Energy Time

II. Energy Time by Amy Ireland 7/99

Temporal Secessionism II. Energy Time Throughout human history, cultural apprehensions of temporality have rarely been uncoloured by political, metaphysical, or ideological presuppositions. Different times have different cultural affordances. A society’s temporal model allows it to articulate itself in relation to the most abstract of ontological laws, justifying its existence or future installation via resonance with the absolute. A certain perception of time can promise or inhibit a revolution, make one feel at home and in tune with the rhythms of the earth, or lost and unmoored in a vast and complex universe. Historically, time has been the medium of immense symbolic wagers. Power is cashed out in temporal standardisation. Imperialism, whether political, religious or technological, requires temporal hegemony to function. With a few important exceptions, two key moments of temporal standardisation define contemporary global experience. The introduction of the Christian Gregorian calendar in 1582, and the official synchronisation of thousands of chaotic local times (each determined by an erratic village clock) to a single World Time at the International Meridian Conference in 1884. The first concentrated its focus on the year, the second sought to coordinate the day. Both negoti8/99

Temporal Secessionism II. Energy Time ated discrepancies between cyclicality and linearity, adjusting the latter to accommodate the former. The Gregorian calendar was an attempt to upgrade its flawed predecessor, the Julian calendar, by matching the earth’s solar orbit to a more accurate year-length. The Julian calendar, implemented during the reign of Julius Caesar in 46 BC, was out by eleven minutes. A discrepancy that by the mid-sixteenth century had made nonsense of seasonal festivals with dates drifting incrementally further away from the astronomical events with which they were supposed to align. This was especially important for Easter—a Christian recuperation of a pagan celebration that still carried its association with the yearly vernal equinox. The second, under the pressure of the intensifying global trade that arose in the wake of the industrial revolution, locked the staggered cycles of local days into an overarching temporal grid, unifying the world in a single twenty-fourhour loop. Although the cyclical rhythms of astronomical orbits would continue to exert their ancient influence over the organic world, the temporal innovations of the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries would nevertheless be used to uphold ideological commitments to linearity. For the Christians, 9/99

Temporal Secessionism II. Energy Time the calendar charted the time elapsed since Christ’s death, performing, by implication, an inverted countdown to the second coming. Enlightenment notions of universal history installed an unflagging belief in scientific and social progression (with success ironically measured as distance from religion) that would carry over neatly into the globalism of the early twenty-first century. The hegemony of linearity seems total. Contemporary strains of millenarian apocalypticism posing as new beginnings only recapitulate the same old structure. Secular progressivism conceals a structural religiosity. But in inscribing itself upon the arrow of time, modernity makes itself prey to the physical forces of entropy that will ultimately undo its dominion. No empire is forever. This—in violation of every ideology—is the true law of time. 10/99