Relational time and creolizing eschatology

Abstract

Using Édouard Glissant's concept of creolization as a lens, this article explores how different senses of time respond to the volatile affective dynamics of polycrisis. It begins by specifying two interrelated problems: first, what it calls the affective double bind that intensifies desire for normalcy and familiarity when what is needed is creative and transformative thought and action; second, what it calls the pluriversal challenge of realizing planetary independence without imposing or privileging any single exclusive hegemonic meaning system. The paper then draws on Kyle Whyte's Anishinaabe informed “time as kinship” and Kyoto school philosopher Nishida Kitarō's “everyday eschatology” as examples for articulating “relational time,” contrasting this with a more familiar sense of “clock time” common to industrialized life. The article argues that cultivating relational time is helpful for navigating the affective dynamics of polycrisis and climate change. This is primarily discussed in terms of how it shifts engagement with conceptions and stories of origin and end, enabling a manner of maintaining their important affective work while challenging dominant habits of conceiving them through a logic of mutual exclusion that elevates one as the only real possibility. This amounts to a creolizing of eschatology.

How can one reconcile the hard line inherent in any politics and the questioning essential to any relation? (Glissant, 1997: 194)

Introduction

It is hard to think creatively in times of conflict and stress, particularly if there is a sense of time pressure. If the end being raced against is conceived as disaster or catastrophe, “running out of time” makes us fall back on familiar habits and strategies. In such circumstances, the uncertainty and vulnerability that come with creative effort feel like luxuries afforded only when “time allows.” ¹ It is also difficult to generate new relationships in conditions of suspicion, mistrust, and presumptions of scarcity or competition. Under these conditions, the comfort of known relationships takes precedence over the work of forging new ones. When this comfort is further manipulated by vectors of digital misinformation and algorithmic marketing, it easily abets forms of ignorance and denial as well as stokes the temptation of reductive scapegoating.

Besides being recipes for maintaining the familiar and status quo, in a context of planetary polycrisis these patterns contribute to “affective constellations” marked by paralyzing anxiety and lack of trust (Firebaugh et al., 2021; Oele, 2024; Oksala, 2023). ² This induces a sociopolitical and existential double bind. A disorienting sense of the unknown causes many to cling to familiar material habits and practices even as it is these habits that must change. Similarly, a pervasive atmosphere of distrust and conflict encourages retreat to the comfort of the like-minded even as the depth and scope of polycrisis requires coming together across differences of identity and ideology to forge a renewed sense of common dependency and care for the earth.

As has been frequently observed, reckoning with this situation in affirmative and ethical ways requires creative imagination. ³ Such observation, correct in principle, risks becoming an ineffectual platitude if taken as conclusion rather than premise. It is easy to say we need creative imagination, it is hard, particularly in conditions of polycrisis, to understand what this means. In some sense, this cannot be known in a fully prescriptive way within dominant present horizons of meaning as it is these very horizons that are in process of changing. Moreover, to avoid repeating mistakes of the past, we must not presume that ethical planetary transition will follow a single overarching lens, theory, teleological narrative, or rubric of meaning (Escobar, 2018; Savransky, 2021). Creating a different world also means conceiving this process without presuming any single imagined path to it as hegemonic or exclusive. Let us call this the pluriversal challenge: How can we practice ethical planetary material interdependence while also balancing and respecting specificities of place and multiplicities of semiotic systems and traditions present in coexisting “worlds”—what Arturo Escobar and others have called the “pluriverse”? (Cadena and Blaser, 2018; Chakrabarty, 2023; Savransky, 2021).

