and this:
"Spacetime Origami
Rovelli shatters time’s arrow. Nevertheless, he is careful not to dismiss time as an illusion. He mourns friends he has lost, and he considers his own mortality. He is acutely sensitive to what it means for us humans to be creatures of time, even as he takes time out of the equation (so to speak) of reality."
Merl's point seems not especially about time, but the nature of reality of which time is a necessary part, and my essays were specifically concerned with the nature of "surrealist time" but it was an interesting juncture. When I wrote the first of these essays The Gold Of Time around 2007 I was fumbling towards a basic concept of time because I was trying to write about the surrealist experience of space and place and sooner or later that means you have to deal with time as well. I decided that, given the apparent surrealist aversion to Bergson, and Bachelard's critique of Bergson in his Dialectic of Duration, I had a starting point. Bachelard proposes that Bergson's notion of 'elan vital' is flawed, because he sees time as a constant flow of durations. Bachelard claims that time is rather composed of 'instants' and the appearance of flow is rather like that of water, which is composed of molecules of water, which in turn, as eny fule no, is composed of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen. So, if we can break time down to instants that too can be seen as 'granular' and discontinuous.
From that point we can see the breaks and discontinuities as possibilities of freedom. Anybody iintererested enough can read my essay, which I shall attach as an appendix to this post. It's very imperfect, but it was a first attempt to think 'surrealist time'. It grasps something of "the gold of time". It is also most certainly aiming at a state of 'profane illumination' in which to experience this time.
The Gold of Time: Surrealism, History
and Time
Stuart Inman
Introduction
On André Breton’s tomb is the inscription “Je cherche l’or
du temp” – I seek the gold of time. This phrase dates from early in Breton’s
career and reappears at its very end. It seems, therefore, a fitting phrase to
open this discussion of the surrealist experience of time. In the course of
this paper I want, by way of a lengthy detour, to tackle the question: what,
for a surrealist, is the “gold of time”?
My research is fundamentally concerned with the surrealist
experience of space and place, the subjective and intersubjective experiences
engendered by wandering, drifting, the notion of objective chance, the
atmospheres of real places and the evocation of imaginary geographies. I hope
that it will be clear to you that such a discussion is incomplete without
taking account of time, All experience, of place or anything else, can only be
experienced in time, it has some kind of duration, it extends through time and
it belongs, in another sense, to a time, an epoch or period.. Space without
time is static, time is the movement of space and we can not move in space
without time. On the other hand, time without space would be a static duration.
While we are not really discussing, except for very brief references, the
Einsteinian view of space and time, we cannot avoid the notion of space/time,
there is no point at which they do not go together.
Don’t read...Bergson
A fairly early surrealist text consisted of two lists,
“read” and “don’t read”. In the former we find Heraclitus, Hegel etc. Among the
latter is included Henri Bergson. Given that this paper is concerned with some
of the same issues as Bergson it is important to understand why he should be
rejected by the surrealists. An obvious reason is that he was a symbol of the
establishment to a very anti-establishment group, Bergson was probably the
foremost academic philosopher of France in the first part of the twentieth
century, consequently his actual status, regardless of the content of his
philosophy, would be challenged by the surrealists, but it is the content of
Bergsonism that must be examined to understand real objections and the
surrealists never bothered with such an effort, he was dismissed in a phrase.
In order come to an understanding of what is really at stake here I am going to
refer to the work of a philosopher who does indeed have sympathies with
surrealism as well as parallels in his later thought, and that is Gaston
Bachelard.
Bachelard’s critique of Bergsonism is contained in two
books, only one of which is available in English and it is this work I wish to
refer to, “The Dialectic of Duration”[1]
Bachelard presents Bergson’s philosophy as
“...a philosophy of
fullness and his psychology is a psychology of plenitude. This psychology is so
rich, so multifarious and mobile that it cannot be contradicted; it makes
repose active and functions permanent; it can always draw on so many things
that the psychological scene will never be empty and success also will be
ensured. In these conditions, life cannot go in fear of some total failure.”[2]
He seems to present Bergsonian philosophy as an idealism:
“Thus, the soul is seen to be a thing behind the flux of its
phenomena; it is not really contemporary with its own fluidity. And the
Bergsonism that has been accused of a predilection for mobility has not set
itself within duration’s very fluidity. It has maintained the solidarity of
past and future and also the viscosity of duration, with the result that the
past remains the substance of the present or to put it another way, that the
present instant is never anything other than the phenomenon of the past.”[3]
If he is correct, then the present moment, the now, is
robbed of its own fullness, it must have a secondary nature to that of the past
and yet that past, being, as it were, a previous present, must also be
similarly diminished except it be seen as an origin, but within a philosophy of
endless flow, where can one inscribe a beginning? Bergson’s philosophy would
seem to be riddled with contradictions that remain unresolved because they
remain unacknowledged.
