Public time
public time
The term public time is relevant for the notion of parrhesia—meaning the courage to speak one’s mind—and for parrhesiastic practices, which I approach as exercises, understood in the ancient Greek context of askesis or disciplined practice. These exercises aim at finding the courage to speak one’s mind by positioning and expressing oneself in relation to others. This happens through an expanded version of performativity that focuses on the right of the people (non-privileged as much as privileged) to ‘appear’ and on the potential of technology and virtual participation to enable the appearance of these bodies. In the field of art, parrhesiastic practices often reveal uncomfortable truths about conventions by undoing dignity and seriousness. They aim at engaging and affecting the spectator through various strategies, ranging from playful, friendly, and healing, to confrontational, disruptive, or aggressive. Unlike trolling phenomena taking place in online social communities, for the one who practices parrhesia this revealing of uncomfortable truths needs to be coupled with some kind of implication, engagement, self-exposure, and a sense of personal responsibility and shame. At that very moment in which the parrhesiast speaks boldly, not only does he/she tackle truth and existing power relations, but also his/her own subjectivity. In finding the courage to examine one’s self and by putting his/her beliefs to the test on a daily basis, the one
who practices parrhesia is freed from previous experiences, prejudices, and forms of control imposed on him/her through the ‘common opinion’. In this sense the parrhesiast is constantly subjected to self-transformation and/or self-de/reconstruction.
In Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy (1991), Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis defines public time in a historiographic sense and discusses parrhesia in relation to the ‘project of autonomy.’ Two roots exist within the Greek word autonomy: autos (εγώ ο ίδιος = myself) and nomos (law). An autonomous person creates his/her own law. Castoriadis argues that the first political society in which the citizens took the responsibility for their way of living and for legislatory regulations of social relations was in Ancient Greece. He posits that the possibility to ask questions as an individual or a group regarding social institutions occurred for the first time in Athens in the fifth century BCE. In this tradition, citizens contribute to the creation of public space (and public time) through the co-existence of three necessary and decisive phenomena: courage (parrhesia), responsibility (euthini), and shame (aidos, aischune).
In my presentation at the Making Matters Symposium (November 2020), I considered Etherpad as a tool for co-creating public time. Between February 16 and March 21, 2021, Thalia Hoffman (TH) and myself (EK) further discussed the term.
Public
Who is the public? ‘Public’ here is an adjective defining the type of time. But indeed, who is the public in the case of a public artistic event? Is this type of open participation enough to create a shared sense of collectivity among the participants? What does a shared sense of collectivity contain? I suggest each participant needs to see/feel their contribution to the collective… which can be at the same time seen/felt/inspected by the collective body of participants, enhancing in this way an understanding of individual contribution as responsibility.
Time
The Etherpad is an open-source online text editor. Each user’s contributions are indicated by a colour code and are recorded onscreen in real time. Unlike discussions in a physical gathering (where unspoken communication expressed through facial expressions and bodily gestures accompanies words) or cloud-based platforms for video conferencing (where participants stare at each other’s faces, talking heads videos arranged next to each other) communicating through the pad takes place purely on the level of ideas and the ability to relate mentally. Do only words communicate ideas? Words communicate ideas on the pad, but also something about the thinking process, the doubts and the hesitations involved in it: the movement of the interactions between our words, the time gaps, the mistakes, the erasures and re-writings. So maybe the pad (public space) needs to collect these gaps, doubts, and hesitations, and not erase them? It is not the pad that collects the gaps, doubts, and hesitations, but all participants together that make use of it to create this collection. But this is also what makes the pad a vulnerable tool for collecting content; any participant can erase the content with one click. Everyone can see what is written at the same time. The thought process is revealed, how thinking takes shape through typing. Does the typing change the thinking as well? Yes, the typing may change the thinking, provided one enters the pad in a state of mind open to change/dialogue, not set on a prefixed message one wishes to convey. I agree, being open for dialogue is needed many times for the possibility of change. I wondered though if the actual physical act of typing also changes the course of thinking. If we had a conversation with spoken words instead, would this change our thinking about concepts and ideas? I am not sure it would change our thinking about concepts, but there is this mechanical, repetitive aspect within the typing process that might interfere with one’s course of thinking. It provokes people to react to each other on the spot. You type something and it is immediately there. Can this be described as performative writing? Yes! I feel we need to capture the ‘liveness’ of this performance. Something that reveals its becoming. Maybe recorded typing? Or performative co-typing that has the potential to be recorded? You can go back and erase it, but people can see this as everything is documented immediately. Online/digital media make it difficult to read each other, as the senses are limited to sight and hearing. Through this visualization of thought, it is feasible to collectively write and speak, to influence our thinking, to both witness and testify. I am interested in considering the pad as a tool for creating public time. Can it grasp collectivity in these times? Does collectivity need public time? or vice versa? Maybe they are interdependent? Collectivity needs public time to reflect on and inspect its own past actions, but also public time cannot exist without a collectivity. What do you think? I think there is an element of time that is always shared. What makes it public in the sense we are trying to capture here, is that the ‘public’ is doing something additional together during this time, something that is more than spending time together. Maybe we should ask what needs to happen in time to make it collective? I agree. Maybe it has to do with future decisions, actions, experiences that will have an effect on people, both individually and collectively.
Are we trying to create public space here? Since we are working on the same text but at separate times?
I think what we are trying to do here is creating both public space and public time. This is how I became interested in Castoriadis, because he brings public time in the conversation as going hand-in-hand with the creation of public space. He finds these two indispensable for what he calls ‘the project of autonomy’* of Ancient Greek democracy. I connect this with my suggestion to connect the personal to the shared, and through that define the collectiveness of this time.
Can time be private? Yes. When I am daydreaming, reading a book, or drawing, I withdraw to a personal sense of time, and I don’t feel the need to share this with others. But this happens within a ‘bigger’ time that is public and local. The personal sense of time is always part of the time of the day at the particular place where it occurs, meaning it is public and local. I also feel time is always private as much as it is public, even if I share time with others, there is always the way I sense the time we spend together. If ‘public’ goes hand in hand with being exposed/accessible to everyone, are obscure and concealed activities also part of public time?