As a way of responding to these affective double binds and pluriversal challenge, the present essay explores a contrast between two patterns in senses of time: linear or geometric “clock time” and topological or poetic “relational time.” Its primary claim is that greater emphasis on practicing relational time can cultivate existential capacities for constructive and creative thought from within the existential double bind. This is discussed primarily in terms of its impact on how we conceive and imagine origins and ends. I describe these impacts as a way of creolizing eschatology, activating eschatology's formal definition as the logic or principles (logos) of end times (eschaton), while complicating its association with any single religious tradition. Relational time offers, I argue, a manner of both respecting the affective work of origins and ends without perpetuating a mode of exclusive disjunction that privileges any one such origin or end and denigrates all others. This has the secondary effect of contributing to the possibility of generative collaborations across difference without imposing a single homogenous rubric of meaning and value. ⁴

What is a sense of time?

My use of “sense of time” resists identifying time senses exclusively with single sociocultural, philosophical, or religious traditions, while also acknowledging that different sociocultural milieus enable different senses in heterogeneous ways. ⁵ This complicated point unfolds throughout the essay, but its most explicit inspiration is the work of Édouard Glissant, broadly, and particularly his concepts of “creolization,” “opacity,” and “relation-identity.” ⁶ (I will discuss all of these through the essay.) Using his own poetic language, Glissant presciently captured deep polarities of the pluriversal challenge before this terminology had gained discursive momentum. In Glissant's words, the planetary epoch of our time must acknowledge both the inescapeability of “Relation” and the necessity of “opacity” and difference in the face of global (market and other) forces of standardization, domination and control. Rather than calls for universal understanding, Glissant insists on the “right to opacity” as a way of “reacting against all the ways of reducing us to the false clarity of universal models” (Glissant, 2020b: 16). ⁷ This insistence nevertheless does not annul the need to “live with … build with … and take risks with…” even as it does resist facile claims of transparency (Glissant, 2020b: 17).

Within this pluriversal polarity, in which we must honor both ineradicable difference and elemental relation, creolization is both a descriptive truth and an unstable prescriptive call. ⁸ Descriptively, it describes a present planetary condition in which “for the first time, the semi-totality of human cultures are entirely and simultaneously put in contact and in effervescent relation with one another” (Glissant, 2020b: 13). Prescriptively, even as creolization is unpredictable, it also holds potential for generative opening:

creolization is the putting into contact of several cultures or at least several elements of distinct cultures, in a particular place in the world, resulting in something new, completely unpredictable in relation to the sum or the simple synthesis of these elements. (Glissant, 2020b: 22) ⁹

The juxtaposition of time-senses in this article acts as a staged “creolization,” in which I articulate a notion of “relational time” that draws on discussions from Kyle Whyte's Anishinaabe influenced perspective and Nishida Kitarō's Buddhist influenced philosophy, as well as a more familiar notion of “clock time” primarily linked to industrialized modern life and tempo. Importantly, and to repeat, in articulating these patterns, I am not claiming exclusive provenance for relational time in these particular sources. ¹⁰ Rather, in describing these patterns I am exploring how they can motivate constructive affective responses around the charged language of origins and ends without requiring a mode of exclusive disjunction that elevates any single origin or end as the only legitimate one. ¹¹ Understanding how to do this is a component of meeting the pluriversal challenge. It also brings into view how senses of time are both already implicated in this challenge and necessarily featured in processes of creolization. The most pertinent aspect is one that Glissant stresses frequently. Creolization is unpredictable and cannot be measured according to a single teleological line of development or progress. History no longer has one arrow, line, or apex (Glissant, 2020b: 64).

To move from this theoretical claim closer to the grain of its existential impact, I need to clarify how I am using “sense of time,” both in terms of what it does and does not mean. The English connotations of sense include semiotic or meaning as well as felt sensibility, and both are important here. We might say that a sense of time includes how time feels and what we imagine it to mean. Let us thus define sense of time as the quotidian lived ways that time is conceived, felt, measured, marked, and imagined, both implicitly and explicitly, personally and socially. ¹²

