Michel Alhadeff-Jones (00:02)
Today we are going to talk about clocks. Clocks and calendars are means used to measure time. More fundamentally, they symbolize how people represent and plan for changes in a given institution or within a society. They play, therefore, a critical role in the social imaginary of time and in the way it influences our actions. Practically, clocks and calendars also fulfill a key function. They allow people to synchronize and organize their activities among themselves, and with their environment. In this episode, we have the privilege to welcome Michelle Bastian, a leading scholar in the field of critical time studies. With her, we are going to reflect on how timekeeping plays a critical role in the way we think and act in relation to environmental issues. We are going to discuss how clocks contribute to power dynamics and social injustices, and what does it take individually and collectively to envision, live through and regulate the plural temporalities and rhythms that shape life on Earth. Michelle, thank you for being with us today. You are a senior lecturer in Environmental Humanities at the University of Edinburgh in the UK. You work in the areas of critical time studies and Environmental Humanities with a broad focus on the role of time in social processes of inclusion and exclusion. Currently, your research is focused on timekeeping practices in a context of climate crisis and developing humanities approaches to phenology, the scientific study of life cycle timing in plants, animals and environments. Michelle, you're also currently finishing writing a book on clocks and the necessity to rethink our relation to timekeeping. To prepare this episode, you shared with us a first version of the introduction, which I really enjoyed reading. Before diving into this, could you tell us first a bit about the origins of your interest in the philosophy and sociology of time, where that comes from?
Michelle Bastian (02:04)
So, thank you so much for having me. It's really exciting to be able to have the conversation with you both. So, I've been doing research on time since my PhD. So, we worked out it was 20 years so far that I've been working on it. And originally I was really interested in the way that feminist activists who are trying to think about how to rethink political activism and think about communities in different ways, how we form communities, what brings us together. That quite a lot of the time when they talked about how we redefine community, they often suggested things that were also about how we redefine time. So, they might say things like we need to reconsider progress and how progress works, or think about history in different ways, or think about just process, so, how things happen over time. And I just thought it was very interesting that it was this hidden aspect of how we change things in the world was seemed to be tied up and bound up with how we change, you that we need to change time as well. Not just change our definitions of community or identity or things like this, but also what time is and how we think time works.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (03:14)
Great. And how does that connect for you with more specifically clocks and timekeeping?
Michelle Bastian (03:21)
Yeah, so I started looking at clocks after I'd finished my PhD. So, I'd looked a lot more at time as social organization and then started becoming interested in clocks when thinking about time and climate change. And, so, my background's in philosophy , so, and continental philosophy in particular, so, European philosophy and in that field, clocks are just always represented as the enemy. They're the thing that distracts you from your authenticity. They're the thing that sort of turns you into this automaton or this robot if you follow clock time too rigidly. Pretty much everybody that you'll find in that field has just has horrible things to say about clocks. But I think for me, I thought it was a shame, know, I mean, worse than a shame. It was a real disappointment that, in doing that, all of those philosophers left this really important way of organizing our lives out of the picture. So, there wasn't any interest in thinking about it as an avenue for rearranging communities or rearranging how we do things. So I just thought it was intriguing from that aspect.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (04:22)
So, for you, rethinking clocks is a way to rethink the way we relate to each other and to communities.
Michelle Bastian (04:32)
Yeah, so I think often when we think about them, we think about, I've got one on the wall behind me. I don't know if you can see, just this ominous ticking presence. But if you think about how we use them in everyday life, quite often we're looking at them to try and figure out what to do. What do we have time for? Can I fit this in? Can I meet that person? And so we're asking questions about activities when we look at the clock, rather than asking questions about what numbers are being presented to us, is it at the nine or the ten? We're asking what can we do? And, so, when we're thinking about how we might reorganise our world and our lives in relation to climate change, which is what we need to Addressing climate change is no less than this complete reorganisation of society and values. Why not look at clocks and how they could help us re-imagine our activities and our relationships with each other.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (05:27)
Okay, well, actually, in the introduction of your book, you write a sentence, I'm going to quote you here, "rather than liberating ourselves from the clock, I invite you to consider what it might mean to liberate the clock " So, somewhere you would like us to open up a space for us to entertain another perspective on our practices of timekeeping. And I was wondering if you could tell us more about that.
Michelle Bastian (05:51)
Yes, so I mean guess it links with what I was saying before about how generally we think there's very little possibility with a clock. So, there's a lot of cultural resonance around the idea that we should smash the clock or that we would liberate ourselves by, you know, destroying it, taking them off the wall, stopping them, something like this. I just thought it was a shame that this tool that we look at throughout the day, so, everybody's looking at it. Most people are looking at it quite frequently throughout the day. Why not use that relationship that occurs so frequently as a hinge point for activism, for trying to imagine change? By rejecting them so forcefully, which I have traced to these ideas from continental philosophy, yeah, there's no sense that we could change what's on the clock. So, something that's been really important to me in my work is working with designers and really thinking about clocks as an object that are designed. They didn't fall from heaven. They've been designed in certain ways, and they can be designed in new ways as well.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (06:57)
Well, we're getting there. You wrote this sentence that really resonated for : "We know we can't tell whether someone in intensive care needs attention or not based on clock time alone. We also know that we can't use it to tell if it is the right time to plant carrots or to ask for forgiveness. Further, experiences of new institutions, countries, cultures, or extreme events can bring us to the boundaries of our knowledge, and we need to learn again how time works here." So, I was wondering if you could give us a kind of practical example of what does it mean for you to learn how time works? Because there is really this idea in what you're suggesting that we have to re-envision clocks, not to exclude them from our lives, which obviously it's probably impossible, but to, in a way, become more friends with them. I think that's an idea that's really at the core of what you're suggesting in your book. So, I was wondering, how concretely, what does it mean to learn how time works and maybe specifically in the context of the environmental crisis that we are facing?
