The Hopi Indian Series: Indian Time

Indian Time (SA/2024)

 

 

I. 

 

Writing in the 1930s and '40s, linguist Benjamin Whorf argued that the Hopi conceptualise time very differently from white Americans and that this difference was basically linguistic in nature; i.e., that it correlated with certain grammatical differences between English and the Uto-Aztecan language spoken by the Hopi.

 

Whorf claims that the Hopi have "no words, grammatical forms, construction or expressions" that refer directly to what we call time, concluding that they therefore possess "no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at equal rate, out of a future, through the present, into a past" [a].

 

I would have thought that's a fairly uncontroversial thing to say, but, apparently, it gave rise to a debate within academic circles known as the Hopi time controversy. 

 

Whilst for theorists this may revolve around the complex question of linguistic relativity, it is usually understood by the lay person to simply address the issue of whether or not a redskin can ever be enslaved to the clock in the same way as those with pale faces. 

 

I suspect it's because this becomes an ethno-racial question - and not merely a grammatical one - that controversy creeps in. At any rate, during the 1960s Whorf's work increasingly fell out of favour amongst linguists and anthropologists and when in 1983 Ekkehart Malotki published his massive 600-page study on the concept of time in the Hopi language, it seemed that Whorf's work was refuted once and for all [b].  

 

 

II.

 

Now, I'm not a linguistics expert and don't speak a word of Hopi. 

 

Nor am I particularly concerned to restore Whorf's reputation, although it might be noted that the concept of linguistic relativity was revived in the 1990s when Malotki's own study was subjected to criticism from those who did not consider his work to have invalidated Whorf's claims.

 

As a Lawrentian, however, Whorf's work continues to resonate sympathetically; for he's basically repeating what Lawrence observed during his stay in New Mexico in the 1920s, when he came into contact with Native Americans and expressed an interest in their religious beliefs and understanding of the universe. 

 

And so, without wishing to sound like a New Age hippie who subscribes to any myth so long as it seems to reveal the supposed limitations of Western thought, I'd like to take a closer look at what Lawrence wrote, thereby challenging the Kantian idea that time and space are universal categories underlying all human thought. 

 

For despite what Malotki says, it seems clear that not everyone is as clock-observant and time-obsessed as the Germans, for example.   

 

 

III. 

In Mornings in Mexico [c], Lawrence describes the white man as "some sort of extraordinary white monkey, that, by cunning, has learnt lots of semi-magical secrets of the universe, and made himself boss of the show" [36]. 

 

And one of these secrets is the secret of time:

 

"Now to a Mexican and an Indian, time is a vague, foggy reality. There are only three times [...] in the morning, in the afternoon, in the night. There is even no mid-day and no evening. 

      But to the white monkey, horrible to relate there are exact spots of time, such as five o'clock, half-past nine. The day is a horrible puzzle of exact spots of time." [36]

 

The white monkey, says Lawrence, has a perverse passion for exactitude; for time is money and every second counts. And he insists that everyone should be as enslaved to the clock as he is; always fretting about what happened yesterday or anxious about what might happen the day after tomorrow; living and dying to the same monotonous rhythm: tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock ... 

But, according to Lawrence, the Native American is essentially different from us: "The Indian is not in line with us. He's not coming our way. His whole being is going a different way from ours." [61]

 

Again, I don't know how true that is, but there are times, like today, when I admire Lawrence's attempt to learn something from the Indian and appreciate what he calls in Apocalypse [d] the "pagan manner of thought" [96] which allows the mind to "move in cycles, or to flit here and there" [97].

 

Challenging the Western concept of time, Lawrence writes:

"Our idea of time as a continuity in an eternal straight line has crippled our consciousness cruelly. The pagan conception of time as moving in cycles is much freer, it allows movements upwards and downwards, and allows for a complete change of the state of mind, at any moment. One cycle finished, we can drop or rise to another level, and be in a new world at once. But by our time-continuum method, we have to trail wearily on over another ridge." [97]

Anyway, I have to stop here: it's dinner time ... 

Notes

 

[a] Benjamin Lee Whorf, 'An American Indian model of the Universe', in Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. John B. Carroll (The Technology Press of MIT, 1956), pp. 57-64. Lines quoted are on p. 57. The essay was written c.1936.  

 

[b] Ekkehart Malotki is a German-American linguist, known for his extensive work on the Hopi language and culture and his refutation of the claim (some might say myth) that the Hopi have no concept of time. 

      Malotki published two large volumes, the first in German; Hopi-Raum: Eine sprachwissenschaftliche Analyse der Raumvorstellungen in der Hopi-Sprache (Gunter Narr Verlag, 1983), and the second in English; Hopi Time: A Linguistic Analysis of the Temporal Concepts in the Hopi Language (Mouton Publishers, 1986). 

      This latter work provided hundreds of examples of Hopi words and grammatical forms referring to temporal relations and Malotki demonstrated that the Hopi do, in fact, conceptualize time as structured in terms of an ego-centered spatial progression from past, through present into the future, despite what some - including, as we shall see, D. H. Lawrence - choose to believe and despite not having any word in their native tongue that exactly corresponds to the English noun 'time'.  

