Keri Facer (00:01)
Hello and welcome to this first episode in Temporal Imagination. I'm Keri Facer. I'm a professor of educational and social futures at the University of Bristol in the UK.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (00:13)
And I'm Michel Alhadeff-Jones, Director of the Sunkronos Institute in Geneva, Switzerland.
Keri Facer (00:19)
And in this episode, we're going to be talking about why we're making this podcast, why we think it's so important to think about time these days, in particular, as our world tries to find new pathways to sustainability and to justice.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (00:34)
We are going to explore the core concepts and issues that matter when we are thinking about time and change. These ideas will help you navigate the rest of the series and we hope you enjoy the conversation.
Keri Facer (00:46)
So, I'm going to start with one of the questions that we're going to ask probably all of our guests, which is, how did you start getting interested in this question, the sometimes abstract question, of time?
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (00:59)
Well, once upon a time, no, I'm not going to go back all the origins, but I would say my interest started probably, professionally speaking, probably 25 years ago when I started working in the field of adult education at university. I've been interested in using life histories and life narratives as a way to explore with learners how they learn throughout their lives. So, it's all about time because it's really about asking people to tell stories and narrative and put in words experiences that they've lived throughout their lives and that somewhere describe the temporalities of their own change, their own transformation. So, somewhere it all started with that. And then I was influenced by the work of a French colleague, Gaston Pineau who has played a really critical role in the development of this approach, and who wrote about time in the field of education and showing the critical role of reflecting on the temporalities of our lives. But I would say more concretely, I really delved into it when I moved from Geneva, Switzerland to New York when I started teaching at Columbia University, because I was confronted, at that time, with the temporal constraints of the institution that were quite different from the University of Geneva that I was used to. And, so, an anecdote that I often tell has to do with the fact that I was asked, when I arrived there, to adapt a course that I used to give on a period of eight months. And I was asked to adapt it to a period of just a few weeks. And that really initiated what I am calling now a kind of rhythmic dissonance, really the idea that how do you reduce content or experiences and concentrate them? I mean, today we talk about acceleration, and some people call about accelerated learning. How do you compress those kinds of learning experiences in a time that fit into the organizational planning? And, so, that created a strong dissonance because I thought that it was not the right way to proceed. But therefore, we had to develop critical mindset in order to challenge those temporalities that are imposed on us. So, that's how it all started for me.
Keri Facer (03:23)
Then you wrote your really rather brilliant book, which is how I got to know you. So, that's great. And it just strikes me that, when you talk about time and you talk about your experience, what it makes me think of is the way that you're talking or you're inquiring into how people live in time. And that, for me, has been so important over the last few years is almost this idea of humans as time beings. There's a beautiful book by Ruth Ozeki, who's, I think, a Buddhist and a quantum physicist, and it's called Tale for the Time Being. And ever since I read that, I've had this concept, this feeling of what it means to be alive, being this question of living in time, and the fact that we never talk about it. We're never really explicit about it. So, you know, we worry about clocks or we worry about the fact we're going to die, but don't really think about what it is to live, to be a time being. So, they're almost like instructions or guidelines, your work, for how to live in time, what it means to be a time being. It's kind of a toolkit for figuring out how to live in the world. So, that's what your work makes me think of. I was doing lots of work in the field of educational futures. So, what that means is we have to start thinking about what is this thing called the future, which inevitably brings you into this question of how do we organize ourselves in relation to past, present and future? What is this time thing? What is this future thing? So, it always makes you ask these sort of really hard philosophical questions. And what came out of that for me was a sense of the way in which we imagine futures and the way in which we imagine change massively impacts the sort of sense of possibilities that we have in the present. And, so, I realized that, for me, thinking about time is also tied up with thinking about possibility, thinking about agency, thinking about our capacity to work and to act together. And I also come at this sort of empirically. I mean, I'm an empirical researcher, really. I've just done this detour into the philosophy of time. For a few years, I was studying how people do research together. And like you, when you're talking about what was happening in New York, what I noticed was that people wanted to build relationships with each other when they were doing work, when they were doing research together. But the time constraints of the institution, the time constraints of project-based research, just meant that people weren't able to build those deep personal connections. So, that again got me interested really in the politics of time. So, that's how I land here in this particular discussion.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (05:48)
So, I need, I guess, to ask you the key question because we need to start somewhere. So, what do you think time is and how do you conceive this idea in your own work?
Keri Facer (06:02)
Yeah, I love this question. And every time you get into it, you just get deeper and deeper, don't you? And somebody always ends up quoting Augustine, don't they? Whenever I think about time, I don't really know what it is. And if that's what Saint Augustine thought, I think, you know, probably the rest of us are there. I mean, the way I've landed on it is thinking about time as the way humans make sense of change. That's at its simplest. And then I sort of break it down into three things. So, into timing. So, how we choose when to do something. Into rhythm, what patterns are we getting ourselves into? What patterns do we organize ourselves around? And then what I've been calling time stories, but the kind of social and the cognitive theorists called temporal frames. So, to me, the narrative is important. Time is also the stories we tell about change, about about how we live in time, about what's going to happen next, about what came first. And my background is literature really. So, I'm always interested in how we tell stories, but you know, what about you? What's time for you?
