Rupturing Space-Time to Radically Dream
31–01–22
Overview: This essay looks at the ways in which art ruptures linear time to create the worlds that are otherwise possible. It is a mediation through the lens of time from scholars in the global south: Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Mohamed Iqbal, and Leopold Senghor through looking firstly, at rupture as protest, and then as art as a means to dream otherwise: a portal that allows us to dream other options- to philosophise otherwise. If a protest is a rupture of time, art is the portal into deaming.
Rupturing
space-time to radically dream
‘Linear time’ as
we know it, is tied to scientific understanding of time, where events have a
past, present and future. This follows a trajectory that reduces time to
measurement and space, or ‘space-time’. Linear time legitimises colonialism, as
this trajectory is linked to progress and modernity through a timeline which
benefits the advancement of the west and compresses subaltern temporal
experiences to privilege a singular, dominant worldview. Linear time is also
complicit in ‘epistemicide’, the destruction of other knowledges
by imposing an alien mode of being onto them, in the positivist motto of ‘order
and progress’ (Santos 2015, 2007 :4). The colonial matrix of power
where the capitalist class control resources, gender, labour, time, economy,
authority and knowledge, can be thought of as a ‘black hole’, a void of
‘homogenous empty time’, through which all of humanity is sucked into in linear
singularity, speeding towards its own destruction. Opposing this is a
gravitational mass that implodes the void, an eruption, an explosion, a
supernova: ‘messianic time’, that sets light to the sparks of hope in the past
in continuity with the present. It this rupture that
allows us to ‘philosophise otherwise’ akin to clusters of stars (or
different temporalities) existing alongside each other in a constellation. But
first, we need to ‘reflect on the borders that separate these different
dimensions’ (Mohomed 2017).
In this essay I
will look at variations of time and how we can imagine a constellation of
coexisting temporalities as a space for solidarity in the global south to
rupture linear time and radically dream. This, I would argue, is done through
‘intuitive’ and ‘creative time’ (Diagne 2008).
Time and space
cannot be looked at outside of the power relations of empire on the global
south. (Globalised) time appears to be monolithic, and in this temporality that
the transnational capitalist class landlord over the labour of the subordinate
classes: those in the global south operating on rented time, who contribute
heavily to globalisation but remain prisoners of their local time-space (Santos
2007: 7), compressing their experiences into singularity. Linear time makes
certain that what bell hooks terms the ‘white supremacist cis capitalist
patriarchy’ (hooks 2005) are projected to the front and people who are
marginalised, behind, on varying points on this timeline, intersectionally speaking,
(Crenshaw 1991) as time impacts marginialised identities differently. Söderbäck
(2012) asserts that black, queer, labouring and female people have been reduced
to building the futures of those further up on this timeline— white, heterosexual men or
women. Furthermore, labour unalienated from itself cannot be considered labour
at all: it is only labour because of its sustenance it provides to white
supremacy (Gamedze, 2021). This is demonstrative of how the west is dependent
on the idea of linear time to support empire. ‘The annihilation of differences
neatly situates everyone on the linear path that we call progress and that
supposedly to be pursued in the interest of a neutral and abstract “all”, which is ‘time’ disguised as a natural and neutral force.
There are two cases of ‘messianic rupture’ that I will look
at. The first occurred in the Arab Spring (2011), which was sparked by the
moment that Muhammad Bouazizi set himself on fire after harassment from the
police over his fruit and vegetable cart, because he was trading without a
permit. This moment, attributed to the economic situation in
the country, was the culmination of constant past repression, emblematic of the
linear trajectory where the subaltern faced (cyclical) trauma imposed by the
state which continued to show up in the present. The other case of messianic rupture
was the Rhodes Must Fall protests (2015), initiated by student Chumani Maxwele
throwing a bucket of shit from one of the townships in Cape Town over the
statue of Cecil Rhodes on the university campus. It was a
call for the decolonisation of the university, an action that was the
culmination of cyclical moments that erupted to express the constant trauma
students faced because of colonial mentality and its productions thereof.
Bergson claims that concepts of time need ‘philosophising
otherwise’, to conceptualise time that is meaningful, and holds interiority.
This poetic understanding of a language is seen
in the work of Glissant (1999), where words invent history, and language is
intuitive and inventive whilst referencing the past, birthing a new way of
thinking that connects across diasporas,
Image 1: Shirin Neshat
Sililoquy
Film, 16 mm, shown as video, 2 projections, colour and sound (stereo)
1999
15 min
Image source: Tate Modern
In this example, by means of allegory, time is intuitive and not rational. It also
‘overfills the present by filling it with a flash from the past’ (McLaverty-Robinson
2013). Neshat places different
temporalities in conversation with each other, and the viewer is transported
into an alternative space that submerges history with the present, which holds
the ability to change the trajectory of the future or reimagine ways of being.
