April 19, 2021
Patricia Reed, Perfect Present, 2013. Modified industrial clock, 2014

Notes on Unilinear Time

 

“…in order to overcome modernity, it is necessary to go back to the question of time and to open up a pluralism which allows a new world history to emerge, but one which is subordinated neither to global capitalism and nationalism, nor to an absolute metaphysical ground.”1
– Yuk Hui,
The Question Concerning Technology in China

The convergence of time systems is a phenomenon associated with late modernity, and the processes of imperialism, religious mission, and ideological proliferation, through both global capitalism and other post-Enlightenment systems of thought. The triumphant hegemon in this contemporary phase is the unilinear, progress-oriented flow of history. The resulting situation is that systems of cyclic time and nonlinearity have repeatedly been supplanted in favour of a model of linear progression. The articulations of this monological linear, or unilinear system are politically and philosophically consequential and have framed our lives on many scales of praxis from a personal to civilisational level.  In dismantling the rule of unilinear history, we create space anew for time systems that are construed in their specificity. 

Yuk Hui’s The Question Concerning Technology in China is a philosophical inquiry into the modes of technical knowledge which underpin contemporary Chinese thought. Throughout the book, Hui tries to explain through an epistemological study, why something resembling European philosophy of technology had not emerged in China. In the early 21st century, we find a China with something akin to a state-led accelerationist programme, itself a Western import and something Hui places in distinct contrast to the homegrown systems of thought stemming from Sinogenic Confucian and Daoist conceptions of time. This disjunct itself is the result of the rapid and incomplete transplantation of a Marxian teleological model of unilinear progress into Chinese philosophy. The attempts that Maoism made to wipe a blank slate for itself were of course, only a partial success.

I want to supplement Hui’s argument, by winding backwards somewhat and examining the origins of this Marxist model of history, to demonstrate the far-reaching influence of European chronologics across cultures and economic paradigms. Despite their respective ideological particularities, a commonality transects these worlds. Tracing the epistemological genesis of modernity, we find its roots in the tripartite view of history stemming from the close of the Medieval period in Europe. This historical model lies on the substrate of Christian eschatology, whose theological formation is construed on a linear basis: all worldly phenomena existing on a timeline prefiguring the Apocalypse. In Occidental Eschatology, Jacob Taubes puts it thus: “In fact, the model of antiquity-Middle Ages-Modern age is nothing but a secular extension of Joachim’s [of Fiore] prophecy of the three ages of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” The codependence between unilinear time and its finitude arises as the end of time prefigures its flow towards an endpoint:

Apocalypticism is the foundation which makes universal history possible. The eschatological chronology of history continues on to the mystical numbers of the late Kabbalah, making it possible to divide world history into periods. In the Apocalypse of Daniel, the aeon of this world is divided up using the Prophecy of Seventy Weeks, a theory adumbrated in Persian eschatology.”2

St. Augustine’s City of God is a work that grapples with the traumatic break of the fall of Rome. In the wake of the fall of antiquity, the sociopolitical chaos and nostalgia for the Roman order prompted his reconciliation with the immanent regression and metaphysical advancement of Godliness. Through this reconciliation, St. Augustine breaks with his contemporaries in their predominantly cyclical purview of history, in presenting history as a linear path, defined by a dualistic struggle between the forces of God and the Devil. As such, Christians perceiving their world falling apart need not worry, as the gnostic path towards Enlightenment was defined by temporary setbacks produced by this dialectical tension. Already the burgeoning desire for universalism is hinted: 

“…what more remarkable history can be found than that which has taken possession of the whole world by its authoritative voice? or what more trustworthy than that which narrates past events, and predicts the future with equal clearness, and in the unfulfilled predictions of which we are constrained to believe by those that are already fulfilled?”3

In his writing, Taubes cites Karl Barth’s understanding of Christian gnosis as apocalyptic, who claims that: “Revelation is the subject of history; history is the predicate of revelation.” The etymology of apocalypse ties it to the acquisition of knowledge, Apokalypsis means “unveiling”.4 Unlike the cyclic, equilibrial regime of antiquity, medieval European time operated under the regime of finitude and linearity, although this was from more of a theological perspective until the Enlightenment when the secularisation and scientific method began to bind this linearity with a technological becoming. In Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel provides this bridge between the theological and the secular: tracing a process of the ‘spirit discovering itself and its own concept’ through historical stages.5 World history is a becoming of human freedom arching towards enlightenment. The Marxian teleology in which production underpins a series of phase-shifts from primitive accumulation-feudalism-capitalism-communism is more or less a reorientation of this purview towards the economy. Both the bourgeois form of capitalist modernity and its enemy in revolutionary communism came to espouse and propagate a unilinear time system which was largely identical in its basic precepts of future-oriented millennialism, taken as an inheritance from Christianity. In this regard, one could summarily claim that China’s state is governed by a party operating under chronologics tracing lineage from Christian eschatology. However, unilinear time’s spread came at the cost of cyclic models of time. Cyclic time exists both as a cosmological and historical mode of thought. “What is at stake […] is the problem of time, and of a history that has been totally conquered by an axis of time largely defined by European ontotheology and its completion in the realisation of modern technology.”

