Something New is Always Coming in on the Tide

Edouard Taufenbach. 

 

'Le Bleu du Ciel', 2020

From Jenny Odell's "Saving Time"

Echoing Ehrenreich s observations about the smoothly functioning machine, the activist and wheelchair user Parry Berne muses that the idea of human enhancement holds out the promise of always being "better than well," an ideal whose appeal she acknowledges. Anyone who is tired at the end of a workday, she says, could understandably think, "I want to be better than well. I'm tired... I want to be excellent all the time." But Berne finds this idea to be, in a way, lifeless. Her conclusion is cut in over footage [in the documentary FIXED: The Science/Fiction of Human Enhancement) of her and another friend in a wheelchair riding through her neighborhood, going fast for the fun of it. "It's actually okay to be on a spectrum of reality. It means that there are times when it's juicier, there are times when it's drier, there's times when I'm gonna be tired, there's times when I'm going to have a lot of energy. It's actually part of being alive. It is being alive."

   It's worth pausing here to note how different Berne's notion of "being alive" is from the cultural view that [Sara] Hendren diagnoses, where being recognizably "alive" means producing and where producing means exhibiting a certain mastery of time. Berne's "being alive" is closer to the moral of that story about the thread, where the boy is supposed to learn that patterns of good times and bad times actually comprise the experience of life itself. To try to reduce the rich topography of experience to a means of maximal output is part of the same philosophy that would turn its back on the ocean or to one's inner landscape, where something new is always coming in on the tide.

   Crip time abandons the rhetoric of mastery not only with regard to daily schedules and career tracks, but also to the future in general.  235