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Into the Wild Time: Notes from a Traveller

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Abstract

I want to feel the temporalities I am theorizing and writing about. To feel, explore, be moved through, tugged under by my research subject, to not know where my explorations will take me. But in rational and competitive academia, utility and efficacy seem to be the dominant topology as we move across our own landscapes of knowledge. An ontology that prevents me from engaging with the land I tread. But what if I want to be the land, if I want to be a ‘geologic subject’ (Yusoff, 2016), or a critter alongside all the other inhabitants of our earthly worlds (Haraway, 2016) with no hierarchical position vis-á-vis the landscape I move in, the knowledge I pursue? How does time appear when I take responsibility for it instead of placing it as and with the Other? Can my temporal research emerge in symbiotic play with other human and non-human entities? In this essay, I will share how a methodological breakdown opened to me a net of (auto-) ethnographic wo/anderings, dialogical interviews and performative time-laboratories. I do not know where I am headed, but every sensuous memory lies in store, waiting for its time.
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Into the wild time: notes from a traveller
Christina Berg Johansen (2017)
Chapter 3 in: Cultivating Creativity in Methodology and Research in praise of detours. (Eds.
Wegener, Meier & Maslo)
Abstract
I want to feel the temporalities I am theorizing and writing about. To feel, explore, be moved
through, tugged under by my research subject, to not know where my explorations will take
me. But in rational and competitive academia, utility and efficacy seem to be the dominant
topology as we move across our own landscapes of knowledge. An ontology that prevents me
from engaging with the land I tread. But what if I want to be the land, if I want to be a
‘geologic subject’ (Yusoff, 2016), or a critter alongside all the other inhabitants of our earthly
worlds (Haraway, 2016) with no hierarchical position vis-á-vis the landscape I move in, the
knowledge I pursue? How does time appear when I take responsibility for it instead of placing
it as and with the Other? Can my temporal research emerge in symbiotic play with other
human and non-human entities? In this essay, I will share how a methodological breakdown
opened to me a net of (auto-) ethnographic wo/anderings, dialogical interviews and
performative time-laboratories. I do not know where I am headed, but every sensuous
memory lies in store, waiting for its time.
Key words
Temporality, time, Anthropocene, strategy, performative research, temporal materialities,
slowness, hyperobjects, geo-philosophy, sustainability.
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Part I: Wrestling the Utilitarian Devil
I do not quite remember how and what led up to it, but it became very clear that I couldn’t
move forward. My plan had become painful in all its meaninglessness, and my subject; the
way we treat time in modern human agency and strategy, was transforming from intellectual
mission to lived experience.
It was 2013, and I was trying to realize my postdoc grant to study ‘temporal hybrids in
corporate strategy’. This would entail some sort of a multi-case study thing where I would
follow various strategic developments in companies and look for their temporal conditions
and boundaries. I wanted to explore how ideals to think long-term and embrace sustainability
are at all possible for companies – and organizations at large – when they are bound by short-
term performance measures, shareholder demands, the acceleration of everything (Rosa,
2013) and the general impatience that seems to permeate modern human agency. What is
strategy at all, if not a rational idea of knowing where you are going and being able to plot
that into a logical route along a series of evenly distributed milestones? (Joas, 1996). And if
strategy is rational – ends and means, a to b – then there is a limit to how far into the future a
strategy can reach. The further reach, the more uncertain the journey and the less help from
actual ‘strategy’. There must also be a limit to how broadly one can think with strategy,
because the more people and factors you involve, the less control you have and your plotted
path may spread out a wild net of trails, a wilderness to the strategist that just wants the coach
to take his company to b. Those were some of my thoughts. And as I read, and contemplated,
I understood how the notion of rational agency is the ontological grandstand for modern life.
Results. Project descriptions. Education. Teleology everywhere. Also inside me. I am
certainly no master of new free temporalities, I too am victim.
Logbook note, October 2013:
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In this strange period of wondering and wildering inside and around my research, reflecting
on my topics becomes increasingly personal. Who am I in the grinding wheel of utilitarian
rationalism?
The idea that time is something to be used. Time should not just flow, or if it does, this flow
should be under control. It is so incredibly difficult for me to just work, just do my thing not
knowing what it is and which strategic boxes it fits into. I mean, I work, but with a constant
voice of productivity standards assessing the value of what I do. This value can be many
things. Today, I have read 3 articles and researched online on autoethnography and
performative ethnography. What's that worth? Where do I put it, what does it contribute to?