Michelle Bastian (08:10)
Yeah, so, I mean, part of that is trying to work back against the idea that clocks tell empty abstract objective time. So, if you start reading about clocks pretty much everywhere, people will talk about them being empty, that they're not connected to anything, an abstract that they feel very disconnected from everyday life. But then I moved house recently. We had lived somewhere for nine years and we moved to a new place. That was about a year ago. It's in the same city of Edinburgh. It's, you know, a half hour bus ride away. And yet when I was in this new place, so, another side of town, all these rules I had for how time works in the city that I lived in fell apart. And I had to learn how to work out how time works here. So, that can be a very simple thing where the bin schedules are different. So, you know, our weekly cycles of activity had to get shifted because we put the bins out on a different day. But also all my rules around how to travel and how to get somewhere were different. Which bus do I get? What time do they arrive? Are they often late or early? And I could just feel myself as I got familiar with the landscape, also having to relearn the rules of time in that particular place. You could think about that sort of writ large, I suppose, of when you move to a different country, that although we use the same clocks, they have the same numbers on them many times, not everywhere, obviously, there's still a situated, connected understanding of time that you have to develop in that place as well. So, the clock doesn't let you in to everything that's happening in relation to coordination, so, how you coordinate yourself. So, in this place, you need to learn are people late or early? If you're teaching classes, for example, are the students on time or do they come late? And is that seen as a problem here? What time are the, you know, businesses open? How do the institutions work? Whenever you use a clock, you're drawing on a lot of situated knowledge in order for it to work in that place.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (10:15)
Was there a way to read time in the landscape or in the new urban spaces you were evolving?
Michelle Bastian (10:23)
One example, I guess, of how important it is to think about time and coordination and environments, based on my experience, was that when we moved to this place, we had a pear tree that was around the back. And it was very interesting trying to figure out how to coordinate with this pear tree. So, when would the fruit be ripe? When could we pick it? When could we eat it? And it was a kind of timing that we had to learn in that place that couldn't be told by the clock. It couldn't be told by those kind of schedules that tell you when pears come ripe or not, because this pear was very specific. And I could see when I was trying to figure out this time problem that I was going through lots of different kinds of activities rather than looking at the number on here. I was talking to my neighbors about when they thought pears became ripe. I talked to someone who used to live here, who was talking about, you know, once you pick them, you have to leave them for two weeks. But I was also watching the animals too. So, I was watching the squirrels. I was watching the foxes when they were eating the pears. And, so, you get all this kind of timing information from what was going on around you. I think there is such an idea that this kind of locally generated temporalities and environmentally attuned temporalities are completely stripped out of Western society and anybody living in Western society. And I like examples like that because it shows how important it is for everybody to always be thinking about time as relationality, to use this relational time with their environment to figure out when to do things and when things happen.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (12:05)
Yeah, I love in what you're saying the fact that, in a way, the blurriness about the fact that you had to reorientate yourself moving to this new place, in a way brought you to get into specific relation with your neighbors, with your natural environment, the landscape around you, the living environment, and to renegotiate with them and to use that in a way as an excuse, in a way to reconnect also with them. So, I find that very, very powerful as an example.
Michelle Bastian (12:33)
Bringing the neighbors into the conversation, you know, it just happened sort of organically, but thinking about it as a philosopher, it became really interesting for, yeah, how you make time with others. So, it's not made in the abstract, it's not made in a kind of in a vacuum, although our clocks often act in vacuums, atomic clocks and things like this. But we're always forming relationships to work out when the right time to do things is. That's a very privileged example, being able to have a pear tree, but hopefully it sort of illustrates the complexity of the behaviour that we're involved in all the time when we're telling time and keeping time.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (13:09)
Do you feel the need when you are in connection with your neighbors to bring in philosophy or does enrich the conversation in a way?
Michelle Bastian (13:19)
Not very often, to be honest. I mean, I have been doing field work with people, which has been really, really important to me as a philosopher doing field philosophy, as we've been calling it. And, so, we do, you know, I do really enjoy having conversations and picking up those moments, I suppose, when they start to be a conversation about what things mean or what's the right thing to do or how a concept might be defined. And I quite like thinking about those as this kind of, yeah, how philosophy erupts in the everyday and you can have those kinds of conversations that usually you associate with philosophy. But no, not too often, not explicitly anyway.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (13:54)
So, in the introduction of your book, you remind us, and I quote, "the everyday orientation provided by the clock and the walls of activities that it makes legible is thus never neutral or without violent erasures. It is therefore needed to reimagine the clock and recognizing the ways that injustice and inequality are bound up in the everyday that clock presides over." So, that connects to what you were introducing about privilege and how the way we relate to time depends, obviously, of the social and environmental context we are in. So, I was wondering if you could tell us more about how do you understand the relation between environmental injustices and inequalities and what we could call the hegemony of traditional timekeeping.
