Time on Our Hands

Note: !is essay was originally delivered as a lecture at a conference on ‘Contemporaneities’ in Ghent, Belgium, in March of 2016. In editing the talk for publication, I have retained many of the formal properties of an oral presentation. If the contemporaneity of the oral event appears removed in this instance, the question at the base of the lecture remains: How long is "now" and what is at stake in extending a hand across time? As such, the talk – composed of a lead-in and two stories – may be considered ongoing, much like a hail in an event of call and response. !e interval in call and response that this talk both responds to and again inaugurates should be open, full of hesitation, and without conclusion – much as this essay is written to be.


"We have time on our hands."
is is an idiomatic phrase. According to the Cambridge English Dictionary the phrase means we have "nothing to do. " We are idle, vacant, without occupation, unemployed. Having time on one's hands can be dangerous. To have "too much time on one's hands" is to be vagrant, up to no good, wastrel, vagabond, even delusional, and inclined toward mischief or trouble. Time on one's hands is time in a now that is unaccounted for: We have time on our hands, so what shall we do? Time on one's hands is both called forth and not yet spoken for. In some ways, time on one's hands is time that is both now and yet to come. It is open time, outside of time. 1 I am intrigued by the idea of time on hand. Why do we not say in hand or at hand? Taken literally, on hand sounds like skin. On hand suggests a substance that touches or covers, like a glove or something lmy, like soap, or paint -or like a rash or someone else's blood (as in the idiomatic phrase for guilt: having blood on one's hands). In this way, time on your hands is on you but not of you, much as when you touch something it is both on you but not of you. When you have time on your hands, you touch time and are touched by time and thus, in some ways, following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's thoughts on touch and the interval of betweenness, you might be said to be "beside" time, or have time set aside (8). Time on hand, or time at the touch, might thus suggest what Karen Barad claims for touch more generally: "intra-action. " In this way, now following Barad, touching time becomes a matter of call, response, and "response-ability. " To have something on hand is also to be at the ready for response or call. It suggests an appendage, like a tool or something spare, not yet needed but there in case of a need anticipated as possible. ere are an in nite number of slightly di erent ways to spin this: Time on hand is spare time. Extra time. Time set aside, to the side, beside. Open for possibility as response-ability. Time on one's hands, both now and not now, is pastpresentfuture time, spoken for in the moment but not accounted for. Like a pause, an interval, it might hover or reverberate -much as an open space between call and response. You get it: We could go on and on in variation stretching this time forward and back and to the side -if we had endless time on our hands.
But here today we are responding to a speci c call. e word at the base of our collective inquiry is "contemporaneity, " a word o en associated with the "now" of the so-called present time and distinguished by that "now" from all periodization considered, by virtue of distinction with the contemporary, to be "past. " But in fact, one critique of the current neoliberal a ect economy, sometimes called the experience economy or the digital economy, is that its trade in nanosecond, twitter-frenzied "nowness" robs us of substantive attention to any past at all, that is, to a time in intervallic distinction to the now. Robs us, that is, of historical critique. Media theorist Michael Betancourt imagines a "Contemporary" that can be distinguished from both newness and nowness: e Contemporary necessitates historical engagement precisely because the ahistorical nowness of digital capitalism acts to deny continuities between earlier capitalist organization of labor and production and those speci c to digital technologies. (17) In order to critique capitalism, Betancourt is arguing as many historical materialists before him that one requires historicity, or, as Luce Irigaray might write, an interval for "freedom of questioning, " holding out possibilities not only for di erence and indeterminacy but for change (Irigaray 152).
