Alterity and Temporality

• In Event: Us and Them: Sociotechnologies of Alterity/Otherness

Abstract

According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock we’re now back at 2 minutes to midnight, the closest the clock has ever been to the time of the apocalypse. What does it mean to return to this time after so much time has lapsed? If nuclearity in its disorienting effects interrupts pre-Cold War confidence in determinate temporal and spatial orientation, as Joe Masco brilliantly details in Nuclear Borderlands, have clocks not run their course of usefulness, perhaps most poignantly symbolized by the permanent inscription of 8:15 melted into the faces of clocks and watches by the bombing of Hiroshima? Given that quantum physics was instrumental in producing the bomb, this paper takes up the question of whether militarism, racism, imperialism, and colonialism can be located inside the very terms of the theory, and whether there also exists possibilities for imagining their undoings, not by some reversal of/in time, but rather the dis/orienting effects of temporal un/doings.

Author

• Karen Barad, University Of California At Santa Cruz