Cyclic time’s conceptualisation in a rationalised model of history has a lineage of its own. In the Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun, an eminent Islamic scholar writing in 1377, hypothesised cycles of history construed through the rise and fall of Maghreban political entities and their power brokerages with Berber tribesmen – following a predictable chronology based on successive discipline and decadence. Based not on an a priori model of cyclicity, instead, Ibn Khaldun observed the empiric repetition in this particular region.6 A similar model of cyclic history might be espoused in Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, which conceptualises civilisations’ fortunes on a timeline of their prowess, seen from Spengler’s reactionary vantage in devastated interwar Germany.

Indigenous peoples worldwide face their chronologics reoriented towards the unilinear, as capitalist logics and ecological disruption increasingly penetrate their enclaves. One type of time defined by metastable equilibrium between lifeforms, is violently replaced by another, defined by disruption and loss of the past, and discipline to imperatives of value-exchange. In The Ends of the World, Deborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro assert that the cosmology of Amerindian peoples operates in a reverse direction to technological Singularity: utilising ritual to bind humans back to an animalistic role in which alienation is subsumed into a praxis which thwarts the ‘regressive proliferation of chaotic transformations.’7 As such, cosmologies of cyclic time often coincide with immanent praxes to mitigate disequilibrium. 

If we take our essence of linear history as that construed through the apocalypse, then the magnitude of destruction associated with the arrival of Columbus was already a veritable end of history in the view of Danowski and Viveiros de Castro. The opening up of specificity in timelines fragments our unilinear model, such that they claim “it is as if the end of the world were a truly fractal event, indefinitely reproduced at different scales, from ethnocidal wars in parts of Africa to the systematic assassination of indigenous leaders or environmental activists in the Amazon, from the purchase of vast portions of poor countries by hyper industrial powers to the squatting and deforestation of indigenous land by mining and agribusiness, to the forcible exodus of peasant families only to give way to the expansion of transgenic soya…”8 How is it possible to assert a unifying history when the apocalypse has in a tangible sense, very much already occurred on many scales?

The tension between praxes of linear time and cyclic time is a current in Russell Means’ speech for Black Hills International Survival Gathering in 1980. Means, a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe, dispels the notion that a direct transplantation of European Marxism is cosmologically relevant to the particularities of their context: “Revolutionary Marxism, like industrial society in other forms, seeks to “rationalize” all people in relation to industry–maximum industry, maximum production. It is a doctrine that despises the American Indian spiritual tradition, our cultures, our lifeways. Marx himself called us “precapitalists” and “primitive.” Precapitalist simply means that, in his view, we would eventually discover capitalism and become capitalists; we have always been economically retarded in Marxist terms.”9 The monological tendencies of this model of history have the potential to be as unsympathetic to the existence of these people and their ways of life as the progress-oriented world order of neoliberal extractivism.

Returning this discussion to contemporary China, we find this same tension at play between a state-led technological becoming, and a society with historical roots in twin traditions of Confucianism and Daoism. Hui interrogates the relationship between concepts of Qi and Dao as words that do not neatly correlate to philosophical concepts in English – but can be taken in some senses as tool and path. Thus we have a burgeoning philosophical model of technics which had been pushed by the wayside in the rush of modernisation. Hui explicates in this project, that the engagement of these theories is not an end to itself, rather a starting point to ‘seek ways other than affirmative Prometheanism or neocolonial critique to think and to challenge global technological hegemony.’10 The loss of psychic and cultural purchase on the industrial acceleration in Chinese society is no doubt a dominant affect in a country of 1.4 billion, greater by orders of magnitude to the first Industrial Revolution’s dark Satanic mills.

