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THE NUN’S GIRDLE

On our way a glorious rainbow appeared before us, and the demarch told us how the peasants of Anaphi know how to foretell the crops by the colours of the rainbow. If red prevails in it the crop of grapes will be abundant; if green, that of the olive; if yellow, that of corn. ‘A rainbow in the morning,’ he added, ‘ denotes luck, evening, woe; ‘ so we felt today that the omen was in our favour. ‘The nun’s girdle’ as they call the rainbow in these parts, strongly recalls the ancient myth about the virgin goddess Iris, and the idea that God sends it to show where a treasure is buried reminds one of the belief that Iris was Jove’s messenger from heaven to earth. (James Theodore Bent, The Cyclades, 1885, Longmans, Green, and co., London, p. 9.)

RECLAIMING TIME

What establishes the durability of domination but also what is common in the time of “master narratives” and to those who claim to have abolished them, is a division within time itself. For time is not simply the tense line between the past and the future, a line that can be loaded with promises or brought back to its nakedness. It is also a hierarchical distribution of life forms. 

The hierarchy of times, which is the basis of the rationality of human action, corresponds to a hierarchy of places which separates two categories of human beings. There are those who live in the time of events that can happen, the time of action and its ends, which is also the time of knowledge and leisure … And there are those who live in the time of things that happen one after another, the shrunken and repetitive time of those who are called passive or mechanical people, because they live in the universe of simple means without having a share of the ends of the action nor of the end in itself of leisure. The rationality of the horizontal course of time rests on a vertical hierarchy that separates two forms of life, two ways of being in time, one could simply say: the way of those who have the time and the way of those who do not. […] This is why emancipation is first and foremost a reconquest of time, another way of inhabiting it. […] Reclaiming time is then transforming this succession of hours where nothing must ever happen in a time marked by a multitude of events. […]

There are interruptions of the normal course of hours and activities, […] there is the time of the assembly which symbolizes an alternative community and the time dedicated to the organization of a daily life both ordinary and settled in a space-time of secession. And there is the effort to install over time these moments of reconstruction of a communal form of life within the experiences of production, exchange, circulation of information, transmission of knowledge and dispensation of care that weave networks of solidarity inside the conflict of the present which is also the anticipation of a form of life yet to come, a form of communal life free from the hierarchy of times and capacities. (Jacques Rancière, Les temps modernes, La fabrique, Paris, 2018, p. 13-47. Informal translation by Iordanis Kerenidis.)

HELLÉ & HORNY 

Greece – The War Council sentenced the typist Hellé Rodochanakis to five years in prison and five years of deportation on the island of Anafi, for espionage. She was also fined 30,000 drachmas. The Finnish citizen Horny was sentenced to seven years of imprisonment and was fined 90,000 drachmas. (Le Temps, 16 March 1938, p. 2.)

AS AN ARTIST EVEN MORE THAN AS AN ARCHAEOLOGIST 

I accepted to present this book to the public because it is a thesis presented to the École du Louvre and because it seems to me necessary to explain the rather particular character of this work, a little different from what one usually seeks in an archeology memoir. This thesis was composed and written by an artist. I had proposed the subject to Mr. Morin-Jean, who had been following my course for several years, because for a long time I saw an opportunity to add a fine chapter to the history of ancient art. But it was him who convinced me and executed the plan and drew from it something other than a scientific monograph, such as it had been made, for example, by one of our pupils who had graduated from the École Normale and candidate at the School of Athens. The author has observed and written as an artist even more than as an archaeologist and scholar, although his earlier work has given us proof that he is well prepared for studies of proper science. But this is due in particular to the excellent draftsman and copyist of Greek vases that Mr. Morin wanted to be in this circumstance. […]  However, it is useless to dwell on the description of these island geometric potteries. They are almost always decorated with birds of a more or less ordinary character. This style is prolonged until a rather low time and resulted in late products very neglected where the birds and the fish become barely recognizable. Let us leave aside these island ceramics and let us immediately go to the Cypriot vases. (Jean Morin, Le dessin des animaux en Grèce d’après les vases peints (Essai sur les procédés des dessinateurs industriels dans l’antiquité), Henri Laurens Éditeur, Paris, 1911, p. 1-21.)

SPACE TIME MATTER

What is at issue is not merely that the forms of the causal relations are changed, but the very notions of causality, agency, space, time, and matter are all reworked. For example, agency – rather than being thought in opposition to structures as forms of subjective intentionality and the potential of individual action – is about possibilities for changing the configurations of spacetimematter relations. (…)

Space, time, and matter are intra-actively produced in the ongoing differential articulation of the world. Time is not a succession of evenly spaced intervals available as a referent for all bodies and space is not a collection of preexisting points set out as a container for matter to inhabit. Intra-actions are non-arbitrary nondeterministic causal enactments through which matter-in-the-process-of-becoming is iteratively enfolded into its ongoing differential materialization; such a dynamics is not marked by an exterior parameter called time, nor does it take place in a container called space, but rather iterative intra-actions are the dynamics through which temporality and spatiality are produced and iteratively reconfigured in the materialization of phenomena and the (re)making of material-discursive boundaries and their constitutive exclusions. (…)

The topological dynamics of space, time, and matter are an agential matter and as such require an ethics of knowing and being: intra-actions have the potential to do more than participate in the constitution of the geometries of power; they open up possibilities of changes in its topology and dynamics, and as such, interventions in the manifold possibilities made available reconfigure both what will be and what will be possible. The space of possibilities does not represent a fixed event horizon within which social location of knowers can be mapped, nor does it represent a homogeneous, fixed, uniform container of choices. Rather, the dynamics of the spacetime manifold are iteratively reworked through the inexhaustible liveliness of the manifold’s material configuration, that is, the ongoing dance of agency immanent in its material configuration. The politics of identity and the politics of location, however useful, have been circumscribed by a geometrical conception of power that arrests and flattens important features of its dynamics. Perhaps what is needed is a politics of possibilities: ways of responsibly imagining and intervening in the configurations of power, that is intra-actively reconfiguring spacetimematter. (Karen Barad, Meeting the universe halfway, Duke University Press, London 2007, p. 223-246.)

May 2019