Heterochronotopia
Author: Mariia Varlygina
Translation from Ukrainian: Galyna Kotliuk
Editor: Clemens Poole
Modern epistemologies and political challenges encourage rethinking of the categories of past, present, and future, undermining their linear nature and universality [5]. Attempts to describe modernity include the concepts of the ever-broadening present and the blocked future of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht [6], the retrotopia of Sigmund Bauman [7], the chronoference of Achim Landwehr [8], the spacetimemattering of Karen Barad [9], etc. The departure from European universalism — one line of time, universal time and universal history [10] — is an emancipatory movement away from colonial modernity. Drawing on a new understanding of time, previously marginalised cultural and political forces, whose voices have not been heard up until now, are reclaiming history, resisting the appropriation of cultural heritage, negative niching, and historical erasure. Achille Mbembe has called postcolonial philosophy a dream of the future for all humanity, a dream of a polis, which is universal due to its socio-ethnic diversity [11]. The study of heterochronotopia as spatio-temporal elasticity can be a step towards its realisation.
The concept of heterochronotopia originates from the juxtaposition of the concepts of heterotopia and heterochrony proposed by Michel Foucault in the essay “Of Other Spaces” [12], where heterotopia is a doubled space that exists according to its own rules (for example, a prison, a hospital, a library), and heterochrony — a different presentation of time — is an accompanying phenomenon coming from the nature of the place. For the first time, heterochronotopia as a combination of the two was proposed by the Dutch cultural theorist Mieke Bal in the context of video art (2008) [13]. She has analysed several works in which migration is a theme as examples of heterotopia. The video works selected by the researcher (she analyses the video editing, the materials selection, the exposure) are an example of spaces separated for the viewer, migratory spaces, where time is layered and new temporal situations are created [14]. In the materials of the Czech sociologists Robert Osman and Ondřej Mulíček (2017), heterochronotopy is defined in terms of places — an “ensemble of spatially and temporally discontinuous locations” [15], where public space can be an intersection of different ideas about time, space, and the rules of staying within it. The application of modern approaches to the interpretation of space-time in relation to socio-cultural phenomena makes it possible to consider the martial law introduced in Ukraine on February 24th, 2022 as heterotopic (according to M. Foucault).
However, heterochronotopia can be understood not only as an opposition to traditional space-time (along with criticism of the conventionality of this concept), but as being flexible and even mimicking the character of temporalities, a variety of temporal orders in institutional (states, corporations) and non-institutional (ethnic cultures, subcultures, etc.) entities [16]. Although the world has undergone globalisation, it is composed of communities with distinct political and cultural agendas. At their intersections arise crisis situations, the complexity of coexistence pushes us to look for answers in the categories of entanglement (Bruno Latour), constellations (Walter Benjamin), archipelagos (Nicolas Bourriaud) [17]. Heterochronotopy allows us to talk about the contact of cultures as a collision of different chronotopes. It is the chronotope that supports their inner realism, a personal system of values and knowledge [18, 19]. The cultural chronotope provides rhythms and aesthetics, reveals an authentic connection between its theories, practices, and material artifacts. The chronotope is the environment in which culture (self)identifies. Manifestations of heterochronotopia are especially prominent in matters of national and foreign affairs, in situations of abrupt changes within chronotopes and during their contacts. In such circumstances, a revision of the past takes place, deposit of memory [20] may be applied, and new heroes and commemorative practices appear, etc.
Postcolonial theory and decolonisation practices in Ukraine, against the backdrop of Russia’s war of aggression, have naturally intensified to manifest cultural and political subjectivity, especially after the full-scale invasion of February 24th, 2022. The study of dominant temporalities and the search for alternative forms of livable time are a manifestation of resistance to the colonisation of time. Decolonial processes in Ukraine can be described as reclaiming the past, clarifying chronologies, debunking stereotypes, and revising cultural heritage for the sake of a sovereign future. Tereza Yakovyna and Oleksandra Pogrebnyak write about calendarism — the dedication of events to certain dates — in art and social life as a characteristic phenomenon of Ukrainian military modernity [21]. A vivid example is, among the others, the online archive of personal stories of residents of Luhansk and Donetsk regions, and artistic reflections and memories about the Russian war against Ukraine in the project 14-8-22 by the Gareleya Neotodryosh. The digits of the title encode the year of the beginning of the war (2014), the year of the full-scale Russian invasion (2022), and the period between them (8), which in the interactive design of the page turns from a set of numbers into an infinity sign. This graphic image is intuitively perceived by users as a mapping of history and at the same time it is a practice of self-awareness and representation to other countries.
In her article about heterochronotopia, Mieke Bal writes about the need to historicise experience [22]. She states that the use of personal experience in works of art is a means of preventing representativeness, and controversial “speaking for the other”. Media capable of directly broadcasting the I-position is non-fiction literature: essays, diaries, and memoirs. In 2022, Vivat publishing house published a collection of essays by journalist Pavol Kazarin, “The Wild West of Eastern Europe”, where the author rethinks the history of Ukraine, “his Crimean past”, circumstances, and time distances as transformative for the author himself, Ukrainian society, and the post-Soviet reality. The structure of the book and its key motifs are full of temporal metaphors: “fake future”, “yakbytologia” [a Ukrainian play on words that can be roughly translated as “whataboutism”. Trans.], “life after credits”, “battle with the present”, etc [23]. For the author, the timeline unfolds as a layering of scenes, locations, experiences, and actions, and the category of the future is the organising one. Kazarin’s essays can be sites as symptomatic in the description of the modern Ukrainian chronotope.
