Ontological Insecurity and Pointillist Time
My pleasure reading over the last couple of weeks has been W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, the story of a man who is haunted throughout his life by his inability, or unwillingness, to remember his origins. Last night, I was reading Anthony Giddens for a class on memory and archives that I’m taking this semester, and I came across a passage that perfectly describes Sebald’s eponymous protagonist:
Both Austerlitz and the anonymous narrator repeatedly remark on his feelings of disconnection from and aversion to the flow of time, and throughout the book Sebald makes the reader feel what it is to experience time as “a series of discrete moments,” as when he describes a massive clock in a railway station:
During the pauses in our conversation we both noticed what an endless length of time went by before another minute had passed, and how alarming seemed the movement of the hand, which resembled a sword of justice, even though we were expecting it every time it jerked forward, slicing off the next one-sixtieth of an hour from the future and coming to a halt with such a menacing quiver that one’s heart almost stopped.
Giddens discusses the “ontologically insecure individual” as if he were a deviation from the norm, where normality is defined in terms of being able to sustain an autobiographical narrative. Certainly that is the assumption of narrative psychologists, who analyze the stories people tell about themselves and correlate mental health with tales of redemption, told in the third person. They would no doubt reward Austerlitz’s melancholy and fragmented first-person recollections with a cocktail of prescription drugs. But maybe Austerlitz isn’t such an oddball. Zygmunt Bauman contends that the linear, novelistic experience of time has been replaced in our current society by what he calls “pointillist time”:
If Bauman is right, ontological insecurity is now the norm, and whatever autobiographical narratives we do manage to piece together function only retrospectively, rather than motivating our future plans and actions.
February 6th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
Fascinating post Ryan. There are some interesting related musings on time, narrative and experience from the narratology and semiotics world. A variant on one of those is the idea that rather than experiencing the world as a linear narrative, we experience it (and represent it in narrative) as a series of linear timelines with interrupt semantics that make it *appear* to be segments in a sequence of discontinuity.
To the extent that people manage multitasking and interruptions with greater comfort and with more frequent “context switches”, the segments will appear to approach moments. Nevertheless, each thread, each task (in the multitasking model) and each social context (in the model of constantly and multiply connected youth) has a linearity and constitutes a locally continuous narrative.
Events as points often drive the interrupt semantics. As you have said elsewhere, much of what we call events are short narrative segments that exist in the context of larger life narratives. I think that the temporality of events is largely a function of distance, and that the continuity of narratives is an issue of teasing out threads and understanding the semantics of how, when, and why interruptions and resumptions happen.
Hope this makes at least some sense - I got used to thinking and talking like this when my head was wrapped around timing and animation models, and extended it again when I was studying narrative models.
February 13th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
I love Sebald. One of my good historian friends swears by it as a text for teaching undergrads about modern Europe. I think he’s actually thinking about writing a book on Seblad and historical memory. Have you read Rings of Saturn? Also amazing.
February 13th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
I haven’t read Rings of Saturn. I will definitely pick it up because I am now hungry for more of his work. I’ve heard that everything he wrote was more or less about memory. After Nature was on the syllabus for the class I’m taking, but it looks like they’ve taken it off, unfortunately. Tell your friend if he writes that book I will read it.