What a “sense of time” explicitly does not purport to capture is its metaphysical essence—what time really is. Metaphysical questions of what time “is” (or how it is) are important, and tacit ideas about such questions influence senses of time. ¹³ Nevertheless, most of us are neither metaphysicians nor physicists, and even for those who are, we can distinguish between these highly abstract modalities and our daily and lived sense of time. Sense of time is perhaps closest to phenomenology of time. However, in classical and neo-classical versions (Husserl, Heidegger), phenomenology of time is primarily oriented to seek transcendental structures of all experience of time whatsoever. Sense of time, by contrast, emphasizes variability of this experience, both socially and personally, interculturally, and intraculturally. While mediated through stories, art, norms, and institutions, senses of time are also personally inflected due to temperament and contingencies of past experience, context, and material condition. Rather than inquiring after underlying structures that do not vary, such variability is constitutive. Senses of time can morph, grow and change both personally and collectively. ¹⁴

This plasticity opens senses of time to normative questioning. It is not the case that anything goes: senses of time inform collective notions of what is appropriate or called for at a particular moment. Moreover, while we can acknowledge this plasticity descriptively, we must also acknowledge that a key affective feature of senses of time is the extent to which they exceed control of ordinary ego-consciousness and desires. We feel in our bones that time exceeds theory. We cannot just will a time experience. Though this essay describes different patterns in senses of time, it would be disingenuous to suggest we simply choose which patterns to live. In the grips of paralyzing anxiety, we cannot just get over it. Despite a theoretical plasticity in senses of time, in the immediacy of lived daily life, senses of time structure our griefs and fears, hopes and trusts in ways beyond conscious control. ¹⁵

Relational time and clock time

Normative questioning and plasticity become more apparent when different senses of time come into juxtaposition. As an example, consider the role that a certain time sense plays in what Kyle Powys Whyte calls “epistemology of crisis” (2020, 2021). Observing that “talking about climate change is an exercise in telling time,” Whyte refers specifically to a sense of time as “ticking time clock” oriented by an impending end (2021: 40). Such an image manipulates affective fears of catastrophe to justify an attitude of emergency that displaces ethical and moral questions. Because “we” are running out of time, “we” must act decisively. ¹⁶ This emergency mode is easily enlisted in the ongoing perpetuation of settler colonial power, for example, in cases where the “unprecedented” threat of climate change rationalizes displacement of indigenous peoples in service of land grabs rationalized as emergency measures. ¹⁷

A key feature of Whyte's analysis is his problematization of a sense of time often presented as neutral, objective, and universal. The apparent neutrality of “track[ing] climate change according to [qualitatively identical] linear units of time” (Whyte 2021: 41) feeds into a panic of approaching deadline that licenses nonreflective action according to established norms and power structures. Whyte is not denying the existential and ethical urgency of this situation, but rather showing how a particular sense of time reinforces a systemically unjust response to it even for the well-intentioned.

Let us call the sense of time that Whyte refers to as “clock time.” Clock time is deliberately conceived as homogeneous and the same everywhere. This standardization has been shown to be closely tied to both the rise of trans-continental trainlines and, correlatively, the work of university and college astronomers selling time signals (Bartky, 2000; Galison, 2003). ¹⁸ Whereas previously different cities and village could link mid-day to the sun's apogee where they were, the need for standardization required a disembodied, abstract, and homogeneous measure of time. In this way, clock time is received or imposed. It does not matter where you are, what you do or how you do it, the hands of the clock turn at the same pace and do not go backwards. ¹⁹ We can also use a spatial metaphor to characterize clock time as linear or geometric (rather than topographic). By linearity, what I mean is that clock time links to a sense of timeline which goes in one direction, and which is conceived of as having a discrete beginning or origin, and, by extension, a possible final ending. Often this is correlated with a sense of development or progress, as in the historical timelines from “prehistory” to the present that some of us might be familiar with from high school social studies textbooks. Finally, by conceiving time as a series of independent units (hours, minutes, seconds, milliseconds, etc.), clock time, in subtle ways, privileges atomistic identity as fundamental, and the relation between such moment-atoms as contingent or evanescent. ²⁰

