Globeness: Time and the Embodied, Biological Consequences of Globalization

Abstract

The objects of time associated with modernity channel thought toward a distinctive temporality and the following features: uniform, homogeneous, and empty time; a combination of the cognitive processes of measuring duration with determining moments in time; and a mediation by the artifacts that hides the separation of temporal algorithms from environmental cycles. Whereas the previous chapter explored social polyrhythmias and arrhythmias, this chapter looks at how the logic embedded in clocks and calendars gets embodied and creates physiological arrhythmias. This is a consequence of how the objects of time encourage a conceptual reshaping of the globe and a reimagining of the body and its cycles in this age of globalization.

The flattening of space defies Einsteinian curvature or quantum expansion but reflects the triumph of a populist and mechanical vocabulary of progress. Travel around the so-called village of the globe is made easy, swift and accommodating. Yet there lingers an unspoken apprehension of an incalculable price to be paid in pollution, in the extinction of species, and in other elemental implosive cycles which leave their shadow upon the psyche of nature.

—Wilson Harris (1999, 62)