On the issue of “time during the war”, philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko and literary critic Tetyana Ogarkova compared European and Ukrainian perceptions of the war as fitting the conventional modes of the novel and the drama, respectively, where the first one is characterized by retrospection, distance, and representativeness, whereas the second one is identified by being inside history, by presence and performativity. Such a literature-centric perspective can also be described as heterochronotopian.
Heterochronotopia is not a barrier to social understanding; problems arise when it comes to unwillingness to recognize the other’s right to be [24]. Therefore, the study of time within the framework of postcolonial studies demonstrates a request to understand whether and how it is possible to achieve humane coexistence.
Endnotes
02. Robert Hassan, Globalization and the Temporal Turn: Recent Trends and Issues in Time Studies, (The Korean Journal of Policy Studies, 2010) t. 25, nr 2, 83-102; Penelope J. Corfield, History and the Temporal Turn: Returning to Causes, Effects and Diachronic Trends (Rennes : Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2015) 259–273.
03. Ibid.
04. David Rooney, O czasie. Historia cywilizacji w dwunastu zegarach, (Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2023), 12. In this context, the concepts of chrononormativity (Elizabeth Freeman) and queer time, which are linked to time disciplining, creation of a schedule as a tool of control.
05. Philosophers such as Zygmunt Bauman, François Hartog, Barbara Adam, Anthony Giddens, Marshall McLuhan, Pierre Bourdieu, Paul Virilio, Judith Butler, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht have written about time as a changeable category in philosophical, social, political, cultural, and artistic dimensions.
06. Ганс Ульріх Гумбрехт, Розладнаний час (IST Publishing, 2019).
07. Zygmunt Bauman, Retrotopia (Polity Press, 2017)
08. Ortfried Schäffter, Malte Ebner von Eschenbach, Reframing Temporality: A Design for a Relational View of Chronoference, (Sisyphus - Journal of Education, 2023), vol. 11, no. 1, 35–61.
09. Karen Barad, No Small Matter: Mushroom Clouds, Ecologies of Nothingness, and Strange Topologies of SpaceTimeMattering (Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, 2017).
10. Walter Mignolo, Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Duke University Press, Durham, 2018), 117.
11. Interview with Achille Mbembe. What is postcolonial thinking? (Eurozine, 2008), Web.
12. Michel Foucalt, The Other Spaces (Texts/Contecst, 1986), vol.6, no.,1, 22–27.
13. Mieke Bal, Heterochronotopie (Thamyris/Intersecting, 2008), 35–56.
14. Ibid. “Migration is also the experience of time: as multiple, heterogeneous. The time of haste and waiting, the time of movement and stagnation; the time of memory and of an unsettling present. The phenomenon I call multi-temporality; the experience of it, heterochrony”, 46.
15. Robert Osman, Daniel Seidenglanz, Ondřej Mulíček, Urban Place as a Heterochronotopia: A Case Study, (Sociologický časopis/ Czech Sociological Review, 2016) “The geographic conceptualisation of heterotopia assumes that place can be regarded as an ensemble of spatially and temporally discontinuous locations located outside the ‘here and now’ of the observed locality (Figure 1)”, 938.
16. An example could be Trainings for the Not-Yet, a project implemented in 2021–22. The organisers aimed to explore alternative temporalities: “The project explores concepts such as “deep time”, “seed time”, “ancestral time”, “cyclical time”, “local time”, “crip time, “queer time”, and “non-human time” in order to imagine escapes from the programmatic movement of capitalist modernity toward ostensibly inevitable catastrophe”.
17. Here discontinuity, another of Foucault’s concepts that was presented at the Post/Future|Art platform may be interesting . With this concept, the author characterises the view on the essence of the historical process as one that is not characterised by internal integrity and ontological continuity.
18. Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope is used today not only by literary critics, but also by cultural scholars, anthropologists, and sociologists. For example, Danuta Ulicka offers a definition of a chronotope: “the definition of categories and values of the real world through attitudes towards it”, Danuta Ulicka, Kariera chronotopu (Teksty Drugie, 2018), 262.
19. Hilary Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism. (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1987).
20. “Deposit of Memory. A historical plot, which for a certain time finds itself in the space of invisibility, but can be reactivated in a political situation that requires the mobilisation of society to unite around a certain goal”. Oksana Dovgopolova, https://pastfutureart.org/glossary/
21. Розширення пам'яті. Нові слова, якими ми описуємо війну, культуру і комеморацію (Postimpreza, 2023).
22. Mieke Bal, Heterochronotopie (Thamyris/Intersecting, 2008) “Temporalities merge that are ordinarily distinct”, 38.
23. Pavlo Kazarin, The Wild West of Eastern Europe, (Vivat, 2022), “War is always near. It is six hours by train or ten by car.” p. 117. “And then Russia came, unhooked my native railcar and attached it to its train, which is not even heading east, but straight into the past. In the past that has no more prospects than a sailing ship. That is, none.”, 10.
24. Pavlo Kazarin, The Wild West of Eastern Europe, (Vivat, 2022), “Each country has its own mental map. Sometimes it is more important than official chronotopes... If the mental map is larger than the political one, this creates a demand to invade”, 33.
For further reference
Nasze terażniejszoszci, „Teksty Drugie”, Krakow, 2023, nr 4.
Historical Understanding: Past, Present, and Future, red. Z.B. Simon, L. Deile, Bloomsbury Academic, London 2021.
Pavlo Kazarin, The Wild West of Eastern Europe. Vivat, Kharkiv, 2022.
Tomasz Szerszeń, Być gościem w katastrofie, Czarne, Wołowiec, 2024.
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Disordered Time, IST Publishing, Kharkiv, 2019.
Mieke Bal, Heterochronotopie (Thamyris/Intersecting, 2008), 35–56.
Author
Mariia Varlygina
About the author