Essays from The English Institute 2016: Time

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Essays from The English Institute 2016:Time Christina Lupton and R. John Williams Time was on our mind at the English Institute in 2016. It was the institution's 75th anniversary and that long axis of continuity came into focus against the fact of our new spatial mobility (what had been an annual trek to Harvard was now a rotating series among Yale, Chicago, and Irvine). That we were interested in time, however, was neither entirely new nor surprising. Topics addressed at English Institute meetings over the last two decades had included Periodization, Repetition, and Tense—each generating its own conversation on literary form and temporality. Reading these conversations carefully, one is left with a sense that nearly every category of literary analysis (historicity, epoch, plot, narration, seriality, meter, linearity, and so on) could be framed as a question of temporal experience. The term postmodernism may have described, in Fredric Jameson's terms, a transition from a modernist obsession with time to a globalist obsession with space, but the term itself (and its accompanying periodization of late capitalism) was already overdetermined by categories of temporal progression. And when high theory was at its highest, it was its attention to the temporality of writing that complicated the philosophical privileging of speech and its various mythologies of presence. Even in what came to be known as the transnational turn in English literary studies—reimagining all kinds of spatial boundaries in more comparative literary forms like the anglophone, the postcolonial, the subaltern, and minority literatures—we have been carefully tuned to questions of time and literary form (demystifying, for instance, colonial fantasies in which certain cultures were declared more "modern" than others). The discipline, it would seem, has always been on time. And yet it could be said that in recent years, time has become a prism through which many material, ontological, and even institutional categories are turned anew. Put simply, the clocks we are watching seem to be getting bigger. Consider, for example, how literature's ability to explore deep time has become a means for the discipline to understand the ecological, cultural, and political dilemmas of the Anthropocene. (Science fiction is certainly no longer a non-academic genre.) Or notice how literature as analyzed by computational algorithms has become an object of inquiry so vast that we are suddenly able to "read" whole [End Page 283] libraries of data—and in a time period no human being could ever hope to replicate. It is a time of big clocks, and these were some of the Institute's considerations as we met in 2016—as well as in the following year, when our topic was Scale. The goal was not so much to replace the discipline's attention to traditional categories of literary temporality as to explore what some of these newer questions respecting time had to teach us about the topics we care so much about. The text assigned for the meeting, E. P. Thompson's "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," anticipates both the political dimension and scalable qualities that work on time can take.1 In this 1967 essay, Thompson famously charts the contrast between the task-orientated practices (of pre-modern societies; of women; of students) and the time-orientated disciplines that came by the late 1700s to characterise modern industrial life. The control of bodies and minds depends in this scenario on the regulation and self-regulation of thought and action in time. Working to the clock, lining up protestant and capitalist logics through the equation of time to money, the modern laborer becomes deprived of a whole set of relations to the world that might open up again if we were to see time differently—as something to be slowed down, for instance, rather than used, spent well, or counted. The piece itself is invested in the big picture because it suggests that we might radically historicize how we occupy and count our days. In Thompson's narrative, literature counts as one of the resources for approaching time otherwise. The optimism of this argument springs, to be sure, firmly from the logic of the 1960s—from a rejection of office routines, of the norms of industrial...