Logbook note, November 2013
I have to win over this utilitarian devil that lives and breathes so deeply inside me. This inner
journey I am on is showing me my deepest illusions as clearly as cannot be explained. In this
sense, I am grateful - I am apparently now wise enough to get to this layer, and see its
fossilized traces in my spirit, through my entire history.
Logbook note, November 2013
This sense that I must hold on to the personal and intimately exploratory, must stay oddish
and sensitive. And the despair of trying to make this meet my academic and logical
constructions. I must find a method that puts my sensitivity and poetry first, that makes them
the Geiger counter of people's deliberations of sustainable futures.
Logbook note, April 2014
Oh dear it's difficult to free up time for my project. … The need to sink into thoughts, to let the
project encompass me so I can feel where it needs work and how the parts go together, the
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need to just nurture the project…this is difficult. ... So if this is a normal pace in the world,
how does anyone ever find the time to stop and think. To think deeply about what is wrong,
and right. To connect poetically with one's world. To wonder, and to have enough mental
stretch to ponder existential questions and see new sides of living and being. ...
If we don't have time to think existentially about the world - and this can be together with
other people as well - then we can't relate ourselves in a world different than our immediate
imagination. We can't access our deeper reservoirs of creativity and insight if we must
constantly be concerned with making end-means relations that we can start acting upon. It's
not that we need to sit isolated and philosophize hermit-like, but that we need to have time to
let things unfold. It's not that we need to think harder before we take our good old ends-
focused action, but that the stretch of thinking and action should be woven together by the
unfolding of thoughts and people and activities - by time. So action becomes investigation
rather than conquest.
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I have still not had the methodological epiphany that I was pining for those days, but I
managed to explore my creativity and begin a different, deeper, sensuous dialogue with the
temporal constructs I am interested in. “Think we must, we must think!(Haraway, 2016). I
am learning about temporal materialities; how we can engage both present, past and very far
future through material play. It is all still in emergence and I don’t know where it will become
“useful” – how it will translate to scientific, academic value. It makes me slow, and
sometimes embarrassed at how little I have yet achieved, measured in regular academic
currency. I am still on a daily quest to not dishonour myself for not having made it further by
now. It’s like an addiction, a deep habit that I am trying to break free of. But time has taken
residence inside me, and it lives there together with ghosts of the future, and poetic sensations
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of the present. The researcher and the living subject have merged, embracing the pathic
(Johnsen, Berg Johansen, & Toyoki, 2017).
Part II: Traveller Doesn’t Know where to Go
One of the places I can go to think, to revolt (Haraway, 2016), to grow precariously as
matsutake mushroom in the ruins of Capitalism (Tsing, 2015), is a large-scale immersive
performance format called Sisters Academy1. Manifestations of Sisters Academy last between
1 and 4 weeks, creating a parallel universe in which performers, visiting artists & researchers
and guests explore what knowledge, learning, living could look and feel like if an aesthetic
and sensuous dimension were primary to defining its values and forms. I have immersed
myself twice thus far, 4 days, 2015, Sweden; 10 days, 2016, Iceland; next immersion planned
for autumn 2017, Denmark. Inside this sensuous and symbiotic academy I slip into my ‘poetic
self’; a deep identity and an authentic quest that everyone in Sisters Academy develops and
names. I am Traveller. This is my poetic self, my name and being that I am able to explore.
Am allowed to explore. Am allowing myself to explore. Traveller is not a role, she is me; my
longing, my logic, my mission in time.
Inside the second manifestation I participated in, I went deeper with Traveller. I revisited my
temporal damages. One of them is the always-between a yearning for destination and my
current landscape and abilities. Always on the strategic go. Not into the landscape, but across
it, towards destinations. Yearning: potentially a slippery slope to devaluation of the present
(not an unusual position for the contemporary human). Wayfaring as Traveller, I decided to
explore the physical experience of all this yearning and strategizing, of plotting out routes and
forcing myself to move. How could I move forward if it wasn’t towards something? How
could I move with my body and soul, without allowing my mind to jump to the coachman’s
seat? As I started experimenting, the answer was that I couldn’t. With Mind assigned a less
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commanding role, Traveller simply didn’t know where to go. It happened again and again.