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (07:04)
Well, it definitely matched that approach. I see time as what humans had to invent to represent how changes occur and to maintain some kind of control and mastery over it. The component of power is crucial to me in the way we understand what time is. And, so, whether we think about time from a quantitative approach, like the measurement of time. If you go back all the way to antiquity, I mean, time has been a tool used by the kings and people in power to try to predict what was going to happen, but also to try to control the groups they were responsible for, in charge of. And, so, we can think about the measurement of time as a strategy to exercise control and power. And obviously, we all experience that in the organizations we are living or we are working through and the role of schedules and planning as the expression of the power exercised on us by the institution. Now, there is also another way of conceiving time that is more qualitative and we refer to that earlier when we were talking about narrative. And, so, we can also refer to changes and, therefore, time through the use of language and words, as you mentioned it also earlier. And, therefore, narratives is also another way to think about the exercise of power related to time, because when we share narratives, we are also trying to influence the way people understand how change occur. And now we can see with the trend around storytelling, obviously, that storytelling is a very powerful tool used in marketing, among others, to exercise some form of social influence. So, for me, time is really about, yes, referring to change, understanding how change unfolds and occurs, and how that relates with the exercise of power and control in our society.
Keri Facer (09:06)
Yeah, I mean, it's funny when you talk about it in relation to control and mastery. I think about our colleagues that we that we work with on our British Academy program, Nomi Claire Lazar and Michelle Bastian, and the way in which they're both trying to really tease out how the technologies we use legally or, ⁓ in terms of design of clocks are used to produce certain sorts of power and certain sorts of effects in the world and it would be great to talk to them later in the series. It's interesting when you talk about control and mastery because I also wonder what it would like to dance with time. What would it be like to make love to time? What would it be like to have different affective relationships with time?
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (09:46)
Yeah, I think that refers to the idea of temporal imagination you're often referring to, and we'll go back to that later, but this idea of enriching the way we represent and understand time. And, for me, one thing that emerged also in my reflection was, well, this key idea of temporal constraint, meaning that we are all experiencing from within with our biological rhythm, but also, obviously, from the outside with the environment we are living in, some form of constraints that are exercised on us. And those constraints can be experienced in our everyday activities, again, with the idea of the schedule or the planning as a way to constrain our move or whatever we do, but also in our representation and in our imagination. I call that the symbolic temporal constraint, the fact that we are raised to understand what time is supposed to be and to embrace the dominant or even hegemonic conception of time and, therefore, we are also prevented to envision other ways to understand what time could be. And I think, for me, that's also one of the strong interests of working on life history and life narrative because it's a way to bring people to reflect on the temporalities of their life in a way that fit into their own subjectivity, their own idiosyncrasy, and what make them unique, and, therefore, what make them experience time in a unique way in their life.
Keri Facer (11:15)
I mean, yeah, this is where I think there's an interesting tension around this, so, talking about the way we're brought up to experience time. I remember I was working in a school a few years ago and one of the things I did was talk with them about how they experience time in the school. And after an afternoon of talking about this, the teachers realized, one of them said, "I've realized we only talk about time as threat." You know, so, it's like a deadline, a thing you have to achieve. It's time can be taken away from you. It's saying that unless you achieve something else in the future, something bad will happen. The teachers, when they were reflecting on the sort of hidden curriculum of time that we have in our schools, it is this framing of time as control. And, so, I suppose the natural reaction to that is to say, well, how do we individualize it? How do we free ourselves from this? But what I wouldn't want to lose is also the idea of time as something that's negotiated, that allows us to live with each other. So, this kind of, you know, if we were all living in completely separate times, we would have no point of connection, no way of being with each other. So, I mean with your life history work, how do you think about how we balance that individual and that collective relationship around time?
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (12:31)
Well, I think what's interesting when we work on life history and life narrative is that that's a possibility, that's an opportunity for participants to express events, experiences that they've lived through, that really compose the particularity and the singularity of their life. But at the same time, most of the time, the meaningful events in our lives are experiences that people can relate to either because they have experienced similar events or experiences, or because they can relate to them and experience empathy. So, the sharing of life narrative is definitely a way for people to also relate, connect, understand that we are sharing some basic features in a way, including the way we experience change and transformations. So, the opportunity when we work on life narrative is really to bring people to reflect on the way they understand how changes occur and transformations unfold throughout their lives. And often it contributes to ⁓ bring cohesion to the group and, therefore, can be also a way to synchronize people because, at the same time, they have a shared experience of what something meaningful means to them.
Keri Facer (13:47)
I wonder if this is a reflection of a kind of loss of collective rituals, a sense of living in proximity. We would imagine living in a village. We would all know about the deaths that happen. We would probably be collectively involved in the rituals of people moving through different life stages. This comes to this really critical issue that we've not talked about yet, which is that time is not consistent around the world, that there are different time cultures and practices, and you and I are both sitting and living in Western Europe with its very distinctive traditions of working with time that are being widely critiqued around the world in terms of their imposition of a particular time logic. So, this is a question for us, which is how do we get outside of our own temporal assumptions, and maybe the difficulties that we have about working with time feel like in the West and not the same difficulties that you might find in other countries, in other cultures, in other traditions.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (14:50)
The way I hear also what you're saying is the fact that we all have assumptions about what time is and how changes unfold and how we are related to each other and individual changes relate to collective changes and we all have some kind of set of assumptions and you're right. I mean, there is also power dynamics among cultures in the way cultures have imposed specific set of assumptions about what time is.