Michelle Bastian (14:49)
One of the things I think is really important about time and about clock time in particular is the way that they're often understood as this asocial background. So, then not generally understood by most people as being filled with values and choices and decisions about we'll keep coordinated with some activities and the processes around us can sort of fall by the wayside. People have become more aware about discrimination around identity or sexuality or race and you know, a whole host of things. We don't often think about time as a form of discrimination. So, I think that's really what motivates me to keep looking at this issue for 20 years as I have so far, is how important it is to develop a kind of temporal literacy, as Keri's written about as well, and you Michel and Paul Huberner as well. That we can't only learn about time in primary school when we're reading the clock as my son's learning this year in school. There's lots more that we need to learn about.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (15:50)
And we know that school is mainly about learning to be conditioned by the clock and the temporal structure of an institution. two ideas that you are bringing that I'd like you to bounce on. One is time as a form of discrimination. I think that's crucial. The other one is temporal literacy that we mostly discuss with the input of Keri. But first, maybe time as a form of discrimination.
Michelle Bastian (16:12)
Yeah, so, I mean, I was just teaching about ideas around time use and how that could be linked with discrimination. So, this is more what I'm teaching at the moment rather than researching. But we were looking at, in my course on time and environment, this idea that if we're going to engage in environmental activities, we need time to be able to do it. So, people are really interested in thinking about time use. So, what we have across our day to use our time as we would like to, or how much of our time is allocated to work and caring work and things like this. And my students found that really, really helpful to try and sort of unpack who has the capacity to change their behaviour and how much time it takes up and things like this. And I know that that's one really important avenue to try and, if we're thinking about how time could help us live more sustainably, then time use is one really important avenue of research for thinking about temporal inequality and like temporal justice. So, who has this kind of wealth of time where they have this free choice and who's living in structures where they have very little time. Transport comes up a lot. So, who has very poor access to really reliable public transport, for example, which means not only that you get somewhere quickly, but that you don't have to add in all this extra time around your transport trip in case anything goes wrong. Some people have to do that a lot more than others, for example. Those practical questions about time use I think are important.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (17:37)
Listening to you, I was reminded, I don't know in the UK if that does exist. In France, they have Les Bureaux du Temps, which literally means offices of time that are attached to some cities, like in Lyon, for example. I know in Spain, I think in Barcelona, there is also one. Do you have that in the UK? Because that's kind of institutional structures that kind of provide space and time to think about how the life in the city can be reorganized in order to make sure that there is not too many inequalities in the way, for example, transportation or the opening times of offices or services are available to everyone. Is it something that you?
Michelle Bastian (18:25)
So, we definitely have the center for time use studies, but that's more of a research arm. And I've been really impressed and really excited about the Barcelona time use policy group, I can't remember their exact name now, but hopefully we'll find them. They have been working really, really hard to get time policy on the agenda and they're doing absolutely amazing work with reaching out to people across Europe in particular, but across the globe to try and foreground this idea of time policy, that when we're thinking about how to support cities, that we don't think just about spatial policy or spatial planning or things like this. Thinking about the temporality of the city and inequalities in that is also really important aspect of policy development.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (19:10)
So, that referred to me to what I would call specific temporal constraints that are institutionalized and somewhere those services provide a way to think and to eventually fight against inequalities in the way they are structured and organized by the temporalities of the life in the city. So, that deals with kind of functional aspect of the constraint of time and the clocks. Now in your work, you're also talking about a more kind of imaginary dimension of the meaning that clocks represent constraint, not just in what they make us do, but also in the way they make us think about what time is. And, so, I would like to hear you more also about that component of it. How do clocks limit our imaginary of time? And what do you suggest? How do you envision the way we could change the specific symbolic constraints that they are inferring or that we are inferring using clocks?
Michelle Bastian (20:22)
I remember when I first started looking at clocks, had to make a poster for an event, uh, as we all have to do. And then you need to find a nice image to, you know, showcase what you're working on. And I went to Google images and put in time and saw what images came up and it was just pages and pages and pages and pages of clocks and very, you know, standard clocks. So, a white dial, you know, a wall clock, very, very standard. And it was just so confronting, just that one experience of how limited our repertoire is for representing time and how it works. And as an editor for Time and Society, we have a digital clock on the front of our magazine, our journal. I have rows of books on time here in the background, and they've all got various variations of clocks on the cover. And being situated in an art college, so being situated in the Edinburgh College of Art, I think it was a really important experience for me to start thinking about how else we might represent time and how else we could think about what kind of times we wanted to have on the dial, what kind of things we wanted to be coordinated with and what kinds of tools we could develop or invent or design to help us to keep coordinated with those things.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (21:37)
That's one thing that comes also in your book. You refer to how astrophysicists, metrologists and other scientists, specifically in the hard sciences, deal with or are familiar with multiple form of temporalities and somewhere you seems to get inspired by the way they are able to negotiate this diversity of way to conceive time as a source of inspiration for maybe the way we should come in everyday life relate to different form of temporality. So, could you tell us more about that and the importance of envisioning heterogeneous temporalities?