Image 2: Nolan Dennis
model for an endless column
2021
compound PET plastic globe model, synthetic stone finish, black primer and steel rod
220 x 30 x 30 cm
Image source: Goodman Gallery
In another work of
Dennis’, garden for fanon (image 3), worms eat copies of Fanon’s The
Wretched of the Earth to secrete it in soil, of which is converted into
energy, then used to grow a plant. This is symbolic of seeing the end of the
world and
all systems of domination, to create new possibilities. It also foregrounds
regenerative nature of knowledge production or ‘time as creation’, which is
antithetical to ‘epistemicide’ and the birth of newness at the messianic moment (yet also
references the erasure of data in African history). The language that Dennis
employs is one of science and ‘rationalisation’, which reads as ironic in my
location of time as creative and intuitive as opposed to rational. However, the
strategies that is used disrupts the logic of science in some way: it is more
the symbolic that is prominent through the disruption of the ‘rationality’,
placing it into the realm of ‘intuitive’ and sensory, as they are not intended
to read rationally but allegorically.
Image 3: Nolan Oswald Dennis
garden for fanon
2021
Bioactive system, books, borosilicate globes, community of eisenia fetida earthworms, care protocols, microcontroller, steel armature
Variable dimensions
Image source: Goodman Gallery
The ‘Black Liberation Zodiac’ (image 4) is another work of Dennis’ that uses scientific language to speak of solidarity in the south, through ‘zodiac’ symbols of liberation movements amidst a cosmos. Dennis remarks that the symbols he uses often ‘morph across time and cultures’, and that ‘there’s a whole Black liberation world- a global language and a global system’ (Dennis 2020). The use of ‘allegory’ is a means of making sense of time to re-situate past struggles or conditions in present space, almost as if art behaves as a portal, or ‘messianic moment’, by providing a different language in which we can create ways of being.
Image 4: Nolan Oswald Dennis
Excerpt: Constellations (Black Liberation Zodiac)
2017
Image source: Art in America
Philosophising Otherwise: A portal into the past, present,
and future through Afrofuturism
I will now consider Afrofuturist thought which has been used
as a creative means to dream of another world for those who, like Jewish people
in Benjamin’s thought, were denied of envisioning a future (Dandia 2021).
Epistemicide meant that Black people experienced cultural
dislocation, alienation, and estrangement. Afrofuturism became a means to
imagine the future free from the shackles of the colonial matrix, where Black
people oversee their own narratives the future to ‘indict imperial modernity’
(Eshun 2003).
Image 5: John Akomfrah
The Last Angel of History
Film, 45min
1995
Image source: hans der Kulturen der Welt
The Last Angel of History (image 6 below) is akin to what
Benjamin (McLaverty-Robinson
2013) describes as ‘The Angel of
History’: based on the Angelus Novelus painting by Paul Klee, where the angel
sees ‘not progress, but a growing pile of rubble’. (image 6, now unironically
showing at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem). The angel is not able to put the
ruins of past together because of a storm blowing from paradise, or ‘progress’.
Benjamin, here, is suggesting the past as an accumulation of ruins, using
allegory to do so (McLaverty-Robinson 2013).
Image 6: Paul Klee
1920
Oil transfer and watercolor on paper
31.8 x 24.2 cm
Image source: Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Image 7: Nollywood cinema defying gravity
Uploaded by: All About Mariana
2017
1:59
Image source: YouTube
REFERENCES
Akomfrah, J. (1995) The Last Angel of History. Available online <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEbjMrl-GXc&t=219s>
Al Jazeera (2020) Remembering Mohamed Bouazizi: the man who sparked the Arab Spring. Available online: < https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2020/12/17/remembering-mohamed-bouazizi-his-death-triggered-the-arab > [Accessed 31 January 2022].
Anzaldúa, G., (2013) This bridge we call home. Routledge.
Badiou, A. (2007). Being and Event. United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Academic.
Anderson, R. and Barber, E. (2020) The Black Angel of History and the Age of Necrocapitalism. Available online <https://terremoto.mx/en/revista/the-black-angel-of-history-and-the-age-of-necrocapitalism/>
Césaire, Aimé. 2013. Return to My Native Land. Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books.
Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299. Available online < https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039 >[Accessed 31 January 2022].
Dandia, A in Los Angeles Review of Books. (2021) [online] Available at: <https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/crisis-as-freedom-muhammad-iqbal-and-walter-benjamin/> [Accessed 31 January 2022].
Dennis, N. O. (2021) Conditions, Goodman Gallery. Online: <https://goodman-viewingroom.exhibit-e.art/viewing-room/nolan-oswald-dennis-conditions#tab:thumbnails;tab-1:slideshow> [Accessed 31 January 2022].
Dennis, N. O. (2020). Nolan Oswald Dennis in conversation with Manisha Holmes: Black Liberation Zodiac. Available online https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/interviews/nolan-oswald-dennis-monisha-holmes-black-liberation-zodiac-1202673932/ [Accessed 31 January 2022].
Diagne, S. B. (2008). Bergson in the Colony: Intuition and Duration in the Thought of Senghor and Iqbal. Qui Parle, 17(1), 125–145.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20685728 [Accessed 31 January 2022].
Eshun, K. (2003) ‘Further Considerations on Afrofuturism’, The Centennial Review, 2003. Available online < http://www.essayfilmfestival.com/wpcontent/uploads/2015/03/3.2eshun.pdf > [Accessed 31 January 2022].
Fourth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle (1996) Available online <https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Fourth_Declaration_of_the_Lacandon_Jungle> [Accessed 31 January 2022].