Such a sense of time is deeply embedded in industrialized culture. As an example, consider the Metronome public art installation in Union Square in New York City. Installed in 1999, the clock displays fifteen large LED digits that mark the time in 24-hr format at hours, minutes, seconds, and tenths of a second. This is a visual marker of time construed as a relentless march of single rapid units. In 2020, the clock's time marking was changed, such that it now counts down (by the tenths of a second) the time remaining in the Earth's so-called carbon budget, as determined by the 2015 Paris agreement (Moynihan, 2020). While the intention of such an installation is to generate public urgency around climate issues, the tacit reinforcement is precisely the ticking time clock sense of time that Whyte has problematized so insightfully.

Whyte's critique is not the end of the story. Rather, he moves from the critical to the creative with a proposed alternative of an Anishinaabe informed notion of “kinship time” (Whyte, 2021). ²¹ Because kinship time fundamentally originates in relationships that Whyte describes as “grounded in responsibility … mutual caretaking and mutual guardianship” (2021: 42), it provides an opening towards patterns that I will articulate as “relational time.” Elements of relational time can be found across different religious and cultural traditions. I begin here with formal articulation of key patterns before turning in the final section to more detailed examples drawing on Nishida Kitarō's “everyday eschatology” and Whyte's “kinship time.”

A key difference is that where clock time is conceived as a homogenous and empty metric imposed in the same way in all places, relational time is not imposed but practiced. ²² Practices shape the qualitative emergence of relational time. Such practices involve relationships to place, to self and to other, including other persons and forms of sentience. In this way, relational time is not, and indeed cannot, be the same in all places and for all persons. Places differ, as do persons. ²³ Relational time is embodied in practices of relation, rather than imposed by an externally constructed clock. Whereas clock time is conceived as a series of independent and qualitatively identical units, relational time emerges through qualitatively variable moments of relation.

In relational time, because relation is first, discrete identity is epiphenomenal, an ongoing process rather than a fundamental essence. We can thus link relational time to Glissant's contrast between “root-identity” and “relation-identity” (1997, passim). Most critically for the present argument, whereas “root-identity” is oriented around a founding episode or origin that is temporally fixed in a distant past, “relation-identity” is “produced” through a “chaotic network of relation” (Glissant, 1997: 143–4). Glissant's reference to chaos should not be taken as lack of order, but rather as an allusion to so-called chaos theory as a nonlinear theory of dynamic order. ²⁴ Relational time is better conceived as topological rather than geometric or linear. It has folds and eddies, moments of rapidity and durations of stillness. This topology is fractal—moving in iterations of complexity that manifest in qualitatively different ways. Such qualitative differences are a matter of relations, which manifest time in different ways. If we care about good relationships, the priority is “making the time” necessary to cultivate, maintain, and enrich these relationships. This does not happen always in the same way.

Relational time (and Glissant's “relation-identity”) is therefore intrinsically more fragile and precarious than clock time. Just as “relation-identity,” in Glissant's words, “does not devise any legitimacy as its guarantee of entitlement” (1997: 144) relational time cannot guarantee any particular outcome before the work of relation. A key distinction has to do with how relational time and clock time variously conceive of origin and ends. For clock time, as we see with the example of the Climate metronome, the conception of end is fixed as a static and final point along a linear timeline. Origins and ends are therefore distanced from the present, even as they enact a powerful affective hold on imagination in the present. This distance implicitly conceptualizes time as a scare and limited resource in which actions and practices have no qualitative effect other than to “use it up.” By contrast, relational time still has beginnings and endings, but they are not distanced in the same way. As we will see, we can even say that such beginnings and endings in relational time are perpetual, and thus must be cared for qualitatively rather than taken for granted as limits fixed irregardless of behavior or relation. Though this does not resolve the challenging affective dimensions of polycrisis, it does change how these are leveraged.