Michelle Bastian (22:23)
So, in philosophy, there was a number of things I had to kind of throw off, I suppose. And one of them was this idea that clocks are just always dangerous. But the second was that it was the time of science in particular that was oppressing us. So, if you read Husserl or Bergson or Heidegger, you know, quite often the foil is this scientific time. But then again, it was a very simple thing of what is clock time? Looking it up on Wikipedia and then seeing that the time we use on all our devices is a thing called coordinated universal time. And it's made up of multiple time scales that have to be coordinated in various ways in order to work. So, even if you do the most basic step of just looking at what clock time is, you confront immediately that it's not the singular objective abstract, you know, speeding on series of nows. It's about coordination. It's about multiplicity of time scales that are created measuring different processes in our universe. And, so, partly after working with Kevin Berth, who's an anthropologist at CUNY Queen's, really inspiring for me, I ended up at a conference on the science of time that was run by the Harvard Astrophysics Center for the Study of Astrophysics. And being in a room where people were talking about families of time scales, everyone were being very comfortable with this and also comfortable that you would pick from the time scale, depending on what your problem was or what you needed to know. And even there was a point where someone mentioned that it's a shame that the general public don't know that you can keep time in these multiple ways. And there was kind of this ripple of laughter in the room, not in a nasty way, but just in a recognition that other people don't understand this. And it was just really, really inspiring, I think, as a way to challenge this complete neglect of clock time in philosophy through the sciences. And as Kevin Bertha said too, finding yourself in this very strange position where the humanities scholars are being very absolutist about what time is and the scientists are the one not being relativists but being much more plural. So, there's a pluralism in their understanding of time which you don't find in the philosophy I was reading anyway.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (24:33)
When actually it would be maybe helpful here for people who listen to us to have some example of the kind of temporalities that are part of this plurality you're referring to. So was it referring to like atomic time on one side, astronomical ones? Do you have example you can give us?
Michelle Bastian (24:51)
Yes, I mean, they use so many, it's a bit hard for me to keep track of. I'll butcher the names of them all. But, so, you can have atomic time, which is not told on any atomic clock. It's told by a suite of atomic clocks that get averaged out. So, there isn't even an atomic clock that tells atomic time. Then you have time based on the Earth's rotation and how that's spinning. But then you can have ephemeris time, told by the stars, how the stars move in the sky. You can have a different time scale if you're basing time on what's happening on the Earth's surface, or you can also create one that's based in the centre of the Earth. There's GPS time as well that comes into things sometimes, so, the time being kept on satellites is called GPS time and that runs in a different way to all the others. So, yeah, it just proliferates.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (25:42)
So, the way I what you're saying is that it really refers to physical changes that are basically put in relation with the functioning of specific devices, such as clocks, atomic clocks, for instance. My understanding of working with the multiplicity of time in human sciences is that that adds another layer of complexity, which has to do with the diversity of our way of being, of the richness of human beings and communities. And, so, it seems to me that it's almost kind of an infinity of kind of possibilities to think about the diversity of temporalities in human settings or in living settings. So, how do you approach the diversity of temporalities that compose living phenomena and we can progressively also move the conversation toward phenology and the timing in living organism and environment. So, how do you approach that?
Michelle Bastian (26:43)
So, I like to think about clocks as things that help us stay coordinated with what's important to us. And it's not that you're looking to anything and everything to keep the time, but you're looking at things that you've found in the past are helpful for the thing that you need to do. You know, the basic kind of example is if you're doing things at sea a lot, you need to keep track of what the moon is doing, for example. But if you're not, you might want to keep track of the moon for other reasons. You know, it's very important in lots of religious festivals, for example. But if if it's not significant to you, you won't be noticing that one as much. It might sort of go into the background. Another example, if you're thinking about being at a pub, and you're, you know, your friends, then I keep thinking about how that drinks that you have in front of you become the clock in a way, because they help coordinate your actions. So, when you have a full drink, everyone knows it's time to relax for a while, we have a little bit of time to talk. But when they start getting to the bottom, it's a time to make a decision. Do we have another drink? Or do we go home? Or do we go to have a meal? You know, it's the thing that signals it's time to decide what's next. So, in that case, you're using a very localised relational timekeeper that's based on the process of drinking the drinks in front of you. If that makes sense.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (28:01)
I will never see a beer the same anymore after what you just said. No it's very interesting actually. If I was into the manufacturing of glasses, I would design a glass with something written with a scale as the content go down and think about reordering a new one or just ending the conversation. That's a nice example.
Michelle Bastian (28:04)
Yeah.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (28:27)
Keri, you want to step in?
Keri Facer (28:29)
Love that. That's fantastic. And it is also the social etiquette around it as well. It's a moment to make a decision. It's also a moment to decide who's going to step up. And, so, we've got memory tied into it as well, haven't we? Who bought the last round in the UK, obviously? I mean, I'm interested in this kind of plurality of clocks, natural and human. And I was fascinated by you saying that the atomic clock sort of coordinates and averages out. So, I suppose a question I've got is if we've always got, what I hear you saying is that we've always got a whole variety of different clocks at play at any one time because we're coordinating a whole variety of different relationships. What's your views on how we negotiate between those different clocks? Because if we're negotiating between different relationships with what matters, and particularly when we come to things like climate change, on one level we've got this new clock which is the parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that's telling us to get a move on in certain ways. And we've also got other lives on the ground, if you like, that are saying other things matter as well. So, I wonder if you can share your thoughts on this question of how we negotiate between these different values, these different clocks. Where are you landing with that challenge?