If we are to insist on historicities that can account for di erence and continuity across historical time -that is, if we are to keep intervals open for "freedom of questioning" across time -how are we to parse the duration of the contemporary? If the past can be open to our questions, then isn't the past in some ways with us, and by being with us, also contemporary? Another way to ask this is, if the contemporary needs must be simultaneously historical, the contemporary needs to be paradoxically shot through with that which it is not. e now must be composed of, or in intimate relationship to, the not now. Indeed, perhaps the contemporary is the place where the past touches us, or where we nd it on our hands. e contemporary might be the place where we say: we have time on our hands, what do we do with it? What do we do, for example, with the past that touches us here? is is to ask, what is the duration of the "now" that contemporaneity might purport to include in conversation? ink only of recent debates about how long our "now" is as regards recent work in eco-criticism, geontology, and new materialism. As debates in earth sciences instruct, depending on your orientation to climate change, contemporaneity might include a "now" that is the Holocene. Or, if you think that the moment of the Holocene has concluded, then we are "now" in the contemporary of the Anthropocene. us, the contemporary may be either A. 11,700 years in duration and ongoing or B. several hundred years in duration and ongoing (though scientists currently debate the beginnings of the Anthropocene). e problem of legislating the duration of the now, whether in science or in art, clearly haunts any notion of the contemporary. A 2013 exhibition at the British Museum titled "Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind" presented Paleolithic artwork as contemporary, for example. is might be an exciting thought, of course, and not unrelated to the second story I will tell later in this essay. But the exhibition completely dissolved any space for historical di erence between a then and a now in extending the contemporary to the prehistoric and back. In this exhibition, extension did not cross time to allow one contemporaneity to touch or stand beside another, but dissolved time into a reverie of newness and nowness that appropriated everything to human cognition as if awash in a giant sel e machine. All time collapsed as reducible to the "arrival of the modern mind" and Paleolithic art was biologized as the result of molecular evolution and the sparking synapses of the "modern" human brain (Higgins). 2 In this model, indebted to cognitive science, the contemporary extends, indeed, but it problematically also collapses and becomes ahistorical as the vitalist chasing of a synaptic nanosecond.
If trouble arises at the scene of any attempt to de nitively legislate the duration of "now, " so too does trouble arise in conferring direction. Whither contemporary? Where are we going "now"? If "now" can extend to turn a nanosecond into an eon, and an eon into a nanosecond, in what directions can "now" extend? Not only backward or forward but … pause … to the side? Here the problem of the contemporary gains in complexity. Does the contemporary move only forward from the past into the future? Or, if our course in the Anthropocene is as deadly Screenshots from the promotional video for the British Museum Exhibition "Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind. " e image shows a prehistoric tiger gure running through an image of a sparking synapse in a human brain. Later images in the video overlap prehistoric art with modernist art to claim contemporaneity. Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2l_3bqAAME as science claims, might we turn "progress" around and return to, say, the upper Paleolithic? Not as if time had collapsed, as in the British Museum model, but as time were full of intervallic hesitations, rich with di erence and traversable in alternative directions? If direction is changeable, might we take some time to interrupt the forward march of time and move, if we can imagine it, to the side? is has sometimes been called a queering or swerving of history and, as I have explored elsewhere, our troubles with the nowness of now begin with a "now" that bursts out of the straight march of linear time (Schneider Performing Remains; Freeman). And maybe that is the promise in a moniker such as "contemporary. " If contemporaneities are expandable or contractible by virtue of a "now" that is exible, indeterminate, and multi-directional, perhaps possibilities for change can be on hand?
Let us return to the idea of "time on one's hands" in relation to the de nition of the idiom as referring to "idle" time, and therefore suggestive of a potentially threatening vagrancy. To have time on one's hands is actually to have time on one's own hands, when o the clock of labor for the capitalist, say, or otherwise not employed in gainful occupation for pro t. When one's time is one's ownwhen one's hands have not been exchanged as one's labor time in the framework of industrial capitalism -the historical implication of threat that resides in idleness becomes clear (Weber 104). e threat of idle hands to productivity is a threat to the supremacy of the capital relation that depended, in industrial capitalism, upon time spent only in the interests of capital, whether productive or reproductive of the capital relation (and "leisure" here, as "earned" time to replenish, is reproductive of the capital relation and o en, in relation "women's work, " not leisure at all) (Weeks; Federici). 3 Idleness, or too much time on one's hands, is commonly "wasting or stealing" time that is not "earned" (Khera 41). 4 In this way idleness would be "stealing time" either directly from the capitalist or from an obligation to reproduce the capital relation. In fact, those who are idle speak of their (non)activities as murderous. ey are, speaking in another idiom, "killing time. " Speaking of killing time, in Marxian terms concerning commodity capitalism, time o the clock for the capitalist is "dead labor. " A laborer not at work is dead labor until he (and the worker is gendered male) returns to work again as living labor. e cycle of capitalist accumulation is threatened if the "interval" between dead labor and living labor becomes too great. at is, if dead labor refuses to go back to work, the interval of idleness could provoke what Marx termed a "crisis" for capital. 