Ghost in the Wire

For me, 2005 goes down as probably the best year of my life. In terms of family, which is to me the most fundamental ground of my existence, I got engaged to a woman I love more than oxygen, experienced the creation, genesis, and birth of my beautiful baby daughter (who, having now turned two months old, has recently started sleeping in four hour chunks! I pray it continues), grew closer with my parents and sister, and even managed to referee three cats and one dog, eventually crafting them into a fully functional animal family. Professionally, I've had better years, but I'm relatively pleased on that front as well. Hell, even this blog, which I never thought would develop into much more than a space for me to think through type, has developed an audience beyond my expectations (even Jay Rosen stopped by to say he liked the place - not bad at all). All in all, 2006 has some stiff competition from its predecessor.

That being said, and having read Jodi Dean's reflective post about our chosen profession, I do find that the New Year often provides a space for melancholic reflection, sort of a sustained engagement with the temporal nature of existence and the irrevocability of the passage of time. Sure there's the usual New Year resolutions: be good, be fit, be happy, etc. For me, I always give up a food or two (last year was ketchup, this year gelatin and non-dark chocolate). But there's also that sort of existential angst, that anxiety over one's choices, sometimes choices in the future, sometimes in the past. It's often a productive anxiety, sometimes a destructive one, but its presence is somewhat of a New Year constant. Or at least I hope it is. If there's one thing I really, really enjoy about being an academic, it's that I am encouraged to be reflective, to think about the world around me and my place within it. I try to encourage my students to do the same. Sometimes I succeed, but sometimes not--usually not I suppose--but I try, and I like trying. Cultivating a sense of critical reflection can be pretty damn difficult, or at least a tough sell to those who just want a degree so they can start making money. Between normal, "real world" careers and the exigencies of daily living, time for reflection can be difficult for folks to procure, and often the plenitude and platitudes of Americana actively work to discourage reflection. I'm always saddened by this, even if I know that it's inevitable to some extent. Heidegger described human beings as uncanny, as possessing an Unheimlichkeit, an uncanniness, or more literally a sense of not-being-at-home. The danger, he noted, was not that humans would or wouldn't find their home, but rather that they would lose their sense of not being there, and so stop searching, when it was the search that really mattered. I've always been rather taken with that concern.

This of course leads up to the other subject of this post, the mysterious extra second. If you haven't been following the controversy, and are unaware that the cosmic order is playing dangerously fast and loose with the mechanical mapping of time by which we understand the universe, let me give you a very quick primer. Earth is just not keeping pace with our measurement of it, and so it needed an extra second this year, just one little second, so our cesium-tickers could once more correctly align with the Earth's geological clock. This "leap second," the first in seven years, is a bit controversial because, well, it raises thorny philosophical issues about the nature of technology and its role in imposing a temporal picture of the world upon the world itself. Alright, that's not exactly the controversy - it's actually that it's hard to adjust for leap seconds because they're only added when needed, the Earth is continuing to slow, which means there might be two leap seconds per year at some point, and the whole thing is just annoyingly inconvenient - but I think there are thorny philosophical issues here, and we'll just assume that they subsume the rest of the debate.

Now, having just referenced some Heidegger, you might expect that I'd be against this whole extra second thing. But you'd be wrong. I'm for it, precisely because that extra second affords me some extra time for reflection, for thinking academic-like. It's not a lot of time, but hey, in a hectic world, we need all the room for reflection we can get. That, and I'm being serious here, I actually appreciate that such a temporal anamoly - the artificial insertion of a leap second, based on perceptions of necessity - actually does a fantastic job of highlighting how perfectly malleable is our sense of time and of timing, and how it is that so-called vulgar time operates by means of an almost constant struggle, or at least a constant perseverence and policing, without which day would be night and night would be day, dogs and cats would frolic together, and Ming the Merciless would begin his bloody reign. These sort of disconnects, in which the real world tricks the mechanical world, seducing it into following its rhythms even as the mechanical world thinks it's more accurately mapping the contours of the Real, remind us that even in the world around us, the world we take so very much for granted, we are never really at home, never truly comfortable, and never free of the need for reflection. So Happy New Year, and Happy Extra Second. I hope we all put both to good use.