 

[c] D. H. Lawrence, Mornings and Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Page numbers given in the post refer to this edition.  

 

[d] D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge University Press, 1980). Page numbers given in the post refer to this edition. 

 

 

To read other posts in the Hopi Indian series, click here and/or here.

 

 

Notes on Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life by Michael Marder (Part 3: Vegetal Existentiality)

Michael Marder (2011)

II. Vegetal Existentiality

The existential domain (of time, freedom and wisdom) is usually reserved for man alone. But if plants were also to have some experience of these things, then their "ethical and political status [...] will need to be revised in order to reflect their purchase on life [... and] the positive dimensions of their ontology" [90].

(1) The Time of Plants ...

Time, as Boy George once said, won't give us time. But time makes plants, like lovers, feel they have something real and if we are to have a close encounter with vegetal being "we will need to rethink temporality as the mainspring of the plant's ontology" [94].

Unfortunately, however, time is one of those questions in philosophy that I cannot get my head around and feel little inclined to try and do so now. Readers who want to understand vegetal temporality and the manner in which plants "spatially express time" [96] in depth will have to read Marder's work for themselves (I suggest you brush up on your Aristotle, Hegel, and Heidegger first of all).    

Having said that, I suppose the key point is that time is not proper to the plant itself but derivative from the other; "whether this 'other' is a part of the organic world or a synthetically produced chemical mix, whether it pertains to the temporality of nature or to that of culture" [101]. The downside of this is that it makes the plant naturally vulnerable; "its potentialities are left vacant for infinite appropriation by anything or anyone whatsoever" [101] - it's a natural born victim of circumstance and agro-capitalist technologies.

What this means - and this presents a real challenge to all those who talk about the exploitation of nature - is that  "techno-cultural and economic phenomena do not negate a preexisting 'natural' condition but interject themselves into the place of the plants' other" [102] and thus determine ontophytology.

This isn't to say that "the positing of the human and capitalist temporalities in the place of the plant's hetero-temporality" [102] isn't exploitative or non-violent, but it's hard to imagine the plant cares as long as it flowers and comes to fruition. That isn't quite Marder's conclusion - he still thinks it important to resist this subsumption - but he recognises the futility of appealing to its nature in order to do so, "since the potentialities of the plant are never completely its own" [102].

Ultimately, the plant is not just non-contemporaneous with us, it's not even contemporaneous with itself, in that it's a "loose alliance of multiple temporalities of growth [...] and in that it does not relate to itself, does not establish a self-identity" [104]. Again, that's why it's forced to obey the time of the other and why Marder finds himself up an ethical junction.

How does he get out? By reversing into ethical assertion: "The hetero-temporality of vegetal existence is the most telling instantiation of the ethical injunction for openness to the other." [107] I'm reminded of something I once wrote in my Illicit Lover's Discourse: "The polymorphously perverse nature of the Prostitute explains her generosity of spirit and openness to all."

It's insatiable promiscuity that bring the world's of vegetation and vice together. And it's "monstrous growth and immoderate proliferation" that have always been "unspeakably terrifying for philosophers" who have always sought to establish the proper limits of desire and police these limits "against potential transgressors" [107-08], whether they have green leaves or black fishnet stockings.  

(2) The Freedom of Plants ...

Contrary to what the Cockney Rejects insist, not only is there freedom for human beings, there's also freedom for plants, says Marder, thereby challenging a metaphysical tradition which would foreclose this latter possibility.

Admittedly, it's difficult to think of freedom in relation to a being devoid of selfhood and literally rooted to the spot. But perhaps if we think of freedom in terms of insouciance and indifference, for example, then the plant might be said to be freer than any of us. But can a plant be free in the ontological sense of being other than it is? Let's find out ...

Part of the problem when it comes to thinking about the freedom of plants, is that nature has been so thoroughly tamed: "Vegetal torpor is the aftermath of civilization; it is what remains of plant life after its thorough cultivation and biotechnological transformation ..." [128]. Marder continues - and I think this is a true and important observation:

"If upon encountering a plant, we fail to be impressed with the exuberance of its growth and uncontrollable efflorescence, this is because its current conceptual framing is the outcome of a long history that discarded and invalidated numerous interpretative possibilities for our relation to 'flora'." [128]

In other words, the plant is given a fixed metaphysical shape and in this way made into something that can be stuck in a pot and put in the corner of even the most respectable living room. Even Heidegger is happy to keep plants lodged in their own environment, denying them a place within the clearing of being (i.e., world).

Marder rightly interrogates such thinking and considers the freedom of the plant in relation to our own freedom. But again, that's not easy when vegetal being is so dissimilar to human (and animal) being. Plants are, in a sense, closer to being gods. For both gods and plants like to play in a carefree manner, whereas man prefers to work and to worry. Only when at his most imaginative, does man become playful like a plant; "imagination is the echo of vegetal freedom in human beings" [146].