Volatile affects of origin and end

The word volatility conjures feelings of unpredictable explosion set off by an unexpected gesture, word, or accident. I think also of the high-risk conditions of the Albuquerque bosque in dry August: when a spark from a careless match can result in cottonwoods churning into an inferno two stories high. ²⁵ I was thus surprised, with wonder, to learn that, among its tangled etymological roots in Old French, Middle English, and Latin, volatile carries a sense of “flight,” of a “creature that flies” and collectively, in Middle English, of “birds.” ²⁶ Such flight runs us toward the familiar neuropsychological trope of “fight or flight.” While fear induced by climate catastrophic futures logically activates such response, its volatility also points to the impossibility of flight. Despite material differences in climate vulnerability, there is no real flight from a planetary phenomenon. The fight side has its own volatility, since, at some level, and admitting of many degrees of difference in responsibility and vulnerability, the fight remains against “ourselves” in terms of material patterns structuring the lives of the materially advantaged. ²⁷ Taken together, this volatile affective condition can activate fight or flight responses that escalate, reinforce, and perpetuate climate change's many fearful fires, rather than generate affirmative and collective response.

This affective volatility is greatly influenced by how we think about origin(s) and end(s) (Wynter and McKittrick, 2015; Yusoff, 2016). This is a scaleable claim. It involves birth and death at personal levels as well as collective sociocultural origin stories and teleological projections and fears. Both personally and communally, how do we imagine life and death, past and future, and the relation between them? Are we terrified of death? Do we pretend it doesn’t exist? Do we orient towards a future salvation promising to redeem the pain? Are we haunted and conditioned by past traumas or injustices? Are we overcome with grief, with rage, with fear? In different registers, can one learn to be proud and critical of their ancestor's struggles, respecting their sacrifices while also reckoning with legacies that are morally and ethically complex and ambiguous? ²⁸ Do we wonder about the unprethinkability of an infinitely evolving universe beyond our capacities for understanding, or do we shudder, with Pascal, at the “eternal silence of these infinite spaces”? (1995: 66). ²⁹

“Clock time” and “relational time” differently temper the volatility of such intimate existential questions, while still granting their personal “opacity.” To explore this, I will first zoom out from this level of personal concern to consider their affective dynamics in terms of two basic needs. The first is the need for a grounding sense of orientation about who one is and where one comes from. Such grounding is frequently provided by origin stories. As Robin Wall Kimmerer observes, origin stories “are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness” (Kimmerer, 2013: 7). This powerful affective need is especially valuable amidst the turbulence of polycrisis. However, it is also no secret that many origin stories are, on the surface, incompatible. Readers will think of their own examples of this charged issue beyond what I offer as a deliberately generic, if still consequential, contrast between secular origin stories structured around some version of evolutionary genetics and various theological accounts of creation. ³⁰ We are, I think, generically familiar with the many reductive ways these stories have been positioned as competitors in a zero sum logic of univocal truth. ³¹ However, navigating the affective volatility of climate change in affirmative and creative manners that resist the poisoned delusion of us versus them survival requires somehow learning to respect the affective work of different origin stories while also letting go of the habit of grounding any origin story's legitimacy in its exclusivity. ³² By exclusivity, I mean the elevation or privileging of one such story as “really real” and the correlative denigration of all other origin stories as lesser illusions. Here, I am reminded of words relayed by Darlene Johnston, a legal scholar, in a paper from the early 2000s:

I have been taught by Anishnaabeg Elders that all Creation stories are true. There is not one story which can be true for all peoples of the world. But each people's understandings and traditions of their beginning is their truth. Origin stories require the utmost respect. No people outside that tradition should question it or try to impose their own story. (Johnston, 2006: 4)

In a planetary condition of creolization, Johnston's powerful reminder emphasizes a logical and affective challenge. How can we learn to honor all creation stories as true without collapsing into a miasma of nihilistic relativism?

