Chaired by Trym Rødvik
Henriette Rørdal: “Hey, What Do You Think’s Going to Happen to Us Now?” Temporal Stagnation and Working-Class Identity in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Raymond Carver’s “Preservation”
Capitalism’s constant call to live in the present expels notions of a mediated past or envisioned future. Our retreat to the “here and now” results in a sense of near timelessness. Through the aesthetic imaginaries of John Steinbeck’s, The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and Raymond Carver’s, “Preservation” (1983), this paper considers how the shift from linear time to timelessness has impacted the American working-class identity. Afflicted by the new temporal paradigm is, among many other things, the way we work – members across professional spheres find themselves the victim of increasingly temporary, fragmented, and makeshift positions. For the working classes, this shift has been particularly severe, as work no longer provides the temporal stability and horizon that once girded working-class identities. Steinbeck’s Wrath follows the Joads, a poor working-class family who, like many other tenant farmers, have their crops fail due to a series of dust-storms ravaging the countryside. When the plots no longer turn out a profit, the landowners see no need for the tenants. But for all the Joads have lost, they know who they are. Although faced with impossible injustice, they are part of a working-class community. As for the way forward, the Joads knowing who they are also know what they must do. Like their neighbors, they will continue working the land, setting out for California to do so. 40 years later, Carver’s “Preservation” explores how neoliberal temporalities change the prospects blue collar Sandy and her unnamed husband. Returning from work one day, the husband announces he has been “canned,” and as the narrative unfolds, the statement proves not only factual, but a metaphoric echo of the story’s title. Unable to do anything, the husband grows increasingly lethargic, it is as if he has been canned in the literal sense of the word, stuck in a jar like a pickle or readymade soup. Without a sense of community or belonging, and now without financial security, the husband’s unemployment pushes the family into a limbolike status of insecurity. In Wrath, loosing work did not mean losing oneself, nor did it mean losing direction. In fact, the migration toward California becomes a metaphor of mass movement toward the hope of a better future. The young couple in “Preservation,” however, find themselves stuck in an in-between, moving neither backward nor forward. The space of temporal opportunity has for Sandy and her husband become impossibly snug, like the sides of a tin can.
Bio: Henriette Rørdal is currently a PhD candidate in American literature at the University of Bergen. Her thesis has the working title: “How Times Have Changed for the White Working Class: Temporal Depictions in American Culture”. The project explores how capitalism is impacting our conceptions of time and time’s passage. In particular, she sees the impact of presentism as a crucial part of white working class-disillusionment. As labor shifts from a longsighted foundation of everyday life into a series of brief, episodic, and sporadic activities, the white working class is losing its sense of identity and belonging. The project reads the short fiction of Bobbie Ann Mason and Raymond Carver together with a selection of contemporary films. Her work is the result of a longstanding interest in Marxism, ordinary language philosophy, and new approaches to literary critique.
Katharina Wuropulos: Doings in times of violence and crisis: when different understandings of time collide
From phenomena of violence and crisis that are bodily experienced, we can learn about the multiversity of time and its relationship with pain and suffering. Wars, crises, and conflict define how time is imagined and enacted. "Before the war started", "after the war", and "during the war", are important timely categorizations in which people who (have) live(d) through violent times differentiate their experiences.
Psycho-social research shows that although context-dependent social groups do in fact experience time during violence in generalizable specific manners. They can have vivid memories of starting points of violence, and if violence is bodily endured, that experience can change how time (flows) during the violent situation is (are) experienced.
My ethnographic research with people in Europe who are in contact with refugees shows how different understandings of time collide and how international and local organisations and institutions colonialise the time of refugees under the guise of managing, organizing, and helping them. Interestingly, refugees who experience themselves as capable of doings fare better than those subjected to waiting. Those people who are involved in organising their time however, often do not have an understanding for how this practice inflicts suffering. Also, in these so-called contact zones international and local organisations and institutions create urgency for specific refugee groups only. In this paper I make the argument that by looking at bodily experienced violence and people's differentiations of time during flight, war, crises, and conflict, we learn much about the importance of the multiversity of time. The multiversity of time is important because when the diversity of lived experience of time is acknowledged, it can contribute to the soothing of suffering.