Gamedze, T. (2021). Thulile Gamedze: Destruction styles / Radical Philosophy. [online] Radical Philosophy. Available at: https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/destruction-styles [Accessed 17 November 2021].
Glissant, E. (1999). ‘From The Whole‐World Treatise’, Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Vol 32, No. 58, 1999, pp. 31-34.
Gibbs, R. in Walter Benjamin and History (Walter Benjamin Studies) by Andrew Benjamin. (2005) London: Continuum. Available online< http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781472547828> [Accessed 31 January 2022].
Fees Must Fall Movement (2015) IOL, Available online < https://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/kwazulu-natal/our-parents-were-sold-a-dream-in-1994-1934973 > [Accessed 31 January 2022].
Goodman Gallery Press Statement (2021). Available online < https://www.goodman-gallery.com/exhibitions/johannesburg-gallery-conditions-nolan-oswald-dennis > [Accessed 31 January 2022]
hooks,b ( 2005) Bell Hooks: Cultural Criticism and Transformation. Available online <https://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Bell-Hooks-Transcript.pdf> [Accessed 31 January 2022].
McLaverty-Robinson, A., 2022. Walter Benjamin: Messianism and Revolution – Theses on History. [online] Ceasefire Magazine. Available at: <https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/walter-benjamin-messianism-revolution-theses-history/#:~:text=Homogeneous%20empty%20time%20is%20meaningless,to%20those%20who%20experience%20it.> [Accessed 31 January 2022].
Morrisson, T. (2015) No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear in The Nation. Available Online < https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/no-place-self-pity-no-room-fear/> [Accessed 31 January 2022].
Mignolo, W. (2011). The darker side of Western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Durham: Duke University Press.
Mohomed, Carimo. (2017). “The Days of God”- Muhammad Iqbal’s Conception of Time and History. Journal of Islamic Thought and Civilization. 7. 1-17. 10.29145/2017/jitc/72/070201. [Accessed 31 January 2022].
Neshat, S. (1999) Sililoquy. Available online: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gnjgntYBts >
Roy. A. (2020). Arundhati Roy; ‘The pandemic is a portal’. Ft.com. (2021). Available online: <https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca> [Accessed 31 January 2022].
Söderbäck, F. (2012). Revolutionary Time: Revolt as Temporal Return. Signs, 37(2), 301–324. Available online:< https://doi.org/10.1086/661710>
Santos, B. d. S. (2007) ‘Human rights as an emancipatory script? Cultural and political conditions’, in Another knowledge is possible: beyond northern epistemologies. London: Verso, pp. 3–35.
Santos, B. d. S. (2015). Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis.
The Guardian (2015) The Birth of Rhodes Must Fall. Available Online: < https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/nov/18/why-south-african-students-have-turned-on-their-parents-generation > [Accessed 31 January 2022].
Quijano, A., 2000. Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America. International Sociology, 15(2), pp.215-232.
IMAGES
1. Neshat, S. (1999) Sililoquy. Film, 16 mm, shown as video, 2 projections, colour and sound(stereo). 15 min. Image: Tate Modern. Available online: < https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/neshat-soliloquy-t07970 > . [Accessed 31 January 2022].
2. Dennis, N.O. (2021). model for an endless column. Compound PET plastic globe model, synthetic stone finish, black primer and steel rod. 220 x 30 x 30 cm. Available online < https://goodman-viewingroom.exhibit-e.art/viewing-room/nolan-oswald-dennis-conditions#tab:thumbnails;tab-1:slideshow > [Accessed 31 January 2022].
3. Dennis, N. O. (2021) garden for fanon. Bioactive system, books, borosilicate globes, community of eisenia fetida earthworms, care protocols, microcontroller, steel armature. Variable dimensions. Available online < https://goodman-viewingroom.exhibit-e.art/viewing-room/nolan-oswald-dennis-conditions#tab:thumbnails;tab-1:slideshow > [Accessed 31 January 2022].
4. Dennis, N. O. (2017) Excerpt: Constellations (Black Liberation Zodiac). Bioactive system, books, borosilicate globes, community of eisenia fetida earthworms, care protocols, microcontroller, steel armature. Variable dimensions. Publisher: Art America. Available online < https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/interviews/nolan-oswald-dennis-monisha-holmes-black-liberation-zodiac-1202673932/ > [Accessed 31 January 2022]
5. Akomfrah, J. (1995) The Last Angel of History. Film, 45min. Available online < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEbjMrl-GXc >Image: hans der Kulturen der Welt
6. Klee, P. (1920) Angelus Novus, Oil transfer and watercolor on paper. 31.8 x 24.2 cm. Online: < https://www.imj.org.il/en/collections/199799?itemNum=199799> Image: Israel Museum of Jerusalem
7. Nollywood cinema defying gravity (2017). Video, 1:59. Image still: All About Mariana. Available online <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0UHzjj_Ydo> [Accessed 31 January 2022]
31–01–22
Overview: This essay looks at the ways in which art ruptures linear time to create the worlds that are otherwise possible. It is a mediation through the lens of time from scholars in the global south: Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Mohamed Iqbal, and Leopold Senghor through looking firstly, at rupture as protest, and then as art as a means to dream otherwise: a portal that allows us to dream other options- to philosophise otherwise. If a protest is a rupture of time, art is the portal into deaming.