This challenge, which is part of the pluriversal challenge more broadly, is bound up with the second affective need that orients how people imagine both origins and ends. This is desire for some form of security amidst vulnerability and uncertainty. As Lewis Gordon observes from an existentialist orientation: “the inevitability of … catastrophe haunts human existence” (2021: 104). As we have already discussed, this perennial human need is amplified under the intensifying uncertainties of climate change.

How do we deal with the lived reality of contingency, of not knowing, of precarity and vulnerability? While there are a wide variety of responses, of prime relevance for my argument is a strategy of immunization against contingency through projection of an explanatory end to come. This strategy posits a closing certainty and givenness of meaning that is already known and linked to an originating and determinate past and a concluding revelatory end or telos (Latour, 2017: 194–5; Skrimshire, 2014; Taubes, 2009). This givenness of meaning becomes a form of comfort by denying in some sense the existential experience of time. Even if individuals face a degree of uncertainty in ordinary temporal experience, this uncertainty is subjective only. I stress that I am not proposing that all messianic or teleological thought is necessarily structured by this existential closure. The key issue is the degree to which the end is conceived through an attitude of dogmatic certainty, or rather through a humility and “fear and trembling” that remains open. Again borrowing from Lewis Gordon's thought, we can describe this as a distinction between a bad faith denial exhibited by narcissistic “spirits of seriousness” (who both pretend to a false security and deny responsibility for a present and unjust order (2021: 107)) ³³ and a more authentic acknowledgement and practice of epistemic humility, even in meaning systems oriented by faith in an explanatory end. The problem is not necessarily belief in a closing end per se, but rather an arrogant assumption that one knows the outcomes and judgements of this end and that one's present actions are already justified by this certainty. The temptation toward such eschatological certainty is intensified by climate change, which explains the curious paradox of climate imaginaries as both novel and perennial in structure. ³⁴

While conceptions of origins and ends fulfill vital affective needs, depending on how these needs are fulfilled, they also risk reinforcing polarizing disjunctions that fail to meet the pluriversal challenge of relation and further intensify affective double binds. If we are certain of an end independent of our actions, then we do not need to change our actions. Admitting that we need to change our actions means also giving up on the certainty of this end if it is structured by a givenness that we claim to already know. The question becomes learning how to honor affective needs for orienting conceptions of origin and end while balancing them with an openness to contingency and the “opacity” of others. One way to do this is by shifting the locus of certainty by distinguishing between dogmatic certainties in transcendent truths to come, on the one hand, and living relations experienced as certainly valuable and meaningful, on the other. The value of such relations is realized not through a certain future outcome or eventual transcendence, but rather in their very contingency and vulnerability in the present. Practicing relational time cultivates a greater capacity for such an affective orientation, whereas accepting a hegemonic conception of “clock time” tends to reinforce retreat into sectarian and identitarian conflict (“there can be only one”) or passivity and fatalism.

Opacity and practicing relational time

In response to a question following a lecture in 1994, Glissant makes the following observation:

I believe that we have arrived at a moment in the life of human communities in which the human being is beginning to accept the idea that he is himself perpetually in process, that he is not Being, but a being, and that like all beings, he changes. And I think that this is one of the major intellectual, spiritual and mental permutations of our age, which means that we are all afraid. (Glissant, 2020a: 14, emphasis added).

In this closing section, I consider how relational time can help navigate this emergent sense of “relation-identity,” in which our beings are implicated in processes of change beyond ordinary ego-conscious awareness and familiar temporal horizons, in affirmative ways despite the fear that Glissant acknowledges. Doing so enables a greater capacity for meeting the pluriversal challenge and remaining active through the affective double binds of climate change.