And, I mean, if I think again about the practice we were referring to earlier, I mean, it's a practice that's not new. I mean, asking people to tell about their life, sharing experiences has been there for quite a while, many centuries, and it's probably universal because we find that in any cultures in different ways. But in the West, that is also true that there is some kind of shift that occurred probably starting in the 70s, what would correspond to what we used to call postmodern times, where there was a destructuring of human or life path. I mean, institutions have not played the same role in the way they shape the life of people. And, therefore, there is also probably a need today more than before to cope with the heterogeneity, the diversity of changes that occur in our life. People don't walk at the same place for their entire life anymore. For example, family life is no longer as linear as it may have been at some point in history. And, so, there is also a need, I think, for individuals and institutions to reinvent the way we understand the multiple temporalities that shape our life. And I think what you are saying is also very important, the fact that it's also culturally grounded in specific places and cultures in the way we are facing and making sense of that. Why do you think it's important to talk about time today? Why does it matter? What, for you, is the problem that we need to address when we think about time?
Keri Facer (16:48)
I come at this probably more from a sort of political angle than the individual angle, although the political angle is tied to that individual. It's tied to that recognition of heterogeneity. It's tied to that recognition of the fact that we live in time differently, but then we have to figure out how to coordinate ourselves. And I suppose the point at which this became really clear to me was when I was doing a lot of work on how universities and communities might respond to climate change and how we take climate change as a phenomenon seriously. And what hit me was the very different temporal frames that people were using to talk about this. So, on one level, you've got this big narrative. You know, we've got 10 years to prevent apocalypse, okay? So, you've got this scenario of sort of progress and ongoing development and there's two possible pathways. You know, either we save ourselves or we're all going to hell in a handcart and we've got to get it done by 2050. You know, so, that's one story. And then you've got indigenous scholars like Kyle White and others raising this is you've got a different story that says actually for some people, for some communities, for some worlds, we've already been living through an apocalypse. When I say we, not me, but the indigenous communities and countries that have been colonized have already experienced the eradication of their civilizations, of their ways of living. And, so, from that perspective, you would look at the situation of climate change in a different way. One way in which we'd frame it is that it's part of a cycle. It's a repeated pattern of destruction and extraction that is causing collapse. And another one is that you would then maybe take a step back and say, look, what are the root causes of this? What's getting us here? The fixed climate change by 2050 tends to be a narrative that keeps a focus on like, what's the technology? What can we sort out? A kind of cyclical frame starts saying, actually, well, what's underpinning all of this? How did we get here? It invites us to look historically, to understand what got us to this position. And, so, what we've got here are different ways of framing a globally significant problem. And we have to think about how do we negotiate that? And, so, that, to me, is both a challenge and a huge opportunity. So, we can pluralize, we can diversify the temporal frames that we use to look at a problem so that we can say, actually, what if we look at it from this temporal lens that allows us to see different things? And it's also a problem because we have to figure out how to negotiate that. We have to figure out, okay, so who's time frame works? How are going to coordinate this? And at the moment we've got a UN process that is locked in to annual cycles, to deadlines, to targets, as opposed to, for example, saying, actually, maybe we work locally, maybe we work specifically, maybe we see this as something that is happening at the moment rather than something that is coming. So, you know, the politics of time, the politics of how we negotiate between different temporal frames is is to me at the heart of the question. And we can't negotiate it. We can't make those judgments unless we become aware of them. And too often they're just hidden and too often they're invisible in our discussions. So, that's why, to me, I think this is important. And also because I'm not gonna see all of them. We need more conversations with more people, with more diversity. My worldview is my worldview. It's my perspective. I'm gonna see certain things. But the reality is we need to bring more people into this conversation so that we can become aware of our own ignorance. That's why it's important for me. What about you?
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (20:32)
I think in our conversation and also, obviously, in the work we are doing, we are moving from time in a singular form to temporalities in a plural form or temporal frameworks at, you know, plural, or rhythms. And that's the notion that I refer to most of the time in my own work. And I think the first shift is absolutely crucial, this idea of deconstructing time as a singular kind of objective reality that we would have to adjust and adapt to because that's still the main way people relate to it. They look at their watch and they think, ⁓ here is the time where, ⁓ in fact, what we are saying and we are sharing that perspective is that it's always plural expression. There are temporalities, there are time frameworks, there are rhythms. And for me, rhythm is crucial because rhythm is really the way we experience time. It's the sense of time in a way. And once we use the plural form, we can start conceiving the fact that time, experience of time, is a conflicting experience. And that's exactly what you have described with the example of the social environmental transition. The fact that what we have to do is to learn to negotiate temporalities, rhythms, that are sometimes complementary, often antagonistic or even contradictory with each other. And that's what composed for me the temporal complexity of ⁓ living in society and living within the environment that we are surrounded with. And, so, what is crucial therefore, I think, is how do we learn to conceive that conflictuality? And you're right. Time is not always negative, obviously, but it's constraining and constraint can be constructive. It can be destructive, but it's constraining because changes that we're facing are constraining the way we live and the way we learn and the way we develop ourselves. So, for me, that's really what's at the core. This capacity to, yes, negotiate, understand, regulate those temporalities that compose social life.