Rupturing
space-time to radically dream
‘Linear time’ as
we know it, is tied to scientific understanding of time, where events have a
past, present and future. This follows a trajectory that reduces time to
measurement and space, or ‘space-time’. Linear time legitimises colonialism, as
this trajectory is linked to progress and modernity through a timeline which
benefits the advancement of the west and compresses subaltern temporal
experiences to privilege a singular, dominant worldview. Linear time is also
complicit in ‘epistemicide’, the destruction of other knowledges
by imposing an alien mode of being onto them, in the positivist motto of ‘order
and progress’ (Santos 2015, 2007 :4). The colonial matrix of power
where the capitalist class control resources, gender, labour, time, economy,
authority and knowledge, can be thought of as a ‘black hole’, a void of
‘homogenous empty time’, through which all of humanity is sucked into in linear
singularity, speeding towards its own destruction. Opposing this is a
gravitational mass that implodes the void, an eruption, an explosion, a
supernova: ‘messianic time’, that sets light to the sparks of hope in the past
in continuity with the present. It this rupture that
allows us to ‘philosophise otherwise’ akin to clusters of stars (or
different temporalities) existing alongside each other in a constellation. But
first, we need to ‘reflect on the borders that separate these different
dimensions’ (Mohomed 2017).
Introduction
In this essay I
will look at variations of time and how we can imagine a constellation of
coexisting temporalities as a space for solidarity in the global south to
rupture linear time and radically dream. This, I would argue, is done through
‘intuitive’ and ‘creative time’ (Diagne 2008).
Firstly, I will
show how linear time is tied to colonial matrix of power through Walter
Benjamin’s idea of ‘homogenous, empty time’ (McLaverty-Robinson 2013). The
subaltern may, at times, experience this linearity as ‘cyclical’ time as the
past occurs in the present. I will then demonstrate how linear time is ruptured
through specific moments in history, namely the moment that sparked the Arab
spring in Tunisia and the action that sparked the Rhodes Must Fall (2015)
protests in South Africa. I will discuss the dialectics of disruption to these
‘events’ (Badiou 2007) through Benjamin’s concept of ‘messianic time’ (McLaverty-Robinson
2013). Lastly, I will discuss how rupture creates an entry point for
alternative ways of being in the world by converging points in Leopold Senghor,
Henri Bergson, and Muhammad Iqbal’s concepts on ‘intuitive and creative time’
(Diagne 2008), as a means of ‘philosophising otherwise’, where art forms take
precedence in imagining the end of the world to create life. The examples of
‘creative, intuitive time’ that I will use are in the writing and prose of
Glissant, allegory in Shirin Neshat’s film Sililoquy (1999), Nolan
Oswald Dennis’ Conditions (2021) and Afrofuturist thought located in
Akomfrah’s The Last Angel of History (1995). The works of art that I use
speak specifically to the condition of the state of time, and/or creation of
another world.
Philosophising time
Time and space
cannot be looked at outside of the power relations of empire on the global
south. (Globalised) time appears to be monolithic, and in this temporality that
the transnational capitalist class landlord over the labour of the subordinate
classes: those in the global south operating on rented time, who contribute
heavily to globalisation but remain prisoners of their local time-space (Santos
2007: 7), compressing their experiences into singularity. Linear time makes
certain that what bell hooks terms the ‘white supremacist cis capitalist
patriarchy’ (hooks 2005) are projected to the front and people who are
marginalised, behind, on varying points on this timeline, intersectionally speaking,
(Crenshaw 1991) as time impacts marginialised identities differently. Söderbäck
(2012) asserts that black, queer, labouring and female people have been reduced
to building the futures of those further up on this timeline— white, heterosexual men or
women. Furthermore, labour unalienated from itself cannot be considered labour
at all: it is only labour because of its sustenance it provides to white
supremacy (Gamedze, 2021). This is demonstrative of how the west is dependent
on the idea of linear time to support empire. ‘The annihilation of differences
neatly situates everyone on the linear path that we call progress and that
supposedly to be pursued in the interest of a neutral and abstract “all”, which is ‘time’ disguised as a natural and neutral force.
We can think of
linear time as ‘homogenous time’, a concept by Walter Benjamin, who offers that
it must be read congruently to a capitalist everyday experience of time, as
each moment is empty and structurally identical to the next (McLaverty-Robinson
2013). It is designed to exploit labour of people to serve the linear time
trajectory.The problem with the linear-progressive paradigm is that it is
purposefully forgetful as it does not allow a return to the past for a sense of
continuity, and that it is simultaneously repetitive as it traps the subaltern
in the past, resurfacing traumatic episodes(Söderbäck, 2012: 303). Time then
becomes cyclical for those on the margins. Linear time is an entrapment that
does not to allow new imaginings of a liberated world to appear where people
are not alienated from their labour, and are allowed to oversee their own
destinies. As Fanon has said, ‘the present always serves to build the future’.
Benjamin offers an
alternative mode of time for the subaltern: the ‘messianic moment’. This
insurgent moment creates connections to the past, present and future where
present revolts can be a redemption or continuation of the past, a
transportation which ‘connects the ruins of the past to the now’. The
messianic moment is a culmination of many moments erupting to create a new
world from burnt embers. Opposed to homogenous time, it is not meaningless, but
filled, ruptural, and qualitative. ‘The past and present meet in a lightning
flash in a constellation, where messianism offers the passing away of the
world’ (McLaverty-Robinson 2013). Here exists a portal into an alternative means of understanding time.