Let us begin first by returning to Kyle Whyte's discussion to consider how “relational time” reframes response to climate change. As Whyte emphasizes, “when time is experienced through kinship, the ticking clock goes away” and we “get a different narration of climate change” (2021: 49). Instead of an exclusively geotechnical issue measured by a ticking time clock, climate change becomes a call for healing, rebuilding and caring for relationships between different forms of life and different communities. Whyte enumerates such relational qualities of “promot[ing] interdependence through shared responsibilities” (2021: 52). Time is no longer a separate measure that uniformly flows independent of relationships, rather, time is “perceived according to the degree of current kinship relationships, the history of kinship relationships, and the future possibilities of kinship relationships” (Whyte, 2021: 49). Caring for and maintaining responsible relationships is not just in time, it is of time—in caring for kin we care for and collectively cocreate the qualitative durational experience of time. Climate change expresses deterioration and collapse of mutually beneficial relationships and caring across forms of life. For these reasons, while “kinship time is no less adamant about mitigating climate change,” the mitigation process is one of “establish[ing] or repair[ing] kinship relations” (Whyte, 2021: 54). This requires attending to relationships without a stop-watch, “taking” the time that is needed.

This emphasis on cultivating relations as ground of time shifts the locus of affective certainty. Certainty is no longer oriented by an end or an origin separated from the present by units of a linear timeline. Rather, it is shifted to an ephemeral present that can be conceived as both, in a certain sense, origin and end. The vulnerability of this present is a condition of creativity. It is, in Glissant's language, the “risk” of the imaginary, conceived as itself part of a process of relation (1997: 1). Rather than certainty of outcome, the only certainty is in the precious contingent reality of experiencing this moment, this place, this relation, in an absolute reality that is nevertheless passing. The quality of caring attention to the relation in the present cannot be outsourced or accumulated. It must be attended to with care even as needs and actions of call and response cannot be subjected to absolute control. Understanding this is part of the “poetics of relation” that Glissant ceaselessly describes and redescribes. Such attending occurs in a balance between “present moment and duration” that “determines the accents of our poetics” (Glissant, 1997: 35, 215).

This kind of attention is undoubtedly difficult, and practicing relational time also means acknowledging that repair of the harms and messiness that are the planetary conditions of accumulated past injustice cannot occur in any single all at once action. Whereas “clock time” tends to reinforce an instrumental approach to desire for social amelioration, relational time accepts this messiness as part of “the right to opacity” in Glissant's language. Furthermore, because clock time intensifies a sense of always running out of time, it also heightens susceptibility to easy reactionary answers on offer to either explain (away) polycrisis or frame its complexity through reductive Manichean oppositions. ³⁵ Relational time must therefore cultivate an existential capacity to resist the comfort of easy answers insofar as they function as dismissals of the need to attend to the messiness and opacity of a present relational moment. However, relational time must also hold open a space for this attention that is unprefigured by a preexisting judgement or assumption. Such assumptions hinder the possibility of a generative and unpredictable relation.

Ultimately, this affective challenge exceeds the theoretical and must be realized, ever imperfectly, in practice. ³⁶ But this does not mean that there are not theoretical or conceptual accounts that can help motivate commitments to attempting to realize relational time, in various and different ways depending on circumstance and location. In closing, I will briefly offer one such conceptual account that can contribute to these practices, as found in Kyoto school philosopher Nishida Kitarō's notion of “everyday” eschatology. The key point here is how the topos of origin and end is moved from the distance of linear timelines and instead placed in the present. In this way, Kitarō urges us to see “everyday human existence eschatologically” (1987: 113), not in terms of a futural end point but rather in conceiving the event of the present as a “self-transforming matrix of history” discovered through the “bottomless depths” of self (Ibid., 84). ³⁷ Such bottomless depths resonate with Glissant's notion of “opacity” (and “abyss,” though I cannot discuss this here). These bottomless depths are, ultimately, depths of relations that condition and create ephemeral experience of self in an absolutely passing present. Our actions are thus simultaneously heightened in their responsibility and conditioned by events that far exceed egoistic desire or control. Realizing this dual condition inspires affective and epistemic humility, hence problematizing bad faith arrogance or certainty in final ends to come. Such humility is a necessary feature of learning to live the pluriversal challenge and honor the “right to opacity.”