Keri Facer (22:43)
Hmm. Yeah. ⁓ I mean, that question of how we become aware of the plurality of ways of thinking about time. Ten, twelve years ago, I started asking people at the beginning of talks to just shut their eyes and think about what shape is time. And it was lovely. It was always very, very funny. What was interesting about it was when people looked at each other and went, "Oh, you see it that way! That's really weird." There's a whole bunch of people that would draw a line. There's a whole bunch of people that draw circles, but you've got amazing things, swirls, you know, chaotic images, sort of tree rings, had somebody draw a ghost once, you know. So, it's just those tiny little things when you ask that question, you invite people to see the difference. Clearly we're standing on the shoulders of giants in terms of our thinking here. There's a really, really long history of thinking about time and the pluralities of time. mean, Barbara Adam was hugely important. ⁓ Michelle Bastian's work, who we'll talk to later in the series. And then the work of Gyordano Nanni, who talks about the relationship between colonization and time. Achille Mbembe... And who's important for you in thinking about this, in informing your thinking?
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (23:55)
Yes. Well, as I mentioned earlier, in the field of adult education, someone like Gaston Pineau, ⁓ who has not been translated in English, but who has been a significant figure in the French speaking field of adult education play really a role. But even he actually, his work was based on work coming from sociologists and philosophers. And among those, I mean, one of the first book I read actually in French, again, I don't think it's been translated, was from Jacques Attali. Jacques Attali is a French thinker who has been an advisor of François Mitterrand, so, someone also very committed politically who wrote a fantastic book about the connection between time and power, and it goes back to antiquity to show how the technology related to time have evolved and, with those technology, have evolved the form of control and how society has itself evolved. There is another author, for me, that was very helpful, Krzysztof Pomian, who is a philosopher of history and who I think provide one of the most clear conception and definition of time as he reflect on how historians have been trying to conceive what time means in this discipline. And I would say maybe the last one who actually did not write so much about time, it's Edgar Morin, who is a major French ⁓ intellectual, who has written extensively around the idea of complexity. And it gave me vocabulary to think about the complexity of time. And I think one of the key ideas for me today is really this idea that is suggested when you think about complexities. Complexity has to do with order, disorder, and organization. And I think, in a way, it's useful to think about time this way. And when we think about the multiplicity of form of temporalities that constitute our life, we are facing disorder. I mean, in the everyday life, I have to deal with the temporalities of my kids, of my work, of my relation with my partner, of the time I want to spend with myself. And, so, that often is disordered more than ordered. For Edgar Morin, complexity has to do with organized way of living, always balance order and disorder. And, therefore, I think there is something to think about time there that may be crucial is how do we organize? And I'm not saying organize just in a time management way of thinking, you know, first I'm doing that, then I'm doing that. But in a more kind of, more elaborate way, the organization of time is the organization of how do I choose to live and interact with others and with their own rhythms? And maybe one last author I would mention, Roland Barthes, who wrote about rhythms and the rhythms that constitute community with this book, How We Live Together, who evoked that notion that is extremely powerful, this idea of idiorhythmia, from idios, meaning what is particular, and rhythmia from rhuthmos, what flows, the rhythm. And, so, this idea that it is crucial for individuals and for collective to find ways to identify and live through rhythms that are particular to themselves. And I think for Gaston Pineau, it's one of the major tasks of adulthood, whether we think about it from an individual or collective perspective, it's to identify and be able to organize our life according to the rhythms that are meaningful for ourselves and not according to the rhythms that are imposed on us by others, whether institutions or society at large.
Keri Facer (27:37)
The binaries between order and disorder and then the resolution of those binaries in a kind of form of organization, I suppose it goes back to my question earlier like can we dance with it as opposed to control it or organize it? The idea of what constitutes an ordered or a disordered relation to me feels quite a complex one. You know, I think about Deborah Bird-Rose's work on multi-species knots of time drawing on the insights of Aboriginal elders. And that sense of if we see ourselves as enmeshed in these knots of time, that's a different sort of language from the concept of living in rhythms that are ordered or disordered. I mean, these are different frames.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (28:18)
Actually, I understand rhythm as a complex expression of change. And, so, dance is a way movements flow. And it's interesting because, to go back to language, I mean, rhuthmos, which is the Greek roots of the word rhythm, refer to a form that flows. So, dance is the movement, the way bodies flows in space. And, therefore, it's organized because there are some rules. Your bodies cannot move in any way. I mean, there is gravity. There is some other form of things that structure movement, anatomy of the body and so on... But there is also, obviously, the more fluid and chaotic aspect of movement that's also emerging dance. So, maybe we can think about it as a metaphor to relate to time.
