According to recent research in psychology, our perception of time became distorted during lockdown (see Grondin et al. 2020; Ogden 2020; Martinelli et al. 2021). For many of us there was a reduction in our daily activities during this period and time seemed to pass more slowly in the moment – there was a sense of sameness or boredom as every day felt the same. However, when we looked back over a week, a month or a year, time was perceived to pass more quickly because there were less ‘novel experiences’: we perceive a month as longer if it has more memorable events in it. ‘Familiar temporal landmarks were unavailable’ (Grondin et. al. 2020) and we weren’t making any new memories.

Unfortunately, when summarising these findings there is a tendency to conflate diverse experiences across lines of class, race, gender, sexuality and ability. The idea that time slowed down or sped up for all of us in the same way conceals the fact that many ‘front line workers’, still went to work, and likely encountered many situations that they will never forget. Nevertheless, my own experience of various remote or digital performances during the pandemic is that they have broken up the sameness of the day-to-day. These performances gifted me novel experiences; they created new memories by laying down temporal markers in my daily experience; they gave me something to do with my time (other than continually re-enacting scenes from Tangled with my 3-year-old daughter, like some perverse Groundhog Day).

While our day-to-day experience may have shifted, there is also a sense in which the futures we imagined for ourselves pre-pandemic were interrupted by the introduction of restrictions: this freelance job or that holiday, a friend’s wedding, a conference in Croatia. All of these plans evaporated. We were mourning lost futures.

This structure of being haunted by failed futures can be related to Jacques Derrida’s (2006) concept of hauntology (as a not actually present future that haunts the present). Responding to Marx’s claim that Europe is haunted by the spectre of communism, Derrida developed the term, playing on the similar sounding pronunciation in French to ontology (the nature of being). For Derrida, the logic of the ghost is a more authentic mode of being in capitalist society (thanks to Phil Smith [2021] for this summary of Derrida).

Hauntology is also a term used by Ashanti Harris when reflecting on her recent audio performance explorations. In an audio workshop that Harris created (Listening with the Body: a workshop in hauntology), she draws on Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987), and her concept of Rememory, to describe the way that the present is haunted by past events – as Harris says in her workshop, ‘time does not pass, it accumulates’. In the context of Harris’s (and Morrison’s) work this accumulation of time often revolves around the way in which histories of slavery, and its ghosts, continually haunt present constructions of body, identity, race. Or perhaps, like a ghost, they can easily disappear from the discourse if we do not continually conjure them in present narratives.

And recorded sound becomes the ideal medium to explore these haunting modes. The temporal gap between recording a sound and its moment of reception emphasises the ghostly qualities of recorded media. Voices from the past are called forth into the present, vibrating in the body of the listener.

More broadly, we might say that the last two years have foregrounded the ways that history continually interrupts the present. Suddenly we’re living through something strangely reminiscent of what previous generations might have endured during the flu pandemic of 1918. Sociologist Josep Maria Antentas has recently written on the way that the paradoxical qualities of pandemic time reveal the contradictions of global capitalism. For Antentas there is a layering of time during the pandemic in which ‘our extended and endless present has been abruptly invaded both by the past (the confinement and the virus evoke situations that we associate with the great pandemics of the past) and by the future (which suddenly appears in the form of an abyss and a catastrophe to come).’ (2020, 316) We are living through a ‘familiar unknown novelty’ where ‘the simultaneous perception of living an unknown moment and a foretold catastrophe has been coupled.’ (317)

In a similar time (and space) accumulation, in Harris’s simple breathing exercises during her audio work History Haunts the Body we become aware of our own bodies, the stories of the Guyanese women brought to Scotland through the slave trade, and the struggle for breath that links a fatal respiratory virus with the chants of Black Lives Matter protesters in the summer of 2020 – ‘I can’t breathe’.

–H.W.

List of References:

Antentas, J.M. (2020) “Notes on corona crisis and temporality”. Dialectical Anthropology 44, 315–318. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-020-09613-2

Derrida, J. (2006). Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Transl. Peggy Kamuf. London; New York, NY: Routledge.

Grondin, S., Mendoza-Duran, E. and Rioux, P-A. (2020) “Pandemic, Quarantine, and Psychological Time”. Frontiers in Psychology. 11:581036. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.581036

Martinelli, N., Gil, S., Belletier, C., Chevalère, J., Dezecache, G., Huguet, P., & Droit-Volet, S. (2021). “Time and Emotion During Lockdown and the Covid-19 Epidemic: Determinants of Our Experience of Time?” Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 616169. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.616169

Ogden, R.S. (2020) “The passage of time during the UK Covid-19 lockdown”. PLoS ONE 15(7): e0235871. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235871

Smith, P. (2021) “Hauntology & Performance” PEP Talk, University of Plymouth, 10 November 2021.