It has often been said that the more time close female friends spend together, the more their periods will tend to take place at the same time. By now, the majority of scientists agree that menstrual synchrony, which Martha McClintock believed she had discovered at the beginning of the 1970s, does not exist.97 Despite this, the phenomenon of menstrual cycles converging among women who live together98 has remained a source of fascination. The mysterious physical communication which seemed to be involved led people to assume that pheromones must play a role: “substances which are secreted to the outside by an individual of the same species, in which they release a specific reaction.”99 Scientists have investigated these messenger substances mainly in relation to sexual behavior, sympathy and antipathy, and social contacts. The difficulty of researching human pheromones is that these phenomena always arise in a complex, multisensory interplay, and cannot be studied in isolation. This makes it impossible to prove that the effect of such substances always brings about ‘the same kind of reaction’.
Periods becoming synchronized would only be the delayed, visible consequence of synchronized ovulation. If we unraveled the chemical composition of the pheromones causing synchronization of ovulation, this might mean the discovery of an efficient, natural form of contraception. In spite of the decades of research in this area, so far no pheromonal method of monitoring fertility has been developed. According to the firm’s own story,100 the lack of knowledge about hormonal effects or how they can be regulated provided one of the incentives to found the start-up Ava, which I researched as one of my case studies. In their product, a bracelet to help women plan their fertility, “clinical research is combined with artificial intelligence”:101 the tracker records users’ cycles and with a growing quantity of data, it can – according to Ava’s promise – successfully predict the moment of ovulation. Rather than pheromones, here it is Big Data and algorithms which are supposed to make it possible to monitor fertility. The method underlying this individual application – observation of different physical indicators in order to estimate the most fertile window in the cycle – is not actually new, but has been ‘women’s knowledge’ for centuries. Still, the demand for accuracy and (self-)monitoring, the need for permanent (self-)surveillance, and the wish to plan ahead have all increased in a knowledge-based society with flexibilized and immaterial work.
The cycle tracker as a product is emblematic of the contradictory logics of acceleration and optimization – precisely because the success of fertilization and conception depends on an interplay of countless factors which cannot (all) be planned, a need arises for comprehensive control. It is because customers are overstretched by their busy lives that “optimizing the timing of intercourse” is important, and sleep and stress levels must be monitored.102 The paradox of this device is that it is supposed to help relieve stress by introducing even more time management. By generating data and sending short notifications to remind wearers in real-time of processes going on in their bodies, it relieves the worry of a ‘potentially non-functional body’. It is not only the demand for efficiency which has spread from the sphere of production to that of reproduction and created a market for ‘self-optimization technologies’; it is also the wish for a sense of calm, trust and confidence: the device will help, it will relieve us of some of our ‘work’, it will no longer all be up to us. In particular, the fact that the bracelet is worn at night and measures physical indicators during sleep enables wearers to wake up in the morning with the feeling that they have even been productive during the night.
This case study presented difficulties for me which I was unable to explain for a long time during the process. Both the discourses and the concrete working conditions produced by this segment of the tech start-up creative industry overlap in many areas with my own experiences. Unlike the case studies with Jacob and with dementia care, this case was one to which I brought pre-existing knowledge and a corresponding perspective (due partly to my age) which allowed me more direct access to these temporal perspectives and multiple possibilities for participant observation: over the four days at the Zurich headquarters of the company, I participated actively in brainstorming sessions, lunches, international online meetings, team building – I sat in the open-plan office at a work station and was so ‘integrated’ in the work that I was mistaken for a new employee several times. I was permitted to film and could schedule conversations with whoever I wanted. But something in me was resistant, although I didn’t want to admit it. Thus, although I collected material from observation of all possible aspects of the company that could be relevant to my PhD, no focus emerged from this, and no specific approach to filming emerged which could convey asynchronous experiences of time in this case study. Only when I came to see the case study as a failure and began to think about the reasons did I realize that the dominant chrononormative narratives of productivity,103 which are exactly what I am interested in as ‘internalized imperatives’, also shaped my own expectations of the case study and overwhelmed me, leading me to push back.
As a start-up, Ava demonstrates countless aspects and attributes of acceleration: since it is a start-up, instability, risk, innovation, competition, and flexibility are basic characteristics of the organization, which is not only dependent on rapid change, but also contributes to producing such change [N is for Normality Principle]. Company culture and work structures (‘flat hierarchies’) demand that employees constantly ‘evaluate’ and independently ‘recalibrate’ their response to time pressure. The product of the fertility tracker itself and its marketing stand for a technology in which the pace of life is accelerated, as the sociologist Hartmut Rosa describes the experience of time pressure.104 Between the technological, social, and individual demands of acceleration, Rosa sees a “self-propelling circle,” based on the capitalist logic of competition.105
What I describe as ‘internal imperatives’ or chrononormative narratives are notions of timing (the right moment, the appropriate point in time, the correct speed, the proper tempo) which stem from social definitions and regulations and are (supposed to be) turned into individual expectations of ourselves. From sociocultural norms to subjective experiences, a kind of ‘osmosis’ takes place which brings ideas about affects, values and emotions into the body, where they are experienced physically.
Demands such as autonomy, resourcefulness, variety, etc., are not perceived as being imposed ‘from the outside’, but as desires of our own. Through this notion of personal responsibility, the effects and affects of time pressure and stress become an individual problem.
Big questions such as the relationship between humans and machines (e.g. in our concept of the body and of health) and the ideology of competition, with which asynchronous experiences of time in the tech start-up world are connected, made me return repeatedly to philosophical, socially critical texts which I had engaged with prior to the empirical approach of my artistic PhD.106 The development of the imaginary friend Chiara [I], to whom I could transfer elements of the (self-)observation of the competitive sphere of work, enabled me to use a strategy with which I could test out imperatives and narratives performatively: what do they do to us when they are adopted or internalized? And is it possible to unlearn them or to ‘externalize’ them?
In the course of this case study, I realized that the experimental approach to the material must also include responding consciously to (my own) demands regarding evaluation, productivity, progress, growth, and success, and sometimes to break away from them: I came to decisions about the next steps of my approach which removed my (personal) responsibility and forced or allowed me to give up control. I accepted that the documentary approach to observation had failed and only occasionally allowed impressions and experiences to flow into the film-essay – e.g. when the narrator reports on a telephone conversation with Chiara, who cannot say clearly what it is that presents difficulties for her at the start-up. Or in Jeux impairs, when the Ava bracelet is worn by the sleeping actor and a few extracts from the physical data and app messages turn up as ‘false’ pairs of cards in the memory game.
I decided to use the cycle tracker as an experiment on myself for a year, as an ordinary user, without expectations, without making records or defining the outcome. I left the case study to Chiara, for whom the start-up is a brief side job which she eventually quits.