5 It is interesting to ask about this interval these days, as industrial capitalism has given way in many parts of the world to the experience economy, sometimes called the digital economy or the a ect economy. In the digital economy's phantasmagoria of productive activity 24/7 live at the "a ect factory, " one could argue that the dead labor/living labor rhythm is no longer contemporary. 6 As already discussed, in the current neoliberal "experience economy" where there is only "now" 24/7, nowness appears to extend without recourse to pause let alone to historicity, hoping to vastly minimize the interval available for the crisis Marx identi ed as both necessary to capitalism and, if the pause is extended too long, its potential Achilles heel. Where those with screens can be plugged into constant interweb connectivity, sirens sing of liveness continually and, without extended pause, consumers are at the ngers of capital every waking and sleeping hour as our information avatars circulate for us. Liveness now streams constantly, and we are at work for capital even while we sleep (which, Jonathan Crary argues, we do not). With social media, if idleness and procrastination have become productive, and possibly even constructive of a new orientation to modes of reproduction of the capital relation, do we have any time on our own hands at all?
In exploration of this question, I will now tell two stories about time, hands, and intervals. One story appears to lack all intervals and the other is full of hesitation. rough these stories I will suggest that thinking about di ering contemporaneities as composed of intervals for response-ability and intra-action may be one way to approach the question of time as open for engagement, heterogeneity, debate, and indeterminacy -however nonproductive that may promise to be.

e First Story of Now (Without Interval)
e rst story I aim to tell is a true if embarrassing story of something that happened to me relatively recently. At a slight impasse in my thinking about the "now" of idle time and the matter of time on hand, I engaged in an activity formerly known as procrastination. I downloaded an app to my phone in order to make an bitmoji cartoon of myself. Now, I am extremely late to this game -sel e emoticons have been around for at least three years, which is forever in the twitter speed of digital time that renders "anyone over 14" obsolete (Parker). I am myself prehistory to bitmoji realism and I blink at the screen as if through a fog of the 20 th -century that still hangs about me like the smell of '80s hairspray, '70s patchouli, or '60s ower power. As you no doubt know, you can make your bitmoji sel e to look like you by selecting skin tone, head shape, eye shape, wrinkle placement, hair color, etc. , and it can o en result in quite an uncanny likeness. So, however belated as I may have been to the phone app, I eventually arrived and made my sel e-Frankenstein monster, who, like the one in the 1910 lm by J. Searle Dawley, instantly hailed me with a simple hand wave as if to say hello. I was also intrigued to see the further range of activity my cartoon Rebecca could employ in communication. I was soon impressed to nd that she could even deliver a lecture about emoji making on my behalf! is was well and good and a er exchanging bimoji sel es with my sister for a while, my apparent idle activity was completed and so, no more time on my hands, I returned to rewriting feeling refreshed. e story I want to tell really begins a mere two hours a er the birth of my bitmoji. A er writing for some time, I returned to the web to check on something through Google and noticed instantly what I took to be my sel e, laboring in my absence! I was completely surprised when my own cartoon self showed up in the margins of my search, waving at me and asking me to buy something for myself. She was working, it appeared, for a company that sold window treatments and I was to be her customer. Customer to myself! Even more unnerving, in an image within an ad on the margin of my screen, this sel e-toon was pointing at her watch (though I don't even wear a watch) as if to say stop procrastinating and buy! You/I do not have time on your/my hands! I was horri ed but should not have been surprised. As Andre Lepecki has written, "in performances of the self in neoliberalism, what Foucault had called "care of the Self " has turned into an ongoing care of the investment on (the future pro tability of) my Self(ie)" (9-10; emphasis in original). Were I to have bought the blinds I was selling myself, my otherwise idle procrastination would have led to a satisfying conclusion for capital. Even dead labor (the worker when idle) is productive labor in a neoliberal "now" that knows nothing but how to extract value for capital even (and perhaps these days especially) from the "idleness" of those entitled (and even encouraged) to kill time. No doubt by now you will have guessed that I was mistaken. I thought the blinds company had almost immediately data-mined my selfie, removed my glasses and facial lines and put me to work hailing myself with the claim that time is running out. I admit my embarrassment. It's remarkable that I thought that this was the , even for a moment. But, in another light, the mistaken thought is probably not mistaken at all, given that the activities we engage when "idle, " and perhaps particularly those activities that are (feminized) "personal" or consumptive of "reality, " are exactly the (gendered) mining elds of the experience economy (McRobbie; Skeggs and Wood). e brown haired "lady" working to sell "me" blinds was indeed played back to me as myself, but was also simply the company's generic "woman of a certain age" who they expected might be, like I was at the time, in search of a commodity (I had accessed their site at some point in the previous weeks). In fact, in emoticoning myself, I had unwittingly shaped myself to pass as some consumer look-alike I may have already been given to be, which of course was an even more horrifying thought to contemplate. I had to ask: Which was older? My bitmoji self-bot or the hail from the sister self-bot siren-singing from the webby intra-margins of capitalism? It didn't matter that I was late to the screen/scene. e moment I arrived, I instantly fell in and immediately (mis)recognized myself(ie).
