"unlike painting and sculpture, music and theater had arisen within bourgeois culture as diversions, as distractions from quotidian problems–in effect, as escape mechanisms. western music was founded on the principle of suspended resolution, within the calculus of dominant harmony. [. . . ] when long durations appeared in this cultural framework, their dialogical shock was immediately felt; it went directly to the core presuppositions of bourgeois cultural construction. the social reasons for the distraction of the viewer came immediately to the surface: the bourgeois cultural framework had been constructed upon the premise that there was a desperate longing amid the middle class for release from the anxiety-production that mobilized their lives, and that they could be tempted to believe in this resolution only by the suggested assuagement that a dispersal of anxieties into a welter of fantasy identifications with imaginary conflicts and repeated, successive, overlapping and interlocking releases might provide. this dense tapestry of defenses was stripped away by the minimalist temporal logic of long durations. instead of the distraction offered by the undulations of conflict and resolution that had inhabited the temporal spaces of western theater and music, audiences were baldly confronted with denied expectations. conflict and resolution had in effect shrunk the field of durations within western art by centering upon the use of distraction: of repetitive conflict resolution and the momentary use of novelty or variation. with long durations, the audience found itself immersed in another and quite opposite system of anticipation, one captured in the tidy psychological aperçu that a watched pot never boils. this "never" fully captures the sense in which long durations were not only "long," but that they implemented a sense of duration that was even longer than "long." duration, that is, was exposed as non-linear, as paradoxical; as capable of overturning the psychic state of bourgeois expectation."
(tony conrad, 2004)
“in the early years of the sixth century, st. benedict formulated a code of law for organising monastic life which became the model for all subsequent monastic rules [. . . ]. this daily routine was regulated by the seven periods of prayer [. . . ] which were intended to act as reminders of the passion [. . . ]. acoustic signals (signa) were employed to announce the hours of the day, and the most common instrument for announcing the canonical hours was the bell. the ringing of the bell was a serious matter within the fortress-like walls of the monastery [. . . ]. this complete authority assigned to the bell in the monastic milieu established a strong precedent for the centralised control of time that would be exercised centuries later in factories and schools – and also, as we will see, on colonial missions. as in factories and schools, the bell’s tolls were given precedence over all other tasks and activities in the monastery: ‘as soon as the signal for the divine office is heard’, the rule ordered, ‘the brethren must leave whatever they have been engaged in doing, and hasten with all speed, but with dignity.’ this system resulted in collective punctuality becoming the specific focus of monastic life.”
(giordano nanni. the colonisation of time. manchester. 2012)
“the act of making music, clothes, art, or even food has a very different, and possibly more beneficial effect on us than simply consuming those things. and yet for a very long time, the attitude of the state toward teaching and funding the arts has been in direct opposition to fostering creativity among the general population. it can often seem that those in power don’t want us to enjoy making things for ourselves – they’d prefer to establish a cultural hierarchy that devalues our amateur efforts and encourages consumption rather than creation. this might sound like i believe there is some vast conspiracy at work, which i don’t, but the situation we find ourselves in is effectively the same as if there were one. the way we are taught about music, and the way its socially and economically positioned, affect whether it’s integrated (or not) into our lives, and even what kind of music might come into existence in the future. capitalism tends toward the creation of passive consumers, and in many ways this tendency is counterproductive.”
(david byrne. how music works. canongate. 2012)
“[. . . ] william grossin notes, ‘there is a correspondence, a correlation between the economy of a society, the way on which labour is organized, the means used for the production of its goods and service and the representation of time in the collective consciousness’. in societies that did not measure and keep time, however, europeans perceived a kind of status naturae as prevailing, since the degree of separation of human-time from natures time operated as a measure of a societys progress in the quest to transcend natural limitations. hunter-gatherer rituals and nomadic lifestyles were labelled as primitive and savage partly because
they were seen as being guided not by a rational, linear and man-made calendar and clock but by unpredictable and irregular cues dictated by the natural environment: the rising of a specific star, the phases of the moon or the seasonal appearance of flora and fauna [. . . ]. the western humanist conception of time is aptly conveyed in the workings of the clock and the seven-day week – two quintessentially man-made inventions whose claim to superiority in their colonial observers’ eyes, was their apparent abstraction and separation from the rhythms of nature.”
