Interview Anna Greenspan

NASCENT
Lets maybe start with something that you’ve talked about on one of the PlaguePod episodes, this talk of COVID as a stretched event, which maybe also ties in really nicely with some of the work that I know you’re working on at the moment in your upcoming book, this idea of time waves as the new ‘geometry’ of time.

ANNA
This question about thinking in terms of events is critical. I take this from Deleuze and Guattari, Whitehead, and in my book, I also quote this quantum physicist, Carlo Rovelli, who writes about time as events. The idea basically - and this comes from Whitehead - is that what appears as stable or constant are actually just slow moving events, and that singular events can in their way encapsulate the whole of time. I feel like COVID has certainly made that very clear, right? We’re in this kind of singular event, and at least our own personal histories beforehand and afterwards can now only make sense in terms of this event. This thought is related to this idea that I’ve been working on, about thinking about time as waves. As you said, I’m interested in the types of geometries, the forms or shapes that time manifests or appears. The project that I’m working on now is about time waves and how they work across a whole bunch of scales. In techno-capitalist history, there are various waves at work. The one that I’m most interested in is the Kondratiev Wave, the K-wave, which is this cycle of about 50 years. So that’s one sort of scale - historical time. And then I’m also interested in this micro-temporal scale, which is the electromagnetic waves that form the abstract transcendental infrastructure for wireless media. But I’m also interested in certain Chinese philosophers who I think make a case for a kind of Cosmo-Ontology of waves, who think about time as waves in a Cosmo-Ontological sense.

NASCENT
The question of where these different structures of time operate on is something that I actually already wanted to ask you about; going from your PhD thesis, and then also looking at how, in your book, Shanghai future, you’re kind of pulling the wool away from this idea of the smooth progression of capitalist time, and revealing that actually there are these kind of ruptures that bring about these different temporal epochs or regimes. The ideas that time is produced, and particular types of time are ultimately produced in in a machinic manner, and that they operate on such different scales is really interesting. In Shanghai Future you’re talking about architecture and sino-modernity, but then there’s also the very decision of the May fourth movement to essentially try and kind of disavow the traditional Chinese kind of circularity, or the circular notion of time, in favour of Western conceptions of time. In your work already, there’s a vast difference in scale, and we wanted to ask you to expand maybe on the interconnectedness of these if possible.

On the one hand, there are these different temporal regimes appearing as these kind of ruptures from the Outside, but then you also have the very conscious decision of, at the time, a group of people deliberately acknowledging a different conceptualization of time, both of which affect the creation of different futures or different modes of futurity. Also in the kind of Sino-Modernism that you’re talking about and that being rooted in the practical reality of how Shanghai has been planned and mediated, and the architecture itself. Is there anything in particular that motivated these changes in focus? Or is it really just kind of an acknowledgment of the different granularities that all of these kinds of differing temporal scales operate on? I suppose, the question here is: is there a perceived hierarchy there? Or is it really just evidence of the multifaceted-ness of how time is produced, and the different overlapping scales of it?

ANNA
So I think that starting from the PhD, I have this task where, for my job, I have to make some story about my intellectual coherence. I don’t know to what extent anyone’s intellectually coherent. And certainly, I don’t know that about myself. But anyway, we can pretend. I think that the interest is in a basic philosophical move, that comes out of Deleuze and Guattari, which is based on a particular reading of Kant. Kant describes the modern notion of time as a transcendental structure, the conditions of experience, or the conditions under which appearances occur. He locates the production of those conditions - the apriori- within the mind of the knowing subject. For Deleuze and Guattari, Kant is correct in his analysis of the transcendental - this is, in fact how time works. But the location of these processes within the interiority of a knowing subject is what is questioned. My work argues that those conditions are produced by techno modernity. So, for example, modernity is expressed by and through the then new technologies of the clock and the calendar and the form of time that they produce. And I think that you could read the May 4th, move, as, in some way, an acknowledgement of that. The May 4th thinkers who wanted to embrace this particular mode of the Gregorian calendar, this particular mode of temporality, thought that this new form of time was the transcendental condition under which China could be modern. I don’t think they were necessarily particularly Kantian, but they nevertheless understood that in some way.

I guess a lot of my work since then has been to question that, or to try to dig deeper into that. So for instance, in my current work I write about the move from the mechanical clock to the atomic clock, and the way that the technology of the clock actually works. In 1967, clock time broke completely with astronomical time and came to be measured against the vibrations of the cesium atom as a more perfect mode of temporality. At that point time and electromagnetic vibration become one. Here too it is a question about the ways in which time is produced.