But why was I surprised? As a white cis woman from the U.S.A. of comfortable economic means, shouldn't I have expected to meet an avatar re-assembled and resembled as "myself " to greet me at the site of my quotidian commodity desires?
at I was surprised that "I" might be gured as the model consumer, when plenty of folks of di erent colors and genders and ages and haircuts surely shop for blinds, only underscores the reliance on blinds (in this case blindness) that supports whiteness and commodity fetishism generally. Did I think I fell outside the category of whiteness or consumerism that a bitmoji based on capitalistbiosimilitude would underscore? inking this over in the wake of my thought that my bitmoji had been datamined, I felt stupid. In greeting my bitmoji, I thought I had been hailed by an uncanny likeness of my own making, but in fact I had created my likeness as likeness, permitting me to then misrecognize the source of own interpellation as my self(ie). is is the opposite of consciously "embodied avatars" explicated by Uri Mcmillan in his recent book by that name, in which black women artists practice(d) a purposeful self-objecti cation, transforming themselves into art objects and redeploying those avatars toward critical awareness. It is even quite di erent from the dynamic that I myself explored in e Explicit Body in Performance in which white women and women of color artists make their own bodies the stage to talk back to primitivization, feminization, and interpellation. So, though I had studied the drama of (mis)identi cation through Riviere, Fanon, Lacan, Irigaray, Lorde, Althusser, Butler, Munoz et al, nevertheless, from the very midst of my own idle activity, with so-called time on my hands, I fell into the scene without hesitation, without, that is, a pause or an interval for critical questioning and suspended attention. It was small consolation that I didn't purchase any material blinds -leaving the time on my bitmoji double's wristwatch at a stand still. But I might as well have purchased them, as immaterial blinds to the capital-colonial reproduction of the capital-colonial relation  had clearly been a matter of my own unwitting investment.
So much for having time on my hands, I thought. What did I do with that time? My dead labor, my idle activity, was clearly (re)productive of the capital-colonial relation. No interval threatened the machinery of exchange. I wasn't dead labor at all! is might lead to the question: where is dead labor now? What has become of the supposed interval between dead labor and living labor Marx elucidated, where crisis can occur and where, if extended, intervals of suspended activity, or nonproductivity, might challenge the accumulation of value and foster ideas outside of or against the colonial-capitalist extraction machine? If, as feminists such as Silvia Federici have long argued, there was never such a thing as dead labor for those (women) who worked in the home or/and in the factory, how might we access an idleness we may never have had in order to interrupt the capitalist extraction machine within? Another way might be to ask: How do we access the laboring dead? 7 We might do this not in order to exible-ize time for the interests of colonial-capitalist extraction that wants to re-consume the past, reduce it to a synaptic nanosecond, or "cannibalize history" as Fredrick Jameson predicted twenty-ve years ago (18), but to think about other ways of being dead to capital, privatization, and the relations fostered by the a ect machine of neoliberalism. Other ways, that is, of engaging with time, with each other, with the earth, and with the deadways not driven to exploitation.