Ready to move, my poncho and fur hat in place, rucksack on my back. Nowhere to go. Or
everywhere to go, but no reason compelling enough to go anywhere. Challenging my well
known, lifelong self-violent strategizing through corporeal deep presence prodded me to find
other ways of moving in the world. It would be dishonest to walk with purpose when there
was none. And silly. It would be just kind of silly, like the distorted sense of importance and
purpose that you sometimes see in organizational life, people sidestepping themselves in
order to reach that performance target. And not just silly; feeling this lack of purpose and
going through with it anyways would be pretence, even betrayal. Then, actually, I’d rather be
silly in the proper sense of that word, whatever that is, but be silly like the fool who really
doesn’t care about anything else than her here and now. So instead of stepping with purpose, I
could take one step that didn’t lead anywhere, and then just stop. Or tap my foot a bit on the
spot. Perhaps another step. And a lot of waiting, or rather, lingering. Standing or sitting in
time. Not blank or in some state of meditation, just reclining against time, accepting time as
an almost spatial realm. “Resting is an aesthetic event”, writes Timothy Morton (2013). So I
indulged in this resting in every moment that did not have a direction, ahh the liberty of no
direction! And then at some point the moments had formed a step and nudged me onwards.
That kind of silly: a poetic, emotional, silly walk so slow it sometimes didn’t move at all. And
then, sometimes, purpose formed as an urge from within and I knew something I wanted to
do, to go for, so I stepped out in the world, trotting towards some landmark, or event, or idea.
This is a different kind of yearning. It transgresses impatience and teleologies. This kind of
yearning encompasses the potential of reflection and mourning, connecting us with the world
in all its sensations, creating “the foundation of any sustainable and informed response” (Van
Dooren in Haraway 2016:39).
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What if we moved like that, in and as organizations? How slow the world would be, how rich
in discovery (Koepnick, 2014). This is everything that acceleration and consumption is not. It
is sensation, deep now, symbiosis.
Part III: Waste Indulgence
Strategy has little patience. One of the central signs of quality in organizational agency today
is efficiency; that we move forward as quickly as the circumstances will let us. To spend as
little time possible – of course without compromising anything, we understand – is good.
I did a small experiment inside Sisters Academy Iceland, where I collected people’s wasted
time in a little bag. I would sit next to someone, show her the bag and nudge her to take a
string of yarn dangling from it and draw it towards her. At the end of the string was a little
piece of paper that asked: What is wasted time to you? When do you waste time in your own
life? Inside the bag were crumbled pieces of paper and a pencil to write with. I only
performed this session some 6-7 times, but became quite fond of it and will do it more.
The answers were all different but one thing they shared was that when people reflect, wasted
time hardly exists except for the waste of worrying about things that worrying will not help –
and even then, people meta-reflected that this worry was probably what they needed to go
through, somehow. One conclusion here would be that on a personal level, it is not relevant to
talk about wasted time – there isn’t a lot of waste. But then why are we organizing ourselves
inside and outside as if we should carry time in a sealed, smooth, aerodynamic vessel that cuts
through turbulence like a bullet? Why are we ourselves sometimes idealizing this, wanting to
be that vessel, to be this frictionless temporal artefact spinning through causal pipes and
pathways? This is not life. This is not travelling. This desired vessel offers no dirt and dust
and people and animals and mad crossings and sweat and disorientation and surprise and
wo/andering. This is just us scared senseless by the wilderness, tarmacking the shit out of it so
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as to minimize the scarring as we brush through. Wasted time is, in response to this, revolt. It
simmers and rots pleasurably together with all the other trash in the compost bin, making life
out of death. It hides from rational man and his scripts while opening up its own worlds. It
defies individualism’s linear desperation against inevitable Death (Adam, 1998; Heidegger,
1996(1927)) and invites death deep into life, into all around us, in the smell of autumn soil
and winter silence, the crackling of beetles in forest grounds, the microbes in our bodies;
boldly embracing our ontological anxiety (Morton, 2016).
Part IV: Research-care in and beyond the Anthropocene
We do not know what the Big Shift is, but we feel it, see it, study it, debate it. We are in it,
and while our Capitalocene (Moore, 2015) structures still haunt and devour anything that can
be turned into economic growth (including ourselves), a cross-disciplinarity of sciences is
locating contemporary homo sapiens in and as a geologic term: the Anthropocene Era
(Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000; Crutzen, 2002; Johnson et al., 2014). Taking over from the
Holocene era which dates back some 12.000 years to the end of the last ice age, the
Anthropocene offers an understanding of human beings as part of, and impacting on,
geological change and hence larger times and lives than our post-WW2, -industrial, Western
societies. We shudder as it dawns on us that our carbon-powered actions are fuelling
uncontrollable climate change, that our use of oil, minerals, chemicals will be visible in the
physical (and biological) layers of the earth for millions of years to come. We calm ourselves
with dystopic cynicism or geo-engineering exuberance (Berg Johansen & De Cock, 2017;
Haraway, 2016; Jameson, 2005; Yusoff, 2016). But we also revolt. Across social and natural
sciences, across arts and geo-philosophy and communities and entrepreneurs, people are
opening, deconstructing, decomposing the old binaries between human and nature and
individuals and systems.