While Bachelard is giving an anti-Bergsonian view of time,
it isn’t merely, shall we say, un-Bergsonian, it is rather that he accepts much
of Bergson’s thinking on duration, but disagrees with his central thesis:
“...let us ay straightaway that of Bergsonism we accept
everything but continuity. Indeed, to be even more precise, let us say that
from our point of view also continuity – or continuities – can be presented as
characteristics of the psyche, characteristics that cannot be regarded as
complete, solid, or constant. They have to be constructed. They have to be
maintained. Consequently, we do not in the end see the continuity of duration
as an immediate datum but as a problem. We wish therefore to develop a
discontinuous Bergsonism, showing the need to arithmetise Bergsonian duration
so as to give it more fluidity, more numbers, and also more accuracy in the
correspondence the phenomena of thought exhibit between themselves and the
quantum characteristics of reality.”[4]
In a paper of this kind it isn’t possible to go into much
detail as to how Bachelard develops his critique of Bergson. It must be
sufficient to understand that Bachelard can propose an idea of discontinuous
time in which duration is composed of instants, that such a notion is true in
both the scientific view of time, that of physics as well as the psychological
view in which our subjective and intersubjective experiences of time are also
discontinuous, showing gaps, rhythms and lacunae.
I have made reference to Bachelard for several reasons. The
first is, as I have said, he shows it is possible to understand time as
something discontinuous on many levels, secondly, he uses the notion of
dialectics in order to show both the contradictions in Bergson’s thought and
the discontinuous nature of time. This is not, I would say, the all-embracing
Dialectic, with a very capital “D” of a possibly misunderstood Hegelianism, but
something like dialectics in a minor key, a series of dialectics that are
particular to the problem. It is also of interest that he suggests that
“Surrealist poetry would give good examples of this temporal dialectic, this
purely psychic rhythm.” I have to say that he seems to reveal a very limited
understanding of what surrealism is, but this comment of his does seem to
indicate the growth of his sympathy with surrealist thought as he moves slowly
towards his later concept of Surrationalism.
Breaking the Wheel of
Time: Agamben’s Discontinuous History
According to Giorgio Agamben, a contemporary Italian
philosopher:
“Every conception of history is invariably accompanied by a
certain experience of time which is implicit in it, conditions it, and
therefore has to be elucidated. Similarly, every culture is first and foremost
a particular experience of time, and no new culture is possible without an
alteration in this experience. The original task of a genuine revolution is
never merely to ‘change the world’, but also – and above all – to ‘change
time’. Modern political thought has concentrated its attention on history, and
has not elaborated a corresponding concept of time. Even historical materialism
has until now neglected to elaborate a concept of time that compares with its
concept of history. Because of this omission it has been unwittingly compelled
to have recourse to a concept of time dominant in Western culture for
centuries, and so to harbour, side by side, a revolutionary concept of history
and a traditional experience of time. The vulgar representation of time as a
precise and homogeneous continuum has thus diluted the Marxist concept of
history: it has become the hidden breach through which ideology has crept into
the citadel of historical materialism. Benjamin had already warned of this
danger in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. We now need to elucidate
the concept of time implicit in the Marxist conception of history.”[5]
Agamben shows how, for instance, the ancient Greek idea of
time was circular, thus Aristotle could say “Do those who lived at the time of
the Trojan War come before us, and before them those who lived in an even more
ancient time…if it is true, on the other hand, that the things that are closest
to the beginning come before, what then prevents us from being closer to the
beginning than those who lived at the time of the Trojan War?...if the sequence
of events forms a circle, since the circle has indeed neither beginning nor
end, we cannot, by being closer to the beginning, come before them any more
than they can be said to come before us.”[6]
The Christian concept of time, on the other hand, is linear
and runs from Genesis to Revelations and it is this notion of time that Agamben
challenges in his critique of the Marxist idea of time. He proposes instead a
broken or discontinuous model in which revolution can erupt as a moment rather
than all time and history being geared to the revolution as an end-state. The
rectilinear model of time dominates not only the Marxist concept of history,
but the Hegelian which went before it and the idea of the end of history, after
which nothing new can ever happen, is not without problems.