The idea of messianic moment is echoed in protest, its
immediacy, for example, in the slogans of student-led Fees Must Fall protests
of 2015 demonstrating cyclicality (past traumas in linear time): ‘in 1994 our
parents were sold a dream, we are here for a refund’ or in the
Zapatista Uprising’s Fourth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle (1996), showing
continuity: ‘these were our banners during the dawn of 1994. These were our
demands during that long night of 500 years. These are, today, our necessities’.
Messianic moments of rupture
There are two cases of ‘messianic rupture’ that I will look
at. The first occurred in the Arab Spring (2011), which was sparked by the
moment that Muhammad Bouazizi set himself on fire after harassment from the
police over his fruit and vegetable cart, because he was trading without a
permit. This moment, attributed to the economic situation in
the country, was the culmination of constant past repression, emblematic of the
linear trajectory where the subaltern faced (cyclical) trauma imposed by the
state which continued to show up in the present. The other case of messianic rupture
was the Rhodes Must Fall protests (2015), initiated by student Chumani Maxwele
throwing a bucket of shit from one of the townships in Cape Town over the
statue of Cecil Rhodes on the university campus. It was a
call for the decolonisation of the university, an action that was the
culmination of cyclical moments that erupted to express the constant trauma
students faced because of colonial mentality and its productions thereof.
In both instances, there existed an ‘arrest’ in time: the
past was not something that those on the subaltern could go back to. It
considered imagining an alternative way of being. These were moments that
caused the ‘truth’ to ‘leap out of their context’ (McLaverty-Robinson 2013). In their respective cases, all of life was compressed into
a single moment that ceased the colonial matrix of power, bringing linearity a
halt, disrupting ‘business-as-usual’, at the prospect of creating a new normal.
These protests punctured the void of homogenous time and gave
way to the messianic moment. In both these instances the actions led to the
explosion of linearity: a ‘violent eruption of an outside, which breaks into
the otherwise peaceful development of (white, northern) humanity’ (McLaverty-Robinson 2013). They can be read through the idea of Badiou’s ‘event’, where there is an arrest in the state of the
situation and hegemonic way of being (i.e. linear space-time, or the colonial
matrix of power) that renders the excluded invisible, ‘hiding inconsistent
multiplicity’ (McLaverty-Robinson 2013). The ‘events’ took place because the trauma that caused the
initiators to act were a result of unbearable living conditions and compression
into linearity, which proved to be cyclical for them. These actions collapsed
time and exploded into the possibility of a new world emerging. The messianic
moment can be thought of as a portal between the world as we know
it and a better one.
According to Benjamin, the catastrophe exists when there is a
continuation of things as they are (the continuation of linear time). This is
exemplified by the ‘business as usual’ period after protests, where movements
de-escalate. The messianic moment, countering the idea of western ‘progress’,
proves to be a radical intervention on linear time.
Dandia (2021) poses that if ‘normal’ is what created the
current situation, we need to question the grounds for this ‘normalcy’, and
develop ideas to free us from its clutches, by breaking out of ‘linear,
rational, calculative conceptions of time and history that have been imposed on
us’. Here, the present is posited as the answer to give way to redemption, and
crisis as a place for possibilities and new ways of being in the world to
arise, in times of messianism. To dream new possibilities, we should not align
ourselves with paradigms that hold our imaginations hostage.
What we require, Dandia suggests, is a mode of operating ‘crisis as freedom’.
This idea is echoed in essay that Toni Morrison wrote (2015), expressing those
times of dread (which can be read as messianic moments) is exactly when artists
go to work:
There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need
for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how
civilizations heal… Like
failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom.
Like art.’
Philosophising Otherwise: Intuitive time
Bergson claims that concepts of time need ‘philosophising
otherwise’, to conceptualise time that is meaningful, and holds interiority.
Senghor interprets philosophising otherwise to consider the
philosophy of others outside of Europe. Mignolo (2011) has made a
similar claim, saying that many different worlds exist, and that there are
other ways of knowing (being, experiencing the world).
Through Bergson’s
notion of ‘philosophising otherwise’, a different concept of time is put
forward: ‘time as duration’ (Diagne 2008). Here, time is felt, intuitive, and
not looked at analytically. It is like Senghor’s thought, who has expressed
‘emotion is black, reason is Hellenic’ (134). The dominant view of
time is tied to space in western, scientific, ‘rational’ understanding.
According to Bergson, scientific time cannot account for our
inner experiences and consciousness. Our experiences are qualitative not
quantitative, and devoid of numeracy.
Senghor comments on the opposition of this
positivist thought as curing the nineteenth century from ‘scientific blindness’. For Bergson, time is intuitive, and we fall into the trap of
using the language available that is immediate to describe it. Because time is
perceived as one event separated from another event, we think we grasp time
because we measure it as opposed to it being felt. To speak of time that
endures, Bergson offers that we need a new language; to make it sound new, the
one of poetry, for example. Intuition is defined by Bergson as ‘the sympathy by
which we are transported inside an object to coincide with what it is in a
unique and therefore inexpressible way’ (Diagne 2008).
