An-Archic Time

Abstract

Hendren’s What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World (2020) shows how clocks are crucial to the design of the built world and its ways of disabilizing bodies that do not move according to societal clocks. Critical disability work on crip time similarly shows how time sediments normate presumptions about bodies. The paper contributes to these efforts by arguing that time cannot be understood as a fixed, transcendental framework or hypernom that stands above changes that “‘happen in time.”’ Rather, time arises out of deep change: an an-archic change, that is not necessarily ordered by a sequencing principle. The argument proceeds by studying the metrology and phenomenology of our access to clocks and time, revealing how time always is accessed as formed in and out of change. The paper concludes with observations about consequences for thinking about ability, disability, and debility—and for philosophy itself.