The Matter of Time: Stories from a Living Present

• Author / Creator

  Loewen Walker, Rachel

•       The living present is the instantaneous contraction of the past and anticipation of an unknowable future. As a method of understanding, the living present employs the claim that “we live as time makers—anything exists as a maker of time,” in order to reveal the power that our stories, memories, predictions, and problems hold in making the time (and world) around us.  The value of such a project is its potential to disrupt the linear and causal stories that we tell about history, as well as to disrupt the anticipatory regime that often holds us hostage to a looming future. Even more importantly, the living present is a frame through which to view the interrelatedness of human and non-human entities organic and inorganic matter, and even material and immaterial interactions as they collaboratively make the past, present, and future. 
   To make a case for the living present as a method of understanding, I use a diffractive method to follow the ripples, overlaps, and differences between various topics as they are taken up in an interdisciplinary arena.  Chapter one develops the central argument of this dissertation through a detailed literary (via Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods) and philosophical (via Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition) explication of the living present. Following this explanation, I apply the living present to three different timescapes in chapters two, three, and four, moving from the temporality of a singular concept (misogyny) to the temporality of identity construction (via queer time), and finally to the temporality of an era that is “not yet” but all around us (the Anthropocene). In each of these I highlight the impact of the “old” on the present, or the past on the new. “The Time of Misogyny” conducts a close reading of Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny in order to demonstrate how an old concept such as misogyny can act as a tipping point for renewed engagement with violence against women in contemporary gender politics and activism. As well, I stretch the term misogyny to show that it is as much about race, culture, and sexuality as it is about gender, and that our response must also be intersectional. 
        In chapter three I explore another old concept, or rather the event of coming out as an affective temporal frame for queer subject creation. My key addition to this field is the notion of the time-body, or rather, the addition of a thick materiality to the otherwise fluid and ever-changing queer subject. I thus demonstrate the way that a living present enables us to understand queer time as not only a multiplicity of non-linear timelines, but as an embodied process of making a subject that is always a seamless flip between univocity and differenciation, sameness and difference.
       In a third timescape, chapter four reads the living present alongside current discussions of the Anthropocene and the related anticipatory academic discourse about climate change. Departing from previous chapters, which centre on the human experience, chapter four explores the non-human, inorganic, and immaterial agencies of the living present, including how these have force and presence in the same ways as their counterparts. The lack of progress-oriented politics that is central to the living present, is a continual reminder that we are always “in the middle of things.” There will be no end to climate change just as there was no beginning, and what really matters is our ability to better understand our complex and multiple present accountabilities within an otherwise incomprehensible process of change.
       The concluding comments ground this work in a thick, durational, understanding of time, especially our own temporal forces as “time-makers.” I argue that when we take heed of the fact that we live, act, and are acted upon within a living present which is always contracting the past as it reaches toward an unknowable future, we can unsettle the fierce linearity of our stories about history, particularly as they impact our political movements, theories, and daily choices. Through interdisciplinary and community-based examples, I demonstrate that by “thickening” the present moment to include multiple pasts (and multiple futures) we are invited to act with a deepened level of accountability to all possible timelines.
  

• Subjects / Keywords

  • temporality
  • queer temporality
  • Deleuzian ethics
  • time-bodies
  • feminist philosophy
  • feminist theory
  • the living present
  • queer theory
  • thick time
  • Gilles Deleuze
  • the Anthropocene
  • misogyny

• Graduation date

  Fall 2019

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-edv2-sv56

• License

  Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.