Author: Michael Flexer

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Grey Time: Waiting for Beckett, 22-23 May 2018, University of Oslo

Our Exeter PI, Laura will be giving a paper on waiting and ‘grey time’ in Beckett at the Grey on Grey Conference at the University of Oslo, 22-23 May 2018.

Abstract:

There is a well-known story that when Beckett got to see the colour footage of his television play Quad played back on a black and white monitor he insisted it was ‘marvellous, […] 100,000 years later’. Beckett went on to record a monochrome, slowed down version of the play, Quadrat II, to sit alongside alongside the surprisingly colourful, rhythmic jerks and swerves of Quadrat I; together these snapshots of life represent an asymptotic stretching of time, a shuffling on and off towards a final still state. This seems like a typical move from the Beckett who insisted on policing the greyscale of his drama. ‘Too much colour’, he told the actor Billie Whitelaw, over and over, as she rehearsed Footfalls. Grey, or ‘Light black. From pole to pole’, is of course everywhere in Beckett’s later work, but although there has been some significant research on Beckett’s relationship to and with colour, the grey so firmly associated with Beckett’s aesthetic – from the tableaux of the plays to his iconic personal
image — has less frequently been linked to the author’s particular interest in the temporality of waiting. This paper sets out to determine what might be meant by ‘grey time’ in Beckett’s work. It traces out a time that is resolutely not a twilight or the famous l’heure bleue stretch of gloaming between night and day; it is rather, I argue, a historically specific, postwar articulation of temporality in which waiting is denuded of its ‘for’ – its purpose, its project, its
‘colour’. By showing how and why certain aspects of grey time speak clearly to Beckett’s ashen historical period, I also want to suggest which parts of Beckett’s temporality remain, lingering and enduring within our current waiting times.

For full details on the conference, including a list of speakers and their abstracts, visit Gray on Gray at the UiO: Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and and Ideas webpage.

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The Social Life of Time, 5-7th June, Edinburgh

In collaboration with the Temporal Belongings network, we’ll be holding our inaugural conference in Edinburgh, on 5th-7th June 2018.

The aim of this conference is to share current research on the social nature of time and to collaboratively reflect on key issues, problems and methodological approaches. In keeping with previous Temporal Belongings events, we will include a mixture of presentation styles, and plenty of time for discussion. We are particularly interested in playing with the traditional time of the academic conference and will include collaborative, participant-driven sessions where themes emerging from the presentations can be synthesised and explored in greater depth.  

Keynote speakers for the conference are:

Please send any queries to temporalbelongings@gmail.com

Michelle Bastian
Lisa Baraitser
Andrew Hom
Laura Salisbury
Conference Committee

For programme details and to book, please visit the conference website.

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Enduring Time book launch 15th March

Enduring Time by Lisa Baraitser
Book launch and panel discussion

19.00-20.30
Thursday 15th March

Swedenborg House
20-21 Bloomsbury Way
London
WC1A 2TH

Celebrating the publication of Lisa Baraitser’s Enduring time, a panel of scholars (Laura Salisbury, Stella Sandford and Raluca Soreanu) will engage with the book to consider the changing ways we imagine and experience time. Climate change, unending violent conflict, fraying material infrastructures, permanent debt and widening social inequalities mean that we no longer live with an expectation of a progressive future, a generative past, or a flourishing now that characterized the temporal imaginaries of the post-war period. Time, it appears, is not flowing, but has become stuck, intensely felt, yet radically suspended. The question the book raises is how we might now ‘take care’ of time? How can we understand change as requiring time not passing? What can quotidian experiences of suspended time – waiting, delaying, staying, remaining, enduring, returning and repeating – tell us about the survival of social bonds? And how might we re-establish the idea that time might be something we both have and share, as opposed to something we are always running out of?

Praise for the book

This work is a tour de force. It constitutes the most significant rethinking of “women’s time” since Kristeva’s influential article. [ …] It brings philosophy, psychoanalysis, cultural theory, feminism and race theory, art and art criticism, together with trenchant social critique, philosophical meditation, and psychoanalytic inquiry in a brilliant and capacious way. Without any recourse to essentialism, Baraitser shows us for the first time the temporal world of care, of maintenance, their nonproductive and nonteleological potentials in an ethics that illuminates our world as one of time-consuming practices of staying with and for one another in the midst of destruction and repair (Judith Butler, UC Berkeley).

The panel discussion will be followed by a wine reception.

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CFP for the Accelerated Academy

The Accelerated Academy have issued a CFP for their upcoming conference on temporality in May this year.  Here are the details or visit their website.

Academic Timescapes: Perspectives, Reflections, Responsibilities
May 24-25, 2018, Villa Lanna, Prague, Czech Academy of Sciences

Keynote lecture: Barbara Adam (Cardiff)

After meetings in Prague, Warwick and Leiden, the fourth Accelerated Academy conference calls for a more nuanced perspective in order to advance our understanding of academic temporalities as experienced, understood, controlled, managed, imagined and contested across different institutional contexts. The question of temporality – the human perception and social organization of time – in and of the academy has been attracting considerable attention across the social sciences in recent decades. Notable accounts have demonstrated that time is an important research object potentially offering new insights into the complex and shifting nature of the contemporary academy and its future. Existing studies tend to stress how pressures intrinsic to the imperatives of the knowledge economy and academic/epistemic capitalism co-shape policies and subsequently impact how time is perceived and experienced on the level of individuals and institutions, leading to concerns over their temporal relation to wider society. Taking the cue from the long tradition of sociology of time the conference aims to tackle various pressing question in the emerging field of the social studies of academic time. The conference will address the following themes but the organizers welcome other cognate problematics:

  • Theorizations and different disciplinary takes on temporality in academia
  • (Possible) methods of inquiring into academic temporalities
  • Temporal design(s), temporal policies
  • Temporal justice vs/and temporal autonomy
  • The promises and limits of ‘the slow’ in academia
  • Temporalities in/of teaching; temporalities in/of research – tensions, complementarities, (in)compatibilities
  • Temporal interfaces with wider society and its implications for science communication
  • Temporality of science communication via social media
  • Digitalization, temporal intersections and emerging temporalities in academia
  • Temporality, metrics, evaluations

Please submit short abstract (250 words) and bio to vostal@flu.cas.cz by 28 February 2018.

Organized by Centre for Science, Technology, and Society Studies, Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences & University of Minho, Research Centre on Communication Studies (CECS).

Funded by Czech Science Foundation, Czech Academy of Sciences (Strategie AV21) & Portuguese Science Foundation, CECS, University of Minho.

Scientific Committee: Emília Araújo (University of Minho), Jana Bacevic (Cambridge University), Libor Benda (Czech Academy of Sciences), Mark Carrigan (Cambridge University), Björn Hammarfelt (University of Borås), Milena Kremakova (Humboldt University), Sarah de Rijcke (Leiden University), Tereza Stöckelová (Czech Academy of Sciences), Tereza Virtová (Czech Academy of Sciences), Filip Vostal (Czech Academy of Sciences)


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