What Nishida calls the absoluteness of a present action is not judged through the lens of a future predetermined certainty, but rather insofar as it is fully manifested in this ephemeral present and its constitutive relations. Each moment is the culmination of all historical conditions up until that point: “each of our actions is historical, and eschatologisch, as the self-determination of the absolute present” (Nishida, 1987: 110). This contrasts with narratives that posit an orienting certainty separate from the unfolding of the present. It is resonant, though not equivalent, with emphasis on relationships in kinship time. Time arises out of determinative actions and rather than a supposed guarantee of a fixed relation transcending time, the quality of durational time is created through attending in the present moment.

Nishida calls this action eschatological insofar as it is both a creative act and an end of time up to this present. This returns us to the affective double bind and intimate questions of life and death. The point is not to annul the intensity of mortality, but to conceive of it through a “relational time” in which one's actions continue to reverberate beyond the horizon of a single life, and conversely, are absolute summations of that life. They cannot be taken back. Rather than separating contingent and therefore meaningless actions from an explanatory end in a distant future, “each moment of time both arises and perishes in an eternity. Or rather, each passing moment is the eternal” (Nishida, 1987: 53). Practicing such “relational time” is to strive for the fullest realization of the moment as complete and ephemeral, birth and death in a process of living and dying, ending and beginning that is active and complete, historical and eschatological. ³⁸ Though this cultivation goes through singular selves it is not solipsistic because “in its own bottomlessly immanent depths, the self never finds itself” but instead discovers what Nishida calls the “absolute” (Nishida, 1987: 110) and what Glissant might call the unknowable but also unavoidable reality of the whole-world (tout-monde). This would mean, following both Whyte and Nishida, and resonating with Glissant's “relation-identity,” that there is no self-subsistent separate essence to self that exists independent of its constitutive relations. Relational time thus calls for attending to specifically different qualitative relations that are not the same for everyone but also not essentially separate. It is this aspect of the pluriversal challenge that urges what Glissant memorably expresses as a condition that is both “solitary and solidary” (1997: 131). ³⁹ Because relational time stresses this, we are therefore more capable of understanding that different origin stories do not necessitate an attitude of defensive competition, but rather an invitation to relation in learning how to practice the truth of our understandings as contributing to a process that exceeds any single understanding.

Conclusion

Nishida's notion of everyday eschatology functions as a creolizing of eschatology insofar as it brings together an intensity and amplification of the stakes and responsibility of attention with an openness and awareness of one's nonuniversal contingencies. In this way, it calls for attending to the singular moment with all one's care while understanding it as a summation of relations exceeding it into future and past. This means letting go of the instrumental desire to know the outcomes of our actions, ideas, and feelings completely, while also understanding that these contribute to the fabric of relations to come. As Glissant reminds us “our existences and our influences on each other are characterized by unpredictability” (2020a: 59). This holds for better and worse and shows that a sense of relational time does not evaporate the double bind of paradigmatic change or lighten its affective load. Relational time does not make relation easier, but it does encourage attention to relations with others, human and nonhuman, as its own unpredictable end. It thus shifts the locus of the affective work of origins and ends and creolizes eschatology. Rather than as insulation from “opacity,” there is a call toward bringing our sense of meaning into relation with other senses, attentive to the ways that relation and creolization render the horizon of all such senses ephemeral and partial. Whereas clock time conflates the ephemeral with the meaningless or lost, and whereas root-identity positions such loss as a matter of threat or competition, relational time cultivates a capacity for finding a bittersweet joy, or something less nameable, in the deeply felt sense of an ephemeral present immanently valuable without instrumental metric. This is what Glissant calls poetic thought. This capacity does not replace the need for material action and collaborative alliance, but it does contribute to more affirmative affective constellation for navigating deep volatility. In this way, Glissant's poetic philosophy and practices of relational time might help us tender this volatility toward renewed forms of hope and trust and a collective meeting of planetary challenge like the steady quest of a migrating arrow of geese.