The Matter of Time: Stories from a Living Present by Rachel Loewen Walker A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy University of Alberta © Rachel Loewen Walker, 2019 ABSTRACT The living present is the instantaneous contraction of the past and anticipation of an unknowable future. As a method of understanding, the living present employs the claim that “we live as time makers—anything exists as a maker of time,” in order to reveal the power that our stories, memories, predictions, and problems hold in making the time (and world) around us.1 The value of such a project is its potential to disrupt the linear and causal stories that we tell about history, as well as to disrupt the anticipatory regime that often holds us hostage to a looming future. Even more importantly, the living present is a frame through which to view the interrelatedness of human and non-human entities organic and inorganic matter, and even material and immaterial interactions as they collaboratively make the past, present, and future. To make a case for the living present as a method of understanding, I use a diffractive method to follow the ripples, overlaps, and differences between various topics as they are taken up in an interdisciplinary arena.2 Chapter one develops the central argument of this dissertation through a detailed literary (via Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods) and philosophical (via Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition) explication of the living present. Following this explanation, I apply the living present to three different timescapes in chapters two, three, and four, moving from the temporality of a singular concept (misogyny) to the temporality of identity construction (via queer time), and finally to the temporality of an era that is “not yet” but all around us (the Anthropocene). In each of these I highlight the impact of the “old” on the present, 1 James Williams, Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 37. 2 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2007). ii or the past on the new. “The Time of Misogyny” conducts a close reading of Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny in order to demonstrate how an old concept such as misogyny can act as a tipping point for renewed engagement with violence against women in contemporary gender politics and activism. As well, I stretch the term misogyny to show that it is as much about race, culture, and sexuality as it is about gender, and that our response must also be intersectional. In chapter three I explore another old concept, or rather the event of coming out as an affective temporal frame for queer subject creation. My key addition to this field is the notion of the time-body, or rather, the addition of a thick materiality to the otherwise fluid and ever- changing queer subject. I thus demonstrate the way that a living present enables us to understand queer time as not only a multiplicity of non-linear timelines, but as an embodied process of making a subject that is always a seamless flip between univocity and differenciation, sameness and difference. In a third timescape, chapter four reads the living present alongside current discussions of the Anthropocene and the related anticipatory academic discourse about climate change. Departing from previous chapters, which centre on the human experience, chapter four explores the non-human, inorganic, and immaterial agencies of the living present, including how these have force and presence in the same ways as their counterparts. The lack of progress-oriented politics that is central to the living present, is a continual reminder that we are always “in the middle of things.” There will be no end to climate change just as there was no beginning, and what really matters is our ability to better understand our complex and multiple present accountabilities within an otherwise incomprehensible process of change. iii The concluding comments ground this work in a thick, durational, understanding of time, especially our own temporal forces as “time-makers.” I argue that when we take heed of the fact that we live, act, and are acted upon within a living present which is always contracting the past as it reaches toward an unknowable future, we can unsettle the fierce linearity of our stories about history, particularly as they impact our political movements, theories, and daily choices. Through interdisciplinary and community-based examples, I demonstrate that by “thickening” the present moment to include multiple pasts (and multiple futures) we are invited to act with a deepened level of accountability to all possible timelines. iv PREFACE: THE MONOMYTH The monomyth, also called the hero’s journey, is a common story arc that traces a character’s call to adventure. Setting out on their own, our swashbuckling hero lets go of the world that they know—Harry Potter’s cupboard bedroom on Privet Drive; Katniss Everdeen’s home in District 12; Frodo’s comfortable existence in the Shire—crosses a threshold of crisis, great challenge or adversity—Harry faces off against Quirrell over the philosopher’s stone; Katniss defeats the Hunger Games by threatening suicide; Frodo faces off against Gollum— which they defeat in order to return home forever changed—Harry returns home, but has a newfound inner strength as a wizard; Katniss returns to District 12 an unlikely champion; Luke is awarded for his efforts; and Frodo leaves middle earth to live with the Grey Elves. The monomyth makes up nearly half of our Hollywood blockbusters, hundreds of thousands of books (fiction and non-fiction), and is often the retroactive frame through which we tell stories about ourselves. I tell a story of being bullied in grade two, and after receiving support and guidance from my brave and emboldened uncle to stand up to my bullies (the mentor, also a key component of the hero’s journey), I am able to stand up for myself. The monomyth also has societal and cultural force as it guides our Nationalist doctrines, our queer activisms, and even our relationship struggles. Therapists use it as a frame through which to push clients toward self-discovery; Trump uses it to justify global calls to war. The monomyth, like other storytelling apparatuses, frames and creates the world around us, and in so doing it actually makes time, particularly the sort of time that literary author Jeanette Winterson describes as a lie: time as a straight line, time as a singular present, time as a known history and v an unknown future.3 When we think of storytelling we think of tall tales, myths, fabrications, and fables. But what if all stories are time-tellers, time-makers, history producers, future creators? Every storytelling trope has material uptake as it frames the past, future, and present in different ways. Sometimes these frames are irregular, multiple, and complex, and sometimes (more often) they are linear, progressive, and cumulative. In each tale, we take a journey to an elsewhere, and in so doing, we construct a present as a somewhere. Stories are not just our access points into the worlds of fantastic beasts and imagined lands, because everything we write or speak is a form of storytelling, whether philosophy, science, cultural anthropology, or narrative. This means that all of our processes of writing and telling play a role in the making of time. This is a central component of the work ahead: the fact that we all tell stories and in so doing, make time. In claiming that we are time makers I mean simply that there is no outside of time. There is no grand clock that marks the passage of days; there is rather a relational passage by way of complicated entanglements of time, meaning, and mattering. Likewise, there is no outside of the story, our worlds are only and always the weaving together of the variety of memories, experiences, and anticipations that make up our own storied embodiments. We tell these stories as linear, but they are actually living presents: thick temporal stretches forward and backward that bring meaning, possibility, and hope to the present experience. As the storyteller, I have the privilege of being able to pick and choose from thousands of different stories that have been told over time—stories about the “waves” of feminist theory, about the timelines of ancient Greece, about misogyny as a limited and complex term, about 3 Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1989). vi queer theory and new feminist materialisms, and about Indigenous temporalities. I also get to tell stories about Sara Ahmed, Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, climate change, how I learned to ride a bike, the love lives of homo sapiens and robo sapiens, the Living Present, and on and on and on. But the stories that I tell are only and ever the product of my own entangled experiences as a complex body in an even more complex world. Some of this complexity includes my embodiment as a white settler, who is a cisgender, queer woman. I grew up in a progressive Mennonite family with divorced parents and conservative cousins. I was already a feminist in elementary school, and never brave enough to think my crushes on girls meant anything more than curiosity. I learned how to bake bread from run-away Hutterites, spent twelve years in University talking, teaching, and writing about queer theory, and then became the Executive Director of OUTSaskatoon, a queer community centre, where I have lived and breathed queer praxis for the last five years.