Colonization as Time Travel
Not only between countries, but across times do we intervene when we colonize as we civilize ourselves
Colonization is usually framed as these men here going out there, far away from their home, taking over another’s property, exploiting them, enslaving them for one’s own gain, to eventually cripple the colonized so deeply that even long after leaving them, they remain incapable of restoring back their health. This is true, but this not the whole truth. What it ignores is acknowledging that colonization is a factor not only of space (colonizer as country X and the colonized as country Y, with X and Y as distinct areas in space) but also, and in some ways, and sometimes even more so, a factor of time: colonizer who is advanced in maturity of its civilization (thus, forward in time, more progressed in the civilizational timeline) versus the colonized who is primitive and still in their infancy and thus, needs to be yanked out of their socio-political slumber.
It is the future (that the colonizer represents) that is colonizing over the past (a la the colonized) in order to transform the past (the primitive) into becoming (at par with) the future (the moderns). *This is the temporal logic of colonization*, which goes beyond and is what underwrites the spatial reality of colonization, that of the geographical element of countries colonizing one another.
The colonizer, by visiting the colonized country, feels like He is going back in time (tfw a New Yorker travels to the Pennsylvania Dutch Country), to an era that His society once was in — barbaric and naïve. He is a time traveler. Doing so, He is inviting/forcing the past to become the future — travelling to the civilizational future. The ridiculously vacuous dichotomy of modernity versus primitivity is all to real.
Colonizing the other who is seen to be still stuck in their infancy, as One used to be, hundreds and thousands of years ago — remains to be an act of propertizing (making proper, cleaning up, giving form) both in terms of SPACE of there those people need to be civilized by Me from here coming from my country, naming/categorizing all that they inhabit properly, and as also in TIME in terms of taking over their back-in-day way of doing things, pulling them brutes from their deeply backward (in time) ways to modern ways, forcing them to reject their past to embrace the future of progress and positivism. (The good colonizer tells himself, «I don’t want to do this, you are tearing me apart; you are making me do this as you show such great potential but fail to unlock it; for you I will take on this burden of being the bad guy, it’s tough love is all.»)
A movie where a character goes back in time with his time machine, picks up people, puts them in his time machine to bring them to their future, our present — that would be, from a temporal aspect, what colonizing amounts to. Time travel is always already political, let no body tell you otherwise… especially, as long as, the future is considered to always be better than the past, which is the hallmark of the ideology of progress key to the project of modernism. At least, when time travelling, try to drop your modernism, lest you end up colonizing the past (when going back in time) or asking the future to colonize you (when going forward in time). Even when we associate travel to the future as forward in time, and to the past as moving back, we have already fallen for the ideology of progress, the curse of colonizing might catch us if we are not too careful, never can be too careful. It is English language and we all know how the English fared in that game of colonizing.
We have recreated this time-as-progress logic in the digital sphere as well. In a web browser, the back arrow button takes us back in browsing history (toward the past) while the forward arrow button moves us forward in browser history. It seems intuitive, but why must the forward button lead to a progress in the state of the browser tab! Take for example, cultures which pictures the past as facing in front of us as we we can see our past, having lived it, while the future as being behind us since we can not see the future like our backs. If they made browsers, the browser arrow buttons would be reversed.
The self-proclaimed good colonizer proclaiming to the colonized with his evangelical mannerisms, his air of superiority, his overall vibe: «I come from the future, your future, my present. Do not worry no more, all your pains and miseries will be gone for I come with good news, you are all to be taken to the future, am doing the good deed by saving you all. The promise land is (̵i̵n̵)̵ The Future, a glorious future.»
Simultaneity is the great virtue extolled by these colonizers: nothing more important than being at the same time period in terms of where a society is in a particular mode of civilizational timeline. Geo-politically, this means that all societies must keep up and catch up to being advanced enough that no one be left behind.
Simultaneity, the colonizer’s political urge for it, makes it a problem that that the colonized is living in the past, that no one can be ignored from living not in the future, that we must all be living in and as with the same times as the colonized! Why oh why does everyone got to live simultaneously. It is not that the colonizer incorrectly perceives/conceives the colonized as to be living in the past and then somehow has a following desire to bring the past to the future, but that the wrong perception is part of the desire.
