Figurations of timely extraction @ The Material Life of Time

a Temporal Belongings conference, 15th-17th March, 2021:

 

https://www.temporalbelongings.org/the-material-life-of-time.html

 

Much of the time of our lives is given to us by the relationships, properties and movements of worldly materialities. Atmospheric carbon has irrevocably transformed agricultural time (Kassam et al 2018), microplastics are queering reproductive time (Davis 2015), dissolvable sutures have remade the time of health, while rare earth minerals make possible the mobile phones at the heart of debates around acceleration and time squeeze (Wajcman 2008). In all of these ways and more, we see material objects — their uses, cost, manufacture, changing composition and characteristics — at the heart of modern debates about how time should be used, lived and valued.

A deeper recognition of the material lives of time thus attunes us to questions of how times are being made, where its materials are coming from, who or what is being displaced in the process, and what kinds of material practices are being called forth. How does the global race for resources in a time of climate breakdown, including for oil, gas, arable land and fresh water, make new times of migration, colonialism and dispossession? How are new bio- and medical technologies affecting embodied temporalities? How are particular generational, political or bureaucratic times out-of-synch (or not) with geological times, biological times or ecological times, and what are the consequences? What kind of resonance do concepts such as ‘modernity’, ‘post-modernity’, ‘growth’, ‘recession’, ‘crisis’ and ‘acceleration’ take on from this perspective? What kinds of speculative futures are being produced and for whom (Keeling 2019)?

‘Materialising’ time also works back on concepts, approaches and methods for studying time by calling into question the dualistic treatment of ‘social time’ and ‘natural time’ which has structured a significant proportion of work on time (Adam 1994). We are asked to  rethink key temporal concepts by attending more closely to their material basis and the ways these materials remain, morph, wear away and disappear with changing environments and socialities, “not in a relation of linear unfolding, but threaded through one another in a nonlinear enfolding of spacetimemattering” (Barad 2010). Another set of questions thus revolves around how to study time in its complexity, the difficulties that disciplinarity presents, and what to make of the continual rediscovery that time is not unitary and objective, but multiple and situated.

 

Figurations of timely extraction (Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting)

 This piece engages with three figurations of timely extraction: consortium, borehole and amalgam. It makes use of the contaminated and contaminating practice of figuration to plot stories that highlight some of the milestones of deadly collaboration, of optimised acceleration, and of sedimented damage. These stories might provide a way to make present the time-space complexities that emerge from the connections between extractivism, computation and semiotic-material values. Attempting to expose the rocky figures of consortium, borehole and amalgam, implies exposing also some of their interdependent articulations such as transnational alliances, gold mining and geocomputation and how they shape life/non-life temporalities. The dynamic crossings of time and matter that they are embedded in establish a dynamics of repeated damage, via latent regimes which maintain extractive forces, practices and modes. 

 

ìnfo and full programme: https://www.temporalbelongings.org/uploads/6/8/8/9/6889024/mlot_full_programme_210308.pdf