This poetic understanding of a language is seen
in the work of Glissant (1999), where words invent history, and language is
intuitive and inventive whilst referencing the past, birthing a new way of
thinking that connects across diasporas,
‘In my thoughts I rush through time and
space… the rivers of China with their smooth silence that extends in
archipelagos… each time engulfing tens of thousands of men, women and children
in their ritual floods… the calendars of Heaven that presided over the destiny
of Empire… the Chain of Ancestors of African countries’
Glissant claims that writing ‘brings us closer to
understanding’, and that ‘we discover the place where we live, from which we
speak, can no longer be abstracted by us from that mass of energy from afar’.
Here I interpret Glissant to mean us speaking of our own temporalities, not a
temporality for us to assimilate into that is given to us by the west. More
directly, Glissant has also said that the poet ‘strives to create
connections between themselves and the whole, permanence in the given moment…
elsewhere within the here, and vice versa.
…
To write is to speak: the world.
…
To write is to summon up the world’s flavours.’
This demonstrates what Bergson was talking about in time
being experienced and felt. The language that Glissant uses is explanatory of
an intuitive, sensory, felt, time. Poetry can channel ideas from various
schools of thought—the past is
summoned, put at odds with the present and future through a ‘new’ language.
Words embody, through metaphor and analogy, a different meaning from their
intention: a poetic approach to reality. Glissant’s writing invokes Mignolo’s ‘option theory’ in practice: recognising the other
worlds that exist, ‘other ways of knowing’, the other worlds you have not been
told about.
Bergson terms ‘vital force’ as closely linked with
consciousness- the intuitive perception of experience and the flow of inner
time. This is similar to how Senghor uses the concept of ‘vital’
to locate equivalence between being, force and rhythm. Scientific time was
devoid of interiority for Senghor, too. Therefore, being is a force, and a
force is rhythm. Life is art, and time (being), is creative. Ghanian
philosopher, Souleymane Bachir Diagne makes the linkage of the art
object to its interior essence: an artistic form is not rationalised, or
analysed— it is
sympathised with and felt, to grasp its interiority, to approach it with ‘rhythmic
attitude’. Diagne claims (via Senghor) that intuition was separated from
intellect by the west establishing ‘analytical reason’ and an ‘ethnographic
divide’ that saw ‘intuition’ un-intellectual and associated with African
people, diametrically opposed to ‘analytical thought’ with the west, seen as
intellectual. This sensory means of being, where time is felt, shows that art
and ‘creative time’ is an option to ‘philosophise otherwise’, in imagining
another state of being within time.
Philosophising Otherwise: Creative Time
Muhammad
Iqbal, according to Souleymane Bachir Diagne, claims that time is creative, as it cannot be measured
scientifically: linear space-time means that the future is as guaranteed as the
past. Iqbal contends that scientific time deprives time of its living history
and reduces it to a spatial representation. Mohomed (2017)
extends this thought, that existence is not bound by serial (linear, scientific
time), and if it is seen as creative through Iqbal’s view—creativity is opposed
to the repetition of mechanical actions present in scientific time. Time is
therefore created, and not ‘serially bound’. Similarly, Bergson shares this
thought — if the
portals of the futures did not remain open to reality, time would cease to be
creative, and if time was teleological, it would already have a preordained
purpose in the world and events would wait for their respective turn to take
their ‘temporal sweep in history’. It is a view that denies
creative agency and sees time as pre-determined. Scientific time cannot
comprehend life (Mohomed, 2017: 11), and it is through creative work, that we
connect our experiences to other beings on Earth, and Earth itself. (Anzaldúa 2013:
542).
Philosophising Otherwise: allegory as antidote and anecdote
We may look at allegory as an antidote, too, if
allegory and anecdote is a sort of experience, an uprising of remembrance
(Gibbs 2015: 209), as it has the power to transport us. Allegory relies on art,
stories and poetry as an alternative time or entry point to envisioning a
better society, using metaphor, and its ability to symbolically make one thing
mean something else. Through ‘allegory’, the present moment becomes a messianic
moment. Art can be a means of ‘healing’ that Benjamin was referring to, in
conjunction with ‘rupture’ to break out of the linear paradigm (McLaverty-Robinson
2013).
To look at allegory as a means of transportation and symbolic
representation, one can look to Iranian born (American based) artist Shirin Neshat’s
(image 1) video piece Sililoquy, which, on opposite screens depict
interchangeable windows into two different worlds: one, the cultural life she
had left behind in Iran, with its vast fields, close sense of community, play invoked
by children where a sensory and dream-like state is foregrounded. This is
contrasted with the other screen, of which her ‘Iranian self’ watches her
‘American self’ assimilating into American landscape: she walks through the
trade center, there are indicators of ‘modernity’, advancement, and progress
everywhere, symbolised by businesspeople with suitcases pass her on their way
to work indicate the flow of capital and a ‘modern’ state of being. She,
however, is in traditional clothes, in some sense, still stuck in an ‘Iranian
temporality’, where time moved slowly, which had to be compressed into the
fast-paced American capitalist culture. It is almost as if the space-time
compression is being sucked from the Iranian landscape into the American one,
as they play interchangeably, and she watches on.