As long as we rely on a singular socio-political timeline, the moment we start looking at the world over, we will have to place all of the different societies somewhere in that time, some as the same as us, some forward, some backward in time. Then we can either pretend to accept those in the past (that pretention game known as tolerance, not actually accepting), while being envious of those in the future. With new groundbreaking inventions, we tend to think of them as allowing us to move decades ahead in time as a result. Inventions and disciplinary breakthroughs are seen as time travel, while the destruction of ideas (such as book burnings, public library destructions) are seen as putting us back in time. Politics is time travel as well, not just the other way round.
But at the same time, we do inhabit multiple timelines on a societal and political ways the world over. We are not obliged to collapse all societies into a single scale of sorts. Some societies only interoperable on a civilizational timeline, while others with some others, with huge chasms in between, with tensions in between in the realpolitik of international politics. Look at so many societies with clearly irreconcilable view of the sort of timeline they draw, some do not even draw in ways others can decipher as a timeline.
There are those as well, who make the engine of global markets run, ones who are versed in living in multiple timelines. A NYC filmmaker wants to shoot few scenes of his latest movie in the villages of India, so he finds a local filmmaker who has grown up in the villages in India but has also spent a few years in LA. That Indian filmmaker has taught himself to live in multiple timelines. Time does not just move different between NYU and this village, but it is not even the same time with a capital T, but just different notions and realities of time. Those men of the early days of English colony in India, there were these men who could sit on a table with the white man as also on the floor (as they still eat like that India) eating with his hands. The Interface guys! They do hyper time travel, moving between multiple timelines. While in the market in Europe, we find fully hard crafted carpet from Iran that took a decade to do, they still do that in those countries — what we can get from an instance of hyper time travel. Or the shirt that you are wearing, made in Bangladesh.
Underlying the colonizer’s urge (to the colonized) to embrace the good natured invitation to (leapfrog to) the future, there is a Schmittian justification at play wherein the colonized is asked/demanded/forced to sacrifice their present form of civilization at the service of the future to come. This is the logic of unlocking potentials.
This happens even outside of the classic example of colonization, with the history of white men going to Africa and Asia and all around the world, but as well within the societies of The West itself in the form of Tech Utopianism telling everyone to get on with the times, either you get plugged to the latest gadgets or you fall behind in times. Here, colonization has become internalized (within one’s own societies).
That happened at the hands of the Silicon Valley trend of long-termism: where we frame every question of development and change as that of long term effects to the point of privileging the long term at the cost of the sacrificing the current state of the world, or looking at the current state only as valuable inasmuch as it will lead to that ultimately positive outcome in the far way future. Global warming now: do not waste money at regulating the megacorps, rather in the far away future, make sure we have other planets already colonized. Wealth inequality now: Forget the scores of hungry masses, fund programs that will create the most optimum healthy food for all of humanity.
Long-termism serves great political escapes for the project of colonization turned inwards. That we have not waited long enough for that glorious future to have arrived, and in fact, we have to rather double down our efforts, ignore the present woes even more strongly, if we are to unlock the true potential, if we want that future that badly. How bad do you want, is how ruthlessly you can sacrifice the present.
The future of unlocked potentials haunts the present, and with long-termism, it even crowds out any proper acknowledgement of the past, when we so badly want the future to be glorious. We are ready to eschew our old cultures (don’t be so backward minded, follow the latest trend in hottest cities of the world). We are keen forget the past (such as revisionism) to have to repeat it (e.g., fascist revivals in the world by an act of historical revisionism; tech utopians wanting to colonize Mars, that planet holds so much promise and potential, forgetting the history of the last 400 years!!!)
For our modern minds, everything looks like a game of ‘find the hidden potential’. This is especially the mantra of successful entrepreneurs where they will tell you how they saw it before anyone could and knew how to capitalize on it. Every startup pitch is filled with slides of ‘we found the potential X before anyone else, X returns 1000X’.
To our modern eyes, a river is an object waiting to have turbines on it, a beautiful sunset is inviting us to get framed in a photo, a tasty dinner is waiting to get reviewed — nothing is what it is insofar as what it could be, will be if you fund me, let me have my way. To all the critics, they just don’t see the unlocked potential that I see, sure there are problem, but wait a few years, give me more money, you will see who will have the last laugh.