Keri Facer (29:05)
Yeah, I mean, and it goes to sort of thinking about, I mean, my background's more music really, so I'm sort of thinking about, you know, what does it mean to improvise musically rather than to follow a score? All rules can be played with. So, there is something about kind of a jazz metaphor, or an improvisational metaphor that might help us with thinking about how we live in time in a way that is adaptive and responsive to difference, but that is a kind of more emergent way of living in time than the one that is, you know, we've got the score, we've got the plan. That question of why talking about time is important is because also we're living in a world that is governed by terrible political five-year plans that don't manifest in anything, that are fantasy fictions that are, you know, by such and such a time will achieve such and such a thing. You know, and they only get achieved by violence, actually. You can only impose a particular vision or change on the world in its messy ongoing emergence through violence. You know, big utopian plans always had such bad rap because, you know, terrible things happen as we try to stick the world to the plan. It feels to me that, at the moment, we are trying to work out what the different modes of organizing, living, relating to each other in the world might be that allow us to coordinate ourselves, that allow us to recognise diversity without falling to pieces into a gazillion individualised fragments or locking ourselves into some sort of lockstep coordination. We're trying to work out what that relationality might be. And it's even more complex now, I mean, particularly because we're also trying to figure out what does it mean to live with the rhythms, the temporalities of more than human others? This has long been understood by indigenous communities, but we're sort of vaguely remembering it from our own indigenous histories in the West now, and also with the temporalities, the technologies that we're working with. These are shifting relations. I mean, just to add to the people who've inspired you, for me, I'm thinking about, somebody like Sarah Sharma, who talks about the complexity of time in the world, and she really resists the narrative that the world is speeding up, which comes from the tech frame, to say, actually, who has to go fast so that other people can go slow? Who's forced to go slow so that other people can go fast? It's a really relational worldview.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (31:33)
Yeah, it's very interesting because I think there would be a book to be written about the pathologies of time in a way. It's the way we struggle with some of those questions in the everyday life. And you're right to refer to this idea of slowness, although it's interesting slow movement, which was a political movement starting in the 80s in Italy around slow food movement, you know, play an important role, but at the same time in the current context, and that's part of my discomfort with slowness as an ideology, is that it tends to reduce the complexity of the problem because slowness is not a solution in itself. There are many things that are great to do fast and things that are great to do slow, and therefore there is no objective way in a way to identify a specific pace of life that would be our tempo, that would have intrinsic value. And, therefore, it's really again about this capacity that we have to identify when rhythms of activities are mismatched or are inappropriate or are cause of suffering, whether it's again for humans or non-humans, and address those issues. And, so, slowness is part of the solution. It can be also part of the problem because if we think about social change, if we take it too slowly, obviously it is an issue. I don't think people needs to be become more aware of how the expense of time can be a source of struggle. I think they are painfully aware of that. But I think where there is awareness that needs to be raised is about how we address the conflict and tensions that comes with the heterogeneity of rhythms of changes.
Keri Facer (33:22)
Yeah, I mean, you and I, I think, are both really agreed on this sense that there isn't one sort of time that's right and that should be imposed everywhere, but that what we're trying to do is play with the different approaches. There's a word you use in your work, you talk about emancipation. What do you mean by emancipation in relation to time and rhythm?
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (33:49)
Well, yeah, maybe just as a basic definition, emancipations, for me, refer to the action of breaking through an existing social order. So, in the history of the term, it refers to the process through which slaves were getting free in antiquity. But the word is also used, obviously, in the framework of family. I mean, the young adult who emancipate themselves from the order of their family rules. So, emancipation is at the core of critical pedagogies, at the core of the reasons why I'm working in the field of education and adult education. I think, in relation specifically to the topics we're discussing in this podcast on time, I would say there are two things that are important. The first one is that we are facing today new forms of temporal alienation. So, if we understand alienation as the opposite of emancipation, alienation as being what's overly constraining and limits drastically the freedom and the agency of people, I think that there are different forms of temporal alienations that we are facing today. And, so, you mentioned acceleration, and we could refer here to the work of Hartmut Rosa, the German sociologist who is quite well known for his discussions around this idea of social acceleration and technological accelerations, the thesis that really the world we are living in is organized around changes whose pace has increased significantly during the past centuries. In a way, acceleration can be experienced as a source of ⁓ suffering and alienation because it challenges our own psychological and social capacity to deal with changes. And that's part of the reason why I think burnout is one of the illness today that has been acknowledged by the International Labour Organization as a significant source of suffering at work because burnout is the expression of the incapacity of individuals to deal with changes in their environment that are imposed on them. But there are other form of alienation. Presentism is another forms of alienation, this idea that we need to focus on the present time. And for someone like you who is interested in future studies, there is really something about being able to bring people to relate to their experience, not just locked into the present, but also embracing the representation of the future and their understanding of the past. And I guess it's something that is much more challenging today that it may have been in the past. And another form of temporal alienation that I'd like to mention here again, one that is proposed by Gaston Pineau, he coined the term schizochrony. Schizo, which is divided, and chrony from chronos time. So, the experience of divided time. And somewhere, at least in the West, I would say we are often experiencing that experience of being split between moments of our everyday life that have different rhythms, that are not well adjusted with each other. So, family time versus working time is a typical a form of schizochrony, but it can be also individual time versus the time of the collective I'm belonging to. That can also be a source of suffering. So, emancipation in that context has to do with the capacity to interpret, give meaning to those struggles that we are experiencing in order to find ways to reappropriate for ourselves our experience of time in a way that is coherent and that is comfortable with our own rhythm as individuals and also as collective. and, so, that's one aspect. The second aspect has to do with the fact that emancipation itself is a process that unfolds through time. And often, at least in education, I can see for people working in critical pedagogy, emancipation is seen as something, you know, that will occur once you emancipate yourself from, you know, from your family, from your working environment, and then you are free. And obviously that never happened like that. It's an ongoing process. It's an ongoing struggle. And I think it's important, that's one of the thesis I defend in my book, that to conceive emancipation in itself as a rhythmic phenomenon, we are never free, like, once for all. That freedom is something we always have to struggle with. So, it's something that fluctuates. And this idea of fluctuation, for me, is critical because it's another way to think about time. It's how do we understand those fluctuations of our way of being in the world? And, I think, for the current situation, when we think about environmental transition, it's also another way to think about the temporality of it. Because if we think about solving the environmental crisis as an event that will occur in history and then, after that, we'll be free from those issues, it's obviously totally naive and unrealistic. So, it's really much more about how do we navigate the tensions between rhythms and temporalities, social, technological, but also usually natural and humans, in a way that we can sustain? And this idea of sustainability is really about regulating over time. And, so, for me, emancipation has to be conceived as a process that we need to sustain and, therefore, to regulate through multiple rhythms that compose it.
