KEEPING CASUAL
TIME TOGETHER
-in close collaboration with Leticia Robles-Moreno, April 2018.
[Carolee Schneeman – MoMA PS1 – March 2018]
“The time that passes, interrupts or connects
(and which has no doubt never been thought) is not programmed time.”
–Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1984, 203)
How can our (a couple’s?) shared acknowledgement of unprogrammed time—“casual time,” per de Certeau’s own designation—allow us to think about such temporal brackets? More specifically, what does the mutual engagement in casual time reveal about production as the measure of time in our technocratic moment, and what possibilities manifest when the limits to production and productivity are thus inevitably exposed?
To delve into these questions, we start this co-written essay where de Certeau concludes his seminal text on the practical modes of subversive sense-making in everyday existences imbued with institutional codes and norms for consumptive behavior and productive functionality. With his final subtitle, “Casual time,” de Certeau nods to the actual discourse of the practices of the city as narrations which unfold in unforeseen time. As friends and more, our concern is for everyday practices of friendship and chosen kinship that almost always play out in casual time, and can even turn programmed time into stolen time: time that sounds off as lazy and leisurely as it passes, interrupts or connects. We explore the dynamic nature of casual time as it gets tangled up with the tempos of mediated and unmediated communication—a text interrupts, an air kiss connects, a coffee run passes time—to make the case for the imperative to keep casual time together. Our own imperative: a response against the oppressiveness of being "productive," i.e., transforming time into capital for others. And an effort to reclaim our own time, which is not only our casual time, but also that time that is constantly being taken away from us, as Rep. Maxine Waters's "reclaiming my time" and intersectional feminisms remind us. Keeping casual time together—sharing it between us but also keeping such accidental time intact—is itself an intimate practice in how our two-by-two friendships can sustain us as we sustain another: precarious, indeterminate time.
FALL: PERFORMING FICTION with Noelle Serafino, October 2010.
part I — FALL: a text and movement collaboration
part II — FALL: neurotic verses à la reverie