In order to let the plant flourish in us, we need, therefore, to give free reign to the imagination (or aesthetic play-drive) and abandon ourselves to art as Dionysian intoxication; "'seizing on what is new and startling [...] what is violent and wild'" [146], as Schiller once described (and denounced) it.

Having said that, we must at the same time "be on our guard against the all-too-prevalent idealist illusion that vegetal life is the realm of purity and innocence. The plant's ontological indifference and lack of concern bespeak its freedom from conscience, but it is an anthropomorphic projection alone that codifies these qualities, as well as everything connected to play, in terms of innocence and lightheartedness." [146]  

I have to admit, I'm pleased to hear Marder say this - though isn't it just as much of an idealist illusion to still speak of the struggle for emancipation and to posit vegetal life an important role in this (once plants have been liberated, of course, from "the political and economic conditions responsible [...] for their oppression" [149])?   


(3) The Wisdom of Plants ...

Whilst frequently borrowing from Derrida throughout this work, here Marder admits that his reflections on vegetal intelligence "ought to be taken as a footnote to Nietzsche's provocative suggestion" [151] in The Will to Power about the sagacity of plants being a good starting point for the revaluation of all values.  

In a sense, we're moving from ontophytology to epistemophytology; although, when it comes to plants, being and thinking are so closely bound together that in order to discuss the latter you need to reckon also with the former.

What soon becomes clear is that one needs to overstep "the bounds of the conventional theories of knowledge" [152] towards a postmetaphysical thinking that is "fluid, receptive, dispersed, non-oppositional, non-representational, immanent, and material-practical" [152]. Marder describes it as the non-conscious intenionality of vegetal life.

Again, I'm not entirely sure I know what that means - even after reading Marder's explanation - but it amuses me to think that this idea might irritate some followers of Levinas.

And I do like the idea of plants having memories, which, as temporal beings, I suppose is a reasonable expectation (albeit these memories will be imageless, or non-representational). Further, recent findings in molecular biology seem to confirm that plants can retrieve information stored in cells. Whereas we might remember the things revealed by the light, they, plants, physically remember the light itself (they might not have minds, but they certainly have bodies). 

Memory, then, is a primal quality - before consciousness - and is found in mimosa as well as man. It's a key component  "of the vibrant and multidimensional intelligence of plants" that can be mapped on the "ever-shifting continuum of sensibility-irritability" [156] (plants might not feel much, but just enough to know when they are getting pissed-off and to ensure their survival).     

Importantly, any attempt to think plant-thinking must always remember that vegetal being revolves around non-identity; "understood both as the plant's inseperability from the environment wherein it germinates and grows, and its style of living devoid of a clearly delineated autonomous self" [162].

No wonder their thinking is so restless and agitated! No wonder that becoming-plant is so difficult! What it ultimately requires of us is something we are not easily convinced to do: close our eyes and affirm the darkness, "while refraining form the indiscriminate repudiation of light" [178].

Notes

Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, (Columbia University Press, 2013). All page numbers in the above post refer to this wok. 

To read part one of this post, on encountering plants and ethical offshoots, click here.

To read part two of this post, on vegetal anti-metaphysics, click here.

Time/Flies

dobrador.com 

Like most normal people, I hate flies; particularly that universal pest Musca domestica and its slightly larger relative, the bluebottle (Calliphora vomitoria). Only lunatics and Satanists find these carrion-loving, shit-eating, disease-spreading creatures genuinely attractive.

Having said that, my pteronarcophobia doesn't prevent me from conceding that flies are fantastic little machines of great scientific interest and ecological importance. And the fact that they have been buzzing about in huge numbers in almost every terrestrial habitat since the Middle Triassic period (i.e. for about 240 million years) is certainly something; for that's not only way prior to man, but long, long before there were even flowers.

Arguably, it's even more impressive when one realises that what is an almost inconceivable amount of time for man, is even longer for a fly. For research suggests that perception of time is not something universally shared across species and that for flies time passes far slower than it does for humans.

As an evolutionary rule, it seems that the smaller an animal is and the faster its metabolic rate, the slower time passes for it - and flies are very small with a very high metabolic rate. Because their large compound eyes can perceive light flickering up to four times faster than ours, they essentially see the world moving in slow motion.

Which is why, of course, the little fuckers so often manage to evade being swatted; being able to perceive time differently to a lumbering ape with a rolled up newspaper, is, in this case, literally the difference between life and death.

Of course, as one of the researchers into this area points out, having eyes that send updates to the brain at much higher frequencies is only of value if that brain can process the information just as quickly and lead to good decision making. Hence, we have to admit that even the tiny brains of flies have mighty capabilities and that - for now at least - insect intelligence remains far more astonishing than even the most advanced AI.

They may not be deep thinkers, but they're not so mindless after all ...                  

Note: those interested in knowing more about the current research into the eyes of flies and their perception of time, should visit the BBC science and environment web page and read the recent article by Rory Galloway: click here. 

Thanks to Simon Solomon for suggesting this post and providing the link.