Keri Facer (39:26)
I suppose for me, I like trying things out. I like doing stuff for this. So, you know, if I think about the questions that that raises for me, I end up thinking, okay, so, it's about noticing the difference between nouns and verbs, you know, so, a transition as an event, actually shifting towards this as process, as relationship, as an ongoing practice. I mean, I do still think that the language of emancipation and freedom, though, has got a legacy tied up in it that is a particular legacy and I wonder about the risk that it falls into an individualized framing because, you know, when I think about some of the tensions that I'm seeing around me when I'm thinking about working with those people who are working in ecological movements today, for example, one of the real sources of grief, it feels to me, is the impossibility of, if you like, diving into other rhythms, of becoming deeply enmeshed in the rhythms of the land, of the seasons, of the other creatures, of the other beings in the world, and the fact of being sort of deracinated, being pulled out of that. And, so, there's something about the language, if we're not careful, around freedom and anticipation, which suggests the development of autonomy and sovereignty, and the separateness. Whereas actually, quite often, for me, it feels like the struggle is to create the possibility to deeply implicate oneself in the rhythms of that which we love. And I'm thinking here about care time. I'm thinking about Lisa Bereitz's work, which talks about the privilege of being alongside someone in illness, the privilege and the repetitiveness and the kind of ongoing maintenance. I mean, this is old school feminist theorizing. It's like we're not just separate in a little bubble, and that, actually, if we can all become independent, autonomous, white males living in a separate thing, everything would be happy. That's not what we're looking for sometimes here. We're looking for connection. We're looking for relationship. So, I suppose that's where I'm sort of sometimes uncomfortable with the language about emancipation and illness.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (41:37)
Actually, in the book, I refer more to this idea, exactly what you're expressing, that tension, and that's not my words, it's actually again, Edgar Morin's, the tension between autonomy and dependence. And, for him, he show how social life and actually living life always inscribe in tension between autonomy and dependence. And, so, this idea that you have to negotiate what makes you dependent. Because what gives you autonomy is also what makes you feeling dependent. So, as human beings, we have developed autonomy towards our natural environment, but we are still fully dependent on it. And, so, I totally relate to what you're saying about this tension. Actually, maybe, Keri, you could say a few words about your work around temporal imagination. What do you mean by this and why do you refer to this notion specifically in your work?
Keri Facer (42:35)
The phrase temporal imagination originally comes from Barbara Adam, but she hasn't elaborated it that that much. And I've ended up interpreting it as follows, really. So, temporal imagination, I refer to as a practice in the same way inspired by, you know, Harvey's geographical imagination or C. Wright Mill's sociological imagination, that coming into awareness that we're living in a set of temporal relationships that are social, not just individual, and that those social relationships cause injustice, they cause inequalities, and that they might be amenable to being changed. Okay, so in the same way as we think about spatial relationships as not natural, but as constructed, in the same way we think of social relationships in that way, I think, Adam, when she's talking about temporal imagination, she's locating time in that way that the way time is organized in society can be disrupted, can be reorganized. The question of how we cultivate the temporal imagination is the thing that I'm really interested in. I mean, as you know, my work has always been about the relationship between education and social change. So, I'm interested in how do we educate, how do we cultivate for it? And, for me, I understand the practice of developing the temporal imagination as having three moves. So, the first move is the one that is about interrupting our own assumptions. So, becoming aware of the temporal habits that we have, you know, the habits we have of thinking with time. And the second move is to tune ourselves in... Miriam Jensen, who's a great writer on time and water talks about this. She talks about temporal attunement, tune ourselves in to the multiple temporalities that might be at play in any particular situation, the rhythms. And then the third element of temporal imagination, to me, is the one that is most important, least researched, and we still need to do a lot of work on it, which is this question of negotiation and judgment. How do we shift from noticing to collectively finding ways of making decisions together about what sorts of rhythms we work with? So, this is the political question. You know, there's a politics in the Derridaean sense. There is a choice, an objective answer to what we should use. There would be no politics, but this is always about values. This is always about choice. So, for me, most of what I've been doing the last couple of years, working with Harriet Hand also at Bristol with me, is trying to find methods to support groups to have those sorts of conversations. But before we talk about that, your framing around rhythmic intelligence is also, I think, really important. So, let's pull that into the conversation here too.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (45:17)
One author I didn't mention earlier, who has been very, very influential, is Henri Lefebvre for me and his work specifically on rhythm analysis. Lefebvre used to be a Marxist, critical of traditional Marxism. And basically, his approach was really about how do we think about social change in the everyday life? And, so, in the 60s, it was kind of revolutionary to think about social change based on the everyday life rather than macro change and revolution. And, so, what is suggested with rhythm analysis is that we need to pay attention to the rhythms of the everyday life, which means the rhythms of our beats, the rhythms of how we interact and live in society and how the shape of the environment we're living in, he was working mainly on cities, for example, also shape the way we experience time in the urban environment. And, so, he had very strong insight that really informed my thinking, but actually, his work on rhythm analysis was published posthumously, and, so, he did not develop further those ideas. And, so, for