Chronopolitics and race, rag-time and symphonic time in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

African American Review, Fall, 2006 by Bruce Barnhart

The abolition of time and particularity enacted in the symphony depends, ultimately, on a manipulation of volume that can only be described as the presentation of a force that is both overwhelming and undifferentiatedly ideal at the same time. Adorno describes this force in the following terms: "The power of a symphony to 'absorb' its parts into the organized whole, depends, in part, upon the sound volume" (118). According to Adorno, to achieve the proper symphonic experience, and concomitant suppression of time, the range of volume presented to the listener must vary not only from soft to loud, but from "Nothing to All" (123). Expressing as it does a vastness beyond that which individuals can imagine themselves producing, the massed sound of the symphony delivers the listener into a sublime transcendent space overwhelming enough to separate those who enter it from their private experience. (18)

What Adorno describes here is the aesthetic analog to Michael Hanchard's central insight in "Afro-Modernity: Temporality, Politics and the African Diaspora": that time is determined by power and by power differentials. Following Fabian, Hanchard explicitly links time to the relations of power and the mechanisms that distribute power unequally within any particular society, alerting us to "the distinct temporal modalities that relations of dominance and subordination produce" (253). Hanchard is speaking specifically of racial time, as am I, but the implication of his critique is that all time is a function of force and power, an implication that, when combined with Zora Neale Hurston's dictum "Discord is more natural than accord" (305), leads us to expect that time will necessarily be replete with surges, ebbs, rushes, lapses, and eddies. To expect otherwise is to fall prey to the idealistic illusion that time is transcendental and, thus, motionless in its total detachment from any tangible object that might move "through," "with," or "in" time, all metaphors obscuring the fact that time is an abstraction determined by, as well as determining, movement. Primarily a technique of social coordination, time, when detached from social experience, reduces itself to the same sterile principle of self-consistency that threatens to engulf a rationality conceived of as the mere satisfaction "of certain axioms of formal coherence" (Aglietta 14). A clock is valued not because it tells us anything about the outside world (as does a clock that beats more slowly when it is damp outside might), but because it is consistent with itself, methodically beating out the same interval that it beat out yesterday and will beat out tomorrow. Faulkner's assertion that "time is dead as long as it is being checked off by little wheels" is part of a nostalgic romanticization of the past, but it is still correct about the inadequacy of a mechanical time imagined as independent of the society that produces it (185).

Thinking of time as detached and regular is a kind of illusion, but it is an illusion whose pervasiveness, or even necessity, accurately expresses the overwhelming forces that go into producing it. A time that surges and ebbs is the function of a give and take between different configurations of force, but a time that is both transcendental and absolutely regular can be engendered only by a concentration of force so overwhelming that any individual force that confronts it is rendered virtually inconsequential. This inconsequentiality is why the abolition of time that the symphony strives to deliver is dependent on the ability to generate a range of volume far exceeding that which an individual can possibly produce. The sound volume of the symphony surrounds and engulfs listeners, removing them from a position in which any response other than awed submission is possible and drawing them into an imaginary and bodiless "symphonic space" free from contingency and the friction of contesting forces. The symphony asserts the opposite of Hurston's dictum that "Discord is more natural than accord," by presenting a puissant auditory vision of force naturalized as necessity and by inviting each listener to set aside her or his individual experience in order to join in the timeless but forward march of symphonic progression.