Image 1: Shirin Neshat
Sililoquy
Film, 16 mm, shown as video, 2 projections, colour and sound (stereo)
1999
15 min
Image source: Tate Modern
In this example, by means of allegory, time is intuitive and not rational. It also
‘overfills the present by filling it with a flash from the past’ (McLaverty-Robinson
2013). Neshat places different
temporalities in conversation with each other, and the viewer is transported
into an alternative space that submerges history with the present, which holds
the ability to change the trajectory of the future or reimagine ways of being.
Another form of
‘allegory’ in ‘creative time’ is Nolan Oswald Dennis’ Conditions (image
2). The work in Conditions considers the other worlds that occupy the
same space and time as the colonial planet does. The visual metaphors which are
employed allegorically imply the occupation of other worlds in space-time
within the colonial planet: it translates to several globes stacked in a line
and overturned on their head, with a black globe in the middle: a void in
linearity, a portal to the other worlds that exist, a different concept of
time, or the messianic moment. ‘The spherical globe is the idealised figure of the planet in
Western cosmology: seamless, smooth, unitary and knowable’ (Goodman
Gallery press statement, 2021).
Image 2: Nolan Dennis
model for an endless column
2021
compound PET plastic globe model, synthetic stone finish, black primer and steel rod
220 x 30 x 30 cm
Image source: Goodman Gallery
In another work of
Dennis’, garden for fanon (image 3), worms eat copies of Fanon’s The
Wretched of the Earth to secrete it in soil, of which is converted into
energy, then used to grow a plant. This is symbolic of seeing the end of the
world and
all systems of domination, to create new possibilities. It also foregrounds
regenerative nature of knowledge production or ‘time as creation’, which is
antithetical to ‘epistemicide’ and the birth of newness at the messianic moment (yet also
references the erasure of data in African history). The language that Dennis
employs is one of science and ‘rationalisation’, which reads as ironic in my
location of time as creative and intuitive as opposed to rational. However, the
strategies that is used disrupts the logic of science in some way: it is more
the symbolic that is prominent through the disruption of the ‘rationality’,
placing it into the realm of ‘intuitive’ and sensory, as they are not intended
to read rationally but allegorically.
Image 3: Nolan Oswald Dennis
garden for fanon
2021
Bioactive system, books, borosilicate globes, community of eisenia fetida earthworms, care protocols, microcontroller, steel armature
Variable dimensions
Image source: Goodman Gallery
The ‘Black Liberation Zodiac’ (image 4) is another work of Dennis’ that uses scientific language to speak of solidarity in the south, through ‘zodiac’ symbols of liberation movements amidst a cosmos. Dennis remarks that the symbols he uses often ‘morph across time and cultures’, and that ‘there’s a whole Black liberation world- a global language and a global system’ (Dennis 2020). The use of ‘allegory’ is a means of making sense of time to re-situate past struggles or conditions in present space, almost as if art behaves as a portal, or ‘messianic moment’, by providing a different language in which we can create ways of being.
Image 4: Nolan Oswald Dennis
Excerpt: Constellations (Black Liberation Zodiac)
2017
Image source: Art in America
Philosophising Otherwise: A portal into the past, present,
and future through Afrofuturism
I will now consider Afrofuturist thought which has been used
as a creative means to dream of another world for those who, like Jewish people
in Benjamin’s thought, were denied of envisioning a future (Dandia 2021).
Epistemicide meant that Black people experienced cultural
dislocation, alienation, and estrangement. Afrofuturism became a means to
imagine the future free from the shackles of the colonial matrix, where Black
people oversee their own narratives the future to ‘indict imperial modernity’
(Eshun 2003).
One could argue that envisioning the ‘future’ is still
located in a space-time temporality. However, in Afrofuturism, this is refuted
through Eshun’s (2003) claim that ‘science fiction was never concerned with the future, but rather with
engineering feedback between its preferred
future and its becoming present’, as colonial powers lay siege to the futures
of the disenfranchised by advancing the future of the colonial matrix. The
present moment is ‘stretching, slipping for some into yesterday, reaching for
others into tomorrow’ (Eshun 2003: 289). Afrofuturism is about imagining an
alternative future to rethink the present, an edit and ridicule on
linear time to manipulate its trajectory.
Afrofuturist
thought is ‘philosophising otherwise’, as it considers the future of many
alternative tomorrows of which black people were denied. This exemplifies the
idea of ‘creative time’. Furthermore, it completely defies the logistics of linear space-time in its makings:
if we are to look at an example of Afrofuturism
in allegory, in John Akomfrah’s The Last Angel of History (image 5) the
‘data thief’ is transported to various spaces-times throughout the film,
searching for the key to his future, while using the ruins of history and
technology. It is not trying to be an accurate representation of space, or
time, but ‘intuitive’ reality, as it is felt for Black people. The filmic language takes on a jarring, fragmented
and disorienting nature that seems to collage time. The actors are disembodied
or alienated from the landscape in some way. The film critiques ‘linear constructions of the past, present, and future in the
humanities and sciences to overturn Eurocentric motifs of identity, technology,
time, space, and religion’ (Barber and Anderson 2020).