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Challenging the notion of ‘Anthropocene’ altogether, Haraway argues for a ‘Chthulucene’
world in which “human beings are with and of the earth, and the biotic and abiotic powers of
this earth are the main story”, in which we and all life forms are critters of the Earth,
‘chthonic ones’: “We are humus, not Homo, not anthropos; we are compost, not posthuman”
(Haraway, 2016:55). We are part of the earth; the most minuscule microbes live in, around
and through us from birth (or before, through the bodies of our parents and the organisms that
sustain them?) through death. I guess we never fully die, we just become something else, as
exhibited by one of the corpses lying in the forest at the ‘Applied Forensics Science Facility’
in Texas2; “partly mummified and with several large, brown mushrooms growing from where
an abdomen once was” (Costandi, 2015). Our linear temporalities explode into deep cyclical
nature, into the earth that we are, as well as into the precarious conditions of earthly life
(Tsing, 2015). Which types of responsibility for our presents and futures does such a
perspective invite?
Taking seriously the vast timescales in which we are “but dust and shadow”3 (Amato, 2001),
we are challenged to a different responsibility when we “understand [that] our being is
mineralogical as well as biological” (Yusoff, 2016:21). Working with million-year geologic
timescales, Yusoff expresses the (temporal) illusion of placing Anthropos at the centre of a
world that moves in much larger and mysterious ways than human: “As if the earth were
available for human responsibility. As if the world originated for the conscience of man (this
is anthropogenesis), rather than the pleasure of snails or the proliferation of bacterial
ingestations over millennia, or the shuffling of pebbles and erratic boulders, as if the genesis
of the world was for ‘us’ alone” (Yusoff 2016:17).
How delightful, this mockery of us humans! But what happens, then, if we take seriously our
situatedness in geological timescales? Morton answers with ‘hyperobjects’; “things that are
massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” and of which we are part,
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examples being global warming, uranium or plastic bags (Morton, 2013:1). We cannot see
hyperobjects in their entirety, but we are hopelessly and –fully enmeshed in them. When “we
realize that nonhuman entities exist that are incomparably more vast and powerful than we are,
and that our reality is caught in them” (ibid.:130), we potentially open up a new era of care
and co-existence with non-humans across time and space.
One of the ways of getting into that kind of relationship is what Morton calls intimacy. Yes.
This pulls at me; this is caring and being in love. Like the 8.000 people engaged in the
‘Crochet Coral Reef’, one of the world’s largest collaborative art projects in which coral reef
ecosystems are crocheted creatively in all sorts of materials, based on mathematical codes,
marine biology science, handicrafts and fabulation and drawing attention to the beauty,
necessity and extinction of coral reefs globally4 (Haraway, 2016:76ff; Wertheim, Wertheim,
& Haraway, 2015). This intimacy that happens when we go slower, deeper. Like the
repetitions of artists like Kjartansson, Abramovic, Eliasson, like research that lasts a lifetime,
like the Future Library5, like looking at lichen on remote hikes or city walks6, like Halperin’s
multimaterial representations of the slow temporalities of Greenlandic glaciers (see Koepnick
2014:91ff.), like the very base of all indigenous wisdom, like rituals and ruins (Benjamin,
1940; De Cock & O’Doherty, 2017).
I circle around these knowledge-scapes, drawn, trying to sniff out their temporal qualities and
peculiarities. How can I investigate the temporalities of these new ontologies, how can I use
my own position as a researcher to explore them materially and conceptually, guided by
intimacy and care? And how can I do it now, in the small and the near, while I wait for Big
Funding Opportunities in my little semi-precarious researcher life? What should I offer here,
at the end of this chapter, as examples of humble but serious play? Well. I try to disrupt, for
example; to insist on challenging the managers I interview with uncanny questions about 200-
year timescales (Berg Johansen & De Cock, 2017) and to make them hold my ‘time pod’ in
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their hands; an artistic sonic device with which you can both feel and hear the sounds of time.
I try to make rituals out of taken-for-granted strategy discourses, reclaiming means-ends
language of ‘goals’ and ‘milestones’ together with participants in Traveller’s time laboratory.
