There are, of course, different dimensions to the problem of the sweeping pandemic and its consequences. Many of the commentators’ & analysts’ inquiries were explicitly concerned with the inherent contradictions of capitalism itself. However illuminating some of them were, there’s still not enough said about the most obvious problematics that the COVID-19 pandemics bring towards us and which, in my opinion, are the first preconditions of the shift in our consciousness of historicity within any previous epoch so far—namely the shift in our understanding of both time and space. In this first article, I’ll deal explicitly—even though in rough strokes—with the problem of temporality and it’s relation to COVID-19, while in the next from these series my subject would be space.

“The time is out of joint”: time is disarticulated, dis-

located, dislodged, time is run down, on the run and run down

[traque et detraque], deranged, both out of order and mad. Time is

off its hinges, time is off course, besides itself, disadjusted. Specters of Marx by Jacques Derrida; 2006; p.20

What does it mean for something to be temporal? What we suggest when we say ‘man is a temporal being’ or moreover ‘man is a being which is capable of comprehending temporality’?

Etymologically speaking, the word temporal comes from the Latin tempus, which bears the Proto-Indo-European semantic—not just phonetic—core of *tempos (“stretch”), derived from the root *temp- (“to stretch, a string”). Thus to say for something that it’s temporal, means to say that it’s something that stretches. It stretches, but we still have to ask where, or how. When we are talking about living things, for example, we might say that they, as a concrete and individual entities, stretch in time and precisely because of it they are this and not that living thing. They are born and would, inevitably, cease. Their origin has its specific place in time, just as their extinction would. Temporality, therefore, has something to do with memory. We’ll also have to ask who’s memory, then? There must be someone who experiences the stretching of the thing, its birth and its death, whatever it is so that he or she can say ‘this thing which is born and would cease or, in other words, which stretches in time, is temporal’. However, this subject of the experience, comprehending the object’s stretching, must be a subject of stretching himself, even though not necessarily of the same kind, since it is he who has the memory of the thing in its previous condition.

Every time when we’re comprehending something, therefore, whatever it is—a dog, a cup of coffee, the contemporary economic relations, the quarantine—we are already dealing with the notion of temporality both without and within. Hence, following Kant’s steps, our understanding of the world is first and foremost shaped by time1, or by that in which everything stretches. Therefore, the epistemological process of cognition (and, henceforth, self-consciousness) is closely linked with the historical process itself. We are historical beings as a result of our cognitive apparatus, which allows us not just to occur and cease in time as many other living things, but to apprehend the being-in-time both ours, and that of other living (or non-living) things. After Kantian transcendental philosophy, and most of all—after the Hegelian take on history, every serious philosophical reflection must be, in the last analysis, a transition to historical reflection or, to be more precise, must be in itself a reflection over the history as a process and the way in which we understand and act accordingly to this process.

However, “It has become customary to counterpose Greek and Christian conceptions of time by means of the metaphors of the circle and the line: while the Greek world was supposedly dominated by a circular conception of both natural and historical time, Christian time had an origin (in the birth of Christ) and an orientation.”2 I won’t argue against this, but I’ll have to add more contemporary nuances over this widely accepted view. The French historian and social thinker François Hartog, in his work Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, following Reinhart Koselleck adds to the debate his understanding of our contemporary ‘regime of historicity’ which he calls presentism. If the Ancients were caught up in a notion of temporality primarily concerned with the past—their mythological conception of the eternal recurrence, the Golden Age and so forth—and the Christians (especially after the advent of modern sciences) had their redemption (or their progress) as the guiding light of their future, we—the contemporary human beings—are concerned, according to him, explicitly with the present. The German social thinker Hartmut Rosa calls this acceleration. He claims that “the cause of social alienation, the increasing number of burnouts and depressions, and the failure of political institutions in our late-modern times” can be traced back to “a single phenomenon: the continuous acceleration of social change, which puts us under increasing pressure to keep up with technological, economic and social developments”3.