Michelle Bastian (29:45)
I think it's really important to have that first step of people recognizing that there are different clocks. I think that's a huge challenge to begin with. It's really horrifying to me when I go on Reddit or some other kind of social media and people talk about lateness, for example, and you'll have hundreds and hundreds of comments where everyone just says it's disrespectful and will not entertain any other option for why people might keep time differently in their lives. And you might have someone coming up who's advocating for people with disabilities, for example, and a kind of temporal empathy. And it's just this very widespread understanding that it's disrespectful and that's it. And that's, I think, an example of where we want to get a wider understanding of, yeah, just this temporal empathy of people working with time in different kinds of ways. I suppose one of the other things I really found really interesting in developing the book is looking at how you can find things in Heidegger and Bergson in particular who both really hate clocks with all their fiber, every fiber in their being it seems like, still have really interesting ways of talking about this multiplicity too, even though they end up shutting it down. You know, they both talk about how anything can be a clock. You know, they talk about any process could be a clock. And, you know, they talk about different ways that we assign meaning to frames of time, you know, they offer lots of really interesting insights. But it's exactly the problem that you're talking about, Keri, of how do we decide which clock and who gets to decide which one that they leave completely on the table because they're not interested in talking about clocks. them at some point in their work mention the time of the scientists and say this is exactly what I don't want to talk about. And, so, one of the things that gets me really frustrated is that what this means is, well, philosophers in particular have left that question of how do we decide what clock completely on the table. You know, all the work on ethics, on politics, on morality, and all these kinds of things without engaging with those really serious problems. I think of how we negotiate, whose time are we keeping?
Keri Facer (31:50)
The concept of temporal empathy, I think, is a fascinating one. I mean, I'm fascinated by also the resistance to that, because what you're inviting people to do is to interrupt something that feels just so natural. You know, my time is something, you know, we learn in our families. My dad was, you know, five hours early for everything. And if you were just two hours early, you were late. You know, it's embodied, isn't it? So, this question of how we interrupt gently without a sense, or maybe we have to interrupt violently. Maybe we have to interrupt in quite a strong way for this deeply embodied felt sense to be disrupted so that you could even begin to be empathetic to these other ways of being. I mean, have you seen good places that people use to do that interruption?
Michelle Bastian (32:34)
I think it was in Chicago, one of the coaches of the baseball team, they're being very insistent on being at the right time. And then I always ask, did he finish his training sessions on time? Like, did he? And everyone had no answer to that. They don't know or they know that he probably didn't finish them on time. He probably made them go over time. And, you know, little things like that are kind of a nice question to ask to like step back of where's the point that we have this strictness and where is the person imposing this strictness allowed to do whatever they want with time, you know, outside of that? So, temporal empathy... where I really confronted that was another research project I was doing about time and sustainable economies. So how, you know, if clock time is so important to capitalism, which is what a lot of people argue, what kind of time would you have in a sustainable economy? And, so, I was at an eco village where people were living off the land, so trying to grow their own food and growing enough things to sell it, to make their living off the land basically. And it was really fascinating how many people talked about how guilty they felt in their bodies. You know, they had this huge anxiety about not living in this nine to five lifestyle. So, someone was talking about, you know, that it was a cold winter rainy day and they were still in bed at nine o'clock, which was perfectly fine because they couldn't do any of the work they needed to do. But they had this intense guilt about it because it was just so ingrained, this training of the proper use of time. And, so, it was someone else who'd been there for a long time and who'd lived an alternative lifestyle for a very long time. I got to talk to him and he would even he was talking about how it took this huge effort to reshape the self, to change the rules that you have around time, to make the kind of time you need in that place to live well, you know, to make it work and to make yourself feel attuned with it.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (34:34)
So, what you're describing somewhere referred to the other question we were starting alluding to earlier, this idea on temporal literacy. And, so, listening to you as myself working in field of adult education, the question is always what do we need to learn and how do we learn to refer to these ideas? And in what you say, basically there are different components. I mean, one aspect has to do with just recognizing and acknowledging the diversity of temporalities that compose our lives. Another aspect also suggested by Keri's question has to do with this idea of temporal empathy and being able to relate to a time or a form of temporality that is different from the one we valorize or the one we experience. What you just gave as an example has to do with the guilt of not being in tune with the dominant schedules, basically that's normalized within a society. So, there are basically normative aspects, there are perceptive aspects also of recognizing the variety of changes that compose the temporalities among us. I was wondering specifically in your work on phenology, concretely speaking, when you're working on, maybe we'll start by defining what it is, phenology, and how do you refer to that in your work, but also concretely what kind of learning you had to develop in order to relate to the temporalities and rhythms of other forms of living organisms.
Michelle Bastian (36:12)
Yeah, so, I'm really excited we're talking about this because it's actually Phenology Week this week. So, the US National Phenology Network, which is run by Theresa Crimmins, have got this week as Phenology Week. And she has a wonderful book out called Phenology, if anyone wants to look at it. It's really exciting. It's come out this week. So, basically, Phenology is described as the seasonal timing of plants and animals, and particularly how aspects of their life cycle sync up with seasonal change. So, here in the UK it's spring, so you can see a lot of things syncing up with the warming temperatures. So, a lot of it is about tracking, for example, when birds start nesting. So, I'm busily looking at the blue tits and the grey tits at the moment to see if they've got little sticks in their beak, because then I would write down the date. That would be the start of that phenophase as it's called, so, the phase where they're nesting. But I'm also looking at my trees around me at the moment where I live. So, I'm looking at the oak and at the rowan and the hazel and things like this, other trees like that to see when the leaves come out, when the little green buds start coming out. Citizen science is really important for phenology. So, that's me participating as a citizen scientist, writing down these states and then I send them off to the databases that scientists use to analyze how things are changing. So, one of the things that's really crucial about it at the moment is that climate change is shifting temperatures and weather patterns all across the globe, and so ecosystems are shifting to try and adapt to this. And one of the sort of, you know, important lines from a IPCC report is that phenology is one of the clearest indicators of the impact of climate change on ecosystems. You know, it sort of ties those things together really well. So, it's very important in ecology and climate change science for understanding those connections. But I became interested in part because there's very little research on it from the humanities perspective, even though it's hugely important in understanding effects of climate change more generally.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (38:20)
What did you learn by working on phenology? And you kind of answer partly in terms of the way you relate to the environment and observing differences and changes that occur around us and taking notes of it as a way to measure those changes. Is there any other thing that you learned by being involved in the community of phenologists?
