Time and the Environment: “Slow Violence” in Benito Pérez Galdós’s Doña Perfecta and Marianela Sarah Sierra In “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” Foucault writes that the great obsession of the nineteenth century was history, or time. Evidence of this obsession abounds in Western literary representations that portray human behavior adjusting to both its historical consciousness as well as the daily measured and rhythmic time of the clock indicative of industrial societies. In spite of this fascination with mechanized rhythms, the nineteenth century marks the beginning phases of a perceptual crisis regarding other temporal horizons, a crisis that has only become more acute during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. One of the great conflicts confronting humanity--and indeed the entire planetary well-being--is the abstraction of human temporality from Earth’s rhythms. As Richard Irvine explains, in contemporary Western-minded societies the changes brought about by industrialization had profound effects on time-reckoning. This term, as Nancy Munn explains, identifies prevailing methods within a society used for temporal orientation: “Strictly construed, ‘time-reckoning’ refers to the use of selected cultural categories, or contingent events […] to “tell time”- to ask “when” something happened, will or should happen- and to “measure” duration- to ask “how long” something takes, or to “time” it (8). Measuring time forms an integral part of society that extends from larger socio-cultural structures to individual perceptions of time. Filip Vostal writes that “not only does transformation of the temporal structures of modern society reconfigure our relationship with each other and with ourselves, but it also affects how we relate to the physical and natural world” (236). Changes in time-reckoning occur in slight ways that can adjust how one organizes and segments activities in daily life; however, industrialization contributed to an extensive time revolution that profoundly altered human thought. While initially localized to industrialized nations in the late-eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century, globalization has implemented these temporal changes imposing what Halmut Rosa calls social acceleration. It transforms human perception of time and profoundly affects, as Vostal notes, how we relate to the external world. Contemporary technological societies have been experiencing an unprecedented acceleration of time that has had direct consequences on how these same ‘advanced’ [End Page 41] cultures perceive the extremely slow rhythms of nature. In fact, many theorists now identify that modern technology imposes a perceptual blindness to causal processes in the natural world.1 This blindness is particularly alarming as it hinders the ability to see the effects of human activity on the biosphere. In Rob Nixon’s provocative study Slow Violence, he sustains that in the modern technological age, human cognitive processes increasingly struggle to recognize a connection when prolonged periods separate an event from consequences. As social acceleration increases, perceptual blindness of slow causal events portends frightening consequences for the global ecosystem. In spite of growing alarm over the destabilized biosphere, detractors of climate change accuse scientists and cultural critics of politicizing the environment. The dismissal of an environmental crisis is often traced back to the increasing disconnect between the human and non-human worlds. In essence, modern societies rooted in an ideology of progress engender convictions of humanity’s domination of the natural world, which perforce ignores that humans are deeply reliant on natural affordances. In a counter effort to redress the increasing disengagement of human beings from the environment, literary and artistic expressions have sought to draw attention to the human factor in the environmental crisis such as Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring. Contemporary efforts in literary and cultural productions attempt to redirect attention to humanity’s integral role in the condition of the biosphere as Nixon has shown in his analyses of ecocritical texts. Earlier works, however, offer insight into the social conditions that altered humanity’s understanding of the Earth and its processes. As modernization and technology reconfigured human experiences of time with an ever-accelerating tempo, the Earth’s slower rhythms fell beyond the scope of cognitive processes. This essay seeks to explore earlier representations of the time revolution and social acceleration that altered perception of the environment in two of Galdós’s novels, Doña...