me, the idea of rhythmic intelligence goes into that direction. I mean, as a psychologist by background, I'm also interested in the way individual and collective actually process their experience of rhythms. And, so, for me, rhythms really refer to the sense of time and the way we experience temporalities very concretely, very practically with something very intuitive about rhythms. We all can relate to this idea of rhythm, which also makes it dangerous as a concept because sometimes things are a bit more complicated than that. But the idea of rhythmic intelligence is really this idea of how do we develop the capacity to critically reflect on the ways we experience processes of change and transformation? And, so, it's really about challenging the assumptions that we have about how changes and transformation occur through time. And, so, also in connection to the work I did previously around the concept of critique from an educational perspective, I identified six dimensions. The first step, and that connects to some of the things you have mentioned also, is to be able to recognize, to discriminate rhythms and to be able to acknowledge the rhythms that compose our lives. That's the first one. Then there is the question of meaning. What is the meaning that we give to a rhythm? I mean, what are the words that we're choosing? Are we choosing to put numbers on that rhythm? Are we just choosing to describe it qualitatively? That's about how we interpret rhythms and changes. And then there's the question of how do we put a value on those rhythms? We were talking earlier about slowness and speed. Slowness is good sometimes, sometimes it's bad. So, we always potentially put a value on the rhythms that we're experiencing. And, I think, it's important to be critical about how we put values and how society values, obviously, specific rhythms. That's the fourth approach. We can discuss about whether that rhythm or that rhythm is more valuable in a given context. Eventually, we can judge, take position, assert specific values and assert specific rhythms that we believe are important, crucial for self or for the community we are belonging to or for the environment among us. And finally, we can challenge, we can put into question those rhythms because when we are clear about the values that we put behind specific rhythms in a way of being, in a way of acting, then we can choose to challenge, to question, to criticize also ⁓ rhythms that are imposed or that have been tacitly chosen in a specific context. So, rhythmic intelligence is about all that. It's not something that is individual. It's not just in the brain of someone. It's also collective form of intelligence in a way that we can collectively develop rhythmic intelligence. In my family, I have two young kids. Obviously, I don't talk to them in those words because they would probably not grasp them. But when I feel that the energy is changing because someone is tired or someone is hungry, I try to draw attention to that. And collectively, with my partner, with the children, we try to identify when things start degenerating. Someone becomes cranky and there is aggressivity raising. And, so, trying to not wait until the crisis explodes and someone gets, you know, I mean, that there is tension or conflict, but trying to anticipate and try to see how progressively some rhythms change that affect our moods and that affect our relationship within the family. So, rhythmic intelligence has to do with that capacity to individually and collectively identify rhythms that compose our life and also rhythms that compose the way we change, the way we live with each other and with the environment within which we are evolving.
Keri Facer (50:19)
We've got such different literatures that we've drawn on and the question is how do we bring the French literature and the Anglo-Saxon American literature kind of into dialogue, you know? That, to me, feels like something that's really valuable. And, you know, what I really appreciate about our conversation is also that, you know, we're both open to trying to find different ways through these challenges. You know, it's not like there's going to be one right answer. The point is to collaborate, which, you know, is a joyful and a lovely thing because in a lot of academia, it can be deeply competitive. And, I think, one of the things that this work is helping us do is also it gives us a bigger picture. You know, we're in a long-term social transitioning process of many different sorts. And our work is part of that bigger picture. One of the reasons I still kind of attach myself to the word imagination is because it really foregrounds the storytelling aspect of this. I want to kind of rescue storytelling from story selling, you know, which is the kind of corporate thing. You know, the way we tell stories is deeply based in time. It is how we give meaning to rhythm. It's how we attribute value. And the question of how we find different stories to live by is at the heart of what I'm passionate about at the moment. But the other thing is, when I think about what you were talking about as we make these negotiations, these judgments about which form of rhythm, which patterns, which time story we want to live by, I also go back to Danielle Allen's work on political friendship. And she talks about the fact that we're always going to have to make these decisions, but we need to be careful. We need to notice that each decision is not a single case on its own. It's also part of wider patterns. The thing that I love about the legacy of the temporal imagination work is that it's located in a wider story of political and social struggle, which is about noticing who loses out each time we make those decisions, right? So, if there are certain groups, if there are certain communities whose time and rhythm is systematically ignored, is systematically judged unhelpful, invalid, then we need to pay attention to that as well. So, it's that shift from the kind of individual relational rhythmic intelligence to the social practices of rhythmic intelligence that I'm super interested in. And that's, to me, where the temporal imagination comes in as a kind of developing social capacity to not just critique, but to notice those moments, and to be able to imagine and create different arrangements that really pay attention to these issues of justice, these issues of whose timings, whose rhythms are systematically ignored. And that becomes important for children, it becomes important for a whole range of groups.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (53:16)
Do want to say a few words maybe to complete this aspect of your work about how do you think we can work with them differently in society and how can we govern or regulate temporalities in different ways?