NASCENT
Maybe we continue on on this thread, this idea of the different technologies that essentially regulate the different conceptions of time, and how they affect the experience of of time, both on a personal level, but also on the broader socio-technical level. So the area that we’ve both been working in, both conceptually but as software developers in the last maybe six or seven years, is blockchains and distributed ledger technologies. And there’s a really, there’s an interesting shift between ‘the time’, the time of the clock, the digital time of what you’ve previously referred to as cyberspace time, which is this counting of this counting of seconds passing, the increasingly refined or specific measurements of the passing of time based on atomic clocks. And then blockchains present almost an interesting sidestep to this in that the architecture of this software doesn’t rely on centralised timekeeping services. Whereas atomic clocks are, obviously, politically also very centralised, it’s only governments and research institutions who have access to these, right. Within these kinds of decentralised networks, time is actually almost more of a product of having to have consensus amongst equally permissioned nodes in the network. So time is machinically produced in a wildly different way., and also measured in, a far more ordinal kind of manner than even blocks of atomic time. Here, it’s simply blocks of events that happen, if we’re measuring it against, you know, the ticking of a clock at variable speeds, but that is increasingly kind of separated from it, or doesn’t even really, necessarily play into it.

ANNA
I think that’s exactly right. So I think that blockchain is another example of a transcendental technology of time. And it produces exactly, as you say, a particular mode of temporality within which experience takes place. This raises this question about the outside in a quite strictly Kantian sense. The blockchain is an example of a technology that doesn’t happen in time, it happens to time. So, as you said, you can measure the time it takes for a transaction on the blockchain to happen, but that isn’t getting at what is important about the blockchain event, right? You’re sort of missing it, if you will. You can measure that it took however many seconds for each transaction for example, but in that measurement you don’t ever get at what this thing is actually doing, what realities it makes manifest. And so it seems to me that this kind of temporal production happens through a kind of machinic connection with an outside.

NASCENT
Another thing we’d like to hear your thoughts on regarding this is that blockchains and distributed ledgers are able to sidestep the necessity for the single measure of time that globalisation kind of needed. Globalisation necessitated the increasing hyper-specificity of digital time, which was obviously, via the imposition of Greenwich Mean Time, so historically rooted and, Unix time - digital time - is counting upwards from the first of January 1970. To a certain extent, these are both still kind of human-scale, or remnants of this very human, mechanical clock time. Not only do blockchains kind of sidestep these aspects, but the fact that there are an increasing number of these networks that do or don’t actually interplay with each other. is interesting. Do you think its fair to say that this could be an instance of, in a way, time fragmenting?

ANNA
So in the media history that I tell in the book that I’m working on, I focus on the telegraph as the technology of simultaneity. The telegraph enables a kind of instantaneous communication and that is what creates a certain kind of globality that we never had before, through the speed and the seeming instantaneousness of messages that traverse across space. But at the same time, this is also the moment that Einstein is working. And it’s his wrestling with the problem of simultaneity that leads to notions of relativity, the notion that time is relative, that there is a multiplicity of time or multiplicity to time.

Wireless time, or a time of electromagnetic waves, requires relativity to be built in. So most famously, the satellites of the GPS signals have to factor that in, otherwise everything goes off kilter. The historian of physics Peter Galisonhas a line about theory having ‘become a machine’, talking about how these satellites had to actually build Einsteinian relativity into the machinic fabric of global techno-modernity. This is an example, a pretty concrete example, it seems to me of this thing that you’re getting at with Blockchains. Although we now live with Covid putting it all under a sort of threat,we still live in a global techno-modern world. I do agree with what you’re saying, that there’s a fragmentation that has occurred, and that there’s all these kinds of multiple types of time that have been and are being produced.

NASCENT One of the really interesting differences here between the satellite GPS time that has to factor in physical constants, the speed of light and your location in space, and blockchain time is that that calculation is still built into the fabric of how these machines communicate the time amongst themselves with timeservers and satellites, but with blockchains you have time being produced from consensus as these blocks of events, that someone wins a particular game, they get to set essentially, what has just happened in history. And this becomes kind of deeper and deeper, more and more kind of set in stone, from the machinic perspective of this particular network, as it kind of moves further back. Blockchains, in doing this, actually kind of negate the notion of spaciality itself, because you no longer even need to have to factor in stuff such as the speed of light, and network lag, and all of that. It seems to negate globalisation, because it kind of refuses the idea of spatial dispersion or distribution actually being a factor in the production of time itself. So in a way, it almost seems like the first instance of properly machine to machine time…

It includes other factors as well. Consensus mechanisms run in such a way that they raise the question of capital allocation in a sense, which pretty much determines how certain blocks are essentially appearing right; the ordering mechanism itself is also more bound to a more pure form of techno-capitalism…

ANNA
That’s the general point, I guess, is that there are mechanisms through which the machinery of techno-capitalism has the capacity to create the form of time itself, rather than just operate within time. And that’s its most abstract power. Again taking Kant’s point that experience, or appearances happen within time, in the sense that time is the form of inner sense. And if you have the capacity, the abstract capacity to create a form of time at this abstract level, then there’s a realm of experience or appearance or manifestation that happens inside that. That’s the ultimate abstract power of techno-modernity or techno-capitalist-modernity.