The Train, The Pulse, The Ghost, The Pulse, The Train.

The Train
We live in a time when trains are scheduled to arrive at, for instance, 8:23. And they often do. So, we set our alarms the night before, and then we wake up, make coffee, make breakfast, listen to the news on the radio, walk to the station, and stand with everyone else by the side of the horizontal void until the great machine slows down carefully and precisely in front of us. The doors slide open and it is 8:23.

Time has always been a subject of fascination. People have observed the cosmic efforts of the sun as it travels from one horizon to the next. People have observed the circular motions of plants as they grow, and the rhythms of people’s insides. People have also made precise machines that partition these observations into very regular intervals so that everything can fit into an hour, a minute, or a second. These partitions are so powerful as a concept that they have come to be what we understand as time itself: a set of measurables that can be worn around the wrist for whenever we need a glance of reassurance. There is a certain empowerment that comes with saying that it is 8:23, and that it is so for everyone around us.

During the early 1800s British trains moved out of the coal mines and began to travel between places with different times. There was no such a thing as national synchronisation so every town would actually have its own “time of day” and this meant that the great machine was also, in a way, a very clumsy one. Calibrating time became a way to increase productivity and efficiency in transport, translating minutes, a little used concept before the industrial revolution, into power and capital. Likewise, having precise clockwork at sea meant being able to draw lines across the earth. Longitude became the maritime measurement of colonisation and when Greenwich Mean Time was established, it was clear that the British was an empire of time: London became the centre of the world.

Abstracted from the variable cycles of nature, the turning dials of clocks evidenced the mechanical governance of rotation. Towards the end of the 1800s the circulations that allowed clocks to measure time led to the development of devices that would attempt to capture it. Recording and archiving moments in photographs, zoetropes, kinetoscopes, praxinoscopes and picture cameras permitted the observation of events removed from their original place and time. The promise of these machines was both spectacular and unsettling: A dead person could be seen alive. This opened many questions with respect to the capabilities of technology in general, after all, if there was now a machine that could capture a time that had already passed, what else could machines be capable of?

As something measurable, standardised and archivable, time also became instrumental in making physical labour more productive. Towards the end of the 1800’s several studies and observations were conducted in order to assess workers’ actions leading to propositions for making these more efficient. With their ability to make documents out of moments, photo and film cameras contributed to the period known as “Taylorism”, named after its most prominent figure, the American engineer Frederick Taylor. One of these experiments included placing a worker in a special room with a grid as backdrop, and a chronometer in sight. The worker would be fitted with small lights on his extremities. Then, a camera with special exposure times was pointed at him as he carried on with his work. On the photographic plate paths of light would emerge, a map of his habits and deviations, a document for improvement: a chronocyclegraph.

The choreographic solutions proposed by these kinds of studies were informed by a notion of labour reliability that challenged personal idiosyncrasies: it is the worker who should now adapt to the temporality of the machine. As Karl Marx points out, “the worker does not make use of the working conditions. The working conditions make use of the worker; but it takes machinery to give this reversal a technically concrete form. In working with machines, workers learn to co-ordinate their own movements with the uniformly constant movements of an automaton.” (Benjamin: 171)

 

The Pulse
The temporal standards deployed at the workplace in order to maximise production were also echoed by the kinds of modulation found in aspects of society that had to do with consumption. Time became the grid against which most market-based activities were devised: opening hours, holiday periods, academic years, coffee breaks, happy hours, breakfast times, news hours, local trains, 8:23’s...As a society based on the rhythms of industrialisation, most aspects of everyday life have increasingly been touched by temporal regulation. A particular indication of this is the advance and spread of information.

For Walter Benjamin information was one of the most prominent agents in a process whereby the rhythms of modernity reduced the value and depth of experience. In The Storyteller he writes that information presents itself with a directness, simplicity and instant veracity that eliminates the possibility of engaging with eventualities in a rich and layered way (Benjamin : 88). The intensity of the industrialised world churns out facts at a rate that leaves the populace unable to relate to them beyond the short-lived heightened attention that a piece of news demands: information is reduced to impulse.

This kind of dynamic described by Benjamin persists today in a vast host of mediatic devices. In our media culture, temporality directly invades the individual, bringing it into the heart of people’s homes, as with television and internet, or as a prosthetic device in mobile technology. Media relies on being a producer of presentness: one bit of information is readily displaced by the next. This nowness is in fact a condensation of temporality that we find epitomised in Television. TV makes everything it broadcasts an event of the “now”: something that has already happened, or that is expected to happen in the future, will become a present event by way of its broadcasting. A recent example may be the series of reportages surrounding the hurricane Irma in the U.S. Internet sites, on-line newspapers and TV broadcasters produced almost constant notifications with no more than reiterations of information in anticipation, or in realisation, of the hurricane’s underwhelming passage.