This ontology of unlocked potentials is dangerous. It is just conveniently vague so as to allow us playing this waiting game forever. If the current state is harmful or our past actions have resulted in a horrible present, frame it as that it is just that the potential has not YET been realized, be patient and keep on keeping on. It can legitimize a whole lot of bad actors. This is not to say we must reject all “unlocked potential” rhetoric, but that we must be extra vigilant when using or encountering it lest it turn into a ‘the perfect future that’s always almost about to be here making way for the continuation of a terrible present’. There is another name for such a politicized perfect future: its called «borrowed hope».
Borrowed from where? From the future of course, a place in time that no has seen, that no one can see by its very nature, thus, impossible to deny based on verifiable facts. To be able to verify any claim of unlocked potential needs the capacity to time travel to the future, and we are back to square one. In the interpersonal scope, this happens when leading someone one, what kids call breadcrumbing — is akin to creating a sense of there being a borrowed hope, that one is lending hope to someone who is living on borrowed hope.
The realpolitik of the colonizer involves teasing the colonizers with trinkets that only help in breadcrumbing the colonized — to imprison then in a never ending land of borrowed hopes, to to keep them forever stuck in a desiring loop that only always leaves one frustrated with fleeting moments of respite (a la trinkets) in between. That was when the English connected all of India with the Trains, or when the latest tech products are sold in the markets of poorer countries, thanks to the global markets. Economic breadcrumbing is all.
So-called advanced nations coming in to a poorer nation, installing their technologies, deploying them for free, selling the latest services for cheap, free Internet in the global south thanks to the benevolence of a tech behemoth from the affluent northern hemisphere, who wouldn’t want that, hard to argue against it, against growth and progress as it is sold to us.
Amounts to breadcrumbing an entire population, slowly capturing their hearts, driving their desire for a future that the colonizer has promised, keeping them forever stuck in a prison of time, a prison of (always escaping our grasp) future haunting the present, the ghost of an always already receding future, empty ghosts made out of empty promises and shiny exteriors.
Then there is the politics of fast forwarding civilizational time to (result in) the end of capitalism itself. One way to cure our crippling fear of death is to just give in and get it over it already. Why wait for the wait if somehow we can force the end to come now, if we can put the end on a time machine and make it travel back to us now as we are. This is the recipe that accelerationism’s proposes and promises.
Instead of countering the colonizing tendencies that lie at the heart of capitalism, accelerationists call to embrace the very contradictions that make capitalism tick. We must find ourselves quickly and now at the ends of our civilizational timeline, that is their bold claim: by speeding up capitalist growth and technological change to the point that capitalism will implode to result in its afterlife
All this has parallels in another society that these accelerationists love to despise: the jihadist, in their desire to fast forward time as well to the apocalypse. They want to force the end times to come sooner and sooner, so the epic battle of the faithful versus the sinners can happen once and for all, for G-d be there to judge.
Both Salafists and Accelerationists love apocalypse so dearly that they are been fighting each other as to who owns apocalypse more properly.
But deep in the accelerationist culture, there is also its own subversion. That presents itself in Mark Fisher’s theme of the slow cancellation of the future ( as part of his style of Hauntology, partly inspired by Slavoj Zizek’s and Fredric Jameson’s aphorism, «It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism»). In that so much of the popular media that has been coming out these days are rehashed ideas from the 80’s and 90’s in terms of reboot of popular movies, even music sounds remixed with samples from back in the day. As if we are stuck in a time loop. Or the popular idea of trends repeating itself every few decades is the meme of time travel of fashion politics.
That death is to be for sure waiting for us in the future is unacceptable. That future that never happened haunts us as we plan to live a long and fruitful life. We want to be immortal. If somehow we could time travel past our deaths, if we could skip it, go straight to the afterlife so there is no more death, we are immortals.
We have been promised cryogenics to keep us alive forever and humans exploring the cosmos to always have a home for each one of us. We want to upload our consciousness to the cloud, but not die in the process. We want to live forever but not the forever that religions have painted as coming post death, but a forever as am sitting on my laptop now, press a button, voila and am in the cloud, living forever. Skipping our death, time travelling straight to the afterlife!
