Lived Temporalities

Julia Mahler Lived Temporalities CULTURAL STUDIES • EDITED BY RAINER WINTER • VOLUME 26 Julia Mahler (degree in Sociology from Hamburg University; MA, Ph.D in Cultural Studies from the University of London, Goldsmiths’ Col- lege) lives as a researcher and writer in London. Julia Mahler Lived Temporalities Exploring Duration in Guatemala. Empirical and Theoretical Studies C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.ddb.de © 2008 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. Layout by: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Edited by: Julia Mahler, London Typeset by: Alexander Masch, Bielefeld Printed by: Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar ISBN 978-3-89942-657-1 2008-12-11 13-09-21 --- Projekt: transcript.titeleien / Dokument: FAX ID 02a2196899370544|(S. 4 ) T00_04 impressum - 657.p 196899370552 CONTENTS Acknowledgements 9 Preface: Inhabiting the Event 11 Abstract 27 1. Lived Temporalities in Guatemala 29 1.1 Lived Temporalities in the Mayan Cosmovision of Time 29 1.2 The Concept of ‘Lived Time’ in Deleuze’s Reading of Bergson 34 1.2.1 Duration: Lived Time as Virtual Multiplicity 36 1.2.2 The Condition of Duration: Ontology 40 1.2.3 The Movement within Duration: Life 43 1.2.4 Knowledge through Duration: Intuition 46 1.2.5 Living Life Impelled by Duration: Vitalism 48 1.3 The Location of the Research: Guatemala 50 1.4 Methodology: Studying Atmospheres of Duration and their Production 54 1.4.1 Affirming an Atmosphere: The Molar and the Molecular 55 1.4.2 Mapping an Atmosphere: The Partial Objects 56 1.4.3 Analysing an Atmosphere: The Machine 59 1.5 Locating the Research Project within Existing Research 60 2. ‘Poco a Poco’: Passive Time and the Traditional Home 65 2.1 Introduction: Passive Time and the Living Present 65 2.1.1 Passive Time 66 2.1.2 The Living Present 67 2.1.3 Tradition 69 2.2 Empirical Explorations 72 2.2.1 Temporalities of Fire 73 2.2.2 Temporalities of Water 78 2.2.3 Temporalities of Sweetcorn 85 2.2.4 Temporalities of Saints 92 2.3 Conclusion and Line of Flight 107 3. ‘Todo Sirve’: The Passive Self and the Guatemalan Market 113 3.1 Introduction: Immanence and Territorialisation 113 3.2 Empirical Explorations 120 3.2.1 The Market as a Plane of Immanence 122 3.2.2 The Passive Self: Territorialisation through Resonance 130 3.2.3 Territorialisation and Consistency 143 3.3 Conclusion and Line of Flight 149 4. ‘Mañana’: Becoming-Active and the Unpleasant 153 4.1 Introduction: The passive Encounter with the Unpleasant and the Affirmation of Life 153 4.1.1 The Affect: Unpleasure as reactive Force 155 4.1.2 Differenciation: Unpleasure as active Force 159 4.1.3 Binding: The active Forgetting of Unpleasure 163 4.2 Empirical Explorations 164 4.2.1 The Affect: Unpleasure as reactive Force 165 4.2.2 Differenciation: Unpleasure as active Force 176 4.2.3 Binding: The active Forgetting of Unpleasure 186 4.3 Conclusion and Line of Flight 195 5. ‘Gracias a Dios’: The Event and Guatemalan Buses 197 5.1 Introduction: Making Sense of the Other and the double Reading of Time 197 5.1.1 The Event and the Notion of the ‘Other’ 199 5.1.2 Chronos: The Time of the Actual Other 202 5.1.3 Aion: The Time of the Event 204 5.1.4 The Event as Virtual Balance between Self and Other 207 5.2 Empirical Explorations 211 5.3 Conclusion and Line of Flight 242 6. Research Findings: Lived Temporalities and the Recognition of the Actual Other 245 6.1 Lived Temporalities: Time as Virtual Multiplicity 246 6.2 The Recognition of the Actual Other 248 6.2.1 The Desire for Omnipotence and the Desire for Mutual Recognition 248 6.2.2 The Desire for Mutual Recognition and the Desire for a Holding Space 252 6.2.3 The Desire for a Holding Space and Becoming-Active 254 6.2.4 Becoming-Active and the Circumvention of Becoming-Reactive 256 6.2.5 The Circumvention of Becoming-Reactive and Responsibility 258 6.3 Conclusion 260 Bibliography 261 Appendix 271 I. Map of Guatemala 272 II. Questionnaire 273 III. Photo Examples 276 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are many people to whom I am grateful for their engagement of one kind or another in the development of this book. I would like to thank the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the Eco- nomic and Social Research Council in the UK (ESRC) for generous financial support of the present work. I would further like to offer my thanks to Françoise Vergès and Rainer Winter for their interest and support throughout the research process. I would like to offer my thanks to those friends and acquaintances in Guatemala who have shared their time with me and thereby made this work possible: Don1 Arsenio, Doña2 