More generally, the sociopolitical articulations of linear time function as a framework in which chauvinism can flourish. The placement of civilisations on a linear axis oriented towards enlightenment almost necessitates their comparison and competition under the axioms of unilinear progress. Hegel’s famously dismissive comment about Africa as a ‘continent without history’, epitomises this dogma. Achille Mbembe unfolds Hegel’s views on Africa and time, arguing Hegel, along with his milieu, typecasts traditional societies as static: “Time—”it was always there,” “since time immemorial,” “we came to meet it”—is supposedly stationary: thus the importance of repetition and cycles, and the alleged central place of witchcraft and divination procedures. The idea of progress is said to disintegrate in such societies; should change occur—rare indeed—it would, as of necessity, follow a disordered trajectory and fortuitous path ending only in undifferentiated chaos.”11 In the speculative mode of this current, Black Quantum Futurism is an interdisciplinary enquiry into how the reorientation of time in a nonlinear fashion can throw questions of political blackness into new relief. As Black Quantum Futurism (BQF) cofounder Rasheedah Phillips writes:

 “[t]ime and space need not be predetermined from pre-existing conditions.” Time is “not its own entity in the African consciousness; it is a component of events and an experience that can be
created, produced, saved, or retrieved. Life is made up of events, and events are defined by
certain relationships, patterns, and rhythms”.
12

The idea that both history and the future are fungible is a lesson learned from having the traumatic break of historical violence – reinventing the past and the future as a means of sociopolitical emancipation is part of a praxis of nonlinear chronologising. For peoples dispossessed of their history, mythopoesis acts as a necessary infill of gaps in time. BQF articulates this into a range of projects which seek to connect disparate events in space and time, such as Community Futurisms: Time & Memory in North Philly 002 – Black Space Agency, a participatory enquiry into the heritage of the Space Race in North Philadelphia. Much of the community mobilised against a perceived misallocation of resources into the Apollo missions which could be spent improving the conditions of the locale.13 Set against a backdrop of unilinear technological becoming vs particularist humanism, we find futurity splayed out in multifarious politicised and contingent outcomes.

Luddite techno-scepticism and eco-primitivism are responses to some of these chronological tensions which are imbued with nostalgia and reify the linear model of time, placing value on the retrograde portion of history. Rather than suggesting a response to the crises of capitalist and imperialist apocalyptic time as reversing backwards, Hui’s concept of cosmotechnics – the ‘unification of the cosmos and the moral through technical activities’14 – is a useful deployment in an arena where the human agency is often typecast as a binary choice between acceleration and deceleration of technological becoming. I would argue that accelerationism itself represents not a break from, but rather an intensification of the model of unilinear time. It is reductionist: technological becoming is represented as a singular, undifferentiated axiom plotted against the x-axis of time. Danowski and Viveiros de Castro similarly critique its claims as perhaps more retrograde than taken prima facie: “ “accelerationist politics,” [is] explicitly inspired by the Eurocentric eschatology of Progress, that is nostalgic of a rationalist, imperialist, triumphalist past…”15

Distinct systems of time and technology can cross-pollinate and interact in non-linear fashions with a cultural substrate, producing different models for futurity on different continents, none of which are preordained as a trajectory. Refusing the subsumption of the particular into the universal is necessary for exploding the determinacy of unilinear history and the monologics it entails. Apocalyptic time is a model which places us on a civilisational arc in which noesis is ordained at scales above the level of the human, the local or personal – the disempowerment entailed in unilinear time is one which threatens to cast us all as undifferentiated human material supporting the steady march of the historical engine. Benjamin forewarns against this type of reading: “Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment.”16 Resisting the march of the historically victorious is necessarily a strategic question inasmuch as a metaphysical one.

______

Notes

1. Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics. 2016Falmouth: Urbanomic.
2. Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology. 2009 (1947). Trans. by David Ratmoko. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
3. Augustine of Hippo, The City of God. Available at: <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45304/45304-h/45304-h.htm> p. 434.
4. Occidental Eschatology. p. 7.
5. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit. 1979 (1807). Trans. by Arnold V. Miller, J. N. Findlay, and Johannes Hoffmeister. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
6. Yves Lacoste, Ibn Khaldun. 1984. London: Verso.
7. Deborah Danowski & Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World. 2016. Trans. by Rodrigo Nunes. Cambridge: Polity Press. p. 67.
8. Ibid. p. 105.
9. Russell Means, “Speech at Black Hills International Survival Gathering”. 1980. Available at: <https://www.filmsforaction.org/news/revolution-and-american-indians-marxism-is-as-alien-to-my-culture-as-capitalism/>.
10. The Question Concerning Technology in China. p. 37.
11. Achille Mbembe, Time on the Move. 2017. Available at: <http://cscs.res.in/dataarchive/textfiles/textfile.2007-10-15.1258457784/file>p. 3.
12. Rasheedah Phillips, Black Quantum Futurism: Theory & Practice. 2016. Middleton: House Of Future Sciences.
13. Cf. <https://www.blackquantumfuturism.com/community-futurisms>
14. Yuk Hui, “Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics”. 2017. Availabe at: <https://www.e-flux.com/journal/86/161887/cosmotechnics-as-cosmopolitics/>.
15. The Ends of the World. p. 114.
16. Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History. Available at: <https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html>

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