Agamben says: “Whether it is conceived as linear or
circular, in Western thought time invariably has the point as its dominating
feature. Lived time is represented through a metaphysical-geometric concept
(the discrete point or instant) and it is then taken as if this concept were
itself the real time of experience.
Vico’s words on the geometric point could also be applied to the instant
as a ‘point’ in time. This is the opening through which the eternity of
metaphysics insinuates itself into the human experience of time, and
irreparably splits it. Any attempt to conceive of time differently must
inevitably come into conflict with this concept, and a critique of the instant
is the logical condition for a new experience of time.”[7]
He finds that “The elements for a different concept of time
lie scattered among the folds and shadows of the Western cultural tradition…It
is in Gnosticism, that failed religion of the West, that there appears an
experience of time in radical opposition to both the Greek and the Christian
versions. In opposition to the Greek circle of experience and the straight line
of Christianity, it posits a concept whose spatial model can be represented by
a broken line. In this way it strikes directly at what remains unaltered in
classical Antiquity and Christianity alike: duration, precise and continuous
time.”[8]
This “time of Gnosticism” is: “…an incoherent and
unhomogeneous time, whose truth is in the moment of abrupt interruption, when
man, in a sudden act of consciousness, takes possession of his own condition of
being resurrected…in keeping with this experience of interrupted time, the
Gnostic attitude is resolutely revolutionary: it refuses the past while valuing
in it, through an exemplary sense of the present, precisely what was condemned
as negative (Cain, Esau, the inhabitants of Sodom), and expecting nothing from
the future.”[9]
From this point Agamben finds it is “…certainly no accident
that every time modern thought has come to reconceptualise time, it has
inevitably had to begin with a critique of continuous, quantified time. Such a
critique underlies both Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ and
Heidegger’s incomplete analysis of temporality in Being and Time.” [10]
he points out how, with Benjamin, “Against the empty, quantified instant, he
sets a ‘time of now’, Jetzt-Zeit, construed as a messianic cessation of
happening, which ‘comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous
abridgement.’’[11]
Benjamin’s critique seems especially relevant in section XIV
of the Theses – ‘Origin is the Goal’.
“History is the subject of a structure whose site is not
homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit].
Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome
was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the
continuum of history. The French revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate.”[12]
Thus, the French Revolution is not merely a re-enactment of the
Roman Republic Roman Empire ? No doubt Benjamin was thinking also of the
Russian Revolution as having the same relationship to the French revolution as
it had done to the Roman
Republic
Once time has been conceived in these terms, as something
other than continuous, rectilinear and homogeneous, it becomes possible to
start to think more concretely as to what the gold of time might be. Agamben
finishes his essay by suggesting that there is “an immediate and available
experience on which a new concept of time could be founded”[13]
and this experience is pleasure. The “…true site of pleasure, as man’s primary
dimension, is neither precise, continuous time nor eternity, but history.”[14] “Just as the full, discontinuous, finite and
complete time of pleasure must be set against the empty, continuous and
infinite time of vulgar historicism, so the chronological time of
pseudo-history must be opposed by the cairological time of authentic history.”[15]
L’Age D’Or: Surrealist
revolutionary play against utilitarian time
Agamben’s conclusion is that “True historical materialism
does not pursue an empty mirage of continuous progress along infinite linear
time, but is ready at any moment to stop time, because it holds the memory that
man’s original home is pleasure.”[16]
It is here that his thinking seems especially relevant to the surrealist
conceptualization of play.
The time of play opposes utilitarian time. In the world of
work all time is turned towards usefulness and productivity, even leisure is
bent towards becoming part of a single and homogeneous duration as leisure is
commodified and as such has to be serviced. Leisure becomes mediated by the
market and is consequently another industry of production. Play ceases to be
play and pleasure and play become other forms of work. A professional
footballer does not play football, it is his job. To use a term coined by the
Situationists play is recuperated
into the totality that is the world of work.
