In recent years we have witnessed a unique global phenomenon in the
history of humanity, creating the conditions for an experiment thatinvolved billions of people around the globe: stopping, changing thepace of daily life and all at the same time, as had already predictedGarcía Marquez in his book Love in the Time of Cholera. Even in thiscase, it was a virus that blocked everything for many months (covid),even if some continue to say that it was not necessary, making the ideaof the experiment even more worthwhile. We didn't go to work or for awalk, we tried to work on the computer, even though the feeling that itwas all an act didn't leave us; and the children running around thehouse and the father trying to invent games and discovering that he isunfit to spend hours with them. In short: a rediscovered arcadia ofwhich we soon tired; and everyone shouting from the open windows: giveus back our normal, fast life, the one that makes sense in this 21stcentury (certainly these considerations do not apply to everyone, evenif we didn't pay much attention to it: the farmers and workers continuedto produce so that everyone could continue to eat). In any case, itseems to me that we have become more aware of at least two things: thatit is not possible to stay in permanent contact with the people in ourcircle of affection, under penalty of a crisis in relationships (forthis reason telepathy would be a social disaster); and that time is nothomogeneous and "moves" differently, at least in our individualconsciousness, depending on the context, our actions and relationships.Which is the same as saying that the "speed" of our daily speech is notsomething natural, but a social construction, different depending on thesituation (Einstein had already said this), intentions and the cultureof reference. We have, at least for a few moments, been aware of therelativity of time.Thinking about time is not easy, so much so that, as Saint Augustinesaid in the Confessions, "If no one asks me, I know it; if I try toexplain it to anyone who asks me, I don't know." This opacity isconsistent with the functions of culture, that is, allowing us to liveeveryday life without having to make decisions at all times. In thissense, cultures produce their own notion of time, but withoutcontradicting the physical essence of the phenomenon: separation betweentwo events that experience a change, allowing the construction of pathsthat link states of consciousness of different facts, whose particularexistence is constructed in terms of before and after. As we know, thisapplies to the actor who lives the direct experience of reality, but itwould not apply to a hypothetical spectator external to the system takeninto consideration (the one where the apple "continues to fall"), forwhom the two events can be perceived simultaneously and evencontradicting the principle of cause and effect.Somehow the societies that have followed one another in the history ofthe world have perceived the complexity of the "time" phenomenon usingdifferent heuristic tools of both a historical and mythical nature. Inthis way, we find at least two great conceptions of time: the "greattime" which is structured into eras and cycles, giving meaning toexistence through mythical forms; and the "small time", which organizesdaily life, through historical forms of rationality linked to theproduction of food and social relations, for which a special handling ofthe cause and effect relationship and of coincident, i.e. simultaneous,events is necessary: deciding to hold a meeting involves collegialrational reasoning about place and time; in the same way as to havewheat, you must first sow it, calculating the duration in a hypotheticaltemporal thread. It is clear that to be able to carry out theseactivities, it is necessary to take into account the intervals in whichevents follow one another, an aspect that cannot be left at the mercy ofpersonal decisions, under penalty of social disorder. For this reason,it is the local society as a whole that historically and culturallyconfigures the temporality of daily life: periods of activities,calendars, duration of each action, etc. Thus the forms that time takesare determined by social structure, the distribution of power and, aboveall, the mode of production of material life, particularly food.In the sixties of the last century, Levi-Strauss's categorization ofsocieties into "hot" and "cold" generated controversy, especially theirequivalence by some insightful interpreters with "society with history"and "society without history". . The French anthropologist defendedhimself from this interpretation, clarifying that for him all societiesare historical, but can be distinguished by the way they react to it:some "ride" it, living from event to event, ever faster; while othersresist it, playing their lives on mythical rather than historical forms.These processes generate a different "speed" in the experience of dailylife: some societies, for example the modern ones of the capitalistWest, increasingly accelerate the lives of individuals (production,work, holidays, love, sex...), perhaps in the illusion to reach a betterfuture, perhaps generated by the promise of happy progress (the consumertrap). Others, peasant or indigenous societies of the Amazon, prefer tobroaden the sense of the present, implicitly denying linear diachrony(that of Jewish-Christian origin, so to speak), reducing daily actionsto gather to talk about more and less, going to hunting when necessaryand without accumulating much of the things produced, preferring toshare with the neighbors. Certainly the situation of these societies ischanging more and more rapidly, due to the action of industrializedsocieties, but the example is still visible."Slow societies", to call them something, are not necessarily static,since this would lead to their extinction; they know how to reactquickly to extraordinary events, having preserved, especially throughmyths, ancestral knowledge whose function is precisely to preservememory. In this sense, Kundera reminded us, "...there is a secret linkbetween slowness and memory, between speed and oblivion.... Our era isobsessed with the desire to forget, and it is to realize this desirethat it abandons itself to the demon of speed." Certainly things are alittle more complex, given that societies function as systems andtherefore only a project of general change, of areas and levels, could"slow down" this crazy race towards the abyss. In any case, we couldstart working on it, precisely starting from time and its speed, at homeor at work, where slowing down could also turn into a form of struggle;or in school, where we already find those who have begun to theorize andpractice "snail time". Festina lente... Let's hurry slowly!Emanuele Amodiohttps://www.sicilialibertaria.it/_________________________________________A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C EBy, For, and About AnarchistsSend news reports to A-infos-en mailing listA-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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