2023-12-11 22:47:50
The decisive sentence is pretty far back in this not at all narrow and not at all modest second lifestyle criticism by the Californian all-round artist Jenny Odell. Every piece of writing, it is lightly said, is a “time capsule”. The author cannot really know what happens in the time between “her writing” and “my reading” (i.e. the reader reading).
This is – after all, we all have our private temporality – almost irritatingly general, so you can never be wrong with this statement. Even after reading a book that aims to help us understand how we “find time. “Beyond the scheduled life,” Odell strengthens your culturally critical reflexes with gentle wisdom. However, they neither catapult you from your own timeline nor from the arithmetic of neoliberalism. And of course this is, first and foremost, a time corset for modern people shaped by the pursuit of profit.
Human surveyors like Francis Galton (“Hereditary Genius,” 1869) or work theorists like Frederick Winslow Taylor (“The Principles of Scientific Management,” 1911) eagerly designed around him. Time is, above all, money. Those who have time usually have money and vice versa. If you don’t have money, you don’t have your time, because you have to spend all your available time finding money for time from those who have time, i.e. money, and so on and so forth.
The computer chip has not made us freer
In order to prove this theory, which is anything but new, Jenny Odell takes a lot of time herself. We too have to take it to take part in this stumbling “search for lost time”. And this, as it becomes clear in the abrupt introduction, does not progress linearly, which is the fundamental evil of our culture of inequality, but in clusters. These time clusters are formed solely by the author’s diverse interests (classics, colonialism, postcolonialism, puritanism, pandemics, platform capitalism, feminism and climate change) and correspondingly disparate reading material (from the American technology critic Lewis Mumford to the German deceleration sociologist Hartmut Rosa).
Jenny Odell: “Finding time”. Beyond the scheduled life. : Image: CH Beck Verlag
Odell piles research report on research report, investigative research on investigative research, and his own view on his own view, so that all the church tower clocks chime at the same time – so loudly that the reader sometimes has to cover her ears in order to hear the sound of at least one bell.
Which is why Jenny Odell gives us reading children a break every now and then in which she ponders the moss on her kitchen window sill or the rare birds of the Bay Area, where the author grew up and still lives today. A retarding moment in a book that moves quickly through cultural history and criticizes capitalism without, of course, gaining any particularly specific insights.
Because who wouldn’t agree if a time management book from the 1990s said: “The computer chip hasn’t made us any more free. He forced us to produce at his own pace.” It’s always the bossa nova’s fault anyway. In other words: the forward-pushing pleasure principle that underlies every consumer promise. That was the insight of Odell’s bestseller “Do Nothing,” a kind of refusal guide in the digital age.
Real reflection on the nature of time
The central question that Odell is now pursuing in a mixture of memoir and master’s thesis is as follows: “Who buys whose time? Whose time is worth how much? Whose schedule should adapt to others, and whose time is considered available?” It takes a while to answer all of this, especially since it has become a new non-fiction fashion to have to say as little as possible yourself, i.e. the researchers, authors, To quote contemporary witnesses in detail and to compile what they captured, mixed with anecdotes from their own lives. This in no way detracts from the work of the keyword contributors. But it also never devotes the appropriate amount of time to them that would be needed to do justice to, for example, the phenomenon of Taylorism or the invention of standard time in the age of the railway. Jenny Odell’s wordy division of the world into “timekeepers” and “timekeepers” leaves one somewhat distracted.
Marianna Lieder Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 29 Anna Vollmer Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 10 Tobias Rüther Published/Updated: Recommendations: 2
At this point the reviewer recommends the short text by Luise Meier, an East Berliner born in 1985. On the bicentenary of Karl Marx’s birth, she published an essay with analytical sharpness, knowledge of sources and autobiographical punch. That was five years ago, but what remains unforgotten is how Meier in “MRX Machine” advised the then relatively new Lieferando precariat to use class struggle rhetoric.
The further the individualization of the social question advances, the less time we have to define ourselves as a group, the less chance we have of ever rebelling against the “myth of equal hours” (Odell). “I believe that real thinking about the nature of time, detached from its everyday capitalist manifestation, shows that neither our lives nor the life of the planet is a foregone conclusion,” writes Jenny Odell, without realizing that the real work of thinking is only now taking place begins.
Jenny Odell: “Finding time”. Beyond the scheduled life. Translated from English by Annabel Zettel. C. H. Beck Verlag, Munich 2023. 440 pages, illustrations, hardcover, €28.
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