Time in the Encampments

To say that “Time moves differently in the encampments” would be to personify it. Is it, rather, that people move through time differently, while it remains, indifferently, as it always is? Or is time something we change by our relationship to it, not existing outside of the moment(s) of its perception?

What I mean is this: it always takes longer than you have scheduled for, if you are coming from the outside in. Eventually you start lengthening how much time you budget, and then abandoning the effort to contain it altogether. Probably you’ll need the whole afternoon, best to just not plan anything afterwards unless it’s something that can be easily canceled.

This is so at odds with the tight timekeeping in many political organizing meetings. I know so many phrases to politely say “this is taking too long” without actually saying it. “I am conscious of the time;” “We’re coming up on an hour now;” “I want to respect everyone’s time.” This last one in particular is a phrase I am partial to, as I also want my time to be respected, and have sat through so many pointless, endless meetings; but it also drips with, is redolent of, an utterly bourgeois relationship to time.

“Some of us have work in the morning.” What a terrible way to live. Do you think that’s normal?

Things take longer in the encampments because nobody prepared until you got there, and once you’re there they have a question before you get started, which turns into a whole conversation that you’ll chase up to the very end unless you find a way to direct it back towards getting what it was you got there to accomplish done. But what you got there to accomplish – the “thing” that is taking longer – is not really very important, ultimately, because what the people you’re talking to are trying to do is stay alive. Any condescension you carry with you into the situation about what respect people should have for your time is checked against – hopefully – your respect for their life. Survival is occurring at all times, and it takes the forms that it takes.

I remember David Graeber discussing the novelty of being able, during the Occupy Wall Street encampments, “to finish a conversation.” He would later extend this understanding of the importance of dialogic thought when discussing, in “The Dawn of Everything,” how many important philosophical treatises are formatted as dialogues, as if the notion that any important level of understanding is reached only in collaboration with other people has been self-evident to the thinkers of many cultures throughout the world. This is a double-edged understanding, though, as the Graeber of the Occupy era is also closely associated, among his critics, with the hellish vision of endless meetings to discuss the structure by which further meetings can be held, on and on and on. So quickly the desire for a space free from the time constraints of Capitalism becomes, under Capitalism, a constraint on who in fact can participate. Because some of us do have work in the morning.

And yes, it is a terrible way to live. We don’t need you to explain that to us.

So, too, can living without any work be terrible. Most of the people who live outside of the formal time constraints of worklife, while still living under Capitalism, do not live in the sort of prefigurative conversation-finishing timespace that the Graeber of the Occupy moment lionizes. Doubtless, of course, he knew this (and indeed would later write about it as an organizing problem), and I do not intend this as a personal critique – that space was intentionally constructed and maintained through particular practices, guarding the boundaries of its little walled garden where a small number of people could dress-rehearse living as if they were already free. This is not the way it goes in the encampments. The boundaries are not ones you have the privilege to determine.

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