Immanent Anthropology: A Comparative Study of 'Process' in Contemporary France

This paper presents a comparative critique of the ‘processual temporalities’ which infuse both social-scientific theorizing and selected Western cultural practices. Through study of a public-private partnership which emerged from a biotechnology project devised for producing ‘self-cloning’ maize for resource-poor farmers, I analyse how processual temporalities were central to re-gearing knowledge practices towards market-orientated solutions. In a study of characterizations of the ‘state of flux’ which affects life in a French peri-urban village, I explore how processualism is identified as a component of a metropolitan hegemony which villagers ‘resist’ through idealizing ‘enduring temporalities’ of cultural practice. Drawing on Arendt and Deleuze, I analyse processualism as a dominant contemporary chronotope, mediating and disciplining conflictive temporalities and practices, underwriting economic projects of deterritorialization and restructuring – whose idiom is also prominent in social-scientific paradigms. I substitute an ‘immanent anthropology’, which advocates a non-transcendental ontology of cultural practice and analysis – displacing anthropological analysis onto a polychronic temporal foundation

Mirror of Time: Temporality and Contemporaneity in the work of Jorge Luis Borges

Borges recognized the cracking facade of modernity and the fragility of its monist absolutisms, its commitment to linearity, and its faith in historical progress.  By disavowing the ability of time to be contained within any collective structure of representation, Borges both refutes modernist conceptions of time and offers insight into recent theories of contemporaneity.  A contemporaneous reading of Borges opens lucid temporal relationships, challenges assumptions about the affinities between the self and time, allows for the existence of multiple temporal antimonies, and ultimately reveals the contemporaneous relationship between individual sensations of time of the collective structural composition of temporality.</jats:p

Time in the ontology of Cornelius Castoriadis

We can locate the problematic of time within three philosophical questions, which respectively designate three central areas of philosophical reflection and contemplation. These are: 1) The ontological question, i.e. 'what is being?' 2) The epistemological question, i.e. 'what can we know with certainty?' 3) The existential question, i.e. 'what is the meaning of existence?' These three questions, which are philosophical, but also scientific and political, as they underline the political and moral question of truth and justice, arise from the phenomenon of time, the irreversible constant flow of phenomena that undermines every claim to absolute knowledge. The purpose of this essay is to illuminate the importance of time for philosophical thought and, more generally, for human social and psychical life, in the context of the ontology of Cornelius Castoriadis. Castoriadis, who asserted that " being is time – and not in the horizon of time " , correlated history to society and being to temporality within the social-historical stratum, the ontological plane created by human existence, where " existence is signification ". Time is interpreted as the creation and destruction of forms in a magmatic, layered with a non-regular stratification, reality, where the social-historical manifests as the creation of collective human activity, in the manner of social imaginary significations. This notion of temporality is accompanied by a profound criticism of traditional rationalistic philosophy, to which Castoriadis assigns the name 'ensemblistic/identitary', that highlights the necessity of a new, magmatic ontology, based on the primacy of time

Time as a strand of the dance medium

Time and space are at the core of our aesthetic experiences of dance performances, yet dance has been frequently categorised as a space-based art. In this paper I revise the choreological perspective developed by Preston-Dunlop and Sánchez-Colberg that conceives dance as an embodied performative art articulated in a multistranded medium (performer, movement, sound, space). I argue that time should be allowed a distinct place in the choreological discourse since its presence is key to the expressivity of a dance piece. I conceptualise the meaning of the time strand and expose how different substrands emerge, connect with others and become expressive in dance performances. My investigation considers in particular the aesthetics of time in live performances in the theatre compared to dances created for the camera, focusing specifically on instances of contemporary transpositions from one context to the other

Projectification and Conflicting Temporalities in Academic Knowledge Production

The project format has become a standard and self-evident way to organize research work in today's accelerated university context, leading to the projectification of science. This paper argues that the project format is not a mere technical organizational tool, but that it challenges and reshapes research practices and ideals. The project format is embedded in a specific temporality which is called project time. The key characteristics of project time are scrutinized by distinguishing it from process time, which refers to the internal organizational logic of research. In addition, project time is examined through Barbara Adam's theorizing on the commodification, control, compression and colonization of clock time. In the last part of the paper, temporal conflicts in project-based research are examined empirically by drawing upon interview material with Finnish academics working in the social sciences

