Non-Time

03-10-2014

 “It may well be the region of the spirit or, rather, the path paved by thinking, this small track of non-time which the activity of thought beats within the time-space of mortal men and into which the trains of thought, of remembrance and anticipation, save whatever they touch from the ruin of historical and biographical time. This small non-time-space in the very heart of time, unlike the world and the culture into which we are born, can only be indicated, but cannot be inherited and handed down from the past; each new generation, indeed every new human being as he inserts himself between an infinite past and an infinite future, must discover and ploddingly pave it anew.”

 —Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future

In the preface to Between Past and Future, Hannah Arendt foregrounds the Nazi/German occupation of France. She does so in order to emphasize how intellectuals who had previously pursued only their own, private careers suddenly became involved in the greater cause of the Resistance. This period, she suggests, was one of an abrupt convergence between “deed and word.” Confronted with the horror of Hitler’s state of emergency, the usual careerist “masks” of “insincerity” were cast off. Then, the introduction of a real state of emergency—that of the Resistance —produced a “public space [within which] freedom could appear.”

After the Liberation and the return to “normal” life, deed and word bifurcated again. As quickly as the new public intellectuals had turned away from academic detachment during the occupation, most returned to it after the war. The overall lack of a common enemy, or at least one as unifying as Nazism had been, meant the dissolution of the new public culture. The end of the war heralded the return of “innumerable cliques” and “paper wars” and the loss of the public culture that that tragedy had inspired.

Arendt articulates a temporal dimension of this shift from private to public and back to private life. There is a time, Arendt writes, that is between past and future. I call this non-time. Here is how Arendt describes this non-time: It is

an in-between period which sometimes inserts itself into historical time, when not only the later historians but the actors and witnesses...become aware of an interval in time which is altogether determined by things that are no longer and by things which are not yet.

The ascendant public awareness of the gap between the “no longer” and the “not yet” is important since it enhances the collective capacity for remembrance and anticipation. Rather than freezing “the” present in a temporal vice-grip between “the” past and “the” future, non-time plasticizes past and future, loosening its hold. Existing in such a non-time enlivens public freedom, enabling the collective ability to resist transcendentally imposed temporal imperatives. In her time, of course, this meant above all else, resisting the trans-European spread of Nazism.

For a brief period during the war and the resistance, she writes, thought had fused with action and historical and biographical time gave way to the free, indeterminate time that Arendt inflects politically as “public freedom.” Her assertion is that non-time, unlike the historical time of past, present and future, is a more radically open yet situated temporality “at the very heart of time”—and at the core of public freedom as well.

Arendt, however, did not limit her analysis to the early-20^th century politics of Europe. Indeed, she selected numerous instances of the transformative, freedom-enhancing capacities of non-time, including the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, as well as, in the aesthetic domain, the modernist literature of Franz Kafka. In doing so, Arendt suggested the dynamism and applicability of her concept to a wide variety of situations - including, potentially, our own.

In this way, the act of thinking slips humanity out of historical and biographical time and into a non-time that reconstitutes the world. In the midst of resisting harkenings back to “the” past or any harkenings forward to “the” future, non-time, for Arendt, emerges as a plasticity subject to intervention.

The point, for Arendt, was to bring forth “the treasure” of non-time, within new temporal conditions that situate subjects anew, such that these new subjects might in turn, resituate the new temporal conditions. As she writes: “each new generation, indeed every new human being as he inserts himself between an infinite past and an infinite future, must discover and ploddingly pave it [the ‘treasure’] anew”.

How might today’s public, some fifty years after Between Past and Future, begin the fight for the public freedom Arendt sought? How might non-time assist in such a task?

Consider the mass media ascription of a non-transformative teleology to the Occupy movement. One refrain of critics of the Occupy movement was that it was not “really” seeking revolution at all. In its most common form, the critique asserted that occupiers were nothing more than recent college graduates confronted with mounting student loan debt and murky career horizons. What they really sought, therefore, was careers. But from the perspective of non-time, was this judgment necessarily “correct”, or was it instead a bit of both?

The frequency with which the same mass media outlets publish pieces concerned with economic justice today is far less today than at the height of the movement’s influence. In late 2011 and early 2012 however, journalists wrote and editors published as though they too had abruptly become aware of the gap “determined by things that are no longer and by things which are not yet.” From the perspective of non-time, the plasticity of public freedom gave way to the historical and biographical time that renders it inert. It was this that allowed the ascription of a non-transformative teleology to hold sway after the decline of the new public culture.

Of course, overstating the revolutionary nature of the occupy movement would also be foolish. Zeitgeists such as those that brought forth the French Resistance, the American Revolution, the French Revolution and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (not to mention, of course, literary modernism), are destined to decline by definition. The occupy movement proved no exception. That said, Arendt did provide some hints regarding how the treasure of non-time might be indicated amidst new, post-zeitgeist conditions, such as our own.

In her view, if humans are to move beyond the predetermined presentism of conditions set by the past, as well as the ascribed teleologism of past conditions in the future, the task is that of producing a critical, engaged public culture not as a periodic impulse, but as a permanent habit.

Doing so requires more than just heeding the often mis-read call to change the world “rather than” interpret it (as an excuse for acting without thinking). Instead, Arendt asserted, we must change the world, and at the same time, change the manner in which we interpret it. In other words, the transcendental hallucinations of time must be transformed by the immanent materiality of non-time. Why? Because, in contrast with those who speak, predictably, of “the” past or “the” future, for Arendt, the present is always an unknown moment of struggle between the past and the future.

- Jason Adams