These constant notifications point to how a crucial element in the temporal model of contemporary media culture is the actual break of an established regularity in order to gain affective power at a given moment. As with Taylorism, the regulated temporality of mechanical steadiness also poses the problem of causing a kind of numbness, or levelling out of experience. DIfferent events are reacted to without major differences or inflections. This leads to a diminished attention span of a worker or, in the case of media, an audience. The model of industrial regularity needs to include a series of modulations in order to sustain the engagement of an individual. Television is an example of this: an orderly and predictable flow in time is established in the way of systematic, 30 minute long intervals, as well as predictable narrative curves in shows and general programming. But built into television’s structure is also its ability to rupture this steadiness in a way best evidenced by “breaking news”. The cultural theorist Mary Ann Doane calls this kind of rupture in time Catastrophe.

Catastrophe gives the nowness of media a heightened intensity, and one that allows it to summon attention and influence over a greater audience. As a de-stabilising agent, in a rhythmic sense, catastrophe doesn’t need a real disaster to give it substance because the temporal break itself is what grants it intensity. For the media, a cat on a tree can be just as catastrophic as an earthquake, and a probable event can be just as catastrophic as an event that has really happened. It all relies on the way this information is delivered in relation to the overall “uniformly constant” temporal landscape. As media expands through the digital revolution and newer technologies, similar strategies appear in the shape of instant messaging, pop-up windows, notifications, push-software, etc. As a foundational strategy for punctuating and intensifying its constant present, temporal catastrophe is crucial for media.

 

The Ghost
Media’s implosion of temporality, where past and anticipated events are mapped into a permanent, imploded present, becomes a model of how -and when- individuals engage affectively with the world. This is not just a narrative outside us, but an active dialogue with our most personal, even neurological, selves. Our interaction with these temporal structures shapes our behaviours and emotions: punctuations, compulsions, repetitions, inability to affect the course of events, impossibility of reliving events of the past, and constant anticipation of the future are all characteristics of the way we navigate everyday life. Interestingly, these are also characteristics of what is psychologically defined as trauma.

Trauma is conventionally understood as what happens when witnessing or experiencing shocking events. But for contemporary theorists the witnessing of an event is only a part of what consolidates the traumatic condition. It is the struggle with representing shocking events of the past (Allen Meek : Trauma and Media), or possible events from the future, that is essential. Trauma is the repeated attempt to draw experience from history. In trauma, the conjuring up of events is a promise to deal with them, as well as the coinciding inability to do so. Like in media culture, the past and the possible future are compulsively brought into the here an now, and like a ghost, the intensity of these projections and memories emerge as a present manifestation of what Hal Foster calls an “experience that is not experienced” (Elsaesser : 15).

Maybe that is why the ghost has no body, because its substance is that of pure non-chronological time. While fundamentally related to death, the ghost nonetheless escapes the gravitational pull of mortality by simultaneously inhabiting the before and the after. The ghost is suspended, witnessing but unable, lost in a constant search for a moment that is perceivable but that cannot be touched. The ghost sleepwalks while dreaming of himself and, like being asleep, a ghost is protected by not being there at the precise moment of presence.

We are ghosts, much in the way of Baudelaire’s Flaneur, we are city dwellers that dwell in trauma as a way to effectively navigate the bombarding impulses of a modern landscape that has spilled from the factory onto the streets and into virtual and affective territories. In a culture of saturation trauma emerges as a dialogue with catastrophe: the redemption of experience as a machine of history.

Pedro Gómez-Egaña, Bergen Sept. 26, 2011

 

 

Referenced texts

Benjamin, Walter. "The Storyteller." Illuminations. London: Pimlico, 1999. Print.

Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002. Print.

Elsaesser, Thomas. "Too Late, Too Soon, Too Much: From Melodrama to Noir and Neo-Noir to Postmortem and Trauma." 2003/7. Web.

Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. New York: Penguin, 2003. Print.

Griffiths, Jay. A Sideways Look at Time. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2004. Print.

Hobsbawm, E. J. The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789-1848. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962. Print.

Meek, Allen. Trauma and Media: Theories, Histories, and Images. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print.

Virilio, Paul. "The Perspective of Real Time." Open Sky. London: Verso, 2008. Print.

Wolf, Eric R. "Capitalism." Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California, 1997. Print.