Abstract
Ironically, I carried Lisa Baraitser’s Enduring Time around with me for longer than I care to admit before finally writing this review. This had nothing to do with Baraitser’s writing nor the nature of her insights. Like most people, I admittedly feel constantly pressed for time – time to read, reflect, think and respond. My situation is not unique. In a capitalist society, these activities, which ‘take time’ without adding anything of obvious value to the economy, are profoundly undervalued. But these restricted conditions are also where Baraitser’s new book – a collection of thematically linked essays – begins.
Above all else, Baraitser asks us to defamiliarise our relationship to time by considering the possibility that change may occur in and through chronic time rather than merely through time passing. Among her more provocative propositions is the suggestion that the most radical acts may not be about movement – breakthroughs or ruptures (visible signs of change) – but rather take far less celebrated forms: waiting, staying, maintaining, repeating, delaying, enduring, recalling, remaining and ending. Indeed, in Baraitser’s reassessment of time, we are asked to consider the possibility that the most powerful antidote to ‘capitalism without ending’, which demands we make the most of our time (e.g. by working online while commuting to work on site), may be to embrace its opposite – ‘care without ending’, an act that invariably demands staying ‘in relation to an elongated present’ (p. 183).
While staying in relation to an elongated present may appear both passive and easy, it is neither. Indeed, it requires one to face things that most people would rather avoid. As Baraitser explains, it may require one to ‘bear the embarrassment of anachronism, the dynamic chronicity of the death drive, the overwhelming effect of the present-tense of intergenerational difference, to decide to know the unbearable’ (p. 183). Thus, ‘care without ending’ is not simply about sticking around but also about letting go of one’s aspirations to always be at the vanguard. It means accepting the fact that you may very well feel left behind. This is also where Baraitser’s insights hold specific import for feminism.
Although Baraitser’s book is not a book about feminism per se, her reassessment of time is certainly relevant to thinking about feminist politics in the present. This is most evident in the fourth chapter, ‘Delaying’. Here, Baraitser begins by asking, ‘In what ways might temporality be a form of politics?’ (p. 93). Her question is not entirely new. Feminist theorising on nostalgia and intergenerational politics and queer theorising on temporality have explored similar questions. Baraitser, however, delves deeper to consider why ‘delayed action’ and even actions that appear to not entail any action at all (e.g. staying) may be especially politically potent.
To explore this question, she introduces the somewhat paradoxical idea of the political encampment. From the nearly two-decade-long Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp to the far more fleeting camps that appeared during the Occupy Movement in 2011, one can find examples of political actions defined by waiting, staying, maintaining, remaining and enduring. Yet, as anyone who has ever participated in a political encampment knows, these camps are not sites defined by stagnation. They are also, as Baraitser reminds us, ‘a mode of potentially sustainable living that both experiments with and creates new collective imaginaries’ (p. 112). Baraitser further suggests that the recent re-emergence of the political encampment as a form of protest may itself reveal something about what it means to stay in relation to an elongated present. Rather than represent something new, she suggests that these camps may be best understood as ‘a time delay’ – a ‘reconnection with something that has remained, perhaps unnoticed, in public life’ (p. 113).
To be clear, most of the examples that Baraitser references in Enduring Time are derived not from politics but rather from theory, literature and art. The point of her collection of essays, however, is not to offer close readings of events or cultural texts and objects but rather to use these collected meditations to disrupt our entrenched assumptions about time. In Enduring Time, Baraitser asks her readers not only to defamiliarise myriad taken-for-granted assumptions about time but also to consider the powerful political potential of time that appears to have stopped – the time we encounter in the delay, the wait, the repeated sequence. In the process, she also leaves her readers with a surprising revelation – that we may not be as pressed for time or as time-deprived as we thought.