Keri Facer (53:31)
Yeah, I mean, I think there's some really interesting global and social experiments starting to emerge. We're starting to see a lot of cities really pay attention to questions of time. So, if we talk about whose timings are systematically ignored, for example, then the timings of people who work at night, for example, absolutely systematically ignored. So, we've now got a growing attention to what happens at night time? What happens at twilight? Who do we need to pay attention to if we recognise that there are people that are alive and awake and operating in those different times? So, we've got things like the Barcelona Time Convention that's just emerged, the growth of time offices. But I think this is in its infancy. In the UK, we've been working with the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and with the groups that are involved in governing water. And what's absolutely clear is that the political cycles that we are enmeshed in are deeply inadequate for the sort of deep time caring rhythms that are required to look after a river. And, so, one of the questions as we start thinking about what sorts of governance structures we need, will be a question of what timeframe is this governance structure responsible for? And that's why organizations like Wales's Minister for Future Generations is super interesting because it's locking in politically and legally the expectation that a future generation, as yet unspecified, needs to be thought about in contemporary decision-making. And we've got the same happening. We've got a EU commissioner for future generations as well now. So, I think what we're starting to see is a whole load of experimentation with different political forms that can only kind of proliferate at the moment. And the challenge is going to be how do we learn rapidly? How do we iterate with each other? How do we develop new ways of doing this? So, it's an exciting time for me. One of the things that we've been doing in the programme is developing this alternative world, this world Chronoberg. We've created an alternative city where we've been doing the kind of imaginative work of saying, what might a city look like if it was governed in the recognition that there are multiple rhythms, multiple temporalities at play, and how would those be negotiated and what would the main conflicts be? So, yeah, I think we're in really exciting times right now. What about you? What are your thoughts around how we can think and organize ourselves differently as a society in relation to time and rhythm?
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (56:08)
Well, you know, I'm probably not as advanced as you are in terms of thinking the collective aspect of it. Maybe it's the bias of being a psychologist by training that tend to bring me to think more about how individuals process those questions. So, I start from that level. I'm convinced that the use of life narrative and life histories individually, but also collectively, can be a way to reframe the narratives and the way we understand how changes occur. And I think there is something about bringing people to challenge the way they understand what social transformation means. So, for me, the key question is really about how do we question the meaning associated with change and transformation? So, the initiative I've been developing within the programme founded by the British Academy, the Time of Just Transitions, has to do with working with activists and people also involved in institutions here in Switzerland about the way they envisions the different temporalities and rhythms involved in transitioning. And, so, what we are doing now is experimenting different methods and one of them has to do with using metaphor as a way to en vision changes and the way they occur. And, so, there is really a stimulating work going on there using photographies and metaphors as a way to develop a vocabulary. Because, I think, it's also about enriching the vocabulary we have to think about time and the experience of time. And yes, rhythm analysis is another way to also process the idea of trying to develop what I'm currently working on, to develop a kind of problem solving methodology that focus specifically on the rhythms in concrete situations. So, the idea is to bring people to reflect on problematic situations they are facing at work, whenever changes has to be managed, so called, or occur, and try to think through the lens of the rhythms involved, the processes involved, to identify the points of frictions and also what can be made more fluent.
Keri Facer (58:13)
Well, it's watch this space, isn't it, for all of us? I mean, that's what I think is so exciting at the moment. Given the ecological, the social challenges that we're facing at the moment, there is such an urgent need to become attentive to the rhythms that we are living within, that are being produced and to the alienating effects of kind of rhythmic misalignment that we're living with. So, we're living in a moment where this feels like important work. And, I think, we're also living in a moment where there are so many scholars, researchers, activists and others who are starting to experiment, who are starting to try things out. So, as well as it feeling like challenging times, it also feels like really exciting times for this, which is why we're doing this podcast, isn't it? I mean, we're trying to have these conversations in the first instance in this series with the brilliant colleagues that we've got from all around the world who are working on the questions of timing, justice, transitions, sustainability. So, we're going to be talking with all of those over the next few episodes. We're going to be thinking about how time and rhythm is impacting on questions of how to create healthy rivers in Goa, for example, with a wonderful colleague, Peter De Sousa, we're looking at what happens when wind farms are imposed on indigenous territories. And what does that mean for the temporalities of the winds in that place and the temporalities of the people who are living there? We're gonna be talking to Michelle Bastian about what might it mean to design clocks differently, and to some brilliant architects, political scientists about how cities can create temporal rhythms that meet different communities needs. So, I'm really excited to start this conversation with you, Michel. I'm really grateful for the chance for us to keep being in dialogue and I'm looking forward to these conversations. So, thank you so much for this conversation today.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (1:00:12)
I want to thank you also, Keri, for this opportunity. And I'm really glad that we could put together this podcast series. I'm very excited for the next episode because, as you say, not only it's brilliant people, but it's people coming from so many different parts of the world and so many different disciplines, academic disciplines. I think through this real transdisciplinary initiative that we can also face and understand better the complexity of the topic we have been discussing during this whole hour. So, I'm also really excited about this opportunity to confront ourselves with the thinking of brilliant people from different areas of the academy and different parts of the world.
Keri Facer (1:00:54)
Yeah, I think that's it for today. Thanks for the conversation and we'll see and hear you all next time. Goodbye.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (1:01:01)
Goodbye.