Real play, in order to subvert this situation, needs to
renounce usefulness. As Roger Caillois, an ex-surrealist, puts it, play is
defined in part by being unproductive: creating neither goods nor wealth[17].
In his book “Man, Play and Games” Caillois theorizes on the nature of play,
partly as a critique of Huizinga’s “Homo Ludens”. Both authors agree that play
has its own time and is, in the ordinary sense, unproductive. Caillois develops
four categories of games.
Agôn: competitive games
Alea: games of chance
Mimicry: games of imitation, illusion and make-believe[18]
Ilinx: games of vertigo.
In surrealism the competitive game is almost unknown and
games of chance and vertigo predominate. For instance, in one of the earliest
and best known surrealist games, Cadavre exquis, a game based on Consequences,
each player draws or writes in ignorance of their fellow players contributions.
Fragments of images or phrases make chance associations that defeat
intentionality.
In games of place and wandering one might take chance or
random directions, so, for instance, Marcel Mariën travelled around London using a Paris street map.
In one game played by some colleagues and friends, we had a set of directions
such as turn left, take the second right and so on, each player taking the same
walk in a different place. Such abandonment of purpose and surrender to the
dictates of chance is precisely in the hope of prompting the experience of vertigo,
the promotion of objective chance in which uncanny, but meaningful coincidences
can happen.
The ur-texts of this exemplary wandering are André Breton’s
‘Nadja’ and Louis Aragon’s ‘Paris Peasant’. In the former, Breton describes a
series of uncanny encounters culminating in his meeting with the eponymous
Nadja, a strange woman who seems possessed of prophetic powers but who succumbs
to madness. Aragon ’s
text takes a minutely detailed tour of the Passage de l’Opera in which the
realism of the description breaks down under the sheer weight of that detail.
On reading these texts it can be said that not all
surrealist play is pleasurable, sometimes it seems to enter a strange realm of
anxiety, even fear, more rarely of actual danger. But this is the price paid
for the desired vertigo, the experience of convulsive
beauty. Surrealist wandering is essentially an exploration of the
commonplace in order to render it unfamiliar, terra incognita.
In this break with utilitarian time we can experience time
as something other than capitalist, consumerist duration. Conceived as a break
in the continuum, surrealist play allows Utopia to emerge, not as somebody’s
projected perfect society – and it is always somebody else’s perfect society –
but as a moment, a tiny fragment of a different order of time in which play and
pleasure form their own duration.
While this can not be a self-sufficient revolutionary
theory, it is the necessary corollary to revolution. For as long as workers
remain only workers they remain within the realm of utilitarian time, they
serve the duration of work. By creating a gap, a space in the utilitarian order
one discovers the means of demolishing the misery of work. Thus conceived, the
useless becomes the most useful thing of all. As Agamben puts it:
“But a revolution from which there springs not a new
chronology, but a qualitative alteration of time (a cairology), would have the weightiest consequence and would alone
be immune to absorption into the reflux of restoration. He who, in the epochē
of pleasure, has remembered history as he would remember his original home,
will bring this memory to everything, will exact this promise from each
instant: he is the true revolutionary and the true seer, released from time not
at the millennium, but now.”[19]
[1]
Bachelard, Gaston: The Dialectic of Duration. Translated and annotated by Mary
McAllester Jones, Clinamen Press, Manchester .
2000.
[2] Ibid.
p.23.
[3] Ibid. p.
24.
[4] Ibid.
pp. 28-9.
[5] Agamben,
Giorgio: Time and History: critique of the instant and the continuum. In:
Infancy and History, Essays on the Destruction of Experience. Translated by Liz
Heron. Verso, London .
1993.
[6] Ibid.
pp. 92-3.
[7] Ibid. p.
100.
[8] Ibid.
pp.100-101.
[9] p. 101.
[10]
Ibid. p.102.
[11] Ibid.
p.102.
[12]
Benjamin, Walter: Theses on the Philosophy of History In: Illuminations.
Translated by Harry Zohn. Fontana Press, London . 1992.
[13] Op.
cit. p. 104.
[14] Ibid.
p.104.
[15] Ibid.
p. 104-5.
[16] Ibid.
p.105.
[17]
Caillois, Roger: Man, play and games. Translated by Meyer Barash. University of Illinois
Press, Urbana and Chicago . 2001. p.10.
[18] He uses
the English word ‘mimicry’ rather than mimesis
[19] Op.cit.
p.105.
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