Time: A Vocabulary of the Present ed. by Joel Burges and Amy J. Elias

Abstract

Reviewed by: Time: A Vocabulary of the Present ed. by Joel Burges and Amy J. Elias David Sigler (bio) Joel Burges and Amy J. Elias, editors. Time: A Vocabulary of the Present. New York UP, 2016. Pp. ix, 372. CAD $38.80. The contributors to Time: A Vocabulary of the Present, edited by Joel Burges and Amy J. Elias, theorize time through pairs of linked keywords. Each chapter scrutinizes a binary opposition around which modernity has organized time: the past versus the future, clock versus lived time, embodied versus dis-embodied time, or the serial versus the simultaneous. There are twenty such pairings in all, each examined by a well-known scholar. The volume is not a guide to existing debates, nor a glossary of key terms, but rather an astonishing collaborative theoretical project—a compendium of highly original essays derived from the dialectical pressure exerted by the binary terms. The essays are organized into three sections: time as history (which largely challenges the theoretical premises of history as it is currently studied in academe), time as measurement (which does theorize clocks but also considers how time structures meaningful professional and domestic labour), and time as culture (including media, computing, recorded music, mathematics, and sampling). They draw on a wide range of theoretical texts and enter into frequent conversation with thinkers such as Theodor Adorno, Reinhart Koselleck, Paul Ricoeur, Gilles Deleuze, Brian Massumi, Johannes Fabian, Harold Bloom, and, indeed, Pythagoras. The essays share a commitment to finding, in contemporary life, multiple and overlapping temporalities at work that can be considered ideological formations. To this end, Burges and Elias urge us to approach “the contemporary” etymologically, as a set of “times joined together” (4), and thus toward a “multiplicity” of times always concurrently operational even if not sufficiently aligned to be described as “concurrent” (12). This sophisticated volume will be of interest to scholars across many disciplines, but will be especially important for those working in history, literature, anthropology, American studies, and cultural studies; it would be an ideal text for a graduate course in time studies within any of these disciplines. The contributors are true leaders in their fields, which span film studies, cultural studies, creative writing, ecocriticism, literary modernism, and video art. Some, such as Paul D. Miller (also known as DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid), Sandra Stephens, Ursula Heise, and James Phelan, are such towering figures that they can be considered scholarly celebrities. Without exception the work is richly theorized and adventurous, particularly Rachel [End Page 171] Haidu’s discussion of influence as a form of transmission and Miller’s paean to Pythagoras’ mysteriousness and ubiquity. The essays draw examples from film, visual art, and music, as well as cultural phenomena like corporate slogans, the avian flu pandemic, the shortening of the second in 1972, and 1970s approaches to child rearing. While a few of the essays reach back to the beginnings of capitalism or the long reception history of mathematics to make their cases, most focus on the twentieth century, examining modern and contemporary culture especially. The contributors analyze these cultural texts through and against the binary pairings that have inspired each essay. Some of the pairings are foundational (e.g., Elias on past/future and Audrey Anable on labor/leisure), while others are more unexpected—for instance, Mark McGurl focuses on how time is gendered through the binary real time/quality time, and Anthony Reed argues that the binary authentic/artificial is, at root, a temporal division. The pairings compel the contributors into dialectical readings that frequently produce conceptual breakthroughs. Burges’ essay, for instance, offers an Adorno-inspired reading of the 2012 Disney film Wreck-It Ralph and suggests that innovation and obsolescence are concepts in perpetual conflict rather than co-constitutive markers of innovation and progress (82). Elias, meanwhile, tests the past/future binary and discovers that duration (rather than synchronicity) is the opposite of the diachronic (35). Elizabeth Freeman’s essay on the synchronic/anachronic binary—one of the collection’s finest—urges us to think about the relationship between those terms, understand why they were never truly opposite, and consider how that non-opposition can help us “conceptualize freedom” (129). Thus the volume...