Catching up with Time

Figures

Figure 1. The bookending ‘death’ of the film.

Figure 2. The man’s witnessing of his own evacuation from the image.

Figure 3. The film’s ‘embalming’ of the future beyond indexicality.

Figures 4–5. The tremulous emergence of a metamorphic impulse between images.

Figures 6–8. The materiality of the future, texturing the image.

Introduction: Catching up with time

Abstract domains such as time are shaped by metaphorical mappings from more concrete and experimental domains such as space.¹

As cognitive linguists have demonstrated, space constitutes this ‘inescapable metaphor’ for any attempts to tackle narratives, be they fictional or historical, insofar as they deal with the abstract notion of time.² In looking at belatedness we should recognize the spatial metaphor that not only opens up considerations of a ‘time out of joint’ but also stands between us and the literary and artistic experiences of being late. What space can best render the inherently elusive concept of belatedness? Turning to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s characterization of a historicist structure of time, the waiting room emerges as an emblematic metaphor. Through the historicist lens, social and political practices in South Asia illustrate a conception of time as an integral overarching frame containing various perspectives of time, hierarchized and hurtling towards the development of modernity, thus not only consigning some nations to the ‘waiting room of history’ but also converting history itself into a waiting room.³ According to what Lera Boroditsky would term the ‘ego-moving schema’ used to describe time, one arrives at the waiting room as ←1 | 2→a static space that is intrinsically built to contain an overflow, to delay the progression to the next stage. The waiting room is where one dwells: in French ‘demeurer’ is derived from the Latin ‘mora’ (delay). The ‘demeure’ that is the waiting room, emblematic of the historicist hierarchization of time, thus can also open up a space for a time that moves in unexpected ways and where the very awkward flow of time comes under scrutiny.

Belatedness, as a subaltern temporality, is the axis upon which hinges the Western historicist structure of time and postcolonial reviews of modernity. As such, it belongs to both postmodern and postcolonial revalorizations of Western cultures. Resisting the narrative whereby history leads us all in the same direction but some arrive earlier than others depends on finding new loci of enunciation to counter the anthropological notion of ‘denial of coevalness’.⁴ Postcolonial modernity opens to a temporal approach that grasps for what Walter Mignolo terms ‘pluritopic semiotics’.⁵ The postmodern interest in time thus accompanies spatial decentring and revalorization of subaltern epistemologies. These interrogations were at the heart of the two-day conference on ‘Delays/Les retards’ which we organized at the University of Cambridge in April 2019. Our main aim was to bring together PhD candidates and Early Career Researchers who were working on time, and especially, on the nature of ‘delays’, and create conversations around what such a concept, omnipresent in Anglophone historical and literary studies, could signify in the Francophone context. The two days brought together a range of papers that threw up a range of questions and, crucially, enabled the group of scholars and the audience to reconsider time and anachronies as notions that are particularly apt to address literature, philosophy and films in French. Underpinning our project was the will to acknowledge that delays and asynchronicity provide a centripetal force in the reflections prevalent in the works studied that constitute themselves as a radical experience of the impossible integration of ←2 | 3→time. The variegating interpretations of delays which the speakers offered fostered a creative assemblage of papers that critically interrogate the pluritopic significance of delays and the prominence accorded to neighbouring concepts such as anachronism and belatedness.