That our entire edifice of being-civilized can all end at one time, is unthinkable, does not give itself to thought, yet we can not but obsess over over it. Obsession with ends is a strange way of bringing the farthest point in the future, the death moment of life, the event of the collapse of an artifact, relevant and present in the current one in our thinking and in our lived realities. The end state of capitalism always already haunts all of the capitalism, in a strange way, keeps it alive as it motivates us all, capitalists, to make it work even more so, keep it going in spite of its failures and follies — following the absurdist dreams of capitalism as an anti-fragile system.
This comes in the form of mechanism designers and industrial designers engaging in edge-case fantasies, designing with failure modes in the very operations of the systems, having elaborate mechanisms to handle exceptions. In the extreme cases, that pipe dream of systems that never ever perish: permanent data storage systems, autonomous self-funding mechanisms of blockchains that will always be able to keep itself alive. Tech utopianism all over again.
Maybe our infinite desire to civilizationally time travel comes from our failure at being able to physically time travel. Am sure there are some tech utopians who are working to fix that!
It is not just out there in other/uncivilized societies that we have colonized their time, but in here amongst us, the moderns. Our psychological time is varied and vague so we don’t coordinate in modern societies based on that even though its way more lived than the clock time. Rather, we be needing a time that runs like the code of tick-tock, always so precise and objective, that the clock is code is temporal law. With the hegemony of clock time, we now eat only during scheduled time, called lunch, dinner, breakfast, and not whenever we feel hungry like a savage salvaging fruits and berries in the forests. We have colonized our lives as having been structured around calendars, schedules, and project timelines.
The civilized time, the man who colonized himself in the image of the G-d the clock maker (Newton and Boyle’s Theology of Clockwork Universe), is a being who is out of time, out of tune with his own temporal horizon, he lives as if he is immortal, as if he is home having skipped thousands of years in his time travel. That image of a baby born wild, unable to feed himself, can’t use the toilet — to the education process, the responsible raising of a kid as having the effect of civilizing him to become a suit and tie wearing serious man with projects and plans. While at the same time, a savage born in an uncivilized part of the world, in the same life span, remaining a brute as he was as a baby, never growing up to learn his table manners or even use a table to eat.
Telling a kid to postpone pleasure, coz if he struggles now, studies harder, does what is being asked, he will grow up to be a great man, one has all the fruits of life. That is a call to sacrifice the pleasure that presents itself in exchange of a future where life be great — time travel argument at work.
It’s as if the modern man is a man who gets to speed up time, travel thousands of years ahead of his savage peers. Growing up in modernity is travelling time. The kinds of stories, the depth of lies we have to invent to face ourselves in the mirror, scapegoating entire masses of wonderfully strange and brilliant people with foreign cultures.
The Psycho-politics of time travel, its libidinal economies in action: stuck in a desiring loop, a vicious cycle, eats you up from the inside, an entire population gone, drugged by the future, haunted by what keeps returning from the past every time we accidentally glance at the savage in the mirror, the ghost of the savage making itself felt in the middle of a seven course meal.
[H]aunting is historical, to be sure, but is not dated, it is never docilely given a date in the chain of presents, day after day, according to the instituted order of a calendar. Untimely, it does not come to, it does not happen to, it does not befall, one day, Europe, as if the latter, at a certain moment of its history, had begun to suffer from a certain evil, to let itself be inhabited in its inside, that is, haunted by a foreign guest. Not that the guest is any less a stranger for having always occupied the domesticity of Europe. But there was no inside, there was nothing inside before it. The ghostly would displace itself like the movement of this history. Haunting would mark the very existence of Europe. It would open the space and the relation to self of what is called by this name, at least since the Middle Ages.
But what does on between generations? […] In “La crise de l’esprit” (“The Crisis of Spirit”, 1919: “As for civilizations, we know we are mortal…”)
— Jacques Derrida, Specters of MarxFarewell, phantoms! The world no longer has need of you. Nor of me. The world which calls its tendency to fatal precision by the name of progress seeks to unite the advantages of death with the benefits of life.
— Paul Valery, La Crise de l’esprit [What is to Become of the European Spirit?], Variété I, Letters, 1919