Toria, Doña Maria, Oswaldo, Doña Luisa, Fredy, Francisca, the teachers at the Spanish school ‘Educación para Todos’ and Nikola. I would like to thank Howard Caygill for invaluable inspi- rations from his seminars on vitalism in philosophy. I also wish to thank Nick Thoburn, Olivia Harris, John Hutnyk, Rosi Braidotti, Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay and Vic Seidler for comments and sugges- tions. I would like to thank those flatmates and study colleagues who have helped proof-reading. I would like to thank especially the follow- ing four people the encounters with whom have given direction to the research process in the most fundamental ways: Scott Lash, Oscar Gómez, Bärbel Mahler and Maria Lakka. The solidarity that I have re- ceived from my mother throughout the development of this work is still hard to acknowledge appropriately. I would like to dedicate this book to my nephew and niece, Moritz and Esther Mahler. 1 English: ‘Mr.’, used with first name. 2 English: ‘Mrs.’, read [dQnj']. PREFACE INHABITING THE EVENT I This book is an attempt at a rethinking of Being and relationality to- wards the world onto a level that in Western modernity in which I grew up, has been explicitly avoided. I would like to call this level the level of ‘lived time’. I mean by lived time the level of sensuality, of affect as a mode to relate to the world. I got an initial idea of how one might think about lived time from the work of the philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941). Bergson’s work is about duration. For Bergson, duration is a plane of experi- enced time that got silenced in Western modernity by an excessive fo- cus on measured time. In duration, lived time is plural (lived temporalities). It is a plane of the given where everything exists as temporal- ity, rather than as distinct material entity. My aim was to give an ac- count of lived time as a plane of the socio-cultural and the biological- technological environment in Guatemala. Empirically, I have looked for example at temporalities of sweetcorn, temporalities of water and temporalities of cable TV in Guatemala. Theoretically, I have ex- plored the plurality of temporalities that I encountered as ‘virtual, qualitative multiplicity’. This is a key term in Gilles Deleuze’s reading of the philosophy of duration. Deleuze thereby characterizes the plurality and productivity of the plane of the sensual, which he calls the ‘virtual’. The first chapter of the book will introduce time as virtual, qualitative multiplicity. To describe Guatemalan everyday life as virtual, qualitative multiplicity of lived temporalities was the long- standing project of this work. The encounter between Guatemalan everyday life and Deleuzian philosophy helps to concretise the abstract and strange Deleuzian terminology as well as to open up a per- spective on Guatemalan everyday life that can be characterized as fol- lows: While Bergson locates duration within nature, Deleuze explores the plane of the sensual within capitalism. For Deleuze, capitalism is characterized by immanence – by an actual that has turned virtual. The 12 LIVED TEMPORALITIES fleetingness, intensity and disembeddedness of everyday life in global capitalism leads for him in tendency to a factual and perceptual immanence of the given. Everything seems to be in a permanent state of openness, intensity, chance and change that is more reminiscent to lived time than to measured time. My interest in the various lived temporalities in Guatemala had to do with my experience of these di- mensions of global capitalism in London. Why explore duration in Guatemala? I got fascinated by the amount of lived time in everyday life on earlier visits to that country. In traditional subsistence, on open markets and in overland-buses, it seemed to me that one was better off when orienting oneself by lived time, relating as a sensual surface to the sensual heterogeneity of the given. This is not just in order to appreciate the sensual richness of this down-to-earth way of life, but as a mere strategy of survival, and as a mode of relating to the given that the material environment seems to suggest anyway. The Deleuzian reading of duration worked very well to emphasize during the process of analysis those moments that had fascinated me when taking up the empirical material. Because the research was set in Guatemala, I naturally ended up with a displacement of the Deleuzian reading of duration. Deleuzian theory is – under different names – in one-way or another not only al- ways concerned with virtual, qualitative multiplicities, but also with the ‘event’.

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