Chartbook 451 What times are these? Crying fire in a Berlin lecture theatre.

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In Berlin last week, it was a panel with good, sensible people, making proposals that I largely agree with. And, yet - as happens quite frequently at the moment - I felt like the mad uncle in the attic, crying fire! Whence my dysphoria?If the theme of a meeting is “Crisis and Transformation” - in the abstract, in the large, in the here and now - can we really begin our answer by invoking old promises?The promise of municipal socialism? (NOTHING against the Mamdani project. More on the political economy of NYC to come over the summer.)Or, the promise of price stabilization, vouchsafed by historical examples? Or, the hope of financial market and digital regulation, to delivered by the EU. Because who else? Don’t we have to start by asking: What time is it? Which historical continuities can we still meaningfully invoke? Or, after a nice pushback (h/t DC), to the point that at any given moment there are multiple temporalities and timelines in play:Not “What time is it?”, but “What times are these?”In the moment, what came to mind was the analogy between the idea of layered temporality and the layering of overtones in sound. We can specify not just a note, but its quality. I tried (and failed) to illustrate the point from the stage. On a flute it is easy to demonstrate. The word I was looking for - it struck me later - was timbre, or tone colorSo what times are these, could be translated into a question about the timbre of this moment. The relative presence of difference resonances of the past, of anticipations of the future. On the panel, in Berlin, last week the differences we…