e Second Story of Now (With Many Hesitations)
My second story is shorter and longer, simultaneously. It comes to even fewer conclusions. In some ways this story is completely di erent from the rst. But in other ways both stories are composed of utter (mis)recognition and/in uncanny doubling. In this story, "time on my hands" really feels like literal time -the living residue or viscosity of thousands and thousands of years between myself and an interlocutor who appeared as likeness in the midst of an ongoing process of call and response. Here's the story: Several years ago I travelled to the Dordogne in France. I wanted to witness, rst hand, one of the many negative handprints made by Paleolithic humans on the cave walls of the region. I didn't set out knowing which hand I might meet rst. I just headed to the caves and signed up for tours. A er visiting the caves of Font de Gaume, Rou ngnac, and several others, and being considerably moved by the artwork, I nally found myself before a negative handprint in Pech Merle. I would be lying if I said I wasn't moved. "Female, " our guide said. "We can tell by the wrist bone size, " he said.
Iterations necessarily jump -they jump time, space, and bodies -to become themselves as "gestures" in reiteration. And gestures, such greeting, inaugurate relation, as Avital Ronnel has written. 8 Standing with the hand and thinking about the sense of greeting -whether a greeting of "hello" or "stop" or some other gesture of intra-relation -surprised me. But as I had traveled thousands of miles to stand where I was standing, why should I have been surprised? First, though I fully expected to nd a negative hand, I had not expected the experience of vulnerability that ensued. Standing with the hand was standing with the rock, and standing with the rock was standing with the earth, and standing with the earth was standing in relation with no other activity planned (on my part in any case) than, indeed, to stand with. Granted, there was no way in which I could "know" or "recognize" precisely what the hand is/was/will have been intending. But standing with the hand -or, for that matter, standing with the rock on which the hand was imprinted -was in itself a powerful provocateur of questions in and about relation both across time and in time. Indeed, many questions arose for me at the site of the negative hand, and I will be writing about this for a long time I suspect, and telling this story in many di erent ways. Here, today, let me mention just a few.
When I rst headed to the caves I wondered: If I meet a Paleolithic hand (a rst hand, say) with a second hand (my own), what would become of rst and second? And how do we know which is rst and which is second? Why would I be more "live" in responding to, or even recognizing, the Paleolithic hand, than the rst hand was/is/continues to be in making the hail -casting it, if you will, into the temporal jump required of iterability? And in the logic (if that can be the right word) of call and response, wouldn't response, in reverse, initiate the hail as hail?
at is, even if the cave hand wasn't "originally" a hail of greeting, does it become one -even illegitimately -by virtue of response?
At the most minimal, the negative hand is simply recognizable as a hand at hand. e "at handedness" of a relationship is striking when standing with one of these hands. Not only is the hand the primary vehicle of touch (the sense that undoes our boundaries, our appropriate distances, dividing self from others) but it is the Prehistoric negative hand in the Pech Merle grotto (Lot, France) privileged vehicle of gesture. "Handling" in English has two meanings: 1. the act of taking or holding something in the hands; 2. the packaging and labeling of something to be shipped. Handling in the sense of packaging something is to send something away. At the same time, handling in the sense of taking in hand is to bring something close. Hands that handle are the medium of proximity as well as distance. ey also imply a movement: toward and away. With this in mind, I thought, "time on my hands" becomes time between our hands and those hands extend in and as time. As such, a "sticky" sense of simultaneity was remarkable to me across temporal distance and di erence could be palpable at the very site of sameness (we both have or will have had hands). 9 In fact, the matter of touch requires di erence and inaugurates the feeling of "besideness" that might well articulate the sense of "standing with" that was embodied or bodied forth for me in the cave (e.g. Sedgwick; Tallbear).
