Saving Time

Summary in 3 sentences

Saving Time explores what time is, examining the concept outside of the linear, “time as money” metaphor. Some of the main reframes are gardening time, seeing ourselves and the world as time not in or of time, and the differentiation between chronos and kairos. The book examines history and developed cultural notions of time as it relates to colonialism, the climate crisis, and deterministic futures.

Key Themes

1. Clock time changed labor into fungible units of time separated from natural world and embodiment
2. Modern workers are achievement-subjects, entrepreneurs under the guise of freedom but trapped in compulsions where self-mastery requires self-policing and busyness is a virtue
3. Timefulness reimagines time as inseparable from space
4. Crip time is “non-linear” time resisting urgency, centering the present moment, tying to chronodiversity
5. Life extension comes from the outward ripples of ourselves, recognizing interconnectedness and holding past and future timescales

Chapter Notes

Ch 1. Whose Time, Whose Money

• Frederick Winslow Taylor (Taylorism) - managing others’ time

“Productivity and policing are two sides of the same coin”

• Hour as disembodied, decontextualized unit
• Fungible time - measures an abstract concept that sees productivity as equal, interchangeable intervals
• Ancient examples of measuring time
  • sundials (sun)
  • clepsydrae (water)
  • fire clocks (fire)
  • incense (fire, smoke)
• Clock time - domination over natural world
• Task-oriented communities work as a social economy, not oriented towards clock
• Puritanism and plantations deepened fungible, clock time
• Chronophage - time eater
• “Time is punitive dimension…fungible time upholds impoverished view of what time and labor are in the first place.”
  • Time only seen as work (if time is money)
  • Time as private property to sell or buy

Ch 2. Self-Timers

• Protestantism → 17th century Puritanism emphasized introspection, self-evaluation. Observation and measurement to improve self
• Donald Laird’s Increasing Personal Efficiency (1925) introduced self mastery and active thinking (Logos, away from feeling and toward discipline)
• Having “same hours in a day” (fungible): not true for caretakers, household workers. Emphasizes individual responsibility and bootstrapping
• Productivity bros preach freedom from others through self-mastery (surveillance) and neoliberal competition
  • Alternatives: worker organizing, mutual aid, legislation
• Zeitgeber - time giver
  • Time charts, school schedules, rush hour, menstrual cycle
  • Someone else determines your experience of time (66)
• “Discretionary time” as true free time
  • Ambitious person wanting more time vs. actually having no free time
• “Preparing for future” as infinite task
• The Achievement Subject (Byungchul Han) are “entrepreneurs of themselves”

  The disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. Instead, it makes freedom and constraint coincide. The achievement-subject gives itself over to compulsive freedom—the free constraint of maximizing achievement. Excess work and performance escalate into auto exploitation.

• One never reaches goal, merely “jumps over own shadow”
• Cultural perception of busyness as good (sociologist Michelle Shir-Wise finds this to be true regardless of work-life balance)
• (pg 76-77) Idea proposed that achievement-subject Linda (time-privileged who can afford to pay social cost of doing less) should consider paying the cost, experimenting with “mediocrity” in parts of one’s life
  • Questions to ask: Why is doing less seen as mediocre? To whom is it mediocre?
• “Slowing Down Modernity” by Filip Vostal
  • slowness is not necessarily deliberation, maturing, human betterment. slowness in its current form is often private consumption
  • slowness as product is still a “logic of increase”, a commodification appealing to “a community of privileged individuals who…can adopt a different temporal reading of clock-time where punctuality and exactness are negligible”
• Bo Burnham’s special Inside: “the non-digital world is merely a theatrical space in which one stages and records content for the much more real, much more vital, digital space. One should only engage with the outside world as one engages with a coal mine. Suit up, gather what is needed, and return to the surface.”

Ch 3. Can There Be Leisure?

• Visionary proponents of leisure (Pieper, Aristotle) - idealizing leisure, only philosophy and contemplation. Nothing practical counts
• Leisure now - purchase temporary freedom and participate in rest and recreation as maintenance
  • leisure machine, feeding machine
  • Place to process collective grief
• Vertical Time (Pieper): fundamental interruptions that collapse back into horizontal time that run at “right angles to work”

Ch 4. Putting Time Back in Its Place

• Timefulness, a concept by geologist Marcia Bjornerud that sees environmental space as markers of past adn present events.
  • The world is made by, made of time
  • Examples: rock strata, tree rings, layers of pearl inside a clam
  • “Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed”
• Time and space cannot be separated!
  • Yet wage work requires us to see time divorced from body and environment
  • Seasons → time and space intertwined
    • 24 seasons in Asian culture, 72 microseasons in Japan, 7 seasons in Melbourne (Kulin)
• Infraordinary
• Unfreezing time: Tree is encoding time and change in the present. Rather than “evidence” of time it is “symbolic” of time
• Experience and experiment share etymologic root. Experience requires presence as a co-creator
  • Ted Chiang’s “Lifecycle of Software Objects”
    • “Experience isn’t merely the best teacher; it’s the only teacher…experience is algorithmically incompressible.”