Nevertheless, one might argue that inside the current worldview there’s a lasting promise of salvation beyond, which is in intimate relation to futurism and presentism alike, and—to some extent—with any previous regimes. But where is this beyond in which salvation lies? Unlike that of Christianity, capitalism’s promise concerning the future isn’t situated simultaneously spatially and temporally, but only temporally—beyond today. The productive ethos, raging in the depths of the exploited—and even self-exploited—capitalist subject, tirelessly places salvation within the limits of an eternal tomorrow. Still, it seems to be somewhat inappropriate to speak of capitalism as some moderate substitute of mythology and/or religion. After all, today we are talking about the emergence of a new temporal and historical consciousness without at the same time dealing with a well-defined change in the politico-social and/or economic paradigm—something we cannot say about any previous regime of historicity besides presentism4. Overidealized qualities such as greed (at the expense of charity), the ceaseless pursuit of economic growth (at the expense of redemption), entrepreneurship as a particular kind of approximation to the absolute (or the union with God), and so on, indicate the occurrence of structural similarities. But we must admit that

… capitalism brings with it a massive desacralization of culture. It is a system that is no longer governed by any transcendental Law; on the contrary, it dismantles all such codes only to re-install them on an ad hoc basis. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher; Zero Books, 2009; p. 6.

In other words, what is essential for this worldview is that it doesn’t have conclusive and fixed temporal boundaries. It is in constant fluctuation, locked up inside a myriad of other streams of motion, a perpetual movement that expands its own boundaries, while the whole is constantly adjusting to each of these streams and each of them—to the whole, depending on an infinite and vast set of conditions. A process which can hardly be called causal. Flows, innumerable and interconnected streams, generating each other and tirelessly shifting the horizon of the plausible before us. To understand capitalism means to understand movement itself.

It looks like the concept of presentism could be of help here. But Rosa’s diagnosis—and Hartog’s one, for that matter—comes too late. We have already reached its conclusion; we are past acceleration as both historical and epistemological truth of our time. They are interpreting and presenting as manifested what already ceased. I guess that’s the intricacy of dealing with a concept so dainty and fluid like this one. It was during the Cold War when the notion of acceleration made sense and, as far as I can see, its peak was right after the fall of the Berlin Wall. That’s over now. We are distant from any conscious movement bothered even with the present, remote to any tendency towards conscious movement at all, what remains for any of the other modes of temporality. Be it political, social, cultural or technological whatsoever, our movement-towards appears questionable. It’s not that the end of history had reached us, but more the other way around—it’s as if there’s no way anything could ever end, since, for that matter, it hasn’t even begun. As far as history is concerned—looked from our hic et nunc consciousness of it—presentism or its external manifestation, namely acceleration, had never really happened. The very notion of acceleration demands that. Where we were before the COVID-19 pandemic, is where acceleration revealed itself only as one of the symptoms of ‘temporal dispersal’, as Byung-Chul Han would put it. It’s a sign of the dysrhythmia in the very core of our contemporary world, of its absence of wittingly seized potentialities and well-defined point of arrival. In this, let’s say dysrhythmic regime of historicity, nothing really occurred or ceased. Everything was here and wasn’t here at the same time, atomized as it is, dispersed by the blast of the subject’s diffused and transient attention. Our time was (and more or less still is) out of joint.

It is the shared sphere of experience with the Other that have been long lost during the regime of dysrhythmicity. This very same sphere is which nourishes our exploration within the multiplicity and complexity of our being-in-the-world. The immediate association with the Other, in short, constitutes the many-faced forms of temporality that we are capable of grasping. The deserted lake of our individuality, which was imposed upon us by the ruling classes through the totality of imaginable mediums, is incapable of comports with time. Thus time itself was disarticulated, dislocated, dispersed, atomized, just as we ourselves were. It seems to me that mankind’s awareness and it takes over the notions of both time and space are reflections of the social reality it’s into. The atomization of society goes hand in hand with the atomization of time. It is still a well-formed flow that stretches before us, just that it doesn’t make sense. Its fold is both nowhere and everywhere. As if we can’t handle duration. Moreover, it’s the same when it comes to our personalities and/or identities. Ourselves, while by definition concrete and definite entities, are abruptly dispersed and dislocated, which reveals our egos as out of joint too. This surely wasn’t the last “regime of historicity”, since its heir is already at our threshold, but was the most meaningless and futile of them all. What I’m saying here is that until the COVID-19 pandemic, we couldn’t even stretch and comprehend stretching properly. Nevertheless, this pandemic event that is now upon us is the point of puncture and revulsion, of rearticualtion and relocation, in which temporality uncovers itself before us as the reviving body of a long-lost comrade. During the siege of the individualistic society, it was silent and lurking, acting as it wasn’t here… Now the specific context of our lives and, consequently, our sentience concerned with it, are about to change this picture dramatically.

