Saving Time (2023) Jenny Odell
Counterspells Against Apocalyptic Time
The apocalypse—you may have heard of it—is a Christian dream of final revelation and total annihilation; a last orgasmic fuck-you to a fallen creation. The so called “end of the world” and similar notions such as the immortal soul, the afterlife, the last judgment, the new earth, the return of Christ are death-drive fetishes for a time after this time; the unreal time of heaven. The nihilism of these Christian beliefs speeds extraction capitalism’s total destruction of worlds: the Christian/capitalist destroys peoples and the earth in order that god/money may one day, in time, redeem them. The linear machine time of capitalism and the apocalyptic time of Christianity are one and the same. We all live there. This can make it hard to think, let alone to act. The determinations of apocalyptic time seem ineluctable. Doom is the mood.
Jenny Odell’s principle counterspell to these giant gloomy enchantments is to do nothing. Her first book, How To Do Nothing, explained such non-activity at length. If one person just does nothing, we might assume they are depressed; if a crowd of people do nothing, it’s a strike: if a whole society decide to do nothing? It’s a revolution. Ways in which one can do nothing are various: take a nap, turn off your phone, observe flowers, go bird watching (she calls herself a “bird noticer”). And yet certain readers complained: “But I don’t have time to do nothing!” Time, as it turns out, is money and for the great majority of us there is not enough of it. “The end of the world?” the Gilets Jaunes protested in France, “We are talking about the end of the month!” At this point does it make any difference?
The new project Jenny Odell attempts in Saving Time is a catalogue of non-apocalyptic time; in her words “time that does not hurt.” Time such as the molasses-now-time of slow-noticing (evenly suspended attention), the epic time of the San Gabriel mountains, the time allowed by universal basic income, the clandestine time of Black music and dance; the time of animism, the time of the orgasm, oceanic time. Oceanic feeling is profound in part because it obliterates apocalyptic time; the young child, like a person tripping on acid, remains indifferent to time; the clock is meaningless in the best possible sense. The great variety of different times conjured here proves that there is no one time to rule them all; despite apocalyptic machine-time’s apparent total dominance it is just a mere fiction of the machine.
But then isn’t time itself a fiction? Is not the idea of time an unnecessary abstraction? This becomes rather difficult to even think of because we are surrounded by so many clocks; absolute linear-time orders how we think: cultural logic degree zero. But to think of time as some kind of separate entity is to think of it in its Christian and ideological form; as if a ticking clock were the transcendental hands of god pulling us into eternity. Time, from this perspective, does not need saving. Rather than thinking of the planet heading towards a final inevitable apocalypse, shouldn’t we think instead of a multitude of bodies—both human and non—each undergoing various degrees of radical change? Time then is no transcendental substance, but is subsumed as the life of an old growth forest, as the hurricane, as the telluric earth. The child learning to talk is involved in a process far weirder than any philosopher of time is able to organize.
A revolt against time itself is outside of what Jenny Odell is trying to think of here and yet her first book is nothing less than such a revolt. Doing nothing is at base a simple refusal of time as time; an attempt to dispel the dominant illusion of time itself. It is a political act in the manner of Diogenes public refusal, or Bartleby’s “I prefer not to." It is a proactive refusal because it publicly dispels the demands of machine-time.
If this is still too abstract and way too spacey (ha ha; the name of the blog; timewhy), we can pan out and cast a further counterspell against the illusion of time with a simple experiment: Think of those others with whom you share your life. Can time ever destroy the immediate fact of your having shared your life with them?
