Episodio 5 Tiempos que no caben en un reloj

·21 min·2 clips

Bolivian sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui's concept of 'lo ch'ixi' rejects synthesis, proposing that multiple temporalities coexist in creative tension.

1. CLACSO Radio presents a deep-dive analysis of a conference paper titled 'Las disputas por el futuro: presentismo, aceleración del tiempo y temporalidades otras' by René Ramírez Gallegos and Guadalupe Valencia García. 2. Two unnamed hosts conduct the analysis in a conversational format, explicitly noting they are reporting the authors' arguments without endorsing or rejecting their decolonial and Marxist theoretical frameworks. 3. The episode's organising question is: if modernity promised a future of progress, why does contemporary life feel like running on a treadmill that keeps accelerating without arriving anywhere? 4. The hosts introduce Francis Fukuyama's 'end of history' thesis (early 1990s) as the moment when the future was cancelled as a space of construction and hope, leaving society trapped in a permanent present. 5. François Hartog's concept of 'presentism' is introduced: a condition of living under the tyranny of the absolute present, in which the past loses its value as a source of wisdom and the future becomes—in the paper's words—'a repository of uncertainties and fears.' 6. Hartmut Rosa's 'contraction of the present' describes how the window of stable experience narrows as social acceleration increases, a dynamic the hosts connect to the perpetual urgency of digital life—emails at 8pm on a Friday, social media feeds that never stop. 7. Manuel Castells' 'timeless time' extends this: in the network society, traditional time sequences disintegrate before the immediate simultaneity of networks, creating the illusion that everything happens at once, everywhere. 8. Rosa's concept of resonance is briefly introduced as a proposed antidote: re-synchronising with the world through harmonic vibration rather than accelerated extraction. 9. Against this Western diagnosis, the paper argues that Latin America functions as a 'living laboratory of resistance' where multiple competing times coexist rather than a single clock dictating the rhythm. 10. The central conceptual tool introduced is Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui's ch'ixi: where Western dialectics blend opposing elements into a new synthesis (illustrated via a smoothie blender), ch'ixi insists that indigenous, colonial, modern, and globalised temporalities in the region coexist in permanent, creative tension without merging. 11. The paper describes Latin American time as 'el mientras tanto, el gerundio'—a present-participle time in which existing amid contradictions has more weight than advancing toward a distant goal. 12. Bolívar Echeverría's 'baroque ethos' is presented as the cultural expression of this resistance: carnival, fiesta, and popular celebration are not rest periods before returning to work but 'radical interruptions of the homogeneous empty time of the market'—a refusal to let market rhythms determine the meaning of existence. 13. Armando Bartra's concept of 'the grotesque' extends this: popular festivity is described as a culturally subversive assertion that bodies and communities exist for pleasure, abundance, and the reaffirmation of life, not solely for economic production. 14. José Carlos Mariátegui's concept of 'stopped time' is introduced to show that time is material and geographic: in latifundist rural zones, historical time literally did not advance because landowning elites deliberately maintained feudal structures to perpetuate exploitation. 15. René Zavaleta Mercado's 'sociedad abigarrada' is illustrated by the image of paying a highway toll via smartphone while a farmer plows an adjacent field with oxen—different historical epochs coexisting in the same kilometre, in a conflictive, not harmonious, relationship. 16. The paper connects temporal domination to gender through Juliana Martínez-Fransoni's critique of welfare-state theorists such as Esping-Andersen: the accelerated productive time of offices and factories is sustained only by an invisible, unremunerated care time—historically borne by women—that feeds, heals, and maintains households. 17. For families in structural poverty in Latin America, time is not experienced as an arrow of progress but as a repetitive loop—'washing, feeding, surviving'—a present that exhausts but receives no recognition from the official economic clock. 18. Carlos Monsiváis is cited for his argument that Latin American social time is inhabited collectively—in pilgrimages, political rallies, markets, and the shared emotional memory of listening to a bolero—prioritising human bonds over instrumental calculation. 19. Enrique Dussel's 'transmodernity' proposes that transformative ethical potential will emerge from the periphery—communities, indigenous peoples, subaltern groups—not from the centre, which is too committed to acceleration to conceive alternatives. 20. The hosts close with a thought experiment: what would happen to labour laws, educational systems, and financial institutions if official time were synchronised not with stock market hours but with the ecological time of nature's regeneration and the time of human care?

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