"Things that stay":feminist theory, duration and the future

Taking up Grosz's proposal for the `complexities of time and becoming' to be considered seriously, this article explores the status of time and the future within feminist theory through empirical research in which teenage girls describe things `staying'. Focusing on these `things that stay' and drawing on Bergson's concepts of duration and the virtual, the article argues that time is dynamic and heterogeneous; things endure through divergence and transformation. It argues that if the relations of temporality are understood as both continuous and discontinuous, enduring and changing, feminist theory orients to the future in `novel' ways

Ruts of Gentrification: Breaking the Surface of Vienna’s Changing Cityscape

Last year, the city of Vienna celebrated the 150-year anniversary of the opening of the Ringstrasse, the central ring road that stands as symbol of the huge structural renewal that accompanied the transformation of the&nbsp;Habsburg empire’s capital into a rapidly growing modern city. The anniversary acquired poignancy on account of the way Vienna’s population is once again growing rapidly, with an estimated ¼ million people to be added to&nbsp;the city’s population over the next decade. While accommodating urban migrants was not a priority in Ringstrasse Vienna, and working class districts are not part of iconic mapped mediations, the current city council, a&nbsp;coalition of Social Democrats and the Green Party, studiously tries to avoid 19th-century urban modernity’s “mistakes” in their efforts to accommodate the growing population, and they let the Viennese, and the world, know.&nbsp;This time, GIS and digital mapping are mobilized for planning, mediating and communicating large-scale development and renewal projects.&nbsp; This paper looks at the mediations of three crucial sites of contemporary urban transformation in Vienna that mobilize the affordances of new technologies: “Loftcity,” a loft development cum cultural centre on the site of one&nbsp;of Vienna’s largest factories, the Ankerbrotfabrik; the transformation of the district surrounding Vienna’s new Hauptbahnhof; and Aspern, “Vienna’s Urban Lakeside,” a new satellite town promoted as a city of the future. By&nbsp;comparing the historical traces that remain in the mediations of these sites with their 19th-century counterparts, a geocritical reading of Vienna’s gentrification emerges that situates spatial practices in historically grown lines&nbsp;of connectivity, presaging and transcending traditional forms of classification, such as national divides or urban/suburban dichotomies

Thinking Materially: Cognition as Extended and Enacted

Human cognition is extended and enacted. Drawing the boundaries of cognition to include the resources and attributes of the body and materiality allows an examination of how these components interact with the brain as a system, especially over cultural and evolutionary spans of time. Literacy and numeracy provide examples of multigenerational, incremental change in both psychological functioning and material forms. Though we think materiality, its central role in human cognition is often unappreciated, for reasons that include conceptual distribution over multiple material forms, the unconscious transparency of cognitive activity in general, and the different temporalities of metaplastic change in neurons and cultural forms

The Maintenance of Virtue Over Time: Notes on Changing Household Lives in Post-Disaster Nepal

Although it is banal to say the series of earthquakes that hit Nepal in Spring 2015 will radically change the country, what this change will consist of still remains undetermined. As many earthquake victims learn to make do in broken houses, tents, or corrugated tin structures, post-earthquake Nepal seems held within a frustrating stasis, wherein temporary hardship is often impossible to distinguish from lasting consequence. Yet this sense of stasis is in part misleading. While the act of building remains slow, households who lost their homes have been scrambling to rethink their financial futures in order to afford reconstruction. In doing so, many earthquake victims have begun to enact changes in their households, accelerating divisions and unearthing tensions that had hitherto been allowed to lie dormant. Revitalizing Meyer Fortes’ classic discussions of amity and the development cycle, I introduce the stories of three informants who attempt to maintain the virtues of kinship in spite of the financial pressures they bear. I also explore how their actions reflect a reckoning between legal ownership and everyday household ownership practices – a reckoning that has affected how household members interact, often in unpredictable ways