Michelle Bastian (38:21)
Well, I mean, loads of things which are really exciting, but I guess just that basic sort of reorientation of your understanding of the flow of time was definitely something that happened. So, when I first started, I got put in charge of an international phenology garden, which is at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh. So, there's 15 trees. I need to track them once a week and I don't know the name of any of the trees. So, this is where I was starting from as well. They're coming from Australia. Not that I would know Australian trees all that well, but these trees I was like, I don't really know what any of these things are. And, so, that's also really important to know that a lot of people are starting from a position where they don't even know what an aspen or oak or a rowan tree is. And, so, it was a really important learning curve for me. But I mean, one thing that really sort of brought home how much I've changed is that in Edinburgh, it's been quite cold this spring, so it's warm and then cold again. And people have been complaining of spring starting and stopping and, you know, where's spring going? Why don't we have a proper spring? And I realized that they were only telling the time of spring by temperature. So, when it was warm was spring to them. Because when I heard them talking about that, I was like, how on Earth could you not think it's spring? Like, look at, I've got forget me nots coming out in my front garden. You know, and look at all the buds all greening up on all the trees, like, everywhere I look around me, I'm like, there's life, there's spring, it's coming. I would have seen none of that prior to doing this practice, you know, and I really do think about it as a practice in that kind of sense. And I think it's just important because, you know, there's a lot of talk about this sort of nature deficit or a kind of inability to see what's happening around us. Things like sliding baselines, like, we forget how rich our environments were quite quickly. And, so, this really attentive practice to your local landscape and learning the names of things, although that isn't good enough in and of itself, at least helps us to notice when something's changing, when something seems off or wrong. Yeah, so, it seemed really important from that aspect.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (40:53)
In our conversation, we've been talking first about physical time. We are talking now more about biological time and natural rhythms. And we've also been mentioning, obviously, the rhythms and temporalities of social life. And I guess one key aspect of being critical about time and clocks has to do with how do we negotiate the tensions between those different temporalities? So, I was wondering in your work and we've been collaborating through the British Academy funded program, The Time of Just Transitions, where I learned more about what you were doing also on phenology, and we are trying to, in our reflections, to connect those different aspects and obviously the power dynamics that are also underlying the tensions between the recognition and the valorization of specific rhythm and temporality. So, I was wondering if you could tell us more from what you learned on the fact that we are not valorizing enough in the mainstream thinking, the values of phenology and the natural rhythms. What did you learn about how to negotiate the power it takes to assert the value of specific form of temporalities?
Michelle Bastian (42:12)
It's a big question that's still really very open, I think. Definitely, definitely very open. Do we have the right kind of time there with the right processes? That's always really a question as well. I mean, so, the project I'm doing for this, you know, funded project with the British Academy is looking at Southern Hemisphere phenology. And that's picking up on things phenologists have been talking about themselves, that there's a lot of data for the Northern Hemisphere. And, so, all these predictions about what changes are coming and how we might need to adapt to them is got more support. But at the same time, there's a sort of recognition that in the Southern Hemisphere phenology and all those cycles could be shifting in much more extreme ways. And then you also have a lot more people who are perhaps dependent on subsistence agriculture or who are living much closer to the land and changes in those cycles will affect them much more directly than people who are in these insulated enclaves in the northern hemisphere that protect against these shifts. And, so, the project I'm working on is with partners in Brazil and South Africa and Australia, where we're trying to construct a phenological record of jacarandis and blue jacarandas in particular, to try and see if we can track how changes have been happening. But also working with people in the African Phenology Network who are working with forest communities and trying to understand how fruit production, for example, has been changing over time and what might be done about that as well. So, you know, we go from my pear tree, I suppose, which is this very privileged kind of problem of temporal coordination to thinking, you know, I think this aspect of how phenology is shifting in different places and who it is affecting really sort of writes this bigger problem, you know, really largely. So, some of that's also coming from work that I know comes from Scott Bremer, who is at Bergen. And so he has been leading teams that have been doing really important work too about seasonality changing and how communities have to adapt to this and how huge these impacts can be that certain ways of life become very difficult or become not possible because relationships to the environment are shifting all around us. And, so, that's been something we've been connecting up with this Southern Hemisphere Network as well.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (44:31)
Among the many things you just said, I think one idea that I find particularly crucial is this idea that exactly as there is different time zones when we think about regular physical time, what you're describing is that we are not all relating to the same extent and with the same intensity with changes that occur according to specific rhythmic pattern and such as seasonality. So, what I hear in what you say is that there are inequalities in the way we recognize the urgency of some changes that affect people's everyday life in a more direct way than others, depending on where they are located, for example, and how natural rhythms have to do with that and how we are balancing or negotiating such differences. So, I think that that's super important.