Image 5: John Akomfrah
The Last Angel of History
Film, 45min
1995
Image source: hans der Kulturen der Welt
The Last Angel of History (image 6 below) is akin to what
Benjamin (McLaverty-Robinson
2013) describes as ‘The Angel of
History’: based on the Angelus Novelus painting by Paul Klee, where the angel
sees ‘not progress, but a growing pile of rubble’. (image 6, now unironically
showing at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem). The angel is not able to put the
ruins of past together because of a storm blowing from paradise, or ‘progress’.
Benjamin, here, is suggesting the past as an accumulation of ruins, using
allegory to do so (McLaverty-Robinson 2013).
Image 6: Paul Klee
Angelus Novus
1920
Oil transfer and watercolor on paper
31.8 x 24.2 cm
Image source: Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Afrofuturist thought is a radical intervention on space-time, as it defies all colonial logic of linearity, science, and rationality. It is speculative and imaginative, and has the ability, through ‘allegory’, to alter the present through ‘creative time’. It almost mocks empire through its sheer rebellion to conform to the principles of science, re: gravity, rationality, and space, elements also seen in Nollywood (Nigerian Hollywood, image 7 below).
Image 7: Nollywood cinema defying gravity
Uploaded by: All About Mariana
2017
1:59
Image source: YouTube
In popular (false) narratives of Africa, it exists as a ‘dark continent’, ridden with AIDS, disease, and poverty (Morrisson 2015) Afrofuturism allows for a reimagining of the future of African time by African people of how they see themselves, through the present, past and future, which, through its medium of imagination and drive for self-determination, is creatively bound (through Iqbal’s reasoning), outside of the trajectory of a linear narrative where the future isn’t already written by an invisible, abstracted, (colonial) force. Afrofuturism is but one illustration of Iqbal’s statement, ‘your ink, that is you’ (Mohomed 2017: 14).
Conclusion
The linear concept of time was constructed to ensure that the colonial matrix of power does not collapse. I have considered ‘homogenous time’ and ‘messianic time’ as a disruption to the colonial matrix disguised as ‘linear time’, or simply ‘time’, as we have come to know it. The messianic moment, through the cases provided in the political and artistic spheres, present a moment of collapse in linearity, through ‘events’ (Badiou 2007), which were seen to create a ‘rupture’, for alternate modes of time to enter. I then provided alternative means of being, through ‘philosophising otherwise’, by showing how creative, intuitive, and allegorical times are ways to envision other possible worlds, with examples from differing art forms. I lastly considered Afrofuturist thought as ‘creative time’ in imagining a different trajectory for those who were denied of envisioning a future in linear time. Even if we used the trajectory of linear time for futurity in the subaltern, it does not work as linear time was not created as a space for marginal identity to exist. Linearity is a timeline that profits off the labour of the subaltern, without any self-determination. To the colonial project, these identities are invisible, but depended on for labour. This puts the subaltern in a powerful position, as they can turn the homogenous into the messianic through rupture, to envision different worlds and to radically dream. It is in allowing these options of time to exist alongside each other, that create a constellation of other philosophies, a container for solidarity in the global south. As Glissant has said, ‘permit me to guess how my place is joined to others, how it ventures elsewhere without budging, and how it transports me in this immobile movement’. Through art, we go to work in times of crisis, to imagine the other worlds that are possible.
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IMAGES
1. Neshat, S. (1999) Sililoquy. Film, 16 mm, shown as video, 2 projections, colour and sound(stereo). 15 min. Image: Tate Modern. Available online: < https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/neshat-soliloquy-t07970 > . [Accessed 31 January 2022].
2. Dennis, N.O. (2021). model for an endless column. Compound PET plastic globe model, synthetic stone finish, black primer and steel rod. 220 x 30 x 30 cm. Available online < https://goodman-viewingroom.exhibit-e.art/viewing-room/nolan-oswald-dennis-conditions#tab:thumbnails;tab-1:slideshow > [Accessed 31 January 2022].
3. Dennis, N. O. (2021) garden for fanon. Bioactive system, books, borosilicate globes, community of eisenia fetida earthworms, care protocols, microcontroller, steel armature. Variable dimensions. Available online < https://goodman-viewingroom.exhibit-e.art/viewing-room/nolan-oswald-dennis-conditions#tab:thumbnails;tab-1:slideshow > [Accessed 31 January 2022].
4. Dennis, N. O. (2017) Excerpt: Constellations (Black Liberation Zodiac). Bioactive system, books, borosilicate globes, community of eisenia fetida earthworms, care protocols, microcontroller, steel armature. Variable dimensions. Publisher: Art America. Available online < https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/interviews/nolan-oswald-dennis-monisha-holmes-black-liberation-zodiac-1202673932/ > [Accessed 31 January 2022]
5. Akomfrah, J. (1995) The Last Angel of History. Film, 45min. Available online < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEbjMrl-GXc >Image: hans der Kulturen der Welt
6. Klee, P. (1920) Angelus Novus, Oil transfer and watercolor on paper. 31.8 x 24.2 cm. Online: < https://www.imj.org.il/en/collections/199799?itemNum=199799> Image: Israel Museum of Jerusalem
7. Nollywood cinema defying gravity (2017). Video, 1:59. Image still: All About Mariana. Available online <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0UHzjj_Ydo> [Accessed 31 January 2022]