Another question that arose for me was the following, not all that di erent from the assumption at the base of the British Museum exhibition I referred to earlier: If I fundamentally recognize or misrecognize the Paleolithic hand because I also have one, and recognize or misrecognize the gesture of the upheld palm because I also make one or might make one, does likeness and liveness, as a matter of exchange, exist in reiteration, in call and response, and therefore manifest an extend-ability of duration that is almost beyond imagination? It may well be that "recognition" is not the best descriptor for the sense of encounter across sameness and di erence that occurs at the chiasmic site(s) of our hand(s) . Recognition is wrapped up in colonialist appropriations that dissolve di erence into hierarchies and submit relation to narratives of "progress" and "development. " For me, with the Paleolithic hand, "progress" and "development" were tragedies at the edges of our encounter but not de nitive of everything that it was possible to say about what existed between, among, or beside us in encounter. e expanse of violence committed by human hands across time was not vanished into the synaptic sameness of our "modern" brains but rather hovered, like a problem, or like a million echoes of gestural hails: "Hey, you there!" Or, "Move along!" 10 "Time on our hands" became palpable for me as both the vast expanse of historical events that suggested an enormity of di erence between "she and I" at the site of our hands, and simultaneously brought us to the scene of our hands as there together -as contemporaries. is is simply to ask: Are we not, she and I, both participant in an act we might think of as call and response and thus, together both contemporary and at a vast historical remove, simultaneously? And if we can think of that sameness while acknowledging our di erence (and vice versa) might that be what Dipesh Chakrabarty has termed, interestingly, "negative universalism"? A way of maintaining sameness and di erence in conversation, much as the negative hand is both a hand in outline and the absence of a hand at the face of the rock?
Of course, human hands -which are already inversions of each other -were not the only participants in the scene. Would it be possible to excise the human from the hail entirely and ask whether the rock face itself (regardless of the trace of the human) might be approached as performing a hail, moving, in deep time, with a gesture of its own cast to its own and its others? e hail is, interestingly, what W.J.T. Mitchell implicitly gives to any and all images and objects in What Do Pictures Want: e Lives and Loves of Images? (37) and what Jane Bennett gives to matter in general. As Robin Bernstein writes succinctly, "things hail" (73, emphasis in original). And I like the notion of the hail, or the gestural call, because it inaugurates an interval, a "hesitation" (to use Bergson's word), a space for radical heterogeneity, an open possibility for response. Response, indeed, may ricochet. Here are a number of possibilities for trajectories: From the hand that is responding to the stone's hail. From the stone that receives the hail of the hand. From my hand arriving (quite late) on the scene. From the stone again in ricochet. From the pixel and light hand you encounter on the screen or the ink and paper hand that hails you from the journal in hand. From the screen face; from my hand and my face to your hand and your face; and who knows where next? If bits and pieces, likenesses and alterations, sel es and trajectories, have traversed hundreds of thousands of years to recombine in this conversation we are having "now, " what part of this is contemporary? Or is it better to talk about contemporaneities that combine and recombine in relation as they touch and, by virtue of touch, intra-act?
Also palpable, at least for me, was the very real sense that the time on our hands was precious and not to be taken for granted. "Time is running out" is in fact the o en heard refrain regarding the threat to the climate and to the earth as a whole triggered by the extractive aggressions of the colonial-capitalist Anthropoceneor Capitalocene (Haraway). In this case, looking at one's watch might be a call to action against capitalism, not (like the call of my erstwhile bitmoji gesturing in a scene of blinds), a call to purchase and waste.
Interestingly, while in the Dordogne I also visited Lascaux II, the fabricated tourist's cave built beside the original Paleolithic one. Because the Paleolithic art in Lascaux I is incrementally disappearing -the faux cave, Lascaux II, is remastered like a photograph, and constructed as an immersive replica gesturing quite clearly to the original cave it stands beside. Fascinatingly, the fake cave is constructed to save the original from the detriments of, precisely, the live. e human living -with all our mold, exhaled CO 2 , and bodily movement -have been damaging the stone over the short 70 years since its modern rediscovery. e human live here outlives stone -a startling inverse of the idea that liveness is ephemeral. e implication may even be that the living human standing before the handprint is older than the Paleolithic print. Hands, as hands go, reduplicate via DNA. Hands are passed hand to hand. What are vulnerable, in this scenario, are the dead, those hands that have sloughed away like so many cells from the ongoing in-handness of the collective human animal. inking about it this way, which comes rst, her hand or mine, is less pertinent as a question than the question of what we should do with "our" hands -hers, mine, and the stone's, earth's and water's that surround us in and as our selves.