Michelle Bastian (45:21)
There's a lot of really, really important work on dispossession from land and dispossession from particular space, the spaces and place. And, so, I think one of the important things that this focus on phenology brings is this dispossession from time as well. So, dispossession from the time in that place that allows a particular way of life to be possible in that place for the more than human communities as well. That's also an aspect to this dispossession from the time needed to make a certain pattern of life possible, a certain kind of life, way of making life.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (45:56)
There is one last idea that I'd like to discuss with you today. of the propositions that you make in your book that I found particularly powerful is to get inspired by the richness of maps in order to rethink the richness of timekeeping tools. So you write, I quote, "the range of possibilities for liberated clocks would be unacceptably narrowed if we turn to horology alone, that is the art or science of measuring time. Instead, you propose that we find inspiration in the huge amount of critical and creative work that has taken place in relation to another pervasive tool in our everyday lives, maps. So, I really would like to hear you more about that. How can the richness of maps drawing inspire us to rethink about timekeeping?
Michelle Bastian (46:48)
I think one of the aspects that I find maps most inspiring for is this fundamental plurality. In everyday life, when you think about maps, there's also part of us that decides which map am I going to use depending on what I'm doing. We're very, very comfortable with that. You know, a nice example is if you're in London, and you're using the tube map, you know you can use that on the tube, but when you get off the tube, you have to switch to Google Maps because it's not going to help you find your way around the streets. But the tube map is really, really good for finding your way around when you're on the tube, even if it's not representational. It's not in sort of gridded space. And if you are going hiking, you need a different kind of map that tells you how high up or down the elevation is going to be. And, so, even just if we're thinking of those standard kind of maps, even before we get to any of these critical or creative ones, there's this sense that I pick across a range of them, depending on what I need to do. And I quite like also thinking about other tools that we have lots of different versions of that we're very happy to have different versions of and we know what to do. So, spoons is one that I keep bringing up because it sort of shows the the strangeness of why we have hundreds of different types of spoons. I've been trying to list them all, but you know, parfait spoon, a teaspoon, a soup spoon, a melon spoon, an oyster spoon, you know, I could go on, know, I could go on forever. And we're okay with there being that many different types of tools that do a similar kind of job. And yet when you say to people that perhaps we could have different kinds of clocks, it's really hard to connect it to anything. For many people, you can't even imagine what that might mean. So yeah, there's something about maps that's this flexibility but also there's been a huge amount of work coming from human geographers in particular, but also activists and artists and community development people who have created all these methods for thinking about space together with others. So, you can have power mapping, community mapping, participatory GIS. There's all these processes where you think about space with communities in a way that help them talk about what the problems with space are, how they'd like the space to be, what would be a better use of that space for them. Also, there's this kind of looking on them enviously that we don't have these kinds of tools and devices to work with time, or we haven't been. I think people have been focusing on them much more recently.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (49:18)
So how would you envision the diversity of clocks or timekeeping devices that we could use in the everyday life to orientate ourselves in a way that is more conscious maybe of inequalities or power dynamics or more in tune with our own inner rhythms, for example? How do you see that also in your own everyday life?
Michelle Bastian (49:43)
I think one of the things is to just notice the way that we're telling time with lots of different kinds of processes and objects in our everyday life. And to try and like push back against this idea that if you're living in Western culture, that you're completely clock based, ⁓ that actually my environment gives me lots of clues about when to do things. even things like, you know, if a certain person walks past your office window, and they always walk past at a similar time of day, you know that, you know, it's lunchtime, you know, so that person becomes a time indicator for you. Hopefully everyone listening can think of lots of examples like that in their everyday life. But there's things that can be more proactive about it. One of the really enjoyable collaborations I've had is with this designer Scott Thrift, who's been very interested in pluralizing time and devices for keeping time. He had a Kickstarter to build a clock called the present, which is a clock that's like a rainbow color. It takes a year to go around the dial. And his idea was how can you live in the moment if it only lasts a second? And when you look at this clock, the moment on it is a season. And, so, I have one in my house. I was very lucky I got in early and got one. And it's really interesting that it directs you to different kinds of activities. So, unlike things like the climate clock, if you guys know about that.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (51:06)
Can you describe it a little or explain what it is?
Michelle Bastian (51:09)
Yeah, so the climate clock is tracking sort of how much time left we have to address climate change. It looks like a digital clock with this countdown number. It was put up in Glasgow during the COP meeting they had there. It's other places as well. But one of the troubles with that clock, you don't look at it going, what can I do right now? And it gives you an answer back. It gives you nothing back. And I think this is one of the key problems with that. Whereas what I found was really interesting with Scott Thrift's clock and living with that was that I would do things like I would look at it and go, is it time for lunch? And it would tell me it's spring. And I'd be like, okay. And, so, you have this disconcerting experience, but then you start finding the things that does tell you what to do. So, the other day I was looking at it and I was like, it's very close to Equinox and I better get ready because we celebrate Equinox in my family. So, it becomes something I look to for different kinds of activities. Scott, very kindly let me send some surveys to the people who've been living with them. And, you know, a lot of people talk about, yeah, when they look at the clock, it reminds them to do different kinds of things. So, it reminds them to slow down or it puts what they're doing in a different value frame. So, if you look at a 12 hour dial, the value, you know, what's the right thing to do in a 12 hour frame is different from what's the right thing to do in a year frame. You can make different kinds of planning decisions or what you're wanting to do in your head gets given a longer frame of what the implications are and what the consequences are going to be. So, it became a very practical thing where they look at it and they do things differently in their lives. And I think that's a really important example as opposed to things like the doomsday clock or the climate clock, which are really well-intentioned. And I think people are really trying to deal with the important problem of how do we keep coordinated with time, but are missing that element of something that can help you in your everyday life make different kinds of decisions.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (53:12)
Keri, I see you in.