Ch 6. Uncommon Times

• Fragile gig, freelance economy
• “Isolation is the harbinger of exploitation” (211)
• Oli Mould’s Against Creativity
  • Creativity encouraged in jobs “often translates to competitive flexibility, self-management, and individual assumption of risk.”
  • Creativity merely “produces more of the same form of society”
    • Ties to my essay When sharing becomes the creative work
• Sela James of International Wages for Housework Campaign (Global Women’s Strike)
  • “We really need to have another reason to be together, which is the real conditions of our lives, rather than an individual ambition”
• Rebecca Solnit essay
  • “To keep walking is to keep living, to keep inquiring, and to keep hoping”
  • “Many love certainty so much more than possibility that they choose despair, itself a form of certainty that the future is notable and known. It is neither. To despair is to stop walking, and to stop walking is to fall into despair or those depressions that are both features of the landscape and states of mind—the hole deeper than a rut.”
• Philosopher Ivan Illich worried in 1978(!) of a barren social landscape with zero-sum games
• Rhythms are both helpful and hurtful. Can we look beyond “saving” and “spending” time and steward different rhythms, gardening time?
  • Acknowledges chronodiversity
  • Share and trust in replication, regrowth (“time is beans”)

Ch 7. Life Extension

• Activist Patty Berne - human ehancement wants to be “better than well” at all times, but being alive includes being tired, being sad.
  • “To try to reduce the rich topography of experience to a means of maximal output is part of the same philosophy that would turn its back on the ocean or to one’s inner landscape, where something new is always coming in on the tide.”
  • Experience of tension within time is life
• Crip time (concept in disability studies): non-linear time resisting urgency and productivity
  • temporal center of gravity not in future but in present
  • time as social fabric, opposing dominant liberal concepts of self-reliance
• From Byung-Chul Han’s “Essay on Tiredness”:
  • “deep tiredness loosens the strictures of identity”
  • quantum field ←> “Less I means more world: ‘Now tiredness was my friend. I was back in the world again.‘”
• South African word “Ubuntu”: “We say a person is a person through other persons. It is not I think therefore I am. It is rather: I am human because I belong, I participate, and I share.” (from Mia Birdsong’s How We Show Up)
• We think of our past and future selves as less alive, less us
  • lack of “direct access” to mental states of past selves
  • why journals are important! “dispels the myth of a finished self”
• Quantum layers of core memories, similar in texture (deja vu?)
  • Henri Bergson - dimension of “the deep-seated self” where our most willful actions arise
• Life extension as outward, not forward movement
  • No one self
  • No one direction of becoming more, or better
  • No responsibility over everything
• Yuri Kochiyama: “Life is the input of everyone who touched your life and every experience that entered it”
• “For there to be ‘more of less of me’, the forward-leaning ego that grasps at time has to die…This death can feel like a trust fall into time and mortality itself.”
  • observer self in meditation, dissolution of ego
  • this state comes and goes like rain

Conclusion: Halving Time

• Henri Bergson in Time and Free Will: “It will no longer do to shorten future duration in order to picture its parts beforehand; one is bound to live this duration whilst it is unfolding”
  • tendency to turn time into space, to “just get through” a task or event you dread, seeing it in a linear way…“instead of admitting the creative aspect of time that is ever evolving and shifting”
    • relationship with time as material
• Bioregionalism: relationship and responsibility to a place that informs one’s identity
  • metaphor and model for identity and time
  • timescales overlap, sometimes outside of human perspective
  • quick and slow, large and small
• Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk
  • place and time are intertwined in Aboriginal perspective
  • “Kinship moves in cycles, the land moves in seasonal cycles, the sky moves in stellar cycles, and time is so bound up in those things that it is not even a separate concept from space.”
• Kairos now means weather in Modern Greek. “seize the time”
• Doubt as valuable feeling
  • agency countering linear progress which may “feel like the road to certain death”
  • To encounter doubt’s freshness and feel agency is to hold one’s ground
  • Gap between past and future (Hannah Arendt)
    • hold one’s ground “between the clashing waves of past and future”—past’s tradition, future’s determinism
      • irony of determinism is that it involves choice
        • Ted Chiang’s “What’s Expected of Us”
          • “Civilization now depends on self-deception”
          • time, will, aliveness, and desire are all intertwined
        • Also reminds me of Minority Report
    • human condition!
    • holding past and future apart in the present (having time = halving time?)
• Life as tidal, as oscillation, “impossible to pin down and yet possibly legible to those around me”
• “A series of creation events ongoing for now that I hadn’t started and wouldn’t stop”

How it changed me

Behavior, ideas, perspectives, emotional shifts

• Incredibly rich in source material to explore! Foundational philosophy to guide my thinking
• I felt encouraged by the emphasis on ecology as a way to perceive time differently.
• The passage to step outside of rhythms for those who can afford to do so really resonated with me! I walk the path I do because I have privilege. It is ever more important for me to live a liberated concept of time to show the possibility—to myself, my ancestors, and my fellow earthlings.
• Concept of time interwoven with increasing isolation. How reshaping time away from preservation to planting, gardening can create radical shifts