We discuss and think and write our way into goals and dreams, and the participants select and
label the stones they need to give attention to on their wayfaring towards their goals. Often,
milestones turn out to be goals in themselves, or just on-going life, like one participant’s
milestone named ‘oxygen’. Yes, oxygen, let us think about that, think we must!, oxygen as
our constantly returning milestone on the road to everything. … I explore the notion of ruins
with participants; ruins of our presents and futures. I investigate imaginaries and paradoxes of
sustainability among key opinion leaders in Greenland and am hopefully going on a series of
temporal travels to different Arctic locations. I write researcher-poetry and try to live with
vibrant humility inside the hyperobjects, interconnected with snails, rocks, plants sounds
bacteria organizations oxygen art and everything else. I try to take, and share, my time.
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References
Adam, B. (1998). Timescapes of modernity: The environment and invisible hazards.
Psychology Press.
Amato, J. A. (2001). Dust: A history of the small and the invisible. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Benjamin, W. (1940). On the concept of history. In H. Eiland, & M. W. Jennings (Eds.),
Selected writings, volume 4: 1938–1940 (). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Berg Johansen, C., & De Cock, C. (2017). Ideologies of time: How elite corporate actors
engage the future. Unpublished manuscript.
Costandi, M. (2015, May 5). Life after death: The science of human decomposition. The
Guardian
Crutzen, P. J., & Stoermer, E. F. (2000). The “Anthropocene.”. Global Change Newsletter,
International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme (IGBP)(41), 17-18.
Crutzen, P. J. (2002). Geology of mankind. Nature, 415(6867), 23-23.
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De Cock, C., & O’Doherty, D. (2017). Ruin and organization studies. Organization Studies,
38(1), 129-150.
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the chthulucene Duke
University Press.
Heidegger, M. (1996). Being and time: A translation of sein und zeit. SUNY Press.
Jameson, F. (2005). Archaeologies of the future: The desire called utopia and other science
fictions Verso.
Joas, H. (1996). The creativity of action. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Johnsen, R., Berg Johansen, C., & Toyoki, S. (2017). Serving time. Unpublished manuscript.
Johnson, E., Morehouse, H., Dalby, S., Lehman, J., Nelson, S., Rowan, R., . . . Yusoff, K.
(2014). After the anthropocene: Politics and geographic inquiry for a new epoch.
Progress in Human Geography, 38(3), 439-456.
Koepnick, L. (2014). On slowness: Toward an aesthetic of the contemporary. Columbia
University Press.
Moore, J. W. (2015). Capitalism in the web of life: Ecology and the accumulation of capital.
Verso Books.
Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects. philosophy and ecology after the end of the world.
University of Minnesota Press.
Morton, T. (2016). Dark ecology: For a logic of future coexistence. Columbia University
Press.
Rosa, H. (2013). Social acceleration: A new theory of modernity. Columbia University Press.
Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in
capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.
Wertheim, M., Wertheim, C., & Haraway, D. (2015). Crochet coral reef: A project by the
institute for figuring. Institute for Figuring.
Yusoff, K. (2016). Anthropogenesis: Origins and endings in the anthropocene. Theory,
Culture & Society, 33(2), 3-28.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1!“Sisters!Academy!is!a!school!in!a!world!and!society!where!the!sensuous!and!poetic!mode!of!being!is!at!the!center!of!
all!action!and!interaction.!It!defines!the!primary!mode!of!being!and!is!the!values!on!which!all!societal!institutions!are!
building!–!including!the!school.!Thus!Sisters!Academy!is!the!school!in!what!we!term!a!Sensuous!society!–!A!potential!
new!world!arising!from!the!post-economical!and!ecological!crisis.!Between!2014-2020!Sisters!Academy!will!manifest!
in!a!series!of!Nordic!countries”.!(http://sistersacademy.dk/about/)!!
2!!http://www.shsu.edu/~stafs/!!
3!Horace’s!famous!quote!from!one!of!his!odes:!Book!IV,!ode!vii,!line!16!
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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
4!See!also!the!project!website:!http://crochetcoralreef.org/!!
5!https://www.futurelibrary.no/!!
6!For!work!on!urban!lichen-human!interrelations,!see!Jennifer!Gabrys,!e.g.:!
http://www.jennifergabrys.net/2012/12/urban-sitework-moss-eye-view/!!
Chapter
This concluding chapter reflects on the importance of detours for creativity by arguing that they offer researchers new positions and perspectives to consider their work from. Detours cultivate difference and, as such, they foster the potential for reflexivity. Importantly, they rely equally on the researcher’s sense of adventure and his or her experience of ‘beaten paths’. The meaning and value of detours for creativity rests precisely in the dialogues they encourage between experiences and perspectives. As such, they should not be judged in terms of short-term outcomes but processes. The promise of a happy ending has less to do with reaching a concrete result and much more with the playful movement between wandering and wondering in research.
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