TechnoLogics: Ghosts, the Incalculable, and the Suspension of Animation

9. Temps: Time, Work, and the Delay

9 Temps: Time, Work, and the Delay THE TIME OF TECHNICITY W e are all temps. Riding the tides of time that ebb and flow, settle and swirl. Weathered and scored. Scoured. “There is a ’now’ of the untimely; there is a singularity which is that of this disjunction of the present” (Derrida and Ferraris 2002, 12). Here today, gone tomorrow. Split. Timed out. Provisionally employed, tensely employed in the legerdemain of time’s play. We temporize: negotiate and compromise, adjust ourselves to circumstances. We are tempted and we tempt, always stretched along beyond ourselves, intoxicated by life and death and unable, not for much longer, if ever we have been able, to tell the difference between the two. For the last time, then, a few amusing etymologies of “temps”: 1. time (Obs) 2. in legerdemain, the exact moment for executing a required movement as when the attention of the audience is distracted by some other act. 3. tense (Obs) 4. Temporary employee. Temporize: 1. to suit one’s actions to the time or occasion; to conform to the circumstances. 2. a.) to give temporary compliance or agreement, evade immediate decision, so as to gain time or avoid argument b.) to parlay with someone to gain time. 3. to effect a 171 compromise temulence: intoxication. Tempest, temple, tempt: fr. L., to stretch. This will lead to the auguries of the tides, but that’s another itinerary. Plato taught us to hold up our fingers to begin the network of relationships that will create the web that twists implacably around each of us, dragging us along, reconfiguring body, world, and identity. One, then two. Counting gets underway as philosophy that reproduces itself and its world in a frenzy that rages, often quite serenely, across millennia, and, before too long Being is the calculable and Dasein exists only as a form of the Gestell, as the setup whose task it is to measurably control the earth and the regions beyond the earth. Of course, it all takes time, and time takes all. But what is time? What is the time of technologics? “[T]ime ‘is’ not,” Heidegger reminds us, “but rather temporalizes itself . . . [and] every attempt to fit time into any sort of being-concept must necessarily falter” (1984, 204). Time, in other words, cannot be defined; metaphysics cannot clarify the concept, because time is not a concept. Nevertheless, metaphysics cannot be faulted for not making the attempt. In fact, from a certain perspective, metaphysics has done nothing else except elaborate a reading of temporality. We have seen the time line laid down from Aristotle through Heidegger and Derrida.1 Dastur, for example, shows that “If Heidegger does maintain the classical analysis of time into a threefold structure, still, past, present, and future no longer designate a succession of nows on the ‘line’ of time but instead equiprimordial modalities of existence” (1998, xxx). Critiquing Derrida’s seminal work on writing and temporality, Wood argues that The terms “différance” and “trace” seem to be used as part of a negative transcendental argument to deny the possibility of any concept of time dependent upon the idea of the present —that is, any concept of time at all. However . . . it is clear that Derrida cannot want it described in this way—as a (negative) transcendental argument. It would . . . make “diff érance” into a ground and thus condemn it to the status of a new metaphysical concept. Indeed, having identified the concept of time as such with the metaphysical tradition, it is . . . surprising, although gratifying, to see [Derrida] referring to “pluri-dimensionality” and “delinearized temporality.”. . . (1989, 331) Thus the aporias of even the most sophisticated attempts at the deconstruction of time. It seems as though, even with the most rigor172 TechnoLogics ous rewriting of the formats of temporality—as, for example, Ereignis or différance—the line and its others all continue to function as simultaneous analogues of an X. We who are crossing the lines stumble along, faltering in our speech and our steps, giving time thought, just as time gives us time to think. We, even as the “we” is transfigured, crossed over and out, are (not) temps. “As they linger awhile, they tarry. They hang on. For they advance hesitantly through their while, in transition from arrival to departure. They hang on; they cling to themselves . . . it aims at everlasting continuance and no longer bothers about dike, the order of...