illustrated
by a funny story, a document I discovered while searching for possible concrete
embodiments of ‘no time’-based art.
Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto is known for his neo-modernist spatial sculp­
tures, fashioned from elastic materials, some of which themselves are quite
inspiring for a person exploring the topic of contemporary temporality. Neto
is an example of a contemporary artist contemplatively revising his attitude
towards modernist art. However, the main character in this story is not Neto, but
a guard at a gallery in NewYork where one of N eto’s installations was exhibited.
The guard was a writer and poet, forced to earn a living through such tempo­
rary jobs. Unable to stand the silent nearness of sublime neo-modernist art,
the guard/poet began sending letters to the artist himself, feeling that constant
proximity to N eto’s piece gave him the right to do that. The letters were compiled
and published as a book describing the time the author spent in the company of
N eto’s installation. It consists in reflections on the meaning of the piece (entitled
Only the Amoebas Are Happy), ironic descriptions of gallery visitors, accounts of
different things the poet did during the workday, such as cleaning the room with
a vacuum cleaner, meditations on the monotony of this w ork (which made the
poet drowsy), and so on.23 Finally, Neto responded with a letter in which he cites
a lack of time, thus making it impossible for him to visit his own installation,
and expresses his joy over the fact that the guard/poet had been able to spend his
time next to N eto’s work creatively. Both subjects of this story allegorically voice
different positions within the realm of cultural production: the personalized
artistic auteur versus the ordinarily anonymous infrastructural worker; the time
pressure faced by the in-demand art producer versus the work time of the gallery
guard, which is practically indistinguishable from procrastination and can be
resisted only by writing letters.

T H E A T T I T U D E OF C O N T E M P O R A N E I T Y

Thus, an already finite human time is instrumentalized and fragmented in the

mega-machine of contemporary capitalism, giving rise to a strange ‘society with­
out time’. The urgent question for all those challenging this machine’s absolute
power is the fight to carry out basic and, therefore, radical research, to create
genuinely new works and poetics, to launch serious political initiatives - instead
of the multitude of dispersed and short-term ‘projects’, those anonymous parti­
cles of time suspended in the pseudo-eternity known as ‘no time’. Sources of new
antagonisms and potentialities emerge here. How do we impart a collective and, 22 See W ork, W ork, W ork: A
R ea der on A r t and Labour
thus, political dimension to the struggle against the ‘tyranny of time in capitalist (Stockholm : Iaspis, 2012), 23.
society’?24 23 See Tom Devaney, L etters
to E rn esto N eto, G erm
It has recently begun to seem that the concept of ‘immaterial labour’ (and the Folio 2:1 (New York: Poetic
new subjectivities shaped on its basis) reveals a vulnerability just in this regard. R esearch B loc, 2004).
24 M oishe Postone, Tim e, Labor
As Matteo Pasquinelli notes, antagonism has tended to isolate itself within the and S ocial D om ination:
multitude of producers itself. It has thus turned not into a fight against new A R ein terp reta tio n of
M a r x ’s C ritical T h eory
forms of control but into a real ‘immaterial civil war’, whereas competition works (Cam bridge: Cam bridge
U niversity Press, 2003), 214.
increasingly to speed up the rate of production and thus ramp up time pressure: 25 M atteo P asquinelli,
‘It is the well known rivalry within academia and the art world, the economy of ‘Im m aterial C ivil War:
P rototypes o f Conflict
references, the deadline race, the competition for festivals, the envy and suspicion w ith in C ognitive
among activists. Cooperation is structurally difficult among creative workers.’25 C apitalism ’, http://eipcp.n et/
p o licie s /cci/p a s q u in e lli/e n .
In traditional political thought, reconciliation in this context took the form M ichel Foucault,
of the establishment of a new sovereignty, an ‘authority’ or leadership that ‘W hat Is E n lightenm ent?’
in The F ou ca u lt Reader, ed.
would stop the internal conflict. Nowadays, perhaps, this would mean a much Paul R abinow (New York:
Pantheon B ooks, 1984), 39.
bigger setback than the negative qualities of the creative industry, enumer­
27 Ibid., 41.
ated above. Perhaps for the time being we have to rely only on the inherent
strength of ideas and images themselves. If they acquire a universal signifi­
cance, they themselves becom e factors for peace and solidarity, independently
of the destructive effects of competition among their creators. But as we have
already noted, the dispersal of time increasingly weakens critical possibilities
for cultural production and political practice, their ability to produce genuinely
new, universal, and politically charged ideas, images, and projects. This vicious
circle leaves open the question we have asked. Somehow, however, contemporary
antagonism has shifted to possibilities for liberating production time itself, to
the fight for another eventual and collective time, for a time that would be part
of the commons like air, water, earth, and sky, that is, beyond forced feverish
activity carried out in the grip of time pressure or painful procrastination. If we
can no longer say we are ‘outside’ of capitalist relations, of all-consuming ‘real
subsumption’, then we must analyze and practise opportunities for opening it up
and undermining it in time, not just in space.
And yet we should not forget that, as a collectively experienced common
time, contemporaneity is not only an objective ‘state of affairs’ but also a sub­
jective ‘attitude’ of the kind that, for example, Michel Foucault discussed in his
famous essay ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ Although Foucault writes of the modern
rather than the contemporary, it is worth thinking about how to reformulate this
attitude in relation to our present. Foucault defines ‘ attitude’ as ‘a way of think­
ing and feeling, a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time
marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task.’26 It was possible to
have been ‘uncontemporary’ in New York in the 1960s, in Paris in the 19th cen­
tury, or in the post-revolutionary Moscow of the 1920s. It is even easier to be un­
contemporary nowadays. To gain access to the present, as well as to the universal
ideas and images that are its expression, one has to work out an attitude or an
ethos, that is, to change and transform oneself, to becom e a different, contempo­
rary subject. Of course, this attitude should be not contemplative but activist in
the broadest sense of the word. As Foucault writes, ‘ [T]he high value
of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it, to imag­
ine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasp­
ing it in what it is.’27We have yet to discover com plex ways for nurturing this
attitude amid time pressure and procrastination.