(giordano nanni. the colonisation of time. manchester. 2012)
“society runs the risk of moving at two speeds [. . . ]. the slow group are those who have been socially left behind. in an interview with an unemployed youth, which was recorded in february 1984 in bremen [. . . ] the “standstill” of time in the social situation of being “unemployed” is made plain. “tiger”, as the youth calls himself, wants to make time stand still because “there must not be no such a bad time in his life”. his strategies are directed towards making this time irrelevant [. . . ]. in contrast to the bold promise of one commentator at the turn of the century, space and time have not been annihilated [. . . ]. the progress of humanity conceived in evolutionary terms still compares itself with thearrow of time which points irreversibly forwards.”
(helga nowotny)
“[. . . ] in a rational approach categories such as animate:inanimate can-
not be mixed when it comes to establishing relationships of meaning. why? because it stands to reason that sheep are not people and stones cannot speak. consequently there is no relation to the world other than through flesh and blood people. it is only the relation of people to people that produces a social relationship [. . . ]. in other words you can use objects and things but you don’t relate to them. only the non-cartesian, so-called ’primitive’, mind could believe in animism and so literally talk to the trees as if they were alive (bird-david 1999). i have difficulty in believing that such a situation ever existed [. . . ]. during hominin evolution objects have played a central role in the construction and mediation of social life. the contexts might have differed but artefacts when animated, held in the hand and worn on the body, would always have acted in a relational way to the agent. while in close proximity such objects would have become extensions of the individual, changing the boundaries of their bodies, as happens for example when clothes are put on. denying relationships between people, objects and things is not possible. the pure social relation, as described here, never existed.”
(clive gamble. origins and revolutions: human identity in earliest
prehistory. cambridge university press. 2007)
“it is important to read time as a situated construction, not a natural, neutral, or universal medium through which all people move in the same way, because colonialism works by normalizing its practices as universal and innate [. . .]. modern temporality is like a grammar of time, an underlying structure that links and organizes multiple iterations of colonial time. site-specific, socially situated iterations of time, in contrast, are like discourses, and i refer to them as forms of time. discursive forms of time are inflected by the specific places, people, and histories involved in their construction. colonial forms of time may contradict one another, but they all maintain their ideological power through recourse to modernitys supposedly universal temporality of homogenous, empty, linear time. for example, u.s. railroad companies creation of time zones depended on modernitys empty, homogenous time to arbitrarily map time onto space. likewise, specific narratives of development psychological, sociological, and biologicaldepend on modern times linearity to prescribe a normative path of progression that authorizes certain peoples, individuals, and places as more (or less) advanced than others.”
(erin murrah–mandril. in the mean time. 2020)
"[. . . ] in other words people, manufactured objects and things such as trees are not distinct categories based on biology or the possession of life. rocks, trees and animals are all examples of material culture and as such can be part of relational networks, as well as relating to each other independently of people. for example, a hen-house is built by people. but the hens that live in it have a relation to those surroundings which conditions their actions when the chicken farmer is far away [. . . ] gell provided an answer for one category of material culture, art. he argued that, for an anthropologist, art must be treated as person-like because it represents both sources of and targets for agency. now, what applies to art also relates to our hand-crafted bodies, to the bespoke objects and artefacts that we make, as well as to things that we find in the world. consequently artefacts and things draw their symbolic force from association with agents and in particular with the relationships they have with our bodies [. . . ] it is also misleading to present these relationships as lopsided. viewed rationally, the respect:hate relationship i have with my computer should be a one-way process in a simple network of domination between subject and object. however as knappett puts it
“neither is it the case that people have the upper hand in these networks, merely manipulating materials as they see fit; agency is distributed between humans and nonhumans such that we have to tackle them symmetrically rather than assume from the outset an unbalanced relationship.””
(clive gamble. origins and revolutions: human identity in earliest prehistory. cambridge university press. 2007)