The Assault of Thoughts
John Maynard Keynes | Seasonality, Revisited | Decommodified Time | Principles
Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.
| John Maynard Keynes
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Seasonality, Revisited
Shallow Time, Deep Time
The German, Catholic philosopher Joseph Pieper is known mostly for his writings on Thomas Aquinas and Plato. However, he also left us some observations on the nature of time. In particular, he offered the concept of ‘true leisure’ that he characterized as existing
on a ‘vertical’ axis of time, one whose totality cuts through or negates the entire dimension of workaday time, ‘running at right angles to work.’
I learned of this from Sarah Jaffe’s magisterial analysis of Jenny Odell’s Search for a New Kind of Time, and she says of Pieper’s true leisure,
Such leisure requires not simply temporary freedom from work—the ability to clock out, turn off the app, ignore the dings of e-mail alerts—but a stability and security that today’s precarity rarely allows.
We are forced away from true leisure by the enclosure of the deep, horizontal time — the time of seasonality, and our inner tempos — where we are corralled into workaday time. We are harnessed to the clock and made to pull.
Capitalist Time, Our Time
Odell builds on Pieper’s insight, and offers older historical terminology, with a strong spiritual element. The shallow, linear time of clocks is ‘chronos’ time, while the deeper, horizontal time is ‘kairos’ time. Jaffe, again:
The world we live in, Odell argues, moves on this chronos time. It is the time on which capitalism runs and, in particular, on which wage labor works. We sell our time to employers, who get to use it as they see fit, more or less, depending on how much power we have in the workplace, individually or (more likely) collectively. Working time has been at the heart of labor struggles from the beginning of the factory to the most recent strikes and union drives, in which fights over forced overtime, flexible scheduling, and paid sick leave have dominated. Karl Marx, Odell notes, spent a lot of time writing about the conditions of work, the length of the workday, and the way that humans become “nothing more than personified labour-time”—or, in Odell’s phrase, “interchangeable, separate repositories of this usable time stuff”.
These terms are also employed by Enuma Okoro, who lays out chronos as clock time, time flattened by machines, while kairos is seasonal time, the rich understanding of time emerging from natural cycles, like day and night, the seasons of the year, the ebb and flow of our blood and brains. As Okoro puts it, we tend to think of chronos time
as something that works against us, rather than for us, an element of life that takes rather than gives. Days marked only by chronos time bind us in ways that can feel restrictive, demanding and consuming.
Chronos takes, while kairos gives.
I will let Okoro offer us hope in the wellspring of kairos:
A kairos moment can open up anywhere, for any length of chronological time. It can be as minute as recognising that sudden need to take a walk in the fresh air to clear your head, trusting that such a simple act of self-care is not a waste of time, but is affordable time. Meditation, leisurely reading, walks, staring out the window, fishing, gazing at art, dancing, slow cooking, conversations of intentional listening, acting in the moment when your intuition speaks, these are all things that keep you attentive, open and in tune in the present moment, where opportunity resides, in the here and now.
I wonder, if we were more habituated to living in kairos time, would we be more likely to consider that time is not something to be afraid of? Can we begin with the possibility that the present moments and seasons of our lives have purpose beyond what calendars and packed schedules might dictate? There’s something freeing about dropping our full hands before kairos. We should consider learning to stand in our present circumstances and finding the courage to ask, “What is time for?” And then to take the time to listen and to act.
She asks, ‘what is time for?’ And implicit in her questions is one answer: kairos time is ours, just as much as the seasons, and can’t be subsumed to the tasks and clocks, the meetings and the quarterly results.
There must be a time outside of work, a time outside of time.
From Acting Into The Unknown (2022)
I’ve been chasing these questions a long time, from the grand scale of our economic relationships, to the smallest grained issue of working on vacations. They are all the same question.
Decommodified Time
In Is It OK to Work on Vacation? Yes, If You Do It Right., Laura Vanderkam sets up a strawman and knocks it down:
Do we need to fully unplug in order to relax? I hope we can begin to understand that, for many, work is a collection of tasks, not a collection of hours in a certain place. And time is a finite resource, but one that cannot always be neatly divided into “work time” and “free time.” Taking time for yourself during the work day doesn’t make you lazy, and working a bit on vacation doesn’t make you a workaholic. Dispensing with strict time boundaries should also mean ditching the guilt you might feel for either.
I agree with the underlying trend: work is a collection of tasks, not a collection of hours. We should all share the incentive of accomplishing the tasks, not watching the hours burn down. Yes, tasks ‘take time’, and likewise, taking a walk ‘takes time’, but they aren’t the same ‘times’. We should resist commoditizing time, and acting as if all time is unitary, waiting to be used for work.
Tasks are part of linear, chronos time, and they can intrude into and dismantle life-renewing kairos time if we aren’t careful.
We can be time-sliced to the point where we are hammered flat, and miss all the inflection points leading outside chronos, and into a deeper realm over all horizons.
Principles
A new assault on the thoughts of the unthinking: I am going to start identifying and espousing what I consider to be general principles impinging on our discourse and practices around work. In each issue where a principle emerges or returns, I will highlight in a section called Principles, reserved for supporters.
I will manage the list as an independent post, here, and link to it as new principles surface.
Work is a collection of tasks, not a collection of hours.
I remember years ago when I went to work in Athens and heard from more than one person, "Here there is no set time for anything." They simply knew what time it was.