Lifetimes: A Theory of Timescales and Life Forms

Abstract

At the beginning of the 21st century, many of our most well-known and dependable forms of keeping, managing, and representing time are losing their grasp on the real. Clocks cannot measure how societies speed up, or come to a standstill during crisis, modern historiography is unable to come up with meaningful narratives about mankind as the sixth extinction event, and calendars are insufficient as tools for societal and political change. Lifetimes: A Theory of Timescales and Life Forms presents an alternative framework for studying lives and times, and the relationships between them.Building on post-war theories of history, as well as several historical sub-disciplines, such as cultural history, history of science, and medical history, Lifetimes integrates approaches from anthropology, game studies, cultural studies, literary studies, critical heritage studies, science & technology studies, and critical time studies. Times are understood as always existing in plural, as embodied and emergent—in things, in assemblages of things, and in the relations between things. Among them are the lives of humans, but also the lives of viruses, plants, animals, rocks, computers, nations, concepts, policies, technologies, infrastructures, etc.Lifetimes explores theoretical foundations while at the same time developing them through case studies in individual chapters. The result is a bottom-up theory of temporal multiplicity, conceptually and theoretically open enough to be productive across various academic disciplines. Rather than discussing how different disciplines relate to time, the authors in this edited collection present a theoretically sustained, empirically diverse range of cases, in which times in plural become politically and historically salient. Out of these case-studies a new theory emerges: a theory of lifetimes.