Now our understanding of time and history is divided between before and since the pandemic. In the way we experience time—some of us at the so-called “critical workplaces”, others at their homes—there’s again this awareness of duration. Where does it come from? Is it because of the ongoing reminders of doomsday stamping on our doors? We must see our current situation as an embodiment of what, in the strong philosophical sense, one might call event. Under the so-called “reality” of late capitalism and our everyday existence in it, something else comes to the surface. What is Real and what—reality? Bernard, from the popular Sci-Fi series Westworld, would say that the Real is which is irreplaceable. The latter remains to be replaceable. We, therefore, are witnessing now the urgency and necessity of replacing the “reality” of late capitalism we’re living in. The event of the pandemic is revealing before us what is constantly at stake in social reality. Like any other strictly philosophical event, the pandemic is “a disruptive, insurgent moment that leaves the situation in which it irrupts irrevocably transformed”5. Duration comes with the sense of the Real, which irrevocably transforms reality.

The constant remembrance that we—even with most righteous intentions towards the Other in mind—presently embody a danger, an inexorable threat to his very being, takes our general demeanour to an entirely forgotten province. Thus our social reality became, once again, social or real. The chaotic self-fulfilment and self-sufficiency of the atomized individualistic project (barely a subject at all) is now gradually superseded by the sign of a molecularized individualistic subject. Our selves, our little egos, at once became insufficient and ineffective. The viral disease and its promises are both terrifying and alluring—cease as an individual or find, once again, mankind. Precisely here is where temporality obtains its grounds again. Precisely here is where the notion of future penetrates the realm of everyday life and starts to re-joint what was out of joint before. It’s we who were disjointed from one another, our epoch and time too, but also the history itself. In other words, a social whole which was entirely amputated of its capability to think and act in respect of the Other, is now growing its parts again. It is not that we can do much in the isolation in which most of us are. But we are witnessing lots of initiatives, proclaiming different ways of doing around the world. The neoliberal project’s defects made volunteer actions based on solidarity and empathy for one another mandatory. It’s as if—in the face of death—the flow of life springs running once again.

In the sphere of professional politics, however, things don’t look so rosy. The extensive authoritarian measures taken throughout are worrying enough, as many—following Agamben’s stance—pointed out. But we mustn’t forget that dictatorship feeds on the tension of the incalculable and, hence, on the disjointed time. Authoritarianism is an artificial construct aiming to accomplish temporal localization. Its anomie is based on the dispersed consciousness and, therefore, on the atomized subject. Our obligation is to find more reliable theory and praxis of molecularization, well-suited for the new conditions of everyday existence. Every system is under the restriction of those energies and flows which are already in circulation. The circulation and what’s therein is somehow the very fuel for a continuous (self)reproduction. But as far as I can tell, this fuel is now almost over. By the end of the present situation, it might be completely exhausted. Thus the new “normal” would have to be driven by some new objectives. Exactly on the basis of our awareness and responsibility towards the Other, and the threat that we represent(ed) for him, for ourselves and everything else, a new world might ripen. We are—or, to be more precise, might be—on the threshold of a more cohere and intelligible historical narrative, capable of providing a shelter for us all. In other words, it’s time to start stretching in time rightly, with an idea of the future yet to come. Much like a fruit, the new system might no longer need fuel or grease because it wouldn’t be a machine anymore, but something else. It might even need sun, water, oxygen, and a noble substrate to propel his juice, some other bee and yet another life to help to spread his seed.

Buen Řavov