On Critical Times: Return, Repetition, and the Uncanny Present

Abstract

This article posits that the vernacular understanding of crisis as existing in a different sort of time needs to be mined for what it tells us about social perceptions of temporality. Using three ethnographic examples from Cyprus, I ask here what temporal features we may identify that lead our interlocutors to see certain periods as “times of crisis”. In particular, I propose a notion that I call the uncanny present to refer to a particular sense of present-ness produced by futures that cannot be anticipated. Crisis, I claim, becomes such precisely because it brings the present into consciousness, creating an awareness or perception of present-ness that we do not normally have.

Keywords:

• Crisis
• Temporality
• Cyprus

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

[1] One reader of this article commented that I may wish to engage in a discussion of affect in relation to time. Here, for instance, one could certainly speak of a temporal affect of “stuckness”, a sense of the sluggishness of time. However, I find the language of affect too often confuses description with explanation, and treats experience as theory. What would it mean to say that time felt sluggish? In order to answer the question, I would first have to understand what it means to “feel” time. Do we mean to feel time's passage, or failure to pass? What would it mean for time not to pass, in any case? Or do we attribute to time some presence outside ourselves that we then feel? These questions should give some idea as to why I find affect to be an imprecise and unhelpful way to try to understand the experience of time, which I explore here as a type of disposition.

[2] For such an analysis, see Akgün et al. (2005), Bryant (2004), Stavrinides (2009), and Taki (2009).

[3] Makarios describes this escape in detail for director Michael Cacoyannis in his documentary about the division, Atilla ’74 (Cacoyannis 1974).

[4] I would note that this repetition of the past appeared to repeat itself with the 2015 Greek referendum on the Troika's bailout conditions, when again newspapers and commentators portrayed Greeks’ “oxi” vote as a “heroic” stance against oppression. In both cases, the “heroic no” failed to bring the future that was intended. Greek Cypriot centrist and leftist politicians tended to portray their own “no” as a vote intended to open the way for further negotiations that would result in a plan with better, more acceptable conditions. More than a decade on, all negotiations have provided fewer concessions to Greek Cypriots than the 2004 plan. And in Greece, of course, the “heroic no” was undermined only a week later when Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras signed the Troika plan anyway.

[5] http://www.financialmirror.com/news-details.php?nid=30803.

[6] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2300888/Cyprus-bailout-crisis-British-ex-pat-familys-dream-building-home-crushed.html#ixzz3PGC32JFa.