Bio: Katharina Maria Wuropulos: I am postdoc researcher in sociology at Helmut-Schmidt University Hamburg, Germany. My interests lie in ethnography, STS, sociology of violence, the globalisation of violent conflicts, social theory and postcolonial theory, as well as sociology of social problems, social problematisations, and their so-called solutions. I currently engage in the research project “Solidarity through Security? Discourses, Interactions and Practices of European Solidarity in the Field of Security." For this I research an empirical field that is particularly marked by conflicts between ideals of European solidarity and togetherness on the one hand, and European security interests on the other: places of first arrival in Europe for refugees. In 2022 I thus conducted ethnographic research at Europe’s topographical periphery at the Moldovan-Ukrainian border, in Chisinau, Moldova, and in rural Romania, as well as in Athens, on Lesvos, and Chios, Greece. Before my research position at HSU, I was a researcher at Bundeswehr University München and Augsburg University. For the duration of the PhD, I was a fellow at the Research School on Peace and Conflict at the Peace Research Institute Oslo.
Aleksandra Bartoszko: The time is always now: Philosophies of the present and future imaginaries in opioid substitution treatment in Norway
In Norway, Patients in opioid substitution treatment (OST) are assigned a specific treatment modality based on their risk profile, with a primary focus on overdose prevention. Medications such as methadone, buprenorphine, buprenorphine–naloxone, and occasionally morphine may be administrated. Patients who are not satisfied with their assigned treatment must negotiate with OST staff to switch treatment modalities. These negotiations reveal inherent paradoxes of the treatment program, particularly with regard to the construction of a meaningful future, which challenges the logic of overdose prevention in OST.
The development of survival logic draws heavily from the logic of risk prevention and management. Public discourse, researchers, clinicians, and industrial actors assume responsibility for imagining possible futures and engage collectively in the construction of possible scenarios to reduce error. Disciplines like science and institutionalized medicine aim to predict and thereby control the future by constantly defining (and redefining), categorizing, and monitoring “risk factors,” “risk groups,” and “risk behaviors”. Minimizing risk, especially the risk of harm and death, and thus prolonging patient’s lifetime, is fundamental to the clinical understanding of sound treatment and prudent reasoning. Therefore, the rationale behind use of “safer” medicines in OST is to reduce the risk of an anticipated bad outcome, possible overdose. However, these outcomes refer to an imagined future with the parameters of risk defined by decontextualized clinical studies on opioids, disregarding other constructions of time.
As present-oriented patients negotiate with the OST program, a future-oriented institution, they contrast living with survival, drawing a meaningful boundary between these two modes of life and times. To patients, life is more than just the number of years survived. Here lies the undervalued paradox of a human being’s construction of a meaningful future. Some patients are willing to risk a shortened life precisely because they appreciate the present time and value it higher than the imagined future. Patients’ dreams of peaceful disengagement from life and the idea of a limited future deserve analytical attention because these dreams influence patients’ choices and the meanings they attach to medications and treatment. Patients’ philosophies about the present illuminate the “life risks” they are willing to take. Therefore, patients’ various engagements with time, the abstract future, and the experienced present are central points of inquiry in this paper.
Bio: Aleksandra Bartoszko is a social anthropologist, professor and Vice-Dean of Research at the Faculty of Social Studies at VID Specialized University, Oslo. She has researched and published on addiction, legality, risk, disability, activism, and social policy, with ethnographic fieldworks in Nicaragua and Norway. Her works appeared in journals such as Contemporary Drug Problems, Nordic Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, Health Promotion Practice, and Journal of Legal Anthropology. Her recent monograph is titled Treating Heroin Addiction in Norway: The Pharmaceutical Other (Routledge). She has developed a graphic ethnography as genre and published, among others, an ethnographic graphic novel The Virus on injecting drug use and hepatitis C. She is deputy editor of Journal of Extreme Anthropology and co-leader of a research group HUMANHARM (Human Rights and Social Harms). Currently, she is leading a research project “Human Rights in Opioid Substitution Treatment”.