Keri Facer (53:14)
I think these different clocks are fascinating. And also I was going back to the map analogy and I was thinking about, well, what are the questions that I ask myself when I'm choosing which map to use? And one of the questions I ask myself is, you know, how fast am I going? If I'm going 100 miles an hour, I need a map that's going to deal with that speed. I think about like, what's the terrain? So, what's the sort of level of detail that I'm going to need there and also what's my purpose? And I was thinking from what you were saying, are there questions that we could work through that would help us say which sort of clock we need? So, going to your point about the clock of the present as compared to the normal clock, is there a question about scale? So, what scale of time do we need to be working with that's commensurate to the issue that we care about? What level of detail do we need that responds to our interaction with whatever it is? And what's our purpose? And with those three things, I mean, what sorts of questions do you think we need to ask as we make decisions about which sort of clock we might want to choose if we imagine that we had more of a proliferation?
Michelle Bastian (54:23)
Yes, my students, my poor, long-suffering students have got an assignment at the moment to make a clock that could help tell something to coordinate the time in Edinburgh. So, it's situated in a place that could help address some issue to do with climate change. And, so, we've been talking about this quite a bit of how do you recognize some kind of temporal problem, for example, and what would help you coordinate with it in different kinds of ways? And initially when I did this, quite a lot of people did do some kind of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere kind of clock. But recently I've been asking people to really link into what problems can they find people are talking about at the moment in the city and how might they address that. One thing I think is really coming from Kevin Berth again is to sort of disaggregate the different jobs that standard clocks do, that we use them to tell how long we should be doing something for, duration. We use them to tell when it's the right time for something, so timing. And we also use them for a beat, like you can use them for a steady beat as well for aligning action with a kind of rhythm. And, so, you know, one thing to open up the design possibilities is to recognize those three things don't have to all work in the same way with the same logics, that you can pull those three things out, that something that helps me understand the right time, it doesn't necessarily have to be linked with a duration that's counted out in seconds. You know, it could use something else in the environment that highlights it's the right time to do something now. Yeah, unpacking that kind of complexity, I think is really helpful. In the first couple of chapters of the book too, I'm also looking at questions that Bergson and Heidegger open up for us, even if they don't necessarily want to. There's this really interesting quotes from Heidegger where he talks about looking at a clock because there's something to do that we long for, that there's something important to us, that's why we look at them. And that every time we look at the clock, it has a sense of what is it the right time to do right now? There's an idea that when I look at the clock and I see, you know, that it's 8 a.m., there's things I can do at 8 a.m. that are socially allowed that I can't do at 5pm, for example. So, there's lots of rules that are happening when we look at the clock that are much more complex than just telling them. You're reading the numbers off there. And, so, partly what I'm trying to do in the book is to open up these different aspects to understand them as design possibilities or design openings. And I think it's really important that we work out what the exact shape of it is depending on our own problems, you know, what the shape of the clock is, depending on what's important. But I'm hoping that what the book will do is open up a whole range of questions you could ask when you're designing your clock that you could love and, you know, coming from these areas and these disciplines that have got us to turn away from clocks or have, you know, just understood them as something very separate to us rather than something that we make. So, some of that is coming from philosophy. Some of it is coming from quite technical uses of time in the internet and our technology. But also the second half of the book is working with lots of examples from artists who open up a whole other set of possibilities for how we can think about what clocks are and how they work. But hopefully overall the book will pull out these kinds of design openings or design possibilities without necessarily answering them but giving you lots and lots of questions that you could ask when you want to design them yourself.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (58:00)
Well, you really succeeded at raising our desire to get it and read. So, as you know, on this podcast, we are interested in surfacing the complicated, messy, political, personal ways in which each of us and our societies use time to create our world.So, we are always interested in our guests own relationship with time. And you have said already a lot from your own personal history and your own personal experience of how you relate. I was wondering as a maybe final question. Because you talk about friendship in your introduction, are you friend with time?
Michelle Bastian (58:41)
So, I actually left this morning the house going, I hate time because I have meetings today that I have to try and organize one after the other. But in general, think I, yeah, people find it very strange that I use clocks a lot. I have a lot of clocks up in the house, although they all tell different kinds of time. But also I track my work, for example, I track all my activities. And it's been such a gift to do that in academia in particular, where we don't have clear signals of when to stop. I think this is just as important to think that clocks get us to do things, but they also help us to know when to stop things is, you know, one possible use of them that we could sort of bring up as well. My contract says I should work 35 hours a week, which is, you know, most academics think that's in some kind of impossible dream. But having that tracked throughout the week and hitting the 35 and having something say, this is enough, you've done enough, I think is really, really important for our type of job in particular, where everything is just ongoing and you could always feel like you should be doing more. And, so, that way it's become a really important friend in that aspect as well, actually, really calming down that anxiety to have to do everything. And yeah, reminding me that you've done enough. It's enough.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (59:59)
I find that also very inspiring. So, Michelle Bastian, it was a real pleasure to share this time and create time with you today. Thank you. And we look forward to getting a copy of your book, hopefully very soon.
Michelle Bastian (1:00:07)
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Keri Facer (1:00:18)
Thanks Michelle, thank you.
